Inn Other Words

Readings on Pakistan

2007-12-13T15:18:00.000-08:00

what is the vertiginous chapati saying to me?

12.11.07 | by sepoy | 7 Comments

I am often asked to write up a single post on the broad overview of the history of Pakistan - and I usually say: I am a medievalist. Part of the frustration is, of course, that there isn’t anything notable out there which covers the politics, history and culture in around 200 pages for the general audience. No, Ian Talbot and Stephen Cohen are not up to the task - neither are any books that have any of the following words in their title: Military, Extremism, Mosque. Such books may or may not be good reading on those specific topics, but they fail miserably at everything else. Until the time that a money-hungry Press asks me for the manuscript that will land them on the best seller’s list (Sepoy’s Pakistan: Mad Mutterings of the Melancholic Sort), the best “book” on Pakistan is a series of readings. I am providing a partial listing from a class I taught. The list is by no means meant to be taken as exhaustive, comprehensive or even exemplary. The main selection criteria was the availability of materials in pdf format. There are also other pedagogical quirks buried here. I pay as much attention to historiography as to history in my selection of readings and I also like to assign readings that will provoke my students, rather than simply inform them. In that, I often tend to assign materials that do not share my own outlook or with which I have substantial issues. That said, if you read these 30 odd articles, book reviews, etc., I promise you will be totally prepared for anything a Fareed Zakaria or a Tom Friedman can conjure.

a bit of political history:

Spate, O.H.K. “The Partition of the Punjab and of Bengal”. The Geographical Journal, Vol. 110, No. 4/6. (Oct. - Dec., 1947), pp. 201-218.

Brown, W. Norman. “India’s Pakistan Issue”. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 91, No. 2. (Apr. 5, 1947), pp. 162-180.

Franck, Dorothea Seelye. “Pakhtunistan - Disputed Disposition of a Tribal Land”. Middle East Journal, 6 (1952) p.49.

Sayeed, Khalid B., “The “Jama’at-i-Islami” Movement in Pakistan”. Pacific Affairs, 30:1 (1957) p.59.

Ikramullah, Shaista Suhrawardy. “The Role of Women in the Life and Literature of Pakistan”. Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 106:5025 (Aug., 1958), p. 713.

Abbott, Freeland. “The Historical Background of Islamic India and Pakistan”. Contributions to Asian Studies 2, (July, 1971), p.6.

Nations, Richard. “The Economic Structure of Pakistan: Class and Colony”. New Left Review I/68, July-August 1971.

Maxwell, Neville. “A Passage to Pakistan”. The New York Review of Books. Vol. 18, No. 5 · March 23, 1972.

Choudhury, G. W. “‘New’ Pakistan’s Constitution, 1973″. Middle East Journal, 28:1 (1974) p.10.

Qureshi, Sameel Ahmed. “An Analysis of Contemporary Pakistani Politics: Bhutto versus the Military”. Asian Survey, Vol. 19, No. 9. (Sep., 1979), pp. 910-921.

Richter, William L. “Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto”. Current History, 88:542 (1989) p.433.

Diamond, Larry. “Is Pakistan the (Reverse) Wave of the Future?”. Journal of Democracy. Vol. 11, No. 3. (July, 2000), pp. 91-106.

Waseem, Muhammad. “Constitutionalism in Pakistan: The Changing Patterns of Dyarchy”. Diogenes, 53:102 (2006).

sub-nationalisms:

Nasr, Vali. “International Politics, Domestic Imperatives, and Identity Mobilization: Sectarianism in Pakistan, 1979-1998″. Comparative Politics, Vol. 32, No. 2. (Jan., 2000), pp. 171-190.

Wright, Theodore P. “Center-Periphery Relations and Ethnic Conflict in Pakistan: Sindhis, Muhajirs, and Punjabis”. Comparative Politics, Vol. 23, No. 3. (Apr., 1991), pp. 299-312.

Chaudhry, Kiren Aziz. “State, Society, and Sin: The Political Beliefs of University Students in Pakistan”. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 32:1 (1983) p.11.

Haq, Farhat. “Rise of the MQM in Pakistan: Politics of Ethnic Mobilization”. Asian Survey, Vol. 35, No. 11. (Nov., 1995), pp. 990-1004.

Nicolini, Beatrice. “The Baluch Role in the Persian Gulf during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2007, pp. 384-396.

borders:

Stern, Jessica. “Pakistan’s Jihad Culture”. Foreign Affairs, November/December 2000.

Tremblay, Reeta Chowdhari. “Kashmir Conflict: Secessionist Movement, Mobilization and Political Institutions”. Pacific Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 4. (Winter, 2001-2002), pp. 569-577.

Laber, Jeri. “Afghanistan’s Other War”. New York Review of Books. Vol. 33, No. 20. December 18, 1986.

Mishra, Pankaj. “Kashmir: The Unending War”. New York Review of Books. Vol. 47, No. 16. October 19, 2000.

de Bellaigue, Christopher. “The Perils of Pakistan”. New York Review of Books. Vol. 48, No. 18. November 15, 2001

the nuclear gods:

Ali, Tariq. The Colour Khaki. New Left Review 19, January-February 2003.

Shaikh, Farzana. “Pakistan between Allah and Army”. International Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 2, (Apr., 2000), pp. 325-332.

Slijper, Frank. Project Butter Factory: Henk Slebos and the A.Q. Khan nuclear network. TNI / Campagne tegen Wapenhandel. September 2007.

Langewiesche, William. The Wrath of Khan. Atlantic Monthly. November 2005.

Langewiesche, William. How to Get a Nuclear Bomb. Atlantic Monthly. December 2006.

(nation) imagined:

Gilmartin, David. “Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative”. The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 57, No. 4. (Nov., 1998), pp. 1068-1095.

Jalal, Ayesha. “Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining”. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1. (Feb., 1995), pp. 73-89.

Oldenburg, Philip. “A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971″. Journal of Asian Studies, 44:4 (Aug., 1985), p. 711.

Khan, Naveeda. “Flaws in the Flow: Roads and their Modernity in Pakistan”. Social Text, Issue 89, Vol. 24, No. 4, Winter 2006, pp. 87-113.

Ali, Kamran Asdar. “‘Pulp Fictions’: Reading Pakistani Domesticity”. Social Text, Issue 78, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 123-145.

Mufti, Aamir. “Towards a Lyric History of India”. boundary 2, Vol. 31, No. 2, Summer 2004, pp. 245-274.

Ewing, Katherine. “The Politics of Sufism: Redefining the Saints of Pakistan”. Journal of Asian Studies, 42:2 (Feb, 1983) p.251.

That is all I can manage at the moment (If you want to grab these readings, join the CM group on facebook). Please add your suggestions in the comments.

Also fictions: Salman Rushdie’s criminally under-appreciated Shame, Shaukat Siddiqi’s God’s Own Land, Abdullah Hussain’s The Weary Generations, Intizar Husain’s Basti and Agha Shahid Ali’s translation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Rebel’s Silhouette. Hmm. Maybe, you don’t need to read all the non-fiction, if you just manage to read the above.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

2007-11-08T12:45:00.000-08:00

Questions for Junot Díaz.

Junot Díaz's fiction is propelled by its attention to the energetic hybridity of American life. His debut, Drown, a collection of stories, dealt with questions of identity and belonging in the lives of his narrators, many of whom were young Dominicans living in New York or New Jersey. At first glance, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, his long-awaited first novel, appears to be a classic bildungsroman: the story of a charming Dominican-American boy who grows up to be an overweight, lonely nerd more intimate with The Lord of the Rings than with the social rings in his high school. But early on, the reader realizes that The Brief Wondrous Life is equally a story about the depredations of dictatorship and a powerful examination of the nature of authority. The novel is strangely fragmented. What initially appears to be a linear story shatters into accounts of Oscar's family's history, as it was shaped over time by the reign of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, a dictatorial leader of the Dominican Republic for more than three decades. We come to understand that the form of the book itself resists the singularity of perspective that is often used to establish authority. Last week, Díaz and I corresponded by e-mail about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and about writing fiction.

Slate: What drew you to the character of Oscar, a fat, nerdy kid from New Jersey?

Díaz: It's hard to remember precisely. Been 11 years since I started the book. I know I wanted to challenge the type of protagonist that many of the young male Latino writers I knew were writing. But I also wanted to screw with traditional Dominican masculinity, write about one of its weirder out-riders. And then there was just the fact of Oscar, this kid who I could not get out of my head, whom I felt strongly attached to because he was such a devoted reader and because he had this imagination that no one had any use for, but which gave him so much enjoyment and sense of purpose.

Oscar was the end point (for me) of a larger, almost invisible historical movement—he's the child of a dictatorship and of the apocalypse that is the New World. I was also trying to show how Oscar is utterly unaware of this history and yet also dominated by it.

Slate: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao isn't just about Oscar Wao's life; it spans the course of many decades and tells the stories of several people related to Oscar. The effect is of fragmentation rather than linear progression. Why did you choose to structure the story like this?

Díaz: I'm a product of a fragmented world. Take a brief look at Dominican or Caribbean history and you'll see that the structure of the book is more in keeping with the reality of this history than with its most popular myth: that of unity and continuity. In my mind the book was supposed to take the shape of an archipelago; it was supposed to be a textual Caribbean. Shattered and yet somehow holding together, somehow incredibly vibrant and compelling.

Slate: You use a relatively unconventional plot device in the book. What the reader initially takes to be a standard omniscient narrator is actually a specific person, Yunior, Oscar's college roommate—but we don't know precisely who that person is for quite some time. How did you come upon on this approach, and why?

Díaz: This narrative approach is nothing new. Look at Rick Moody's The Ice Storm and you'll see the tactic. As we all know: All stories are told for a reason. And all narrators have a stake in the story they're telling. In Oscar Wao, one of the questions that a reader has to answer for themselves is: Why is Yunior telling this particular story? One might say that for him the telling of this story is an act of contrition, but that's too simple—it's something else, I would argue.

One should also remember that in places like the Caribbean, which has suffered apocalypse after apocalypse, it's rarely the people who've been devoured by a story that get to bear witness to its ravages. Usually the survivors, the storytellers, are other people, not even family. In the United States you only get to visit a sick person in a hospital if you're immediate family; where I come from the idea of family is far more elastic, far more creative, far more practical, far more real.

Yunior's telling of this story and his unspoken motivations for it are at the heart of the novel and can easily be missed.

Slate: As I mentioned above, much of Oscar Wao isn't only about its protagonist, a nerdy kid from New Jersey, but about the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Can you tell us what drew you to Trujillo?

Díaz: Trujillo was one of the U.S.'s favorite sons, one of its children. He was created and sustained by the U.S.'s political-military machine. I wanted to write about the demon child of the U.S., the one who was inflicted upon the Dominican Republic. It didn't hurt that as a person Trujillo was so odd and terrifying, unlike anybody I'd ever read or heard about. He was so fundamentally Dominican, and for a Dominican writer writing about masculinity, about dictatorship, power, he's indispensable.

I've always been drawn to dictators. My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power. So there was that. Also, my book required a Dark Lord, and what better dark lord than a real life dictator? Trujillo exemplifies the negative forces that have for so long beleaguered the peoples of the New World. Seemed the perfect foil for Oscar. This novel (I cannot say it enough) is all about the dangers of dictatorship—Trujillo is just the face I use to push these issues—but the real dictatorship is in the book itself, in its telling; and that's what I think is most disturbing: how deeply attached we all are to the institution of dictatorship.

Slate: What do you mean when you say the "real dictatorship is in the book itself"?

Díaz: We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters[...]

On Feminism, Women of Color, Poetics, and Reticence: Some Considerations [I think this is the final version]

2007-11-08T11:41:00.000-08:00

barbara jane reyes
Subsequent to the Chicago Review’s publishing of Juliana Spahr’s and Stephanie Young’s now notorious essay, “Numbers Trouble,” on gender disparity in the US experimental poetry scene, these two authors initiated a project entitled “Tell US Poets,” and issued a call for information on feminism as it exists for women writers in the world outside of North America. I responded to Spahr and Young, and to my relief, they were both receptive to my criticisms and questions. I asked if they were interested in hearing about American feminisms from the perspective of women writers from communities of color, for I was troubled by what appeared implicit to me in their request for non-North American information: that all women in North America experience and define gender relations, power dynamics, and feminism in the same manner.

This is a dangerous assumption, for Third World conditions exist in North America, in North American countries that are not Canada and the USA, among Native Hawaiians and the First Peoples of Canada, on Native American reservations, in the prison industrial complex, in urban, inner cities, in rural and agricultural settings. I suspect that women in these communities do not have access to the feminism which exists in white American middle class households and their corresponding professional workplaces and educational institutions.

As well, North America is comprised of many immigrant communities (one of which I am a part), who have different beliefs and practices of gender relations, and who live in varying degrees of integration into and isolation from mainstream institutions and popular culture.

And so I have come to both appreciate and resent this, “Tell us what we need to know about feminism in _____,” (fill in blank with a name of a place that isn’t in America) coming from white American women who are middle class and professionals.

Perhaps a “Please,” and a withholding of any initial assumptions would have made me appreciate the request a little bit more. This “Please,” would have made the request sound like a request and not a command. I would have also appreciated an explanation of why the requesters feel they do not know enough or anything at all about the feminism of “other” women, why this information is not something they have not found, where they have looked, to whom they have spoken as they have attempted to gather information.

I am critical of the assumption that communities of “others,” or those of “other” places deemphasize feminism because of these “other” communities’ inherent or essential misogyny.

I am critical of the assumption that “other” communities’ misogyny is essential.

I am critical of the assumption that “innovative” poetry coming from these “other” places will abide by the same standards by which “white,” “avant garde” American poetry abides; I find this problematic precisely because these standards are determined by this same “avant garde,” their cultural values and their relationship with English.

As well, I would ask that this American “avant garde” reconsider that we of “other” communities may not group ourselves in the groupings set up for us by those who do not live in our communities.

Consider that Filipino American poets may have more historical and linguistic commonalities with Chicano and Latino poets.

Consider that Filipino American poets may have more aesthetic commonalities with African American poets.

Consider that Filipino American poets may have more oral tradition/storytelling commonalities with Native American poets.

In thinking about what is “innovative” poetry for women of color poets, and in thinking about this alleged reticence of women poets to submit their work to journal and anthology editors for publication, here are a couple of my reference points:

(1) Chris Chen, who curated the Asian American Poetry Now reading at the Berkeley Art Museum in October 2007, discussed “post identity poetry,” for contemporary Asian American poets, as a process of movement and negotiation, between the already used and overused tropes of cultural artifact and sentimentality, and its binary opposite of blanket disavowal of any ethnic identifiers.

Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution reenvisions the American city and American language.Bruna Mori’s Dérive witnesses, engages, and participates in American city and its farthest reaches, via public mass transit. Sarah Gambito's Matadora persona is full of rage despite her apparent delicacy. Yoko Ono, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Shin Yu Pai, and Eileen Tabios write from visual and conceptual art.

(2) On the Harriet blog of the Poetry Foundation, Rigoberto González reminds us that not all poets are published (yet), or seek print publication. This may be interpreted as reticence but let me offer this possibility: Many poets not widely published are perhaps invested in live and recorded performance, which makes sense for communities for whom oral tradition is underscored over written tradition.

Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge draws from scat’s improvisation, verbal games such as playground rhyme, and the dozens. The chanting of Mazatec curandera María Sabina, and of Tibetan Buddhism, Anne Waldman borrows and utilizes in her incantatory long poem, “Fast Speaking Woman.” In a similar vein, Genny Lim’s incantations draw from and expand her Buddhist traditions, and from Jazz.

Cecilia Vicuña draws upon the quipu tradition of the Andean people, elongating her words as she intones, as one spins fibers into thread. She incorporates actual string into her performance, tying herself to the space, and to her audience. She writes threads of words upon the handwritten pages of Instan.

In Storyteller, Leslie Marmon Silko writes that words set into motion, much like the casting of a spell, cannot simply be taken back. There are consequences to speaking, and so it should not be done lightly or carelessly. Here, word is the thing and the representation of the thing.

Spanning or blending poetry and theatre, Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, is performed by an ensemble of women.
Jessica Hagedorn, one of the original Colored Girls, has performed her poetic work with her rock band, the West Coast Gangster Choir. We can consider the ensemble poetic performance productions of Aimee Suzara’s Pagbabalik, and Maiana Minahal’s Before Their Words as descendants of Shange’s Colored Girls and Hagedorn’s Gangster Choir.

An emphasis on oral tradition in part explains the popularity of Def Poetry, slam poetry, poetry performed with music, not because it’s “new” and “innovative” a thing to do, but because certain types of music are simply a part of the oral tradition. We see Hip-hop poets as descendants of the Black Arts and Jazz Poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni. This Hip-hop generation includes such poets as LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Ishle Yi Park, Tara Betts, Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, Aya De León, Staceyann Chin, and Chinaka Hodge. We see many of these poets actively pursuing publication, literary awards, graduate degrees, writing and teaching fellowships, acceptance and participation in artist in residency programs, and professorships.

Still, another reason for this perceived “reticence” of women writers of color to publish also has to do with a general and justifiable distrust of American letters and Western institutions. I say “justifiable,” for the historical exclusion women of color voices from American letters, but I am also wary of blanket rejections of poetry written by women of color who are products of MFA programs, erroneously thought of as not ethnic enough, not political enough, not invested in, not informed by the communities from which these writers come.

A member of an Asian American writers’ list serve some years ago attempted to make the argument that the poetry of Myung Mi Kim did not speak to the Asian American experience because Kim was a “Language Poet.” Here, I interpret this list serve member’s inaccurate use of the term “Language Poetry” to describe Kim’s fractured usage of language, narrative, and expansive use of white space. But it is precisely these fractures and caesurae in Under Flag which embody and enact some Korean Americans’ experiences of war, American Occupation, and subsequent displacement from their homeland, of struggling to learn new language and culture, and of negotiating between what is native, acquired, and imposed.

Catalina Cariaga’s Cultural Evidence, in using white space and invented poetic form; Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s In the Absent Everyday, in questioning English words’ conventional meanings; and Heather Nagami’s Hostile, in examining translation and in criticisms of Asian American tropes are descendants of Kim’s numerous works.

What is “innovative” in our communities then: code switching, translating and fracturing language, while writing in polyglot and various vernaculars; integrating performance and music onto the page presentation; integrating our own cultures’ oral and poetic forms into written English and Western poetic form.

Debra Kang Dean’s Precipitates synthesizes koan and haiku with American Transcendentalism. Michelle Bautista’s Kali’s Blade integrates the movements of the Filipino martial art, kali, into written free verse. In Teeth, Aracelis Girmay pays very close attention to poetics rhythm and meter which mimic those of the African slaves who worked the American South’s sugar cane fields. Evie Shockley writes sonnet ballads in a half red sea, in the tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Do editors of American publications recognize these innovations? How do these editors read or deal with the “foreign” elements in this work, and especially “foreign” elements that do not abide by these editors' preconceived notions, assumptions, and prejudices? For example, not all Asian American poets are East Asian. Not all East Asian poets have Buddhist sensibilities. Not all Hip-hop poets are African American. Not all African American poets are Hip-hop. Not all Spanish writing comes from Latino/a and/or Chicano/a poets. Not all ethnic “innovative” poets disavow ethnicity; many enact rather than simply tell.

What happens to the work of “ethnic” poets who do not conform to some American editors’ expectations? How is this work received? Where does that work go? Who publishes it? And so is this reticence when we do not see this work in print?

One major theme I find in the poetic work of women of color is body politics, and its intersections with war, imperialism, race, and ethnicity. Combine these issues with the above explorations of language, vernacular, bilingualism, oral tradition, and performance. How is this work read and received by predominantly white, maybe predominantly male American editors?

Tara Betts and Patricia Smith write about the racially motivated abduction, torture, and extreme sexual abuse of Megan Williams. On the Harriet blog of the Poetry Foundation, Smith posted mug shots of Williams’ assailants, telling us, “This is where poetry comes from.”

In Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T, Harryette Mullen writes of femininity, fashion accessories, advertising, marketing, and reproduction, in ways that verge upon pornography.

Invoking the spirit of Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Ching-In Chen’s “Ku Li,” utilizes strategies of sound association and wordplay, and in the process, tests her readers’ sensitivities at hearing this racially derogatory term in repetition.

Elizabeth Alexander writes of Saartjie Baartman, popularly known as the Venus Hottentot, whose prominent buttocks and sinus pudoris (elongated labia) placed her body in the Western world as a living display piece or artifact. Her preserved genitals remained on display in Paris, after her death in 1815 and until 1974.

Evie Shockley writes of the Middle Passage, of rivers in the tradition of Langston Hughes (this talk of rivers which influenced Jean-Michel Basquiat), and women who navigate these rivers: Phyllis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sally Hemmings, Billie Holiday, and Anita Hill, to name a few.

Suheir Hammad writes of the plight of Arab women negotiating tradition and war, surviving tradition and war, and of finding and forming alliances and communities with women across ethnicity.

In the largely imagistic poems of Crazy Melon, Chinese Apple, Frances Chung has written about the inhabitants of New York Chinatown, pushed off the sidewalks and forced to walk in the gutters, Oriental curio objects gazed upon by white tourists.

Maile Arvin writes also of tourism, which continues to push native Hawaiians off their land and away from their depleting natural resources. Arvin also writes of Hawaiian Sovereignty as it permeates every aspect of her poetic speaker’s daily life.

Irene Faye Duller, in considering the global perception of Filipino women as sexual commodity and servant, has written, “I am the maid of the world, and the world has made me dirty.”

I write about Third World women in war and military occupation — Filipina brides, the gang rapes of Iraqi women, the Comfort Women of WWII, linking these power dynamics to pornography.

We are American poets and we are American feminists.

I don’t think we are reticent.

The Bailey Affair: Psychology Perverted

2007-10-17T21:06:00.000-07:00

By Joan Roughgarden
Department of Biological Sciences
Stanford University
February 11, 2004

A long-simmering dispute pitting psychologists against others in academe has now boiled into public attention, receiving coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education, ScienceNOW, the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune, among others. On National Academies’ letterhead, a book’s advertisement reads: ``Gay, Straight, or Lying? Science Has the Answer", and conclusions promised that ``may not always be politically correct, but… are scientifically accurate, thoroughly researched and occasionally startling." Published by the National Academies, and written by Michael Bailey, professor and chair of the psychology department at Northwestern University, the title alone is considered inflammatory, The Man Who Would be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. Transgendered people, outraged by the book, by the National Academies’ leadership, and by academic psychologists’ uncritical stance, have launched an unprecedented counterattack. The National Academies’ leadership as well as the author profess to be “surprised” by the continuing dispute.

This dispute won’t go away. The book isn’t an isolated instance of poor and prejudicial scholarship. The outrage of transgendered people against Bailey coincides with that of other scholars against psychologists who write about gender while pretending to be scientific.

Bailey’s thesis is that all transgendered women can be divided into exactly two mutually exclusive classes---extremely feminine homosexual men, and men who pursue a cross-dressing fetish to the point of modifying their bodies. This thesis is not new.

Since turn-of-the-century sexology in Europe, many manifestations of gender and sexuality variance have been distinguished. Then 20 years ago, the psychologist, Ray Blanchard of the Clarke Institute in Toronto, tried to argue that all varieties of gender/sexuality variance could be boiled down to the two classes that Bailey is trying to resurrect. Sexologists have not signed on to the Blanchard scheme. Bailey, upset about this, disparages his colleagues by writing, ``Blanchard's ideas have not yet received the widespread attention they deserve, in large part because sex researchers are not as scholarly as they should be." (p. 176)

Initial reaction to Bailey’s book was disappointment that no new ideas were proposed. Bailey’s elaboration of Blanchard’s two categories seems dubious on its face. Bailey profiles the “homosexual transsexual” as a young woman who comes out relatively early in life, is attractive, and is sexually oriented to men. To illustrate attractiveness, Bailey writes of one, ``She was stunning... My avowedly heterosexual male research assistant told me he would gladly have had sex with her, even knowing… [she] still possessed a penis." (p. 182) In contrast, Bailey writes of the cross-dressing variety, termed ``autogynephilic’’ by Blanchard, ``There is no way to say this as sensitively as I would prefer, so I will just go ahead. Most homosexual transsexuals are much better looking than most autogynephilic transsexuals." (p 180) Bailey profiles the cross-dressing transsexual as an older woman who comes out relatively late in life, is unattractive, and is sexually oriented to women.

From a transgender perspective, Bailey’s claim that all transgendered women match one of these two profiles is clearly counterfactual. Many transgendered women come out late in life and yet are sexually oriented to men, many come out early in life and yet are oriented to women, many who are oriented to women are attractive nonetheless, many have changed direction of sexual orientation when they transitioned, many are bisexual, and many are not sexually active. Transgendered women also encompass heterogeneity in occupation, presentation, temperament, sexual history, and ethnicity. Furthermore, transgendered people are not as fixated on sex as Bailey evidently is. The need to locate in the social and occupational space of one’s gender identity, to live as a woman, is a stronger motivation for many transgendered women than is attaining sexual pleasure. So, the initial dilemma faced by transgendered women was to discern how Bailey went wrong, why so far off course, and perhaps try to lend some accuracy to his account.

The plot thickens. As the two quotations above already suggest, Bailey uses sensational and pejorative language. Bailey writes, ``prostitution is the single most common occupation that homosexual transsexuals in our study admitted to... Juanita is a very attractive postoperative transsexual who has worked as a call girl both before and since her operation... she does not feel degraded and guilty about what she does for a living. I suspect that this reflects an aspect of her psychology that has remained male... her ability to enjoy emotionally meaningless sex appears male-typical. In this sense homosexual transsexuals might be especially suited to prostitution… Homosexual transsexuals... lust after men." (p. 184—185, 191)

Bailey gathers steam when turning to his other type of transsexual, those with a condition he calls ``autogynephilia, (pronounced Otto-guy-nuh-feel-ee-ya)," (p. 164) a ``type of paraphilia,... unusual sexual preferences that include autogynephilia, masochism, sadism, exhibitionism,... frotteurism,... necrophilia, bestiality, and pedophilia... Paraphelias tend to go together... The best established link is between autogynephilia and masochism. There is a dangerous masochistic practice called `autoerotic asphyxia,' in which a man strangles himself, usually by hanging, for sexual reasons... Perhaps about 100 American men per year dies this way. About one-fourth of the time, these men are found wearing some article of women's clothing, such as panties... Although most autogynephiles are not sexual sadists, they are more likely to be sadists compared with men who are not autogynephilic." (pp. 171--172) So according to Bailey, all transsexual women can be placed in either of two categories, one predisposed to prostitution and the other likely to be sexual sadists. No transgendered woman can read Bailey’s characterization and emerge with their dignity intact.

Bailey’s account is racist. He writes, ``about 60 percent of the homosexual transsexuals and drag queens we studied were Latina or Black." (p. 183, no sample size given.) Bailey noticed ``the large number of Latina transsexuals" (p. 183) and offered a conjecture that ``Hispanic people might have more transsexual genes than other ethnic groups do." (p. 183-184)

From a transgender perspective, the prospects for rapprochement seem remote. We’re scratching our heads wondering where such outlandish descriptions have come from. Whether say, 25 men hang themselves each year wearing panties is irrelevant to how tens of thousands of transgendered people live their lives. How could Bailey have mischaracterized a whole subpopulation so incorrectly? His writing is hate speech, detached from reality, and yet advertised as science and published by the National Academies.

Bailey also attacks gays and women. About gays, Bailey writes, ``the brains of homosexual people may be mosaics of male and female parts... this mixture explains much of what is unique in gay men's culture and lives." (p. 60) Bailey goes on to claim that ``gay men have tended to have more of certain psychological problems than straight men" (p. 81.) The disease of being gay is the disease of being a woman. ``Gay men's pattern of susceptibility to… mental problems reflects their femininity. The problems that gay men are most susceptible to---eating disorders, depression, and anxiety disorders---are the same problems that women also suffer from disproportionately" (p. 82) He continues, ``Learning why gay men are more easily depressed than straight men might tell us why women are also." (p. 83) Then he piously states, ``nothing I have written means that we should… again consider it a mental illness... the problems are being... depressed... [whereas] homosexuality, per se, is not a problem." (p. 83) Furthermore, ``Gay men will always have more sex partners than straight people do. Those who are attached will be less sexually monogamous." (p. 100) Then he follows with another pious disclaimer, ``Social conservatives will view this prediction as tantamount to an admission of the inferiority of the gay male lifestyle, but it is not." (p. 101). And he winds up raising the specter of eugenics, ``I certainly have no motive to change gay people or prevent them from being born." (p 113)

These disclaimers are disingenuous. Bailey is setting the stage for others to advocate the persecution of gays from a scientific perspective. This tack was used when setting up a biological argument for racially cleansing the Aryan race of Jews in Nazi Germany. His work is cited by homophobic groups such as NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality), a group dedicated to ``curing'' homosexuality with so-called reparative treatments. One of Bailey’s few favorable reviews is a homophobic piece in the National Review by John Derbyshire, also a National Academies’ Press author (June 30, 2003). According to Derbyshire, “conservatives remember... the AIDS plague spread in this country mainly by promiscuous homosexual buggery’’ and “the sacred texts of all three major Western monotheistic faiths proscribe homosexuality in unambiguous terms,” a claim incidentally, that is mistaken. Bailey writes with an eye toward a right-wing political agenda.

Perhaps these hateful politically-charged claims about transgendered women, other women, gays, Latinas and Blacks are all true. Perhaps we should celebrate Bailey’s honesty for bringing these painful “facts” into the open. Yet as already mentioned, Bailey’s claims are inaccurate, and so the source of the problem might lie somehow in his data. So, what does Bailey have to offer scientifically, leaving aside his pejorative rhetoric?

Bailey has no data, none at all. He offers no surveys, no data tables, no statistics, nothing. He doesn’t give the sample size for the “study" he refers to occasionally. No references are offered to primary literature either. Six transgendered people are mentioned by name (pseudonym). Bailey did not take detailed and rigorous notes when interviewing these subjects, and relies on his recollection of their meetings. This sample is highly non-representative because the women he interviewed he met while ``cruising" (p. 141) in ``the Baton, Chicago's premier female impersonator club,'' (p. 186) leading to an occupational and socio-economic bias.

Still, one may anticipate that Bailey has at least found a tiny non-representative sample, and offers a truthful account of the life-narratives from this selected group. No, Bailey has manipulated even the few narratives he has. Bailey admits to an ``ongoing argument'' (p. 161) with one of his subjects who will not agree to say what he wants. When his subjects disagree with him he calls them liars, ``Most gender patients lie."(p. 172) Also, gay males who don't report a feminine childhood are lying too (p.58) because they suffer from "internalized femiphobia" (p. 80). Therefore, Bailey is compromising his own data by putting words in the mouths of his interviewees.

And amazingly, four of his six subjects filed formal complaints with the administration at Northwestern University charging that Bailey did not notify them that their narratives were to be used as “research material” in his book (Jennifer Leopoldt, Transsexuals file 2 more claims against Bailey, The Daily Northwestern, August 2, 2003.) After reading accounts supposedly about them, the women reported being inaccurately transcribed. Furthermore, Bailey did not disclose that he was writing letters for these women to authorize sex-reassignment surgeries in return for their interviews, placing the women and Bailey in conflict of interest. As of December 2003, all six of the subjects have filed formal complaints that their consent was not obtained. And even more astonishingly, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that one of the women has formally charged Bailey with having sex with her at her apartment. Bailey has declined to comment, and the Northwestern University has declined to pursue this charge, although they are pursuing the charges about failure to obtain consent (Robin Wilson, Dec. 12, 2003, Northwestern U. psychologist is accused of having sex with research subject). At this time, all of Bailey’s narrative information is irretrievably compromised, and the circumstance in which the information was obtained is allegedly scandalous. Finally, the narrative that frames the section on transgendered women (the Danny narrative) is reportedly acknowledged to be completely fabricated.

Thus, Bailey does not report his sample size, the sample turns out to be small and unrepresentative, all of the narratives are compromised, elementary abuse of ethical protocol with human subjects has been alleged, Bailey does not disclose conflict of interest, all contradictory evidence is dismissed, and at least one of the narratives is apparently fabricated. Bailey’s study comes nowhere close to acceptable science. Yet it has been published by the National Academies and endorsed as “scientifically accurate” and “thoroughly researched.” [...]

Germany's mythic titans

2007-09-12T18:50:00.000-07:00

It is a brave novelist who attempts to convey how Wagnerian intensity led to Nazi catastrophe

Hywel Williams
Thursday September 13, 2007
The Guardian
Conventional political history, with its story of elections won and lost, struggles to explain what happened to Germany between the unification of 1871 and the nemesis of 1945. Here we are at the furthermost limits of the usefulness of "facts". The consequences of nazism were so catastrophic that there is a gap of historical explanation that might link the possible factual causes with that final Götterdämmerung effect. This remains a mysterious question and it explains why the history of the Third Reich remains big business: a teasing psychodrama as well as a consuming Holocaust. It's at this point that the historian needs an artist's imagination.

Article continues
Other novelists before AN Wilson - whose fictional take on Adolf and the Wagners, Winnie and Wolf, was a surprise omission last week from the Man Booker shortlist - have tried their hand at a fictional account of Hitler. Beryl Bainbridge brought a quizzical genius to her picture of a gauche outsider in Young Adolf. Richard Hughes and George Steiner described a mysterious demon. But Wilson presents a more plausible figure by placing him firmly in the Wagnerian aesthetic while building on what we know of his affection for Winifred Wagner, the composer's daughter-in-law and director of the Bayreuth festival in the 1930s. It was the artist in Hitler who succumbed to that cult of Nordic self-realisation and ensured subsidies for the Festspielhaus, while the politician in him saw exactly why Richard Wagner's reinvention of medieval mythology appealed to German audiences.

The Ring of the Nibelung, a powerful indictment of materialism, shows how those who wish to love must give up power. It is the renunciation of the will - not its triumph - that is basic to Wagner's art. But to the original audiences of the late 19th century, just as for Hitler, it was the energy of a truly German art that was the real message. Those mythic titans on the Bayreuth stage were all too easily equated with the Promethean energy of a country that became an economic superpower in the 1880s.

But there was a gap between this material success and Germany's political status. After so many centuries as a collection of small states, this newly unified country was neurotic about its relationship with the great powers of Britain, France and Russia. This sense of fragility accounts for the common emphasis on the holiness of the homeland - a Heimat that needed defending against sacrilege. If this was true at the end of the 19th century, it was doubly so in the misery of the 1920s, a time of national humiliation with the French occupation of the Rhineland.

It is a brave novelist who tackles these giant themes. The historical novel that mingles fact with invented incident is a tricky genre and the novel of ideas, although a German tradition, is hardly an English one. But Wilson's achievement is startling, the product of profound immersion in the German intellectual journey from a 19th-century crisis of religious faith to a 20th-century collapse into nihilism. Most contemporary English fiction looks rather etiolated and pointless by comparison.

As Wilson's narrator says in his story there was an aesthetic cost, as well as personal suffering, involved in national socialism. Because the Nazis had appropriated so much of German art, literature, music and religion, it became necessary to "cleanse" much that was good as well as bad during the denazification process. That "Gothic" or medievalising element in German culture - seen in the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich as well as heard in Wagner's music - simply disappeared. Awareness of complexity and avoidance of simple moralism are the signs of a great artist; 21st-century historians will need the same gifts to unravel the causes of Germany's 20th-century tragedy.

CAConrad- An Interview

2007-09-12T13:31:00.000-07:00

The Mad Poets Blog
Posted by GEReutter on September 12, 2007 06:53am

CAConrad has been a fixture on the Philadelphia poetry scene for many years. He is passionate about poetry and in particular poetry in Philadelphia. His passion extends to a number of political and social causes in the city and at one point time he considered running for Mayor of Philadelphia. CA has been published internationally and has toured reading his work throughout the
United States. His first love is Philadelphia and if you hear a discussion or are at a reading downtown you will either hear CA or hear someone speaking of his work. He is a regular contributor to the Philly Sound Poets Blog, has been a guest editor at a number of literary journals and has published a number of works to include The Frank Poems, advancedELVIScourse and his recent full length collection Deviant Propulsion. You can visit with CAConrad at his blog http://caconrad.blogspot.com/

What Others Say about CA and Deviant Propulsion:

“Conrad is a fearless combination of the out front & tenderness, subtlety in the literary equivalent of outrageous drag….” Ron Silliman

“Deviance for CAConrad is survival; deviance is an act of faith: a religion against religions; it’s a private, vulnerable deviance distinct from the grand malevolent brand. There is something loving and lonely about Conrad’s deviance. His poems propel deviancy–his deviancy–into the poetry. In a country that wrongly casts poets and poetry itself as deviant Conrad’s poems here are unflinching. That is, the poems are not about deviancy, each in its own artful way, is an act of deviancy itself” – Tom Devaney.

“I’ve been living with and loving Conrad’s work, and his person — his entire being; the man is radiant! — for years and years. Having the book here is almost as pleasurable as being in the man’s physical presence.” – Joe Massey

“CA Conrad is committed to numerous political issues, most notably economic disparity and gay rights. His first collection of poems, Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press), has Publishers’ Weekly comparing him to Allen Ginsberg. Indeed, Conrad’s poems have that sexy playfulness and the willingness to expose hypocrisy that leads through Ginsberg back to Walt Whitman, with a bit of the New York Schools (Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan in particular) thrown in to keep it humorous.” – Kevin Thurston

THE INTEVIEW:

Q. What direction is life taking CAConard?

A. Most of my family in the dirty little rural Pennsylvania world I grew up in worked at the factory making coffins. Direction is a wondrous idea from there. The factory was closed down during Bill Clinton’s NAFTA reign of terror, so no one back home can proudly say they’re making coffins bound for George Bush’s reign of terror in Iraq. What direction? Aren’t we all headed down the up stairs at this point? What a relief our slide into destruction might actually wind up being, right? It was a beautiful day today. It’s okay to enjoy the day. It’s okay to get the Love. In fact it’s essential to get the Love. Every moment we can we had better do so now. Everyday I feel like storing each beautiful thing I smell and feel and hear. Do it for those burning alive in the deserts of Iraq. It’s going to be a terrible day when we all finally understand how much we contribute to suffering. Tattoos that read I SUPPORT IMPERIALISM WITH THE TAXES I PAY! In the end what do we deserve? If we could understand punishment as a nation the way Germany was asked to understand it half a century ago, what would it be? As a nation we must all pay, not just our leaders who made it happen. And not just the leaders who allowed it to happen. But the tax payers who fund this war and continue to fund this war. The you and me of the equation. The consumer with the house so full the storage rental so full. Everything’s got to stop soon. The direction of this nation is erasing any pencil marks making plans on the map. If freedom is this damnation of bullets at other souls than I don’t want it. Fuck my direction. I have no idea how to make this world work. I have no idea how to make money. I have no idea what to do when the rent goes through the roof. I have no particular angst at the moment either way about it. Last week I was at work in Rittenhouse Square and a man had a heart attack on the third floor of the parking garage next door and drove his car through the wall and out onto the street and flipped upsidedown and I never saw so much blood. It was as if every drop of blood was wrung out of him. And people said to me they thought it was a movie being shot. And other people said they though it had something to do with terrorists. And everywhere I looked people were standing there with their cellphones taking pictures of it. And calling friends and sending the pictures. “DO YOU SEE IT!?” It’s funny how we have to actually KNOW someone to care about their death. Maybe we don’t care about the death of the trees in the woods because we don’t know them. Maybe we don’t care about the end of the polar bears because we don’t know them. Maybe we’re not selfish, maybe we’re just big stupid babies who need to actually know, really connect and know to care. Maybe we are selfish because we don’t bother connecting. Maybe we have no idea what we deserve. Maybe we deserve whatever is coming toward us right now. Maybe the Light we keep hearing about is the path the bullet that hits you takes but you can’t tell anyone about it because you’re quiet, and gone. The light thrown from the sun is beautiful this time of year, end of summer, in Philadelphia. It’s painfully beautiful. What direction? My direction is American and not noble. If I were noble I would have the courage to stop paying my taxes and stop funding an evil I know, and you know, is happening in our names whether or not we choose to say it’s in our names. I participate. I am here with you in this dark feast, gliding in and out of the calendar as if someone else is going to make this story have a nicer plot. Our brutality is daily in Iraq, in the supermarket, the butcher, the child labor, the need to believe in the consumption of joy brushing teeth with a toothbrush someone’s hands made somewhere in the world who we don’t know and don’t want to know. A spasm of recognition as the alarm goes off. Hello hands, hello yourself they say.

Q. What would you say was safer; being trapped in a high rise on fire or an evening drinking with Joe Massey?

A. HAHAHA! I LOVE this question! I don’t feel unsafe around Joe at all as he’s a trusted friend, but my inclination is to say it’s safer in a high rise fire because it would funnier. He’s famous of course for his readings, getting drunk and saying things at the microphone you never, ever forget you heard him say. My favorite time was when he wanted me to shove a Rolling Rock bottle up his ass in the bathroom after a reading, and I said, “JOE THERE’S NO LUBRICANT IN THIS PLACE!” Lubricant is often on my mind but later I realized there was soap, which I hadn’t thought of at the time. Yes, you look back and think to yourself, JESUS! WHY DID I FORGET ABOUT SOAP!? And also his girlfriend (from that time) was there and wasn’t too happy about him asking me to do this. Girlfriends are always an issue to consider of course, besides soap I mean. She was very nice and I wonder sometimes where she is. Anyway, soap, Joe, high rise fires. Now if Joe had asked to shove a bottle up my ass instead it would have turned into a different story. And that’s all I’m going to say as I need to leave SOMETHING to your imagination!

Q. Deviant Propulsion, (Soft Skull Press), was your first full length collection published. What effect did the positive reception of the book have on your current writing and when can we expect to see another volume of work?

A. What? What is this question? What? I’m still queer, so the book didn’t make me heterosexual. Was that a goal? I don’t think so. But I’m one of the few queers who will actually admit that our odd race of deviants are going to subvert this world. It’s only a matter of time. Oh yes, you hear stories all the time of queers wanting to get married, wanting to settle down, blah blah blah, have babies and prove how NORMAL we are. Oh yes, you hear these things. But we’re not normal, we’re odd, and some of us will hide it. But we’re not normal, and yes we’re here to confiscate the things the national mind holds pure. Even those (especially those) who pretend to want a normal life do this. As an honest queer I’m telling you I’m always ready to take a giant shit on the holiest of cloth you offer. What the hell was the question again? Oh, I’m confused. But my current work isn’t something I would say is a result in any way of the Soft Skull book. Soft Skull is a marvelous blessing of course as they take very good care of their authors. But I’ve recently completed a series called (Soma)tic Midge, which is coming out later this year from Jack Kimball’s FAUX Press. These (Soma)tic poems were written in a series of 7 colors where I would eat a single color all day long, then write. Several of these have been published online:

RED on listenlight: http://listenlight.net/07/conrad/ ORANGE on MiPOesia: http://www.mipoesias.com/2007/conrad_ca.htm GREEN on Sawbuck: http://sawbuckpoems.blogspot.com/2007/04/caconrad.html BLUE on Coconut: http://www.coconutpoetry.org/conrad1.htm

And now I’m working on other (Soma)tic poems, and have developed a free blog which will contain weekly updates with a new (Soma)tic exercise each week. Here’s where it can be found: http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/ Poetry is the CENTER of my world, and has been so for most of my life. The ways to get the poems out is infinite, and no one should be afraid of writing them. It’s kind of funny to hear poets CONCERNED about their poems lasting for hundreds of years when the world is such a dangerous place, and threatened. It will be a miracle if there is anyone left in a hundred years to read them. Now is the time to say FUCK YOU to those who would tell us how to write. Just write! And if you’re having trouble getting started then maybe try one of my (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises, or make one up yourself. What is most important is making space in your life for the writing. And getting out of the pain of routine, and to not allow the pain of routine to become a routine of pain which files down our sharp edges. We must keep sharp to keep alive, keep as alive as we can.

Q. If you were sitting on a bench in Rittenhouse Square and an unexpected person sat down next to you, who would you want that person to be?

A. Franz Kafka, my first Love. I’ve never Loved another man like Kafka. It breaks my heart over and over and over and over thinking about the dumb fucking luck to be born decades too late. But I would LOVE Kafka to sit next to me in Rittenhouse Square on a bench! And I would want it to be a bench where we could see the little goat statue, you know that statue? He’s a little goat, and a little pissed or playful, and he’s getting his horns ready to RAM someone! But Kafka, yes. And I mean the dead Kafka. Capital D, Dead Kafka. I’d like to nibble his Dead ear, listen close for his Dead pulse that never appears, and of course ask him what he’s been up to all day. “Where were you earlier Dead Kafka my dear? Oh, don’t answer, your jaw hurts, I know, I know, don’t worry.” It would be even better if Dead Kafka were some kind of freak literary zombie vampire, and I would GLADLY let him chew on my wrist and drink my blood, a little snack from my wrist. Ah, Dead Kafka, my dear one. There’s a Kafka altar in my apartment, and a lot of Elvis things as well. The Kafka and Elvis connection is bigger than most people realize. Two special forces with separate beams of energy, but when combined, WHOA, let me tell you, IT! IS! like breakfast with a CASSANDRA!

Q. Who were your major influences growing up and who currently influences you as a poet?

A. Kafka turned me on first. Turned me on in the sense that the imagination suddenly had this GASH in the side of the wall someone else had put up in front of me, and I could see through. Poets, early influences? Molly Russakoff came to my high school to give a reading. I was in a bad way out there in deep, rural Pennsylvania. My life was so fucked up, and unsafe in an extreme way surrounded by fascists who were not armchair fascists. But Molly told me to read Joseph Ceravolo, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, and off I went! I had already discovered Kafka, my mind was already ready and open. Molly gave me this silver platter. I’m always in debt to her for this. But influences now? You mean poets whose work I Love and am STARTLED BY now? My friends! No doubt about it! The best poems I’ve ever read in my life are by my friends! Frank Sherlock, Dorothea Lasky, Ish Klein, Ryan Eckes, Linh Dinh, Jessica White, Jenn McCreary, Brenda Iijima, Joe Massey, Laura Jaramillo, John Coletti, Erica Kaufman, Stacy Szymaszek, Carol Mirakove, Brett Evans, Magdalena Zurawski, Kathryn Pringle, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Divya Victor, the list goes on. These are the poets I read and feel a velocity of color, ingenuity, problem solving, entire new structure, sand, wood, metal, wickedly honest, and like none of it ever imagined in my past. The fucking pyramids could be rebuilt in a day!

Q. You have been active for a number of years in the Philadelphia poetry scene and all its ebbs and flows. What directions do see poetry as an influence in Philadelphia moving?

A. Hmm. Philadelphia is a bucket of shit now that the rich are taking control. Fuck the rich! They have NO IDEA what this city was like in 1986 when I first moved here! Yeah, now they want to claim this town, call it their own, say it’s building an arts scene. Building an arts scene!? Wow! They know NOTHING! In 1986 I moved into the Imperial Hotel, just a teenager at the time. And the center city area was The Zulli Nation, named after landlord Al Zulli. He was a generous guy, and his friends Doug and Cindy were my crazy, generous landlords. They all loved artists, and kept the rents low, and we could afford to create things, write, paint, whatever we wanted, and NOT have to fight all the time like we do now! Now these rich greedy scumbags are here to cut everyone’s balls off and make everyone work and work and work. Unless you’re fortunate to have money, it’s going to be rough in this town soon, very soon. I’m planning on opening The Philadelphia Poetry Hotel one day to make room for poor and working class poets who want to move to the city and WRITE! I meet young poets all the time now who are the age I was in 1986 and they can’t do what I did! My rent was 210 a month in The Zulli Nation. That same apartment is now almost 1500 a month. And people say stupid shit all the time like, “Well, you have to consider inflation.” What!? This city is 300 years old! How can you excuse THAT as inflation? That’s NOT inflation, that’s GREED! http://poetryhotel.blogspot.com/ Greed wants to stand in the way of the history of art, and I’m going to do my best to stand in the way of greed, at least for some poets. My goal is to open this hotel and have it be cheap rent so poets only have to work a part time job like I did when I first moved here. Then they can spend their time in the libraries and bookstores, and museums, learning, writing, reading, learning, writing, reading, being beautiful.everyone’s got no time for bullshit, which is what I Love most about Philadelphia. You want bullshit, fuck yourself and look elsewhere because we’re BUSY! Philadelphia is not a place I ever intend to leave. They’ll have to drag me out of this town clawing and screaming. This city is where I learned to write poems. This city is always ready to give that to anyone who wants it. I truly did understand how to Love the world here in poetry. And I learned that I need NO ONE’S permission to do that. And I learned that I need NO ONE’S direction but my own in how to do that. Some people say (especially ignorant newcomers) that this is a mean town. First, GO HOME if that’s the case! But second, there is a grace, a powerful grace in a city where everyone’s got no time for bullshit, which is what I Love most about Philadelphia. You want bullshit, fuck yourself and look elsewhere because we’re BUSY!

The Poetic Case

2007-09-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007)
2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/07/3304-0008$10.00. All rights reserved.
865
1. Poetry and poetics have an important role to play, for instance, in the political thinking of
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Rancie`re, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben. See Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford, Calif., 1999); Jacques
Rancie`re, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New
York, 2004); Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, Calif.,
2005); and Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas:Word and Phantasm inWestern Culture, trans. Ronald L.
Martinez (Minneapolis, 1993) and The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, Calif., 1999). I don’t want to presume to amalgamate the work of all these very
different thinkers, but it is interesting to note that they all interpret the relation between poetry
and politics by establishing its specificity, sometimes (as in Badiou) even its singularity or (as in
Lacoue-Labarthe) its absolute character.

The Poetic Case
Christopher Nealon
What might a poem be said to be exemplary of, today? How is its exemplarity
shaped by discourse on poetry, on the aesthetic, on history? As
far back as the Republic, debates about the value and the function of poetry
have been tied to questions about the exemplarity of poetry as a kind of
creativity, or representation, or labor so that, down to this day, much aesthetic
and political theory still depends on a notion of poetry to explain
what escapes (and urges on) conceptualization in language and in social
life.1 But since the theory-revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s the poem’s
significance for historical thinking has dropped out of sight; especially in
the Marxism of Fredric Jameson and his readers, narrative, rather than poetry,
came to symbolize the historically and socially significant scene of human
action.
The narrative that has become dominant since Jameson is a tragic one;
the aim of this essay is to begin to disentangle Left aesthetics from that
mode. Though I will be following through on arguments of Jameson’s, I will
also be reading against the grain of the terms he has bequeathed us. I will
not only be arguing for a shift in our attention to different literary genres
866 Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
2. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1981), p. 70; hereafter abbreviated PU.
but also making a case for tuning in to different emotional structures than
those to which the academic Left, at least, has become habituated. My argument
will move from a consideration of how the tragic operates in Jameson’s
sense of history, to a range of poetic and aesthetic theory that posits
forms of value other than those articulated in a tragic mode, and finally to
a contemporary poem whose historical pathos derives from a fascinating
palimpsest of antitragic arguments. What I have to propose is humbler than
a political unconscious writ large, but I think its pas de deux of hope and
disappointment may be something like what we need to read the history of
the present.
1
In the long first chapter of The Political Unconscious, Jamesonwrites that,
“no matter how weakly . . . all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation
on the destiny of community.”2 This is a less well-knownpronouncement
than the one that opens the book—“Always historicize!”—but it is,
Jameson suggests, a characterization of the political unconscious itself—
“meditation” isolated in no one subject or any single period on a “destiny”
that Jameson argues must be understood historically as “the experience of
Necessity.” Interpreting this History requires assembling “inert” historical
data into a story of “why what happened . . . had to happen the way it did”;
Jameson refers to this reassembly of data into History as “the ‘emotion’ of
great historiographic form” (PU, p. 101).
In Jameson’s interpretive system, a literary text must be read against
“progressively wider horizons”: first as an isolated “symbolic act” that exists
in chronological, punctual time; next as an “ideologeme” that expresses features
of ongoing class struggles; and then as an instance of an “ideology of
form,” which orients the first two types of reading to an understanding of
symbolic activity as giving form to simultaneous, coexistent “traces or anticipations
of modes of production” (PU, p. 76). Against the backdrop of
this widest horizon, the liberation of texts from mere inert chronology and
into the pathos of Necessity gives “the ‘emotion’ of great historiographic
Christopher Nealon is associate professor in the Department of English at
the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Foundlings: Lesbian and
Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (2004) and a book of poems titled The
Joyous Age (2004). He is currently at work on a manuscript called The Matter of
Capital: North American Poetry from Bretton Woods to Black-Sholes and Beyond.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 867
form” a particular shading; it is “represented in the form of the inexorable
logic involved in the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have
taken place in human history” (PU, p. 102).
These formulations have moved and inspired me since I first encountered
them in the early 1990s. But I have always been struck by how the
prospect of adhering to Jameson’s interpretive system feels at once too difficult
and too easy: too difficult because to take seriously the suturing of any
given text into the simultaneity-rich history Jameson describes would be to
delay that suturing, perhaps infinitely, while gathering data; and too easy
because, once Jameson has described the widest backdrop against which
texts may be read—the coexistence of traces of all modes of production and
the determinate defeat of every revolution to date—it is very hard not to
succumb to the temptation to skip to the end, as it were, and assign each
text a place in universal history right off the bat.
I have also been unable to answer the question of whether, in Jameson’s
system, the deepest “emotion” literary texts can yield is tragic. My uncertainty
is linked to a confusion about phrasing the role of historical Necessity
as “the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in
human history” rather than, say, the determinate coordination of allwriting
to the same system of abstraction that organizes the life of the commodity.
Why is “failure” the normative standpoint for reading the political unconscious
in or out of literature?
Not only do I feel a sheepish desire to redact or compress the Jamesonian
narrative but I’m not sure whether some of the emotions that most interest
me in reading literary writing can count, in his terms, as truly “historiographical.”
So this essay will attempt to chart another way of reading, which
takes seriously Jameson’s insistence on a political unconscious—whichtries
to detect the trace “meditations” on “the destiny of community” at work
in literary writing—but which arrives at a different understanding of the
“emotion” it puts in play.
For Jameson, mere chronology becomes a “socially symbolic act” by being
reconstructed into a tragic narrative of a very particular kind: the narrative
of the failure of revolutions, which he conceives as the supersession
of one set of historical conditions (“revolutionary”) by another (“inert”).
What this means, for Jameson’s reading practice, is that the inert chronologies
he wants to reconstruct into “socially symbolic,” affectively forceful
interpretations are reconstructed as inert—as a story of becoming-inert,
becoming-failure, that mere chronology, itself inert, has disguised. We
move, in this style of reading, froma historical inertness to a tragic story of
becoming-inert. This is not a circular interpretive practice, necessarily; it is
868 Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
3. Narrative is not, of course, Jameson’s only means of approaching the question of what can or
cannot be made present to consciousness in the production of a text; in his essay “Postmodernism,
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson calls for an aesthetics of “cognitive mapping”
that would catch up to, and outmaneuver, the disorientation produced by postmodernism’s
technological sublime—famously rendered in that essay through the narrative of a shopper being
unable to navigate the spectacular spaces of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. The
simultaneity of one’s sense of placement in space, were it made possible again in postmodern
spaces, would indeed share something with what I’ve taken as part of lyric experience, something
of its instantaneity. But the optative pedagogy embedded in “cognitive mapping”—which, in the
volume that later came to incorporate his essay, Jameson acknowledges was “in reality nothing but
a code word for ‘class consciousness,’” is still hitched to a division between materiality and vitality
whose source lies, not in Sartre’s useful depiction of totality as an ongoing process of totalization,
but in his understanding of that process as a cycle that always returns human projects to the
“practico-inert,” the used-up, the worked over (Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism [Durham, N.C., 1991], p. 418).Without dismissing the possibilities of an aesthetics
of cognitive mapping, then, I want to clear space for other understandings of the political
unconscious not premised on this undialectical division between the dead and the living. For
Sartre on the practico-inert, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Theory of Practical Ensembles, vol. 1 of Critique of
Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith, ed. Jonathan Re´e (London, 2004), with a foreward
by Jameson.
a way of reading that turns interpretation to the task of remindingourselves,
you might say, how dead we have become.3
Even so, this reading style, grounded in a narrative of tragedy and supersession,
forecloses the possibility of reading for the local affirmations,
emphatic shifts in tone, and ecstatic simultaneity that have shaped the history
of the lyric, as well as the history of poetry as an early name for what
we would now call aesthetic experience. Three features of that history shape
my essay. First, I traverse episodes in a gradual movement from a classical
context in which poetry was a privileged name for all artistic creation to an
aesthetic theory that depends on, but departs from, the tradition of seeing
poetry as the metonym for all the arts. Second, I ammoving across language
that shifts from thinking of poetry as the name for a kind of thing made by
poets—either literal writers of poems or artists generally—to thinking
about aesthetic experience as marking a kind of human capacity, whether
or not it produces traditionally aesthetic objects. And, third, I will be attending
to the ways in which Western discourse on poetry is built so as to
position any given poem as bearing value partly by way of its partial realization
of the capacities of poetry. When I turn to an individual poem at the
end of this essay, then, I will be trying to read it, not as an instance of inertness
made live by reconstruction, but as a partly realized instance of a
discourse on poetry that avoids the deadness-liveness binary of Jameson’s
tragic model in favor of raising questions about poetic value—what poetry
is good for and whether what it’s good for can ever be realized.
This last point forms the crux of my essay. I believe that we are able to
read poems through the lens of their partial realization of the possibilities
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 869
4. My term unrealizability topoi modifies a phrase of Ernst Robert Curtius’s, “inexpressibility
topoi,” which he used to name the poetic strategy of claiming, in medieval Latin poems praising
royalty, that the overlord to whom the poem is addressed is too glorious or powerful to be
compassed by any single poet or poem. See Ernst Robert Curtius, “InexpressibilityTopoi,”
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans.Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J., 1973), pp.
159–62.
of the category poetry because the history of theWestern discourse on poetry
is itself built around recurring topoi of unrealizability. As I will detail
below, these unrealizability topoi range frommeditations on whetherpoem
making is a kind of labor to claims that poetry illuminates theunimportance
or even pointlessness of all human labor.4 The questions posed in such topoi
are so basic that they are capable of making the category poetry straddle
what we would now think of as two very different languages of value: an
ancient language of use-value and a modern one of surplus-value. Questions
about whether a poem really is a made thing oblige us to think about
something like the use-value of poems, what they are for, what they can do,
and whether for-ness, telos, is really the right language for thinking about
poems. Questions about the pointlessness of human labor, meanwhile,
shine a light on what goes on in laboring activity, whether it can be said to
be for something, a higher purpose, or whether it is simply toil or exploitation.
A central argument of my essay is that, in the history of defending
poetry, the topoi of unrealizability give poetry’s defenders a way to suggest
that the significance of poetry is not captured by the language of making or
purpose but that it is a type of activity that puts pressure on the social
meanings of both. And as the meaning of the social develops ever-greater
complexity, relentlessness, and intensity, this demurral frominstrumentalization
opens up a space of bewilderment about the present that is potentially
critical, even as it risks valorizing uselessness as such.
In what follows, then, I will visit some key moments in the “defense of
poetry”—a genre that returns, again and again, to questions of partial or
impossible realization. In particular, I will focus on the way implicit and
explicit defenses of poetry feed into a Left aesthetic tradition thatkeepsopen
the question of whether and how poetry—or, later, aesthetic experience—
troubles our understanding of value as realizable in the first place. And I
will argue that pursuing this trouble is exactly the way to begin reading a
history of poetry that produces a historiographic emotion not quite captured
by the story of the tragic and the inert.
2
To build an archive of rhetoric around poetry that centers on the question
of the possible failure to realize of its social value is to imagine that
870 Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
5. Plato, Republic, trans. RobinWaterfield (Oxford, 1994), p. 353.
rhetoric as part of a long reply to Plato; so I think it makes sense to begin
with a scene from the Republic in which this issue is addressed directly. In
book 10 Socrates’s discussion of poetry is almost entirely role based; he is
irritated by a popular, unphilosophical attribution to poets of polymathy—
the idea that poets, because they write about the whole world, must have
expert knowledge of all trades, all skills, all professions. Plato counters this
claim to universal poetic subjecthood by arguing, through Socrates, that
poets are neither makers nor users of anything. Luring Glaucon through a
thicket of leading questions, Socrates draws a distinction between the false
universality of the poet and the functional dyad of maker and user—here,
figured as the player and the maker of a pipe:
“A pipe-player, for example, tells a pipe-maker which of his pipes do
what they’re supposed to do when actually played, and goes on to instruct
him in what kinds of pipes to make, and the pipe-maker does
what he’s told.”
“Of course.”
“So far as good and bad pipes are concerned, it’s a knowledgeable person
who gives the orders, while the other obeys the orders, and does the
manufacturing. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Justified confidence, then, is what a pipe-maker has about goodness
and badness . . . while knowledge is the province of the person who
makes use of the pipes.”
“Yes.”
“Which of these two categories does our representer belong to?”. . . .
“He doesn’t fit either case.”5
Plato presents, against the claims of poetry, a political economy of pure
realization: a theory of production and consumption in which one transforms
into the other with no overlap or residue. Everyone, that is, must have
a single function, and there must be no gap between the production of a
thing and its use, no deferral or ambiguity in realizing the value of, say, a
pipe. The pipe may not be played upon right away, but it must be immediately
clear that being played upon is what it is for.
So this is what we might call the economic claim against poetry.Socrates’s
objection to poetry is not that it is a failed case, a secondarity or copy, but
that it is neither the case of production nor of consumption; it is a failed
universality.My interest in this essay will be in responses to this accusation,
especially when rhetoric around the utility or function of poetry proposes
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 871
its unrealizability, when languages that defend the deferral or nonexistence
of poetry’s utility defend it exactly for having no obvious end. Another way
to describe what I mean by unrealizability is that it describes a condition of
poetry as not most importantly a made thing or perhaps not a made thing
at all. Certainly this is what Plato thinks; and one feature of the defense of
poetry, as well as of the Left aesthetics that comes to draw on it, will be to
accept Plato’s characterization and ask whether the not-made-ness of poetry
is such a bad thing. This opens up other ways of thinking about the
importance of poetry, not least as the scene of a perpetual making that never
quite settles into the state of having-been-made.Unrealizability,then,might
also be a name for the way in which any given poem can be read as much
for its instancing poetry as for its separate status as individual poem.
In any case, these unrealizability topoi cluster around different kinds of
questions from the Renaissance on—questions of sovereignty, of labor, of
historical change and causality, of exploitation and value—but to read them
from the long end of their deployment is to begin to be able to read a compressed
history of the social relations, imagined and real, aroundthe reading
and writing of poetry. I think it makes sense to start looking at these unrealizability
topoi in Renaissance replies to Plato because the Renaissance
is the period when poetry begins to be understood once again as more than
a school activity—not only as material for memorization, or as a tool for
learning the classical languages, but as a creative activity vulnerable exactly
to Plato’s charge of nonutility.
I will, then, conduct a brief and whirlwind tour of selected defenses of
poetry from the Renaissance on. This tour is meant to be neither comprehensive
nor definitive; indeed it is deliberately eccentric and discontinuous.
What will link my visits to these earlier defenses of poetry is the topos of
unrealizability and the joint it forms at the beginning of the modern era,
with certain ideas about labor, its value and its exploitation.
I begin with Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, which depicts the social
competition between schoolmen and courtiers by way of a language of utility,
of ends, and insists that poetry has an end, after all, even if it isn’t immediately
evident. Sidney, discussing oratory in his Defence of Poesy, follows
Aristotle by defining kinds of human activity in terms of their relation to
“virtuous action” and specifies that it is not an action’s “next end”—that is,
its immediate utility—that matters for virtue so much as its “further end,”
which is a little harder to pin down:
even as the saddler’s next end is to make a good saddle, but his further
end to serve a nobler faculty, which is horsemanship, so the horseman’s
to soldiery, and the soldier not only to have the skill, but to perform the
872 Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
6. Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney: The MajorWorks, ed. Katherine
Duncan-Jones (Oxford, 2002), pp. 219–20; hereafter abbreviated DP.
7. See Robert Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory
in Social Context (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 60–64.
practice of a soldier. So that, the ending end of all earthly learning being
virtuous action, those skills that most serve to bring forth that have a
most just title to be princes over all the rest.6
Poetry’s telos, then, is virtuous action, but not necessarily the poet’s. Elsewhere
in the Defence of Poesy, Sidney suggests that poets can fashion models
or examples of governance superior to what—thus far, at least—has been
found in nature and that these models can be of use to the queen. Indeed
the canonical rendering of the second nature of the made world in the Defence
of Poesy involves an implicit comparison of Elizabeth to the Cyrus of
Xenophon’s Cyropaedia:
Which delivering forth [of ideal types] also is not wholly imaginative, as
we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substantially
it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a
particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus
upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and
how that maker made him. [DP, pp. 216–217]
Though Xenophon’s Cyrus is a fictionalized perfection of the actual emperor,
Sidney suggests that the replication—and the replicability—of his
ideality is a form of service to the queen unique to the poet, useful to her
in the perfection of governance. Aristocratic court poets, then, become first
among courtiers, “princes over all the rest,” by serving a higher authority,
working for the sovereign by miming sovereignty for her. As Robert Matz
has shown, this canny rendition of aristocracy-as-service allows Sidney to
reply to detractors of poetry who see it as having been reduced, since heroic
times, to a decadent court pleasure. Matz argues persuasively that Sidney’s
Defence of Poesy is as much a defense of the idea of virtuous aristocracy as
it is a defense of poetry, and he draws our attention to the ways in which,
in Sidney’s hands, poetry’s role of circulating models of virtue allows it to
serve as a kind of rhetorical value adjuster. To accusations that the aristocracy
is simply feeding off the rest of the social body, Sidney argues that this
problem—which he tacitly acknowledges is real—can be altered by the activity
of poetry, which will serve as a corrective to aristocratic excess and
return the class system to its proper functioning.7
This argument for poetry as the platform for class homeostasis survives
past the Renaissance, though it is called in to correct for different kinds of
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 873
8. GiambattistaVico, The New Science of GiambattistaVico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and
Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), p. 118, ¶378.
9. See Max Horkheimer and TheodorW. Adorno, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” The
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid
Noerr (Stanford, Calif., 2002), pp. 1–34.
10. Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment:Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton, N.J.,
2000), p. 60.
crises of value. Beginning with Vico, and later among the romantics, we can
see the particular not-quite production that is poetry brought to bear, not
so much on the question of decadence, but on the problem of the increasingly
abstract character of social life. Vico’s The New Science, for example,
is an attempt at what he called universal history—universal not only in its
aim of comparing civilizations by abstracting them into stories of development,
but also in its method, which is to use philology to coordinate
across cultures their different histories of kinship and state forms, habits of
mind, and linguistic character.
Poetry has a central role to play in The New Science. Vico asserts that
human language was originally full of vivid images—for gods and the powers
of nature, especially—and that it became less “poetic” with the development
of modern government and science:
the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in
the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our
languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were
spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how
to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the
vast image of this mistress called “Sympathetic Nature.” Men shape the
phrase with their lips but have nothing in their minds; for what they
have in mind is falsehood, which is nothing; and their imagination no
longer avails to form a vast false image.8
This will prove a very influential formulation; it is reworked two centuries
later in the opening pages of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, where it buttresses
Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument that a ban on mimesis lies at
the origin of the development of instrumental reason.9 Vico’s understanding
of the cost of the development of abstraction is not dialectical,however;
he believes in a combination of tragic and providential historical causality,
in which cultures, even if they are destroyed by their own limitations, may
be able to restart their development. Having positioned poetry at the origin
of civilization, Vico sees it as a resource that later cultures can rediscover if
they grasp a collective need for imagination as well as for abstract and empirical
knowledge.Writing about this idea in Vico’s philosophy, Isaiah Berlin
says that for Vico the problem of rampant abstraction is that “men have
not realised their marvellous potentialities.”10
874 Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
11. Thomas Love Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry,” rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/
displayprose.cfm?prosenum7
12. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley: The MajorWorks, ed.
Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford, 2003), p. 696; hereafter abbreviated “DPS.”
13. Scholarship on Ecclesiastes returns frequently to this question, not least as it is raised by the
insistent Ecclesiastian use of the Hebrew word hebel (lbh), which has been most frequently
This positioning of poetic imagination as an unrealized potentiality will
reverberate in the writing of the romantics. In the work of Schiller, Percy
Shelley, and others, though, the theological mode subtending their historical
claims about poetry will shift from the providential to the prophetic, not
least because by the early nineteenth century poetry has begun to be classified
as obsolete by a rising middle class that understands its interests in
primarily material terms.
Shelley’s “The Defence of Poetry,” for instance, is primarily a defence
against Thomas Love Peacock’s claim that, in an age that prizes facts, science,
and technical utility, poets are committed to hopelessly outdated
“Cimmerian labours.”11 Shelley’s response to this claim is to insist that poetry
can balance or compensate for excesses of what he calls the “calculating
principle”:
The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods
when from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation
of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the
power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.12
Like Sidney before him, Shelley wishes to defend poetry in terms of its capacity
to repair an imbalance of value or accumulation in the social body;
like Vico, he correlates periods of history and habits of mind. Under pressure
to account for poetry’s seeming supersession by the principle of utility,
though, Shelley makes two additional moves.
First, he makes recourse to the language of prophecy; the poet, he says,
“beholds the future in the present” (“DPS,” p. 677). Second, he reworks the
definition of utility so that it not only includes but is organized around
poetry. This Shelleyan utility is linked to tragedy; poets, in his account, produce
a kind of mixed pleasure and pain that is the highest pleasure, and “the
production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility”
(“DPS,” p. 695). The argument here is obscure, but made slightly less so by
Shelley’s use, in the passage describing pleasure and pain, of a verse from
Ecclesiastes: “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house
of mirth” (“DPS,” p. 694). Though the particular verse does not express it,
Ecclesiastes is substantially concerned with the vanity of labor, its inability
to realize human happiness; and it seems, if we put the pieces together, that
Shelley’s argument about tragic emotion as the highest utility is an argument
for poetry’s power to highlight the limits of human labor’s ability to
answer larger questions of humanity’s ends or uses.13
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 875
translated as “vanity.” See, for instance, Douglas B. Miller, Symbol and Rhetoric in Ecclesiastes: The
Place of Hebel in Qohelet’sWork (Leiden, 2002).
14. Robert Kaufman has worked assiduously to bring the contemporaneity of Shelleyan
aesthetics into view for the twenty-first-century academy and, more broadly, to align the
development of a romantic aesthetics of negativity with the aesthetic theories of Adorno and
Benjamin and problems of Leftist politics today. His work at this juncture is immensely clarifying,
and I feel a debt to it. For work most pertinent to the place of Shelley as precursor and reference
point for a Left aesthetic theory, see his “Negatively Capable Dialectics:Keats, Vendler, Adorno,
and the Theory of the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27 (Winter 2001): 354–84 and “Legislators of
the Post-EverythingWorld: Shelley’s Defence of Adorno,” English Literary History 63 (Autumn
1996): 707–33. Also useful for a detailed account of the routes of transmission running from
Shelley to Adorno and Benjamin is “Intervention& Commitment Forever! Shelley in 1819, Shelley
in Brecht, Shelley in Adorno, Shelley in Benjamin,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (May 2001),
www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/interventionist/kaufman/kaufman.html
15. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth
M.Wilkinson and L. A.Willoughby (Oxford, 1967), pp. 31–33; hereafter abbreviated AE.
Shelley’s ideas in “The Defence of Poetry” are helpful in piecing together
a genealogy of poetic discourse on value partly because they are broad. His
ideas that poetry has the power to correct for excessive material accumulation
and that technical labor cannot provide its own answers to the question
of the ends of humanity allow us to see something like a perimeter of
Left aesthetic theory that will remain stable downto the twentieth century.14
Though his defense of poetry contains elements that remain useful for contemporary
theory, however, it does not contain a theory of modernity per
se; Shelley tends to rely, in phrases like “periods of the decay of social life,”
on an implicitly cyclical historiography (“DPS,” p. 685). For a romantic aesthetics
that tries to ground its claims for the value of poetry in an account
of the rise of the modern, we have to look elsewhere; and it is in Schiller
that we can find the most thoroughgoing and influential formulations.
In the sixth letter in his On The Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller’s
argument centers on an account of the fragmentation of modern society
that devolves from a comparison with ancient civilization:
[The ancient mind] did indeed divide human nature into its several aspects,
and project these in magnified form into the divinities of its glorious
pantheon; but not by tearing it to pieces; rather by combining its
aspects in different proportions, for in no single one of their deities was
humanity in its entirety ever lacking.How different with us Moderns!
With us too the image of the human species is projected in magnified
form into separate individuals—but as fragments, not in different combinations,
with the result that one has to go the rounds from one individual
to another in order to be able to piece together a complete image
of the species.15
For Schiller, having to “go the rounds” of the social body just to piece together
a whole human subject is disastrous. As he puts it elsewhere, “Thus
876 Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
little by little the concrete life of the Individual is destroyed in order that
the abstract idea of the Whole may drag out its sorry existence” (AE, p. 37).
Schiller views this destruction of concrete existence as unavoidable:
“there was no other way in which the species as a whole could have progressed”
(AE, p. 39). By introducing the idea of historical necessity into the
story of the fragmentation of human capacity, Schiller obliges aesthetic theory—
and the theory of poetry that forms part of it—to generatemore complex
concepts of part–whole relations. And in the sixth of the Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of Man he produces a striking account of what we could
call the causality of tendencies, where individual causes contribute to an
effect only apparent at the level of the system: “one-sidedness in the exercise
of his powers must . . . lead the individual into error; but the species as a
whole to truth” (AE, p. 41). Schiller sees the implications of this causalmode
in exceptionally stark terms, envisioning philosophy, for instance, as a kind
of terror: “as long as philosophy has to make its prime business the provision
of safeguards against error, truth will be bound to have its martyrs”
(AE, p. 43). Sidney had seen aristocratic virtue tied to a notion of sacrificial
service; here, all humanity is subject to the possibility of sacrifice.
Schiller’s martyrology of truth is resonant in Left aesthetics down to our
day; Jameson depends on it when, reading Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo at the
end of The Political Unconscious, he urges us to see the novel’s “ultimate
narrative message” as the “disjunction between the movement of history
and its enactment by individual subjects” (PU, p. 278). For Jameson, to seek
the “ultimate message” of Conrad’s novel is to understand the particular,
the material, and the individual as performing a sacrificial function that
allows latter-day readers to “keep faith with” the possible realization of a
good totality we can never perceive except in the dialectical supersession of
what has come before us; the characters in Nostromo serve “merely to enable
the coming into being after [themselves] of a new type of collectivity” (PU,
pp. 277, 279).
The indelibility of the language of sacrifice in Left aesthetics since Schiller
does not mean, though, that it is the root formula for all subsequent rhetorics
of deferred or unrealizable value. It is particularly well suited to theory
that has been cut adrift from the energies of a live political movement; but
in writers more closely aligned with present-tense class or movement politics,
the complex form of historical causality Schiller helped make evident
is lined up with other languages than those of tragic necessity and sacrificial
supersession. The history of the defense of poetry and of the aestheticmakes
persistent recourse to topoi of virtuality, potential, and prophecy before
reaching, in Schiller, the scene of tragic sacrifice; but those optimistic languages
don’t seem able to meet the possibility of tragic social abstraction
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 877
16. Georg Luka´cs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 139; hereafter abbreviated HCC.
17. See, for instance, Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and
Eric Matthews, ed. Guyer (Cambridge, 2000), p. 254.
head-on. In the militant Georg Luka´cs, though—and, later, in the work of
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—we can read the emergence of other topoithat
reground the tradition of valorizing making over the made, but in ways that
are specifically geared to confront the abstract character of social life. I
would like to think through two of these other topoi—of vigilance inLuka´cs
and of tone in Spivak—before turning, finally, to a contemporarypoemthat
traffics in them all.
3
Luka´cs, in History and Class Consciousness, identifies Schiller and Schiller’s
aesthetics as the ground for his own investigation of life under capitalism:
By extending the aesthetic principle far beyond the confines of aesthetics,
by seeing it as the key to the meaning of man’s existence in society,
Schiller brings us back to the basic issue of classical philosophy.On the
one hand, he recognizes that social life has destroyed man as man. On
the other hand, he points to the principle whereby man having been socially
destroyed, fragmented, and divided between different partial systems
is to be made whole again in thought.16
Luka´cs departs from Schiller by pointing out that man cannot be made
whole again only in thought or by any single individual; but he hews to
Schiller’s emphasis on the aesthetic principle as a ground for the development
of freedom. This is because, for Luka´cs, the aesthetic is still determined
by a relationship between the given and the made, whereas a
philosophy dominant since Kant has insisted that only what has been made
by humans can be known.17 But this emphasis on the made excludes the
complex processes of making; by limiting philosophical reflection to the
realm of the already produced, Luka´cs argues, the activity of thought becomes
increasingly limited and less able to grasp anything that straddles the
world of given matter and the “intelligible” matter of the humanly made
world. What’s excluded in this narrowing of philosophical activity, Luka´cs
suggests, is the entire realm of production, which is where social relationships
under capitalism are formed (see HCC, pp. 111–20).
To describe these relationships, Luka´cs develops a language of reifying
tendency and counterreifying vigilance. He describes the worker’s comingto-
consciousness about the character of his exploitation this way: “the
878 Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
worker . . . perceives the split in his being preserved in the brutal form of
what is in its whole tendency a slavery without limits” (HCC, p. 166). Because
this exploitation is tendential and because it tends toward limitless
exploitation, Luka´cs believes itmust be met not with a single act of becoming-
aware, but with a continual reassertion of immanent awareness of the
workings of totalization: reification “can be overcome only by constant and
constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by
concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the total
development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these
contradictions for the total development” (HCC, p. 197). Not, in English at
least, very pretty prose; but it helps clarify the particular function of vigilance
in a reading practice that seeks to understand the exemplarity of its
objects. For Luka´cs, aesthetic objects and experiences can be read as instances
of a single totalizing process, but one in which the character of the
totalization cannot be understood without reference to the constantly shifting
ground of the particular. Another way to think about this vigilance
would be to say that Luka´cs’s insistence on the relations of making as more
central to philosophy than the realm of the humanly made positions him
alongside those thinkers who tried to separate the significance of poetry
from manufacture—whether by emphasizing its virtual force in Sidney, or
by thinking of it as a reserve of human potential in Vico, or as the mark of
a time other than the time of facture in Shelley, or (though I have not
touched on it directly here) as linked to the capacity for play in Schiller.
The militancy of Luka´cs’s project lends a fatedness to this way of interpreting
aesthetic production, however; when he writes “the fate of the
worker becomes the fate of society as a whole,” it is implicit that the aesthetic
capacities of workers, always being tapped into by the processes of capitalist
labor, are also tangled up in that fate (HCC, p. 91). This language of fate,
however, limits the role of the aesthetic to an alternative potentiality that,
under the right historical conditions, might serve as the ground for different
forms of the realization of human value. In political terms, this idea has
tended to mean that only those whose labor is obviously an instance of
capitalist exploitation—especially wage workers—can be imagined as the
potential agents of revolutionary change. In aesthetic terms, the language
of fate tends to burden poetic or artistic activity with an obligation to reflect,
negatively, the operations of a capitalism we then believe we fully understand.
Ironically, it took the long twentieth century of defeat and disappointment
on the Left for its intellectuals to ask whether the split between
the technical and the aesthetic under capitalism is best understood as a fated
polarization or sundering and to begin to think of the relationship between
technologized labor and aesthetic experience in less binary terms.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 879
18. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,” In Other
Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London, 1988), p. 175; hereafter abbreviated “SS.” Spivak takes
the phrase “apocalyptic tone” from Derrida’s 1980 essay, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in
Philosophy,” which reads a late work of Kant’s, “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy.”
Kant’s essay is a polemic against the Christian neo-Platonists of his day, who mount an argument
for the importance of emotion and intuition in philosophy. Kant’s rejection of this argument is
grounded, as was Plato’s argument against the polymathy of poets, in the language of labor, which
he links to the language of tone. He writes:
In a word: all think themselves superior to the degree that they believe themselves exempt
from work . . . in this [mystical] philosophy one need not work but only listen to and enjoy the
oracle within oneself in order to bring all the wisdom envisioned with philosophy into one’s
possession: and this announcement is indeed made in a tone indicating that the superior ones
do not think of themselves in the same class as those who, in a scholarly manner, consider
themselves obligated to progress slowly and carefully from the critique of their faculty of
knowledge to dogmatic knowledge. [Kant, “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy,”
in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by
Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore, 1993), p. 52]
We return here to the Platonic language of poetic class usurpation, though the centuries have
honed and altered it. In Kant, the claim of poets to have made a thing without having actually
worked to make it is twined together with the problem of mimesis, but not—as in Plato—at a
metaphysical level. In this passagewe can see that Kant imagines poets miming the aristocracy,
adopting their “tone,” flaunting a laborlessness they haven’t earned. Kant thinks this tone, should
it spread too wide among pretenders to philosophy, will mean the end of the philosophical
enterprise altogether, the abandonment of the hard work of conceptual reflection and
determination. This is why Derrida turns the phrase “superior tone” into “apocalyptic tone”:
In her 1985 essay “Scattered Speculations on the Question ofValue,” Spivak
revisits the problem of the technical–aesthetic split, though it is not the
binary she begins with. She asks, instead, whether and how FirstWorld intellectuals
might imagine a political subject who is predicated neither in
exclusively materialist nor idealist terms. To ask this question is to ask exactly
how and to what extent subjects are determined by social forces. Are
they simply made by them, or is there something else, some surplus in persons
such that the forces that determine their formation do not do so entirely?
One wants to avoid, Spivak suggests, thinking of people as simply the
product of external forces but also thinking of people as somehow innately
able to transcend those forces. Clearly, historical subjects are not purely
determined by their histories; history keeps being changed by people. But
if the idea of a transcendent will is too triumphalist an account of the realization
of a human subject that is both determined by and formative of
history, what other narratives do we have? How can the subject of capitalism,
for instance, be said to be more than the product of capitalist abstraction
if he or she doesn’t transcend it?
Spivak answers this question in literary terms. In an explicitly deconstructive
reading of passages from volume 1 of Capital, Spivak moves away
from the Luka´csian language of fate and towards an attention to what she
calls, following Derrida, an “apocalyptic tone” she hears in Marx’s text.18
880 Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
Derrida sees the twining together of the question of the end of philosophy with the more limited
teleological question of the “ends” of our activity, its aims, what it is meant to produce. For
Derrida, working the double meaning of ends in French and English, the “apocalyptic tone,” the
tone that announces the end, also announces the question of ends. In his essay, a phrase like “the
beginning of the end” can mean the beginning of the investigation of what we are for, or even the
beginning of the discovery of what we might do, what we might make.
I read Derrida here, and Kant, in order to suggest that behind not only Spivak’s analysis of
value but all the texts I’ve set before you here there lies a problem, given the name poetry, that
haunts our scenarios of the realizations of value with an abiding insubstantiality and that tethers
even latter-day formulations of value to a social imaginary that, if it is much simpler that the
economic relations it tries to explain, nonetheless keeps it honest; we don’t know, yet, what is at
stake in social production.
But what is this tone, and what does it have to do with the unrealizability
topoi or deferred realization that I have been tracing?
For Spivak, reading Marx, it is crucial to understand that the conception
of the subject as the bearer of labor-power, of extractable value, is both historically
contingent and, teleologically speaking, indeterminate. To conceive
of subjects as “superadequate” to their material engagements, as
Spivak puts it—as bearing value not only in the labor they perform but in
their capacity to labor—is possible only as the outcome of long struggles of
dispossession; it is not a timeless idea (“SS,” p. 161). Furthermore, Spivak
argues, the historical struggle over exploitation is incomplete, and renewed
at every moment in the circuit of capital, to which that historical capacity
to exceed making lends a series of indeterminacies. As Spivak puts it, “at
each step in the dialectic something seems to lead off into the open-endedness
of textuality: indifference, inadequation, rupture” (“SS,” p. 160).
This “inadequation,” Spivak contends, prevents use-value from seamlessly
becoming exchange-value becoming surplus-value, because keeping
production running is not simply a means of the physical survival ofworkers—
what Marx called “socially necessary labor”—but of their emotional
survival as well. Spivak calls the calculations sustaining such survival “affectively
necessary labor.” One implication of “Scattered Speculations on
the Question of Value” is that the masters of capital (such as they are)must
take despair into account as a component of the immiseration they skirt; it
is to the affective body, at least as much as to the physical, that the rate of
exploitation must be pitched.
I write pitched because Spivak suggests that the enmeshment of affect in
the open-endedness of value is what produces the “apocalyptic tone” she
hears in Marx. That tone, then, is something like the sound of the rate of
exploitation, differentially intensified across classes and sectors, and made
most clearly audible in the “super-exploitation” of women in the Third
World (“SS,” p. 167).
We have come a long way from the aristocratic-sacrificial poetics of Sidney,
the humanist theologization of poets in Vico, and the Ecclesiastian
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 881
warning against the worship of technical labor in Shelley. But across the
texts of these writers and throughout the development of aesthetic theory
and its incorporation into Western Marxism there is also a staggered continuity
of thinking about poetry—then the aesthetic and then the affective—
as a ground or example of indirect, deferred, or impossible realization
of value. This tradition of unrealizability-writing has by no means always
been critical (think of how deferred utility is realized in service to the sovereign
in Sidney) but its resonances in Left aesthetic and critical theory
make it possible to think about the defense of poetry, for instance, as part
of the prehistory of dialectical thinking and, the other way around, to see
dialectical criticality as bound up, even today, with a history of the aesthetic
whose roots lie in defenses of a broadly conceived concept of poetry.
But can the collocation I have offered help us read a poem? I think it can,
and I would like to close by trying to show how. I’m not sure whether, by
reading a poem at the end of this essay, I’m constructing a test case; if the
precondition for its authenticity or experimental success would be to
choose a poem as unlike the discourse I’ve traced as possible so as to measure
the reach of that discourse, or bid for its universal validity, then I am
not providing a test case. But the poem I have chosen, because it shares
elements with the discourse I’ve been outlining, may help us think about
the exemplarity of poems in another way, by allowing us to see how much
world can be touched on from within, or around, a given structuring language.
This poem, written by a young American poet who is well versed in the
tradition of Euro-American Left aesthetic theory, is mimetic of parts of that
tradition; but its mimetic relation to that discourse does not have to mean
that the poem simply collapses into it. Instead it shifts the language of aesthetic
value from an axis of realization and failure-to-realize to a cluster of
descriptions and performances of tone and comportment; indeed thepoem
quietly insists that tone and comportment are built out of resistance to the
idea of realization. And in doing so it serves as a reply, not only to the ancient
insistence on usefulness, but to the modernist valorization of tragedy and
failure.
The poem is by JenniferMoxley, fromher 2002 volume The Sense Record.
In its entirety:
ON THIS SIDE NOTHING
The objects have gone quiet. Even old
Mister Unicorn has run out of words,
despite his painted red lips. Things inured
to emptiness continue with their cold
882 Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
busyness. And thus the flurry of cash
around the center silence still appears
charitable tinsel, bright with the solace
of distress, the joy of being in arrears
so much more joyful than other joys. Songs
unlike a virus have grown in this season
of record rare, they sound an echo long
in repose and leave conflicted reason
to its bafflement. Things couldn’t be worse,
or could, we could resist, or complacent
argue against resistance, neither course
puts change at risk. Though we lay adjacent
the cold garden wall and exquisitely sigh
it will come, freed perhaps of our compelling
but nevertheless compelled. It’s well-nigh
Christmas, snow covers the ground and is falling.
the thirsty birds have re-opened our hands:
though weary of ritual tending we deck
the house yet again, reenact the ends
of long antiquated customs, rectify
the aggressive apathy that binds us
to our friends. To what design? What lie lies
hidden in an ornament, in a truss
of tissue snug in a box? An old idea
forced into perverted service of the new
makes strange commerce of this cold affection
enfoiled in childish fables, a revenue
of hope out of the heart’s aphasic diction.
And if it prove false, at least daily labor
will feel refreshed in the wake of leisure.
The bonvivant who repeats “love thy neighbor”
does no harm, and Tennyson’s sad measure
of years since we last saw our friend can bring
to mind a loss reduced from one December
to the next, a comfort and reminder
that we are at worst, on this side, nothing,
and risk nothing, to fight against and yet
not cut the feeling from our breast in queer
penance to a blundering world, to split
the will in two, to tell the truth, to fear
defeat, etc. The thought-ruined things
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2007 883
19. Jennifer Moxley, “On This Side Nothing,” The Sense Record (Washington,D.C., 2002), pp.
9–10. An mp3 of Moxley reading this poem at the University of Maine in September 2003 is
publicly accessible at www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Moxley.html
20. Lucas’s poem includes this passage about the aesthetic experience the living owe the dead
soldiers, which he links, later in the poem, to collective guilt:
So lone and cold they lie; but we,
We still have life; we still may greet
Our pleasant friends in home and street;
We still have life, are able still
To climb the turf of Bignor Hill,
To see the placid sheep go by,
To hear the sheep-dog’s eager cry,
To feel the sun, to taste the rain,
To smell the Autumn’s scents again
Beneath the brown and gold and red
Which old October’s brush has spread,
To hear the robin in the lane,
To look upon the English sky.
. . . .
have done their work to keep our sentiment
in trust, though now we know we raised the scene
neither for ourselves nor for the love of it,
but out of some mislaid duty to form—
a table, a ribbon, a set of rules—
to adjust the love of a furious home,
but do not think we were born to be fools
nor bred to thoughtless and false happiness,
given our time’s caution and your kind lash
it has never been easy for us to say yes.19
I think the first thing worth noticing about the poem is its particular superimposition
of rhetorics; it is a Christmas poem, with Edwardian and
Victorian bearings, shot through with economic language: “cash,” “charitable,”
“arrears,” “rare,” “commerce,” “revenue,” “trust.” In puzzling over
why, each year, her circle of familiars participates in the season’s rituals—
not least, it seems, the ritualized rhetoric of loving one’s fellows—the
speaker worries over a question of larger ends (“To what design?”) and joins
that worry to two others: the potential hypocrisy of idly favoring “change”
or “resistance” and the possibly foolish affective labor of “rectify[ing] . . .
aggressive apathy,” “adjust[ing] . . . love,” or “cut[ting] the feeling fromour
breast.” The poem also links the cyclical time of the holiday to problems of
memorial and to debt; she aligns her poem not only with Tennyson’s “In
Memoriam” but also with Edward Verrall Lucas’s 1917 poem “The Debt,”
from whichMoxley takes the phrase “blundering world.” That poem identifies
the aesthetic experience of all English people who survivedWorldWar
I as indebted to the sacrifice of the young soldiers who died in its battles.20
884 Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
Those men who died for you and me,
That England still might sheltered be
And all our lives go on the same
(Although to live is almost shame).
(Edward Verrall Lucas, “The Debt,” in A Treasury ofWar Poetry: British and American Poems of the
WorldWar, 1914–1917, ed. George Herbert Clarke [Boston, 1917], pp. 228–30).
The poem’s title is a fragment of its emphatic answer to the problem of
whether merely managing feeling—wishing others well, disentangling aggression
and apathy—can possibly serve as payment of the debt that the
death or injury of others incurs. The poet is agonizingly aware of the illusions
in which she traffics—that “the flurry of cash” is actually “charitable
tinsel” or that “resistance” or arguments against it are of any consequence
at all. Perhaps the bitterest recognition in thepoemis that beneath“distress”
is actually “solace”—by which, I think, the poet means the solace of finding
that others have incurred injury on her behalf, putting her joyfully, guiltily
“in arrears.” And by citing Lucas’s poem, so centered on the guilt of survivors,
Moxley suggests that worry about others, or grief over losing them,
may contain a germ of relief that they, not we, are the ones who paid the
price of injury or death.
The violence and loss the poem hints at is figured through three overlapping
moves: the reference to the loss of a friend, the link back to a poem
ofWorldWar I, and the insistent foregrounding of economic language. This
lastmove inflects the other two with a sense of system and circulation,which
becomes clear in the poem’s language of objects, through which all emotion
is financed; material things have already “gone quiet” by the poem’s first
line, silenced by the “flurry of cash” around them, but they serve, despite
being “ruined” by thought, “to keep our sentiment / in trust.” This service
objects offer is mismatched, however, to the feelings of the season and to
the subjects of those feelings:
though now we know we raised the scene
neither for ourselves nor for the love of it,
but out of some mislaid duty to form –
Spivak might call this “mislaid duty to form” a kind of inadequation; “solace”
and “joy” are no match for the other, ambivalent feeling that invests
itself in objects, carriers of the season’s rhetorical force. This inadequacy,
and the foolishness or even hypocrisy that it puts her in danger of, pushes
Moxley to formulate two related positions: first, an ambivalent assertion of
her harmlessness or worthlessness and, second, a defense of fellow feeling
in the face of something like totalization and paralysis.
At the poem’s rhetorical center, the occasion of grief is met with a TenCritical
Inquiry / Summer 2007 885
21. Ibid.
nysonian “sad measure” that allows the poet to feel her loss reduced from
year to year; a strangely actuarial formula, it offers, for Moxley
. . . a comfort and reminder
that we are at worst, on this side, nothing,
and risk nothing, to fight against and yet
not cut the feeling from our breast in queer
penance to a blundering world, to split
the will in two, to tell the truth, to fear
defeat, etc.
Only by positing her worthlessness in the face of death—that she and her
cohort are “at worst, on this side, nothing”—is Moxley able to free herself
from serving “queer penance” to the “blundering world” that, in Lucas’s
“The Debt,” blundered into war and tethered all sensory experience thereafter
to the guilt of having survived it. Lucas’s proposition, I should say, is
less like an Adornian hesitancy about writing poetry after Auschwitz than
it is a version of Sidney’s language of aristocratic sacrifice as the guarantor
of stable class relations; his soldiers die “that England still might sheltered
be / And all our lives go on the same.”21 Moxley, then, in rejecting Lucas’s
“queer penance,” is rejecting not the idea of guilt but the idea that it must
crush all other feeling; loss and violence remind her “to fight against” false
solace, tinselled joy, but not at the price of “cut[ting] the feeling from our
breast,” even though keeping it there may oblige “the will” to “split . . . in
two” and place the subject of feeling in the path of “defeat.”
Moxley knows this counterformation, this defense of feeling despite its
susceptibility to capture and falsification, places her on the knife-edge of
the weakest forms of sentimentality. Her assertion of worthlessness is also,
by way of reference to the “bonvivant” who “does no harm” in wishing
others well, an assertion of her own harmlessness—an assertion thatwould
seem to confound or back away from the poem’s aggressive insistence that
seeming innocence is no such thing. But thepoemsupplies a second, closing
formulation that links this potentially irredeemable sentimentality to the
conditions that produced it as an option:
given our time’s caution and your kind lash
it has never been easy for us to say yes.
This last defense of affirmation—and of poetry as an affirmative art—identifies
the formalized and falsified emotion Moxley has been describing as
the product of “our time’s caution” and the “kind lash” of a heretofore in886
Christopher Nealon / The Poetic Case
visible addressee. Both this “caution” and that “lash” are meant to encapsulate
the structures of feeling of those who know they only bear the brunt
of exploitation indirectly and who live, literally, at the expense of others. It
is a guilty affirmation and a calibration of emotion registered in the “rectifying”
and “adjusting” affective work the poem describes. What Moxley
offers is a fellow feeling among all those who find, in the face of a hollow
aesthetic (of “songs”), the “bafflement” of a “reason” that cannot answer
the question of what we are “for.” And she insists on positing a “we” regardless,
against the “you” that manages the rate of ruin with its “kind lash.”

“On This Side Nothing” is not a poem of solidarity with the oppressed.
It is an uneasy exploration of the reverb of oppression, as it registers in
objects and sentiments consumed by the sheltered, and a defiant insistence
that, despite its daily capture in the “flurry of cash,” emotion does not belong
to it. I hope I’ve made it possible to sense, reading Moxley’s poem, the
different rhetorics of deferred or unrealizable value I have identified here.
I hope it’s possible to hear, in other words, Moxley making the poetic case,
the case for poetry, once again, out of the checkered rhetoric of its defense.
I cannot not hear, in this poem, Sidney’s language of aristocratic sacrifice,
displaced onto soldiers lodging in an earlier poem and another period; the
Viconian presumption that poets (collectively evoked, I think,by thepoem’s
closing “us”) have a historical claim to languages that precede abstraction;
the tragic Shelleyan sense of the pointlessness of labor (“weary of ritual
tending” or the poem’s Ecclesiastian title); Schiller’s dismay at the gap between
the actions of the individual and the workings of the system (“freed
perhaps of our compelling / but nevertheless compelled”); Luka´cs’s vigilance
around traversing this gap (“do not think we were born to be fools”);
or, by way of Spivak, both affective labor and the rate of exploitation given
tone (“rectify / aggressive apathy”; “our time’s caution and your kind lash”).

Moxley’s poem is a dossier, you might say, assembled on poetry’s behalf;
and as such it gains exemplarity as an instance of poetry, if we can give partial
credit to the language of poetry’s defense for shaping our sense of what
poetry might be. Tangled into that exemplary case-making activity is a
thickly layered text of propositions, no longer immediately evident as such,
about poetry’s place in the long development of value as a social abstraction;
they form the poem’s bridge between the feeling it affirms and the social
violation it cannot escape. This feels like the poem’s political unconscious—
not a tragic emotion, built out of inert materials and reconstructed from
the point of view of failure, but an assemblage, a case, fashioned out of
historically divergent materials to create a tone—a tone that makes both
affirmation and exploitation audible at once. I think learning how to listen
for it is the central task of aesthetic theory today.

Vous avez dit pardon ?

2007-09-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

A Nyamata, au sud de Kigali, les rescapés tutsis tentent de cohabiter avec les tueurs hutus. Le retour de Jean Hatzfeld au Rwanda.

Par Thomas HOFNUNG
LIBERATION
QUOTIDIEN : jeudi 6 septembre 2007
Jean Hatzfeld La Stratégie des antilopes Le Seuil, 302 pp., 19 €

«Encore des questions?» Le troisième livre de Jean Hatzfeld consacré au génocide commis au Rwanda en 1994 s'ouvre sur ce soupir feint de Claudine, une rescapée rencontrée lors des précédents séjours sur place de l'auteur, longtemps journaliste à Libération . Mais peut-on jamais cesser d'interroger et de s'interroger sur le «crime des crimes» ? La réponse est toute entière contenue dans l'existence de ce troisième volet d'une trilogie à la fois rwandaise et universelle par les thèmes qu'elle aborde : la barbarie, l'indicible, la réconciliation et le pardon impossibles, et la vie qui malgré tout s'enracine à nouveau. Si le génocide est un crime imprescriptible, comme le soulignait Vladimir Jankélévitch, son questionnement l'est tout autant.

Après avoir donné la parole aux survivants (Dans le nu de la vie) en 2000, puis aux tueurs (Une Saison de machettes) en 2003, Jean Hatzfeld est de retour à Nyamata, une localité située au sud de la capitale, Kigali. Durant sept semaines, sept jours sur sept, les Tutsis y ont été pourchassés et exécutés sans pitié par leurs «avoisinants» (voisins) hutus. Sur 59 000 tutsis, seuls 9 000 étaient encore vivants lorsque les hommes du chef rebelle (tutsi) Paul Kagamé mettaient un terme au bain de sang.
Le point de départ de ce troisième opus, qui comme les deux premiers accorde une large part au témoignage direct, se situe dans la libération massive, ces dernières années, des tueurs présumés après de vagues confessions publiques, tant pour désengorger les prisons que pour remettre en marche le pays. Comment les rescapés parviennent-ils à cohabiter avec les auteurs du massacre, se demande l'auteur, évoquant à ce propos une «destinée dantesque». Réponse : ils font semblant, sous la pression, évoquée en filigrane au fil des témoignages, du régime autoritaire de Kigali.

Seul un observateur ayant tissé des relations durables de confiance avec les habitants de Nyamata autant dire Jean Hatzfeld pouvait remarquer ces tensions imperceptibles pour l'étranger : les Hutus et les Tutsis qui font table à part dans les cafés, ou à la sortie de l'église. Les regards qui s'évitent, les voix qui se taisent.

Ici, comme en Europe après la Shoah, les rescapés apparaissent comme les grands perdants des lendemains de tragédie. L'une d'entre eux, Berthe, confie à propos de l'attitude des tueurs récemment libérés : «Au fond, ils croient qu'ils n'ont plus à envoyer de pardon valable, puisqu'ils n'ont pas reçu de punition valable.» Pour un autre, Innocent, les survivants ont été «oubliés» par le régime fondé par les Tutsis de l'étranger sur les décombres du génocide : «Avec les Hutus, ils s'envoient de bons mots, ils évitent les fâcheries, ils ne visent que l'avenir, ils gouvernent le pays.»
Dans les descriptions souvent tendres des survivants, on sent bien que l'auteur désirait aussi, à la faveur de ce livre, prendre des nouvelles des personnages croisés dans les deux ouvrages précédents, dont certains sont devenus ses amis : Claudine, Marie-Louise, Innocent, Sylvie, Jeannette, et bien d'autres. La Stratégie des antilopes prend ainsi des allures de chronique du temps qui passe, du génocide qui ne passe pas, des blessures qui ne se referment pas, et de la vie qui se poursuit envers et contre tout. Comme lorsque Jean Hatzfeld raconte la mystérieuse union entre une survivante tutsie, Josiane, et un bourreau hutu, Pio.

A la fin, Hatzfeld résume en ces termes le projet sous-jacent à ce troisième livre : «Dire aux rescapés : Vous nous intéressez aussi lorsque vous continuez à vivre.» Un droit de suite que Jean Hatzfeld, journaliste écrivain comme il aime à se définir, exerce ici avec sensibilité et humilité.

THE ART OF FICTION NO. 131 - GRACE PALEY

2007-08-29T12:03:00.000-07:00

"...[W]e had our normal family life—
struggles and hard times. That takes up a lot of time, hard times.
Uses up whole days[...]"

The Paris Review
1992

When Grace Paley visits New York, she stays in her old apartment
on West Eleventh Street. Her block has for the most part escaped
the gentrification that has transformed the West Village since Paley
moved there in the forties. The building where Paley lived for most
of her adult life and where she raised her two children by her first
husband, the filmmaker Jess Paley, is a rent-controlled brownstone
walk-up with linoleum hallways. Mercifully spared mid-career
renovations, Paley’s apartment retains the disheveled, variegated
look of an apartment with children. Paley now lives in Thetford,
Vermont with her second husband, poet and playwright Robert
Nichols, but we arranged to speak with her in New York. We met
her on the street outside her apartment—she was returning home
from a Passover celebration with friends elsewhere in the city. We
recognized her from half a block away—a tiny woman with fluffy
white hair in a brown overcoat.

People often ask Grace Paley why she has written so little—
three story collections and three chapbooks of poetry in seventy
years. Paley has a number of answers to this question. Mostly she
explains that she is lazy and that this is her major flaw as a writer.
Occasionally she will admit that, though it is “not nice” of her to
say so, she believes that she can accomplish as much in a few stories
as her longer-winded colleagues do in a novel. And she points
out that she has had many other important things to do with her
time, such as raising children and participating in politics. “Art,”
she explains, “is too long, and life is too short.” Paley is noticeably
unaffected by the pressures of mortality which drive most writers
to publish. Donald Barthelme scavenged her apartment for the stories
that made up her first book, and her agent says she periodically
raids Paley’s drawers and kitchen cabinets for material. Her
first collection of stories, The Little Disturbances of Man, did not
appear until 1959, when Paley was thirty-seven. Since then she has
published just two collections of stories (Enormous Changes at the
Last Minute in 1974 and Later the Same Day in 1985) and three
collections of poems—Leaning Forward (1985). New and
Collected Poems (1992) and Long Walks and Intimate Talks
(1991). Though Paley is better known as a short-story writer than
as a poet, her stories are so dense and rigorously pruned that they
frequently resemble poetry as much as fiction. Her conversation is
as cerebral and distilled as her prose. The oft-noted Paley paradox
is the contrast between her grandmotherly appearance and her no-schmaltz
personality. Paley says only what is necessary. Ask her a
yes-or-no question, and she will answer yes or no. Ask her a foolish
question, and she will kindly but clearly convey her impatience.
Talking with her, one develops the impression that she listens and
speaks in two different, sometimes conflicting capacities. As a person
she is tolerant and easygoing, as a user of words, merciless. On
politics Paley speaks unreservedly and in earnest, on writing, she is
drier, more careful.

Grace Goodside was born in the Bronx in December 1922,
seventeen years after her parents immigrated to New York and one
year after the invention of the sanitary napkin (as she notes in her
poem “Song Stanzas of Private Luck”). Her father, Isaac, was a
doctor who learned English by reading Dickens and was, like her
mother, Mary, a committed socialist. The family spoke Russian
and Yiddish at home and English to the world with a Bronx twang
that remains one of the more noticeable signs of Paley’s attitude
towards the establishment. Writing has only occasionally been
Paley’s main occupation. She spent a lot of time in playgrounds
when her children were young. She has always been very active in
the feminist and peace movements. She has been on the faculty at
City College and taught courses at Columbia University, and until
recently, Sarah Lawrence College.

—Jonathan Dee, Barbara Jones, Larissa MacFarquhar

INTERVIEWER
What were you doing before you became a published writer?

GRACE PALEY
I was working part time. I was hanging out a lot. I was kind
of lazy. I had my kids when I was about twenty-six, twenty-seven.
I took them to the park in the afternoons. Thank God I was lazy
enough to spend all that time in Washington Square Park. I say
lazy but of course it was kind of exhausting running after two
babies. Still, looking back I see the pleasure of it. That’s when I
began to know women very well—as co-workers, really. I had a
part-time job as a typist up at Columbia. In fact, when I began to
write stories, I typed some up there, and some in the PTA office of
P.S. 41 on Eleventh Street. If I hadn’t spent that time in the playground,
I wouldn’t have written a lot of those stories. That’s pretty
much how I lived. And then we had our normal family life—
struggles and hard times. That takes up a lot of time, hard times.
Uses up whole days[...]

"There is the sense that you can't be a great poet if you're funny. But people are funny all the time; they just are."

2007-08-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

Alice Notley: It’s taken me a very long time. That was one of the reasons I did it the way I did and why I didn't become a teacher or get involved in something else. Because I found it very hard to become as good as I wanted to be. It's just taken a lot of time, and I didn't feel that I was as good as I wanted to be until I was into my forties.

J.D.: Though your first book came out when you were twenty-six—

A.N.: Yeah, but poetry's really hard. You don't understand what you're doing for twenty years, and you don't understand what your friends have done for twenty years, either. It takes twenty years of seeing it and twenty years of people being at it. As Eileen Myles says, "Now I am just happy to see anyone still here." The factions all fall away, and you just look around to see who's still there, and you're so pleased to see them that you don't care what they stand for in poetry. They're still writing. They made it.

[This interview was conducted in October 2001.]

Jennifer Dick: Looking at the past few books, The Descent of Alette was one poem with a character at its center, whereas Mysteries of Small Houses, a series of separate poems, was more personal, about your life. I was wondering if you could talk about where personnage/character comes into play in your poetry and about how you have developed, matured and changed as a poet.

Alice Notley: With this book, Disobedience, I was actually trying to break down those distinctions, because I had maintained them very much in those two previous books. The Descent of Alette is a fiction, it's all a fiction. Mysteries of Small Houses is autobiographical but the intention was not to write an autobiography, the intention was to explore the concept of the self, and explore the concept of the I pronoun, and the only way I could do that, it seemed to me, was to explore my life. At the beginning it wasn't going to be chronological, but then that turned out to be the most logical way to present the material—it made it easiest for the reader. But it's not an autobiography.

But at the point where I came to write the next thing, I realized I just didn't want the barriers between these genres anymore. So Disobedience exists on a daily level, it records what's going on in Paris, and, to a certain extent, my life in 1995 and 1996. There are two fictional characters, three perhaps, who talk to each other. One of them is me, because "I" is always slightly fictionalized—that's one of the things that I know about poetry, that you fictionalize yourself when you write about yourself. I was trying not to do that in Mysteries of Small Houses—I was trying to break that down, but I felt it happening anyway, you do do it.

But there's a character in Disobedience who's based on a seedy detective and he looks like Robert Mitchum. His name is Mitch-ham. But sometimes his name is other things. There's a lot of dialogue between him and "I." There's a third character who's called Soul. Sometimes she's called Soul Dark, Dark Doll—she's called a whole lot of other things, too. But she gradually becomes me and Mitch-ham, actually gradually becomes me, too. I kind of take over the poem at the end—I become the whole consciousness of it.

What's going on in this poem are the events of 1995-96 which, as you'll remember, was a rather hot year in Paris for current events—there was the grève—that big strike, that November-December where no one could go anywhere without walking. There were also a lot of terrorist bombings. Those are in my poem—all of that is in my poem. I am also keeping track of the fact—I was finally getting to feel as if I lived in Paris, and it is my first poem that deals with the fact that I'm here.

J.D.: Do your characters "I," "Soul" and "Mitch-ham" all relate differently or in a similar way to the kinds of events that happened in 1995-96?

A.N.: It works on different levels. There is one level that is literally me recording the events, and it's pretty literal. But there is another level where "I" talks to Mitch-ham, and that's fictionalized, and then the events are turned into what I do myself in relation to them. Because it's a soul journey.

J.D.: A spiritual journey?

A.N.: A spiritual journey, yes, the whole book is a spiritual journey. It's a spiritual journey that refuses to let go of the outside world, because what's going on in the outside world is too important. But on the other hand, it also refuses to ally itself with any kind of organization—organized religion, organized politics, organized feminism, anything like that.

J.D.: Do you find this text's publication timing uncanny—I mean, how strange it seems—

A.N.: Oh, yes, (laughs) it leads right to this September.

J.D.: Does the question of how Americans or people in the whole world deal with these kinds of events come into play?

A.N.: Yes, it's about globalization, it's about all of that—about who we are now. It's very feminist. My conclusion at the end is that to be a woman is to have the world against you, basically, and that you have to be very very wary. It's that you shouldn't go along with anyone or any group—either of men or women—you have to start at the point that is yourself, or you'll wind up being involved in a lot of lies.

J.D.: And that conclusion—does that sound like a defensive space, like a woman needs to put herself on the defensive—

A.N.: No, it's a beautiful space. Because it's a space where you can say, "I am the ultimate authority spiritually" and if I want to have contact with spirit as a large entity, I will figure out how to do it myself.

J.D.: Finding your own end.

A.N.: Yes.

J.D.: "What service does poetry serve now?" remains a big question for young people living now. Or, “What's its purpose in a world that seems to be forgetting how to read poetry?” A lot of poets have gone over to writing novels or to making films, in order to survive and thrive financially. I'd like to know what you think your role is as a poet in this 21st century full of violence, technology and economic functionalism.

A.N.: Well, nothing can take the place of poetry. Poetry is poetry and I just don't think you can do without it. It fulfills a very particular function that has to do with philosophical and emotional truth as expressed through a specific use of language.

Also, it's a much more selfless mirror of the culture than a novel is—I don't know if selfless is the right word—but it's certainly less commercialized. You can't have a successful novel without writing for a mass audience, but poetry can't necessarily be written for a mass audience—if you’re going to serve truth.

Poetry serves the future. It's always got a little line into the future—of five or ten years, at least, and sometimes fifty and sometimes one hundred years, and that's how it works. It's possible that there isn’t that much time anymore, and that's the thing I worry about, that there isn't enough time anymore for people to catch up with poetry's truth. Because people aren't changing the world the way they should be—I mean, this war is an example, and the biggest example is what's happening with the environment—nobody's catching up with that. It's not necessarily poetry's truth, but it's in my poetry.

I have a long poem from 1994, it's about global warming, it's a fiction, and it's partly poetry and partly prose. It's called "Désamère." I think there just isn't time and that worries me. I also don't feel as if I'm writing necessarily for people who live a long time from now anymore, because I'm not sure people will be living a long time from now. I don't understand what's going to happen. I'm a pessimist! I’m writing for the present and for the pretty near future.

J.D.: Do you feel that if you were heard, that if other poets were heard, that that would change and create the possibility of a future … ?

A.N.: Yes, I do, but poets are heard less and less because as you say people read less and less. Some people would argue with me that this is the case, but people do read poetry less. They tend to read a hell of a lot of novels. There are a lot of sort of middling, middle-range novels, sort-of-good novels—there are millions of them—and they don't do shit. They don’t serve any function at all except as reading matter, and—

J.D.: To remove you from your life on the train.

A.N.: Or to make you feel you're having a slightly deep thought, but not one that's really going to shake you up. None of those books—none of those Booker Prize books are going to change your life.

J.D.: Going back to—or, linking those two—I've noticed that Disobedience is all one book-length poem. I've also seen some other yet-unpublished work which is long-lined, moving almost towards a prose in the line-length, and again with the narrative. What do you see as the difference between what you're doing in those pages and what some novelists, some of the prose writers such as Carole Maso, do in their work?

A.N.: In the very long-lined work I am not writing fiction, for one thing. What I'm actually doing—and I'm not really even telling a story, except for possibly the story of my own progress through the book which is the story of my own spiritual progress, which I hope that other people can then share if they wish to.

What I'm doing is creating—trying to create—a different consciousness. And I'm trying to make it possible—I know when I read that particular book, Reason and Other Women, my consciousness is different. And I think this happens for some other people. It actually makes your head different. I think that's different from what an experimental fiction writer would be trying to do, but I could be wrong.

J.D.: Along that line, your syntactical use is also very different. At least in some of the poems in Mysteries of Small Houses there is this skewed or slightly off-syntax, where it's not fragmented across the page but is fragmented within the lines themselves.

A.N.: Oh—that's me. That's me using all of the tricks I've accumulated over the years. One of the things that I was doing in Mysteries of Small Houses was trying to remember all of the different styles I had written in. I'm constantly and consciously using each of those all of the way through.

J.D.: In your early work I noted a paucity of words—à la Williams, or more likely H.D.—where there's a lot of space on the page, a single image or thought or sensation. Whereas I noticed that as your work has developed it has accumulated a sort of density—you talk about the speed at which we live, and it seems like your poetry contains that speed in the way the syntax rolls over itself, the lines roll into a longer length and one idea, or one feeling rolls into another and around and around.

A.N.: I've always been doing both. I never wrote exclusively in short lines or in short poems. I've always sort of moved back and forth between the two ways, and sometimes used both ways in the same work.

J.D.: Do you think there's a density in one and not the other, or vice versa?

A.N.: I'm thinking of two books. One book is When I Was Alive and in that book I was actually trying to emulate the poetry of the past and see if I could do it. I was working with meter and rhyme and past literary forms. I had a particular sense of the subject for that book. I was trying to catch particular moments which might be thought of as universal but on the other hand were composed of particular colors, clothes, weathers, the fact of the city, things like that.

But another book in which there are a lot of short poems is At Night the States. When I was writing that book, Ted [Berrigan, Notley’s first husband] had just died and I was really only capable of writing those little poems. I only had, was only having that kind of conscious thought actually.

J.D.: I wanted to return to the question of narrative and character. You talk about the word "Soul" as the name of a character, and I noticed in the piece we're seeing in Upstairs at Duroc [Paris literary and arts review publishing new work by AN in June 2002] there is a lot of use of "the Real" or the "City of the Real." I was thinking about how people talk when they talk to youngsters when they start writing, always saying, "Don't use beauty, don't use soul, don't use real" (laughs)—and I don't think you're using them in the way that we see an 18, 17, 16-year old use them—but how do you feel that you're bringing that back, the use of those words and those sorts of abstractions, in a way that takes on a corporeality, a corporeal reality or solidity?

A.N.: I feel that the soul is a corporeal reality or solidity. I feel as if I've earned the right to use the word because of my experience, and I also don't think that there is another word—because I have tried to find another, other words for this, and I can't. I loathe the word "self." I find it to be a very artificial word—

J.D.: Psychoanalytic

A.N.: Yeah, but I used it with great distaste in Mysteries of Small Houses because I didn't even like to say the word, but it was so in the air. Everyone was saying that you didn't have one or that you couldn't say "I," and I had to adapt to their terminology. I don't have another word for soul, I just can't do it any other way. It’s a very tangible place for me, a mystical place, a state—it's a state that enables you to rise above, for example, this war. And to be involved.

J.D.: Do you feel that you are reaching through language, through the poetry towards making those things that float around and are considered ethereal or difficult or unreachable, reaching through language and making them solid so that you feel them?

A.N.: Yes. But a lot of what I know comes from reading mystical writers like Meister Eckhart and recognizing the truth there. Also reading about and reading the works of tribal peoples who have a very tangible sense of these things.

J.D.: Of all the tribal peoples in the world, do you have a particular favorite?

A.N.: Well, I'm interested in Australian Aborigines, but that's dilettantish of me because I can't possibly know anything about them really, but I read as much as I can. And I read a lot about Native Americans. I grew up around Native Americans, and I have their feel for the relation between the people and the landscape. I understand the relation between what they believe and what that landscape is like—how things are tangible, how spirituality is tangible if you’re in a landscape. But if you're in a city, it isn't.

J.D.: Yes, you're living in a city. You also lived in New York before this, and in San Francisco—

A.N.: But I grew up in the desert. I grew up in Needles, California, and it was frighteningly lonely and empty, and I was dying to get away from it—and now I'd love to go back. But I can't live there; I mean I can never do my career there, but it's so beautiful. There are certain kinds of things that I only understand there. For example, that landscape is sacred, that the earth is sacred. If we're bombing the shit out of Afghanistan, we're bombing the sacred. The land. I mean, it's beautiful—I see what it looks like on television, and I can't believe how beautiful it is. It's very barren, but where I grew up is barren—why would anyone want to drop bombs on that?

When they bombed Iraq in 1991, it was like I just felt they were bombing Inanna. I'd just written The Descent of Alette, which got some of its inspiration from the poem "Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld"—she was a Sumerian goddess. I just thought they're bombing her, they're bombing the fertile crescent, they're bombing Mesopotamia, they're bombing the cradle of civilization—how could people do this?

J.D.: Speaking of city and country, how has moving to a different place and a different language changed you? For example, Disobedience is your first book that deals with Paris—how has that been important? How long have you lived here now?

A.N.: Nine years. I wrote this in '95-'96, when we had just moved to this apartment. We had previously lived on Montmartre, and I didn't like it there very much. When we moved down here I felt as if I was really in Paris. It's horrible here, but it's great at the same time. I mean, you can't breathe, it's so noisy, but it’s a real working and working class neighborhood—mixed.

J.D.: The gritty real Paris. Not the tourist part, and it's not above or around where it just gets all suburban.

A.N.: Yeah, it's Arab, it's Jewish. (Laughs as she adds) It's Japanese now, too. It's just everything.

J.D.: North African, too. But how do you feel that living here has changed your writing?

A.N.: Although my writing may appear to be self-involved—I don't know if it does or not—but I think that American writing has a way of … the American turns in on her or itself, and I think I've been able to escape that by coming here. That's one way it's changed.

New York is an international city, but New York poetry isn't necessarily an international poetry. Paris is a more international city than New York is, even. And it's older and—I don't know. I love New York, actually. I don't really prefer Paris to New York. I just can't go back.

It's also very different to live inside a foreign language, and that's one of the reasons my last book looks like that [Reason and Other Women]. Because it's my sense of language just spinning off, and the mind just spinning off—people understanding each other through words, but the words not necessarily being pinned down as to meaning, because you don't understand each other that way. So the linguistic part of poetry just gets knocked out the window, actually. The meaning thing goes haywire. It's sort of total communication without pinned-down meanings. But that's what the mind is like, too. The mind goes very fast. It's not pinning down meaning. It's just going too fast for that and working in another way.

J.D.: Do you think there are writers here in Paris that influence you or that have an effect on your work?

A.N.: No. No.

J.D.: Are there writers in the States that do?

A.N.: At the moment, I've noticed that I'm being influenced by the novels of Leslie Marmon Silko. But I haven’t noticed an effect in a long time from another writer. I've been mostly affected by my reading in anthropology and mythology and things like that. I think that's been the biggest influence on me in the last ten or fifteen years.

J.D.: I'm sure there have been a lot of questions about The Descent of Alette and its relationship with Dante?

A.N.: Oh, yes, I get it all the time. I wasn't reading Dante when I wrote it. I was trying to stand Dante on his head—I was trying to reverse things so that the Paradiso was down instead of up, and was dark instead of light. And it's my favorite book of The Divine Comedy.

J.D.: The Inferno was my favorite—I don't know what that says about me, but—anyway, why don't you tell me more about this book before I move on and ask you some more questions. I am interested in the title: Disobedience?

A.N.: There's a poem towards the end that explains that. I was writing this without a title for a very long time. Then I had a dream—and the dream element is a very large part of this—I wanted to have the waking consciousness, sub-waking consciousness that isn't dream but is imagination and dream consciousness. I wanted to have all three in this.

J.D.: And do they parallel your three characters at all?

A.N.: No, they don't. Except that the three characters are mostly in the second level, the imaginary level. But sometimes Soul turns up in dreams, and of course "I" turn up in the dreams. But Mitch-ham, he never turns up in dreams. And sometimes I interpret the dreams into being about him.

J.D.: As we read this, do you think we'll know which space is which or do they blend?

A.N.: I think you know, but I don't think you'll be thinking about it.

This was the dream:
"A question in a large package,
a big cardboard envelope entitled Disobedience.
A member of a girl group asks me
where the comic poet's things are.
Disobedience belongs to the comic poet.
She's clear about this.
It isn't the comic poet's lectures on Thoreau,
but the comic poet's own book, Disobedience."

And then when I had that dream I realized that that was what was going to be the title for my book, because what I was trying to do was create a state of pure Disobedience in the book. That's what it does for me. I decided to question everything—question reality, question politics, question received feminisms, question what my friends thought, question what everyone was telling me was the truth, question what I was telling me was the truth, question everything I thought so far, just question, question, question.

J.D.: Do you think that came out because of the political events and the life here, or just because it was the right time in your life for that?

A.N.: I actually think it's something I've always done, really. But it was particularly crystallized that year. Also, I turned 50—so there was a lot I couldn't get away with anymore. There's a lot you get away with when you're younger because of looks, personality, moving fast, having fun and so on. After you tip over into 50, you don’t get to do it anymore, so you might as well have the truth at that point.

Also, you start to realize how little power you have because there are these jerks who are a year younger than you or two years younger than you and get elected president and vice president, and you suddenly realize that they have power and you don't have any power and that they're stupid and you're not.

J.D.: Yes, I feel, personally, like I wish I could be in a position to just say, "Sorry, you're fired, thank you for leaving your name tag at the door" to a few of our political leaders, and there is this hopelessness, this helplessness in relationship to not being able to change the world. Do you feel like this poem addresses that hopelessness personally for yourself?

A.N.: Yes, but it's not enough. Because I feel I have to address it over and over and over—and I'm having to address it again. I think that the United States has lost its mind. I feel fairly helpless with regard to what goes on in the world.

I am writing something now in which there's a concept called "negative space," and there are a lot of dead women in this book—this book is about dead women, actually, though they're not all dead, the dead women, because I'm one of them. But since we have no role in these events, particularly now, we withdraw into negative space and take no part in it.

J.D.: I think that's true—people here say, "Why don't Americans protest if they're not for the war?" And I think, that's obvious, there's just no sense of being able to change anything.

A.N.: There's nothing we can do. But one thing we can do is say that we don't want to be protected. And you have to say it kind of inside yourself, you have to become this other kind of person: "I don't want those troops protecting me, and I don't want anyone protecting me. I don't want to be that person who's protected by these ugly-faced men anymore. I don't want the protection. I disown it."

J.D.: It goes with the title.

A.N.: Yes—stay away from me! (Laughs)

J.D.: Since we're laughing, I wanted to ask about the role of humor. You deal with really intense subjects: deaths, feelings about politics, wars, environment—but you also have a lot of humor in your writing. A wackiness.

A.N.: Well, that's me. It's not anything I work for. I don't even always know it's there—I think it's just very much what I'm like. It just is, and I don't think about it very much any more—it is what the New York School of poetry is like, but I think I was that way before I even became a New York School poet. My mother laughs a lot.

J.D.: Having mentioned the New York School, do you consider what you're doing now to be still linked to the idea that people have of the second generation of New York School poets?

A.N.: I am still linked to them by friendships. I think that if someone wanted to do a job on my poetry they would find a link in the concreteness of my poetry. Even when it's just taking place inside the head, there's always a lot of color around, a lot of detail. I associate that with the New York School of poetry—the use of the eyes—you get the eyes as well as the ears, the touch—the senses, exploration of the senses and something about sympathies.

But humor. Because you can't be in the New York School without being humorous. American mainstream poetry is largely without humor, even the good parts of it. There is the sense that you can't be a great poet if you're funny. But people are funny all the time; they just are.

J.D.: Are there things you would like to add in relationship to your own sense of how you have developed as a writer or about where you think you are going?

A.N.: It’s taken me a very long time. That was one of the reasons I did it the way I did and why I didn't become a teacher or get involved in something else. Because I found it very hard to become as good as I wanted to be. It's just taken a lot of time, and I didn't feel that I was as good as I wanted to be until I was into my forties.

J.D.: Though your first book came out when you were twenty-six—

A.N.: Yeah, but poetry's really hard. You don't understand what you're doing for twenty years, and you don't understand what your friends have done for twenty years, either. It takes twenty years of seeing it and twenty years of people being at it. As Eileen Myles says, "Now I am just happy to see anyone still here." The factions all fall away, and you just look around to see who's still there, and you're so pleased to see them that you don't care what they stand for in poetry. They're still writing. They made it.

J.D.: Do you think that being a woman and winning those prizes last year (the Poetry Society of America and Academy Award) is representative of a greater openness in America to considering women's poetry? After all, a lot of prizes still go to the standard men, the standard white male.

A.N.: I actually don't know. I think what it means is that I wrote Mysteries of Small Houses, and it sort of begged for a prize, and I had the right publisher. You can't win one of those prizes if you are published with a small publisher—or at least it's not likely. Perhaps it's happened once—it does happen with the LA Times Prize—but I don't think it's ever happened with the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. You just don’t get those awards if you are published in small places, and it's ridiculous.

J.D.: To end, I want to go back to something we were talking about before we even started this tape—do you feel that your writing represents a women's writing or a men's writing, or is separate from both of those senses of gender?

A.N.: I often say in interviews that if I were to say what I feel most a part of, it’s not the New York School, but it is the generation of women poets who are my age, who cut across all of the ways that American poetry is written. People like Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, but also Susan Howe and Fanny Howe, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino—also someone like Jorie Graham. Women my age who are very strong.

J.D.: Maybe it's time more than gender or movement—timing in the world.

A.N.: But it is gender, it is, but it would be nice if it weren't. But it is, that's a fact, and now is the time for women.

Still closed-off worlds

2007-08-17T17:07:00.000-07:00

"Ein habuba" ("The Doll's Eye") by Sami Shalom Chetrit, Hargol & Am Oved, 205 pages

Reviewed by Oren Kakun

Ha'aretz
17/08/2007

When I wrote a review for Haaretz about Dudu Busi's latest novel, which was not very complimentary, the new hegemons of Mizrahi culture jumped on me with two accusations, which are actually related. One was that being granted a forum in a prestigious newspaper had gone to my head and turned me into an Ashkenazi, and the other was that what I wrote was a product of self-hatred. The first charge is not even worthy of an answer. About the second, let me say this: Yes, I do hate myself, and for a lot of reasons, but being Mizrahi is not one of them.

The absurd implication of these charges is that origin is fate: Because I was born Mizrahi (i.e., with origins in Middle Eastern and North African countries), I am not allowed to say anything bad about Mizrahi literature and I am not allowed to judge a "Mizrahi" book by literary standards. I am supposed to be an ambassador for all Mizrahi Jews from time immemorial, for my persecuted brethren to whom I am tied by culture. That is precisely the argument I was trying to refute in my review of Busi's book, if not in general.
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This distressing episode might not have come to mind if not for an invitation I received recently to speak about Mizrahim and the Nakba (the "catastrophe" of the establishment of Israel). If there is any such connection today between Mizrahiness and the Palestinian tragedy, I am at a loss to say what it could be. But certainly there is a growing similarity in the way Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian Arabs are portrayed, as a kind of homogenized entity.

Instead of real Mizrahim from Katamon or Yeruham, or authentic Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and Hebron, what you get is a delegate, someone who represents them. The Mizrahim have gone through every possible incarnation on the way to recovery. Now they are suffering from over-treatment.

The truth is, anyone who wants to be an educator in the peripheral areas of the country today encounters a whole new world of not-so-new immigrants - Jews from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, living in the housing projects abandoned by the previous occupants: the Mizrahim. Anyone who wants to write about the Mizrahi problem will have to do it out of real love or passion, rather than a sense of humanitarian mission.

I am not saying that the world is perfect. Equality is still a long way off. But to make Sami Berdugo's book required reading in schools simply because he is a Mizrahi Jew is not a matter of fairness or equal rights, especially not for Berdugo himself, who might have achieved the same status by dint of writing well, if Mizrahi patrons had not intervened on his behalf.

When it comes to the Palestinian problem, Israelis are dangerously blind, despite the fact that it constitutes a dominant feature of our lives and exists in our own backyard.

People are too busy searching every crack and crevice for Holocaust deniers, while inventing all kinds of creative ways of denying the destruction, displacement and killing that is going on around them.

What we learn from all this is that uniform representation is a hoax. Those who are doing the representing have their own agenda. The Palestinians and their pain, and the Mizrahim and their sorrows, are as far apart as Judaism and Islam. The distance is too great for any real rapprochement.

In this world of representation, there are no real people. The former defense minister, Amir Peretz, and Israel's first Arab minister, Raleb Majadele, are a facade for the stuffy democracy that has grown up here.

Activist Tali Fahima, for example (who has now been dragged into representing some other bizarre cause), will be tried for espionage only if she dares to set foot outside her house. (It is interesting to compare the biblical story in Genesis 34, where Jacob's daughter, Dina, leaves her home and goes to Shechem (Nablus), unwittingly bringing about the destruction of the city by her brothers. Then, as now, Jewish nationalism is the strongest of all emotions).

There are no two ways about it. We are imprisoned behind walls that we have arrogantly built for ourselves, never allowing ourselves the opportunity to know or understand other worlds. Even if they are an hour's drive away, even if there are distant cultural roots, even if there appears to be some faint resemblance between one injustice and the other, these worlds are closed off to us, whether we are Mizrahi or Ashkenazi.

Archetypal thinking

Conventional wisdom holds that Mizrahi Jews should be the ones most capable of understanding the Palestinians. What could be more natural than thinking that the Mizrahim could be excellent mediators between Israelis and Palestinians, and their sole representatives? After all, they know Arab culture; they grew up in it. But this Orientalist stance is based on the stereotype that an Arab from Palestine is identical in outlook to an Arab from Morocco. That is the archetypal Western thinking.

Sami Shalom Chetrit's "Ein habuba" ("The Doll's Eye") came into the world without literary pretensions. It is not even a novel. It is a Hollywood script (parts of it written in Los Angeles), derived from real life in its most distilled form (the Jewish-Palestinian conflict), and then further distilled.

Meta-realism never enters the picture, and that is a major problem in a book where the author's viewpoint is so central. On second thought, maybe "The Doll's Eye" could be described as a lengthy article from the "house" of Haaretz's Gideon Levy - the journalist Israelis love to read to get a sense of where they are in geopolitical space, if not to ease their guilty consciences.

The story, in short, portrays a few days in the life of Linda, an American girl with an Arab mother and a Jewish father. In preparation for making a documentary film, she interviews three women shahids (martyrs) from Jenin. She gravitates between Salah, the Shin Bet security service's No. 1 wanted man, and Danny, her Jewish cousin, who works for the Shin Bet. The two men march toward their tragic end, and Linda, after being wounded, finds consolation in the arms of Michael, her American Jewish lover.

Chetrit sets himself up as the Mizrahi revolutionary, his tried and true persona, and then moves away from this position by means of a narrator, who can gain entry to the Palestinian camp because she is a journalist and make friends with terrorists because she is part Arab. So now he can tell the Palestinian story without hindrance. But this strategy is based on the same ridiculous presumption that a Mizrahi writer can represent the Palestinians and their feelings.

Chetrit has read the late Prof. Edward Said's "Orientalism." Said is mentioned in Chetrit's book and seems to be the driving spirit behind it. But Chetrit has a very strange understanding of Said's message. Otherwise, how do we explain the fact that he consciously creates a false picture of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict?

Chetrit paraphrases Said, but takes a stance that is precisely the opposite, fueled by the special closeness between America and Israel, and presenting the Orient to the West wrapped in convenient, even intriguing, packaging. And the truth is that all of this is closer to Chetrit's white world than to the coal black world of the Palestinian shahid.

New Mizrahi-speak has become a kind of Buddhism that gives back love. In contrast to the panicky rebellion of the social action group, the Israeli Black Panthers, for example, who made do, after putting up a tough fight, with running a gas station and joining the Communist Party, the new representatives have embraced a deep, narcissist intellectualism. They perceive themselves as the sole messengers of peace and the only ones who can deliver Israel from the conflict, and all because of their Levantine origins.

What might have saved Chetrit's book from being a literary flop is reading it as a parody of the failed attempt to write something in the name of the Palestinians (or any other people). But that is beyond the new Mizrahi intelligentsia. It doesn't know how to laugh at itself yet. Parody remains in Hanoch Levin's court.

Yet there is a certain danger in a book of this kind, where the authority of the author is seemingly absent (although it is there, and very much so). With its hyper-realism, the book is liable to give lay readers the impression that they know the truth.

Closer ties with the Arab world around us, and also with the Arabs in our midst, is the heart's desire of people who believe that mankind deserves a better world, a more interesting world, a world that is less discouraging. But this desire is also shared by petty individuals who squabble needlessly over ethnic origins, and stand with their hands in their pockets and their faces to the wall.

The Mizrahi talk about cultural affinity and common roots with the Palestinians is immature and forced, and smacks of separatism. Sami Shalom Chetrit, despite his efforts to bring the Palestinians to the Hebrew reader, only pushes them further away, creates alienation, and above all, imparts an eerie sense that there is no real Palestinian literature.

Room to Roam

2007-08-16T14:35:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Solnit’s peripatetic education

By Peter Terzian
Columbia Journalism Review
Q and A - July/August 2007

Just what kind of a writer is Rebecca Solnit? It’s not an easy question to answer, given the effortless way she crosses the borders of disciplines and genres. Her irrepressible curiosity has led her to investigate and reflect on a diverse range of subjects: landscapes both rural and urban, politics, the environment, indigenous people, technology, gender, art, and photography. Each of the labels that have been used to describe her—historian, journalist, cultural theorist, critic, activist—bumps up against the others.

A look at her publication history further illustrates that capacious quality. Her ten nonfiction books have been alternately published by major houses and by small and university presses. The essays collected in her new book, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (University of California Press), have appeared over the past decade in such prominent publications as The Nation, the San Francisco Chronicle, the London Review of Books, and the nature journal Orion, as well as on the left-wing blog TomDispatch (edited by Tom Engelhardt) and as introductions to art books published in limited editions and overseas. Solnit is a prolific writer who spreads the wealth.

When I read Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West upon its release in 2003, I felt like my mind was on fire. I picked up the book not knowing Solnit’s previous work and expected a dutiful, mildly interesting biography of the pioneering nineteenth-century photographer. Instead, the book flowered into a history of the origins of the modern world. Muybridge’s studies of human and animal locomotion, Solnit proposed, broke time down into its smallest components and paved the way for the invention of cinema and television; along with the railroad, the first invention capable of transporting humans faster than water or wind power, Muybridge’s work led to what she calls “the industrialization of time and space.” Solnit followed those radical shifts through to the wired world of today, and “the disembodiment and exhilaration of everyday life.”

River of Shadows introduced me to Solnit’s distinctive style: using measured, graceful prose, and relying equally on intuition and analysis, she makes thrilling leaps and connections, following tangents and linking ideas. “The straight line of conventional narrative,” she writes in the introduction to Storming the Gates of Paradise, “is too often an elevated freeway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. It is not how our thoughts travel, nor does it allow us to map the whole world rather than one streamlined trajectory across it. I wanted more, more scope, more nuance, more inclusion of the crucial details and associations that are conventionally excluded.”

Solnit’s first book, Secret Exhibition (1990), about a group of avant-garde artists in 1950s San Francisco, drew upon her early years as an art critic; her art writings were later collected in 2001 in As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art. Savage Dreams (1994) established her terrain—the American West—and the overarching themes of landscape and politics. An antinuclear activist at the Nevada Test Site in the 1980s, Solnit associated the human and environmental costs of the government’s bomb testing program in the Great Basin with the genocide committed against the Native Americans in the Yosemite Valley in the mid-nineteenth century.

Over the next few years, Solnit continued to write about landscapes distant and close to home. In 1997, she examined the history of her ancestral country, as well as the nature of travel itself, in A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland; three years later, Hollow City looked at the dot-com gentrification of her native San Francisco. Released in 2000, Wanderlust: A History of Walking was something of a breakout book. Solnit’s cultural history of one of the most basic human activities encompassed contemporary theories about the origins of bipedalism; Walter Benjamin’s ideal of the flâneur, the observant urban stroller; and, with foreboding, the new pedestrian walkways of Las Vegas. “Walking as a cultural activity, as a pleasure, as travel, as a way of getting around, is fading,” she writes, “and with it goes an ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination....Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedoms and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.”

It was a logical step from the peregrinations of Wanderlust to Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies. River of Shadows won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Criticism for 2003 and won Solnit a Lannan Literary Award. Two slender books followed: Hope in the Dark (2004), her most directly political, celebrated the power of grassroots protest; A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), her most personal, elaborated on the virtues of meandering.

Storming the Gates of Paradise draws together twelve years of essays. The paradise in the title refers to the public and private spaces reshaped by greed, fear, and sentimentality: the Western towns whose indigenous names were supplanted by those of prospectors and bureaucrats; the national borders erected in an attempt to maintain a fictional homogeneity; the nature photographs that construct a fantasy of virgin wilderness.

As you were putting together Storming the Gates of Paradise, were you able to make any observations about your writing and your career to date? I’d been anticipating at some point assembling a sequel to As Eve Said to the Serpent and expecting it to be similar because my interest in gender politics and representations of landscape in nature hadn’t died away. When I started to look at what I’d actually been writing over the last few years, I realized that the work had become much more directly political and much more urban[...]

Bohemian Rhapsodies

2007-08-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

Mary Heaton Vorse’s labor reportage
By David Glenn
[Columbia Journalism Review]

In April 1952, Harper’s Magazine published “The Pirates’ Nest of New York,” a report on the aftermath of a wildcat strike on the city’s docks. The piece begins with a longshoreman and two activist priests conducting a friendly argument about exactly how a port reformer of an earlier era had been murdered. Was he shot, garroted, or immersed in fresh concrete? The article moves with an easy authority, sustaining its momentum by shifting between narrative and analysis every several paragraphs. By the end of its roughly ten thousand words, the reader knows why (and to what extent) longshoremen’s wages were lower in New York than on the West Coast; which Manhattan piers were under the sway of “the pistol local,” also known as “the superhomicidal local”; and how the shipping companies themselves were complicit in the mob corruption that had crippled the longshoremen’s unions.

Was this the work of an upstart writer inspired by the reportage of Edmund Wilson’s early Depression-era dispatches, The American Jitters? No, the energy that drove the creation of “Pirates’ Nest” was not the energy of a young reporter on the make. Its author was Mary Heaton Vorse, a seventy-seven-year-old who had been writing about labor for Harper’s (and many other outlets) since 1912.

Vorse was never a household name, but in her long career she witnessed an astonishing range of events. She interviewed Belgian refugees in the Netherlands during World War I, and then was detained at the German-Swiss border on suspicion of espionage; she was present at the creation of the Provincetown Players, who initially performed on a converted pier that she owned; she barnstormed for women’s suffrage in 1915; she organized textile workers in Pennsylvania in 1920; she visited Berlin during the grim summer of 1933, and wrote a dispatch for The New Yorker; she covered one of the Scottsboro Boys trials for The New Republic; and she attended the auto workers’ victorious sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, in 1937. (Hours after General Motors capitulated, Vorse’s son, who was also a labor reporter, was shot and seriously wounded when vigilantes attacked a United Auto Workers celebration in Indiana.)

Not all of Vorse’s journalism has aged well. Her work from the 1910s and 1920s is often bracing, but it sometimes suffers from left-wing cant and overheated prose. Men and Steel, her book on the 1919 steel strikes, begins with this description of the industry: “The Principality of Steel is young. It has the despotism and the power of youth; its power rests only on wealth and dominion. Power without responsibility. Power that throttles among its subjects all efforts at self-government. Power brutal, young, riotous, lusty, driven by the force of steam. Power which treats men’s lives as commodities.” It was only in the early 1930s, when Vorse was approaching her sixtieth birthday, that her prose grew less strained and her reporting became consistently vivid and persuasive.

But even Vorse’s weaker writing holds a certain mesmerizing power today. She created a vast record of America’s labor battles, many of which would otherwise have been forgotten. Few present-day reporters cover social movements of any kind in such depth. She was occasionally sentimental, phony, and posturing, but those vices might have been inseparable from the motivation that pushed her through her fifty-year career[...]

Henry James on 'character' in the novel form

2007-07-20T15:07:00.000-07:00

[from his preface to The Portrait of Lady (1881)]

...I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles,1 saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel.

‘To arrive at these things is to arrive at my “story”,’ he said, ‘and that’s the way I look for it. The result is that I’m often accused of not having “story” enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I need—to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them placed, I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them—of which I dare say, alas, que cela manque souvent d’architecture.2 But I would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too much—when there’s danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The French of course like more of it than I give—having by their own genius such a hand for it; and indeed one must give all one can. As for the origin of one’s wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where they come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn’t it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are there at almost any turn of the road? They accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them. They are the breath of life—by which I mean that life, in its own way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and imposed—floated into our minds by the current of life. That reduces to imbecility the vain critic’s quarrel, so often, with one’s subject, when he hasn’t the wit to accept it. Will he point out then which other it should properly have been?—his office being, essentially to point out. Il en serait bien embarrassé.3 Ah, when he points out what I’ve done or failed to do with it, that’s another matter: there he’s on his ground. I give him up my “architecture”,’ my distinguished friend concluded, ‘as much as he will.’

So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image en disponibilité.4 It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just that blest habit of one’s own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived or encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals, with the germinal property and authority. I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting—a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse. I might envy, though I couldn’t emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out its agents afterwards: I could think so little of any fable that didn’t need its agents positively to launch it; I could think so little of any situation that didn’t depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it. There are methods of so-called presentation, I believe—among novelists who have appeared to flourish—that offer the situation as indifferent to that support; but I have not lost the sense of the value for me, at the time, of the admirable Russian’s testimony to my not needing, all superstitiously, to try and perform any such gymnastic. Other echoes from the same source linger with me, I confess, as unfadingly—if it be not all indeed one much-embracing echo. It was impossible after that not to read, for one’s uses, high lucidity into the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled question of the objective value, and even quite into that of the critical appreciation, of ‘subject’ in the novel...

Stefanie Sobelle on Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations

2007-07-18T12:35:00.000-07:00

Dresden, 1741: A count lies suffering from chronic insomnia. To soothe his misery, he orders a musician to play to him every night, a ritual that necessitates the composition of pieces for the young clavier player. The task is assigned, a set of thirty variations on a theme is written, and one of the masterpieces of Western music is born. The insomniac is Hermann Karl von Keyserling; the harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg; and the composer, Johann Sebastian Bach. So goes the creation myth of the Goldberg Variations, a tightly assembled rotation of elements including canons, genres, and arabesques. Its structure is the organizing principle and its conception the theme of Gabriel Josipovici’s captivating novel Goldberg: Variations.

Bach’s composition has earned its own list of variations (not least, Glenn Gould’s famous recording, recently digitized for a player piano; a Jerome Robbins ballet; and Richard Powers’s novel The Gold Bug Variations). Yet Josipovici has done something delightfully daring for his homage: With the trick of a colon, his rendition proposes variations on Goldberg himself. The novel’s setting is not Germany but nineteenth-century England; the insomniac is not a count but a wealthy aristocrat unmoved by music; and Goldberg, here named Samuel, is not a musician but a storyteller—a Scheherazade plagued with writer’s block for whom Queneau-esque variations are the only solution. Samuel recounts tales of Scottish villages buried in sand and butterflies that reside in little girls’ heads, just as he confronts ordinary agonies of love and loss. His seemingly disjunctive anecdotes reach from Odysseus’s Ithaca to contemporary London. If Bach’s Variations exhilarate partly in one’s anticipation of the next segment, Josipovici’s remind us that one must not forget the importance of “that which lies in between” the details. The reader is informed that “sleep is the goal of art as it is of man”; it is the “blessed” ending allowed when truth is discovered between stories, and “only a true work will allow him to sleep well when he has closed the book.” Inevitably, sleep comes when the insomniac accepts the reliability of silence over the ambiguity of tales.

Like Bach, Josipovici plays with canon (Homer, Shakespeare, Bellow), genre (the epistolary novel, the domestic melodrama), and arabesque (in the end, Goldberg revises the story of his visit— once dark and mephitic, now full of dancing and cheer). Bach’s eighteenth-century moment is, after all, credited with the birth of the novel, and inevitably, the book’s subject becomes that very invention. Samuel must contend with literary history and all its emerging forms, and this burden mutates him into a metafiction within the narrative as another, contemporary author emerges to voice his concern for the artistic process: “You have to feel that more is at stake than the skillful telling of thirty anecdotes . . . that all will add up to more than the sum of the parts.” Josipovici finally suggests that all novels—and, in a sense, all lives—are indispensable variations on one another.

Return of the 'modest poet'

2007-07-13T18:48:00.001-07:00

Palestinian poet Darwish returns to Haifa on 1st literary event since self-imposed exile.

By Dalia Karpel

How thrilled is he really about his coming visit to Haifa? What was the impact on him of a report that 1,200 tickets (out of a total of 1,450) for his poetry-reading appearance this Sunday in an auditorium on Mount Carmel had been snatched up in one day? Does this embrace move Mahmoud Darwish, known as the Palestinian national poet, who in recent years has lived in Amman and occasionally in Ramallah?

"When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions," Darwish says, during a conversation that takes place in Ramallah. "I am going to Haifa without any expectations. I have a barrier on my heart. Maybe at the moment of the encounter with the audience a few tears will fall in my heart. I anticipate a warm embrace, but I am also apprehensive that the audience will be disappointed, because I do not intend to read many old poems. I would not want to appear as a patriot or as a hero or as a symbol. I will appear as a modest poet."

How does one make the transformation from being the symbol of the Palestinian national ethos to being a modest poet?

"The symbol does not exist either in my consciousness or in my imagination. I am making efforts to shatter the demands of the symbol and to be done with this iconic status; to habituate people to treat me as a person who wishes to develop his poetry and the taste of his readers. In Haifa I will be real. What I am. And I will choose poems of a high level."

Why do you disdain your old poems?

"When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book. I have not yet decided what I will read to the audience. I am not stupid. I will not disappoint them. I know that many want to hear something old."

Darwish arrived in Ramallah from Amman on Monday morning of this week. He was scheduled to hold working meetings in the days that followed and then go to Haifa, the city in which he embarked on his literary path, in the 1950s. He doesn't yet know how he will travel - there are many volunteers who want to drive him to the meeting in Haifa with residents of the Galilee. The evening is being organized by Siham Daoud, a poetess and editor of the literary journal Masharef, in conjunction with the Hadash Arab-Jewish political party. Darwish will speak and read about 20 of his poems. Samir Jubran will accompany him on the oud and the singer Amal Murkus will moderate. Darwish hopes the Interior Ministry will let him stay in Israel for about a week, although the entry permit he received is valid for only two days.

The conversation with the poet takes place at 4 P.M. in the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah. The magnificent, well-kept building contains an art gallery and a hall for films and concerts.It also has a spacious office, from which Darwish edits the poetry journal Al-Karmel.

The room we are in contains a library rich in Arabic books, though a few Hebrew ones are interspersed among them. There is a poetry collection put out by the Hebrew literary journal Iton 77, Na'ama Shefi's "The Ring of Myths: Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis," as well as copies of the literary-political journal Mita'am,edited by the poet Yitzhak Laor, and a poetry collection by Sami Shalom Chetrit.

Darwish, thinner than ever, elegantly dressed, is cordial. For someone who eight years ago was pronounced clinically dead and was restored to life almost miraculously, he looks fit and younger than his 66 years.

"Is there any hope for this nation?" I ask, and Darwish, the great pessimist, does not even bother asking which nation I am referring to. "Even if there is no hope, we are obliged to invent and create hope. Without hope we are lost. The hope must spring from simple things. From the splendor of nature, from the beauty of life, from their fragility. One may forget the essential things occasionally, if only to keep the mind healthy. It is hard to speak of hope at this time. That would look as if we were ignoring history and the present. As though we were looking at the future in severance from what is happening at this moment. But in order to live we must invent hope by force."

From Marco Polo to Leibniz: Stories of Intercultural Misunderstanding

2007-06-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

A lecture presented by Umberto Eco
December 10, 1996

In the course of my last lecture I dealt with the long-lasting dream of a perfect and universal
language. This evening I shall on the contrary deal with some misunderstandings that took place
when people were unable to understand that different cultures have different languages and
world-visions. The fact that - by serendipity - also those mistakes provided some new discoveries
only means (as I stressed in my last lecture) that even errors can produce interesting side-effects.
When two different cultures meet each other, there is a shock due to their reciprocal diversity. At
this point there are, in general, three possibilities:
Conquest: The members of culture A cannot recognize the members of culture B as normal
human beings (and vice versa) and define them as "barbarians" - that is, etymologically, non-
speaking beings, and therefore non-human or sub-human beings - and there are only two further
possibilities, either to civilize them (that is, to transform people B into acceptable copies of people
A) or to destroy them - or both.

Cultural pillage: The members of culture A recognize the members of culture B as the bearers of
an unknown wisdom; it can happen that culture A tries to submit politically and militarily the
members of culture B, but at the same time they respect their exotic culture, try to understand it,
to translate its elements into their own. The Greek civilization resulted in transforming Egypt into a
Hellenistic kingdom, but the Greek culture highly admired Egyptian wisdom since the times of
Pythagoras, and tried - so to speak - to steal the secret of Egyptian mathematics, alchemy, magic
or religion - and such a curiosity, admiration and respect for the Egyptian wisdom reappeared in
the modern European culture, from the Renaissance until our days.

Exchange, that is, a sort of 'two ways' process of mutual influence and respect. This is certainly
what happened with the early contacts between Europe and China. From the times of Marco
Polo, but certainly at the times of father Matteo Ricci, these two cultures were exchanging their
secrets, the Chinese accepted form the Jesuit missionaries many aspects of the European
science and the Jesuits brought to Europe many aspects of the Chinese civilization (at such an
extent that nowadays Italians and Chinese are still debating who invented spaghetti - before the
New Yorkers damaged the whole thing by inventing spaghetti with meatballs).

Conquest, cultural pillage and exchange are naturally abstract models. In reality we can find a
variety of cases in which these three attitudes can be merged. But what I want to stress today is
that there are two other ways of interaction between cultures. I am not interested in the first,
which is exoticism, by which a given culture invents by misinterpretation and aesthetic bricolage
an ideal image of a far and idealized culture, such as the past chinoisieries, Gauguin's Polynesia,
the Siddharta syndrome for hippies, the Paris of Vincente Minnelli, or New York as viewed from
xenophile Italians who cross the Ocean to buy here Italian but Hong-Kong-made jackets at some
famous English store. The phenomenon I am interested in is more difficult to label, and let me to
use for the moment being a tentative definition. We (in the sense of human beings), travel and
explore the world bringing with us some "background books." It is not indispensable that we bring
them with us physically; I mean that we travel having a previous notion of the world, received by
our cultural tradition. In a very curious sense we travel by already knowing what we are on the
verge of discovering, because some previous books told us what we were supposed to discover.

The influence of these "background books" is such that, irrespectively of what the traveler
discovers and sees, everything will be interpreted and explained in terms of them...

But what does it mean a good cultural anthropology? I do not rank among those who believe that
there are no rules for interpretation, since even a programmatic misinterpretation requires some
rules: I believe that there are at least intersubjective criteria in order to tell if an interpretation is a
bad one - in the very sense in which we are sure that Kircher misinterpreted something of the
Egyptian or Chinese culture, and that Marco Polo did not really see unicorns. However the real
problem is not so much concerning the rules: it rather concerns our eternal drive to think that our
ones are the golden ones.
The real problem of a critique of our own cultural models is to ask, when we see a unicorn, if by
chance it is not a rhinoceros.

Butler vs. Nussbaum

2007-05-25T11:39:00.000-07:00

WHEN POSTSTRUCTURALIST FEMINISTS BEGIN TO ATTACK EACH OTHER, THE END OF THE PC DYNASTY IS NEAR.

[Salon, 1999]

Dear Professor Paglia:

Denis Dutton, the teacher at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who founded the annual "Bad Writing Contest" a few years ago, recently announced the winner of this year's contest as Professor Judith Butler of the University of California at Berkeley. Her "winning" sentence comes from an article she wrote for the journal "Diacritics":

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the questions of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural tonalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

Now, I don't think I'm a stupid person, and I think I have a pretty good grasp of the English language, but I haven't a clue as to what Professor Butler is trying to say. And she's a professor, yet! Apparently someone, like, read her work and thought she should be paid big bucks to do more. I don't get it. There are crazy people ranting on the streets who make more sense (Berkeley could save a wad of cash by hiring a dozen of them to take Butler's place). But I recall that in one of your books you said she was a student of yours once. Did you teach her to write like this?

Joseph Molden
Santa Cruz, Calif.

Dear Mr. Molden,

"A hard rain's a-gonna fall!" prophesied Bob Dylan in 1963. The academic sun that once brought high rank and riches to PC queens like Judith Butler has begun to fade in the gathering storm.

May the Muses bless New Zealand's Professor Dutton for his witty championing of basic standards of logic and style! Unfortunately, Butler is only one of a flock of poststructuralist seagulls whose empty squawks have been hailed as divine wisdom by gullible professors and imposed on hapless students in required reading lists[...]

[...]Please do not blame me for Butler's lousy writing! She was never officially enrolled in my classes in the mid-1970s at Bennington College -- although her circle of close friends were repeat students of mine. I was then in my most militant lesbian-feminist mode (which led to me getting fired after a fist fight at a college dance half a decade later). My influence was everywhere on that small, seethingly insular campus. For example, I helped organize a feminist film festival, for which I chose the films and wrote the program notes. I gave illustrated public lectures on sexual personae and "performance" (a Swinging '60s London and Warhol New York principle that stupid people think Butler or Foucault invented). In an essay for the alumni journal, I celebrated Bennington's transvestite production of Jean Genet's "The Maids," starring a charismatic theater major, Mitchell Lichtenstein, as the maid Clare.

The sad truth is that Judith Butler -- at that time wry and smart but timorous, mundane and as nervously anxious as early Woody Allen (I used to call her "the little brown mole") -- fled Bennington at the height of David Bowie's flamboyant, gender-bending period (Bowie was our god) to enroll as a transfer student at Yale University, where she eventually got her B.A. Yale was then the first landing point, via Johns Hopkins, of French poststructualism,

a ponderously labyrinthine style of false abstraction that killed the American-born Warholite pop revolution dead in its tracks, when acolytes like myself were trying to use it to revolutionize academic discourse[...]

Who Needs Philosophy?: A profile of Martha Nussbaum

2007-05-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Magazine, November 21, 1999

Back when she was the star of her high-school drama club, the philosopher
Martha Nussbaum wasn't interested in playing Emily in "Our Town." Her favorite
role was Robespierre – in a five-act, French-language production she wrote
herself. Decades later, she still speaks fondly of the meandering walks she
would take around the affluent Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr, dreaming of the
sacrifices the Frenchman made to advance his ideals. "I was fascinated by his
dilemma of wanting liberty for everyone, but having to figure out what to do
with individuals who won't go along with your plan," she recalled recently. "I
still think about it all the time." Nussbaum also remembered the fun she had
playing Joan of Arc, entranced as she was by the question of "how far to
sacrifice friendship and personal loyalty to an abstract cause." Although
Nussbaum eventually traded the stage for the academy, she still takes these
early inspirations to heart. Synthesizing the passion of the revolutionary with
the zeal of the self-sacrificing saint, she has become, at 52, the most
prominent female philosopher in America.

In addition to producing a steady stream of books and articles from her
perches at Harvard, Brown and now at the University of Chicago, she has
cultivated a distinctive, even glamorous, public presence. Nussbaum has
discussed Greek tragedy with Bill Moyers on PBS, presented Plato on the
Discovery Channel and been photographed by Annie Leibovitz for her new book,
"Women." More important, as a regular contributor to The New York Review of
Books and The New Republic, Nussbaum's essays have become required reading for
those with a taste for intellectual combat. Prized for her writing's acerbic
bite, she first attracted notice in 1987 with a devastating attack on Allan
Bloom's conservative diatribe "The Closing of the American Mind." Writing in The
New York Review of Books, she denounced his proposal that universities dedicate
themselves solely to educating the elite and savaged what she saw as Bloom's
distorted reading of Greek philosophy. "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan
Bloom?" she concluded. "We are given no reason to think him one at all."

Earlier this year, Nussbaum took aim at Judith Butler, the radical feminist
philosopher who has attained cultlike status (through dense monographs like
"Gender Trouble") for arguing, among other things, that society is built on
artificial gender norms that can best be undermined with "subversive" symbolic
behavior, like cross-dressing. Appearing in The New Republic, Nussbaum's
8,600-word essay, "The Professor of Parody," castigated Butler for proffering a
"self-involved" feminism that encouraged women to disengage from real-world
problems – like inferior wages or sexual harassment – and retreat to
theory. "For Butler," she wrote, "the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy,
that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better." By
abdicating the fight against injustice in favor of "hip defeatism," Butler,
Nussbaum concluded darkly, "collaborates with evil."

The review received a visceral response within the academy and beyond.
Butler's defenders branded it an ad feminam attack on an innovative thinker
whose reputation was surpassing Nussbaum's own. "It was a crassly opportunistic
act," said Joan Scott, a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. Others welcomed Nussbaum's blow against the hermetic politics of
postmodernism. "The piece was a skillful and long-overdue shredding," said Katha
Pollitt, the feminist writer.

Although it would be hard to find two more ideologically dissimilar thinkers
than Bloom and Butler, according to Nussbaum's withering judgment they were
guilty of a common crime: both were mandarin philosophers who refused to use
their theories to help wage the battle for freedom, justice and equality. While
Bloom was at least openly skeptical about philosophy's connection to democracy
(he disparaged those who dared to seek practical advice from his beloved Greek
texts), Butler drew Nussbaum's ire because she claimed to be using philosophy to
address political issues even as she manipulated poststructuralist theory to
sidestep them. "I thought of the Butler and Bloom reviews as acts of public
service," she said. "But a lot of my impatience with their work grew out of my
repudiation of my own aristocratic upbringing. I don't like anything that sets
itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or
Derrida."

The debate over whether philosophy should play a mandarin or public role has
been a contentious one throughout American intellectual history. In the hands
of thinkers like Sidney Hook and John Dewey, philosophy turned its attention
"from the problems of philosophers toward the problems of men," as Dewey wrote
in "Reconstruction in Philosophy" (1920). After the Second World War, the
mainstream of American philosophy became reclusively "analytic," orienting
itself around the study of logic, mathematics and the philosophy of science,
while maintaining only a tenuous connection to the world at large. With John
Rawls's "A Theory of Justice" (1971), academic philosophy initiated a wary
rapprochement with its more socially engaged past, using the analytic idiom to
address age-old questions of justice. Nussbaum's work has played an important
part in this revival, as she has extended Rawls's liberal insights to examine
questions of gender, race and international development. She insists that
philosophy be rigorous and, above all, useful.

Whereas Ludwig Wittgenstein once
compared philosophers to garbage men sweeping the mind clean of wrongheaded
concepts, Nussbaum believes they should be "lawyers for humanity" – a phrase
she borrows from Seneca, her favorite Stoic thinker. Part wonk, part sage,
Nussbaum is determined to make philosophy relevant to the modern world.

Q&A with Lydia Davis

2007-05-04T14:05:00.000-07:00

I haven't met a so-called experimental writer who likes the term.

By Kate Bolick | April 29, 2007

You may not have heard of her, but Lydia Davis is the sort of fiction writer that other serious practitioners -- Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith, for instance -- admire and champion. Her famously short stories (some are only a paragraph long, or even a sentence) defy classification, which makes them blessedly refreshing to read but maddeningly difficult to describe. To call them an epigrammatic hybrid of poetry and philosophy risks making them sound pretentious and difficult, when in fact they're accessible and forthright. Likewise, to say they're contemplative and methodical leaches her wry, understated humor right out. The best way to make sense of Davis's work is simply to read it.

Davis's new story collection, "Varieties of Disturbance," out next month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is her eighth work of fiction, and the first to be published since she won the prestigious MacArthur Award in 2003. Along with being a writer, Davis is an accomplished translator -- she's translated six books from French into English, including "Swann's Way," the first volume of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Thanks to the "genius grant," she has been able, for the first time in 30 years, to devote herself exclusively to her fiction.

Happily, the 57 stories collected are as intriguing and inimitable as ever. Each takes a thought and steadfastly pursues it to the very end -- whether that takes 12 words or 40 pages, and whether the subject at hand is loneliness or a complicated professional relationship. Some of the stories excavate the intricacies and limitations of language and perception; others, such as a critical analysis of 27 schoolchildren's get-well letters, make new a familiar experience. The sensation of reading them calls to mind what the novelist Claire Messud once wrote about Proust: His "gift to his readers is the discovery not of experiences that we did not know, but of experiences we did not know we knew."

I called Davis last week in the former grammar school near Albany, N.Y., that she and her husband, the abstract painter Alan Cote, now call home.

IDEAS: You're often called a minimalist; do you consider yourself one?

DAVIS: I don't particularly like that label. It sounds so stingy and grudging. And writing brief stories isn't all I do. I resist labels anyway.

IDEAS: So I suppose the same goes for the "experimental" label?

DAVIS: I haven't met a so-called experimental writer who likes the term. It must be people who aren't experimental writers who call people experimental. It's just the wrong word. "Experiment" carries the suggestion that it may not work. I prefer the idea of being adventurous, exploring forms. You wouldn't call Beckett an experimental writer, would you? You look at the whole span of his career -- he started with poems and short stories and novels, and then he got into these strange texts. Kafka is the same with his parables and paradoxes. You wouldn't say, "Oh he's an experimental writer," you would just say, "That's Kafka writing in that way because that's what interested him."

IDEAS: How about "avant-garde"? What does that term mean to you?

DAVIS: I guess I prefer that term to the others. But "avant-garde" -- being out in front -- implies that other writers will follow, and I don't think that's the case. The German writer Peter Altenberg, much admired by Kafka and Thomas Mann, was writing eccentric little stories back around the turn of the last century. Kafka was probably influenced by him -- maybe to write his parables and paradoxes -- but this did not lead to a general movement in the direction of short, pithy stories.

IDEAS: Has winning the MacArthur, and being freed from having to work as a translator, changed your writing process?

DAVIS: The writing has felt a little more naked. I mean, at first it was a great relief. "Swann's Way" was an enormous job, and a very absorbing one, so it was a relief not to feel obligated to do anything for a while. But then I just simply missed translating. It had been part of the structure of my life for so long, and there was something very steadying about it.

More generally, it makes me all that much more alert to shades of meaning, and it allows me to write in another style that's not my own, which is a great pleasure. One thing I believe about translating is that the translator should not impose a style on the translated work. I try to disappear into the text when I'm translating, and speak with the voice that I hear when I read the original, and speak with that voice in English.

IDEAS: It can feel sometimes like your stories arrive in your mind already intact. How do your ideas come to you?

DAVIS: Most of them begin somehow in a notebook, because I keep various notebooks and I try to write down anything that interests me either in terms of language or situations. Most of the time they just remain notes, because time is pressed, and you can't develop all your ideas. But some of those go immediately into a story, and I try to write the story then and there if I can, so I don't lose it. Once it's mostly written I can safely go back to it later and improve it.

Sometimes I have a formal idea, but that's a little unusual. For instance, I did the very, very short ones while I was translating Proust. I wondered how short I could get and still write a piece that felt to me like a fully living, complete piece. But that was in reaction to the great length of the Proust, and the fact that I had so little time to write, and I really couldn't think of writing anything very large while I was doing that translation.

IDEAS: How about the longer stories?

DAVIS: "Helen and Vi" is almost 40 pages, but was intended to be only two or three pages. It's simply that once I got going there was nothing I wanted to leave out. I try to let the form grow out of the demands of the material. If the material only needs a sentence it only gets a sentence; if it needs a paragraph it gets a paragraph, and so on.

IDEAS: It's very methodical.

DAVIS: I like the idea that the brain can do so many things at the same time. That even in an emotional relation your brain can still be noticing how things are said, and be hanging onto them. You may be in tears, but at the same time still enjoy the certainties of language. So you can try to write it down later.

Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@

2007-04-12T10:18:00.000-07:00

By Joel Bleifuss | 1.27.03
In These Times

[Kurt Vonnegut 1922 - 2007]

In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written 13 others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of the pre-eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century.

As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter of this magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes to quote: “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

—Joel Bleifuss

You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?

One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here...

"My Name is Rachel Corrie"

2007-04-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

A Debate Over Why the Play is Not Opening in New York
Democracy Now - March 22nd, 2006

Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
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"My Name is Rachel Corrie" - a play based on the words of the American peace activist crushed to death three years ago by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza - is causing controversy after the New York City theater that was scheduled to run it postponed production. We host a discussion with Katharine Viner, the editor of the play in London and James Nicola and Lynn Moffat, the two top directors of the New York Theatre Workshop. [includes rush transcript] We turn now to the controversy over the play "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which is based on the words of the late U.S. peace activist.

Three years ago this month Corrie died at the age of 23 after she was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer. At the time Corrie was attempting to block the demolition of the home of a Palestinian doctor in the Gaza town of Rafah.

The play opened last year in London to rave reviews and sold out audiences. It was scheduled to come to New York and open tonight at the celebrated off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop.

But there will be no opening night.

In late February, the theater announced it was indefinitely postponing production of the play due to the current political climate.

The theater's artistic director James Nicola told the Guardian of London: "In our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas, we had a very edgy situation." Nicola went on to say, "We found that our plan to present a work of art would be seen as us taking a stand in a political conflict, that we didn't want to take."

But the theater has been accused of political censorship. The co-creator of the play, Alan Rickman responded by saying, "This is censorship born out of fear" and that the theater had effectively canceled the play.

Today, in a broadcast exclusive, we host a discussion between one of the creators of "My Name is Rachel Corrie" and the New York theater group that postponed the production of the play.

In London we are joined by Katharine Viner, the co-editor and co-producer of "My Name is Rachel Corrie." She is an editor at the Guardian newspaper in London. Here in our New York studio we are joined by James Nicola, the artistic director at the New York Theatre Workshop as well as the theater's managing director Lynn Moffat.

* Katharine Viner, the co-editor and co-producer of "My Name is Rachel Corrie." She is an editor at the Guardian newspaper in London.
- Read Viner's article: "A Message Crushed Again"
* James Nicola, artistic director at the New York Theatre Workshop.
* Lynn Moffat, managing director of the New York Theatre Workshop.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: Today, in a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we host a discussion between one of the creators of the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie and the New York theater group that postponed the production of the play. In London, we're joined by Katharine Viner. She’s the co-editor and co-producer of My Name is Rachel Corrie. She's editor at the Guardian newspaper in London. Here in our New York studio, we’re joined by James Nicola. He is the artistic director at the New York Theatre Workshop, as well as the theater's managing director, Lynn Moffat. And we welcome you all to Democracy Now!...

Manhood and its Poetic Projects:

2007-04-03T13:10:00.000-07:00

The construction of masculinity
in the counter-cultural poetry of the U.S. 1950s

Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Jacket number 31 : October 2006

[An early version of this paper was given in 1996 at the National Poetry Foundation conference on the 1950s held in Orono, Maine (USA). It was subsequently delivered at a conference in Athens (2002), at the University of Arizona (2003) and at the University of Florida, Gainesville (2004). A version treating Ginsberg and Olson only was published as ‘Manhood and its Poetic Projects.’ In The Periphery Viewing the World, ed. Christina Dokou, Efterpi Mitsi, Bessie Mitsikopoulou. Selected Papers from the 4th International Conference of the Hellenic Association for the Study of English. Athens: Parousia Publications 60, 2004: 159-181.This piece is 18,000 words or about 36 printed pages long.]

The works of Beat and “New American” poets of the 1950s were overtly counter-cultural and counter-canonical.[1] They were made on the periphery of American culture by people in chosen and flaunted marginality to the center at the moment of the fixing of the Cold War, the fixing of United States post-War hegemony, and the construction of influential intellectual and cultural analyses justifying these global politics. The most dramatic instance of cultural marginality was Charles Olson’s; he gave up two relatively centrist career paths (in the Democratic Party and in the university), to propose an alternative United States-ness and an energetic geo-cultural vision.[2] Olson emphatically did not accept “the Americanization of the world, now, 1950; soda pop & arms for France to fight, not in Europe, but in Indo China, the lie of it,” a prescient statement about the global penetration of U.S. products, globalization, and the forthcoming War in Vietnam (Olson Origin, 9). Allen Ginsberg, who brought the Popular Front politics of the 1930s forward into the 50s, is well-known for his visceral, principled identification with the deviant Others — people in minority cultures, internal exiles for political reasons (communists, anarchists, anti-Bomb radicals), exiles for psychological reasons (the dissident/ odd, psychotic, crazy, or driven mad), as well as the sexual exiles and outcasts (mainly male homosexuals, also the sexually promiscuous, and others who do not enter the family economy). Robert Creeley, rather uninterested in these overt realms of socio-politics, nonetheless engages many of the normative gender tokens of the 1950s — home, family, breadwinner, wife, and husband, exploring the fissures and ironies within their putative seamlessness. All three poets, variously, investigated United States culture; they resisted “mere aestheticism” of the arts, wanting to integrate social critique and energies with artistic expression “as the wedge of the WHOLE FRONT” (Olson, Origin 95; 11). Their poetry and poetics were proudly peripheral, stylistically non-conforming, and intellectually outspoken.

These poets’ ideological, cultural, and political critique of the “American century” also implicated gender.[3] Their writing is notable for its various but considerable opinions on manhood. Thus not only being male (a fact), these poets often championed strong-minded, pushy, outspoken, feisty, shrill, self-consciously posing and even hysterical masculinities (as ideology) — in contradistinction to the more buttoned-down, centrist manhoods normalized in the 1950s. They constructed a dissident and analytic subjectivity on the periphery of their culture, including critiques of masculinity, yet simultaneously they claimed the powers and privileges of normative manhood.

It has been often noted that it is difficult to talk about gender without tumbling into binaries, especially when the people you’re talking about deployed them, sometimes assiduously. Maleness is hardly one totalized thing. Ideologies of manhood and of masculinity are not single. All of the manifestations of gender are historically variable, affirmed, selected from, reaffirmed, and deployed even if these manifestations sometimes proceed under the rubrics of “nature” or “the natural.” Further, one’s sense of the meanings and practices of a gendered self may change over a lifetime and inside a poetic career...

...the close-up view, the revelatory detail, the single significant moment.

2007-03-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

Steven Millhauser

by Jim Shepard

I first met Steven Millhauser some 16 years ago, when, with my friend Ed Hirsch along as a somewhat disinterested coconspirator, I induced Steven to meet us at the Russian Tea Room. My plan was to convince him to take the job of visiting writer at Williams College, to replace me when I went on leave. He took some convincing.

Steven's hesitations — and hesitations is too tepid a word for the tenacity and resourcefulness of his initial resistance to the idea of himself teaching anyone anything — were just one part of an enduring conviction he's displayed throughout his career that his work alone should do the talking; that nearly anything else the writer has to offer is either an impertinence or an unacceptable approximation of what it was the writer really wished to express. There was a single week sometime soon after his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse, appeared, when three different writers called to tell me that I had to read it. Once I'd done so, I started calling people. The sensibility on display was a revelation: the book posited childhood as a magically illuminating state, and the tenderness and generosity of its perceptions made that wonderful and Nabokovian claim entirely persuasive. Nine books later, Steven's work is still all about magical illuminations: The King in the Tree, three novellas, opens up the intensities of obsessive love and anguished betrayal with both minute precision and startling élan. That book was the occasion for

the following interview, conducted over a couple of weeks through email, a format that spared at least one of us the bother of having to clean our house for company...

A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York.

2007-03-28T12:26:00.000-07:00

Christine Schwartz Hartley on Andre Schiffren
BookForum Apr/Mar 2007

About halfway into his memoir, André Schiffrin notes that after his father died in 1950, André and his mother lived on New York 's Upper East Side on only a few hundred dollars per year, well below the city's poverty line. Yet as the distinguished French-born editor of the New Press explains, he never felt lower-class: Back when his family lived in Paris, his mother had detailed the different layers of the French bourgeoisie, concluding that "[o]n top of them all were the intellectuals. That was us, and therefore there was never any question of our feeling underprivileged." Though Schiffrin may misremember the timing of this remark—he turned five the day the German army invaded Paris in 1940 and was just six when his family reached New York, perhaps too young to grasp such concepts—it contains everything he wants us to take away from A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York.

These are the memoirs of a twentieth-century, Continental-born intellectual, for whom most everything happens in the world of ideas. Consequently, there are hardly any sights, sounds, smells, or emotions here, unless they are related in some manner to Schiffrin's intellectual pursuits, where men seem to rule. Besides Hannah Arendt and other female writers he has published, the only women worth a nod are his mother; his girlfriend at Cambridge, who reappears in the epilogue as his wife of several decades and the mother of his two daughters; and the assistant who follows him to the New Press after he resigns from a thirty-year stint at Pantheon. Also unsurprisingly, this lifelong Socialist Democrat reformist, who first visited the New York Socialist Party headquarters at fifteen, occasionally launches into tirades about the superiority of publicly owned companies and national health services and the evils of globalization and publishing conglomerates.

At its best, however, Schiffrin's coming-of-age story acts as a springboard for a series of vivid and insightful vignettes about political developments in the United States (including the rise and long-term effects of McCarthyism), the evolution of the left, and his own political maturation. This last topic is capped by a fiery account of his 1989 showdown with Random House head Alberto Vitale, a former banker whose office "featured only a photograph of his yacht" and whose policies forced Schiffrin out of the job in which he had published the likes of Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, Michel Foucault, Günter Grass, and Art Spiegelman.

Above all, these are the poignant memoirs of a precocious only child who fashioned himself after his famous father, Jacques, the first editor of the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and a close friend of André Gide and numerous other European intellectuals. It was Jacques who asked a very young André whether he should publish Curious George (yes!), who sent his fourteen-year-old son on a solo trip back to France to meet Gide with a fresh-off-the-press copy of Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, and who defined their relationship as so rooted in the life of the mind that he neglected to tell André that he was dying of emphysema. Given the enormous expectations and rewards that came with Schiffrin père's love, it's no wonder that André never felt underprivileged or that A Political Education is bathed in his father's aura.