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.

Getting The Message in Montaigne's Essays

2007-03-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

Philosophy and Literature 24.1 (2000) 165-184
Patrick Henry

There is no doubt that, after a significant absence, the question of ethics is back in literary studies. Even if ethical inquiry does not dominate the critical scene as textuality and historicism commanded the 1970s and 1980s respectively, it constitutes major literary-critical interest as we enter the new millennium. But, as Lawrence Buell points out in his excellent introduction to the January 1999 issue of the PMLA, which itself is dedicated to the "new resonance" of ethics in literary criticism, there is no univocal ethics movement. It is rather a "pluriform discourse" 1 constituted of various and competing voices from many literary and philosophical traditions.

These differences emerge sharply when critics of an ethical bent converge on a single author. We have already seen this to be the case in the preceding articles on Montaigne and I would like to examine it further here. Arguing that Montaigne is neither a moral relativist nor a moral skeptic, Ann Hartle finds "a very well-defined, coherent ethics" in the Essays. For her, Montaigne's "accidental," "non-authoritative" philosophy "does not teach or form, it discovers and tells" (p. 140). When the essayist writes: "I do not teach, I tell," 2 Hartle takes him to mean that "the authority of his moral standards is not grounded in or derived from his (or any other) philosophical account" (pp. 138-39). Although he does not blindly submit to tradition, his authority in moral matters, as she sees it, is "the classical-Christian tradition that he inherits" (p. 139). [End Page 165]

In his essay here, but more generally in his recent groundbreaking study, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy. Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais, David Quint combines literary analysis and philosophical inquiry to mount a convincing case that the author of the Essays transcends his skepticism and transforms his stoicism to offer a positive and urgent message to his contemporaries. This message constitutes a new ethics--one of "pliant goodness," "fellow-feeling," and trust--that counters the model of heroic virtue dominating his culture and his class, as practiced by "the constant Stoic, the honor-bound aristocrat, [and] the religious zealot." Directed principally to the nobility of a nation torn apart by civil and religious conflict (which forms the backdrop of both Montaigne's and Quint's book), this message, which eschews violence and cruelty and is part of the "civilizing process," urges those French nobles to realize that "they have no choice except to give way to one another," and "to submit to the authority of the French monarchy, the only possible guarantor of civil order." 3 Viewed from a different angle, Montaigne's sustained moral argument, as understood by Quint, depicts the deflation of extreme humanist aspirations toward radical and divisive individualism and, in the name of a "shared humanity," a common human nature, manages to promote a new form of human dignity. Here, then, is a didactic reading of the Essays whose author is a moralist with a political project that would put an end to the practice of cruelty and vengeance and accomplish "[the] ethical reform of his class." 4

Jerome Schwartz, for one, will have little if any of it. He sees the problem of freedom at the ethical center of Montaigne's book and studies its evolution throughout the Essays. For him, the essayist's ethics are founded upon "an unstable, fragmented, contradictory being" whose "critical method . . . dissolves authoritarian certainties and ethical givens in a general revolt against the didacticism of Renaissance humanism" (p. 154). In his seventh footnote, Schwartz registers "a certain dissatisfaction" with Quint's book because it tends to emphasize "moral doctrine" and "moral teaching" over other issues (p. 163).

The most sustained argument of recent vintage against a didactic Montaigne, however, is found in Alexander Nehamas's The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. This is an honest, very personal book whose author attempts to practice the aesthetic self-fashioning he finds in the various philosophers he analyses. Regarding the Essays, Nehamas does an excellent job of showing the extent to which Montaigne's Socrates has been pieced together from Xenophon, Plato, [End Page 166] Cicero, and Plutarch, and he proposes an intriguing explanation of what he terms Montaigne's notion of "progressing to nature." 5 Nehamas goes on to stress that, just as his Socratic sources only "taught Montaigne a few general precepts, like 'Live according to your power' or 'Follow nature,' which do not describe their end and offer no instructions for reaching it" (p. 126), so too we get no substantial advice or concrete counsel from Montaigne. "Socrates has no specific lesson to teach," he continues, "and neither does Montaigne: 'I do not teach, I tell'" (p. 124), notes Nehamas as he cites the essayist. He concludes that ". . . what we learn from Michel is that we must know ourselves" (p. 124). This is certainly true, but it is not all we learn from Michel...

Writing a Novel

2007-03-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

By Elizabeth Hardwick

It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Each morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread, the table with the Phone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door. It does not help to remember Rand Avenue in Lexington and old summer rockers still on the gray, dry planks of winter porches. A novel is always written on the day of its writing.

I begin, seeking distance, imagining or pretending to imagine thus:

"She often spent the entire day in blue, limpid boredom[...]Unsavory egotism? No—mere hope of self-definition, the heroism of description, the martyrdom of documentation. The chart of life must be brought up to date every morning. 'Patient slept fitfully, complained of the stitches. Alarming persistence of the very symptoms for which the operation was performed. Perhaps it is only the classical aching of the stump.' "

An impasse. How can she, opiumstill, a dramatic star of ennui, with catlike eyes and abrupt disappearances, begin, continue? Her end is clearly too soon at hand. On the next page, verisimilitude would not be outraged to find her dead. Not smiling perhaps, as they say suicides smile, but reflective, sunk in last thoughts. Her still gaze would be downward, as if she, who knew nothing of literature, were thinking of poetry or philosophy[...]

Soon I abandon the languid girl. My mind is elsewhere. I have taken a journey in order to write my novel in peace. A steamy haze blurs the lines of the hills. A dirty, exhausting sky. Already the summer seems to be passing away. The boats will soon be gathered in, ferries roped to the dock.

A new scene: A short pear-shaped man came onto the stage for his lecture. He is the author of two peculiar novels, some shorter fiction of an in-between length difficult to publish, and a number of literary essays. All of his work is strikingly interesting and odd. His essays are gracefully and yet fiercely written, with the same teasing moil of metaphor found in his fiction; but of course their meaning is clearer and people are inclined to prefer them to his pure works of the imagination. His opinion is different: he feels his essays are works of the imagination but that somehow in the end they do not fully reward their hurting effort. They live and die in a day, a week at most. The orange, black, and yellow wings of opinion make a pleasant, whirring sound, dip down, soar up ward, and then disappear, their organic destiny achieved.

His mere name on the page can make you tremble if you are interested in him. Movement, agitation, somber explosion of thought and feeling—complicated learning and an aggressive, poetic style. He has no remarkable popular reputation. Only the most curious and the most alert care about him, but they care with some vehemence. He is enormously ambitious, resolute, assured, and seems not to know that he is rumpled, lumpy, looks far older than his forty-one years. His clothes are a scandal.

A pert-faced, slim wife, with very short hair, came into the hall with him. She sits down on the aisle in a row near the front, but not in the very first rows. The wife smiles a good deal and appears to be proud, but with moderation. Her smile disguises the frowning dilemma that never leaves her thoughts: the mathematical estimate of his talents, which are not precise in her mind, to be weighed against the score of his defects—acerbity, impatience—which are.

The author begins to speak of his obsession: the theoretical problems of contemporary fiction. In his life he is a man of reason, bound in his spontaneous actions and in his deliberated decisions to a loose, but genuine, reverence for cause and effect. There are times when he grows short-tempered because of the ignorance or bad character of many people. Then he angrily asserts the laws of cause and effect, and he accuses with a good deal of arrogance.

Fiction is another matter. He cannot, for us, for himself, accept a simple, linear motivation as a proper way to write novels, involve characters. He does not at all agree that if the gun is hanging on the wall in the first act it must go off before the curtain comes down. No, the ground has slipped away from causality. Muddy, gorgeously polluted tides of chaos, mutation, improvisation have rushed in to make a strewn, random beach out of what had not so long ago been a serene shore, bordering a house lot always suitable for building.

He accepts, embraces, adores the fragments of life. But he studies them with great sternness, with a clean, sharp rigidity, and in this way he puts together fictions that are new, difficult, obscure, and "really good."

As they are going home after the lecture, his wife says to him, "Is it actually OK to write stories about writing?" She has overheard this whispered remark during the question period. Fiction about fiction—Borges, etc. The skepticism thrills her, even as it brings on a little squeezing of her heart. He must not fail, and yet she feels perversity in him, nagging withholdings, a stingy reluctance to redeem his narrative promises. For instance, he has written a story about her mother, a woman he despises. Somehow it angers the wife that her own mother, the creator of brutal emotions in the heart of the author, the vigilant, dirty-fingered, blue-haired mother has come out like a beaded purse, pure design.

"Now, all writing is about writing, especially poetry," he answers thoughtfully, without rancor. After all it is the question. His wife, he knew, read a great deal, but never willingly. She reads as you keep the store for the good of the family: his work, those he has praised and learned from, those he disapproves of seriously.

One evening they went to hear a large, handsome English poet, first-rate for a long time, his career arching from the Georgian to the very moment of his appearance. In his scattered, fascinating remarks about his own work, the poet spoke in a hospitable manner of Frost and Ransom. Later, at the reception, a student tried to approach the poet. "I didn't know you particularly admired Frost. Wouldn't have thought it somehow," the young man said. "I don't," the poet said. "Not in the least. And Ransom only with reservation. Still if you name one, you must name two. One lone name out of a national tradition, even a dreadfully short, patchy one, is no go. Arouses suspicion, doesn't sound genuine." The author's wife liked that. She has a feeling for paradox and for unfriendly appraisals.

The odd thing is that I have taken the two, husband and wife, from life, but they have come out false to their real meaning. The writer is not a fraud but a genius, a rare creature out of nowhere—actually from Shaker Heights around Cleveland, like Hart Crane. His seriousness, excellence, eccentricity stir my feelings. His wife is agreeable, sociable, but her "reality" and her lack of ostentation, her simplicity, her way of puncturing pretension are not the sly and cunning moral virtues I have made them appear. Those ideas of hers have nothing to do with literature, with the novel. Her husband rightly goes his own way.

But how is the man's genius to be made manifest—at breakfast, making love, engaging in his ruling passion which is writing? How is his art to become real in my novel? What is a writer's motif, his theme song, except stooped shoulders, the appalling desolation of trouser and jacket and old feet stuffed into stretched socks. And women writers, of course, interest me more since I am a woman. Remember what Sainte-Beuve said about George Sand: "A great heart, a large talent, and an enormous bottom."

An unhappy summer, and yet not a happy subject for literature. Very hard to put the vulgar and common sufferings on paper. I use "vulgar and common." in the sense of belonging to many, frequently, everlastingly occurring. The misery of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the telling, in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Pleasant to be pierced by the daggers at the end of paragraphs...

The Lasting Power of the Political Novel

2007-03-16T16:06:00.000-07:00

By MARY McCARTHY
January 1, 1984

omeone said the other day that the American novel was, of course, not political: By comparison with the European novel, say Zola and the Russians, our home product was primarily domestic, unconcerned with public affairs. It was a surprise to me to learn that this strange notion was taken for granted - a truism - by common opinion; to me it was a new idea. At once a contrary list sprang into my mind, ''The Bostonians'' and ''The Princess Casamassima'' lining up with Henry Adams's ''Democracy''; behind them Mary McCarthy, the novelist and essayist, most recently published ''Ideas and the Novel.'' marched ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (''did much to hasten the American Civil War'' - Oxford Companion to English Literature) and ''The Blithedale Romance,'' Hawthorne's satire on the Brook Farm experiment in communal living; ahead were Dos Passos' ''U.S.A.,'' ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,'' right up to Norman Mailer's ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''

Indeed, Americans, I think, tend to get their political education through fiction - occasionally through poetry, though this is becoming rarer. Today a novel such as E.L. Doctorow's ''The Book of Daniel,'' currently a film, seems to have no other design than to excite a belief in the innocence of the Rosenberg couple or to reinforce a disbelief already held as to the charges against them. I do not know whether the Doctorow book changed anybody's mind on this subject - how could it, seriously, being fiction, deal with a concrete instance of fact? -

but fictions do sway us to the right or left, and Americans, I suspect, more than most...

Grecian Formula:

2007-03-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

Ancient Tales Built to Last Because They Were Built to Change

In the South, there's a popular bumper sticker that reads IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE DRIVERLESS. At a time when literalists are loud and creationists expend so much energy twisting the beautiful stories of the Bible into pseudoscience, this is an excellent occasion to raise three cheers for myth—to praise it, revive it, show off its protean splendor. In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong's brief work introducing Canongate's new Myth series, she makes a case for this sacred form's contemporary relevance. "Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities by asking ‘what if?'" A myth is powerful for precisely the same qualities that a literal reader might deride—there are knots and holes in the story, and the meanings are unfixed. In other words, it predicates its own retelling.

This is the premise of the series; a lofty project, to be sure. The publisher has commissioned writers to recast a myth—any myth, from any culture—within the format of a novella. Each volume, then, will be issued simultaneously in several countries. The authors chosen to launch this project are already known for using midrashic elements in their work. Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, transformed elements from stories in the Bible, and Jeanette Winterson, in many of her novels, but especially in The Passion, has cast fairy tales into new forms. Sometimes books in a series feel too similar, almost as if they were written by the same person, but fortunately The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus and Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles each bears the distinct imprints of its new author.

In The Penelopiad, Atwood analyzes the social forces at work in the tale of Penelope, who waits years for her husband Odysseus's return from the Trojan War...

...Jeanette Winterson, in her examination of what it might actually be like to be heroic, takes a much different tack. Starting with its poetic and evocative title, Weight plunders images from the myth of Atlas, whose punishment from the gods is to bear the cosmos on his shoulders. Made up of several short chapters, the book begins with the narrator contemplating the beginning of the world as a narrative in itself...

Lydia Davis: water-tight absurdities

2007-03-01T14:53:00.000-08:00

francine prose Do you remember learning to read?
LYDIA DAVIS Yes, and my memories of the Dick and Jane books are very happy memories. I loved learning the words "look" and "see": "Run, Jane, run. See Jane run." It was so clear and easy and unconfusing and neat. Actually I spent my second grade year in Austria. I had one year of learning to read in English and then I learned to read in German. I still have the German textbooks in which the letters got smaller and smaller as the pages progressed through the book.

fp How sadistic!
LD That’s right, very sadistic.

fp Do you think about the rhythms of Dick and Jane?
LD I always liked clarity and simplicity and balance. All rhythms can be seductive. I was attuned to the music of language as well as the music of music. Learning another language when I was seven probably made me hyperconscious of language; also the German language in the classroom was a wall of incomprehensibility around me. Gradually the words began to have meaning. But first I heard the language as rhythm.

fp So do you write for rhythm now?
LD Yes, it’s always rhythm. I always hear it in my head...

Babble and nonsense and typing and speech.

2007-02-22T09:20:00.000-08:00

by ballastexistenz @ 2:59. Filed under Uncategorized

There are things that I don’t really want — would never truly wish for — but various nuisances make me wish they could change. This kind of thinking is incredibly narrow in scope, and does not take into account the real causes of the problem. It’s a kind of thinking I see all the time in other people, but so often presented without questioning it, without pointing out the errors in this kind of thinking, without pointing out the damage it does to present it as if it’s just fact.

I sometimes wish I could talk (note: talk here means in any functional sense to use speech for communication on a regular basis — it does not mean, make word-noises with my mouth). Not because I think there’s anything superior about talking. Not even because of most of the everyday nuisances of communication equipment usage. No, it’s a different nuisance.

People react to my writing differently than they react to the writing of speaking people. They act like what I have to say is more profound because I type to communicate — even though, if I could speak, I would be saying the exact same things. They also question whether I am really the one writing things more often, which is not something I see a lot directed at speaking people (even when they are using a form of echolalia less communicative than what I am doing in writing, and may in fact be repeating someone else’s words and concepts).

They also seem to assume an entire history that isn’t mine (usually of someone who never talked and then started using FC and then started typing independently), and then if I correct them they want the entire complex speech history explained in detail. Even if I’m way too tired to do it justice. (And if I’m too tired to do it justice, then I have to gloss over and oversimplify things in ways that they blame me for later when they find out that it was a glossed-over oversimplification.) And even if my life story isn’t really anyone’s business.

They also seem to assume that I am vastly, vastly different from people who speak better than I do (or have enough tricks set up to look like they speak well even if they’re just muttering a word now and then to people). Zilari and I have a lot in common even in terms of speech and communication history, but I bet people would put us in two totally distinct categories because we branched off in slightly different directions at one point with regard to the prioritizing of speech vs. writing in our brains.

Here is a big part of why I don’t understand or believe the whole thing about speech meaning you’re better at doing things:

If I were to speak, here is what my life would be like:

I would every few hours hit a level of shutdown that I now normally only experience during stressful trips to conferences and other unfamiliar and busy locations. I would freeze in place far more often than I do now. My mind would be filled with a constant painful buzzing haze that I could not get to go away no matter what I did. This would affect my ability to understand and react to my environment in an efficient (for me) way. I would be totally incapable of learning to do many of the things I have learned recently, and even if I learned them, I would be unable to perform them. I would not be baking orange bow knot rolls for fun, I would not be baking anything at all, I would in fact be routinely struggling with the physical act of getting food into my mouth. I would throw loud screaming fits on a regular basis (something I’ve managed to stop for the most part), I would still head-bang to the degree I used to (once per second for hours, rather than the occasional thing it is today), I would possibly even do violent things (something that is all but gone). I would walk into walls, walk into the street, and all those sorts of things, far more often. I would fail to notice many key aspects of what was around me.

And all the same people who come to all these weird conclusions about me because I don’t speak, would then decide that I was something they called “high-functioning” because even if all other abilities went down the tubes at least I’d be speaking.

And that is the position that all kinds of speaking auties are in right now.

By contrast, if my brain were to cut out typing (and all pre-typing activities) as well as speech (something it’s shown itself quite capable of doing in the short-term), many other skills would increase greatly. Typing may not be the extreme of a memory-hog as speech is, and may be far more comfortable and useful, but it’s still pretty processing-intensive. If I were to cut out language and the idea-blocks that go with it, there are all kinds of things I could do (and do do, when that happens temporarily).

And yet you’d probably call me lower-functioning because I wouldn’t even type at that point.

I don’t understand this. This is foreign to my brain. If I am not having to process words and the majority of abstract concepts, there are all kinds of things I can do. I can read the social mood of an entire room and the pattern of each person’s part in shaping it. I can sense dangerous situations and figure out what needs to be done to avoid them. I can feel my way through all kinds of survival-related tasks. I can draw on a vast reservoir of instinct and pattern-matching to navigate situations that words and abstract concept crap won’t let me do. (And I have done all these things, in situations where other people saw me as not typing and not responding to them and started doing things like waving their hands in my face.)

So I see a bizarre pattern here: The more standard forms of language and speech we use, the less many of us can do, but the “higher-functioning” everyone will claim we are (and will attribute all kinds of skills to us that don’t exist). The idea that speech and language are both processing-intensive tasks that detract from our ability to do other things doesn’t cross people’s minds. The fact that for some people the more speech they use the more assistance they will need for other things, doesn’t cross people’s minds either.

I type because communication in language is important for various purposes (both personal and more general) in my life, and it is the absolute most efficient way I have to communicate, and other methods are not feasible. It does not make me a different species of autistic person from people who speak, or from people who don’t speak or type. It does not determine what sort of autistic person I am as compared to others (other things determine that). It does have a negative effect on some skills, but that’s something I’m grudgingly willing to deal with given the consequences of not typing (although sometimes I wish there was some other setup available where language was not necessary at all). It certainly does not make me either more or less worth listening to than anyone else, and it does not make my ability to do day to day living skills automatically worse than people who speak (in fact for some of them speech might render them less capable of some things than I am, the same way it would do for me if I could still do it). It does not make me amazing (from a non-disabled “inspiration” perspective).

It seems though that whether you type or speak, if you’re autistic, people will stereotype you into one form of oblivion or another. Unfortunately that stereotyping can be a matter of life and death at times, so it’s not all that trivial.

'The First Poets': Starting With Orpheus

2007-02-16T19:42:00.000-08:00

By CAMILLE PAGLIA
Published: August 28, 2005

Ancient Greece is the fountainhead of Western culture and politics. As Michael Schmidt demonstrates in ''The First Poets,'' the evolution from aristocratic rule to democracy in Greece was accompanied by the emergence of a strongly individualistic lyric poetry. While the Hebrew Bible, the other major source of Western literature, expresses a God-centered view of the universe, Greek literature gradually freed itself from the sacred to focus on the uniquely human voice.

Schmidt is the editor of PN Review, the founder and director of Carcanet Press and the director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. His widely praised book ''Lives of the Poets'' (1998) was a 900-page meditation on English poetry in which his forceful, witty, sometimes partisan sketches revealed a mind deeply in love with literature.

In ''The First Poets,'' however, Schmidt seems less confident of his opinions. He is excessively deferential to authorities, even when gently rejecting their views. It is always a pleasure to encounter the lucid, astute prose of the late Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra (Schmidt's don at Oxford), but this book is clogged with too many pedestrian quotations from academics past and present. Whenever he is front and center, Schmidt himself is a fascinating guide who wins the reader's trust.

''The First Poets'' covers about a half-millennium of writing up to the third century B.C. Its chronological organization is ideally suited for those seeking an introduction to Greek poetry, although the book needs better maps of the Mediterranean world. Drawing on translators from John Dryden to Guy Davenport, Schmidt deftly explains the problems in translating ''vowel-rich'' ancient Greek into English, which cannot capture Greek's falling rhythms and vocal pitch.

A constant theme is the tragically fragmentary nature of the Greek poetry that we have. Only a fraction has survived, much of it by chance -- perhaps because it was quoted in an ancient letter or essay. Because of the fragility of papyrus and parchment, Greek literature was decaying by the Roman era. Schmidt stresses what we owe to the Egyptian desert, where papyrus discoveries are still being made in mummy wrappings and trash heaps. Ancient Greek poems today are often merely tentative scholarly reconstructions.

Schmidt has a sharp eye for material culture: he notes, for example, how the fine grain of papyrus (made from Nile reeds) promoted the development of writing because it gave ''the ability to vary letter-forms.'' Many modern words for books descend from antiquity, when papyrus scrolls -- some up to 100 yards long -- were used for storage. A ''volume'' (from the Latin volumen) literally means ''a thing rolled up.''

The book's profiles begin with Orpheus, the legendary father of poetry and music, whom Schmidt boldly treats as a real person: ''I take Orpheus to have been an actual man with an actual harp in his hand.'' After his wife, Eurydice, was lost in Hades, Orpheus turned to boy-love and was reputedly the first to practice it in his native Thrace. His death was gruesome: he was torn to bits by bacchants, and his severed head floated to the island of Lesbos, which was thereby impregnated with poetic genius.

Schmidt's chapters on Homer, while rich, seem too long for a survey book -- and we're still at the start of the ''Odyssey'' on the next-to-last page. Far more interesting than the excessive plot summary is Schmidt's treatment of Homeric diction as ''a composite of different dialect strands . . . as though a poet wrote in Scots, South African, Texan and Jamaican, all in a single poem.''

Much attention is devoted to controversies over the authorship of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'': Was Homer a myth? Did one man (or even a woman) compose both poems? Was Homer merely a collator of inherited material? Schmidt makes Homer concrete by taking us on a lively fictionalized odyssey through his hypothetical life and experiences. As for those who allege there were two poets, Schmidt rightly scoffs, it's ''as though Shakespeare could not have written 'The Comedy of Errors' and 'Othello.' '' ...

Eileen Myles, 1998

2007-02-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

WITH AMY KELLNER

AMY: So, what did you do today?

EILEEN: I learned how to canoe. And I'm readjusting, because I spent July on tour with these girls, Sister Spit. We did this amazing 20-shows-in-30-days tour, you know, where we slept on floors in anarchist bookstores. It was dazzling and funky and totally cool. So I went from there to here, which is this incredible big-lake-knotty-pine-looking place with great dinners and eighteen people I never met before. It's a big meltdown and now I'm getting used to it, and I'm writing, working on a new book called Cool For You.

AMY: Is it going to be Chelsea Girls, part two?

EILEEN: It's more about childhood. It's weird because its technically about female incarceration. I had this idea about how the outsider in art is really male. Because I always think that females are insiders, and that female rebellion starts someplace where you're really trapped, like mental hospitals or shitty jobs. So I'm exploring my narrator, the Eileen Myles character, from the position of being, like, a camp counselor, and in lousy jobs and institutions. I have an Irish grandmother who ended her life in a state mental hospital in the '50s, during my childhood. So I'm weaving a lot of my childhood in with the notion of work and jobs. It's totally about class.
AMY: Class is a big thing for you.

EILEEN: I come from an Irish-working-class-townie-in-greater-Boston reality. I went to U Mass (Boston) and we were constantly reminded during our education there that we were unique people for these teachers to be teaching because they all went to Harvard and we hadn't read James Joyce in high school. So we were very exciting because we knew so little.

AMY: That's not very encouraging!

EILEEN: It's how I learned about class. It was crossing the river, in a way. I went to college in the late '60s, and there was lot of political activity going on, but not at my school. We all worked in Filene's Basement, and there were a lot of Vietnam vets. It was already a very checkered class world view when I started to wake up and write, and be more me...

The Eternal Repository

2007-02-07T15:43:00.000-08:00

Dodie Bellamy interviews Lyn Hejinian

On August 30, 1994, Lyn Hejinian and I talked in my living room, as we drank peppermint tea from Fire King mugs. This conversation is part of a larger project of mine, a study of the correspondence between Hejinian and Susan Howe (mid-70’s to mid-8-‘s), which is housed in the Archive for New Poetry at UCSD. This conversation’s very existence raises issues about the documentary value of intellectual exchange, issues familiar to readers of Lyn Hejinian’s poetry. What is the self? How does the “person” function in the larger world? How do women talk to each other? How do history and epistemology affect each other? How do we distinguish the public from the private?

Lyn Hejinian: Probably very few of us realize how intertwined our thinking is with our letter writing, our theorizing with the personal thing we say in letters. It is such an intimate medium. Even when you know some third party is going to be reading the letters some day, you still end up speaking intimately.

Dodie Bellany: It’s just the form that is seductive?

LH: I think so. I love the letter form. I think that’s the one reason I’m glad my letters are in the Archive.

DB: As you know, I’ve spoken with a number of people whose papers are housed at UCSD. You’re the only person who has no regrets.

LH: I love to writer letters. I love to receive them. And I still writer lots of them. I really do think the letter is a literary enterprise, and I always did even when I wasn’t thinking of being archived. My contemporaries and I have always insisted that our poetry is grounded in the world—and that’s really a place where the grounding can begin, the first workings out in stages of ideas, with the relationship of ideas to other things in life preserved. Maybe I’ll writer to Charles Bernstein tonight and tell him about my conversation with Dodie today, and I’ll say more about what I think about letters, and it will be an unfolding.

DB: Michael Davidson said the archives speak back and forth to one another—and after looking at them for a while, they really do. People you think don’t have any connection are suddenly mentioning on another, and it becomes this huge matrix, an organic web.

LH: I like that unfolding; it’s very process-oriented, letter writing, especially when you write a lot of letters over time to the same person.

DB: You seem to be a very private person. On the phone the other day Susan mentioned how careful she felt you were in your letters—and in one of the letters I read you were talking about how you didn’t like to talk about yourself, you didn’t like to reveal personal stuff. How does this feel in terms of having this public record there; is there any conflict?

LH: I think that when I sold those letters I was too cowardly to reread them, so I could delude myself that my archive was just literary. It wasn’t personal.

DB: How were you cowardly?

LH: Because I wouldn’t want to be revealed in all my pathetic singularity [laughs]. There’s some very serious negative aspects to selling one’s letters or to having one’s letters exist in an archive like that, and paramount among them is the question of privacy. Since I was the beneficiary of the money that came in from my letters, it would be slightly disingenuous or two-faced to complain too much about it. I made them public. But some people with whom I was corresponding, whose letters I sold, have felt, for various reasons, unhappy with that decision. Maybe your article will lead to a discussion of what the ethics of living people selling their own papers should be. For me it has been the sole lucrative thing I’ve done as a poet, until recently when I have gotten teaching jobs as an outcome of my poetic enterprises. But I’ve never gotten any money that’s worth speaking of for a poem. Royalties from books? They’re just pathetic; it’s ludicrous to even think about them. So getting twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand, whatever different people get for their archives—and mine was on the low end because I didn’t have that much stuff at the time, maybe two, three cartons…but I know other people who’ve had up to twenty-five, thirty, forty cartons, and I’ve heard of people getting as much as $200,000 for their papers. It’s kind of like getting paid for the debris of what you really do. If I sold what’s accumulated since I sold my papers to San Diego in 1984—say if next year I started thinking about selling the next ten years from ’84 to’94—I think I’m going to send a letter to everybody with whom I’ve corresponded and inform them of this decision, and give them the option of sealing their papers—to sell them but sealed. Or to not sell them at all.

DB: Unlike the letters of many other poets, your letters don’t complain about marginalization. They’re much more about building a community. You didn’t seem to feel you were this isolated being writing.

LH: I never have felt isolated. I yearn for more isolation than I actually have, in the sense of time for writing and contemplative time to thing about the sorts of things I write about. As a girl, until the mid-seventies when I moved to the Bay Area, I was very guarded and stayed out of scenes, partly because I had that romantic notion of the lonely poet, and I was attached to that; it made me feel poetical. Also, I think circumstances had kept me excluded or apart from scenes, like going to Harvard which was this old boy’s club. But I didn’t care—I thought those old boys were farts and stupid and untalented and pompous and boring. It had nothing to do with me. I guess I identified with people who seemed the centers of the universe, like Kerouac say, but thought of themselves as marginal. So if I could be like them how could I be marginal if they were the center of the universe? My career’s ended up so much better than anything I would have dreamed could possibly happen, that I could never complain about being excluded. So much good has happened. I don’t have any justification for being pissed off. As we’re looking at the end of this century and these huge anthologies that are coming out, this correspondence with complaints about being marginalized is going to look pretty ludicrous. The language poets, for example, are being taught all over the place. It’s not maybe the mainstreaming of the work, but it’s not by any stretch marginal...

Doing the work

2007-02-07T15:34:00.000-08:00

Nicola Griffith

Even though I can list in my sleep the questions I'll get when this book comes out, I'll still be struck dumb when they're asked because the answers are all connected and about as easy to explain as why being alive is a good thing. People will ask, Where do your ideas come from? Why do you write what you write? Why do you write about the kind of people you write about? Why did you choose to work in the noir genre? Why make your main character a woman? but what they'll really want to know—and will be too polite to ask—is, Don't you think Aud, her personality and attitude to violence, is a bit, you know, unrealistic and over the top? As far as I'm concerned, life's too short to sidestep around anything so I'll just cut to the chase, and begin with this matter of Aud.

Aud is my commitment to excellence made flesh and walking around; she uses whatever it takes to get the job done. She is the tension between the joy and discipline that is my art (or craft or life or bane, depending) filed to a point and stabbed into the tabletop. She is a public challenge—to me and from me—because there's no way to disguise the meaning of a naked blade quivering in the wood: the game is serious, the personal stakes high.

Before I wrote, I sang, and before that I played various sports, studied martial arts and other things, but no one ever asked me why I sang (or loved using my body) because the answer is self-evident: it feels good. Singing is a visceral act: vocal cords thrum in the throat and set up a resonating hum in the diaphragm, muscles squeeze and air flows from lungs to throat to mouth to atmosphere. Get it right and you can feel the vibration in your bones—a sort of internal massage. Lovely. When I studied martial arts it was the sheer physical thrill—adrenalin, sweat, speed, balance—that made me want to throw back my head and laugh. Writing is no different. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I fizz and itch with my eagerness to write. I get to that keyboard and zzzsst, it's like sliding down a greased ramp into white water. There's nothing but light and liquid and weightlessness. If something hurts I no longer feel it; my music playlist ends but I don't notice. I'm riding the turbulence, bringing to bear every mind muscle I possess, flexing, leaping, diving, cleaving the water like an Olympic swimmer. It's a rush, an absolute joy.

Joy can take a swimmer, or singer or writer or karateka, a long way but at some point, if you're serious, you have to accept the discipline of work—which is of a different order than mere effort. An Olympic swimmer doesn't win gold by just swimming a long way every morning. He spends a mind-numbing number of hours setting his toes just-so on the starting block, bending, diving, taking two strokes, pulling himself out of the pool and back onto the block, bending at a very slightly different angle, and diving again. And again. Over and over. And if the angle thing doesn't work, he'll swear, and shrug, and start messing with the toe placement, then the arm angle, and the hand shape, all in the quest to shave another two hundredths of a second from his time. This kind of work is unglamourous, frustrating, repetitive and occasionally heartbreaking. It requires a discipline and commitment that, until I accepted that I'm a novelist, I'd never needed...

Sex, capitalism and antidepressants

2007-02-07T14:36:00.000-08:00

Two writers wrestle with the impossibility of literature in a society that's afraid of the dark.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Rick Moody and Mary Gaitskill

Aug. 14, 2000 | Mary Gaitskill, author of the short story collections "Bad Behavior" (1988) and "Because They Wanted To" (1997) and the novel "Two Girls, Fat and Thin" (1991), and I have been corresponding by e-mail for some months on literature, sex and contemporary Western culture. Gaitskill is an incisive and fierce critic of what's deplorable at present, and also a passionate protector of what she thinks might still work for writers and thinkers these days. Perhaps the two of us exemplify the problems at hand, in that this conversation never took place as a conversation; rather, it occurred only in the confines of an e-mail exchange. Yet we're attempting to indicate the possibility that literature and other marginalized discourses might still flourish inside the machine of Western consumer culture. What follows, then, are excerpts from the most recent weeks of our epistolary tête-à-tête.

-- Rick Moody

RM: I want to start with the hypothesis that there is a sociological basis for thinking that one should not be sad. This surely comes from the notion that capitalism can quench our thirst with the application of product. It is un-American to be sad, therefore, or at best, sadness is simply something to be treated with antidepressant meds and otherwise need not be spoken of. However, all the emotions are grand, and if sadness is among them, then I embrace sadness. This also reminds me of a great sentence from Foucault, from his introduction to "Anti-Oedipus": "Do not think that because you are a revolutionary you must be sad." Does sadness, for you, relate to sexuality in any way?

MG: A friend, in an e-mail, quoted from an essay by Robert Warshaw ("The Gangster as Tragic Hero") on this subject of sadness, and he broadened it to include systems other than capitalism: "Modern egalitarian societies ... whether democratic or authoritarian in their political forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier." And so public displays of unhappiness and failure are seen as disloyal. I'd say, that is, that public displays of unhappiness and failure that are not reducible to supposedly soluble social problems -- to some category like "poverty" or "mental illness" -- are considered disloyal, or at least incomprehensible.

My suspicion is that this is an unavoidable human dilemma, that people will always want to avoid pain, to avoid those who are in pain, and so will be vulnerable to anyone or anything that seems to promise permanent avoidance. At the same time, I think people know that pain is part of our nature, that it cannot be avoided and that it should not be avoided. But capitalism in this country is focused on the idea 1) that life can and should be absolutely beautiful; 2) that beauty can be defined according to an ironclad objective standard; 3) that beauty can be held onto forever if only you do the right things perfectly enough; and 4) that it can be purchased. I don't only mean physical, personal beauty, but that is a good enough example and metaphor. You look at a fashion magazine, or really any glossy magazine, and you see flawlessly beautiful women in fantasy lives of utter beauty and excitement, sometimes mixed in with a little cruelty. It appeals to what I think of as the upper layer, the part of us that wants that perfection so much because it is static; it pretends that life can be captured, controlled by us forever without the endless slippage of organic life, in which we are a mere piece of vegetable matter in a system that is as much about disintegration and decay as anything else -- a system in which our personalities and egos do not matter, let alone whether or not we are pretty.

The fantasy pictures are never-never land, and yet you can feel a certain desperation in the way they deny everything that isn't utterly beautiful, utterly light; paradoxically, the insistence on occupying that realm evokes all the more ungainly, "ugly" things that are being denied. People know there is something wrong with this denial, even if they want to buy into it, so "darkness" asserts itself in increasingly distorted forms, like anorexia, cutting, all kinds of emotional violence. Light and dark become so polarized that it is terrifying, and something like sadness can come to seem grotesque -- and in fact become grotesque, like you see in somebody like [writer] Elizabeth Wurtzel, who I believe is desperately unhappy in part because she has absolutely bought into the idea that she should not be unhappy.

About your question of sexuality and sadness: I think they have a natural connection for everybody, which is why (and I know I'm talking out my ass here) I think people on antidepressants often lose sexual feelings. I don't mean that I think sex is only about sadness; it is obviously about joy and vitality and birth as well. But I think it is our root link to the deepest part of ourselves, the part that goes beyond personality or even human identity. It goes down into a pit we can't see into, and people tend to be scared of what they can't see.

I don't think "sadness" alone is in that pit; I think everything is in it, too much for us, in our human incarnation, to bear -- so that a fully expressed sexuality does have that dark, earthen element that is profoundly sad, at least in human terms. I think it is in part about death, and is what menopausal women sometimes feel, an extraordinary despair that is about the breaking down of procreation and identity -- which is now controllable by hormones so nobody has to feel anything icky. This is a part of sexuality that never shows up in advertisements, that rarely shows up in pop music, but everybody knows it's there. And in our trying, maybe unconsciously, to find it, it gets expressed in some distorted forms...

Wannabes beware, writing isn't a matter of staying the course

2007-02-05T14:38:00.001-08:00

* MY JOURNAL
Jenny Sinclair
* January 27, 2007

EVERYWHERE I turn, it seems, I see advertisements for writing courses, writing workshops, writing weekends, writing holidays. All of them promise to help participants polish their prose and carve out their characters.
It should be stopped. The only people writing should be those who must write, I scrawl in a notebook as I sit on the side of the running bath while my young son makes duck noises at me.

There is no shortage of people who can, with a little encouragement, write. There are lots of skilled craftspeople. Even more say they want to write, and many of those find their way into university courses, adult education or privately run seminars on the novel, genre, short story and importance of plot. Some can write like angels from the outset, others can't write at all, as I've heard for myself in classes I've attended.

This multiplicity of courses promises a way forward, a way into print, possibly even that chimera, a writing career. But desire and training don't equal genius or that je ne sais quoi that allows a writer to connect, to slip refractive glasses over a reader's eyes, to say, "see this". They don't give the writer something to say that can be said in no other way.

What they do is provide toolboxes, and with those toolboxes the vaguely talented often turn out the equivalent of high school carpentry projects: a procession of by-the-numbers breakfast trays and carved wooden animals.

So do I expect geniuses to spring forth untrained, with no access to guidance? Not at all: researchers such as the University of Chicago's Benjamin Bloom found that many years of hard work and, most crucially, an influential mentor were the keys to unlock talents in most fields. Up to a point, writing can be taught. But that point isn't the point where the wider reading public would want to read that writing, where it would enhance and enrich their lives.

Writing is not a good in itself that everyone should be encouraged to attempt, such as cycling to work or eating more broccoli. It's a specialised art that if practised, only adds to billions of existing published words. Training and encouragement will not bring out the real writers. The threat of not writing will.

By the time I was 35, I had attended a half-dozen university-level writing classes, receiving respectable marks and enough encouragement to justify a shot at a writing career. I was already a journalist so I could spell and take editorial advice without bursting into tears (once past my cadet reporter years, at least). I wasn't fazed by producing 2000 words a day; that was what I did for a living. I thought I wanted to write, in the literary sense. I had plenty of free time, being childless and independent, and I'd even bashed out a 30,000-word document I called a novel. But I wasn't a writer.

Then I had a child and I despaired, amid piles of nappies and from under a crushing weight of exhaustion, of ever writing anything longer than an email or incoherent blog entry (usually on the topic of sleep). I spent four months mostly alone with my baby in an apartment in Hong Kong while my husband worked long hours.

And then I got cancer. Death threatened, if merely statistically. Suddenly I left the dishes undone, let the washing pile up, declined social invitations, turned my back on my husband in the evenings, ran to the computer to write the second my child was asleep. I completed scenes as I waited for chemotherapy, scribbled plot outlines in the radiotherapist's waiting room, wrote dialogue on the tram, jotted down two-word ideas in a notebook while my car idled at the traffic lights. I wasn't sure where it was taking me, but in the fourth month, on a holiday to give me relief from the relentless treatments, I had an epiphany: it didn't matter to me if I was any good as long as I wrote. The realisation was like a starburst in the dark of a hot, sleepless night in Thailand, and it hasn't left me since.

Two years later, I'm a writer. I've had a few stories published, won a minor literary prize, had many more pieces rejected. Hundreds of thousands of words lurk on my hard drive, or are in the post travelling to and from editors' slush piles, fulfilling my mantra of "write and send, write and send". I don't know if I'm any good but I am a writer, and the reason I'm a writer is that I was suddenly faced with not being one.

I still fight obsessively for every free minute at my computer. I baulk at time-consuming paid work, invent other activities to excuse me from invitations that might interfere with my writing; I even enrolled in a university writing course to give a socially acceptable face to my compulsion. I try not to neglect my son but I scheme and plan and look forward to my writing times, free of him. Tired, not in the mood, it doesn't matter: I sit and write and soon enough the muse pops by to see what I'm doing.

From the ridiculous to the sublime: at a seminar at the University of Melbourne last year, Gerald Murnane spoke of writing his stories standing up at the kitchen bench while family life went on around him, and of what he calls "secret writing", writing that is done without reference to the glare of publicity, the culture of big names, writing that is done because it must be done.

A recent article in The New Yorker described how Noah Webster, author of Webster's Dictionary, padded the walls of his study to shut out the noise of his many children while he worked his way through American English from A to Z.

Manuscripts worked on in secret, smuggled out of Soviet gulags or completed in the attics of Amsterdam row houses, written in exile, written in prison, written behind the backs of tyrants: these are books that have something to say.

If all writing were forbidden, the stories written in secret would be the ones we needed to read. It's not writing that should be encouraged but reading, widely and voraciously, reading the classics, reading the modern masters. That, if my university lecturers are right, is what will bring out the real writers among us. Magazine editors, publishers and writing competitions are groaning under the output of all those writing courses and I want to say stop. Stop if you can. And if you can't stop, write.

OCTAVIO SOLIS: "Terrors of the Heart"

2007-01-23T11:35:00.000-08:00

By Julia Reynolds

Octavio Solís is, perhaps, the most prominent Chicano playwright in the country. He is of the post-Luis Valdez generation that has gone beyond Chicano identity-seeking and is now looking at humanity, at issues revolving around love and death and why the world is such a mess.

His work has been called dark, but he thinks it’s funny. At least a lot funnier, he says, than most people realize. Critic Judith Green wrote in 1994 that Solís took a “brave new path” with his play El Paso Blue. “It moves fluidly from hunter to hunted, from past to present, from reality to dream, from the prosaic to the mythic,” she said in the San Jose Mercury News.

He can’t deny it: Solís deals with the underbelly of life, with secrets and hidden fears, violence and misunderstanding. His plays are about infidelity, deception and murder. But other than that, okay, he is funny, in a nasty sort of way. But his work reflects a love of humanity, a love of all its weakness and screw-ups, which is why Solís ends up coming across as tender, though his subjects are harsh.

His works Man of the Flesh, Prospect, El Paso Blue, Santos & Santos, La Posada Mágica, El Otro and the workshop production of Dreamlandia have been mounted at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Dallas Theater Center, the San Diego Repertory Theatre and many other theaters around the country.

Solís received an National Endowment for the Arts 1995-97 Playwriting Fellowship, the Roger L. Stevens award from the Kennedy Center and the Will Glickman Playwright Award, among others. Solís is married to attorney Jeanne Sexton, and has a daughter, Gracie. They live in San Francisco, where Solís was interviewed for El Andar.

El Paso Blue opens November 9 in Philadelphia at Venture Theatre.

JR: What is your next play going to be like?

Solís: This is something different in that I’m starting with no script at all. I’m going to start with a couple of notes, some ideas of who the characters are, what their names are, who’s married to who.

JR: Do you have any idea what the plot is?

Solís: Sort of, very loosely. The idea is there’s three couples. I don’t know how they’re related, but there’s three couples married or living together. And in the course of this play these three couples have their own crises. And they’re all brought to the brink. Some of them are going to come back from the brink and be stronger.

One of the men or the women is going to have a gun in the house.

JR: Uh-oh. Chekov at work…

Solís: The thing that’s fascinating to me is that before, people used to fight and they’d get divorced, they’d break up and that was that. But there’s this trend, a real ugly trend, where a guy nowadays will hunt and kill his wife and then kill himself. That’s happening a lot. I want to figure out, what is this? What is it about these men that makes them want to do this?

They can’t believe that they’re being rejected, or that they’re losing their “possession.”

It has to do very much with ideas of possession. That women in this society are still considered cattle, property. And they’re murdered.

And at least one of the couples is going to be interracial.

JR: Is the theater scene in this country receptive to the playwright as an artist?

Solís: I don’t know if this country is more receptive because I don’t know the theater scene in other countries, except the few that I’ve visited. I visited Columbia, Puerto Rico, Venezuela. In the major cities there, people really, truly respect the theater. They really do. Poetry and theater are very highly regarded. In Venezuela the students have developed a very strong theater-going habit. It’s just part of the things they do. Like in England: they have the theater-going habit.

JR: But here we have New York...

Solís: You know the ones who go to the theater a lot in New York are the tourists. The tourists, when they go to New York, they think, “Well, gotta go to the theater!”

I have a hard time in New York, too, because the material and the part of the country that I write about is so alien to people in New York. To the theater directors and producers, it’s alien country. I may as well be writing about Africa, I may as well be writing about Mars as writing about El Paso, Texas, Mexico, and to write about people around the border in that desert environment.

JR: It will be interesting to see the reaction in Philadelphia when El Paso Blue opens there.

Solís: I’m curious! My plays have gone over well in Chicago, but there’s a huge Latino population in Chicago. Mexican. They know what’s going on. They know that things are going to happen around the border sometime in the future that’s going to blow this country wide open. It’s going to really be dramatic.

JR: And the other Easterners don’t get it?

Solís: No, they just think that it’s something so far away from their understanding. So far away. A friend of mine who’s a director, he and a set designer went to El Paso and Juárez just to walk around for several days. And they were stunned, absolutely stunned at how different that part of the border is, and how close it is to America and half of it is America. They just could not believe that they were on American soil, that just crossing a line in the sand or the river, all of sudden they’re in the Third World. They were confronted with such troubling, disturbing things about human society that they just thought, “My God, it’s here, right here.”

JR: Will you keep writing about the border?

Solís:For a time I think I will. I think it’s good for me. I think there’s a lot of stories there. It’s part of my cultural background. It’s part of who I am, having been born and raised there.

JR:You focus on the individual rather than on society. The political and social is kind of outside, in the setting. You don’t write a play about Proposition 187.

Solís: It’s always there. The audience should first be compelled by the characters and then the idea will blind-side them when they realize why the characters did what they did, or why they couldn’t act, what hampered them. What was it about our prejudices, our biases, our judgment as Americans, that makes us do what we do? That makes us not act? Those are things that are important in my work. At the same time as an artist I really want to open it up. I get to explore, in a non-linear way.

JR: Where is your work taking you?

Solís: Relationships. I think at the heart, all theater is about relationships. But I really want to focus on marital relationships, the relationship between men and women, and men and men. I don’t know how my next script is going to take shape, but I do want to explore gay relationships as well. Interracial relationships. I want to explore how people fall in love, get along and then fall out of love — and fall back in love. How they can be restored, resurrected, and destroyed by the events in relationships. Those are the sort of things I’m trying to look at.

JR: Does having a kid and family make you think about these things?

Solís: Probably. I think so. Yeah. Because marriage is a tough contract. It’s really hard. It’s a very tough contract. And making a commitment to that is no easy thing. It’s not an easy thing. And sometimes when things don’t work out, people blame themselves or blame the other person. Or we get very confused and very lost. Then they get very violent.

So I’m interested in those things. In how somebody can, out of love, write in a suicide note, “I killed her to relieve her of her pain. Because she was suffering so much, I killed her.” I want to know what it is about love that drives people to that. Love to that kind of extremes.

JR: To help your writing, have you talked to people who’ve experienced violence?

Solís: I think we all have that capacity to love and to kill. It’s real easy to say, I’m not capable of that. Or she’s not capable of that. But in truth, we’re all capable of all the things, the horrible things, that could happen.

It might help, but I doubt if Shakespeare had to interview any killers in order to write Hamlet or MacBeth. He was on to something, because he understood human nature.

JR: People spend years trying to find answers to these questions. How are you going to get there?

Solís: I don’t pretend to be a psychoanalyst or a sociologist. I don’t even pretend that I want to approach it from that angle. I have to do research, obviously, in the issues and pathologies that are going to be key in the work that I write. And I do the research. But ultimately the impulses that I have to study and examine all are inside me.

There’s a script I’m writing right now called Bethlehem that I’m writing for [San Francisco’s] ACT. And it’s about a man who, twelve years before the play begins, committed this horrible murder. He decardiated a girl and raped her body. Took her heart out. He cut her open and took her heart out. And the thing is, nobody could find the heart. He doesn’t remember anything, doesn’t remember doing it. His lawyers got him off on an insanity plea, and he takes twelve years in a prison hospital. So he’s released.

And now a reporter wants to interview him to find out why he did it. To make him first of all, ’fess up to doing it. That he did do it. Find out why he did it, what was the root of his evil. And that’s sort of my interpretation of the work: what is evil? What is the root of evil? In a culture that defends that God is dead, we still cannot somehow get out of our heads the idea that Devil is dead. No, the Devil is very much present. But we think of it as some evil guy with horns and he’s sort of comical.

So if we choose to live outside of the spiritual realm, how do we account for things that we can only describe as evil? You know, scientists and psychologists say, “Well it’s something in his background that did it. Something in his background. He was abused as a kid.” That’s part of another myth.

JR: Do think we’ll ever understand it?

Solís: We’re getting a little closer to understanding why we should not hurt people and kill people, rather than understanding darkness and evil. I don’t think we ever can. Certainly it would be arrogant of me to just presume I knew the answer to why there is evil.

I just know that without love, you’re leaving yourself open for evil to enter.

I found out how it happened in this play. The reporter’s talking to the guy, day in, day out, day in, day out, getting his story and then trying to go back and back and back, thinking that there’s a Rosetta Stone in his history so he can say, “There! That’s the seed from way back then that made him do this. I can make him do it again.”

So the further he goes and reaches back into his psychic history, his personal history, the more he thinks he’s got it. And then the killer — his name is Mateo — reveals to him that he hasn’t in fact told him anything new and he hasn’t told him anything that is true. He’s been telling the reporter his story, the reporter’s history. It’s something the reporter has been denying in his mind for years.

JR: How do people go there?

Solís: I think I’ve become aware of my capacity for things that I didn’t think I could do before. When I first came to San Francisco I’d never hurt anyone in my life. But I was put in a situation where this guy started breaking into cars. He was a big guy. And I busted him over the head with a bat. Twice. And he couldn’t believe it. He said, “What’d you do that for? What’d you do that for? I’m going to sue you.” Then he passed out. And I knew if he started to get up again, I’d hit him again.

I hit him hard. And I almost killed him. It wasn’t even my own car radio, stereo, whatever he was ripping off. The thing is that no one, not even a low-life like this guy, is worth killing for a car radio. Or dying for. Because he could’ve had a gun, and here I have a bat. And yet at that moment when I did it, I knew that if I had to, I could kill him and I would do it. And I knew that if I was threatened or my family was threatened, I knew what I could do. I knew what I was capable of doing.

El Paso Blue takes women and men through the trials of interracial relationships — like poor Al, who says that without his Sylvie, he’s “just another Mexican.” Solís says he wrote the play to explore those issues, after a friend asked about his own interracial marriage.

Marriage, he says, is the ultimate challenge, the thing that will take his work forward because love is where the great test of our humanity takes place.

In the opening scene of Blue, the heroine Sylvie sings:

“I hunkered down in a sweet, sweet place

Between your arms and your chest

Sheltered and safe from all the troubles

That put lovers to the test.”

We know better. With Solís, there’s safety and no rest, and we’ll soon be off on an epic voyage through the terrors of the heart.

© 1999, 2000 El Andar Magazine

The Progressive Interview: Tillie Olsen

2007-01-20T23:02:00.000-08:00

by Anne-Marie Cusac

Tillie Olsen, the beloved fiction writer, is self-effacing in person. "I haven't published a lot of anything," she says. And she's partly right. Her output has been relatively small. But she makes up for that in quality. Most famous for the short-story collection Tell Me a Riddle (Dell, 1961), Olsen has the ability to imply whole lives in a few sentences.

Here the speaker of "I Stand Here Ironing" looks back on the difficulties of young, single motherhood: "She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily's father, who "could no longer endure" (he wrote in his good-bye note) "sharing want with us."

"I was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression. I would start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs, the place smelling sour, and awake or asleep to startle awake, when she saw me she would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet."

Olsen says she was born in 1912 or 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska. Her parents were working class Russian Jewish immigrants and were deeply involved in the Socialist Party, which her father served as state secretary. Once, Eugene Victor Debs, head of the Socialist Party, came to Omaha in celebration of his release from prison (he was incarcerated for protesting World War I). Olsen and her sister presented him with red roses--an event she recalls fondly.

She showed early promise as a writer--part of what became her novel, Yonnondio (about a working class family in the 1930s), was published in 1934 in Partisan Review to high praise. But she spent much of her life working full-time jobs and raising four children. Among other things, she was a pork trimmer in meatpacking houses, a hotel maid, a laundry worker, a jar capper, a waitress, and a solderer.

In 1955, Olsen won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, which allowed her to do her first sustained writing in twenty years. She published Tell Me a Riddle when she was fifty. That book includes the much anthologized "I Stand Here Ironing" (a mother's reflection on her daughter, raised during years of poverty and anxiety), "Oh Yes" (the story of a threatened friendship between two young girls, one white and one black, who are entering the stratified world of junior high school), "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" (the tale of a seaman and unionist who returns to San Francisco on a drunken binge and finds only cautious acceptance from his former comrades), and "Tell Me a Riddle" (the story of the death of a Russian Jewish immigrant and revolutionary). In 1974, after setting aside Yonnondio for forty years, she finally revised and published it (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence).

From personal experience, Olsen came to realize the obstacles in the way of many writers not born to luxury. "In the twenty years I bore and raised my children, usually had to work on a paid job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist," she writes in Silences (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), her book on the economic and social reasons writers fail to produce, and why many do not come to writing at all. Here is her dedication to that book: "For our silenced people, century after century their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made--as their other contributions--anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost."

An activist most of her life, Olsen was jailed twice: "First in Kansas City, winter '32." She was distributing leaflets to the meatpackers. The charge was "making loud and unusual noises." There she "languished five or six weeks--no money for bail--and got pleurisy, then incipient TB," she writes in her essay "The '30s: A Vision of Fear and Hope" (Newsweek, 1994).

Her second arrest occurred just after the San Francisco General Strike in 1934. In response to the murders of several striking longshoremen, 100,000 marched down Market Street to protest. "No one spoke," wrote Olsen. "The only sound was the beat of our feet. Then came 'The Terror'--bloody crackdowns by vigilantes who, the police giving them the power to arrest, wrecked encampments and beat strikers and 'sympathizers.'"

At the time of the General Strike, Olsen was a single mother. She met Jack Olsen (a fellow Young Communist League member) that year and had three more children with him, marrying him in 1944 before he went off to war. They lived together until 1989, when he died.

Before our interview, Olsen and I ate lunch together at an Italian restaurant a few blocks from her home in Berkeley, California. After making sure the busboy got his own tip, she suggested we walk back the long way and took my arm firmly in hers.

Just before we reached her house, she pointed to a third-floor window. "That hat is always there," she said. I looked up. Visible in the window was the back side of a bureau mirror. A straw hat and a scarf were slung from the top. "Sometimes the scarf is gone," Olsen said. "And then it is back as though it never moved." We turned toward her house. "You have to ponder the little mysteries," she said.

Until about eight months ago, Olsen lived in St. Francis Square, a three-block, working class, multi-ethnic cooperative in San Francisco's Fillmore district. She now lives in a small house directly behind the home of her youngest daughter, Laurie. We sat on her sunny porch and--while hornets darted in and out of her open door--talked for several hours.

Q: Why do you write?

TILLIE OLSEN: Because I'm a human being and human beings have a need to express themselves. Also, I stuttered. So I listened a lot, and there was a lot to listen to in my neighborhood. And there was the wonder of the black church, right around the corner. I loved that music so much, sometimes I'd go sit on the stairs. Once one of the women said, "Why don't you come up and sit in a real chair?" So I went in and came every Sunday I could.

I also had luck because I was proud of my class--because of growing up with Socialist parents and having sat on Eugene V. Debs's lap and given him red roses. And hearing him. I remember how he said passionately, "You are not heads to them, brains that can think. You are not hearts to them, that can feel. You are hands." And he held up his hands. And he started, you know: "Cowhands, farmhands. . . ." I was impressed again by the power of language.

Q: How were you in school?

OLSEN: I had this real passion for books, although almost everything I read wasn't anything like the people I knew or the life around me. The marvel was, by imagining, I gained so much from [as Anna says in Yonnondio] "being in places you've never been, inside people's heads you wouldn't ever get to know." Without articulating it, I also learned I had something to add to literature. In study hall, instead of doing my work, I read because I didn't have much time otherwise. Ours was a large family [Olsen had five siblings, and she was the second oldest], and sometimes my mother worked outside. There was so much to be done.

We were poor. My mother used to buy chicken feet. And you'd have to chop off the nails. Then you'd scald them, then you'd peel them. Once, my daughter Julie was buying chicken feet for soup, so I told her about this. "You know, one doesn't always remember accurately. There's nothing to peel," she said. And I said: "Julie, when you buy them now, they're already peeled."

I remember when I first started high school and we were studying ancient history. My mother, who had never had formal education, was always curious about what we were learning. She said, "Tell me, what was good about slavery for humanity? I don't mean for the slaves themselves." I thought this was a crazy question. "What do you mean? Nothing is good about it." And she said, "No, think about it. What was good?"

Well, I really thought she'd lost it. I couldn't think of any answer. So she said, "Those who owned them had leisure." Not everybody used their leisure in the same way. People who were thinking were able to be philosophers, like Socrates, or playwrights, or sculptors. And she went on to the uses of literacy by a small number of humanity.

On some of the jobs my mother did she could bring along a couple kids. There were some where she couldn't, and then she worried. This was before child care.

It was the period before automatic dishwashers, and you washed clothes with the washboard. If you were lucky, you could get a wringer--what Walt Whitman called "the technological sublime." I really appreciated that phrase. I know there's a lot of scorn about these advances. But think of the enormous difference in time even having an electric dishwasher makes. I remember women in my generation saying, "It wasn't Lincoln who freed the slaves. It was the Bendix." The Bendix was the first automatic washing machine.

Q: What was your life like when you were trying to write?

OLSEN: I'd try to get to work as early as possible, which was very difficult to do with the kids, and very much the kind of morning I describe in "I Stand Here Ironing"--you know, lunches packed, the lost shoe or sock. I would try to get to work early enough--even five minutes--because there was this marvelous electric typewriter. I would just type as fast as I could whatever was in me to write--my "five to keep writing alive"--although I missed some of the wonderful gossip that took place in the restroom before it was eight o'clock and time to be sitting down.

I would have time on the streetcar in the morning going. I would also write sometimes on the streetcar coming home, usually having to stand up, rush hours, with one child picked up from child care.

It was really hard when I got into something and had to put it aside. And when I finally won my Stanford fellowship, it took me a long while to fully use the time. I had this fear of interruption, the cost of leaving writing again.

Q: Are writers still silenced by their economic circumstances as they were when you began your career?

OLSEN: Yes, of course, the silences go on. The first silencing is the inequality of the educational system. We still have a strong class system in this country. Look at what's happening with most public schools. Think of the future writers who are being lost all along. Future writers. In Yonnondio, the kids really hate school, and their mom wants them to get a good education, but instead they are turned against it. And as I write in there, "For was it not through books they had been taught that they were dumb, dumb, dumb?"

That process is exactly what is happening in the public schools now for many children--the doing in of bilingual programs, for instance. I'm enraged by charter schools. Every school should be a good school. We are just setting up more educational class systems.

The second silencing is the workload so many have to carry, the problem of time. You may use spoken speech marvelously, people love to listen to you. Or you are a great gossiper, or somebody who is empathetic to what others are thinking and feeling, but none of that gets written.

Q: A lot of your fiction uses language as it is spoken.

OLSEN: Think about all that we've lost that has been said orally because nobody was taking it down. I feel very fortunate to live in a time where we have so many different voices. We have a much richer literature than we've ever had, and we can know our country so much better.

Tolstoy was so excited, absolutely thrilled, when Maxim Gorky began to publish because he was writing working class. When he met Gorky, Tolstoy told him about the time he'd had this great night in Petersburg. It's winter, freezing, but he's had a night of gypsy music and women. He comes out, dressed warmly in his army great coat and fur hat, striding along, to use Thoreau's expression, "inhabiting his body with inexpressible satisfaction." He feels this tug at his coat. Here is this filthy little bare-legged kid trying to pull him back and pointing to this half-naked woman, vomit all over her, lying unconscious in the gutter. He brushes that kid aside. He has no intention of touching her, freezing to death though she may be. His beautiful mood is spoiled. Again the little boy, looking imploringly up at him, pulls at his coat. He pushes him away hard.

By this time, Tolstoy is crying, and he puts his arms on Gorky's shoulders, looks into his eyes. "And you," Tolstoy says, "you must keep writing what happens with the people who are not ever written about. Or else that little boy will follow you with his eyes all of your life as he does me."

Q: How did you come to write down your stories?

OLSEN: I didn't realize that I really had something to add until I crossed the tracks to Omaha Central High School, crowning its highest hill. It is still considered one of the most prestigious public schools in the country.

For the first time, I encountered class differences, clothes, attitudes, backgrounds. The dean called me down to give me cast-off clothes to wear, which were usually recognized by those who had donated them.

The really close friends I developed there were working class. Aggie Jensen--who was six feet tall, which was phenomenal for a female. Her father would never let her cut her hair--her braid, five feet of it, went down, I know you won't believe me, to her mid-calf. Beautiful. Sometimes we would get together enough money to rent a rowboat. And when we did, she would unbraid her hair, and there would be that wonderful blond wake behind us in the water.

We were all considered freaks in that school. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. We didn't have handkerchiefs. Sometimes my mother would come up with a rag for our runny noses in the winter, sometimes not. Sometimes I smelled of garlic. I was from over across the tracks, and what's more, Jewish. Most of the Jews who did go to Central High, with a few exceptions, were well off, some generations in this country.

There are "hidden injuries of class" whether you are conscious of it or not.

When I crossed the tracks to Central High, I left behind those eighth graders who went out into the world or were becoming mothers in a few years. Most of my eighth grade class never went on. You were out of school. Period.

Central High was my first college of contrast. Central High School was where I first learned about the power of circumstances, about economics. I learned about what people of color were like through my neighborhood relationships, and also that there was racist hatred because there was a lynching in our neighborhood.

Q: What happened?

OLSEN: I was very young. I knew something terrible was happening. Our next-door neighbors, who were black, came and stayed in our house. It had started in the city jail, and the whole thing was a plot by some politicians to remove the recently elected sheriff, part of a reform movement. Other reform candidates had also been elected. And so they trumped up this raping that was supposed to have taken place, got a crowd, broke into the jail, and lynched an innocent black man.

Q: How old were you?

OLSEN: I must have been about seven, maybe eight. Some years later I read about it at the Western Heritage Museum, where there was a whole section on that lynching. I still have a recurring nightmare--the smell of burning flesh and a boy about my age whose father is trying to put this open pocketknife in his hand, pushing him, and telling him to go up [to the hanged man] and bring back part of his ear.

Q: This must have made a big impact on your views of race.

OLSEN: I very much dislike the word "race," and I never use it. I use the word "racist." Race is not a fact. There is only one race: human. Skin color is less than 2 percent of the DNA.

Q: What were your parents' educational experiences as immigrants in this country?

OLSEN: My father learned English very quickly and spoke it without an accent. But he was out in the world a lot. The big thing for my mother was when we finally moved to Omaha, and she went to night school. Somewhere I have the original of what she wrote. It was so eloquent. Years later, after they'd moved to D.C.--it was the year that she died, actually--she said the happiest time in her life was when she went to night school. In that Czarist Russia, Jewish girls were not taught even to read and write. It took her becoming a revolutionary and joining the Bund, the Jewish Bund, a socialist organization, to learn to read and love books.

Q: How did you learn?

OLSEN: In the college of literature. What's in books--history, too. And the great college of motherhood. You learn so much about human development, human capacity. And it doesn't have to do with whether you have wealth and advantage or not. It has to do with the parenting those first few years before the world comes in with its enormous effect. The ecstasy of achievement when you first learn to walk, the passion for language. When children first learn to talk sentences, you usually can't shut them up. When they learn how to climb, for instance, again the ecstasy of achievement, that real hunger to learn, to have experiences, to be on top of something.

And the college of activism--that whole participation with others in trying to make change for the better. When I had only one child, I was already a labor activist. I did leaflets for unions in the old mimeograph days way back in 1932 and '33. And of course, '34 was the year when union organizations finally were really winning. The General Strike was my second-ever arrest. The city jail was just packed. We'd be serenaded every night from the men's section with "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

But I was separated from the common cells and put in with the widow of the superintendent of schools. She had murdered her lover because he'd been unfaithful. But she was upper class, so because I seemed to be a nice girl, they put me in the two-person cell with her. And she would sing to me, "Keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved." So I missed the camaraderie of being with the other women.

And I was terribly worried about my daughter Karla, of course, and what was happening with her.

Q: Grace Paley writes about that--being in jail and worrying about the children.

OLSEN: But of course, Grace had a much more protected situation than I did because I was renting a room from a landlady who did not like kids anyway. And here was this little girl. It was a very strange period for me.

I was sprung, much to my surprise, very early. I'd published the first part of Yonnondio in Partisan Review--it was the second issue ever of Partisan Review. It had been reviewed in The New Republic by a man called Robert Cantwell, in which he wrote, "Of all the fiction published in a little magazine, this is unmistakably the work of early genius." He was exaggerating. But anyhow, they had this protest meeting in New York about my arrest, which I didn't know about until I got out. I was furious. The protest shouldn't have been about one person, who happened to be in that freaky situation. It should have been about the fact that the jails were jammed with strikers.

In San Francisco, I worked at the old Palace Hotel, first of all as a maid, changing beds and vacuuming up. All the lamp shades, damn them, were pleated. So you had to be sure to dust between every single pleat, and meanwhile you were on a time schedule. The head housekeeper would come and run her finger down the pleats to check.

Q: What would happen if she found dust?

OLSEN: You were told, "Once more and you're not going to have that job." And this was already the Depression.

Q: What was your political involvement at this time?

OLSEN: After I got together with Jack, there was another child. It was the period of the Spanish Civil War. We lefties said over and over and over again, "If Hitler and Mussolini and Franco win there, there's going to be World War II." If only we'd had enough power, millions of people would be alive and the Holocaust would never have happened.

A lot of San Francisco waterfront guys went to Spain. A proportion of them were members of the Young Communist League. It was a young group that went. I was nursing Julie, my second daughter, then. Julie is named after one of the seafarers who was killed in the retreat across the Ebro, Julius (Jack) Eggan.

Spain was where we felt it was really being decided whether or not the Western powers were going to act, and they didn't. They did not lift their embargo on arms, which meant Franco won. People see Picasso's Guernica. They don't know what that is really about. Guernica was the first bombing of an entire town. The United States backed the real bastards because they were all anti-Red.

It's hard for me to talk about the terrible things that have happened in my lifetime because they didn't need to be.

Q: What gives you hope?

OLSEN: History gives me hope.

Q: Even though this century's been so violent?

OLSEN: The century has also been full of resistance. Why is it that the resistance movements--often so heroic and so ingenious--get obliterated from consciousness?

There's always been resistance, and there comes a time when changes are made. The fact that human beings do not put up forever with misery, humiliation, degradation, actual physical deprivation but act is a fact which every human being should know about. We are a species that makes changes.

I have a lot of faith in the American people if they have access to truth. I buy 100 copies at a time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was Eleanor Roosevelt's great work. And it happened in San Francisco, at the first meeting of the United Nations. I was there because I was head of CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] War Relief, and also I was president of the California CIO state auxiliary. So since labor was big and important because it was needed in the war, I was invited to U.N. gatherings.

It was such a time of hope.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes economic rights. It also has a clause that the son-in-law of Karl Marx would have loved. He wrote a book called The Right to Be Lazy, one of my favorite revolutionary pamphlets--the right to vacations with pay, what Walt Whitman called "loafing and inviting one's soul."

I sometimes, if it's an adult audience, ask how many of them are familiar with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most highly educated people have never read it. It's a tragic erasure of our heritage.

Q: What was your experience as a woman in the Communist Party?

OLSEN: We could not change our society. It was a time of the six-day workweek, by and large--I'm speaking of the early thirties. It was the beginning of the period in which there were enough--thanks to the unions partly--good wages so mothers could stay home with their kids, though some of us were working everyday jobs, too.

In the warehouse union, we really taught about . . . we didn't call it sexism, we called it male chauvinism. There were trials. One party woman, Lil Carlson, brought her guy, who was one of the heads of the Young Communist League in California, up on charges for male chauvinism. And she was not the only one. There were also trials for white chauvinism, which meant racism.

The party certainly created feminists. I was very interested that just in the last month, Betty Friedan suddenly broke down and said she'd been a member of the Communist Party.

We also read Lenin on housework, which is a very, very interesting essay. He uses the word "degrading," which I never felt, because you really see the results of what you've done. But the enormous amount of time it took! That was a factor in our not being as active. Of course, the men came home, and if we were working, we did not sit down like they did. It took a women's movement to change that.

Q: Did you have trouble because of your party membership in the 1950s?

OLSEN: Yes. There was a guy who testified before the Un-American Activities Committee that it was at the house of Jack and Tillie Olsen that everybody was ordered to throw their party books into the fireplace. The only thing he goofed on was that we never had any fireplace, let alone the fact that it never happened.

I was president of the PTA. A neighbor called one morning and said, "Do you have your radio on?" I said, "No." And she said, "Well, you'd better put it on. It's about you." I said, "About me?" So I turned it on fast and heard I was "an agent of Stalin who'd been empowered to take over the San Francisco school system."

Fascinating to me, there were some who absolutely believed every word--that I was that. They should have known better because they knew and worked with me. Some went by their own reality knowledge and were angry about it. They called the station to protest.

The biggest surprise was our school principal. She was a graduate of Stanford. She never let you forget it, and she felt humiliated because she was the principal of this working class school. But she was very, very proud of my work. She called up all of her principal friends to assure them that it wasn't true. She told them what an absolutely wonderful person I was, and it was because of my stirring up other members of the PTA that we finally got a school library when we hadn't had a library and we got a playground when we hadn't had a playground before, and how well read I was, and how she couldn't believe I had not gone to college.

Q: How has the situation of women writers changed?

OLSEN: There's been some change, as is evident by the number of women writers who are read. And education itself has somewhat changed. There's a lot more encouragement, a lot more writing classes. It was the women's movement that gave women in academe a certain strength. If you'd look at the old reading lists, maybe George Eliot, the Brontes, Virginia Woolf might be taught. At Stanford, I think it was 1971, they needed somebody [to teach their first-ever course on women's literature], and my name was suggested. Well, I had no credentials. I had never gone to college. And there was quite a to-do about whether or not I had the qualifications. It was supposed to be a small class. I went into this auditorium. It was jammed. There were, I think, four guys, one of whom went out and then came back again and then went out and then came back again. There were over 100 women there, including faculty wives. By and large, none of this had ever been taught at Stanford before.

Q: What effect do you hope your writing will have?

OLSEN: What does hope have to do with it? It depends on time, circumstances, whether or not your writing lives the life of being read, taught. Certainly, for years, I wrote of women's lives, working class lives, when few others were. I do know that the two talks printed in Silences had real impact at the time, as did my reading lists--for academics, especially.

I haven't published a lot of fiction. I haven't published a lot of anything. But it does go on, it's taught, anthologized. That's very dear to me, and dearest of all are the people whom it has affected. I know that for some people, they feel that it's their life or the life of their mother, or alcoholic relative [that I'm writing about], or they suffer over a daughter and think, "my wisdom came too late" [as the speaker says in "I Stand Here Ironing"].

In the title piece of Tell Me a Riddle, I was writing about a revolutionary generation, immigrants in this country whose children grew up here. But I wanted to write about other aspects of their individual lives. Little is written about revolutionaries, let alone Jews who became atheists, "idealists," some people might term them, not "realists." I like to quote William James, who said, "The world can and has been changed by those to whom the ideal and the real are dynamically contiguous." It was their struggle to do this and make needed changes.

There was a period in my parents' lives--it was a period in our country's life--when the ideal and the real were dynamically contiguous. They really felt that the international movement was going to change the world and make it a more just, human place. They were young when they came here, but they'd lived so very, very much.

The world is so different from the world of their youth and the world of my youth. Still, power is primarily held by people of wealth and position. By and large, class interest still rules in our country.

Who are the people who make policy and how do they get there? You may get an elite education, but you don't learn labor history (which means the lives of most of humanity).

There aren't many of my generation left who did make history. I'm going to be eighty-eight.

There is entrenched power, and with few exceptions it has no feeling for the vulnerability and sacredness of human life. And they have the weapons and the power until there is a movement of people, as has happened over and over in the past.

And that's why "These Things Shall Be," that British labor song in "Tell Me a Riddle," is sung still:

These things shall be, a loftier race
than e'er the world hath known shall rise
with flame of freedom in their souls
and light of knowledge in their eyes
|They shall be gentle, brave and strong,
to spill no drop of blood, but dare
all . . .
On sea and fire and air.
And every life shall be a song.

I have a lot of hope from young people, too, with that flame of freedom and light of knowledge, as well as from some of the old people, whom I honor a lot. There's the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who fought in Spain, what's left of them, and there's no bitterness, there's no cynicism. They believe, too, as I do, that it's in human beings not to put up with what is harming and depriving. I am a believer, but the U.S. über alles psychology is very strong now and our bombings from the air. I don't want to die leaving the world as it is right now.

You know the old saying, "Whoever degrades another degrades me"? That's Walt Whitman--an American, I'm proud to say.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lecture on "The Metamorphosis"

2007-01-19T16:22:00.000-08:00

http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vermeer/287/nabokov_s_metamorphosis.htm

Of course, no matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. "To take upon us the mystery of things"—what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and for Cordelia—this is also my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat (Gogol's "The Greatcoat," or more correctly "The Carrick"); another poor fellow is turned into a beetle (Kafka's "The Metamorphosis)—so what? There is no rational answer to "so what." We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual. If Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers.

I want to discuss fantasy and reality, and their mutual relationship. If we consider the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" story as an allegory—the struggle between Good and Evil within every man—then this allegory is tasteless and childish. To the type of mind that would see an allegory here, its shadow play would also postulate physical happenings which common sense knows to be impossible; but actually in the setting of the story, as viewed by a commonsensical mind, nothing at first sight seems to run counter to general human experience. I want to suggest, however, that a second look shows that the setting of the story does run counter to general human experience, and that Utterson and the other men around Jekyll are, in a sense, as fantastic as Mr. Hyde. Unless we see them in a fantastic light, there is no enchantment. And if the enchanter leaves and the storyteller and the teacher remain alone together, they make poor company.

The story of Jekyll and Hyde is beautifully constructed, but it is an old one. Its moral is preposterous since neither good nor evil is actually depicted: on the whole, they are taken for granted, and the struggle goes on between two empty outlines. The enchantment lies in the art of Stevenson's fancywork; but I want to suggest that since art and thought, manner and matter, are inseparable, there must be something of the same kind about the structure of the story, too. Let us be cautious, however. I still think that there is a flaw in the artistic realization of the story—if we consider form and content separately—a flaw which is missing in Gogol's "The Carrick" and in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." The fantastic side of the setting—Utterson, Enfield, Poole, Lanyon, and their London—is not of the same quality as the fantastic side of Jekyll's hydization. There is a crack in the picture, a lack of unity.

"The Carrick," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and "The Metamorphosis": all three are commonly called fantasies. From my point of view, any outstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. But when people call these three stories fantasies, they merely imply that the stories depart in their subject matter from what is commonly called reality. Let us therefore examine what reality is, in order to discover in what manner and to what extent so-called fantasies depart from so-called reality.

Let us take three types of men walking through the same landscape. Number One is a city man on a well-deserved vacation. Number Two is a professional botanist. Number Three is a local farmer. Number One, the city man, is what is called a realistic, commonsensical, matter-of-fact type: he sees trees as trees and knows from his map that the road he is following is a nice new road leading to Newton, where there is a nice eating place recommended to him by a friend in his office. The botanist looks around and sees his environment in the very exact terms of plant life, precise biological and classified units such as specific trees and grasses, flowers and ferns, and for him, this is reality; to him the world of the stolid tourist (who cannot distinguish an oak from an elm) seems a fantastic, vague, dreamy, never-never world. Finally the world of the local farmer differs from the two others in that his world is intensely emotional and personal since he has been born and bred there, and knows every trail and individual tree, and every shadow from every tree across every trail, all in warm connection with his everyday work, and his childhood, and a thousand small things and patterns which the other two—the humdrum tourist and the botanical taxonomist—simply cannot know in the given place at the given time. Our farmer will not know the relation of the surrounding vegetation to a botanical conception of the world, and the botanist will know nothing of any importance to him about that barn or that old field or that old house under its cottonwoods, which are afloat, as it were, in a medium of personal memories for one who was born there.

So here we have three different worlds—three men, ordinary men who have different realities—and, of course, we could bring in a number of other beings: a blind man with a dog, a hunter with a dog, a dog with his man, a painter cruising in quest of a sunset, a girl out of gas— In every case it would be a world completely different from the rest since the most objective words tree, road, flower, sky, barn, thumb, rain have, in each, totally different subjective connotations. Indeed, this subjective life is so strong that it makes an empty and broken shell of the so-called objective existence. The only way back to objective reality is the following one: we can take these several individual worlds, mix them thoroughly together, scoop up a drop of that mixture, and call it objective reality. We may taste in it a particle of madness if a lunatic passed through that locality, or a particle of complete and beautiful nonsense if a man has been looking at a lovely field and imagining upon it a lovely factory producing buttons or bombs; but on the whole these mad particles would be diluted in the drop of objective reality that we hold up to the light in our test tube. Moreover, this objective reality will contain something that transcends optical illusions and laboratory tests. It will have elements of poetry, of lofty emotion, of energy and endeavor (and even here the button king may find his rightful place), of pity, pride, passion—and the craving for a thick steak at the recommended roadside eating place.

So when we say reality, we are really thinking of all this—in one drop—an average sample of a mixture of a million individual realities. And it is in this sense (of human reality) that I use the term reality when placing it against a backdrop, such as the worlds of "The Carrick," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and "The Metamorphosis," which are specific fantasies.

In The Carrick" and in "The Metamorphosis" there is a central figure endowed with a certain amount of human pathos among grotesque, heartless characters, figures of fun or figures of horror, asses parading as zebras, or hybrids between rabbits and rats. In "The Carrick" the human quality of the central figure is of a different type from Gregor in Kafka's story, but this human pathetic quality is present in both. In "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" there is no such human pathos, no throb in the throat of the story, none of that intonation of "'I cannot get out, I cannot get out,' said the starling" (so heartrending in Sterne's fantasy A Sentimental Journey). True, Stevenson devotes many pages to the horror of Jekyll's plight, but the thing, after all, is only a superb Punch-and-Judy show. The beauty of Kafka's and Gogol's private nightmares is that their central human characters belong to the same private fantastic world as the inhuman characters around them, but the central one tries to get out of that world, to cast off the mask, to transcend the cloak or the carapace. But in Stevenson's story there is none of that unity and none of that contrast. The Uttersons, and Pooles, and Enfields are meant to be commonplace, everyday characters; actually they are characters derived from Dickens, and thus they constitute phantasms that do not quite belong to Stevenson's own artistic reality, just as Stevenson's fog comes from a Dickensian studio to envelop a conventional London. I suggest, in fact, that Jekyll's magic drug is more real than Utterson's life. The fantastic Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, on the other hand, is supposed to be in contrast to this conventional London, but it is really the difference between a Gothic medieval theme and a Dickensian one. It is not the same kind of difference as that between an absurd world and pathetically absurd Bashmachkin, or between an absurd world and tragically absurd Gregor.

The Jekyll-and-Hyde theme does not quite form a unity with its setting because its fantasy is of a different type from the fantasy of the setting. There is really nothing especially pathetic or tragic about Jekyll. We enjoy every detail of the marvelous juggling, of the beautiful trick, but there is no artistic emotional throb involved, and whether it is Jekyll or Hyde who gets the upper hand remains of supreme indifference to the good reader. I am speaking of rather nice distinctions, and it is difficult to put them in simple form. When a certain clear-thinking but somewhat superficial French philosopher asked the profound but obscure German philosopher Hegel to state his views in a concise form, Hegel answered him harshly, "These things can be discussed neither concisely nor in French." We shall ignore the question whether Hegel was right or not, and still try to put into a nutshell the difference between the Gogol-Kafka kind of story and Stevenson's kind.

In Gogol and Kafka the absurd central character belongs to the absurd world around him but, pathetically and tragically, attempts to struggle out of it into the world of humans—and dies in despair. In Stevenson the unreal central character belongs to a brand of unreality different from that of the world around him. He is a Gothic character in a Dickensian setting, and when he struggles and then dies, his fate possesses only conventional pathos. I do not at all mean that Stevenson's story is a failure. No, it is a minor masterpiece in its own conventional terms, but it has only two dimensions, whereas the Gogol-Kafka stories have five or six.

Born in 1883, Franz Kafka came from a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him. He read for law at the German university in Prague and from 1908 on he worked as a petty clerk, a small employee, in a very Gogolian office for an insurance company. Hardly any of his now famous works, such as his novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) were published in his lifetime. His greatest short story "The Metamorphosis," in German "Die Verwandlung," was written in the fall of 1912 and published in Leipzig in October 1915. In 1917 he coughed blood, and the rest of his life, a period of seven years, was punctuated by sojourns in Central European sanatoriums. In those last years of his short life (he died at the age of forty), he had a happy love affair and lived with his mistress in Berlin, in 1923, not far from me. In the spring of 1924 he went to a sanatorium near Vienna where he died on 3 June, of tuberculosis of the larynx. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn everything he had written, even published material. Fortunately Brod did not comply with his friend's wish.

Before starting to talk of "The Metamorphosis," I want to dismiss two points of view. I want to dismiss completely Max Brod's opinion that the category of sainthood, not that of literature, is the only one that can be applied to the understanding of Kafka's writings. Kafka was first of all an artist, and although it may be maintained that every artist is a manner of saint (I feel that very clearly myself), I do not think that any religious implications can be read into Kafka's genius. The other matter that I want to dismiss is the Freudian point of view. His Freudian biographers, like Neider in The Frozen Sea (1948), contend, for example, that "The Metamorphosis" has a basis in Kafka's complex relationship with his father and his lifelong sense of guilt; they contend further that in mythical symbolism children are represented by vermin—which I doubt—and then go on to say that Kafka uses the symbol of the bug to represent the son according to these Freudian postulates. The bug, they say, aptly characterizes his sense of worthlessness before his father. I am interested here in bugs, not in humbugs, and I reject this nonsense. Kafka himself was extremely critical of Freudian ideas. He considered psychoanalysis (I quote) as "a helpless error," and he regarded Freud's theories as very approximate, very rough pictures, which did not do justice to details or, what is more, to the essence of the matter. This is another reason why I should like to dismiss the Freudian approach and concentrate, instead, upon the artistic moment.

The greatest literary influence upon Kafka was Flaubert's. Flaubert who loathed pretty-pretty prose would have applauded Kafka's attitude towards his tool. Kafka liked to draw his terms from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, with no intrusion of the author's private sentiments; this was exactly what Flaubert's method through which he achieved a singular poetic effect.

The hero of "The Metamorphosis" is Gregor Samsa (pronounced Zamza), who is the son of middle-class parents in Prague, Flaubertian philistines, people interested only in the material side of life and vulgarians in their tastes. Some five years before, old Samsa lost most of his money, whereupon his son Gregor took a job with one of his father's creditors and became a traveling salesman in cloth. His father then stopped working altogether, his sister Grete was too young to work, his mother was ill with asthma; thus young Gregor not only supported the whole family but also found for them the apartment they are now living in. This apartment, a flat in an apartment house, in Charlotte Street to be exact, is divided into segments as he will be divided himself. We are in Prague, central Europe, in the year 1912; servants are cheap so the Samsas can afford a servant maid, Anna, aged sixteen (one year younger than Grete), and a cook. Gregor is mostly away traveling, but when the story starts he is spending a night at home between two business trips, and it is then that the dreadful thing happened. "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into corrugated segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, flimmered [flicker + shimmer] helplessly before his eyes.

"What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream....

"Gregor's eyes turned next to the window—one could hear rain drops beating on the tin of the windowsill's outer edge and the dull weather made him quite melancholy. What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be done, for he was accustomed to sleep on his right side and in his present condition he could not turn himself over. However violently he tried to hurl himself on his right side he always swung back to the supine position. He tried it at least a hundred times, shutting his eyes* to keep from seeing his wriggly legs, and only desisted when he began to feel in his side a faint dull ache he had never experienced before.

*Nabokov’s notes in his annotated copy: “A regular beetle has no eyelids and cannot close its eyes—a beetle with human eyes.” About the passage in general he has the note: “In the original German there is a wonderful flowing rhythm here in this dreamy sequence of sentences. He his half-awake—he realizes his plight without surprise, with a childish acceptance of it, and at the same time he still clings to human memories, human experience. The metamorphosis is not quite complete as yet.”

"Ach Gott, he thought, what an exhausting job I've picked on! Traveling about day in, day out. Many more anxieties on the road than in the office, the plague of worrying about train connections, the bad and irregular meals, casual acquaintances never to be seen again, never to become intimate friends. The hell with it all! He felt a slight itching on the skin of his belly; slowly pushed himself on his back nearer the top of the bed so that he could lift his head more easily; identified the itching place which was covered with small white dots the nature of which he could not understand and tried to touch it with a leg, but drew the leg back immediately, for the contact made a cold shiver run through him."

Now what exactly is the "vermin" into which poor Gregor, the seedy commercial traveler, is so suddenly transformed? It obviously belongs to the branch of "jointed leggers" (Arthropoda), to which insects, and spiders, and centipedes, and crustaceans belong. If the "numerous little legs" mentioned in the beginning mean more than six legs, then Gregor would not be an insect from a zoological point of view. But I suggest that a man awakening on his back and finding he has as many as six legs vibrating in the air might feel that six was sufficient to be called numerous. We shall therefore assume that Gregor has six legs, that he is an insect.

Next question: what insect? Commentators say cockroach, which of course does not make sense. A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.) Further, he has strong mandibles. He uses these organs to turn the key in a lock while standing erect on his hind legs, on his third pair of legs (a strong little pair), and this gives us the length of his body, which is about three feet long. In the course of the story he gets gradually accustomed to using his new appendages—his feet, his feelers. This brown, convex, dog-sized beetle is very broad. I should imagine him to look like this:

In the original German text the old charwoman calls him Mistkäfer, a "dung beetle." It is obvious that the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly. He is not, technically, a dung beetle. He is merely a big beetle. (I must add that neither Gregor nor Kafka saw that beetle any too clearly.)

Let us look closer at the transformation. The change, though shocking and striking, is not quite so odd as might be assumed at first glance. A commonsensical commentator (Paul L. Landsberg in The Kafka Problem [1946], ed. Angel Flores) notes that "When we go to bed in unfamiliar surroundings, we are apt to have a moment of bewilderment upon awakening, a sudden sense of unreality, and this experience must occur over and over again in the life of a commercial traveler, a manner of living that renders impossible any sense of continuity." The sense of reality depends upon continuity, upon duration. After all, awakening as an insect is not much different from awakening as Napoleon or George Washington. (I knew a man who awoke as the Emperor of Brazil.) On the other hand, the isolation, and the strangeness, of so-called reality—this is, after all, something which constantly characterizes the artist, the genius, the discoverer. The Samsa family around the fantastic insect is nothing else than mediocrity surrounding genius.

PART ONE

I am now going to speak of structure. Part one of the story can be divided into seven scenes or segments:

Scene I: Gregor wakes up. He is alone. He has already been changed into a beetle, but his human impressions still mingle with his new insect instincts. The scene ends with the introduction of the still human time element.

"He looked at the alarm clock ticking on the chest. Good Lord! he thought. It was half-past six and the hands were quietly moving on, it was even past the half-hour, it was getting on toward a quarter to seven. Had the alarm clock not gone off? ... The next train went at seven o'clock; to catch that he would need to hurry like mad and his samples weren't even packed up, and he himself wasn't feeling particularly fresh and active. And even if he did catch the train he wouldn't avoid a row with the boss, since the firm's messenger would have been waiting for the five o'clock train and would have long since reported his failure to turn up." He thinks of reporting that he is sick, but concludes that the insurance doctor would certify him as perfectly healthy. "And would he be so wrong on this occasion? Gregor really felt quite well, apart from a drowsiness that was utterly superfluous after such a long sleep, and he was even unusually hungry."

Scene II: The three members of the family knock on his doors and talk to him from, respectively, the hallway, the living room, and his sister's room. Gregor’s family are his parasites, exploiting him, eating him out from the inside. This is his beetle itch in human terms. The pathetic urge to find some protection from betrayal, cruelty, and filth is the factor that went to form his carapace, his beetle shell, which at first seems hard and secure but eventually is seen to be as vulnerable as his sick human flesh and spirit had been. Who of the three parasites—father, mother, sister—is the most cruel? At first it would seem to be the father. But he is not the worst: it is the sister, whom Gregor loves most but who betrays him beginning with the furniture scene in the middle of the story. In the second scene the door theme begins: "there came a cautious tap at the door behind the head of his bed. 'Gregor,' said a voice—it was his mother's—'it's a quarter to seven. Hadn't you a train to catch?' That gentle voice! Gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice answering hers, unmistakably his own voice, it was true, but with a persistent pitiful squeaky undertone.... 'Yes, yes, thank you, Mother, I'm getting up now.' The wooden door between them must have kept the change in his voice from being noticeable outside.... Yet this brief exchange of words had made the other members of the family aware that Gregor was still in the house, as they had not expected, and at one of the side doors his father was already knocking gently, yet with his fist. 'Gregor! Gregor!' he called, 'what's the matter with you?' And after a while he called again in a deeper voice: 'Gregor! Gregor!' At the other side door his sister was saying in a low, plaintive tone: 'Gregor? Aren't you well? Do you need anything?’ He answered them both at once: 'I'm just ready,' and did his best to make his voice sound as normal as possible by enunciating the words very clearly and leaving long pauses between them. So his father went back to his breakfast, but his sister whispered: 'Gregor, open the door, do.' However, he was not thinking of opening the door, and felt thankful for the prudent habit he had acquired in traveling of locking all doors during the night, even at home."

Scene III: The getting out of bed ordeal in which man plans but beetle acts. Gregor still thinks of his body in human terms, but now a human's lower part is a beetle's hind part, a human's upper part is a beetle's fore part. A man on all fours seems to him to correspond to a beetle on all sixes. He does not quite yet understand this and will persistently try to stand up on his third pair of legs. "He thought that he might get out of bed with the lower part of his body first, but this lower part, which he had not yet seen and of which he could form no clear conception, proved too difficult to move; it was all so slow; and when at last almost savagely he gathered his forces together and thrust out recklessly, he had miscalculated the direction and bumped heavily against the lower end of the bed, and the burning pain he felt taught him that it was the lower part of his body that probably for the time being was the most sensitive . . . But then he said to himself: 'Before it strikes a quarter past seven I must be quite out of this bed, without fail. Anyhow, by that time someone will have come from the office to ask what is the matter with me, since it opens before seven.' And he set himself to rocking his whole body at once in a regular series of jolts, with the idea of swinging it out of the bed. If he tipped himself out in that way he could keep his head from injury by lifting it at an acute angle when he fell. His back seemed to be hard and was not likely to suffer from a fall on the carpet. His biggest worry was the loud crash he would not be able to help making, which would probably cause anxiety, if not terror, behind all the doors. Still, he must take the risk... Well, ignoring the fact that the doors were all locked, ought he really to call for help? In spite of his misery he could not suppress a smile at the very idea of it."

Scene IV: He is still struggling when the family theme, or the theme of the many doors, takes over again, and in the course of this scene he falls out of bed at last, with a dull thud. The conversation is a little on the lines of a Greek chorus. From Gregor's office the head clerk has been sent to see why he has not yet turned up at the station. This grim speed in checking a remiss employee has all the qualities of a bad dream. The speaking through doors, as in the second scene, is now repeated. Note the sequence: the chief clerk talks to Gregor from the living room on the left; Gregor's sister, Grete, talks to her brother from the room on the right; the mother and father join the chief clerk in the living room. Gregor can still speak, but his voice becomes more and more indistinct, and soon his speech cannot he understood. (In Finnegans Wake, written twenty years later by James Joyce, two washerwomen talking across a river are gradually changed into a stout elm and a stone.) Gregor does not understand why his sister in the right-hand room did not join the others. "She was probably newly out of bed and hadn't even begun to put on her clothes yet. Well, why was she crying? Because he wouldn't get up and let the chief clerk in, because he was in danger of losing his job, and because the boss would begin dunning his parents again for the old debts?" Poor Gregor is so accustomed to be just an instrument to be used by his family that the question of pity does not arise: he does not even hope that Grete might be sorry for him. Mother and sister call to each other from the doors across Gregor's room. The sister and servant are dispatched for a doctor and a locksmith. "But Gregor was now much calmer. The words he uttered were no longer understandable, apparently, although they seemed clear enough to him, even clearer than before, perhaps because his ear had grown accustomed to the sound of them. Yet at any rate people now believed that something was wrong with him, and were ready to help him. The positive certainty with which these first measures had been taken comforted him. He felt himself drawn once more into the human circle and hoped for great and remarkable results from both the doctor and the locksmith, without really distinguishing precisely between them."

Scene V: Gregor opens the door. "Slowly Gregor pushed the chair towards the door, then let go of it, caught hold of the door for support—the soles at the end of his little legs were somewhat sticky—and rested against it for a moment after his efforts. Then he set himself to turning the key in the lock with his mouth. It seemed, unhappily, that he hadn't really any teeth—what could he grip the key with?—but on the other hand his jaws were certainly very strong; with their help he did manage to set the key in motion, heedless of the fact that he was undoubtedly damaging them somewhere, since a brown fluid issued from his mouth, flowed over the key and dripped on the floor. . . Since he had to pull the door towards him, he was still invisible when it was really wide open. He had to edge himself slowly round the near half of the double door, and to do it very carefully if he was not to fall plump upon his back just on the threshold. He was still carrying out this difficult manoeuvre, with no time to observe anything else, when he heard the chief clerk utter a loud 'Oh!'—it sounded like a gust of wind—and now he could see the man, standing as he was nearest to the door, clapping one hand before his open mouth and slowly backing away as if driven by some invisible steady pressure. His mother— in spite of the chief clerk’s being there her hair was still undone and sticking up in all directions—first clasped her hands and looked at his father, then took two steps towards Gregor and fell on the floor among her outspread skirts, her face quite hidden on her breast. His father knotted his fist with a fierce expression on his face as if he meant to knock Gregor back into his room, then looked uncertainly round the living room, covered his eyes with his hands and wept till his great chest heaved."

Scene VI: Gregor tries to calm the chief clerk so that he will not be discharged. "'Well,' said Gregor, knowing perfectly that he was the only one who had retained any composure 'I'll put my clothes on at once, pack up my samples and start off. Will you only let me go? You see, sir, I'm not obstinate, and I'm willing to work; traveling is a hard life, but I couldn't live without it. Where are you going, sir? To the office? Yes? Will you give a true account of all this? One can be temporarily incapacitated, but that's just the moment for remembering former services and bearing in mind that later on, when the incapacity has been got over, one will certainly work with all the more industry and concentration.' " But the chief clerk in horror and as if in a trance is stumbling towards the staircase to escape. Gregor starts to walk towards him—a wonderful bit here—on the hind pair of his three pairs of legs, "but immediately, as he was feeling for a support, he fell down with a little cry upon his many little legs. Hardly was he down when he experienced for the first time this morning a sense of physical comfort; his legs had firm ground under them; they were completely obedient, as he noted with joy; they even strove to carry him forward in whatever direction he chose; and he was inclined to believe that a final relief from all his sufferings was at hand." His mother springs up, and in backing away from him she upsets the coffeepot on the breakfast table so that it pours over the rug. " 'Mother, Mother,' said Gregor in a low voice, and looked up at her. The chief clerk, for the moment, had quite slipped from his mind; instead, he could not resist snapping his jaws together at the sight of the streaming coffee. That made his mother scream again." Gregor, looking now for the chief clerk, "made a spring, to be as sure as possible of overtaking him; the chief clerk must have divined his intention, for he leaped down several steps and vanished; he was still yelling 'Ugh!' and it echoed through the whole staircase."

Scene VII: The father brutally drives Gregor back into his room, stamping his feet and flourishing a stick in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Gregor has difficulty getting through the partly opened door, but forced by his father he tries until he gets stuck. "One side of his body rose up, he was tilted at an angle in the doorway, his flank was quite bruised, horrid blotches stained the white door, soon he was stuck fast and, left to himself, could not have moved at all, his legs on one side fluttered trembling in the air, those on the other were crushed painfully to the floor—when from behind his father gave him a strong push which was literally a deliverance and he flew far into the room, bleeding freely. The father caught at the handle of the door with the stick and slammed it behind him, and then at last there was silence."

PART TWO

Scene I: The first attempt is made to feed coleopteron Gregor. Under the impression that his condition is some kind of foul but not hopeless illness that may pass with time, he is placed at first on the diet of a sick human being and he finds that a human meal of milk has been offered to him. We are always aware of those doors, doors opening and closing stealthily in the dusk. From the kitchen, across the hallway, to the hallway door of Gregor's room light footsteps had come, his sister's, awakening him from sleep, and he discovers that a basin with milk has been placed within his room. One of his little legs has been damaged in the collision with his father; it will grow better, but in this scene he limps and trails it uselessly behind him. He is a big beetle as beetles go, but he is smaller and more brittle than a human being. Gregor makes for the milk. Alas, while his still human mind eagerly accepts the notion of that sweetish sop, with soft white bread in the milk, his beetle stomach and beetle taste buds refuse a mammal's meal. Although he is very hungry the milk is repulsive to him and he crawls back to the middle of the room.

Scene II: The door theme continues and the duration theme settles in. We shall begin to witness Gregor's usual day and dusk during this fantastic winter of 1912, and his discovery of the security of the couch. But let us look and listen with Gregor through the crack of the parlor door on the left. His father used to read aloud the newspapers to his wife and daughter. True, this has now been interrupted and the flat is silent though not empty of occupants, but on the whole the family is getting used to the situation. Here is the son and brother plunged into a monstrous change that should have sent them scuttling out into the streets for help with shrieks and tears, in wild compassion—but here they are, the three philistines, cosily taking it in their stride.

I don't know if you read a couple of years ago in the papers about that teenage girl and boy who murdered the girl's mother. It starts with a very Kafkaesque scene: the girl's mother has come home and found her daughter and the boy in the bedroom, and the boy has hit the mother with a hammer—several times—and dragged her away. But the woman is still thrashing and groaning in the kitchen, and the boy says to his sweetheart, ''Gimme that hammer. I think I'll have to knock her again." But the girl gives her mate a knife instead and he stabs the girl's mother many, many times, to death—under the impression, probably, that this all is a comic strip: you hit a person, the person sees lots of stars and exclamation marks but revives by and by, in the next installment. Physical life however has no next installment, and soon boy and girl have to do something with dead mother. "Oh, plaster of paris, it will dissolve her completely!" Of course, it will—marvelous idea—place body in bathtub, cover with plaster, and that's all. Meanwhile, with mother under the plaster (which does not work—wrong plaster, perhaps) boy and girl throw several beer parties. What fun! Lovely canned music, and lovely canned beer. "But you can't go, fellas, to the bathroom. The bathroom is a mess."

I'm trying to show you that in so-called real life we find sometimes a great resemblance to the situation in Kafka's fantastic story. Mark the curious mentality of the morons in Kafka who enjoy their evening paper despite the fantastic horror in the middle of their apartment. " 'What a quiet life our family has been leading,' said Gregor to himself, and as he sat there motionless staring into the darkness he felt great pride in the fact that he had been able to provide such a life for his parents and sister in such a fine flat.” The room is lofty and empty and the beetle begins to dominate the man. The high room "in which he had to lie flat on the floor filled him with an apprehension he could not account for, since it had been his very own room for the past five years—and with a half-unconscious action, not without a slight feeling of shame, he scuttled under the couch, where he felt comfortable at once, although his back was a little cramped and he could not lift his head up, and his only regret was that his body was too broad to get the whole of it under the couch.”

Scene III: Gregor's sister brings a selection of foods. She removes the basin of milk, not by means of her bare hands but with a cloth, for it has been touched by the disgusting monster. However, she is a clever little creature, that sister, and brings a whole selection—rotten vegetables, old cheese, bones glazed with dead white sauce—and Gregor whizzed towards this feast. "One after another and with tears of satisfaction in his eyes he quickly devoured the cheese, the vegetables and the sauce; the fresh food, on the other hand, had no charms for him, he could not even stand the smell of it and actually dragged away to some little distance the things he could eat." The sister turns the key in the lock slowly as a warning that he should retreat, and she comes and cleans up while Gregor, full of food, tries to hide under the couch.

Scene IV: Grete, the sister, takes on a new importance. It is she who feeds the beetle; she alone enters the beetle's lair, sighing and with an occasional appeal to the saints—it is such a Christian family. In a wonderful passage the cook goes down on her knees to Mrs. Samsa and begs to leave. With tears in her eyes she thanks the Samsas for allowing her to go—as if she were a liberated slave—and without any prompting she swears a solemn oath that she will never say a single word to anyone about what is happening in the Samsa household. “Gregor was fed, once in the early morning while his parents and the servant girl were still asleep, and a second time after they had all had their midday dinner, for then his parents took a short nap and the servant girl could be sent out on some errand or other by his sister. Not that they would have wanted him to starve, of course, but perhaps they could not have borne to know more about his feeding than from hearsay, perhaps too his sister wanted to spare them such little anxieties wherever possible, since they had quite enough to bear as it was."

Scene V: This is a very distressing scene. It transpires that in his human past Gregor has been deceived by his family. Gregor had taken that dreadful job with that nightmare firm because he wished to help his father who five years ago had gone bankrupt. "They had simply got used to it, both the family and Gregor; the money was gratefully accepted and gladly given, but there was no special uprush of warm feeling. With his sister alone had he remained intimate, and it was a secret plan of his that she, who loved music, unlike himself, and could play movingly on the violin, should be sent next year to study at the School of Music, despite the great expense that would entail, which must be made up in some other way. During his brief visits home the School of Music was often mentioned in the talks he had with his sister, but always merely as a beautiful dream which could never come true, and his parents discouraged even these innocent references to it; yet Gregor had made up his mind firmly about it and meant to announce the fact with due solemnity on Christmas Day." Gregor now overhears his father explaining "that a certain amount of investments, a very small amount it was true, had survived the wreck of their fortunes and had even increased a little because the dividends had not been touched meanwhile. And besides that, the money Gregor brought home every month—he had kept only a few dollars for himself—had never been quite used up and now amounted to a small capital sum. Behind the door Gregor nodded his head eagerly, rejoiced at his evidence of unexpected thrift and foresight. True, he could really have paid off some more of his father's debts to the boss with this extra money, and so brought much nearer the day on which he could quit his job, but doubtless it was better the way his father had arranged it." The family believes this sum should be kept untouched for a rainy day, but in the meantime how are the living expenses to be met? The father has not worked for five years and could not be expected to do much. And Gregor's mother's asthma would keep her from working. ''And was his sister to earn her bread, she who was still a child of seventeen and whose life hitherto had been so pleasant, consisting as it did in dressing herself nicely, sleeping long, helping in the housekeeping, going out to a few modest entertainments and above all playing the violin? At first whenever the need for earning money was mentioned Gregor let go his hold on the door and threw himself down on the cool leather sofa beside it, he felt so hot with shame and grief."

Scene VI: A new relationship begins between brother and sister, this time having to do with a window instead of a door. Gregor "nerved himself to the great effort of pushing an armchair to the window, then crawled up over the window sill and, braced against the chair, leaned against the windowpanes, obviously in some recollection of the sense of freedom that looking out of a window always used to give him." Gregor, or Kafka, seems to think that Gregor's urge to approach the window was a recollection of human experience. Actually, it is a typical insect reaction to light: one finds all sorts of dusty bugs near windowpanes, a moth on its back, a lame daddy longlegs, poor insects cobwebbed in a corner, a buzzing fly still trying to conquer the glass pane. Gregor's human sight is growing dimmer so that he cannot see clearly even across the street. The human detail is dominated by the insect general idea. (But let us not ourselves be insects. Let us first of all study every detail in this story; the general idea will come of itself later when we have all the data we need.) His sister does not understand that Gregor has retained a human heart, human sensitivity, a human sense of decorum, of shame, of humility and pathetic pride. She disturbs him horribly by the noise and haste with which she opens the window to breathe some fresh air, and she does not bother to conceal her disgust at the awful smell in his den. Neither does she conceal her feelings when she actually sees him. One day, about a month after Gregor's metamorphosis, "when there was surely no reason for her to be still startled at his appearance, she came a little earlier than usual and found him gazing out of the window, quite motionless, and thus well placed to look like a bogey. . . She jumped back as if in alarm and banged the door shut; a stranger might well have thought that he had been lying in wait for her there meaning to bite her. Of course he hid himself under the couch at once, but he had to wait until midday before she came again, and she seemed more ill at ease than usual." These things hurt, and nobody understood how they hurt. In an exquisite display of feeling, in order to spare her the repulsive sight of him, Gregor one day "carried a sheet on his back to the couch—it cost him four hours' labor—and arranged it there in such a way as to hide him completely, so that even if she were to bend down she could not see him. . . Gregor even fancied that he caught a thankful glance from her eye when he lifted the sheet carefully a very little with his head to see how she was taking the new arrangement."

It should be noted how kind, how good our poor little monster is. His beetlehood, while distorting and degrading his body, seems to bring out in him all his human sweetness. His utter unselfishness, his constant preoccupation with the needs of others—this, against the backdrop of his hideous plight comes out in strong relief. Kafka's art consists in accumulating on the one hand, Gregor's insect features, all the sad detail of his insect disguise, and on the other hand, in keeping vivid and limpid before the reader's eyes Gregor's sweet and subtle human nature.

Scene VII: Here occurs the furniture-moving scene. Two months have passed. Up to now only his sister has been visiting him; but, Gregor says to himself, my sister is only a child; she has taken on herself the job of caring for me merely out of childish thoughtlessness. My mother should understand the situation better. So here in the seventh scene the mother, asthmatic, feeble, and muddleheaded, will enter his room for the first time. Kafka prepares the scene carefully. For recreation Gregor had formed the habit of walking on the walls and ceiling. He is at the height of the meagre bliss his beetlehood can produce. "His sister at once remarked the new distraction Gregor had found for himself—he left traces behind him of the sticky stuff on his soles wherever he crawled—and she got the idea in her head of giving him as wide a field as possible to crawl in and of removing the pieces of furniture that hindered him, above all the chest of drawers and the writing desk." Thus the mother is brought in to help move the furniture. She comes to his door with exclamations of joyful eagerness to see her son, an incongruous and automatic reaction that is replaced by a certain hush when she enters the mysterious chamber. “Gregor’s sister, of course, went in first, to see that everything was in order before letting his mother enter. In great haste Gregor pulled the sheet lower and rucked it more in folds so that it really looked as if it had been thrown accidentally over the couch. And this time he did not peer out from under it; he renounced the pleasure of seeing his mother on this occasion and was only glad that she had come at all. “Come in, he's out of sight," said his sister, obviously leading her mother in by the hand.

The women struggle to move the heavy furniture until his mother voices a certain human thought, naive but kind, feeble but not devoid of feeling, when she says: 'Doesn't it look as if we were showing him, by taking away his furniture, that we have given up hope of his ever getting better and are just leaving him coldly to himself? I think it would be best to keep his room exactly as it has always been, so that when he comes back to us he will find everything unchanged and be able all the more easily to forget what has happened in between." Gregor is torn between two emotions. His beetlehood suggests that an empty room with bare walls would be more convenient for crawling about—all he needed would be some chink to hide in, his indispensable couch—but otherwise he would not need all those human conveniences and adornments. But his mother's voice reminds him of his human background. Unfortunately, his sister has developed a queer self-assurance and has grown accustomed to consider herself an expert in Gregor s affairs as against her parents. "Another factor might have been also the enthusiastic temperament of an adolescent girl, which seeks to indulge itself on every opportunity and which now tempted Grete to exaggerate the horror of her brother's circumstances in order that she might do all the more for him.” This is a curious note: the domineering sister, the strong sister of the fairy tales, the handsome busybody lording it over the fool of the family, the proud sisters of Cinderella, the cruel emblem of health, youth, and blossoming beauty in the house of disaster and dust. So they decide to move the things out after all but have a real struggle with the chest of drawers. Gregor is in an awful state of panic. He kept his fretsaw in that chest, with which he used to make things when he was free at home, his sole hobby.

Scene VIII: Gregor tries to save at least the picture in the frame he had made with his cherished fretsaw. Kafka varies his effects in that every time the beetle is seen by his family he is shown in a new position, some new spot. Here Gregor rushes from his hiding place, unseen by the two women now struggling with his writing desk, and climbs the wall to press himself over the picture, his hot, dry belly against the soothing cool glass. The mother is not much help in this furniture-moving business and has to be supported by Grete. Grete always remains strong and hale whereas not only her brother but both parents are going to be soon (after the apple-pitching scene) on the brink of sinking into some dull dream, into a state of torpid and decrepit oblivion; but Grete with the hard health of her ruddy adolescence keeps propping them up.

Scene IX: Despite Grete's efforts, the mother catches sight of Gregor, a "huge brown mass on the flowered wallpaper, and before she was really conscious that what she saw was Gregor screamed in a loud, hoarse voice: 'Oh God, oh God!', fell with outspread arms over the couch as if giving up and did not move. 'Gregor!' cried his sister, shaking her fist and glaring at him. This was the first time she had directly addressed him since his metamorphosis.'' She runs into the living room for something to rouse her mother from the fainting fit. Gregor wanted to help too—there was still time to rescue the picture—but he was stuck fast to the glass and had to tear himself loose; he then ran after his sister into the next room as if he could advise her, as he used to do; but then had to stand helplessly behind her; she meanwhile searched among various small bottles and when she turned round started in alarm at the sight of him; one bottle fell on the floor and broke; a splinter of glass cut Gregor's face and some kind of corrosive medicine splashed him; without pausing a moment longer Grete gathered up all the bottles she could carry and ran to her mother with them; she banged the door shut with her foot. Gregor was now cut off from his mother, who was perhaps nearly dying because of him; he dared not open the door for fear of frightening away his sister, who had to stay with her mother; there was nothing he could do but wait; and harassed by self-reproach and worry he began now to crawl to and fro, over everything, walls, furniture and ceiling, and finally in his despair, when the whole room seemed to be reeling around him, fell down on to the middle of the big table.” There is a change in the respective position of the various members of the family. Mother (on the couch) and sister are in the middle room; Gregor is in the corner in the left room. And presently his father comes home and enters the living room. "And so Gregor fled to the door of his own room and crouched against it, to let his father see as soon as he came in from the hall that his son had the good intention of getting back into his own room immediately and that it was not necessary to drive him there, but that if only the door were opened he would disappear at once."

Scene X: The apple-pelting scene comes now. Gregor's father has changed and is now at the summit of his power. Instead of the man who used to lie wearily sunk in bed and could scarcely wave an arm in greeting and when he went out shuffled along laboriously with a crook-handled stick, “Now he was standing there in fine shape; dressed in a smart blue uniform with gold buttons, such as bank messengers wear; his strong double chin bulged over the stiff high collar of his jacket; from under his bushy eyebrows his black eyes darted fresh and penetrating glances; his onetime tangled white hair had been combed flat on either side of a shining and carefully exact parting. He pitched his cap, which bore a gold monogram, probably the badge of some bank, in a wide sweep across the whole room on to a sofa and with the tail-ends of his jacket thrown back, his hands in his trouser pockets, advanced with a grim visage towards Gregor. Likely enough he did not himself know what he meant to do; at any rate he lifted his feet uncommonly high and Gregor was dumbfounded at the enormous size of his shoe soles."

As usual, Gregor is tremendously interested in the movement of human legs, big thick human feet, so different from his own flimmering appendages. We have a repetition of the slow motion theme (The chief clerk, backing and shuffling, had retreated in slow motion.) Now father and son slowly circle the room: indeed, the whole operation hardly looked like pursuit it was carried out so slowly. And then his father starts to bombard Gregor with the only missiles that the living-dining room could provide—apples, small red apples—and Gregor is driven back into the middle room, back to the heart of his beetlehood. "An apple thrown without much force grazed Gregor's back and glanced off harmlessly. But another following immediately landed right on his back and sank in; Gregor wanted to drag himself forward, as if this startling, incredible pain could be left behind him; but he felt as if nailed to the spot and flattened himself out in a complete derangement of all his senses. With his last conscious look he saw the door of his room being torn open and his mother rushing out ahead of his screaming sister, in her underbodice, for her daughter had loosened her clothing to ler her breathe more freely and recover from her swoon; he saw his mother rushing towards his father, leaving one after another behind her on the floor her loosened petticoats, stumbling over her petticoats straight to his father and embracing him, in complete union with him—but here Gregor's sight began to fail—with her hands clasped round his father's neck as she begged for her son’s life."

This is the end of part two. Let us sum up the situation. The sister has become frankly antagonistic to her brother. She may have loved him once, but now she regards him with disgust and anger. In Mrs. Samsa asthma and emotion struggle. She is a rather mechanical mother, with some mechanical mother love for her son, but we shall soon see that she, too, is ready to give him up. The father, as already remarked, has reached a certain summit of impressive strength and brutality. From the very first he had been eager to hurt physically his helpless son, and now the apple he has thrown has become embedded in poor Gregor's beetle flesh.

PART THREE

Scene I: ”The serious injury done to Gregor, which disabled him for more than a month—the apple went on sticking in his body as a visible reminder, since no one ventured to remove it—seemed to have made even his father recollect that Gregor was a member of the family, despite his present unfortunate and repulsive shape, and ought not to be treated as an enemy, that, on the contrary, family duty required the suppression of disgust and the exercise of patience, nothing but patience." The door theme is taken up again since now, in the evening, the door leading from Gregor's darkened room to the lighted living room is left open. This is a subtle situation. In the previous scene father and mother had reached their highest point of energy, he in his resplendent uniform pitching those little red bombs, emblems of fruitfulness and manliness; and she, the mother, actually moving furniture despite her frail breathing tubes. But after that peak there is a fall, a weakening. It would almost seem that the father himself is on the point of disintegrating and becoming a feeble beetle. Through the opened door a curious current seems to pass. Gregor's beetle illness is catching, his father seems to have caught it, the weakness, the drabness, the dirt. “Soon after supper his father would fall asleep in his armchair; his mother and sister would admonish each other to be silent; his mother, bending low over the lamp, stitched at fine sewing for an underwear firm; his sister. who had taken a job as a salesgirl, was learning shorthand and French in the evenings on the chance of bettering herself. Sometimes his father woke up, and as if quite unaware that he had been sleeping said to the mother: 'What a lot of sewing you're doing today!' and at once fell asleep again, while the women exchanged a tired smile.

“With a kind of mulishness his father persisted in keeping his uniform on even in the house; his dressing gown hung, uselessly on its peg and he slept fully dressed where he sat, as if he were ready for service at any moment and even here only at the beck and call of his superior. As a result, his uniform, which was not brand new to start with, began to look dirty, despite all the loving care of the mother and sister to keep it clean, and Gregor often spent whole evenings gazing at the many greasy spots on the garment, gleaming with gold buttons always in a high state of polish, in which the old man sat sleeping in extreme discomfort and yet quite peacefully." The father always refused to go to bed when the time had arrived, despite every inducement offered by the mother and sister, until finally the two women would hoist him up by his armpits from the chair, "And leaning on the two of them he would heave himself up, with difficulty, as if he were a great burden to himself, suffer them to lead him as far as the door and then wave them off and go on alone, while the mother abandoned her needlework and the sister her pen in order to run after him and help him farther." The father's uniform comes close to resembling that of a big but somewhat tarnished scarab. His tired overworked family must get him from one room to another and to bed.

Scene II: The disintegration of the Samsa family continues. They dismiss the servant girl and engage a still cheaper charwoman, a gigantic bony creature who comes in to do the rough work. You must remember that in Prague, 1912, it was much more difficult to clean and cook than in Ithaca, 1954. They have to sell various family ornaments. "But what they lamented most was the fact that they could not leave the flat which was much too big for their present circumstances because they could not think of any way to shift Gregor. Yet Gregor saw well enough that consideration for him was not the main difficulty preventing the removal, for they could have easily shifted him in some suitable box with a few air holes in it; what really kept them from moving into another flat was rather their own complete hopelessness and the belief that they had been singled out for a misfortune such as had never happened to any of their relations or acquaintances.'' The family is completely egotistic and has no more strength left after fulfilling its daily obligations.

Scene III: A last flash of human recollections comes to Gregor’s mind, prompted by the still living urge in him to help his family. He even remembers vague sweethearts, "but instead of helping him and his family they were one and all unapproachable and he was glad when they vanished." This scene is mainly devoted to Grete, who is now clearly the villain of the piece. "His sister no longer took thought to bring him what might especially please him, but in the morning and at noon before she went to business hurriedly pushed into his room with her foot any food that was available, and in the evening cleared it out again with one sweep of the broom, heedless of whether it had been merely tasted, or—as most frequently happened—left untouched. The cleaning of his room, which she now did always in the evenings, could not have been more hastily done. Streaks of dirt stretched along the walls, here and there lay balls of dust and filth. At first Gregor used to station himself in some particularly filthy corner when his sister arrived in order to reproach her with it, so to speak. But he could have sat there for weeks without getting her to make any improvement; she could see the dirt as well as he did, but she had simply made up her mind to leave it alone. And yet, with a touchiness that was new to her, which seemed anyhow to have infected the whole family, she jealously guarded her claim to be the sole caretaker of Gregor's room." Once when his mother had given the room a thorough cleaning with several buckets of water—the dampness upset Gregor—a grotesque family row ensues. The sister bursts into a storm of weeping while her parents look on in helpless amazement; "then they too began to go into action; the father reproached the mother on his right for not having left the cleaning of Gregor's room to his sister; shrieked at the sister on his left that never again was she to be allowed to clean Gregor's room; while the mother tried to pull the father into his bedroom, since he was beyond himself with agitation; the sister, shaken with sobs, then beat upon the table with her small fists; and Gregor hissed loudly with rage because not one of them thought of shutting the door to spare him such a spectacle and so much noise.”

Scene IV: A curious relationship is established between Gregor and the bony charwoman who is rather amused by him, not frightened at all, and in fact she rather likes him. "Come along, then, you old dung beetle," she says. And it is raining outside, the first sign of spring perhaps.

Scene V: The lodgers arrive, the three bearded boarders, with a passion for order. These are mechanical beings; their beards are masks of respectability but actually they are shoddy scoundrels, these serious-looking gentlemen. In this scene a great change comes over the apartment. The boarders take the parents' bedroom on the far left of the flat, beyond the living room. The parents move across to the sister's room on the right of Gregor's room, and Grete has to sleep in the living room but has now no room of her own since the lodgers take their meals in the living room and spend their evenings there. Moreover, the three bearded boarders have brought into this furnished flat some furniture of their own. They have a fiendish love for superficial tidiness, and all the odds and ends which they do not need go into Gregor's room. This is exactly the opposite to what had been happening in the furniture scene of part two, scene 7, where there had been an attempt to move everything out of Gregor's room. Then we had the ebb of the furniture, now the return flow, the jetsam washed back, all kinds of junk pouring in; and curiously enough Gregor, though a very sick beetle—the apple wound is festering, and he is starving—finds some beetle pleasure in crawling among all that dusty rubbish. In this fifth scene of part three where all the changes come, the alteration in the family meals is depicted. The mechanical movement of the bearded automatons is matched by the automatic reaction of the Samsas. The lodgers "set themselves at the top end of the table where formerly Gregor and his father and mother had eaten their meals, unfolded their napkins and took knife and fork in hand. At once his mother appeared in the other doorway with a dish of meat and close behind her his sister with a dish of potatoes piled high. The food steamed with a thick vapor. The lodgers bent over the food set before them as if to scrutinize it before eating, in fact the man in the middle, who seemed to pass for an authority with the other two, cut a piece of meat as it lay on the dish, obviously to discover if it were tender or should be sent back to the kitchen. He showed satisfaction, and Gregor's mother and sister, who had been watching anxiously, breathed freely and began to smile." Gregor’s keen envious interest in large feet will be recalled; now toothless Gregor is also interested in teeth. "It seemed remarkable to Gregor that among the various noises coming from the table he could always distinguish the sound of their masticating teeth, as if this were a sign to Gregor that one needed teeth in order to eat, and that with toothless jaws even of the finest make one could do nothing. 'I'm hungry enough,' said Gregor sadly to himself, 'but not for that kind of food. How these lodgers are stuffing themselves, and here am I dying of starvation!' "

Scene VI: In this great music scene the lodgers have heard Grete playing the violin in the kitchen, and in automatic reaction to the entertainment value of music they suggest that she play for them. The three roomers and the three Samsas gather in the living room.

Without wishing to antagonize lovers of music, I do wish to point out that taken in a general sense music, as perceived by its consumers, belongs to a more primitive, more animal form in the scale of arts than literature or painting. I am taking music as a whole, not in terms of individual creation, imagination, and composition, all of which of course rival the art of literature and painting, but in terms of the impact music has on the average listener. A great composer, a great writer, a great painter are brothers. But I think that the impact music in a generalized and primitive form has on the listener is of a more lowly quality than the impact of an average book or an average picture. What I especially have in mind is the soothing, lulling, dulling influence of music on some people such as of the radio or records.

In Kafka's tale it is merely a girl pitifully scraping on a fiddle and this corresponds in the piece to the canned music or plugged-in music of today. What Kafka felt about music in general is what I have just described: its stupefying, numbing, animallike quality. This attitude must be kept in mind in interpreting an important sentence that has been misunderstood by some translators. Literally, it reads “Was Gregor an animal to be so affected by music?” That is, in his human form he had cared little for it but in this scene, in his beetlehood, he succumbs: “He felt as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved.” The scene goes as follows. Gregor’s sister begins to play for the lodgers. Gregor is attracted by the playing and actually puts his head into the living room. “He felt hardly any surprise at his growing lack of consideration for the others; there had been a time when he prided himself on being considerate. And yet just on this occasion he had more reason than ever to hide himself since owing to the amount of dust which lay thick in his room and rose into the air at the slightest movement he too was covered with dust; fluff and hair and remnants of food trailed with him, caught on his back and along his sides; his indifference to everything was much too great for him to turn on his back and scrape himself clean on the carpet as once he had done several times a day. And in sprite of his condition no shame deterred him from advancing a little over the spotless floor of the living room.”

At first no one was aware of him. The lodgers, disappointed in their expectation of hearing good violin playing, were clustered near the window whispering among themselves and waiting for the music to stop. And yet, to Gregor his sister was playing beautifully. He “crawled a little farther forward and lowered his head to the ground so that it might be possible for his eyes to meet hers. Was he an animal that music had such an effect upon him? He felt as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved. He was determined to push forward till he reached his sister, to pull at her skirt and so let her know that she was to come into his room with her violin for no one here appreciated her playing as he would appreciate it. He would never let her out of his room, at least not so long as he lived; his frightful appearance would become for the first time useful to him; he would watch all the doors of his room at once and spit at intruders; but his sister should need no constraint, she should stay with him of her own free will; she should sit beside him on the couch, bend down her ear to him and hear him confide that he had had the firm intention of sending her to the School of Music, and that, but for his mishap, last Christmas—surely Christmas was long past?—he would have announced it to everybody without allowing a single objection. After this confession his sister would be so touched that she would burst into tears, and Gregor would then raise himself to her shoulder and kiss her on the neck, which, now that she went to business, she kept free of any ribbon or collar."

Suddenly the middle lodger sees Gregor, but instead of driving Gregor out the father tries to soothe the lodgers and (in a reversal of his actions) "spreading out his arms, tried to urge them back into their own room and at the same time to block their view of Gregor. They now began to be really a little angry, one could not tell whether because of the old man's behavior or because it had just dawned on them that all unwittingly they had such a neighbor as Gregor next door. They demanded explanations of his father, they waved their arms like him, tugged uneasily at their beards and only with reluctance backed towards their room." The sister rushes into the lodgers' room and quickly makes up their beds, but "The old man seemed once more to be so possessed by his mulish self-assertiveness that he was forgetting all the respect he should show to his lodgers. He kept driving them on and driving them on until in the very door of the bedroom the middle lodger stamped his foot loudly on the floor and so brought him to a halt. 'I beg to announce,' said the lodger, lifting one hand and looking also at Gregor's mother and sister, ‘that because of the disgusting conditions prevailing in this household and family'—here he spat on the floor with emphatic brevity—'I give you notice on the spot. Naturally I won't pay you a penny for the days I have lived here; on the contrary I shall consider bringing an action for damages against you based on claims—believe me—that will be easily susceptible of proof.' He ceased and stared straight in front of him, as if he expected something. In fact his two friends at once rushed into the breach with these words: 'And we too give notice on the spot.’ On that he seized the door-handle and shut the door with a slam."

Scene VII: The sister is completely unmasked; her betrayal is absolute and fatal to Gregor. " 'I won't utter my brother's name in the presence of this creature, and so all I say is: we must try to get rid of it....

" 'We must try to get rid of it,' his sister now said explicitly to her father, since her mother was coughing too much to hear a word. 'It will be the death of both of you, I can see that coming. When one has to work as hard as we do, all of us, one can't stand this continual torment at home on top of it. At least I can't stand it any longer.' And she burst into such a passion of sobbing that her tears dropped on her mother's face, where she wiped them off mechanically." Both the father and sister agree that Gregor cannot understand them and hence no agreement with him is possible.

" 'He must go,' cried Gregor's sister, 'that's the only solution, Father. You must just try to get rid of the idea that this is Gregor. The fact that we've believed it for so long is the root of all our trouble. But how can it be Gregor? If this were Gregor, he would have realized long ago that human beings can't live with such a creature and he'd have gone away on his own accord. Then we wouldn't have any brother, but we’d be able to go on living and keep his memory in honor. As it is, this creature persecutes us, drives away our lodgers, obviously wants the whole apartment to himself and would have us all sleep in the gutter.' "

That he has disappeared as a human brother and should now disappear as a beetle deals Gregor the last blow. Painfully, because he is so weak and maimed, he crawls back to his own room. At the doorway he turns and his last glance falls on his mother, who was, in fact, almost asleep. "Hardly was he well inside his room when the door was hastily pushed shut, bolted and locked. The sudden noise in his rear startled him so much that his little legs gave beneath him. It was his sister who had shown such haste. She had been standing ready waiting and had made a light spring forward. Gregor had not even heard her coming, and she cried 'At last!' to her parents as she turned the key in the lock." In his darkened room Gregor discovers that he cannot move and though he is in pain it seems to be passing away. ''The rotting apple in his back and the inflamed area around it, all covered with soft dust, already hardly troubled him. He thought of his family with tenderness and love. The decision that he must disappear was one that he held to even more strongly than his sister, if that were possible. In this state of vacant and peaceful meditation he remained until the tower clock struck three in the morning. The first broadening of light in the world outside the window entered his consciousness once more. Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath."

Scene VIII: Gregor's dead, dry body is discovered the next morning by the charwoman and a great warm sense of relief permeates the insect world of his despicable family. Here is a point to be observed with care and love. Gregor is a human being in an insect's disguise; his family are insects disguised as people. With Gregor's death their insect souls are suddenly aware that they are free to enjoy themselves. " 'Come in beside us, Grete, for a little while,' said Mrs. Samsa* with a tremulous smile, and Grete, not without looking back at the corpse, followed her parents into their bedroom.'' The charwoman opens the window wide and the air has a certain warmth: it is the end of March when insects come out of hibernation.

* In a note in his annotated copy Nabokov observes that after Gregor’s death it is never “father” and “mother” but only Mr. and Mrs. Samsa.

Scene IX: We get a wonderful glimpse of the lodgers as they sullenly ask for their breakfast but instead are shown Gregor's corpse. "So they entered and stood around it, with their hands in the pockets of their shabby coats, in the middle of the room already bright with sunlight." What is the key word here? Shabby in the sun. As in a fairy tale, in the happy end of a fairy tale, the evil charm is dissipated with the magician's death. The lodgers are seen to be seedy, they are no longer dangerous, whereas on the other hand the Samsa family ascends again, gains in power and lush vitality. The scene ends with a repetition of the staircase theme, just as the chief clerk had retreated in slow motion, clasping the banisters. At the orders of Mr. Samsa that they must leave the lodgers are quelled. "In the hall they all three took their hats from the rack, their sticks from the umbrella stand, bowed in silence and quitted the apartment." Down they go now, three bearded borders, automatons, clockwork puppets, while the Samsa family leans over the banisters to watch them descend. The staircase as it winds down through the apartment house imitates, as it were, an insect's jointed legs; and the lodgers now disappear, now come to view again, as they descend lower and lower, from landing to landing, from articulation to articulation. At one point they are met by an ascending butcher boy with his basket who is first seen rising towards them, then above them, in proud deportment with his basket full of red steaks and luscious innards—red raw meat, the breeding place of fat shiny flies.

Scene X: The last scene is superb in its ironic simplicity. The spring sunshine is with the Samsa family as they write their three letters—articulation, jointed legs, happy legs, three insects writing three letters of excuse to their employers. "They decided to spend this day in resting and going for a stroll; they had not only deserved such a respite from work, but absolutely needed it." As the charwoman leaves after her morning's work, she giggles amiably as she informs the family: " 'you don't need to bother about how to get rid of the thing next door. It's been seen to already.' Mrs. Samsa and Grete bent over their letters again, as if preoccupied; Mr. Samsa, who perceived that she was eager to begin describing it all in detail, stopped her with a decisive hand. . .

" 'She'll be given notice tonight,' said Mr. Samsa, but neither from his wife nor his daughter did he get any answer, for the charwoman seemed to have shattered again the composure they had barely achieved. They rose, went to the window and stayed there, clasping each other tight. Mr. Samsa turned in his chair to look at them and quietly observed them for a little. Then he called out: 'Come along, now, do. Let bygones be bygones. And you might have some consideration for me.' The two of them complied at once, hastened to him, caressed him and quickly finished their letters.

''Then they all three left the apartment together, which was more than they had done for months, and went by trolley into the open country outside the town. The trolley, in which they were the only passengers, was filled with warm sunshine. Leaning comfortably back in their seats they canvassed their prospects for the future, and it appeared on closer inspection that these were not at all bad, for the jobs they had got, which so far they had never really discussed with each other, were all three admirable and likely to lead to better things later on. The greatest immediate improvement in their condition would of course arise from moving to another house; they wanted to take a smaller and cheaper but also better situated and more easily run apartment than the one they had, which Gregor had selected. While they were thus conversing, it struck both Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, almost at the same moment, as they became aware of their daughter's increasing vivacity, that in spite of all the sorrow of recent times, which had made her cheeks pale, she had bloomed into a buxom girl. They grew quieter and half unconsciously exchanged glances of complete agreement, having come to the conclusion that it would soon be time to find a good husband for her. And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body."*

* “The soul has died with Gregor; the healthy young animal takes over. The parasites have fattened themselves on Gregor.” Nabokov’s note in his annotated copy.

Let me sum up various of the main themes of the story.

1. The number three plays a considerable role in the story. The story is divided into three parts. There are three doors to Gregor’s room. His family consists of three people. Three servants appear in the course of the story. Three lodgers have three beards. Three Samsas write three letters. I am very careful not to overwork the significance of symbols, for once you detach a symbol from the artistic core of the book, you lose all sense of enjoyment. The reason is that there are artistic symbols and there are trite, artificial. or even imbecile symbols. You will find a number of such inept symbols in the psychoanalytic and mythological approach to Kafka's work, in the fashionable mixture of sex and myth that is so appealing to mediocre minds. In other words, symbols may be original and symbols may be stupid and trite. And the abstract symbolic value of an artistic achievement should never prevail over its beautiful burning life.

So, the only emblematic or heraldic rather than symbolic meaning is the stress which is laid upon three in "The Metamorphosis." It has really a technical meaning. The trinity, the triplet, the triad, the triptych are obvious art forms such as, say, three pictures of youth, ripe years, and old age, or any other threefold triplex subject. Triptych means a picture or carving in three compartments side by side, and this is exactly the effect that Kafka achieves, for instance, with his three rooms in the beginning of the story—living room, Gregor's bedroom, and sister's room, with Gregor in the central one. Moreover, a threefold pattern suggests the three acts of a play. And finally it must be observed that Kafka's fantasy is emphatically logical; what can be more characteristic of logic than the triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. We shall, thus, limit the Kafka symbol of three to its aesthetic and logical significance and completely disregard whatever myths the sexual mythologists read into it under the direction of the Viennese witch doctor.

2. Another thematic line is the theme of the doors, of the opening and closing of doors that runs through the whole story.

3. A third thematic line concerns the ups and downs in the well-being of the Samsa family, the subtle state of balance between their flourishing condition and Gregor's desperate and pathetic condition.

There are a few other subthemes but the above are the only ones essential for an understanding of the story.

You will mark Kafka's style. Its clarity, its precise and formal intonation in such striking contrast to the nightmare matter of his tale. No poetical metaphors ornament his stark black-and-white story. The limpidity of his style stresses the dark richness of his fantasy. Contrast and unity, style and matter, manner and plot are most perfectly integrated.

patience

2007-01-10T09:01:00.000-08:00

SUZANNE STEIN:
I don't know that I've learned how to manage my time, I feel I waste it inordinately all day & all night long, I can never get enough done no matter how much I do or try to do. I will say that there have been very few decisions I've made about my life that haven’t been with some eye towards how I could continue to begin to investigate language & eventually poetry, particularly in its most expansive [architectural] forms, or thinking, and try to come to some understanding of what it is possible to have happen inside of it, that can willfully effect or affect my own body and therefore or possibly additionally the bodies and environments around me. I can’t really separate the work that is the writing of texts from the work of being a poet or person or agent in the world. There is the part of me that goes to a job every day that is not about writing with the hand and the pen [keyboard], and I lament that but I also take it into account as an opportunity--when I can remember to--to make a wilful prosodic act by my manner of being present there. I guess what I am addressing here is how I engage at every moment what you are calling the creative core, even in those places where it doesn’t look possible to do that.

In 1998 I left the gallery I'd been running with a friend for four years because I recognized it was keeping me from being fully attentive to this other [writing] work I wanted to do. I went to graduate school and I was at that time semi-employed at a law firm where I had no work to do and an office with a door that closed, and I kept that job for almost 7 years. I finished my graduate thesis there, then they laid me off and I had about eight months of being unemployed, where I walked around Lake Merritt every day and read a lot of books [I think] and started a press, and became as busy as if I had two full-time jobs, one which was reading and writing and the other about being even more fully engaged with the community of writers here. Then I had to go get an actual full time job on top that.

I would say that these efforts have landed me at 38 somewhat outside of what I myself feel is appropriate or at least conventionally socially acceptable for a person my age: I live alone, I'm poor, I'm in debt and I have a pretty grueling low-level administrative job [albeit in a wonderful place]. All my efforts have also put me very productively & giddily inside a conversation and a community and a body of work [mine and the works of those around me] that I feel have possibility for what you call "changing the world" if by nothing else, their, our, insistent continuance. I do think that making life-decisions in the service of art, even if one fails, is itself a life-affirming act that demonstratively feels up other bodies, and hopefully excites them to take their own matters into their own hands.

To specifically answer your question about time and creative process: right now, since I have the full-time job: weekdays & weekday nights are for the day job & for dispensing with tasks like laundry bills correspondence business of poetry tasks and anything to do with the press. Also reading, thinking, notetaking, walking, yoga, a social life [you see already that it is impossible]. Also I try every day while at work to put a little of my writing life into it [more about that below]. On Saturdays I am working on one book, and on Sundays I am working on another book. [Except maybe they're one book; I keep changing my mind.] So far this plan is sort of working. But also I need long periods of unstructured time in order to work/think/write well and this is something I'm trying right now to negotiate, as I have very little time thus. I have to take a long-range view of my work and be patient, not my foremost quality, patience.