Page [unnumbered]BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD TARGETGraduate LibraryUniversity of MichiganPreservation OfficeStorage Number:010:: a 67000232 ACT2080022/1:0: a 0026-2420035/1:: a (RLIN)MIUG0690-S035/2:: a (CaOTULAS)175715235040:: c MUL Id CtY d DLC id NSDP d MiU042:: I a Ic a nsdp050/1:0: a AS30 I b.M48082/1:: a051222/1:00: | a Michigan quarterly review245:00: | a Michigan quarterly review.260:: | a Ann Arbor, I b University of Michigan.300/1:: a v. I bill. Ic26cm.362/1:0: I a v.1- Jan. 1962 -500/1:: | a Vol. 1, no. 2- issued as the University of Michigan officialpublication, v. 63, no. 74 -580/2:: | a Electronic serial mode of access: World Wide Web via ProQuestResearch Library.690/1: 4: | a General Interest and Popular Journals and Newspapers710/1:2: | a University of Michigan.730/2:0: a ProQuest research library.740/3:0: a Michigan quarterly review (Online)Scanned by Imagenes DigitalesNogales, AZOn behalf ofPreservation DivisionThe University of Michigan LibrariesDate work Began:Camera Operator:
Page [unnumbered]Michigan Quarterly ReviewVol. XXXI, No. 3Summer 1992_ ___ __MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW is publishedquarterly (January, April, July, and October) by The University of Michigan, AnnArbor, Michigan. Subscription prices,$18.00 a year, $36.00 for two years; Institutional subscriptions obtained throughagencies $20.00 a year; $5.00 a copy; backissues, $2.50. Claims for missing numberscan be honored only within two monthsafter publication.Available on microfilm from Xerox University Microfilms, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., AnnArbor, Michigan 48106, where full-sizedcopies of single articles may also beordered. Reprinted volumes and backvolumes available from AMS Press, Inc.,56 E. 13th St., New York, 10003. Indexedor abstracted in Abstr.E.S., Am.Bib.Cent.,Ann.Bib., Bk.R.Hum, BK.R.Inc.,P.A.I.S.,P.M.L.A., Index of AmericanPeriodical Verse, Index to Periodical Fiction, American Humanities Index.Editorial and business office, 3032 Rackham Bldg., The University of Michigan,Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109. Unsolicitedmanuscripts are returned to authors onlywhen accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes or by internationalpostal orders. No responsibility assumed forloss or injury.Second class postage paid at Ann Arbor,Michigan.Copyright ~ The University of Michigan,1992All Rights ReservedISSN 0026-2420Editor:LAURENCE GOLDSTEINAssociate Editor:E. H. CREETHAdministrative Assistant:DORIS KNIGHTAssistant Editors:LYN COFFINTISH O'DOWD EZEKIELLINDA GREGERSONJOHN KUCICHREI TERADAALAN WALDContributing Editors:PHILIP LEVINEARTHUR MILLERJOYCE CAROL OATESInterns: Angela BommaritoBen DeanRebecca Kreis
Page [unnumbered]EDITORIAL BOARDRuth Behar, ChairJoseph BlotnerEnoch BraterC. R. EisendrathRobert FeketySidney FineSusan GelmanJuan LeonJoanne LeonardDavid L. LewisAndrea PressJoseph ViningCharles WitkePublished with financial support from The Horace H. Rackham Schoolof Graduate StudiesCofnratulationsLucie Brock-Broido Jorie GrahamRobert Hass Evelyn Lauwhose poems in 1991 issues of MQRwill be reprinted in Best American Poetry, 1992edited by Charles SimicandLaurie Sheckwhose poem "Mannequins" from the Fall 1991 issuewill be reprinted in The Pushcart Prize XVIIedited by Bill Henderson
Page [unnumbered]CONTENTSRobert Hayden: Some IntroductoryNotesA Selection of LettersEntrances and Tableaux forJosephine Baker, PoetryIrresolutions on a Theme ofLa Rochefoucauld, PoetryThe Passing of Barbed Wire, PoetryIRagged Dick and the Fate ofRespectability GWorking for Oneself: Labor and Lovein The Silence of the Lambs"Not Everyone Can See the Truth, ButHe Can Be It"; As Our Bodies Rise,Our Names Turn Into Light, PoetryFable of A Kiss; No Fingertips, PoetrySalvation by Mistake, FictionWhat We Write, Why We Write It,and Who CaresWorkshop, PoetryStealing Trees, FictionBOOKSHeat and Cold: Recent Fiction byJoyce Carol OatesFlorence Nightingale: The Inner andthe Outer DramaXavier Nicholas 301Robert Hayden 305Robert Hayden 318John Ashbery 3213ebekah Remington 323\orman Beauchamp 324Adrienne Donald 347Charles WrightTess GallagherEdoardo AlbinatiRichard FordDalia HertzLisa Lenzo361363365373390391Sally Robinson 400Stephanie Kiceluk 415
Page [unnumbered]The American Sublime, c. 1992:What Clothes Does One Wear?Keeping a Distance from the MoviesMutlu Konuk Biasing 425Laurence Goldstein 442Cover: from The Silence of the Lambs
Page [unnumbered]CONTRIBUTORSEDOARDO ALBINATI, born in 1956, received the Premio Mondello for his book of short stories, Arabeschi della vita morale(1988), from which "Salvation by Mistake" is taken. His translator JOHN SATRIANO received the PEN Renato Poggioli Awardfor Italian translation in 1990.JOHN ASHBERY's latest book of poetry, Flow Chart, is reviewed inthis issue. Next season Alfred A. Knopf will publish a new collection, Hotel Lautreamont.GORMAN BEAUCHAMP teaches in the English Department at theUniversity of Michigan. He is the author of a book on Jack London and of articles on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to science fiction.MUTLU KONUK BLASING, Associate Professor of English atBrown University, is the author of American Poetry: The Rhetoricof Its Forms (Yale University Press, 1987).ADRIENNE DONALD teaches in the English Department atPrinceton University. She is currently working on a book onWordsworth and Enlightenment discourses.RICHARD FORD is the author of four novels: A Piece of My Heart,The Ultimate Good Luck, The Sportswriter, and Wildlife. Hisshort stories have been collected in Rock Springs.TESS GALLAGHER has most recently published two books ofpoetry: Moon Crossing Bridge (Graywolf) and Portable Kisses(Capra). Graywolf Press has also reprinted her short story collection, Lover of Horses.LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN, editor of MQR, is the author of twobooks of literary criticism and two books of poetry. He is currently completing a study of the response of American poets to themovies.ROBERT HAYDEN, a major American poet and a former professorof English at the University of Michigan, is profiled in an essay inthis issue.DALIA HERTZ's recent collection of poems, Ir Shirim (City ofPoems), won the Publisher's Award for Poetry in Israel in 1991.She has been a Rockefeller Fellow in Middle Eastern Literature at
Page [unnumbered]the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at theUniversity of Michigan.STEPHANIE KICELUK is Rudin Scholar in the Humanities at theCenter for the Study of Society and Medicine, College of Physicians and Surgeons, at Columbia University. She teaches "Medicine and Western Civilization" at Columbia College and is coediting the course materials for publication.LISA LENZO is an MFA graduate of Western Michigan University.Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review and NewEngland Review.XAVIER NICHOLAS teaches American and African American literature at Bryn Mawr College. He is the editor of the forthcomingSelected Letters of Robert Hayden.REBEKAH REMINGTON recently earned an MFA at the University of Michigan. Her poem in this issue is from her Avery Hopwood Award-winning manuscript.SALLY ROBINSON is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Engendering the Subject:Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction (SUNY Press, 1991).CHARLES WRIGHT's most recent volume is The World of the TenThousand Things. Poems 1980-1990, reviewed in this issue. Heteaches in the English Department at the University of Virginia.
Page [unnumbered]1991-1992FALL American Poetry Since Walt Whitman - essays byWilliam Harmon, Samuel Hazo, Paul Lake, and GeorgeWatson; reviews by James Applewhite, Ashley Brown,Wallace Fowlie, Brendan Galvin, R. S. Gwynn, Donald Hall,Jay Parini, Monroe K. Spears, Donald E. Stanford; poetry byChristopher Brookhouse, Christopher Buckley, Robert Cording, Michael Mott, G. E. Murray, Roy Scheele, Dave Smith,J. P. White * Fiction by David LongWINTER War and Its Aftermath - fiction by Wendell Berry,Robert Olen Butler, Hilary Masters, and Helen Norris; essaysby Catharine Savage Brosman, Leslie Brunetta, GeorgeGarrett, Samuel Hynes, and William Zinsser; reviews byGeorge Core, James M. Cox, Clayton W. Lewis, Louis D.Rubin, Jr., Michael Simpson, Hans Schmitt, and others;poetry by various handsSpring Love and Its Snares - "Elephants and Ostriches," along story by Kent Nelson; fiction by other hands; poetry byNeal Bowers, Paul Grant, X. J. Kennedy, Jayanta Mahapatra,Barry Sparks, George Woodco*ck, and others * Essays byGeorge Bornstein, Edward L. Galligan, and Ben HowardSummer Biography and Its Imperatives- essays by CatharineSavage Brosman, Paxton Davis, Pat C. Hoy II, LeonardKriegel, Reed Whittemore; reviews by J. A. Bryant, Jr.,George Core, Wallace Fowlie, Steven Helmling, James Kilgo,Russell Kirk, David Miller, Michael Mott, Sam Pickering, andGeorge Woodco*ck * PoetryTHE SEWANEE REVIEW735 UNIVERSITY AVENUE $16 per yearSEWANEE, TENNESSEE, 37375-1000 $5.75 per copy
Page [unnumbered]ROBERT HAYDENCourtesy National Baha'i Archives
Xavier NicholasNicholas, XavierRobert Hayden: Some Introductory NotesVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.301-304http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:01
Page 301XAVIER NICHOLASROBERT HAYDEN:SOME INTRODUCTORY NOTESWhen Robert Hayden died on February 25, 1980, at the age of 66,he was just beginning to receive the recognition that had eluded himfor so long. For over four decades Hayden was, as Julius Lester, hisformer student, remarked in his New York Times review of Words inthe Mourning Time, "one of the most underrated and unrecognizedpoets in America." Published in 1970, Words in the MourningTime - a meditation on the violent public events of the sixties - wasa breakthrough for Hayden in the expansion of his themes and themastery of his craft. When Angle of Ascent: New and SelectedPoems was published in 1975, Hayden, who wryly spoke of himself,according to the poet Michael S. Harper, as "the best unknownAmerican poet in the country," was elected Fellow to the Academyof American Poets. Hayden's growing national reputation culminated in his appointment as Poetry Consultant to the Library ofCongress for the 1976-1977 term, making him the first AfricanAmerican poet to hold this position.When Hayden arrived at the University of Michigan in 1969 toundertake his teaching duties as Professor of English, he was bearingthe scars from the verbal attacks he experienced at the First BlackWriters' Conference at Fisk University in 1966. Having worked inobscurity at Fisk University for twenty-two years before coming tothe University of Michigan, Hayden suddenly found himself thecenter of controversy for insisting that he was a poet, not a "blackpoet." While poets of his generation like Gwendolyn Brooks andDudley Randall changed their poetic styles to fit the standards of theBlack Aesthetic, Hayden refused to submit to what he called "blackchauvinism." He was never, therefore, a part of the Black Artsmovement of the sixties, in which poets such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi301
Page 302302 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWJones), Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Larry Neal, EtheridgeKnight, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni achieved great popularity. But neither was he part of the "mainstream" because his poetrywas too "black." The one thing that sustained Hayden during thisperiod was his religion. He joined the Baha'i faith in 1943 and, bythe time of the Fisk conference, he had been a member for morethan twenty years. It is a religion that forbids all forms of nationalism and chauvinism - one of its twelve principles being "the onenessof mankind." Unaware of the principles of the Baha'i faith, theparticipants at the First Black Writers' Conference could only viewHayden's refusal to be called a black poet as an act of racial apostasy. Hayden's critics, then and now, have failed to acknowledge thepowerful influence of the Baha'i faith not only on his poetry but alsoon his poetics.In this regard, Hayden is a true heir of the Harlem Renaissance,and his poetics is deeply influenced by the writings of Alain Locke,who was also a member of the Baha'i faith. In a new edition of TheNew Negro, published in 1968, Hayden stated in the "Preface":The main thrust of The New Negro is clearly integrationist, notseparatist. Dr. Locke and most of his collaborators thought of raceconsciousness and race pride as positive forces making the Negroaware of the true worth of his contributions to American societyand helping him to achieve his rightful place in it. His task wasinterpreted as being twofold. He must be, in Dr. Locke's words, 'acollaborator and participant in American civilization,' and hemust at the same time preserve and implement his own racialtradition.In keeping with the spirit of the "New Negro," Hayden saw himselfas a participant in the American tradition and a preserver of theAfrican American tradition. He found a model in Yeats, whose portrait hung over the desk in his study. What he admired in Yeats washis ability to create out of the folk culture of his people an art thatspoke to all humanity. This was in accordance with Locke's contention that all great art is both particular and universal: "Give usNegro life and experience," he declared, "but with a third dimensionof universalized common-denominator humanity." It is this "thirddimension" that one experiences when reading Hayden's poemswhich have their source in black history - poems such as "FrederickDouglass," "The Ballad of Nat Turner," and "Runagate, Runagate."
Page 303XAVIER NICHOLAS 303His masterpiece in this mode is "Middle Passage," a collage-poemabout the slave trade which Hayden researched while a graduatestudent at the University of Michigan in the years 1941-46.Although Hayden steadfastly resisted the label of "black poet," henevertheless produced some of the finest poems about the blackexperience in American literature. He is now the subject of anexpanding critical literature that began to emerge in the late seventies. Now that Hayden's Collected Poems and Collected Prose havebeen published, the forthcoming Collected Letters will provide yetanother valuable resource for the study of Hayden's life and work.Hayden was not a prolific letter writer, just as he was not a prolificpoet. For Hayden, writing letters was a chore he put off until lateinto the night. His best letters, however, are lively commentaries onthe literary scene, full of personal expressions of friendship and lovefor his correspondents and for his family and friends. The selectionsthat follow highlight Hayden's literary observations, which aresometimes excerpted from longer letters with private material.Hayden's literary opinions are revealed in his Collected Prose butalways in the measured language of the scholar. His tone in thosewritings, often introductions to anthologies, is judicious. His lettersare more likely to put the matter in more vigorous and even vituperative terms, as when he rails against the Beat writers and HenryMiller. He can be elegiac, as when he mourns the deaths of CounteeCullen and Dylan Thomas, and even courtly, as in his letter to AllenTate. Only rarely did Hayden view letter-writing as an opportunityfor self-expression, as a creative extension of his poetry. But in thoserare moments, admirers of Hayden's poetry will see that his command of rhetorical strategies extended to his correspondence, hiseveryday commerce with likeminded spirits.In letters to Michael S. Harper at the end of his life, Hayden madefrequent references to a poem about the black entertainer JosephineBaker that he hoped to include in his volume of poetry, AmericanJournal, published in short form by Harper as a chapbook in 1978and posthumously as a full volume by Horace Liveright in 1982. Themanuscript of Hayden's last poem can be found at the NationalBaha'i Archives in Wilmette, Illinois. He never brought the poem tosatisfactory completion, though the manuscript versions suggest thatthe first two parts of what seems to have been a projected three-partpoem were in final form. In the last letter he wrote before his death,Hayden called Josephine Baker "one of the great loves of my life!"
Page 304304 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWHe had written fine lyric poems about black singers such as "Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday" and "Homage to the Empress ofthe Blues." This poem for the black expatriate singer and dancerwho delighted Paris audiences in the twenties and thirties wouldhave been a worthy companion to those other tributes.For their cooperation in preparing what follows, I am grateful tothe National Baha'i Archives and to the poet's widow, ErmaHayden.
Robert HaydenHayden, RobertA Selection of LettersVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.305-317http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:02
Page 305ROBERT HAYDENA SELECTION OF LETTERSJanuary 15, 1946Dear friend Nathan:The longer I live and the more I ponder the human condition, themore convinced I am of the reality and power of spiritual forces,and specifically, of the spiritual union between people which transcends time and space. Why was it that this morning I picked upCane and re-read your inscription and sat thinking of you - only afew moments before Erma brought in your letter?You'll never know how much your letter meant. For truly I havehad a heavy heart since I learned of Countee Cullen's death. I onlyheard of it Monday morning, upon Wells' giving me a clipping fromthe Times. I didn't want to believe it; I read the article over and overand could hardly keep back the tears. Like you, I kept thinking ofthe promise yet unfulfilled, the potentialities yet unrealized.Because I know how intense the inner struggle to achieve is, howlong it takes to arrive at anything fine and meaningful, I was all themore affected by Countee's passing, for perhaps in his maturity hemight have written with greater wisdom and artistry. As it is, he didleave a few poems that should last.I read about the funeral and shuddered: the ancient customwhereby the tribe ate the corpse of the departed king.* * *305
Page 306306 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWNovember 10, 1953My dear Richard,This has been a sad day for me, since I read in the morning paperthat Dylan Thomas is dead, dead at thirty-nine. His death gives mea feeling of personal loss and I have been able to think of little else.Re-reading his poem 'Do not go Gentle into that Good Night', whichappeared in his last collection, makes me wonder if he didn't havereason to believe he would die soon. Then too I remember that hestated in an interview last year that his poems were the words of aman on his way to the grave. I am really shattered - in a way that Icannot quite explain. It is devastating to know that we shall neverhave another poem by him. There can never be another like him, forhe was in the old mystical sense a Bard, a speaker of mysteries. Noother poet is. The news of his passing merited only a fraction of acolumn on a back page - ironical when you realize that nothing onthe front page will be remembered in, say, a hundred years fromnow and Thomas' poetry will endure as long as the English tongueendures.The Fisk trivia is still the Fisk trivia and not worth discussing. Abright interlude was the concert by the Belgian group of singers andinstrumentalists, Pro Musica Antiqua, presented last Sunday evening. You would have loved it, for the music presented consisted ofsongs and instrumental numbers from the Medieval period and theRenaissance. Recorders, viols, and a lute were played, with a resultant charm which the antique usually has. Some of the vocal numbers were exceedingly complex in structure. I liked best, I think, thedances, which were gay, fresh and spritely the way illustrations inMedieval Books of Hours (or is it Days?) sometimes are.As for my writing- I am picking at it at odd moments, not gettingvery far because school-work takes up most of my time. Indiana U/Press turned my ms. down, with praise, wouldn't you know! Theeditor's letter seemed howlingly funny after I got over the firstdepression of another rejection, because in it he said that there were
Page 307ROBERT HAYDEN 307only fourteen excellent poems! Now I ask you. He wants me to rewrite or throw out some of the poems then re-submit the ms. nextyear. Nothing doing. I don't intend to spend my whole life on onebook. I shall send it to a couple of other publishers and if nothinghappens lay it aside and go on to new work. A poet grows from bookto book, not by re-writing the same book to satisfy the whims ofvarious editors. And I do think that fourteen good poems wouldcarry any volume; I can sometimes find only one or two really firstrate poems in some of the collections I've seen recently.But enough of 'me' and 'mine' and on to 'thee' and 'thine.' Wouldyou like me to send you anything in the way of books or magazines?My account with Zibart is in more or less good standing and I couldeasily send you something. Please let me know.Affectionately,BobJuly 28, 1958Dearest Richard,Yes, I am positively the world's worst! But letters have been beyondme, for again this has been one of those enervating summers full ofpressures and anxieties. Aunt Julia died, and Erma had to make aquick trip to Detroit, and now Aunt Maude is in the hospital, andthis means that we'll be going back to Detroit in a few weeks-aprospect that I scarcely look forward to. Add to this the fact that wehave been running in and out of hospitals to see friends who are ill. Ihave had enough of this kind of thing, believe me.I taught summer school for six weeks, a class in the Humanities,and found the work rather enjoyable, as I had two or three goodstudents in a small class of twelve. But Erma has worked like a horsethis summer, because she has been supervising arts and crafts (alongwith hysterical Ardella Thompson) in the park program and hashardly had a moment to herself or for me. She has made somebeautiful masks, by the way. But I have served notice that this is thelast summer that she will work, money or no money.
Page 308308 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWTo go on with this fascinating account of middle class life andthen have done with it! - we shall probably move into the 'Rempfer'house between now and September. It's being repaired and decorated and, amazingly, the way we want it. Ironical but true, this isthe one bright thing I have to look forward to. It will be a comfortable house for us, will solve lots of problems for me, as we're goingto fix the upstairs room up as my 'studio' where I can really workundisturbed by TV and teenagers. We've bought some rather beautiful prints and will key our color schemes to them. Now ain't that themost exciting news you've ever heard in your little ole life? My God,I'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn!Really, old cheri, all this has gotten me down down down. I feelengulfed in mediocrity and overwhelmed by responsibilities andobligations which interfere with my writing six days out of seven. Iam truly fighting for my life these days, in a very real sense, and myonly hope now is that with my usual persistence and wonted resiliency I'll be able to muddle through and accomplish something however small. I want to get away from here for a few weeks - I'll settlefor three days! - but it seems out of the question now, for, as I said,we have Detroit and the moving ahead of us. Is it any wonder thatmy poems are real and seem violent to some people? I have to cometo grips with the so-called actualities around me in order to bearthem.I have been writing, of course, and re-writing, salvaging old mssand trying to finish new ones. But the work goes at a snail's pace,because I am tired and I do need stimulation and a new perspective.Well, lacking anything else, I have been reading shall I sayfiendishly?I sent for Ginsberg's Howl, Ferlinghetti's Pictures of the GoneWorld, and Arna, who's in California this summer, sent me A ConeyIsland of the Mind (Ferlinghetti). And last week I read Kerouac's Onthe Road. I can't say that I've been particularly enthralled by any ofthese books. But I do like the vigor and the compassion which I thinkare characteristic of the group. These writers are not world-wearyand coldly intellectual nor are they ladylike and correct and elegant.Then too it's heartening to see social awareness come back intopoetry, even though I do feel that it is attenuated by a strain ofpseudo-mysticism. And I note in Kerouac a return to a kind ofprimitivism - an effort to find in Negroes, poor Mexicans, hobos andwhor*s a spiritual vitality lacking in everyone else. Kerouac's insis
Page 309ROBERT HAYDEN 309tence on physicality, on sex, drinking, physical movement, etc.,harks back to Hemingway, but his characters are less meaningfuland their activities are less engrossing and certainly more futile. Thetwo poets, particularly Ferlinghetti, have some co*ckeyed theoryabout writing in jazz rhythms, and F. has written his verses with theavowed intention of making them 'oral' and suitable for recitation tojazz. This is a lot of damned foolishness. But I'm glad that someoneis experimenting again.You obviously did not receive a Whitney Fellowship, and I amterribly sorry about this. The only thing to do, I think, is to applyagain in the fall. Nobody ever knows what these fellowship committees want. But things just must work out for you somehow (andMary Worth says, 'You're welcome!'). I am as dull as dirt today andgrowing duller by the minute, so adios for now.Love,BobJune 22, 1961Dearest Richard,I manage to keep my hand in, writing whenever I have a freeinterval and enough peace of mind. My last word from Breman wasthat the book will come out in October, as perhaps I told you whenwe talked on the 'phone. Meanwhile, I'm trying to assemble thepoems I've written over the past couple of years so that I can haveHemphill bring out another pamphlet. I guess this is, in a sense,vanity publishing or something, but I feel that for my own sanityand for the sake of my life as a poet I just have to see something inprint. I feel so far away from everything that means anything tome - feel so completely out of writing that I must take this means ofre-establishing my identity, in a sense. I've not sent any poemsaround for a long time, because frankly I've had so consistent a drainon my emotions that rejection slips would throw me. Knopf is goingto bring out a new anthology of work by Negroes and I've beeninvited to submit mss. So far, I've not sent a thing, because I have
Page 310310 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWsuch a block these days, meaning, frankly, that I am afraid of havingmy work rejected. I know I've got to get over this, but you canimagine why I feel as I do. I've reached the point where everythingI've done seems to have been the wrong thing. But I will get overthis, I know; many people go through something similar, I guess,during middle age.What a barrage of gloom for you! But it does help to be able to saywhat is on my heart to you, whom I love more and more as the yearsgo by. So, my son...!Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer: I spent three nights reading itlast week and reached the conclusion that it's one of the damndest,dirtiest tricks ever foisted off on gullible eggheads. What a nauseating book! Like smelling dirty feet. Or putrid drek. Heaven knows, Idon't mind the sex, but I am revolted by the obsessive allusions toexcrement, the excretory imagery, etc. Then too there is scarcely alikable character in the book, and what Miller has to say about lifehas been said and said much better by better writers. It seemsincredible that Karl Shapiro and Lawrence Durrell, who shouldboth know better, call Miller the greatest living author (Americanliterature begins with Miller, ejacul*tes Durrell). I can see nothingin Miller except a kind of beat revolt against middle-class life. Ithink he and his book are symptomatic. The intellectuals, so-called,all seem to be looking for something or someone to worship, are alllooking for a "prophet". God save us if Miller is a prophet, a claimthat Shapiro makes for him. And of course Tropic is not even goodhot-pants stuff. I'd like it better if it were, though I'd still feel itwasn't worth my $7.50. Really, I detest that book and the impression I have of Miller himself is that he is a nasty old man! And whata bore he is when he starts philosophizing, although I grant that hehas a few eloquent passages here and there. It does seem to me thatthe fight to use dirty words has already been won; artistically I don'tsee what is gained by them in Miller's case. I've already had a letterfrom Julius Lester, now living in N.Y., praising it as the greatestbook ever written. And I'm flabbergasted to know how anyonecould think this. Well, as Erma said, it's the old story of the Emperor's new clothes.With all the love in the world for contemporary literature andrespect for contemporary writers, I fear nonetheless that this reallyis a decadent period in literature. Miller and the beats seem to haveno feeling for language and no power over it. And while they protest
Page 311ROBERT HAYDEN 311vociferously and boringly that they are "on the side of life" theyreally seem to me to be on the side of death. And they go back - notMiller, but the beats - to Zen Buddhism for spiritual guidance. I'vebeen forced to read Zen, and I find that it is often good psychotherapy but it's nothing else. Buddhism itself has been dead for thousands of years, and Zen, which cannot even be considered a religion,is a curious offshoot about whose nature one can never, so I gather,be really certain. It turns on all sorts of contradictions and paradoxes, denies the importance and relevancy of the intellect yet isfundamentally a kind of intellectual game. I will have none of it. Icannot see that Zen or any other form of Buddhism will provide theanswers to today's dilemmas. If it could, why is the Orient such aseething cauldron of conflict and unrest today? Oh, of course, theZen boys have an answer for that; they will tell you that only a smallminority have ever followed The Way, etc.There is a slim possibility that I'll be able to visit you again inSeptember, if I can figure out ways and means. I'll let you know. Ido hope that I can get back. I want to see Genet's "The Blacks" andwhatever Albee is doing. I think I read that "The Death of BessieSmith" has closed, a play that I am wild to see, after having read it.A powerful and disturbing play, like all the others Albee has done sofar. Did you by chance see it or the Genet? Genet's plays are the kindof thing I'd like to do if I had the time and mind. Who knows? I mayyet.Affectionately,BobApril 20, 1970Dear Professor Kaplan:Your letter of March 19 was forwarded from Nashville, reaching mea couple of weeks ago at the University of Michigan, where Iassumed duties as Professor of English last fall. I must apologize fornot replying before now, but I have been swamped with work, and
Page 312312 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWlately with correspondence, and unable to answer letters aspromptly as I should.I thank you for your kind words about my poetry, and I ampleased to know that you will reprint "Middle Passage" in youranthology.I wrote "Middle Passage" about twenty-six years ago. It was firstpublished in Phylon, the Atlanta University quarterly, in 1944, Ithink, when W. E. B. Du Bois was editor. I do not have a copy of themagazine at hand and so cannot check the date. The poem was nextpublished, with revisions of course, in Edwin Seaver's anthology,Cross Section: 1945. And I am sure of this date.I've revised the poem several times since it first appeared inprint- still hope to change the ending some day when I begin thescary business of getting a Collected Poems together. I'm glad that"MP" stands up as a poem after all these years. I remember that itwas mentioned with praise when the Seaver anthology wasreviewed-but only mentioned. Today it is getting attention fromall sides, is being studied. Littlejohn in his Black on White (sic?)singles it out for comment, but for all the wrong reasons. He makesme sound like a racist, which I decidedly am not. Otherwise, whatwould marvelous old John Quincy Adams be doing in the poem?I shall have a new book soon and thought you might like to see thejacket.Best wishes for your anthology and your teaching. And thanksagain for your interest.Cordially,Robert HaydenMay 21, 1970Dear Charles,At the risk of sounding like the veriest tyro I'm dashing this note offto you - I labor over my letters and haven't written the perfect oneyet!-to thank you and Daniel Walden for On Being Black. It isreally a splendid anthology from every standpoint- free of stridorand special pleading, balanced, sound in its critical evaluations,
Page 313ROBERT HAYDEN 313fresh in its approach. And I'm especially happy and encouragedheartened is the word I want - by your thesis that there is a relationship between Afro-American writing and American or Westernwriting in general. My own point of view, as you know. An obviousrelationship. Who could ever doubt it? But in these bad timesthese days of sheer madness -we are obliged to prove and proveover and again the obvious.Your evaluation of my work pleases me very much indeed. Andyour reading of "Middle Passage" delighted me because you mentionthe various voices in the poem and are sensitive to some of the subtlethings I tried to get into it. And you are certainly on target when youspeak of my "careful research," for I spent a couple of years readingeverything I could find on the slave trade. And then I spent two orthree years trying to write the poem - had to work out a form, etc.Some nasty critics seem to think I imitated Eliot's technique in "TheWaste Land"-but, you know, I had not read Eliot back in theforties when I was working on "Middle Passage"- I didn't even likehim then. But enough of this. I didn't mean to get carried away!Letters are beyond me these days. I have mountains of correspondence I seem unable to get up, over or beyond. This explains in partwhy you've not heard from me long before this. I wrote you severalimaginary letters, thanking you and your wife for kindness shownme while I was at Penn State- all of them beautifully phrased, ofcourse, and collector's items!I know of the bad times at Penn State. We've gotten our lumps atMichigan too this year. The Black Student Action Movement andSDS called a strike which disrupted our classes, polarized (that wordagain!) the campus still further. It was all very ugly and raunchy.Black students got most of their demands but are apparently still notsatisfied and plan further disturbances. And of course the killings atKent and Jackson are going to be used as an excuse for all sorts ofevils perpetrated in the name of change, freedom, progress. One canonly hope.Sincerely,Robert Hayden
Page 314314 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWNovember 29, 1970Dear Mr. [James Alan] McPherson,Let me say first how pleased I am to be in touch with you, because Ihave become a fan of yours - admire your work tremendously. I wasdisappointed that we didn't see each other again after the ceremonial in New York, for I wanted very much to talk with you.The story you sent me, "Away, Up in Brooklyn," is excellent; it isdeeply affective, is written with your usual subtlety and perceptiveness. But I'm afraid I can't use it- and, again, I'm disappointedowing to, shall I say, its strong "realism." Since the anthology (Fromthe Life is the title I finally hit on) is primarily for high schoolstudents, there's a limit on what I can include. Even so, there seemsto be more latitude now than there was a few years ago, and so I'llbe permitted to use several pieces with THOSE words and S*E*X inthem without risking censorship. But I can't use all the stories I'dlike to, because parents will complain, the committees that selectschool texts will be in a tizzy, and so on. What hypocrisy!Although I wanted something new by you-a scoop for the littleold anthology! - I'll use instead "A Matter of Vocabulary," which Ithink absolutely superb, a marvelous story for students to experienceand discuss. However, if you still want to send the other story youmentioned in your letter, I'll be glad to consider it. How can I loseeither way?Congratulations on the Ellison piece in the Atlantic. I have a copyof the magazine but haven't had a chance to do more than glanceover some of the paragraphs. I'm sure it's first rate, and I will read itbetween school chores tomorrow.I love Ellison, though we rarely see each other and do not correspond, and I have sometimes been afraid for him, the chauvinisticmadness being as intense and vicious as it is these days. I certainlyagree with most of his views - and most heartily concur with him inregard to yourself. I respond to Hue and Cry exactly as he did. Ihope you will not be pressured by the fascist-minded among us whowant to regiment Negro writers and artists in the name of freedomand "revolution" and turn us all into yea-saying ventriloquist dummies. These people sicken me, and I am appalled by their insistenceon conformity and readiness to censor and low-rate (that grand oldghetto word!).
Page 315ROBERT HAYDEN 315My new book of poems, Words in the Mourning Time, is out atlast, after more than a year's delay, and I am sending you a copy.I know you are busy, and so I don't expect an early or detailedreply. Send me the other manuscript if you'd like to, but if you're tooinvolved don't bother. "Vocabulary" is a star piece. You'll hear fromHarcourt Brace Jovanovich in regard to permission fee and so on,after I get the manuscript of the anthology in-if I ever do. Thesedays I am operating on a wing and a prayer, and I'm not always sureof the wing.My wife is also one of your admirers and joins me in wishing yougood health and many, many blessings.Oh, yes-your manuscript. I'll return it in a day or so. I couldsend it along with this letter but decided not to, because I wantedyou to have the letter first and not get the impression that your storywas being rejected. Too complicated to explain, but I hope yougather what I mean.Sincerely,Robert HaydenApril 3, 1972Dear Mr. [Allen] Tate,I am sorry you are ill and cannot be with us at this time. Radcliffehad arranged for my wife and me to meet you at his home theevening before your lecture, and I had hoped to be able to apologizeto you in person for what must certainly seem to you boorishness andingratitude- to put it mildly.Please believe me when I say that you have been on my conscienceever since I received your letter. At the time, I was in a state of greatuncertainty and turmoil, with far too much happening in my life allat once; and when several weeks had gone by -then months - Isimply didn't know how to make amends. Nor do I now, really, andmy tardy explanation must seem lame in the extreme. But I assureyou it was not lack of appreciation or an insensitive disregard foryour kindness and your interest in my work. Quite the contrary, forI felt -and feel -honored by your encouragement.
Page 316316 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWBill Meredith told me, when I was in New York for the RussellLoines Award, that you were largely (if not wholly) responsible formy receiving the honor. And, again, I wanted to write and thankyou for your efforts on my behalf, but by then I was really soblocked that when I started writing a letter I felt I'd made such amess of things that I couldn't finish it.Well, enough of this. It all sounds so foolish. But I trust you willtry to understand this idiocy and accept my sincere, if terriblybelated, apologies.I hardly know what else to say. Except that I treasure the graciousletter you wrote to me and am proud to acknowledge my indebtedness to you.I hope you will soon be well enough to leave the hospital. And Ihope I may visit you when I am next in Tennessee.All good wishes,Robert HaydenOctober 25, 1972Miss Margaret RauschEditorScott, Foresman and Company1900 East Lake AvenueGlenview, Illinois 60025Dear Margaret,Herewith the evaluations of the poems. I know we must stop addingnew poems to an already formidable list, but in accordance withyour instructions I am enclosing some material that I feel it is absolutely essential that we consider.Among Afro-American poets, young ones, that is, I think MichaelS. Harper is the very best, and he is attracting a great deal of attention. I've chosen sections from his latest book for consideration, andwhen you read these poems you will see why I'm excited. And if wecan use them, we'll be the firstest with the mostest, since these pieceshaven't to my knowledge been anthologized yet. Of course, it's possible none of you will like these particular poems, but he has other
Page 317ROBERT HAYDEN 317good ones in his History is Your Own Heartbeat and Dear John,Dear Coltrane. I should think we could do without Knight's haiku,with the other poems by Helene Johnson, Sam Cornish, etc., thatI've marked "C."ý3Jay Wright is yet another Afro-American poet who is doing morethan wallowing in racial woes. And he too is getting an enthusiastichearing. His latest book received a highly favorable review in theTimes a few months ago. Margaret Danner, among the older poets(my generation, alas!), is doing interesting things too. I'm sendingthe little collection of hers that I myself published in my (nowdefunct) Counterpoise Series. Margaret's uneven, but her poems areoften appealing for their imagery and irony.James Wright (not B.; you see, I'm not really chauvinistic!)might, I strongly feel, be better represented by some of the poemsI'm sending. They are characteristic of his style today, and I knowthat young people like them very much. Of course, we might wantto keep "St. Judas" and also use one of these later poems in order toshow the change in idiom, etc.If there is time for further browsing, I might send some poems byElinor Wylie that I like better than "Now Let no Charitable Hope.""For instance, "Hymn to Earth" in Collected Poems still seems to me,after all these years (I first read it when I was in college and was oneof her ardent worshipers at the time) to be beautiful andsignif icant.But, heavens to Betsy, we have to stop finding poems, don't we?And I'm scared enough as it is when I think of the editorial workwe'pre going to have to do.One more thing: Do let's confine ourselves to the poems by RobertGraves we've already approved. He knows (and has said so) he's thegreatest poet writing in English today. But, oh, have some of us gotnews for him!I rush off tomorrow to read at Middlebury College in Vermont.Best wishes,Robert Hayden
Robert HaydenHayden, RobertEntrances and Tableaux for Josephine BakerVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.318-320http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:03
Page 318ROBERT HAYDENENTRANCES AND TABLEAUX FORJOSEPHINE BAKER[an unfinished draft]IWe see her in the next to final scenestanding at the rainbow's end,Maya's darling still, and know the goldis real and all else brummagem.Once at the Casino de Parisshe made her entrance-face agleamwith diamond dust- descending invisible stairswhose treads unfolded to receiveeach glittering step just when it seemedthat she must plunge through light and musicto her death. Her Parisians gasped and cheered;such calculated risk exalted her;she sang J'ai deux amours, as nowshe sings it, grown old and ageless,triumphant in the sortilege of an artfleeting as rainbow fire, as durable.IIOh, let us talk of happy things,she cried in those last yearsof her unhappiness, oh cherish, mon ami,318
Page 319ROBERT HAYDEN 319illusions, do not look too close,believe in fairy tales and let us writeour own. By then the castle, rainbowchildren - alas, for all my hopesof human brotherhood - the exotic animalsin their diamond collars, the goldall all was gone, had ended likean idiot's tale. Whom had she offended,God? Yet she had served Him in her way.J'ai deux amours, one France and oneAmerica, one had betrayed and onehad rejected her like some slavey stepchild.Where then was La Belle Francethat bitter day she never could quitebelieve or understand when the ruffians cameto drag her from her fairy house foreclosedand with vile names strike her down?Where were de Gaulle, the Maquisardswith whom she braved the villainsof the Iron Cross? She had allbut died for France. But now her medalswere auctioned off as she lay in the mud.There is no hope, she said, no hopefor France or anywhere. How could such thingshappen here to me? I do not understandthe world any more. Why do we hateeach other so? My God, my God, I tried,you know, as foster-mother to a broodof homeless kids, to point a better way.My rainbow children, ah, but they grew upto call me whor*; I gave them lovebut failed. Was my love but vanity?
Page 320320 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWBut let us talk no more today of trouble.I am still Josephine, mon cher, thesefires have not consumed me, for Iam phoenix now, no longer bird of paradise.Wait for me here. I'll climb those steps again.IIILet down from the flies in giltbaskets of cabbage roses, dancingin ermined nudity from a RussianEaster egg, borne upon hypnoticmirrors by silverblack Nubians -O Josephine O la Belle SauvageDancing le Charleston le Blackbottomsinging whirling glittering to le jazz hotL'Africane in jungle jewels by Cartier.Baudelaire's ghost sighs in the wings,Ah mon amour, fleur du mal retrouvee.O washerwoman's daughterfrom East St. Louis (and don't you forget it,mes amis) walking her cheetahs on a diamondleash vamping Vedette Americaine, conjure womanwith pranking familiarsHuckleberry Finn and nigg*r Jim andthe voodoo empress Marie Laveau.They laugh and bless her antic style, with sensuousmockery, with something poignantas down-home blues....
John AshberyAshbery, JohnIrresolutions on a Theme of La RochefoucauldVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.321-322http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:04
Page 321JOHN ASHBERYIRRESOLUTIONS ON A THEME OFLA ROCHEFOUCAULD"We are all strong enough to bearthe misfortunes of others."We leave out old regretsthat when they be found are almost blendedin the grass, shadows of apple stemsthey might be or collages from another country.We shall, at the steeps, commandeer allthat bed is good for, then sink into a platter of sleep.Bringing water to the fountain, a hot day'srest, and too soon is it excludedto the delight of those sitting near us, who,on the verge of bailing out, decided to approachthe argument again in a spirit of fairness this timesince we all have to cooperate, or else the earthwill get slightly out of kilter, its revolutionsa few seconds off, enough to produce climatic changesin places you least think ofOne day the mice became suspicious. That was allwe needed to get going again, in plansof luxurious travel this time - on foot, by planeaching through the deserted night for itsimagined double, shot against the sunrisewith blips to read by, a miracle -One should be filling outthe forms, but tension has lessened, though321
Page 322322 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWwe need to know we live in explosive times;we can see our way around corners to wherewe dressed the birds. They liked the clotheswe gave them, liked us, but still theywanted to go home, not to a forestor savannah, but to the place of captivitythey had always known, a cage somewhere inside a school.So each day the predicamentemerges different, yet the same-you wantto have birds at your shoulders and wrists, to connivewith nature in her song, but something alwaysalways leaves you. Suddenly there are no more disappointments tobe hadand the laziest are crowned and anointed for their efforts:somewhere we see in this something which is shyly wrong,some corner of the heart, birdhaunted, by birdsong haunted, as though we twowere far away, and these others strangely neara paradise, if we had the facts to open it.And when an elfsits on a golf tee before you, and someonebehind you asks to play through: then, thenit doesn't matter much which of the old gipsy crones isreally a princess in disguise, with flowingchocolate braids, and olive-dusted complexion! O may sheredress our wounds, and leaveconnivance to us, where we shall findit a suitable burial ground and allwill be as if we never had lied,never hounded our mortal parents with persistent questionsand all shall be as though dawn came easilyany time. The mountains fall apartin my hand as I hold you: there, threeare smoothed over already withfive more to come before a delicious breakfast,and I try to cherish you.
Rebekah RemingtonRemington, RebekahThe Passing of Barbed WireVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.323http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:05
Page 323REBEKAH REMINGTONTHE PASSING OF BARBED WIREIn Kansas old folks lamentthe passing of barbed wire. They gatherin firemen's halls to displaytheir steel sprigs and last knowledgeof knots. Iron & flamelock.How each loop harnessesa truth. Children take upelectric banjos and fightlaser-armed demons flying out of blackholes, as space sails beyond itself.What are cattle compared to stars?An old woman who once saw sunlight waltzoff with a field of wheatlays out her labeled sampleson a doily. She imaginesthese spears, clipped and rusted,fenced a chariot that left long ago,swirling up dust toward the classic beyond.Now there's the farm. Outside,the dust is blowing hard.East coast museums will pay well to lockthese ruptured fences behind glassso progeny can wander the dark wingof rural arts, seeking historyin charred remnants they'llknow to be true. Rust and restraintalways win belief. And if this lifeis still inscrutable, loud speakers willplay amplified mooings of cowsto guarantee the experience, genuine.323
Gorman BeauchampBeauchamp, GormanRagged Dick and the Fate of RespectabilityVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.324-345http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:06
Page 324GORMAN BEAUCHAMPRAGGED DICK AND THE FATE OFRESPECTABILITYIn Henry James's The American a French aristocrat, Valentin deBellegarde, attempts to fathom the career of the self-made millionaire, Christopher Newman: "Being an American, it was impossibleyou should remain where you were born, and being born poor - do Iunderstand it? - it was therefore inevitable that you should becomerich." Bellegarde may not be wholly serious here, certainly Jamesisn't; but, playfully, the passage captures the central American mythof upward mobility, the belief that anyone (if not necessarily everyone) can rise from rags to riches, from log cabin to White House - orat least a co-op on Park Avenue and a condo on Hilton Head.Whether or not this myth is as uniquely American as sometimesclaimed, it is nevertheless quintessentially American, embedded inour folklore and ingrained in our social psychology. In The American Credo H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan assert:The thing which sets off the American from all other men, andgives a peculiar color not only to the pattern of his daily life butalso to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for want of a more exactterm, may be called social aspiration. That is to say, his dominantpassion is a passion...to improve his position, to break down someshadowy barrier of caste, to achieve the countenance of what, forall his talk of equality, he recognizes and accepts as his betters.So pervasive is this faith in and striving for upward mobility, sovaried and general its manifestations, no single formulation of thecredo can be all-embracing; but, if one figure can be said to haveembodied the credo, in all its essential, naive purity, surely thatfigure is Horatio Alger, Jr., the writer whom Hugh Kenner calls "thelaureate of the paradigms of ascent."324
Page 325GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 325In 1868 Alger published Ragged Dick and launched one of themost phenomenal careers in American literary history. Not his firstnovel - it was in fact his eighth - Ragged Dick established the coreplot that Alger was to repeat, with minor variations, over a hundredtimes: the tale of a poor but honest lad who, through grit, industryand some well-deserved luck, pulls himself up from poverty and intomiddle-class respectability. So invariant is this scenario that one istempted to appropriate for Alger, with the necessary changes, LuigiDallapiccola's crack about Vivaldi: that he didn't really write fivehundred concerti, but one concerto five hundred times. But if it'strue that you can't argue with success, then there is no faulting themyth that Alger formulated first in Ragged Dick, for it clearlyanswered to something deep and abiding in the American psycheand, for at least half a century, sold exceedingly well. The highestestimates - no doubt wildly inflated - place the sales of this book athalf a billion copies; even sober estimates range into the scores ofmillions -250 million according to Quentin Reynolds in The FictionFactory, between 120 and 250 million says Thomas Holbrook in TheLost Men of American History. Whatever the exact figures, saysHolbrook, "it was enormous, probably larger than the sales of anyother American author." So successful were the Alger books thatthey continued to appear years after his death, ghost-written byhacks hired by his publisher: at least a dozen Alger novels are not byAlger.In the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of thetwentieth century a vast proportion of America's youth, it appears,were buying, borrowing and swapping Alger novels -particularlyin the popular ten cent paperback editions - finding inspiration andguidance in their optimistic message that any of them, too, couldsucceed in life, if, like the Alger hero, he (the readers were mainlyboys) were good and brave and industrious and perhaps saved abanker's daughter from a runaway horse. Testimonials to the uplifting influence of Alger have been left by some of the leading figuresof this generation, ranging from Al Smith and Cardinal Spellman toCarl Sandburg and Knute Rockne, not to mention a president ofUnited States Steel and the author of "Trees." Jack London, ErnestHemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald all, as boys, read their Alger and itshows in their adult inversion of his success formula in such creationsas Martin Eden, Nick Adams, and Jay Gatsby: The Great Gatsby, infact, might be subtitled "Horatio Alger Meets Modernism." In 1934
Page 326326 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWNathanael West administered the coup de grace to the Alger myth asa viable literary motif (if it ever had been) in his zany, if not whollyunsympathetic spoof, A Cool Million; by this date, in any event, noself-respecting literatus could take seriously a tale of virtuerewarded, not, at least, under Capitalism.When Alger's readership and influence declined precipitouslyafter World War I - and his literary standing evaporated entirely -his reputation became the property of the chronicler of pop culture,of the journalist and the publicist. His name passed into the language as a metaphor, a shorthand designation for any rags-to-richessuccess story: the Alger hero became a journalistic trope, a publicrelations shibboleth. For many years the American Schools and Colleges Association presented an annual Horatio Alger Award to somesuccessful man who had risen from humble origins; recipients of itsbronze plaque include Bernard Baruch, Herbert Hoover, EddieRickenbacker, Dwight Eisenhower, and Norman Vincent Peale,who later wrote: "This country needs a new birth of the philosophyand spirit of Horatio Alger, whose books showed that a boy couldrise from humble beginnings to outstanding achievement and service." The filiation between Ragged Dick and The Power of PositiveThinking is not far to seek. The durability of the Alger formula wasevidenced most recently in the praise that Senator John Danforth ofMissouri accorded Clarence Thomas, then nominee for a seat on theSupreme Court and Danforth's former protege': Thomas's, he said, is"a true Horatio Alger success story."By our day, however, Alger remains little more than a namewithout a substance: indeed, generally well-read people sometimesexpress surprise that he was a real person, not a fictional creation.Of his scores of books, only Ragged Dick (as of this writing) remainsin print, more as a quaint period piece to be taught in AmericanStudies courses than an inspiration to hard work and clean living.Yet among surveyors of American culture, Alger retains his minorstatus as the chief purveyor of the rags-to-riches myth: indeed, hisname seldom appears without the suffixing of that formula. As anumber of the more careful Alger critics have noted, howeverperhaps most importantly, John Cawelti in Apostles of the Selfmade Man - the myth does not really fit the fiction. That is to say,the Alger hero seldom, if in fact ever, rises from rags to riches;instead, he achieves a comfortable middle-class niche in what todaywould correspond to an entry-level executive trainee program, a
Page 327GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 327good first job. A writer for Time, Cawelti notes, once calculated theaverage Alger hero's fortune to consist of no more than $10,000,tops. "None achieve [sic] anything resembling economic or politicalprominence. Moderate economic security would best summarize thepecuniary achievements of the typical Alger hero, despite such tantalizing titles as Fame and Fortune."The closest parallel to the Alger formula in recent years is probably the popular film Working Girl - a sort of Ragged Dick in miniskirts. Here, Tess McGill, a lower-class Staten Island secretary withblonde ambition, imitates and outwits her unscrupulous Ivy Leagueboss, puts together a multi-million dollar merger, and is rewardedwith entree into the Entree Program for junior executives - a slot,that is, at the bottom of the top, with her own office, her ownsecretary, and an upscale boy friend, but with no great fortune andno fame. What Tess achieves is middle-class respectability - she nowcarries a briefcase and no longer fetches coffee-and future prospects. And this is precisely what the Alger hero achieves, respectability and a promising future. In debunking the Alger myth as false tothe Alger fiction, recent critics have perhaps, overstressed themodestness of his heroes' achievements; for at novel's end each is stillyoung-Dick, no longer ragged, is only 15! - just beginning whatpromises to be a successful career, with the whole world lying beforehim, filled with opportunity. Alger's stories are stories ofbeginnings.Nevertheless, it is true that his persistent and overriding theme isthe acquisition not of wealth but of respectability. As the best andbest-selling of his books, with a freshness of invention that wouldonly later harden into mechanical formula, Ragged Dick offers themost appealing and instructive instance of this true Alger myth.Episodic and awkwardly plotted, filled with improbable coincidence and - when it turns most serious - woefully stilted dialogue,the book is yet immediately engaging in its sincerity and high spiritsand its almost desperate desire to convince young readers of themerits of middle-class respectability -and responsibility. For theodyssey of young Dick Hunter is from a careless, haphazard, handto-mouth life on the streets to that of a prudent, calculating, capitalaccumulating petit-bourgeois-to-be, with a savings account and apocket watch.When we first encounter him, Dick is a bootblack, sleeping nightsin a box on the streets of New York and wearing the dirty rags that
Page 328328 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWprovide him his nickname. But, significantly, Dick is not without amodestly adequate income, industrious and enterprising as he is indrumming up shoe shines. "Being always wide awake and ready forbusiness, he earned enough," Alger explains, "to have supportedhimself comfortably and respectably. There were not a few youngclerks who employed Dick from time to time in his professionalcapacity, who scarcely earned as much as he, greatly as their styleand dress exceeded his." In fact, when Dick later aspires to join theranks of these same clerks, he realizes that he will actually have totake a cut in income, as well as incur hitherto unthought-of expensesfor things like laundry and rent. Dick's poverty, then, consists not ina lack of income, but in the thoughtless, improvident way in whichhe wastes it.However much he managed to earn during the day, all was generally spent before morning. He was fond of going to the Old Bowery Theatre, and to Tony Pastor's, and if he had any money leftafterwards, he would invite some of his friends in somewhere tohave an oyster stew; so it seldom happened that he commencedthe day with a penny.In addition, Dick has formed the habit of smoking, which "cost himconsiderable, for Dick was rather fastidious about his cigars, andwouldn't smoke the cheapest"; he regularly loses money at the gaming tables of a gambling den and occasionally even partakes of a"vile mixture of liquor at two cents a glass."Certain sociologists who have studied the dynamics of poverty - Iam thinking particularly of Edward Banfield in The UnheavenlyCity - contend that poverty consists not in a lack of money per se,but in an attitude toward the future. If the future appears to hold nopromise, then planning ahead, saving, denying oneself such immediate pleasures as one can grab seem to make no sense. When livingday to day, one doesn't pay insurance premiums or open savingsaccounts. Such people, says Banfield, "would live in squalor andmisery even if their incomes were doubled or tripled," for theirpoverty results from "an outlook and style of life which is radicallypresent-oriented and which therefore attaches no value to work,sacrifice [or] self-improvement." Whatever the general truth of sucha view, Alger clearly shares it. Dick's poverty results more from thestate of his mind than the condition of his pocketbook. To rise fromsuch poverty, then, involves a shift in attitude, in motivation. This
Page 329GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 329shift occurs for Dick when he is hired (somewhat improbably) by agentleman, Mr. Whitney, to show his nephew Frank, a prep schoolstudent, around New York. To render Dick more presentable for thistask, Mr. Whitney (again somewhat improbably) takes him to hishotel and gives him an old suit which works a miraculous transformation in the urchin's appearance. "When Dick was dressed in hisnew attire, with his face and hands clean, and his hair brushed, itwas difficult to imagine that he was the same boy." Indeed, Dicklikens his own to Cinderella's transformation, and with some justice,for it has much the same fairytale effect. He is immediatelyaccorded a kind of respect that he has never enjoyed before, by thehotel doorman, by shopkeepers, by a street hustler who takes himfor a young swell; even his cronies among the bootblacks and newsboys now fail to recognize him.This experience- like Cinderella's at the ball - reveals to Dick anew world filled with hitherto unimagined possibilities: he might,he now realizes, rise to the level of his new clothes. He finds in Frankboth a role model and a mentor. Relating the story of Dick Whittington (arguably the first capitalist hero, he of the fortune-makingcat), Frank convinces our Dick that his background (illiterateorphan) and current status form no insurmountable barrier to futuresuccess. "A good many distinguished men have once been poorboys," Frank assures him. "If you'll try to be somebody, and grow upa respectable member of society, you will. You may not becomerich -it isn't everybody that becomes rich, you know -but you canobtain a good position, and be respected." Here sounds the realAlger message, and Dick takes it wholly to heart. No one had everexpressed any belief in him before -"They just told me I'd grow upto be a vagabone...and come to the gallows"-so that Frank's faithproves an inspiration. Simplistic as this conversion appears, it doesaccord with today's conventional wisdom that those who areexpected to fail usually will fail, unless someone believes in theirpotential and encourages them (in the current idiom) to be all thatthey can be. It works for Dick. "I mean to turn over a new leaf andtry to grow up 'spectable."Alger invests Dick with all the qualities necessary for success,honesty, energy, intelligence, and now he adds ambition. Despitethe lipservice Alger pays to the dignity of any honest work-"Alllabor is respectable, my lad," he has Mr. Whitney pronounce, "andyou have no cause to be ashamed of any honest business" - clearly
Page 330330 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWneither he nor his hero considers manual labor truly 'spectable.When the daughter of a Sunday School teacher who has invited himto dinner asks Dick what he does for a living, he blushes in embarrassment, "although he well knew that there was nothing dishonorable in the occupation," and her mother quickly changes the subjectbefore Dick has to reply. The clerks whose shoes Dick shines have astatus that he obviously lacks, despite an income that equals theirs:he would have felt no shame in declaring his occupation as clerk.Throughout Ragged Dick, Alger displays that confusion aboutmatters of class that Americans generally evince, committed as theyare officially to an egalitarian political philosophy. If all men arecreated equal, if all honest toil is honorable, if Americans acknowledge no "betters," recognizing none of the legitimations of distinctions and deference used to justify the aristocracies of Europe, thenclass ought to be a concept alien to Americans; but it proves so, ofcourse, only rhetorically, not actually. Two decades after RaggedDick, William Dean Howells in his "utopian romance" A Travelerfrom Altruria relentlessly exposed the doublethink that Americanspractice toward class. The Altrurian visitor to America, taking itspolitical rhetoric literally as a description of its social reality, scandalizes the gentry at a posh summer resort by treating everyonewhom he meets as an equal: he helps the porter carry luggage, thewaitresses serve meals, the bootblacks shine shoes; he shows thescullery maid the same consideration that he shows the stockbroker'swife. With great pains and much indirection, his hosts try to conveyto him the social reality that segregates doctors from dirt farmers,professors from porters; but, finally, a straight-talking banker, tiredof the persiflage, lays the class cards flat on the table. We have nopolitical aristocracy, he tells the Altrurian, "But there is as absolute adivision between the orders of men...in this country as in anycountry on the globe. The severance of the man who works for hisliving with his hands from the man who does not work for his livingwith his hands is so complete...that nobody even imagines anythingelse.I wonder [he continues] you were not ashamed of filling our friendup with that stuff about our honoring some kinds of [manual]labor. It is the truth that we don't go about openly and explicitlydespising any kind of honest toil - people don't do that anywherenow; but we contemn it in terms quite as unmistakable. The
Page 331GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 331workingman acquiesces as completely as anybody else. He doesnot remain a working man a moment longer than he can help; andafter he gets up, if he is weak enough to be proud of having beenone it is because he feels that his low origin is a proof of hisprowess in rising to the top against unusual odds. I don't supposethere is a man in the whole civilized world...who is proud ofworking at a trade.The Altrurian is amazed: "But are all the workingmen in Americaeager to rise above their condition? Is there none willing to remainamong the mass because the rest could not rise with him?" Thebanker drily replies: "I never heard of any. No, the American ideal isnot to change the conditions for all, but for each to rise above therest if he can."This passage can serve as a convenient gloss on the attitudes thatinform Ragged Dick. Most immediately, of course, Alger's successformula envisions no change in the conditions of the laboring poor asa class, but only the escape of the exceptional individual out of thatclass. Less immediately apparent, but still unmistakable is the negative valuation of the working class inherent in the very notion ofrising above it. The decisive class divide in nineteenth-centuryAmerica, as Howells asserts, lies between hand work and headwork, manual labor and intellectual labor. The gentleman of thatera, Veblen postulates in The Theory of the Leisure Class, carriedhis walking cane as the symbol of this status, evidence that he had noneed to work with his hands. While numerous gradations existed oneither side of this divide-the bank president would hardly classhimself with his clerks - the line itself is unambiguous, and respectability lies exclusively on the upper side. While Alger-typically, asHowells's banker suggests - never openly and explicitly despises anyhonest toil, he contemns it nevertheless in terms quite asunmistakable.To pass the divide into respectability, Dick must prepare himself,then, to work with his mind instead of his hands; most crucially, hemust learn to read. To that end he offers to share his newly-rentedroom with a younger, but literate bootblack, Fosdick, in exchangefor tutoring. When, at the first session, Fosdick asks him if he knowshis letters, Dick replies, "yes, but not intimately." He went to schoolonce for two days, he relates, but it proved hazardous to his health:"I found lickins didn't agree with me." But the once licking-prone
Page 332332 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWprankster is now consumed with the desire to improve himself, andwithin nine months has learned all that Fosdick can teach. "Dickhad gained something more valuable than money. He had studiedregularly every evening, and his improvement had been marvellous.He could now read well, write a fair hand, and had studied arithmetic as far as Interest." (Ah, yes: Interest.) At this point, the didactic import of Alger's fiction, never far below the surface, breaksthrough in open preachment:If some of my boy readers, who have been studying for years, andhave got no farther than this, should think it incredible that Dick,in less than a year, and studying evenings only, should haveaccomplished it, they must remember that our hero was verymuch in earnest in his desire to improve. He knew that, in order togrow up respectable, he must be well advanced, and he was willing to work.... He knew that it would take him a long time toreach the goal which he had set before him, and he had patienceto keep on trying. He knew that he had only himself to dependupon, and he determined to make the most of himself-a resolution which is the secret of success in nine cases out of ten.In addition to his scholarly achievements, Dick gives up smoking,going to the Bowery theatres, and other wastrel vices, starts tobathe, and banks every penny not needed for living expenses in asavings account. "He had been accustomed to joke about Erieshares, but now, for the first time, he felt himself a capitalist, on asmall scale, to be sure."What a reader today will experience, I suspect, witnessing thistransformation, is a certain sense of loss. The street kid of the beginning of the novel is carefree, spontaneous, daring, with a lot ofmoxie, a smart mouth and an exuberant sense of humor: his irreverent repartee is often quite funny. One critic aptly calls him (at thispoint) a Broadway Huck Finn. But as Dick exchanges his rags forrespectability, the juice drains out of him; as he becomes good, hebecomes gray - the appropriate color, perhaps, for a clerk. Alger -consciously, at least, certainly ideologically - wholly approves of theimprovement in Dick's manners, of his smoothing away the roughedges so as to fit into the pigeonhole of middle-class respectability;but the reader may be excused for feeling that his puckish charmresides almost entirely in his rough edges.His new life is predicated on self-restraint, self-denial, delayed
Page 333GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 333gratification. Thinking now in long-range terms, his eye to thefuture, Dick becomes careful, prudent, calculating. Nothing iswrong with this, of course, except that it makes Dick rather boring,the more so the more respectable he becomes. One imagines him, bymiddle age, grown heavy, prosperous, a little pompous, preachingto the younger generation the virtues of self-improvement, his owncareer the subject of his sermon. Jack London, in Martin Eden,offers a grown-up version of Ragged Dick, Mr. Charles Butler, heldup to Martin as the exemplum of the penniless youth who, "contentto make immediate sacrifices for his ultimate gain," becomes one ofthe richest men in California. Martin is unimpressed, pitying,instead, the dyspeptic old man his sacrificed youth:"...a young boy cookin' for himself on an oil-burner an' layin' upmoney, workin' all day an' studyin' all night, just workin' an'never playin', never havin' a good time, an' never learnin' how tohave a good time - of course his thirty thousand [dollars] came toolate...."I feel sorry for Mr. Butler. He was too young to know better,but he robbed himself of life for the sake of thirty thousand a yearthat's clean wasted on him. Why, thirty thousand, lump sum,wouldn't buy for him right now what ten cents he was layin' upwould have bought him, when he was a kid, in the way of candyan' peanuts or a seat in nigg*r heaven."Dick's self-denial is never presented as bleakly as all this, but perhaps only because Alger's knowledge of poverty is less realistic thanLondon's-or his imagination less romantic. In any event, evenwhen the reformed Dick decides to treat himself to a big breakfast,he justifies the expense on the purely prudential grounds that it was"a good preparation for a busy day."As more than one critic has noted, the newly prudent RichardHunter is the direct descendant of another Richard, BenjaminFranklin's Poor Richard. Ragged Dick reads like a fictionalizing ofthat compendium of Poor Richard's wit and wisdom that Franklincollected as "The Way to Wealth," the most widely reprinted American essay throughout much of the nineteenth century. It is filledwith Franklin's folksy and by now proverbial advice on how tosucceed in life, celebrating industry, frugality and prudence, thetrinity that elicits heaven's blessing -wealth. Considered the quintessence of the American commercial ethos, "The Way to Wealth"
Page 334334 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWconveys all the practical, utilitarian good sense that parents traditionally would want their children to imbibe, particularly if thelatter are to make it into Harvard Law or the Wharton School. Butfor youth itself- what an unyielding, tedious business all this PoorRichardry must seem, with all its penny saving and early rising. So,at least, it appeared to Mark Twain, who, advocate of those notwholly averse to a little sloth and periodic self-indulgence, offers awickedly funny estimate of the dolorous influence of "The LateBenjamin Franklin":The subject of this memoir [Franklin's Autobiography] was of avicious disposition, and early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering uponthe rising generation of all subsequent ages... His maxims werefull of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow outa single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot....Thatboy is hounded to death and robbed of his natural rest, becauseFranklin once said, in one of his inspired flights of malignity:"Early to bed and early to riseMakes a man healthy and wealthy and wise."If Dick Hunter can be seen as the exemplary convert to "The Wayto Wealth," Huck Finn, Twain's most inspired creation, stands as theapostate from all its sententia; if Dick studies and strives and saves toachieve respectability, Huck runs from its restrictive demands as fastas his bare feet and fugitive raft can take him. Narratively, thepatterns of their stories are inverse: beginning as a disreputableoutcast, rootless and ragged, Dick moves toward an ever greaterdegree of social acceptance; Huck, at least at the beginning of hisown book, is about as respectable as he will ever get-living in ahouse, sleeping in a bed, attending school, even wearing shoes- andcan't wait to escape, lighting out, as we all know, for the Territoryat novel's end, "because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me andsivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before." What Dickdesires -good habits, steady work, money in the bank -Huck,equally and oppositely, rejects, even the reward money left overfrom Tom Sawyer. Wrested from the respectable milieu of WidowDouglas's genteel hearth and home by his foul, foul-mouthed, oafishfather, Huck is happy as a clam as long as Pap ignores him, which isusually.
Page 335GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 335It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying comfortable all day, smokingand fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more runalong, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't seehow I'd ever got to like it so well at the widow's, where you had towash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get upregular, and be forever bothering over a book and have old MissWatson pecking at you all the time. I didn't want to go back nomore. I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn't like it; butnow I took it up again...It's almost as if Twain deliberately set out to mock each item in theinventory of reforms that Ragged Dick follows in his 'progresstoward respectability.Any comparison of Huck Finn and Ragged Dick must acknowledge that while one is among the great masterpieces of literature,the other is hardly literature at all: the deck - unless one belongs tothat new breed of critic that refuses to "privilege" Shakespeare over,say, Sidney Sheldon -will seem egregiously stacked. Still, the aesthetic disproportion set aside, comparing the attitude towardrespectability in each novel helps to illuminate the value accordedrespectability in the dwindling years of the twentieth century.Let us begin with prayer. Dick and Huck encounter prayer for thefirst time at about the same age, 14. His first night rooming withDick, Fosdick kneels to pray. "What's that for?" asks Dick. "What'sthe good?"1Fosdick explained as well as he could.... [T]he example of hisnew friend... had considerable effect upon him. When, therefore, Fosdick asked him again if he should teach him a prayer,Dick consented....He did not attempt to ridicule his companion,as some boys better brought up might have done, but was willingto follow his example in what something told him was right. Ouryoung hero had taken an important step towards securing thatgenuine respectability which he was ambitious to attain.Alger intends, apparently, no irony in Dick's discovering the primary efficacy of prayer -like that of churchgoing -to be therespectability that it conveys. His hero seems well on the way to thetheology espoused by the bourgeois's bourgeois, George Babbitt:"The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, andbeneficial to one'Is business to be seen going to services; that the
Page 336336 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWchurch kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that thepastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good-kepthim in touch with Higher Things.' "Huck is introduced to prayer by the same persnickity Miss Watsonwho makes life in a house so miserable for him:She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I wouldget it. But it warn't so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but nohooks. It warn't any good to me without hooks. I tried for thehooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't make it work.By-and-by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but shesaid I was a fool. She never told my why, and I couldn't make itout no way.Huck then confesses to the Widow Douglas that he can't see anypoint to prayer,and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it was"spiritual gifts." This was too many for me, but she told me whatshe meant - I must help other people, and do everything for otherpeople, and look out for them all the time..... I went out in thewoods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn'tsee no advantage about it - except for the other people - so at lastI reckoned I wouldn't worry about it any more, but just let it go.His ruminations on the inefficacy of prayer leave Huck feeling "kindof low down and ornery," a response just the opposite of Dick's selfcongratulation on his increment in respectability. Objectively considered, what Huck expected to gain from prayer is at least as utilitarian and self-interested as what Dick hopes to gain; however, thehonesty of his unabashed pragmatism makes Huck sympathetic,while Dick's respectability-mongering on his knees appears facileand vacuous. The response postulated might, in fact, be limited tosecularists, who never found prayer productive of fish hooks either;so let me take another example from something even the secular tendto hold sacred, education.At dinner at the Sunday School teacher's home, Dick's ignoranceis made painfully evident to him when, shown some engravings, hemust confess that he knows nothing of the pyramids-people can'tlive in them, he surmises, since "I don't see any winders"- nor ofEgypt, nor of any geography or history at all. As always, he emerges
Page 337GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 337from such an experience not only chastened, but resolved to remedyhis educational deficiency as rapidly as possible. Huck has a similarintroduction to Egyptology, but a different response. "After supper[Miss Watson] got out her book and learned me about Moses and theBulrushers; and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but byand-by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable longtime; so then I didn't care any more about him; because I don't takeno stock in dead people." Any educator, faced with the crushingcultural illiteracy of today's youth, ought to recognize in Huck theproleptic voice of a generation whose credo seems best expressed inthe immortal words of "Ruby Tuesday"-"Yesterday don't matter ifit's gone" -and whose most representative icon is probably BartSimpson. Yet can one doubt that the same educators will find Huck'swilled ignorance, his breezy bibliophobia, not only more real - andcertainly more entertaining -but somehow even preferable toDick's resolution to undertake a strenuous course of intellectual selfimprovement? Why?The obvious - and perhaps sufficient - answer lies in the aestheticdisproportion between the two works that I noted earlier. A greatwork of art can entice us to accept in its particularity what we mightreject as an abstract proposition; it can seduce us into preferring amendacious, sticky-fingered vagabond, with no ambition and apenchant for stealing chickens, to an honest, hard-working, highminded hewer of the straight and narrow - Huck to Dick. Twain'sgenius lies in elevating Huck's ignorance to the status of truth, inmaking the boy's social disreputability the source of his moral courage. Huck can help Jim gain his freedom precisely because he is not(like Tom Sawyer) respectable, has not learned properly the SundaySchool lessons of his slave-owning society and thus prefers to be anoutlaw - and go to hell- than to betray a friend. In a brilliant featof inversion, Twain renders social respectability disreputable anddisrepute a necessary condition for correct moral choice. In HenryNash Smith's perceptive discrimination between Huck's "soundheart and deformed conscience," the latter is "simply the attitudesthat he has taken over from his environment" - that is, the little thathe has learned about what respectable society considers right andwrong and that plagues him to "do the right thing" and turn Jim in."What is still sound in him," Smith continues, "is an impulse fromthe deepest level of his personality that struggles against the overlayof prejudice and false valuation imposed on all members of society in
Page 338338 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWthe name of religion, morality, law and refinement." By presentingrespectable society itself as morally problematic, Twain poses Hucklike Milton's "only Son of light/ In a dark Age, against example,good." All those librarians who, upholding the genteel tradition,once banned Huckleberry Finn from their shelves had perhapsunerring instincts if shallow reasons: in addition to spitting andlying and stealing and murdering grammar, Twain's picaro commitsrespecticide on a grand scale-in all innocence, in all ignorance.Huckleberry Finn is surely among the most subversive books everwritten.So apparent today is the greatness of Huckleberry Finn, so representative it seems of the vitality of American life and so central toour literature - cf. Hemingway's encomium, that all modern American fiction stems from this one book-that we may fail to realizethat it was wrought very much against the grain of Twain's own era,when respectability was still respectable. The initial sales weregood, although not nearly so good as those of Ragged Dick, but withonly a few notable exceptions, it was negatively reviewed or ignoredaltogether by the critical establishment: one critic opined that it hadruined Twain's career as a humorist. A modest succes de scandalewas achieved when Concord, Massachusetts librarians pitched it asunelevating: "the veriest trash." The Springfield Republicanacknowledged the book's literary merits, but concluded that "itsmoral level is low, and [its] perusal can not be anything less thanharmful." Twain took all this with amused equanimity for it tickledhim to play the bull in the china shop of gentility. But only to apoint. Despite the world wide fame and acclaim that he ultimatelyachieved - surely no one else who treated tradition and erudition sorudely was ever awarded honorary degrees by both Yale andOxford! - we now know that even this iconoclast dared not publishsome of his profoundest and most deeply pessimistic writing, particularly those works of his later years written, as he put it, with a penwarmed in hell. Even he, apparently, knew the limits to whichVictorian propriety could be pushed.Our age acknowledges no such limits; even the most scandalous ofTwain's once-suppressed writings is now readily available, if notwidely read. Indeed, one finds it hard to imagine any subject thatremains taboo at our own fin de siecle. The expressions of religiousskepticism that got Shelley sent down from Oxford or Emersonbanned from lecturing at Harvard would today raise hardly an eye
Page 339GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 339brow, much less a fuss, in any of the tonier groves of academe. Thekid-glove reticence that constrained the Victorian writers' treatmentof sex and inhibited even so daring a Modernist innovator as Virginia Woolf has given way to Erica Jong's bare-knuckled odyssey forthe zipless f*ck and Bret Easton Ellis's orgies of sado-murder. Thelove that dared not speak its name now prates incessantly and has itsown caucus at MLA conventions. Even so grand a dame of the oldschool as Edith Wharton has had her p*rnographic story of fatherdaughter incest posthumously exposed to any sophom*ore with stackprivileges, courtesy of a Yale professor.Popular culture no less than high has undergone the same revolution. What Ragged Dick was to the 1880s the Corleones were to the1980s, their rags-to-riches saga somewhat more aggressivelyadvanced than was that of Alger's upright bootblack. Girls whoonce would have wept over Little Women now groove on PrettyWoman, Cinderella as streetwalker with a sugar daddy for a fairygodmother. Adolescents once inspired by the adventures of KingArthur and his noble knights now thrill to the body counts of Ramboand the Terminator, while their younger brothers prefer mutantturtles who live in sewers and eat garbage. Tom Brown's Schooldaystransmogrifies into Ferris Bueller's Day Off, that apotheosis of thecomplete goof-off. Rock singers in drag bite the heads off live bats inlive performance (so I'm told) and a popular rap group celebratesassorted acts of violence against women (and is, in turn, celebratedin the pages of the New York Times by a Duke professor as theauthentic voice of the streets). "Come to the Church in the Wildwood" segues into "Come on, let's do it in the road," and Rebecca ofSunnybrook Farm is replaced by Madonna of MTV.In short, ours is an age that no longer respects respectability.Under the influence of Freudian psychology, that most Modernist ofideologies, we have come to suspect that respectability is only apretense, after all, a sham, a denial of the truth about ourselves.Kurtz in the Congo, Aschenbach in Venice, Connie Chatterley inthe gamekeeper's arms: these are the images of our authentic selvesyielded by Modernism. When George Babbitt rummages the roomof his college student daughter, he discovers books of Conrad,Vachel Lindsay, Mencken -a sampling meant to represent suchModernism as had penetrated Middle America, circa 1920: "Heliked none of these books. In them he felt a spirit of rebellion againstniceness and good citizenship... discontent with the good common
Page 340340 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWways." Obtuse about most things, Babbitt instinctively grasps thesubversive spirit of Modernism, himself exhibit A, of course, in hiscreator's brief against the "niceness" of the booboisie. So totally hasthe Freudo-Modernist ethos come to dominate our times, that crafting serious literature out of respectable people doing respectablethings - taking no drugs stronger than aspirin, killing nothing exceptcrab grass, with no skeletons in the closet and no sons out - is almostimpossible to imagine. The novelist Mary Gordon put it this way: "Iwouldn't know what to write about a good family. They don't interest me....What are you going to say? 'They all got together,somebody took the leg of the chicken, somebody took the breast andsomebody got the wing'? Who cares?" On the other hand, the poetPhilip Larkin regretted that "ordinary sane novels about ordinarysane people can't find a publisher these days. This is the tradition ofJane Austen and Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wantsits successors today." Why, he demands, are we given only "dopetaking nervous-breakdown rubbish?" The answer, I suppose, isbecause we live in the twentieth century.The sort of treatment that novelists have accorded fictional characters in this century, biographers have applied to real ones. At leastsince Lytton Strachey's wickedly irreverent Eminent Victorians of1919 psycho-shrunk his subjects from icons to case histories, biographers have tended toward the deflating expose, the revelation of the"real" (read: warped, wounded, wacko) person hiding behind thepublic posture: a tendency that Joyce Carol Oates has termed"pathography." A successful biography today usually depends ondiscovering - or fabricating - something unsavory, preferably scandalous about its subject: an illegitimate daughter for the good, grayWordsworth, a black mistress for Jefferson, trysts with Old BlueEyes in the White House for Nancy. The most attention that Algerhas received in recent years stemmed from a biographer's revelationthat he had been dismissed from his pulpit in Brewster, Mass. for (asthe church record put it) "gross immorality and a most heinouscrime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." Goody Two-Shoesexposed as pedophile: what could be more - well - more modern? Acentury ago the Brontes burned Emily's letters, and Hawthorne'swidow took the scissors to his journals, from a desire to protect theirloved ones from their perceived indiscretions; lately, the children ofJohn Cheever permitted publication of his journals, for which
Page 341GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 341"indiscreet" would be a much understated characterization, whilethe daughter of the poet Anne Sexton opened to a biographer hermother's psychiatric records, revealing, among other unsavory matters, the mother's sexual abuse of the daughter. Clearly, our notionof what the reading public has a right to know has undergone aradical change. So entirely natural to us seems this desire to strip andshrink a subject that the nineteenth-century biographers' desire toprotect and exalt, to burke those very indiscretions or enormitiesthat would nowadays ensure a book's success, seems naive at best,hypocritical at worst. Autres temps, autres moeurs, however. Our"inquiring minds" would probably appear to earlier ages moreappropriate for below-stairs gossips than for the keepers and shapersof the culture.In any event, my all-too-cursory sketch of the shift in the climateof opinion over the last century should help clarify why Twain'sdisreputable runaway appeals to contemporary readers whenAlger's hard-working, self-helping, respectability-seeking hero doesnot. While our age is, in any practical sense, as materialisticallycentered as any other-probably more so-still the intelligentsiaprofess an aversion to the rags-to-respectability formula of a RaggedDick. The ideal of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps seems somehow retrograde, an affront to those ideologically enamored of victimization, an implicit insult to all those who remain mired in thelower depths. David Brian Davis, reviewing a recent biography ofFrederick Douglass, makes this point well. Modern academia, hewrites, "has long professed a deep suspicion as well as distaste forupward mobility. [The author] almost conveys a shudder when hementions Douglass's 'best-known stock-in-trade lecture,' on 'SelfMade Men'...[He] shows little sympathy for Douglass's remarkableself-discipline, temperance, ambition, and commitment to bourgeois moral values." These characteristics, Davis notes, createdDouglass's greatness as a public figure, an important writer andorator; yet they will interest Freudo-Modernist readers much lessthan, say, his (wholly private) ambivalent sexual feelings towardwhite women, a motif rife with psycho-speculative possibilities andripe for a Spike Lee movie. Precisely this condescension toward selfdiscipline, temperance, ambition, and bourgeois social values characterizes, I have wanted to suggest, contemporary response to Ragged Dick, who has no hidden depths to explore, no dark secrets to
Page 342342 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWexpose (unless one wants to make something, as one critic recentlyhas, of his sleeping in the same bed with Fosdick).The fate of respectability has not, of course, been nearly so dire inthe society at large, where Rotary Clubs yet meet and where Norman Rockwell is still preferred to Robert Mapplethorpe. Yet evenhere one finds bizarre ambivalences, particularly among MiddleAmerica's young. The sixties produced perhaps the first generationwith downward aspirations, a generation that, at least in its trappings, fled rather than pursued respectability. The reasons for thatshift in attitude are, obviously, complex. While a tradition of artistsand savants seeking epater les bourgeoisie runs through muchnineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual life, such rejection ofmiddle-class modalities was limited, by and large, to small elites.But the emergent counterculture of the sixties, as the man-in-thegray-flannel-suit orthodoxy of the Eisenhower fifties dissipatedbefore the challenges of the New Frontier, moved beyond theboundaries of bohemia into the suburbs of Middle America. In itsopposition to racial segregation and the war in Vietnam, the counterculture adopted civil disobedience not merely as a tactic, but as amoral imperative, calling into question the legitimacy of authoritythat could be so malevolently misused. The political pieties used tojustify the war sounded particularly hypocritical after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, with their exposure of a policy of brutalrealpolitik; the sanctimonious platitudes of Richard Nixon rang particularly hollow after the release of the Watergate Tapes, where thepresident who declared himself not a crook revealed himself a crook.When Middle America's landslide choice for its highest office proveda moral thug, corrupt and corrupting, when his Vice President wasconvicted of extortion and his Attorney General was sent to prison,little wonder that the nation's young preferred sex, drugs and rock 'nroll to Nixonite "respectability."While the counterculture, in certain ways and to some degree,shifted the center of gravity of the whole of mainstream culturetoward greater openness and tolerance for deviations from traditional norms, its residual effects remain most pronounced among theyoung - not so much in any overt political activity on their part as intheir primitivivist "life styles." The preppie-as proletarian lookemerged, torn jeans and work boots replacing Weejuns and blazers;the rattiest dresser I knew in college in the sixties, the son of thepresident of Illinois Lighting and Power, boasted of not owning a
Page 343GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 343suit. Even today, when time and hard times have dimmed the desireof suburbia's youth to be one with grape pickers and campesinos andthe people, neat is still out, funky is still in. For a little extra, jeanscan be bought pre-faded and already torn and designer-brand"work boots" sell for a small fortune. In malls, on diags, at rockconcerts across the country, the ragged Ragged Dick look is derigueur: Alger's boy who slept in a box could easily pass for a NewKid on the Block. A college student's wearing a coat and tie toclass - or hose and heels - unmistakably announces that he or she isheaded for a job interview and thus teeters on the verge of "sellingout to the Establishment" - if lucky. In dress, in music, in "lifestyle," in its choice of cultural icons, today's youth reject many of thecanons of middle-class respectability, even as they aspire to middleclass incomes and comforts and lines of credit.This general cultural phenomenon manifests itself in moreextreme and consequential ways in black America, where, increasingly, to aspire to bourgeois respectability is viewed at the streetlevel as a kind of race treason. To study hard, to speak grammatically, to behave politely, to dress soberly are to "act white," to be anOreo. This animus toward achievement reflects, as Henry LouisGates, Jr. has written, "a shift in black attitudes toward socialadvancement."Black literature is full of characters whose greatest pride is theirmiddle-class ancestry and whose greatest aspiration is to becomeeven more deeply middle class. In fact, this drive for social elevation seemed to be a central trait of the culture, at least for acentury.The emergence of a new nationalist ethos in the late 60's and70's changed that. As ghetto or street culture became romanticized, many blacks became defensive about a middle-class past orfuture. "Authentic" black culture, in other words, was lower-classculture, from speech and attitude to clothes and coiffure. As if toassuage guilt for having escaped, new arrivals in the black middleclass...embraced the affectations of the ghetto, though withoutit* pain, frustration and suffering. For one of the few times inblack history, the "blackest" aspects of black culture were thoughtto be those least related to economic success. To be black andmiddle class was to betray, somehow, one's black heritage.
Page 344344 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWAlthough this rejection of middle-class-or "white"respectability takes numerous and complex forms, a simple instancestrikes me as particularly significant - the inversion of the term badto mean good. In the street argot of black America, a "bad-ass dude"is an honorific title. Michael Jackson's hugely successful video wasentitled, simply, Bad. This usage has spread sufficiently into mainstream culture to figure in a fast food commercial: a group of blackmusicians, on their break, take turns pronouncing their friedchicken bad, to the bemusem*nt of the token white player whomeekly opines that he thinks that it tastes good. Laughter. What asquare! Anyone who's hip knows bad means good, right? But why?The inversion, without any of the theological resonance of Satan's"evil, be thou my good," nevertheless encapsulates the alienation ofthe dispossessed from the traditional moral norms of society, theequivalent, perhaps, of Huck's "All right, then, I'll go to hell." Thevalue-reversal in the mean streets of the ghetto, the thorough rejection of the modalities of middle-class respectability, has clear, ifregrettable socio-economic causes. The aping of these attitudes byhomeboy wannabees, in particular affluent white ones, is, however,a curiouser phenomenon.Where America's young once read Alger books in great numbers,today in even greater numbers they watch music -and the mostpopular form of the moment is rap, that "authentic voice of thestreets." Ironically, however, the rapper who currently tops thecharts is not black, but a very blond white boy, Vanilla Ice. In thecareer and popularity of Vanilla Ice we find both the perfect 1990sparallel to and antithesis of the Ragged Dick scenario of successthrough respectability: his is a tale of making good by being bador, what is more significant, pretending to be bad. The bio that hispublic relations apparat fed the press presented him as a roughliving, hard-fighting street kid from the slums of Miami, with knifewounds to prove it. His hit single "Ice Ice Baby" depicts him carrying a "nine" (a nine-millimeter pistol), engaging in gunplay, eludingthe police, etc.- a bad dude. The truth, however, uncovered bysome investigative reporters, is that Vanilla grew up Robert VanWinkle in an affluent suburb of Dallas-had, that is, a "respectable" background, apparently the last thing a street-fightin' songstercould want. Despite these revelations, Vanilla insists "I'm from thestreets....It should be obvious to anybody's eye that a white guydoing what I'm doing had to be exposed to the streets." Less impor
Page 345GORMAN BEAUCHAMP 345tant than the truth about his background is the fact that he wants toproject an outlaw image. Hamlet urges his mother to assume avirtue if she has it not; today's image polishers of pop stars would bemore likely to advise the opposite, assuming some vices if - hard toimagine-they have them not. So unrespected is respectabilityamong pop culture consumers that an aspiring rocker or rapperwould, no doubt, rather admit to possessing a prison record than anHonor Society pin. In any event, Vanilla Ice serves as the RaggedDick equivalent for the 1990s, an ersatz-rags-to-real-riches successstory. For a cultural role model of the 1890s, the idealized path tosuccess ascended from a box in the mean streets to an office on MainStreet, whereas in the 1990s the path descends from the suburbs tothe ghetto and then to the recording studios and Rodeo Drive: ournostalgia de la boue has become, above all, bankable.The Bitch Goddess Success surely holds sway no less in our daythan in Alger's, but respectability, I have tried to suggest, no longerconstitutes a cardinal virtue among her acolytes. Claus von Bulowreports that, after two trials for attempting to murder his wife, henow gets the best tables in the best restaurants; Sherman McCoy, inBonfire of the Vanities, when merely a million dollar a year stockbroker, has no status at all at the same society soirees that subsequently lionize him once his criminal indictment becomes a matterfor headlines. The age of criminal chic has arrived: notoriety is in,respectability is out. One knife blow the less and Jack Henry Abbottwould probably now be the Jean Genet Distinguished Professor ofLiterature at - well, you name it. Ours may be the first age to takemoral instruction from rapists and thieves.In such a cultural climate, a boy's desire to become 'spectable - tohave a steady job, clean clothes, status, a savings account - in short,to be comfortably middle class-must offer very thin stuff fromwhich to fashion a best-seller. Alger's formula for the achievement ofrespectability - hard work and self-denial, prudence and clean living and self-help-seems obsolete in a play now, pay laterhedonomy. The Ragged Dick vogue has gone the way of the bustle,the gas light, and good manners. Had Dick only turned to a life ofcrime and ended up on the gallows, he would be far likelier to figurein today's college curriculum; and if the crimes had been reallylurid, something like the dismemberment and ingestion of prostitutes, we could be almost certain of a big-budget movie, starring, letus say, Keanu Reeves or Christian Slater.
Page 346Top: Hannibal Lecter at his work table, with his drawings of aestheticobjects. Bottom: Clarice Starling receives her certification of identityfrom the F.B.I.
Adrienne DonaldDonald, AdrienneWorking for Oneself: Labor and Love in The Silence of the LambsVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.347-360http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:07
Page 347ADRIENNE DONALDWORKING FOR ONESELF:LABOR AND LOVE INTHE SILENCE OF THE LAMBSThe Silence of the Lambs' sweep at the Academy Awards-bestpicture, best director, best leading actress and leading actor -wasremarkable not only because rarely does one film win all of themajor categories but also because it was the first "horror" film towin best picture. And while it is bemusing that some of the otherfilms nominated - such as Bugsy, JFK, and Beauty and the Beast -don't also count as horror movies, The Silence of the Lambs wasclearly a controversial choice. It seemed unlikely that the Academyof Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, an institution more often dedicated to the art of compromise than of the cinema, would embrace afilm featuring serial murder, homicidal transvestism, and cannibalistic psychoanalysts - or would court the outrage of gay activistswho have attacked the film's hom*ophobia and misogyny. The picketing at the Oscars wasn't the first demonstration against the film.Before its official premiere, Richard Jennings of the Los Angeleschapter of Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation called thefilm "an atrocity against women and one more instance of an industry that can't seem to create a positive gay character." MichelangeloSignorile of the now-defunct New York queer magazine, Outweek,vilified one of the film's stars, Jodie Foster, for being involved insuch a hom*ophobic project.' Indeed, it's possible to see the Academy's decision to honor The Silence of the Lambs as the industry'sprofessional refusal to bend to outside political pressure.While the criticism of the film has been justly sobering, theemphasis on gender and sexuality nonetheless limits an account ofother forms of violence in it. What is truly frightening is that viewersmay take for granted or overlook the silent humiliations endured by347
Page 348348 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWwomen workers and the brutalizing stigmas of class. The Silence ofthe Lambs's hom*ophobia and misogyny are inextricable from economic violence. Economic violence shapes everyone in the film, thepolice as well as their prisoners, the gainfully employed as well asthe wantonly destructive, the powerful as well as the powerless.Every character- not just the victimized women and the murderousgay transsexual - struggles with what might figuratively or literallycannibalize us all: work.In the film, as in life, work powerfully informs human identity.Theorists from Locke to Marx have valued work as the potentialmeans by which people may shape the material world around themto reflect and embody a sense of self. In the film, as in life, however,different kinds of work narrowly determine different kinds ofidentity-or rather, different kinds of alienation. There are twokinds of workers in The Silence of the Lambs: wage laborers-thepolice, the transsexual serial killer called Buffalo Bill, and most ofthe women whom he murders-and professionals-the FBI, psychologists, and psychotherapists. The wage laborers in the film donot gain a sense of self from what they do for a living or what they'repaid. On the other hand, since their work expresses nothing aboutthem as unique individuals, what they do in their free time doesn'tcontribute to the ways in which their work subordinates them in theadministered world. In contrast, the professionals in the film arepaid for the intelligence, training, and personality which is indistinguishable from their sense of identity.2 Nonetheless, their work is nomore self-expressive than wage laborers'. By locating their skillswithin their personalities, professionals undermine the distinctionbetween what they do and who they are. They have more controlthan wage laborers over how they work but in exchange they internalize administered labor as a sense of self. They don't producecommodities - they are commodities.The Silence of the Lambs opens with a scene depicting the processwhich creates the internally disciplined professional. We see a youngwoman by herself, working her way through an obstacle course.When an FBI instructor briefly steps into the frame, we realize thatshe is not alone because she is watched; her solitude is that of thestudent displaying her resourcefulness and self-control for an audience which invisibly observes and judges her. For her, the purpose ofthe exercise is to show that she has internalized the discipline of heraudience of teachers. As we watch the FBI instructor's thoughtfulgaze after the dutiful young woman, we, too, are metaphorically
Page 349ADRIENNE DONALD 349part of her administered world, if we observe, even take deep interest in her without intervening in or aiding her progress.Her name is Clarice Starling and her prime teacher and exemplary disciplinarian at the FBI Academy is Dr. Jack Crawford, apsychologist who is hunting down Buffalo Bill, the serial murdererwho flays his female victims. She finds Crawford in a small, cinderblock room, the walls of which are covered with newspaperclippings and photographs of unsolved crimes, as well as a few professional plaques and citations. His office is not much different fromanother room which we see later in the film, the cell occupied byDr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, psychoanalyst and serial murderer; the resemblance indicates not only the impersonality ofCrawford's professionalism, but also that the places of institutionalpower and correction oddly resemble each other. Crawford's colorless austerity is perfect for training Starling in the professional rigorsof transference and counter-transference. He assigns her an apparently simple exercise: since he's busy with Buffalo Bill, Starling is togive Lecter a questionnaire with which the FBI is creating a profileof serial killers. Above all, Crawford warns her, she should not tellLecter anything about herself: "Believe me, you don't want Hannibal Lecter inside your head."Only later does she learn from Lecter that Crawford is reallyusing her to get information on Buffalo Bill. When she confrontsCrawford on his reasons for sending her to Lecter, he argues that,had she known about her visit's purpose, Lecter would have wheedled it out of her without giving her any information in exchange.She shouldn't feel personally betrayed since, Crawford assures her,he had only professional reasons for manipulating her ignorance.Such disinterestedness distinguishes his behavior from Lecter's - andfrom her sense of personal betrayal. Crawford's managerial foresight blandly masks and contains his sadism; since he takes no personal pleasure in it, he can justify manipulating Starling professionally.If impersonality is Crawford's mode of aggression, it is supposedto be Starling's defense against Lecter's perversely brilliant insights.For her psychic security and professional authority, Starling needs toanalyze Lecter before he analyzes her. Her model for interpretivestrategies is Crawford in his use of her against Lecter; and, obviously and eventually, vice versa. Crawford and Lecter thus becomefrightening mirror images of each other in the account of Starling'sprofessional education. Lecter bizarrely extends and parodies trans
Page 350350 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWference and counter-transference; his cruel, reductive, yet canny"reading" of Starling's personality and past is part of an interpretivewill to power, of which his cannibalism is the most radical andliteral form of internalization. Crawford, conversely, wants Starlingto emulate him and his Freudian strategies of effacing the interpretive self, withdrawing from the patient's constructions and projections; Crawford's model of professionalism is a form of selfcannibalism. His impersonality makes him an easy character forStarling to internalize and yet distance herself from. He is a coolmentor, who comes to congratulate Starling at her graduation fromthe Academy but who hesitates to shake hands, as if the gesturemight be a little too intimate for him. At that moment she's moreperfectly professional than he is; she is so bumptiously sure of hernewly-authorized self that she doesn't even recognize the possibilityfor an unseemingly private gesture.The scene concludes the film's account of Starling's professionalization. Her transformation begins in earnest when, on Crawford'sassignment, she meets Frederick Chiltern, the psychiatrist who runsthe hospital where Lecter is imprisoned. Like other shrinks in thefilm, Chiltern is a little unstable himself - he gleefully flirts with herby showing off his "specimens" of insanity. (Later, we learn that hesystematically abuses Lecter.) While Starling artfully frustrates hisadvances,3 Chiltern gets his revenge as he leads her toward Lecter'scell. While warning her about the security protocol for Lecterwhich includes staying away from the glass, passing him only softobjects, and so on - he pulls a picture out of his wallet as evidence ofwhat Lecter did to a nurse administering an EKG to him yearsbefore. Chiltern tells her that doctors reset her jaw and saved one ofher eyes; when Lecter swallowed her tongue, his heartbeat never gotabove eighty beats per minute. The horror isn't simply what we andStarling infer that Lecter did-it is that Lecter didn't physiologically register the horror of his act; his violation of the nurse's bodysimply didn't arouse him at all.But it does move Starling, and it does move us, as we avidly takein her struggle for composure. With the camera angled up towardStarling's face, we never see the photo. Instead, we watch her,bathed in red light, looking down at the picture - and obliquely atus -while Chiltern vengefully describes the results of Lecter'sattack. Jodie Foster's performance is finely controlled at thismoment: we see her eyebrows knit slightly with intensity as she looksat the photo but we don't see simple disgust, horror, or morbid
Page 351ADRIENNE DONALD 351fascination. We watch her contain and conceal strong feeling; wesee the depth and strength of her character. As we hear what Lecterdid to the nurse's face and our own pulses beat with calm selfcontrol or speed up - with surprise, horror, pleasure-we see Starling's guarded reaction which we consume and internalize. And,most powerfully, we see her obliquely watch our fascination withher reaction to horrifying violence. The audience's aesthetic appetitefor violent sensationalism becomes complicit with Chiltern's assaulton her.When the film locates the audience's reactions alongside those ofits characters, its central dilemma emerges: is the ability to experience horror without getting excited a sign of calm professionalism ormadness? When Chiltern leaves her to face Lecter on her own,Starling has just discovered that her quest for knowledge is going tobe much harder than she expected. What she had thought wouldprotect her- that is, the impersonality of her aspiringprofessionalism - reveals its own dangers in the world which she hasentered. The blurring of the distinction between psychosis and theimpersonality of professional self-commodification takes on furtherimportance for the moviegoer who watches Starling's struggles withand for impassivity. That is, what kind of aesthetic pleasure can begained from the representation of pain? On the one hand, the audience needs to distinguish its aesthetic and moral or political reactions to the film; for example, there is a difference between thecharacter Jodie Foster plays and how she performs the role. Yet onthe other hand, the audience's aesthetic competence which enablessuch distinctions results from a commodification of personalresponses analogous to that in professionalism. Aesthetic competence shares professionalism's containment and splitting off of intimate, helpless, useless feeling. Slipping the restraints of empathythat makes us mutely feel pain for others' pain, aesthetic competenceand professionalism frees the sad*stic pleasure of witnessing andcausing what we can't feel in others, and fear in ourselves: vulnerability. Starling's poised tact reverses the pedagogic relation betweenher and the audience; walking down the subterranean corridor toLecter's cell, assaulted by the shrieks and whispers of the criminallyinsane, balancing professional competence against psychotic disinterestedness, she shows the audience how to weigh its fear for, andpleasure in, her vulnerability.Washed in the analytic glare of white light, fastidious even in hisprison uniform, alert, formal, and arch, Lecter fuses extraordinary
Page 352352 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWintellectual self-control and irruptive emotional abandon. Almostimmediately, he parodically treats Starling as a training analyst,evaluating her interviewing technique to show off his own expertise.And going further, he nastily reads her cool professionalism as a vainflight from her white trash origins. What distinguishes Starling fromother figures in the film - such as Chiltern and even the mother ofone of Buffalo Bill's victims, whom Lecter taunts--is that shedoesn't angrily deny and thus confirm his insight; like a good analyst, she calmly turns it back against him: "You see a lot, Dr. Lecter," she says, "but are you strong enough to point that highpowered perception at yourself?" That he has hurt her is confirmedby her tears as she leaves the hospital, and by her flashback to thepoor, rural childhood which Lecter accurately guessed at; but whenshe is with him, she coolly exploits her own feelings to get him to talkto her.What develops between Starling and Lecter is a bizarre form ofanalytic exchange. Rather than giving memory for insight aboutherself, insight for money, Starling trades her childhood memoriesfor Lecter's riddling clues about Buffalo Bill. The challenge for Starling, then, is that she must produce for Lecter her private memoriesof a past from which, he has already pointed out, she wants toescape by becoming a professional; in order to gain the professionaland class advancement which Lecter says she loves most, she mustreveal the personal identity which she wishes to repress.Unfortunately, the portrait of Starling which emerges from hersessions with Dr. Lecter and from her two flashbacks is a littledisappointing because Lecter's first hunch about her is absolutelyright. It is in part a sign of our interpretive voracity that Starling'slack of narrative resistance is comparatively uninteresting; a largerproblem with Lecter's reading of her is that it is both couched in andabout psychological cliches. As a child growing up in rural WestVirginia, she was orphaned when her father, a town marshal, wasshot to death in a burglary. She was sent to a nameless, "decent"uncle and aunt who supported their family by raising livestock forslaughter; her identification with innocent, helpless, bleating lambsis the narrative key to her professional vocation, the emblem of herown moral worth, and the explanation for the film's enigmatic title.As a story, it is too formulaic in its grief, in its resolution of guilt andrage. Her professionalism is too clearly a mode of self-protectionwhich distances her from memories of loss and impoverishment and
Page 353ADRIENNE DONALD 353a means of idealizing her grief by projecting it onto the innocentvictims with and for whom she works.Such obsessions have an ostensible moral dignity which attemptsto redeem Starling's submersion of her identity in work. Yet by theend of the film, she has become a cliche, not a character. In theclimactic scene, she stalks Buffalo Bill around his own darkenedbasem*nt maze of torture. Our viewpoint at that moment is identical with Buffalo Bill's, who's wearing infra-red goggles, so we seeher terrified expression, her blind clumsiness, her gun shaking violently in her hand. The scene is startling since Foster's performance,like almost all of the film, is otherwise tastefully understated.Indeed, it is bizarrely comic, not only because Foster overacts with aprop but because she is being stalked so closely by the person whomshe's stalking. From the beginning of the film, we've seen herrehearse for this moment. But rather than being heroically revealed,her personal courage and strength collapse into merely professionalbehavior. As a character, Starling never recovers from this momentof conflation. Hereafter, she's the successful student at her graduation who has earned not freedom from her past but professionaladvancement. She acts like a cartoon because she has been reducedto one.While the scene's crudeness seems at odds with The Silence of theLamb's refusal of slasher and suspense cliches it suggests deeperconsistencies. The film's tasteful symmetries are too pat, too fungible to offer the exhilarating and frightening revelation of the private, the individual, the vulnerable. For the audience, the commodification of Starling's personality as a professional identity ismanifested through the sentimental cliches of her narrative. It'shard to imagine that Hannibal Lecter would be at all interested inher nightmares about screaming lambs. Yet his alertness to her classnarrative indicates the political and aesthetic flaw in the film's senseof its own good taste: it assumes that Starling's desire to escape herclass and regional identity is completely creditable and empathetic.According to the ethos of The Silence of the Lambs, there's not muchdifference between being a psychotic serial murderer (or his victim)and being poor white trash. The narratives of sexual deviance andgender oppression which the film explores with such morbid relishand tactful sensitivity, respectively, are thus disturbingly underpinned by a common economic narrative of class resentment andaspiration. For example, closeups of Jodie Foster, especially duringher flashbacks to her childhood, visually sustain the account of her
Page 354354 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWupward escape from her shameful class origins. These shots, unusualboth for their angularity and Foster's lack of adornment, suggest ageometry of bone structure, muscle, and gaze that charges her luminous face with the intelligence to contemplate the gawky, sorrowful,underprivileged child she once was in order to transcend that past.Starling is not the only character in The Silence of the Lambs whowants to escape a past identity; the other is Buffalo Bill, or JameGumb who presents a still more parodic and grotesque version ofclass identity than does Starling. But while Starling's sexuality andclass are equally ambiguous and universal, Gumb's class is explicitlyand viciously mediated through his sexuality. According to Lecter,Gumb thinks he's a transsexual but he's not really-he's simplyunhappy being what he is. So just as Starling uses work to escape herpast, he uses his; but while she cultivates a pure, classless professional identity, he is a tailor who must literally stitch together a suitof clothes for a new identity as a woman. The film cynically manipulates the audience's voyeuristic fascination and disgust by sexualizing Buffalo Bill's pathology and by identifying the hatred and envyof women with gay men. Yet such hom*ophobia becomes apparentwithin the film's overarching treatment of class. Buffalo Bill is dirty,inarticulate, artisanal (as opposed to artistic), vulgar, fa*ggy, misogynistic, violent, perverted, tattooed, and mutilated; he listens toheavy metal, he drives a van, he lives in the suburbs, he owns a toypoodle named Precious, he is a Vietnam veteran. In short, he is anunformed, shadowy, vaguely working-class, gay composite noncharacter, a study in suburban Gothic, an appalling stereotype ofclass and erotic loathsomeness.One may hope in vain that audiences would perceive JameGumb/Buffalo Bill to be the hom*ophobic caricature that he is.While his erotic and class identity is anathematized, however, Hannibal Lecter's intelligence, class, sophistication, and power makehim an evil ideal. For example, when Starling first visits him,another prisoner hisses that he can smell her c*nt. After forcing herto repeat the comment, Lecter says that while he cannot smell that,he can describe her shampoo, perfume, and cosmetics in virtuosicdetail; he smells her culture, not her biology - and in drawing thatdistinction, he reveals his mastery of the former and disdain for thelatter. In every sense, Dr. Lecter is a perfect gentleman.Lecter's austerely rational, even neoclassical aestheticism is theessence of his violent insanity. He doesn't rape people; he eats theirlivers with fava beans and Chianti or swallows their tongues with
Page 355ADRIENNE DONALD 355perfect calm. To cultivate such Promethean tastes is beyond thedreams of Bon Appetit (a copy of which is unconvincingly placed inLecter's cell for a rather flat joke). He is an amateur artist whocompensates for the aesthetic boredom of incarceration by drawingthe Palazzo Vecchio, the Duomo of Florence, parodies of Renaissance masterpieces.4 He sneers at Starling's badges of class-hergood bag and her cheap shoes-with epigrammatic panache. Hemurders two men while listening to a tape of the GoldbergVariations.Lecter's brutal dandyism has distinct erotic undertones. His cannibalism is a literalizing return to the atavistic origins of sexualdesire: the craving for the flesh that gives the feeling of satiety. Hisability to comprehend and manipulate other people's eroticism isastonishingly polymorphous; for example, he verbally compels theprisoner who hisses at Starling to swallow his own tongue. In thefilm, Lecter's reading includes J. D. McClatchy; in the book, theItalian edition of Vogue. The evidence may be as strong as a scentand just as disembodied: Hannibal Lecter is a gay dandy.The dandy's deliberate cultivation of a sense of self invested not infictions of commodified power but in style, gesture, irony, and parody both marginalizes him within a world governed by exchangerelations and privileges him as a unique and therefore - within theterms of that world- authentic personality. With the medicalization of sexuality, the dandy and the deviant hom*osexual were by theend of the nineteenth century all but identified with each other asfrightening, antithetical versions of the stable, autonomous bourgeois subject, who enters exchange relations as a professional. Thegay dandy subverts his own commodification and classification withhis dangerous uselessness, his exquisite sense perception, his socialand erotic production of nothing more than style. In the openingsection of Minima Moralia (appropriately entitled, "For Marcel Proust," a consummate gay dandy), Theodor Adorno describes thedouble-edged threat of the unprofessional personality:The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become'practical', a business with strict division of labour, departmentsand restricted entry. The man of independent means who choosesit out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will notbe disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He isnot a 'professional', is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as adilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if
Page 356356 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWhe wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutelyblinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspendthe division of labour which, within certain limits, his economicsituation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposedby society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishingmind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiatesthe division of labour- if only by taking pleasure in his workmakes himself vulnerable by its standards in ways inseparablefrom elements of his superiority.5Is Lecter, a figure of aristocratic privilege, aesthetic hauteur, andraving self-indulgence, more compelling aesthetically and morallyfor his pure defiance of every authority figure (Dr. Chiltern, JackCrawford, the police) or more abhorrent for the exquisitely disinterested manner in which he clubs a man to death? While Lecter maybe a more interesting, complex, and sympathetic character thanBuffalo Bill, does he play upon anything other than the same classand erotic ideologies in the audience?Privileging the hom*osexual dandy as a figure who defiantly resiststhe administered world problematically assumes that a marginalized sexuality is in some sense authentically oppositional. In VolumeOne of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault conversely arguesthat marginalized sexualities are created by power which anathematizes them.6 Thus a Foucaultian reading of The Silence of the Lambswould emphasize all of the ways in which Lecter recuperates thepower and privilege which are too explicitly exercised and recognizable in characters such as Crawford and Chiltern; it would portrayhis relations to Starling and Gumb as means of exploring those characters' ambivalently differentiated relation to power. However,such a reading subsumes the aesthetic thrill of Lecter's resistancewithin a political analysis of its potential hom*ophobia and classism.If the audience is utterly repelled by Buffalo Bill, it is both fascinated with and horrified by Lecter, who thus embodies howeverambivalently the hope and desire for the reconfiguration of classand sexuality.It is through his own aestheticized attentions that Lecter holdsopen to Starling the possibility of transformation and resistance.While Chiltern and more minor characters are interested in hersexually, and Crawford is interested in her professionally, Lecter's
Page 357ADRIENNE DONALD 357feelings for her are fundamentally disinterested, a point which hesardonically makes when, as she visits him one last time, he says,"People will say we're in love." While she begs him for Buffalo Bill'strue identity, he makes her retell the story of her own, by reconstructing with her an account of her victimization. In effect, hedevotes their last minutes together to redeeming her slightly boring,slightly unconvincing account of her professionalism by translatingit into an explanation of why she feels compelled to rescue BuffaloBill's latest victim. As before, the narrative is a cliche: soon afterarriving at her uncle's and aunt's ranch, she tried to save a screamingspring lamb from slaughter. At Lecter's insistence, she recognizes inher desire to be an FBI agent her empathy with innocent suffering,which will always exist and will always haunt her. Lecter shows herthat she wants to be like Jack Crawford and have his power becauseshe cannot help but identify with Buffalo Bill's powerless victims.Starling wants clues about a killer; she also gets from Lecter anempathetic attention which sees personal dignity in her ambition.Lecter's counter-transference - which is, of course, highlyunprofessional - results in his disinterested love for Starling. Whenhe finishes the story of the lambs for her, describing the nightmaresthat awaken her still, her eyes fill with tears even while she demandsBuffalo Bill's real name. Lecter thanks her, and when he looks upand then down to say hello to the approaching Dr. Chiltern, his owneyes have tears in them. Before she is escorted from the room, hecalls her back, saying she's forgotten her case file and in passing itthrough the bars to her, while the police with Chiltern drag heraway (one of her few moments of defiance), his index fingermomentarily caresses hers.After that scene, while Starling dwindles into a white-collarstereotype, Lecter is crucially transformed by his disinterested lovefor her. He thanks her, with a quiet nod of his head, for the closureof memory. His tears well up both in empathy with hers and inanticipation of losing her, when Chiltern arrives. Like the gesture ofa secret lover whose touch momentarily overcomes obstacles andsurveillance, his tiny caress of farewell reveals the pleasure ofmutual recognition, rather than of possession and domination. Atthe moment when he must let her go, Lecter abandons, if for just amoment, his psychological and literal cannibalization of others byloving the one person in the film who cannot sustain (however muchshe tries) an identification with the power of the administeredworld. While Starling may identify with Buffalo Bill's victims, Lec
Page 358358 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWter recognizes rather than identifies with her. To paraphrase JessicaBenjamin's description of mutual recognition, he accepts Starling'sotherness but nonetheless feels for and with her; he is compensatedfor his loss of absolute power by the pleasure of communion withher.7 And the recognition is mutual. After Lecter escapes, Starling isunconcerned for her safety because, as she tells her roommate, Lecter would not be so rude to attack her. He himself tells her in theirlast conversation, "The world's more interesting with you in it." Allhe wants is for her to be.The concept of recognition, rather than of identification, enables areading not only of Lecter's love for Starling and of the film's movement away from its hom*ophobic representation of Buffalo Bill butalso of the film's sexual politics in general. The dangerous, rather thanliberating, power relations in The Silence of the Lambs- Starling'srelation to Crawford, Buffalo Bill's relation to women- are foundedon false identifications whereas Starling and Lecter's moment ofmutual recognition eroticizes and subverts the barriers of prison cells,professionalism, even sexual orientation which divide- and perhapsalign- them. For just as the disinterestedness of his love is groundedin his sexual indifference to her as a woman, so Starling's disinterestedness is grounded in her indifference to or toleration of the horrors ofhis psychosis. Starling and Lecter's recognition reveals and affirmstheir difference from each other, as well as from other people. Byempathetically recounting Starling's recurrent nightmare, Lectershows that he can be moved by a vulnerability which he himself doesnot possess. Similarly, Starling's ability to "read" his riddles, anagrams, manners, and desire suggests her interpretive familiarity withthe language of shared secrets and silent acknowledgement. After all,a closeted person is implicitly recognized by some, but not all; issomeone who is known speculatively by action and relations ratherthan by identity. It could thus be asserted about Starling and Lecter,with as much certainty as it could be asserted about any other suchcouple, that she is a closeted lesbian and he is a gay dandy. It couldalso be argued that criticism of Jodie Foster's appearance in a filmostensibly without positive images of gays and lesbians is perfectlywrong: unlike identification, which enforces similarity, recognitionrespects and preserves differences both between individuals as well asbetween them and their impersonal masks, whether they be of professionalism or aestheticism. Those who assert that Foster herself is closeted in the film thus unwittingly register the power of recognition.The film's final moment of recognition occurs not so much between
Page 359ADRIENNE DONALD 359its characters but between itself and the audience. Just after her graduation from the Academy, Starling receives a call from Lecter, who ison a tropical island. As a final joke, he tells her that he's having an oldfriend for dinner; and we see, as Starling cannot, Dr. Chiltern- thesad*st who tortured him, who made passes at Starling, whose vanity ismatched by his stupidity and aggression - whom Lecter is evidentlyabout to kill and eat. The line makes audiences cheer; it makes Lectera hero. At that point, his cannibalism is no longer a threat to Starlingand to us but is a form of subversive energy turned against a figure ofadministered life. His appetite is for, rather than simply of, evil; themurderous gay dandy for at least a moment represents for the audience the possibility of a cultural subversiveness which aligns ratherthan divides him from Starling at her most resolute-the West Virginia woman struggling against sexism, poverty, and death. Ofcourse, the greatest change isn't in Lecter - it's in the audience whichat the beginning of the film is aligned with the administrative apparatus supervising Starling and which at the end of the film cheersLecter on to a dinner in which he'll be eating yet another man. Whathad been a source of fear and revulsion at the beginning of the filmbecomes a liberating ideal. The audience's desire for terror can beseen at that moment not only as a potentially horrifying, masoch*sticworship of power which overwhelms the viewer but as the subversive,thrilling pleasure of imagining the forbidden.Hannibal Lecter is an odd figure to encounter on the way to liberation; why tout a final scene of rebellious evil eating away at evilauthority? I suspect, too, that those who found Buffalo Bill a viciousstereotype will not be happier thinking of Hannibal the Cannibal as agay dandy. Delighting in a fiendish gay killer is ultimately not thatmuch different from hating him, if it means identifying his ambivalent power with his marginalized sexuality. Nor is Starling's dispiriting fate of becoming a successful FBI agent more encouraging. Atbest, Lecter and Starling mark only provisional moments of liberatingrecognition.But what more could one ask of a film? We turn to the passingdistractions of art not for a substitute for the world but for a shockthat will make us recognize our desire for another world. For Adorno,the fantasy element of art which rejects reality offers the hope of amelancholy utopianism: "Truth is inseparable from the illusory beliefthat from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come" (121-122). The viewers who cheer Hannibal Lecter'sfinal scene in The Silence of the Lambs both register the burden of
Page 360360 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWliving in the administered world of work, governed by all of our Dr.Chilterns, and recognize, as much in Lecter's love for Starling as inhis appetite for his warder, the hope of being without work.NOTESFor their reactions which immeasurably improved this essay at various stages of its composition, I thank Eduardo Cadva, LawrenceDanson, Maria DiBattista, Claire Fowler, Jonathan Freedman, Walter Hughes, David Kaufmann, and Sherri Wolf.1Larry Kramer and Stephen Harvey, "Writers on the Lamb," The Village Voice, 5March 1991: pp 49, 56; David J. Fox, "Gays Decry Benefit Screening of 'Lambs'," LosAngeles Times, 4 Feb 1991: p. F9; "Gossip Watch," Outweek, 27 February 1991: pp.44-45, 60, and 6 March 1991: pp 58-59.2According to Magali Larson, the modern professional emerged during the nineteenth century with economic qualifications invested in a definition of personalityostensibly free of specific class definitions yet nonetheless anchored within monopolisticcultural institutions. See The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1977) pp 14-15.3Although Starling's sexuality is not made explicit, she keeps all interested men atarm's length. On the other hand, toward the end of the movie she repeats with theblack woman who is her roommate at the Academy, Lecter's advice (taken fromMarcus Aurelius) on the first principles in finding Buffalo Bill: "What need does heserve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what wesee every day." With each sentence, the camera cuts back and forth in reverse angleshots of the women's faces, looking at each other with growing revelatory excitement.The scene would seem to suggest that they, too, covet what they see every day. Whilethe reasons for reading Starling as a closeted lesbian will become clearer later in theessay, for the moment it is enough to say that heterosexual eroticism is only an obstacleand a danger for her throughout the film.4Later in the film, he draws Starling, swathed in drapery, holding a lamb. It wouldbe generous to describe the picture as "cheesy" and it represents a failure of taste whichI would rather ascribe to the film's set designer than to Lecter himself. I will admit,however, that Lecter's aesthetic tends toward Walter Pater's more lurid excesses.5Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N.Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974) p. 21.6See for example Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980) p. 48.7One of the more helpful discussions of identity, domination, and recognition can befound in Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and theProblem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
Charles WrightWright, Charles"Not Everyone Can See the Truth, But He Can Be It"Vol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.361http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:08
Page 361CHARLES WRIGHT"NOT EVERYONE CAN SEE THE TRUTH,BUT HE CAN BE IT"Sunday. It's always Sunday.Rifts and seams of dark birdsRight-flank and wheel across a darker December skySouthwest and so wide.Winter solstice again,burnt end of a narrow road.The lawn chairs gutter and glare in their white solitude.How short the days are.How imperceptibly we become ourselves -like solstice-diminishing lightDevolving to one appointed spot,We substitute and redressIn predetermined degrees we've neither a heart nor hand in.How slowly the streetlights come on.How shrill the birds are.Take off your travelling clothes andlay down your luggage,Pilgrim, shed your nakedness.Only the fire is absorbed by the Holy of Holies.Let it shine.361
Charles WrightWright, CharlesAs Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn Into LightVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.362http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:09
Page 362362 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWAS OUR BODIES RISE, OUR NAMESTURN INTO LIGHTThe sky unrolls like a rug,unwelcoming, gun-gray,Over the Blue Ridge.Mothers are calling their children in,mellifluous syllables, floating sounds.The traffic shimmies and settles back.The doctor has filled his truck with leavesNext door, and a pair of logs.Salt stones litter the street.The snow falls and the wind drops.How strange to have a name, any name, on this poor earth.January hunkers down, the icicle deep in her throatThe days become longer, the nights ground bitter and cold,Single grain by single grainEverything flows toward structure,last ache in the ache for God.
Tess GallagherGallagher, TessFable of A KissVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.363-364http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:10
Page 363TESS GALLAGHERFABLE OF A KISSI was lonely. Very shortlyI was lonely again.I found myself in my mother's orchardbut she was nowhere about.I pulled a plumfrom her plum tree and took a bite.It was bitter, mixed witha puzzling unripeness of my ownthat made me feel I had lost everything.Birds came and went from the trees.A brown snake slid into the iris bed.I took a vicious bitefrom the plum. It seemed to knowit had fallen to my hard jawand participated in its violent addition.My mouth ached: the plum fleshshoved itself along in me.I ate it down to the shaggy pitwhere loneliness changes to solitude,and what was bitter slipsinto another register, a woman'sfootsteps, her kisson the forehead,which for the motheris another mouth.Even if she is missing,perhaps long dead, the storyof her one-time child363
Tess GallagherGallagher, TessNo FingertipsVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.364http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:11
Page 364364 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWunder a plum treeis a kind of snare to press the lipsof the mind against, an inexactcomfort that is also a pangand a forfeitas the ceremony of the ever-unloved heartunfolds, contracts, unfolds.NO FINGERTIPSAll day the cat has behaved strangely, pausingto stare back at the doorway as ifsomeone stands there but doesn'tapproach. I look too, inhabit the blankyou widen attentively with silence.For an instant you've turnedmy head. Yes, you still have poweron earth, and though I've stopped expecting tofind you here when I come in, the houseis quicksilver so I listen beside the truth.He's in, I think. In.
Edoardo AlbinatiAlbinati, EdoardoSalvation by MistakeVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.365-372http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:12
Page 365EDOARDO ALBINATISALVATION BY MISTAKEI was having my teeth worked on, and, to take my mind off thepain, my dentist told me his fascinating life history.My dentist's name is Baldassare Z., and I'll just keep the Z so asnot to be indiscreet. He's of Czech origin but was born in Italy,either in Venice or Vicenza. Or else he was brought here when verylittle. I haven't been able to make that out for sure, but it doesn'tmatter. Baldassare is deliberately vague about it. He's an old man,exceptionally old, with very fine teeth and white hair. His nervousgood-humor comes from his considering his life to be over and fromhis looking at it from the outside with a certain sense of satisfaction.Or perhaps indulgence. He takes it out of a drawer, turns it and returns it, and then puts it back in its place. Yet he has a beautiful andyoung wife, and is healthy and rich. The type of wife that a guestfinds desirable, who takes his breath away, in short. (I'm speaking ingeneral, I've never actually seen her.) I go to him quite simplybecause, for two years now, out of the blue, my teeth have beencrumbling into pieces, while I'm eating, or even when I just drinksomething cold. There's no explanation for it in the medical books,not a word. I've swallowed down every kind of mineral tonic there isbut my teeth have just kept right on exploding. What's needed nowis a craftsman to put them back together again, and Baldassare is agenuine master, with an inclination toward art, aided perhaps byhis artistic physique. In fact, he has beautiful hands, strong andslender fingers, faded and spotted by age.Last month, he was putting a course of tiny screws into my jawwhen he begins the following story.I lived in Venice, was twenty-two years old and happy, thoughrestless. Despite all appearances, happiness and restlessness can coexist, don't you think? - or maybe the one actually presupposes the365
Page 366366 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWother. I was a student of the arts. I frequently fell in love. My familywas powerful and rich, but plagued by an occurrence, convulsed bya shudder, which originated at its head. Every six years, with regularity, my father would go mad. He would lose control of himself,for a few days or a few months. I had already witnessed two of thesecritical cycles of his, but my older brothers, for example, Giuseppe,the eldest, had practically lost track of the times they had seen theirfather grow somber, seen him become uneasy and, then, in a greatand uncontrollable fury, suddenly fling himself at his wife andthrow her from the house. During these attacks my father possessedall the strength of a Hercules, and the rage that had got its grips onhim would brook no one approaching or touching him. A certainmale-nurse knows this for a fact because he ended up a cripple whenthe unassailable old man let him have a tremendous kick, and ourfamily administrator knows it for a fact too because he had to paythe fellow a decent pension for the rest of his life. As I said, thevictim of my father's madness, the preordained victim, was his wifeor, in any case, the woman who was living with him at the time. Hisfirst wife lasted twelve years, or two times around, let's say: she wasdriven out once but had the fortitude to come back home and pickup where she had left off- and also because my father had becomehis good, sweet self again, but the second time, six years later, shebarely escaped with her life. My father threw her down the stairwell. Afterwards, he was the same gentle and self-possessed man healways was: he remembered nothing of his violent fits of anger, andhe got married again, to a woman who laughed a good deal when,with the next due-date approaching, an old housekeeper told her,confidentially, the way things stood and what would happen beforetoo long. She was beaten, stabbed in the palm of the hand with aletter opener, and driven out. My mother would have been next. Asimple girl with good manners, she had time to give birth to me andrun away before the cataclysm. I never saw her again and her nameis never mentioned in family conversations. Since she wasn't married, I am, strictly speaking, her illegitimate son. Last of all, beforethe episode I want to tell you about, came a young Austrian woman,whom my father married at the tender age of sixteen (in the meantime, the second wife had died in the United States, in a buildingcollapse), and whom he loved greatly and sincerely. I was nine orten years old when mama fell ill, though not seriously, with tuberculosis, and went away for treatment; and the sanatorium, besidescuring her, removed her from the punctilious violence of her hus
Page 367EDOARDO ALBINATI 367band, who, the object of his fury being out of reach, gave vent to itin a single night. After the crisis, which, for the very reason that itwas brief, was extremely violent - my father went so far as to sh*t onmy mama's clothes and linen, which he then showed, sneering, toeveryone as proof of her incontinence - once the crisis was over, myfather set out on a journey to the sanatorium where for a month heshowered love and attention on the woman whom, a little before, hewould gladly have strangled with a silk stocking.He was most affectionate.He was, in effect, a kindly and reserved man, with a very largebuild and seemingly embarrassed by the intimidation that his sizeinspired in other people.Mysteriously, six years later, nothing took place. Nothing happened. As occurs every once in a while to women in their secret andsomewhat repugnant cycle, my father skipped over his time withouteven being aware of the date which we were all waiting for withclenched fists. The year flew by, quietly, quickly, notwithstandingthe long and lingering glances that fell on my father whenever hewrinkled his brow reading a bill from the tailor, and on New Year'sDay, Giuseppe, the other brothers and I especially, for I was veryfond of mama, relaxed our aching fists.It had passed.After this came a rather strange time. We were not convinced, notcompletely convinced, that the danger had been avoided; in itswake was left a feeling of uncertainty. For various but good reasonsmy brothers all left home. Giuseppe died of consumption. I was theonly one left in the house with my parents, and, in all honesty,things were very good indeed for me. I led the slightly bohemian lifeof a privileged and gifted young man. Now it was easy women,prostitutes, now it was stimulants and drugs (and it goes withoutsaying they were drugs of the intellectual sort), now it was feelingsof remorse, immediately squandered in some new and droll adventure. That life of mine could have lasted forever, but I was the onewho forced it to yield every so often to periods of great and seriousendeavor. Then, for several months, I would throw myself into mystudies and, till late at night, apply myself to writing, note-taking,translating, drawing, planning works and monuments, bindingbooks, scribbling notes and commentaries in the margins, withoutmeeting any of my friends and barring the window whenever theycame in a cohort to tempt me, with inviting shouts and taunts,especially during the summertime.
Page 368368 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWI shaved my head bald, the way Gericault did to make himselfugly in the eyes of anyone who might want to distract him from hiswork. I won't say that I accomplished nothing in that period of greatdedication: a few poems, a number of songs in the Renaissance style,and especially some caricatures of famous citizens drawn in indiaink found their way out of my cell, how, I don't know; and theybegan to circulate, to be seen roundabout, sung, recited with greatsuccess. At the very time I was withdrawing from my seclusion, mypopularity was rising. My encloisterments, which, I swear, were inearnest, very much in earnest, became the subject of exaggeratedand fashionable talk.Finally, dead tired and drained, with my hair standing straightup on my head, an inch or so in length, like pins, I went back to myold way of life, which I spent gathering in the success that hadripened in my absence.Relations with my parents were excellent. My mother looked onat my extravagances benevolently; perhaps she thought that something of her temperament, too vague and unassertive to overcomethe encumbrances of her sex, had been transferred to me and that Ihad the necessary strength to bring it to fruition in some way orother. And she was patiently waiting for those fruits to appear. Myfather too was waiting, perhaps more restlessly. And even morerestlessly, I was waiting for him.I was waiting for him to go mad again.The trouble with this world is that, if you smoke a cigar, rightaway people say that you are "a cigar-smoker." If you do somethingor other, in a certain sense you do it forever. It becomes your symboland your destiny.My father was not sick or mad, yet he was. A person can act like amadman and be one too or act normally and, in reality, be a madman, or worse yet, and this was the case of my father, act like amadman and not be one- and this is really the height of madness.Its paradox. Here is the absurd thing, in madness: the returns tonormalcy, which make a person sicker, because madness itselfemerges debased, ridiculous, and normal life proceeds in doubt, in astate of constant alert, something like the shadow of someoneunknown which is cast out from behind a street corner, a long, longshadow which cuts the street, which perhaps disappears if you stepon it with your foot - or perhaps it eats your foot, your leg, swallowsyou up into the dark. At one time, the shadow seemed to walk atyour side, in step with you, or to run ahead, far away, vanish...
Page 369EDOARDO ALBINATI 369Now it has made an about-face...it is coming toward you...youare inside it, it has you covered, it is swallowing you up.There it is again.In the sky of my father's life, in that empty, clear sky, a single littlecloud cast a sidelong shadow and this shadow was enormous. Fearsome. The shadow of that cursed cigar. My father was a condemnedman.I knew that his crisis would take place according to its usualrhythm, picking up the skipped beat again in regular time. Often,before plunging into delirium, Giuseppe had told me, my fatherwould go through a period of great patience and gentleness. It was asignal. The already kindly features of my father's face would soften.He would become more gentlemanly and gracious toward his guests,he would fervently kiss my mother's hands and arms, on certainoccasions the simple act of the parlor-maid bringing him his hatwould cause his eyes to moisten.This is what Giuseppe had told me.And it was happening again.I had to do something about it.I wrote to Zurich. I won't say to whom, except of course to mention that he was the greatest psychoanalyst alive. I wrote him without going into the particulars of the case upon which I begged himfor an opinion, yet alluding to its very serious nature and to theprobable reluctance of the subject to submit to an examination. Inpoint of fact I wasn't sure what I should say and what I shouldn't.My somewhat haphazard studies had conducted me close to the quidof the psyche's problems, had let me touch upon it, yet I possessed noexpertise. The figure of my deranged father would superimposeitself upon the theory which I was endeavoring to grasp, and cancelit out. I was immersed in fog. I was unable to go beyond a literaryapproximation; for example, while reading a number of famousclinical cases, I would dwell upon the stories but then never manageto get down the scientific interpretations, which spoiledeverything.I couldn't stand the idea that terror should be a pretext forpedantics.Perhaps on account of this my pen grew very heavy in my hand,enormous. I struggled to keep it upright and go on with my requestfor help. I was asking a rhabdomancer to change the course of myfather's life, to destroy it, in a certain sense.
Page 370370 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWAnd in those days my father was as calm and gentle as a littlecalf.Six weeks after the letter had been sent, at nine in the morning,the maid conducted two silent and austere gentlemen into the parlor. It was Sunday, and cool, for the additional reason that theshutters were all half-closed and the apartment was bathed in a poolof semi-shadow.I approached the edge of a chink in the sliding door that dividedthe parlor.I could clearly see a younger man with a grave face, seated on achair, a folder on his lap, and, very close to me, but turned away, around and white head, which was all that was visible above theback of the sofa.I deftly drew away.Everything had been contrived so that the visit to my fathershould be conducted, at least at the beginning, under the guise of amedical examination. His languor, the blurring of his faculties, wereexcuse enough for one. But I was terrified by the idea of bringingthings out into the open. When my father would be obliged toconfront, first his violence, then the reasons behind this violence. Iwas hoping in a way that the doctor would discover nothing andleave shaking hands and waving his hat, as after any ordinary Sunday visit.I went to my father's study, to call him. He wasn't there. Perhapshe had stayed in bed. I knocked on the door of his room and entered:he wasn't there. I knocked on the little bathroom door. No oneanswered. I threw it open: the bathroom was empty. Somethingcold and bristling touched me above the temples. I flew down thecorridor to my mother's bedroom, where she was sleeping in herbed, huddled up. She sometimes slept twelve, fourteen hours anight, without ever waking completely rested. Huddled up, sheseemed a little, little woman, like the statue on the lid of a sarcophagus, white and still. I flew down the corridor again. I skidded alongthe smooth marble. A second later I was clutching the moldings ofpapa's bedroom door to keep from falling down. I looked into theroom again. The bed was still made. My father hadn't slept in it. Hehad left during the night. Fled. This time his madness had chosen tounleash its fury outside the family walls.Or...someone had warned him about the visit. My father had
Page 371EDOARDO ALBINATI 371been put on his guard by an informer. Or perhaps he had found outabout it on his own.I don't mean to give too much credit to this hypothesis but I'munable to rule it out either.Onto the same absurd string of events this last pearl might also bestrung: premonition. Otherwise known as telepathy or pure coincidence. My father had fled.I lingered in the hallway. From the parlor came not the slightestrustling. I knew the doctor's schedule was rigidly fixed, and his billunchangeable. The cool wall upon which I was leaning gave me asense of vertigo. Jung was waiting to meet his patient, perhaps hisassistant was drawing a watch from his pocket. I pulled the cuffs ofmy shirt down and straightened my vest and told the parlor-maid tolet the visitors into my father's study. Their patient was on his way.At the end of the session, the doctor touched the base of his nosewith his thumb and index finger, just barely raising his little roundspectacles. His whole, massive body, which was dressed with dignitybut not elegance, which seemed fairly stuffed into his suit, exhaled akind of morose gentleness. First he briefly lamented the fact that, inall probability, we would never see each other again. And thus hecleared the field. Then he concentrated, he fixed his eyes in concentration at the level of my chest. He didn't speak so much now asenunciate. A reflection on his spectacles had hidden his eyes.You are in danger of your life. Your happiness, your well-beingand I should say your health above all are in great jeopardy. Thefreedom which you are permitted to enjoy is, for all intents andpurposes, illusory. This mere semblance of freedom is like a threat toyou. If I may use a poetical expression, and I don't like to, because indoing so I give scope to the evil I wish to eradicate, it is your veryyouth making you ill. However much you declare yourself to berestless, your privileges and talents afford you a perfectly pleasantlife full of meaning, and yet you might die any day now, perhaps byyour own hand. Your suffering is caused by a marvelous intertwining of chance and the givens of your personality. Your vice is inenjoying in a facile way the rewards and disappointments of the oneand the other, but in such doses that you can never, truly never,attain either fullness or emptiness. If someday you should ever toucheither of these two extremes, and you probably will, you would,suddenly, be lost. You would be disgusted by existence, all at onceyou would realize what your brilliance had till then hidden from
Page 372372 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWyou. You are intelligent. This gift has kept you from learning something about yourself which can only be experimented with in a stateof forlornness. And the surroundings in which you live, surroundings favorable to, indeed fanatically supportive of, your intelligence, do nothing but perilously postpone that moment. With thepassage of time, the damage caused by your ignorance, so to speak,will grow, it will form a cyst inside you, yet you will be convincedthat you are doing something worthwhile by closing yourself up in agarret to copy, with a certain ability, the style of others, and to makejest of the universe. I fear the moment, as I've told you, when youwill find yourself face to face with a franker image, for example acompletely and irremediably negative one. I fear that your logicalinsight may, then, condemn you. You may become compassionless,genuinely compassionless. If, suddenly, we are exposed to theessence of things, which, it turns out, is only their vanity, we willnot be able to tolerate this. And we will not be able to toleratehaving been in the dark up till then, about everything. A versatilespirit, like yours, a spirit longing for humanity, can yet turn to stone.It happens to certain soldiers in time of war, and it happens to themost generous, to the most strong. Suddenly they can no longerendure their self-assuredness, their advantage when faced with suffering; and they plunge right into it. When the strength of a selfassured man changes its character it becomes a terrible thing: forothers and for himself. If we tap a beetle with a stick, it stops, drawsits legs in and dies; except that, after a quarter of an hour, it comesback to life and beats a hasty retreat. Men are not always capable ofdoing the same thing.I enjoin you, therefore, to leave this house, this city, your parentsand your affairs, this very day. I repeat, it is a matter of life ordeath. I can say and do no more. Farewell.My doctor withdraws a speculum from my mouth as the doctor inhis story withdraws from the house followed by his assistant, whohas a sizeable check in his briefcase. The ink still fresh. A bit ofblood clotted on the wad of cotton. Baldassare looks down benevolently between my jaws, where he has compiled a small fortune inprecious metal and porcelain in the meantime. At this point I wouldlike to ask whatever became of his father. But I'm unable to, there'sa muzzle of steel over my mouth.Translated from the Italian by John Satriano
Richard FordFord, RichardWhat We Write, Why We Write It, and Who CaresVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.373-389http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:13
Page 373RICHARD FORDWHAT WE WRITE, WHY WE WRITE IT,AND WHO CARESIt's probably not a novelist's proper calling to give lectures. PhilipLarkin called writers standing up in front of audiences, "me pretending to be me." But it's a chance we jump at because it's so mucheasier than writing stories. In lectures, glibness is acceptable, sometimes even appreciated- whereas in actual writing it usually isn't.At the lectern you get "help" from your actual voice and personabeing already more or less in place, whereas in stories you have tostart new every time. The many disparate opinions, biases, vindictivenesses that usually float around useless in your head can in a talklike this be corralled and advertised as: "a far-ranging, widelyreferential, no-holds-barred address stressing the value of Mr. Ford'sage and experience."And finally, of course, in a lecture there's the promise which realwriting doesn't offer: that if the content's no good, or not even there,it'll quickly be forgotten and do no harm as we float off towardco*cktail hour.On the other hand, writing and its more august cousin, literature,are permanent. Once we commit them, they last forever. And, in asense, what I want to talk about commences and ends in that important fact.I've been away from the university for what seems like a longtime - twelve years - and away from this one for nearly sixteen. Butwhen I was here, writing a novel for the first time, and being astuffed-shirt Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, teaching creative writing, and being a cringing preceptor for Mr. Weisbuch'sintroductory literature course, I frankly thought it was just greatThe Hopwood Lecture, 1992373
Page 374374 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWhere. This was before the deconstructionists took a stranglehold onthe Modern Language Association, and started turning students ofliterature against literature. Then, at least, beginning in 1971, itseemed to me that literary study, and literature itself, and "writing"were all part of one continuum, and that I was in the world here -the applause of my colleagues was the world's applause; their disapproval or indifference a credible cultural milieu for the writing Iwas beginning to do. I have no wish to overturn that view now. Iwas encouraged and welcomed here and my status as a non-entitywasn't held against me. I was here to learn, not just to perform.It's true that in the years between then and now my experience ofthe university in general has made me think that literary study,imaginative literature itself, and ongoing writing, are more of acontinuum-by-consent than a manifestation of some natural law.And beyond that, I've been struck by how much of university life isinvolved with the practice of judging-judging others, their acts,their attitudes, making discriminations, assigning moral values, andconversely, by how much of life outside the university is not concerned with that, indeed hardly has time for it.My first evidence of this judging came, in fact, in 1975, when myoffice-mate over in Haven Hall (we'll call him Professor Jones)explained to me one afternoon-one in which in his absence I'ddispensed some good-willed but he thought incorrect "instruction"to some of his students about how to pronounce some MiddleEnglish vowels in The Canterbury Tales, that (he explained) Writersreally didn't belong in the university, that it was not the correctplace for us. We could be here for a while, okay. But we needed, hefelt, to be out living our lives, having adventures, finding things towrite about. I don't remember if he finally said where our placeactually was. Just elsewhere. Out. This-the university-was hisplace. He did seem certain of that.But in truth, I had no body of specialized knowledge to teach. Ihad no controversial research underway requiring the university'sshelter. In fact I had no real care about aiding young women andmen to become writers-especially not at the expense of my owndesires, which were to write novels. It may just've been as EudoraWelty wrote about herself, that I "lacked the instructing turn ofmind." And so, shortly after this conversation and for reasons relatedto it, I departed the university. It was, as the saying goes, one of my
Page 375RICHARD FORD 375"earliest influences," one of the negative ones I had to try to turninto profit.So, I know acutely -and poignantly on a day like today -thatnow is an influential time in the life of you young writers. Thebarely conscious convictions you begin to form now about whor*ads, and how well, and where's the ideal destination for yourwork, what are the right elevations to set for your seriousness ofpurpose, and what should you be writing about, and what publictolerance for your work can you rely on-where's your "place" inother words - these'll have to direct and console you for your wholelife.Thinking about these same things, myself, I sense in the Americanair now an unhappy censoriousness - something much differentfrom when I began writing stories in the sixties, even though Ithought I began at a time of relative aesthetic and political tumult.But from all angles I hear people saying "no" to someone else. Wecan hear it in our politics and political processes: people telling uswhat we can't do. Few people seem willing to admit or say "yes" tomuch of anything; and both as a cause and as an effect, there's awide feeling of bad apprehension and distaste for current life, anational feeling actually of powerlessness even to perceive accurately our private lives; a hunger for governance; a lack of courage.In many parts of America the powers that be would rather you ownand use a Mac-10 than The Catcher in the Rye.Obviously, this censoriousness is perceptible in the arts; and notjust in the high administrative levels which control, for instance, theNEA and the NEH, but a censoriousness among ground-levelcommentators- often novelists themselves -saying "no" to this,"no" to that, unable it seems to like something without dislikingsomething else - a habit more typical of critics than artists.*Tom Wolfe complains in Harper's magazine that there are actually good subjects and bad ones, and practically all contemporarynovels but the one he wrote are neurasthenic because they don'tchoose-or at least he doesn't perceive them to have chosen-toreflect recent social history or economics or immigration patterns -the way he thinks Balzac did, or Trollope.*Edward Hoagland, the distinguished essayist, complains inEsquire that very little's good at all in current American literature.*Patricia Hampl complains inexplicably in the New York Timesthat there's something second-rate about writing in the first person.
Page 376376 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW*Madison Bell complains that minimalism (whatever that is) haseroded the longueurs within the American narrative impulse-theantidote being to write like Peter Taylor, or by implication, like Mr.Bell, himself.It is, I hardly need to say, a Republican mood-pinched andconservative, peremptory and uncharitable, dismissive and afraid, anational temper in which it's appealing to shout art down. Thoughsimultaneously, of course, in such an unpretty national temper, thearts take on a very special and resuscitative responsibility (a badtime in the world is often a good time for art). Indeed, in thesemoments of powerlessness the impulse to write or read a novel oughtto be a saving impulse.Consequently, I've thought to myself from time to time lately thatit might be hard starting out writing today-during a period inuniversities when stories and novels were reduced to being texts saidto mean the opposite of what they evidently mean and what theirprivileged authors rashly thought they meant; when literature wastreated as bankrupt and boring, and a writer a figure of fun forwriting it; and when what you thought was no good was actuallydeemed excellent - only you weren't the right race or the right sexual orientation or the right gender to understand what excellence is.I know I'm sensitive to this peculiar air we all breathe and that'ssupposed to inspire us: I write novels myself, and this mood influences my work and how I think about literature, just as I'm surewhether you know it or not it influences you - influences what youchoose to write about, what you will and won't take credit for, whatyou believe literature is and what it isn't. It's certain that some ofwhat feels like moral imperative now will pass, and seem like avogue in five years. So, it's important for us all to decide- by looking closely at the world and at language-what's worth acceptingand what's not.I have a friend who teaches at a major Eastern university nearBoston. He's a writer like I am, and he teaches creative writing. Andlast autumn, a young male student turned in for class a particularlygraphic story in which a good deal of heterosexual fornication wasdescribed in vivid documentary detail culminating in an act of climactic anal intercourse. The story was read and given if not exactlyloving at least respectful treatment by the class, except for a youngwoman who said that such writing as this was not literature, andshouldn't even be allowed into the dignity of class discussion.
Page 377RICHARD FORD 377Women were being degraded in this story, she felt. She thereafterwent home and wrote and turned in for class an even more vivid anddetailed story of heterosexual roguery also eventuating in a climacticanal intercourse-which I guess is now the ne plus ultra inheterosexuality- whereupon the class and my novelist frienddeemed this her best work.But the young woman was stricken. She felt she'd written herstory as a protest, to outrage and anger her colleagues and to illustrate for them their errors by putting them into the distressing placeshe'd occupied before: certainly a time-honored use for literature.She felt she'd carefully calculated the response of her audience, yetunfortunately she'd been wrong-which is, of course, one, thoughonly one measure of writing's success or excellence.My friend told me this story a bit in the Art Linkletter spirit of"kids saying the darndest things." We were both of us amused. Butwe were surprised by the events as a small but serious piece of ethicalbusiness. The young woman in question (and it might as easily havebeen a young man) had failed to appreciate not only that her claimto write such a story in protest was equal to the previous youngman's claim to write his to titillate or annoy. She likewise seemed notto appreciate what, in fact, was the inspiration for her own story(Larkin wrote once that "One of the reasons one writes is that allexisting books are somehow unsatisfactory"). And beyond that, andeven more worrisome to me, was her choice not only to exercise herfreedom to write what she pleased when it suited her, but also toviolate her own apparent criteria for good literature when she feltshe had a high enough purpose for doing so. I couldn't help feelingat the time the similarity on a small scale to the situation Bret Ellisfaced in publishing American Psycho two years ago - that being abook, curiously enough, more people wished to condemn and suppress than read, but which quickly disappeared not because it wassuppressed but because the culture dealt with it ultimately and proportionately as a book- not as a war-crime.This past September, I took a trip to Sweden, to take part in acolloquium on multiculturalism at the University of Lund. Lund, Iwas told at the time, was Sweden's Yale. Whereas Uppsala was itsHarvard. I never found out where its Michigan was. And, this iswhat writers do now instead of going to war, something also easier
Page 378378 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWthan writing - colloquializing in foreign countries. Spreading American influence.Present in Lund were a "Native American Female Poet"; a"Native American Male Professor" from the University of San Diego;a Fulbright Professor of American Studies representing the U.S.State Department -and me. And while we were addressing as apanel a group of Swedish journalists and students of American culture, giving witness to the convergent and variegated forces of ethnicity and race and gender in our society, I happened to observe thatI was the token Living White Male in our group. And when I saidthis, I noticed a ripple of discomfort go across my colleagues' faces.And in the course of continuing our panel I was asked eventually bythe moderator if I myself had a Native American heritage. And,natch, I did. And thereafter on several occasions I was told that Iwas not really a Token Living White Male, but in fact was arguablya Native American, myself - that is, their kind of Native American,not the kind I already thought I was.This of course was amusing to me since not so long ago, practically everybody I knew was claiming to be part Cherokee as a wayof one-upping somebody else. It became a cultural cliche, afterwhich there dawned a period of rather severe credential checkingand loudly expressed indignity over the Indian's sole ability to speakfor the Indian.In my own family, our Indian-ness was always a subject of somedystrophic unease. My great-grandmother had been born on theOsage Strip in Oklahoma and had married a non-Indian and movedacross the border into Arkansas, where apparently there weren't asmany Indians. Thereafter there was a considerable scramble in mygrandmother's generation to keep their Indian-ness quiet and toseem like what they thought were regular white people - Irish andGermans. This issue eventually devolved upon my mother as ethnicity often does upon succeeding generations: clumsily. From time totime she gave evidence of believing Indians were second-classhumans, but then she would fight you if you said so. There was agood deal of looking at our profiles and wondering if they "seemedIndian," and making wry insider jokes about "Italian Indians" in themovies, and admiring the Navajos for baffling the Japanese cryptographers in World War II, and shaking our heads about what a rawdeal Jim Thorpe got from the Olympic Committee. There even
Page 379RICHARD FORD 379began to be some lack of clarity about whether we were actuallyOsage or Cherokee, ourselves - if indeed we were Indians at all.But here now in Sweden I was being unexpectedly conscriptedinto the tribe, so to speak, and for reasons I had to think about, sinceI hadn't wanted to be. And the reason I felt I was being made an adhoc member - I came to believe this later - was not so much so I'dfeel at one with anybody, but so that I'd feel I spoke for others andnot just for myself, or for whomever I might've thought I spoke for;and, importantly, so that I would try to calculate or modulate whatI said in behalf of not offending the putative beliefs of unnamedothers.I'd been made part not just of a tribe, but of a special interestgroup, which depending on the Indian or the professor you spoke to,had a way of looking at things, and perhaps a way of lookingaskance at or of casting aspersions on non-members. Somethingabout me -my good will or my complex sense of myself, or myfreedom from some cultural biases and cliches, or indeed my ownexperience with my own past, or maybe just my willingness to seemyself as I chose to, wasn't exactly being credited.And I didn't like that, no more than I like hearing somebody saywhat should or shouldn't be read. Not that I wanted to speak for allLiving White Males any more than I wanted to speak for NativeAmericans - whom I wasn't very familiar with as a group. I was infact just making a little multicultural joke-jokes being a rare commodity in multicultural circles.As a writer, I don't believe in "groups." Generalities -aboutwomen or men, or blacks or whites -have never been sufficientlyconsistent with my experience. A kind of truth-telling god lives onlyin details for me. That's one of literature's appealing conceits - thatit is specific and often takes as one of its challenges to test withdetails (even invented details) the truth of conventional wisdom,and even to supplant that putative wisdom if it's found lacking.What I wanted was to speak not for my group but simply frommyself-even if I might've been wrong, offensive, or finally chastised. Indeed, I wanted to imagine not what made me or Nativepeople special; but what made me- a non-native- like them. Whatmade us alike.To me this is what multiculturalism is worth - in colloquiums andin writing short stories and novels: it's an invitation to imagine moremeticulously the distinctions and similarities which make us able to
Page 380380 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWshare the planet together; it's an opportunity to challenge and ifneed be break the hold of conventional wisdom, of history, and tocomplicate our responses on behalf of extending the benefice of sympathy to others who aren't just like us but may be more like us thanwe know. Good intentions, of course, don't make good literature.There's still the obligation in exercising free sway about humanity toget it right. But I'd rather risk doing my best and getting it wrongand being ignored and castigated than to be scared off by what aUniversity of Chicago sociologist recently referred to as the "hegemonic vision of single-minded interest groups," which-to me-isnothing but a lower form of ward-heeling, small-time power politicswhere truth is not the goal.To my mind, one good definition of a political issue is an important human issue somebody decides to treat politically, just as apolitical novel is a piece of persuasive art somebody decides to treatas politics. There's a sentiment which says you can't just speak fromyourself, that you can only represent your group, and all is politics.Be that as it may be, those determinations are usually made after thefact of artistic utterance, in an attempt to influence the future. AndI merely try not to be misled about my own first principle: that I'mresponsible for my book, and nobody else is.During the writing of five books and a relatively short time aswriter-sixteen years since the first novel I wrote was publishedI've had my share of influential forces worked on me. And in thattime I've tried to be faithful and stay alert to what I was ignorant ofso I could see my miscues and not go on making them. But, I've beenaccused of being a racist in the New Yorker because a reviewerthought a character in The Sportswriter had insensitive racial views.I've been accused off and on of having "problems with women,"though my accusers were almost always men. I've been accused ofbeing cruel to animals any number of times, and of condescendingto the "lower classes," although I don't believe in class distinctions.I've been accused of writing "male books," of being a phony westerner, a failed southerner, and to having no right even to writeabout the people I've written about. I've been told in print, in theWashington Post, that I actually had no subject at all and shouldquit writing; and that a rather simple-seeming book of mine which Ithought was just about a young Montana boy growing up in theworld, being abandoned at home with his mother and once inadvertently seeing her naked one night, was actually a book about
Page 381RICHARD FORD 381incest--an accusation which I didn't think was true but whichfrankly troubled me.I've had it the other way, too: some good reviews that said I wasdoing a good job-though I don't mean to confuse book reviewswith serious judgment. My friend Joyce Carol Oates has told me onseveral occasions that I wrote very strong and good and convincingfemale characters. I often find myself clinging to that endorsem*ntlike a piece of thin driftwood. And if it's true I attribute it to givingmy female characters as many good dialogue lines - lines that possess drama or the potential for affecting human action - as I give tomy male characters.Once, indeed, I wrote a story in which a little Anglo-Canadiangirl tells a young Blackfeet boy that "An Indian is just another bumpin the road to me." And shortly after that I got a phone call from aprofessor at the University of North Carolina wanting to know whatI knew about "young Indian men lying out on public highways atnight," since his research showed this was a frequent cause of deathamong male native Americans. I had to tell him that I hadn't doneany research on the subject. I'd just hit upon that line one morning,liked it and left it in the story trusting that if I could think of it,somebody'd certainly already done it. In other words, I'd just madeit up without knowing so much about Indians, but having spent mylife paying attention to human beings. Such, I guess, is the uncannypower of the imagination if not reliably to find truth - at least toshed light on new facts, which if we're persuaded by them becometruth.To bring this set of concerns down to a less politically-sensitivelevel, I think of writing about humans somewhat as I think of writing about places. In Kim Townsend's biography of Sherwood Anderson he claims that Anderson wrote so well about northern Ohiobecause he hadn't lived there in a long time and had forgotten allabout it. Anderson invented Ohio using bits of memory, and using ahabit and affection for language with which to give literary body tothe strong, unarticulated feelings and torques he was subject to. Andit's somewhat in this way that many writers make characters, recognizing as Paul West wrote about Robbe-Grillet, that language is a"uniquely human and subjective thing to begin with, and it cannever with utter authority reveal the nature of anything," peopleand places included, though language can certainly invent what wethen believe.
Page 382382 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWThe impulse to choose a line of dialogue which eventually will beunderstood as a component of a character is in some ways similar tothe impulse to choose, for example, to set your story in a place calledWinesburg, or in Great Falls. Admittedly, in the case of Great Falls,there's a town out there on the plains of Montana. But the GreatFalls in my stories bears more resemblance to Anderson's Winesburgthan to some actual place: it's made up principally of its nameGreat Falls, a two-word combination I like (the long A sound givingway to the short A; an appealing iambic or, if you choose, trochaicfoot; the idiosyncratic picture it puts in my head; the appearance ofits letters on the page - these among other qualities I ascribe to it).These spontaneous, sensory, rather less-cognitive considerationsare close to how I chose the line I had my little Canadian girl say toher Indian friend and that then became part of her character andhis, and turned out to be the object of someone's "distinguishedresearch": I just liked the line. I thought it was vivid, raw, memorable, funny.I chose Great Falls, in fact, before I'd never been to the actualplace or knew much about it. I just sensed for some of the reasonsI've just said, that it was for me what the poet Richard Hugo called a"Triggering Town"-a name, a place that provoked me to writesentences and from whose earthly actuality I needed to be free so Icould write something new.Later on, of course, I'm free to return to my sentences, as we do. Ican decide if I want to use Great Falls, if it makes sense, if I'm usingit in an interesting way; or, in the other case, if I want to be theauthor of a line that says, "An Indian is just a bump in the road tome"; does it mean, if I write it, I have to believe that sentimentmyself? Can this woman's character survive it? Can the story go onto something redeeming? Okay, maybe I'm compensating, in myunconscious, for an ambiguous feeling about my family's disputedNative American heritage, and I'm trying in writing a line like thatto obliterate it. Freudian or multicultural critics can declare aboutthat, if the story's any good, once they've read it.But I wish primarily to be close to that which seems like earlyimpulse - as romantic as it might be - the one that brings words andphrases to my consideration early. It's the impulse Miss Weltydescribed as a writer "writing at his own emergency." I know thatwhen I fret that I've lost it, the "it" is always that - the impulse toassociate freely and haphazardly in language and in the ideas and
Page 383RICHARD FORD 383associations words carry with them, to play loose with the ordinaryways of organizing the world in words.Stephen Spender once wrote in his journal that Louis McNeiceknew everything he thought and had a clear response to everythinghe experienced. But I'm not like that; and I doubt, frankly, ifMcNeice was either. Things come into my rather chaotic mind - bitsof language, self-awareness - and they hide there, swirling and randomly attaching and separating like electrons, coming back, if ever,into consciousness or onto the page sometimes profoundly reconstituted. And it is indeed there, in that inchoate stage of writingwhich-is-actually-thinking, that I suspect great invention and surprise and new intelligence occur. In a writing life in which you tryto keep yourself open to random experience, it's unwanted and alsoimpossible to keep yourself entirely "un-influenced" at this earlystage. But it's at least worthwhile to think where the surprises inyour work come from.I believe-and you probably do, too, at least in principle- thatit's sometimes literature's project to outrage and offend and to shockand upbraid and make readers uncomfortable, and that RandallJarrell was right when he said that we need to be sure our writingoffends the right people. (In reviewing Richard Wilbur's poems in1951, he wrote rather self-interestedly that, "If you never look justwrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right toposterity- every writer has to be to some extent, sometimes, a lawunto himself.")Though putting up personally with being a law unto oneself is anambiguous and often unpleasant and ethically precarious businessfor a writer. On the one hand, of course, we're aided by our ignorance, and by slogans about our putative freedoms. We're tooyoung, many of us, to remember those famous books which were alaw unto themselves and were actually banned- Ulysses, LadyChatterly's Lover, more recently Huckleberry Finn and Catch 22.And then my friend Rushdie; well, we may think, he's sort of anEnglishman and far away, and maybe we didn't think The SatanicVerses was worth it anyway. He certainly outraged the wrongpeople, and has been subject to considerable influences upon hisfreedoms. But maybe we think he should've been more prudent.Myself, in truth, I don't like outraging people, and I don't meanmy work to offend, and actually think that it shouldn't. I worry
Page 384384 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWwhen people say to me I should quit writing, or that I write "male"books. (Though there are other days when I worry that my booksare tame, not offensive enough, and that I'm not a technical innovator). In any case, I don't want to be unduly affected by reactions tomy books such that I might next time decide differently what towrite or not to write. If I continue, I want to feel free to writewhatever I think I can write well. I want my stories, if they can, toaffect readers in the way great literature has affected me: to be theax for the frozen sea within us; to be, as Duirrenmatt wrote, a rebelagainst death.It is one of the privileges of being a writer, and likewise one of itshigh prices, that we intend the effect of what we write to be permanent, and accept responsibility for it. Proportionate to our aspirations, we can't escape responsibility, for example, for those effects ofour writing that naturally and reasonably come into the purview of"multiculturalism," or "race consciousness," or "sexual orientation,"or gender concerns-because, most intimately, those are humanconcerns. And in any case, the world out there, the world that hasno interest in anything as privileged as imaginative writing, has nowordained these concerns as facts.Free as we are, writers do come to these issues- as least in ourwork-differently from other people. Freedom and Art are notinstitutions, and as writers - just as is true of filmmakers or photographers or painters - no one has a claim on us. We employ no one,we give no one tenure, we have no clients, or fiduciary relationships; we're not in loco parentis, and we owe no one fairness unlesswe choose to. Writers are not required to be democratic. And ourobligation is not to flatter you, or to create positive role models, butto try at the height of our aspiration to tell you something you didn'tknow about a subject you care for, and which once you know it,becomes essential. We expect a voluntary audience if we have one atall. And consequent to such freedoms as these, we accept-even ifwe don't exactly relish - marginality in our culture.From time to time, in variable moods, I've wondered how I canmake my stories be more "multicultural," more sensitive. Whom Ican stop oppressing, whom I can appreciate more in my own workplace? Should I have more narrators be women, or maybe Mexicanwomen (though perhaps I can't because I'm not a Mexican womanmyself). Maybe I should have more white males be hoodwinked byclever lesbians who are CEOs of large corporations, or more gay
Page 385RICHARD FORD 385men be brain surgeons, or more African Americans be SupremeCourt Justices.In actual practice, it might suit me to write about a minoritycharacter in an unflattering light, some light which doesn't corroborate all of humanity's best possibilities. I might have a woman getsocked in the mouth, or portrayed as a prostitute. I might decide tohave a living white male depicted as a figure of fun or even killed. Imay diminish one character, f latten another, if I think the wholejustifies it, if I can say to myself that I take this decision proportionate to a high aim, to discovering something important - such as theconnection,, as James wrote, between "bliss and bale." Or if I cananswer affirmatively the question: does my writing it this way makeany good difference in the world?And maybe someone will think any one of these decisions makesmy book no good. And if he does think that, what he can do is notread it. But unless I choose it', he can't stop me.In the news a month ago you might remember there was a storyabout the film Basic Instinct, an especially fatuous and egregious bitof movie prurience. Gay and lesbian groups didn't like this movie,and protested it publicly, threatened to shut down theatres; therehad been efforts to obstruct the actual making of this film by cuttingelectrical lines and disrupting the movie's production. These groupswere offended that lesbians and bisexuals, all of whom I guess theyrepresented, were in the movie depicted as homicidal -which thelesbians and bisexuals actually portrayed in the movie certainlywere.And this strikes me several ways at once. First, I think it's the rightof interested people to protest what they don't like and to make theirfeelings and thoughts known. I think it's at the very least defensiblethat they argue for a benigner public perception - for sympathy. ButI think it is not their right nor is it right forcibly to suppress themaking of this movie or any movie inasmuch as doing so takes theirown freedom and sets it against itself in a stupefying way.Living in and around Mississippi, as I do, I think about MissWelty a lot these days. In a letter to her literary agent in 1942 shecommented upon what she called rival validities, by which shemeant actuality as it's encountered upon the page (in her case, shortstories) and actuality as it's encountered outside of books - actualityin the world so to speak. She was being urged at the time by editors,powerful people in New York who, like movie producers, thought
Page 386386 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWthey were mindful of what were the tastes of the Americanreadership - an urge which almost always establishes a low watermark. They wanted her to write stories that seemed to them "morelike life."Only that wasn't what she cared to do, even at the cost of beingkept out of print. Her belief of course was that her stories - storiesthat offended no one, I suspect - were good the way they were, andthat what was on the page had its own sovereign validity. And whatunderlies her claim is the conviction that what comes to the page isfree-free to be what it is, free from any allegiance to how somebody other than the writer thinks the world or literature is, orshould be, or shouldn't.Art always thrives as some function of freedom, which isn't to saythat oppression will kill it, only impede it, and deprive some of us ofits generosity and its light. To accord others freedom is, however,not such a noteworthy virtue when you agree with what they'redoing. It's only a great virtue when you agree to allow what youdon't like. It is that odd, uneasy, vertiginous quality of art - that itmay surprise you and tell you things you won't like to know - whichmakes it different from politics. And it is also this quality of artwhich makes it so fragile and precious and attractive.When people suppress art -a movie, a book, a collection of photographs showing a representation of Christ in a tray filled withurine - the target of that suppression is usually, at least in this contemporary and moralizing atmosphere, thought to be the artist,who's stopped from making what he wishes to make because hisrights are said to interfere with the passive unspecified rights ofothers. But the actual and more vulnerable victim of such suppression is the audience who's stopped by others from seeing somethingwhich might affect them, stopped from reading what might illuminate the world for them by shocking them, by turning the world orlanguage in a way it never was seen to be and thereby revealing theworld clearly. Indeed, suppressing art stops us even from being ableto exercise a valuable moral or aesthetic judgment by saying, "no, Idon't like that. I see that, and I reject that sensibility. I seek thebeautiful and that's not it."Real censorship -and that's ultimately what we're talkingabout- is not merely a personal attack which says, "you can't saythat," but one which insidiously says, "you can't hear that; you can't
Page 387RICHARD FORD 387think that; you can't know that." It's an impulse which caters tomoral lassitude in all of us.As Rushdie wrote long before he became a victim of oppressionand censorship, and I quote him from his book Imaginary Homelands, "Literature is not in the business of copywriting certainthemes for certain groups... [indeed]... the most insidious effect ofcensorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination ofpeople. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering,every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument. Itbecomes almost impossible to conceive of what the suppressed thingsmight be. It becomes easy to think that what has been suppressedwas valueless, anyway, or so dangerous that it needed to besuppressed."Confoundingly enough, it may even be in universities that subtleforms of oppression find a home. Universities, after all, are placeswhere a rather inert politeness unknown elsewhere in the worlddominates, so that varying ideas (good and bad - and there are badideas) are often viewed as having the same neutralizing weight;where scholars write without the expectation of a large readership sothat the possible crucialness of any single piece of new writing is lessfelt. Writing programs themselves (and I went to one) stress theimportance of writing and the romantic sovereignty of the writerherself or himself, more than they stress the destination of writingand its most important power-readers and their need to be toldthings.The basic character of the academy is conserving and selfpreservation, whereas the nature of art is to be on the "dangerousedge of things." Art is frail, and optional and precarious (we hardlyneed to be protected from it). But the academy is armored againstfrailty by a history of great books and great thought and great writing already done. It may be, simply, that here truth may seem moreavailable than it really is, less a matter requiring personal courageand vision.My former teacher, Mr. Doctorow, who, I know, once deliveredthe Hopwood Lecture, spoke last October to a committee of theCongress in defense of the National Endowment for the Arts, and heremarked then on what he called "the latent underlying jealousy wehave for elevated expression that is personal, uninvited and powerful, that almost automatic anger we have for a kind of witness and
Page 3883188 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWtruth-telling that is not endorsed or accredited by church, or corporation or family, or other governing institution of our society."Jealousy or conservatism or whatever are the other forms of timidness which lead to censorship do indeed press peculiarly upon thecontemporary arts by assuming their existence matters somehow lessthan the apparently unsuppressed art of times past-whose excellence we come to take for granted, though they may only be survivors of some other kind of oppressive society.But that sort of bias, for a writer, propounds a lie, because there'sno reason to suppose that work going on this afternoon is likely to beless excellent than work which came into being a hundred years ago.In fact, there may be good reasons to expect quite the opposite.The larger point here, having said these few words about artisticfreedom, is not so much to boast that "I can write what I want andno one can stop me," but rather it's a point less certain of answer butmuch to the heart of what it is to be a good writer-a fact youngwriters have to address somehow and so do I, and not just once butagain and again. That old white, middle-class literary critic, LionelTrilling, wrote it this way, in 1940: "A culture is not a flow, noreven a confluence: the form of its existence is struggle-or at leastdebate - [and] it is nothing if not a dialectic." The challenge for anywriter of high aspiration is this: given my quarrel with a culturecomplexer than I ever guessed, how with my freedom intact can I bebetter? It's art's premise, after all, that there can be better. And it'snot enough merely to do what you're free to do. The challenge is tochange, adapt, find new means, new enthusiasms, to move past thelimitations of vogue and politics and most cunningly past your ownfear that.you can't do it.Richard Shweder, the University of Chicago sociologist I mentioned a while ago, wrote on the Op-Ed Page in the New York Timesthat "... the authority of a voice ought to reside in what it says andnot in who says it... [T]o grow is to exceed the limits of parochialexperience... [and] people have written brilliantly about culturesand genders other than their own... our humanity [being after all]polymorphous and complex."And so, to be better, I take that as my own premise: to exceed thelimits of parochial experience in what I write; and to try, using mylittle freedoms, even occasionally moderating them, to representmankind not so as to endear myself but so as to dignify it by insistingon its humanity and its complexity, its finality.
Page 389RICHARD FORD 389And I try harder. I try to stay thoughtful of what is humanity'sbest self. If I diminish a character, make assaults on humankind insome way, I try eventually to replenish the account in other ways;and I don't part with a book unless I feel I've authorized every line.The feminist literary critic, Carolyn Heilbrun, wrote more than adecade ago that "Today's youth, whatever the reasons, no longer goto literature and what we used to call 'culture' as to the fountain ofwisdom and experience. Youth... responds rather to an alternativeculture, outside the English classroom, vital, challenging, relevant,and usually electronically transmitted.... If students are to seeliterature as capable of informing them about any of the aspects oflife, they must become convinced that literature is as capable ofrevolutionary exploration as their own lives are. 9Ms. Heilbrun made this observation in behalf of teaching feministcriticism, a good cause. I borrow it now in behalf of saying to youwriters who're very likely writing the books the next generation willbe reading in universities and that critics will be explaining, thatyou must re-vision in some humane spirit the orthodoxies that seemeven new to you now. (Since mostly they're already just the conventional wisdoms posing as taboos.) And do it as a way of attractingreaders to literature. Or else you'll leave to the David Dukes and PatBuchanans and Jean-Marie Le Pens of the world to decide what artis and who ought to get to see it.My modest hope for young writers - those of you who won theseawards and those who didn'ot and who might just as easily becomegood writers - is the same hope I have for myself and for readers:that you not be timid. That you not let others make you that way;that you not think that being a writer is just another profession withanother set of networks to master, another ladder to climb, anotherset of well-placed elders to impress. Since there's no one who can tellyou what to write, or how to do it, you're entitled to your ownvision, but it ought to be worth your life to put it to words the bestyou possibly can.
Dalia HertzHertz, DaliaWorkshopVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.390http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:14
Page 390DALIA HERTZWORKSHOPWhen rhyme has been played out, it is abandoned.When the image has been played out, how shall we replace it?Will our imagination point to a future worldthat isn't purely descriptive?It is possible that the heavy anchorof what is actualwill speak a dream woven of words with a new clarity.My grandfather didn't aim highyet he loved life.The poet Amir lived modestlyin Ramat Aviv.On the beach in Tel Avivit's easy enough to imagine myselfan ancient Egyptian woman.A single boatladen with all my belongings,taking the small burdenon my way out.And the boat, undoubtedly made of paper.A page.Something so realbeyond any sort of archeology.But in the meantime a "Dan" bus like a boldfaced youthbrings me back to the peculiar, wallowing natureof a sweltering city, a living city, breathing out its days.As long as a wind stirs.Translated from the Hebrew by Gabriel Levin390
Lisa LenzoLenzo, LisaStealing TreesVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.391-399http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:15
Page 391LISA LENZOSTEALING TREESWe started stealing trees after the elms were dead and gone, whenthe city planted a twig in front of Frank's house. The twig had nobranches and no leaves. It was as thin as a car antenna. FromFrank's front stoop at dusk it was invisible.So Frank and I started driving around at night and stealingthicker, bigger saplings, ones with branches and lots of leaves. We'ddig them up from the better neighborhoods in northwest Detroit,dump them into the trunk of Frank's Fairlane, and replant them onFrank's front lawn.Frank refused to call what we did stealing; he was always correcting me: "Tree relocation, Stanley. The 57 Farrand Street Tree Relocation Project."We could plant the trees at Frank's house because Frank's motherdidn't live there and Frank's father never noticed what we did. Mr.Chimek played cello with the Detroit Symphony, and when hewasn't in concert he was upstairs in one of his rooms, either practicing music or listening to it. Occasionally he'd wander downstairsand fry himself some eggs, then go back up without turning theburner off. I can still picture him leaving the house for a concert:dressed in his black suit, white hair springing out of place, walkingpast the trees without turning his head. I lived five blocks over fromFrank, and since my mother never passed by the Chimeks' house,she never saw our accumulating collection of stolen trees.I suggested to Frank that we stop stealing trees after we'd baggedand replanted a half dozen. But Frank pointed out that stealing treeswas less degenerate than setting tires on fire and rolling them downthe ramp of the underground parking lot at Farrand and Woodward, something we used to do all the time in junior high. And byrelocating lots of trees onto his front lawn, Frank said, and sneaking391
Page 392392 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWa few onto the lawns of our neighbors, we were helping to restoreour city's reputation and name: "Highland Park, City of Trees."We used to watch for the signs with these words-stamped in acircle around a tree silhouette-when we were little kids cominghome from Detroit; crossing over the Highland Park border, we'dshout, "Now we're in Highland Park!"In those days, the elms formed a ceiling of leaves a hundred feetup from Highland Park's streets. I didn't notice the leaves over myhead as I grew older any more than people notice the ceilings oftheir houses. But when I was a little kid I used to look up past all thespace to where the layers of green began, and watch the breezestirring the leaves and imagine myself up there.Ten years later, there wasn't a branch or leaf left in all of Highland Park's sky, but the signs were still standing. We watched forthem on our way home from stealing trees, and though we still spokeout when we crossed over the border, our voices were quieter andour emphasis had changed. Most of the time we'd be smoking a jointor a pipe. "Now we're in Highland Park," we'd say. "City of StolenTrees," I'd sometimes add."Relocated trees, Stanley," Frank would insist.Daytimes that summer, Frank and I worked at the rag factory atWoodward and Cortland, cutting up new rags and washing anddrying old ones for the guys at Chrysler. Evenings we played basketball with Frank's neighbors, usually quitting when it got dark, butwhen we felt like it playing on into the night using the light Frankhad rigged on his garage. (The guys we played with said Frankshould turn the light off and just use himself as a bulb, he was sopale-blond-white hair, moon-white skin-that he almost glowedin the dark. They didn't comment on my whiteness, except for oncewhen I was sunburned, and Dwight Bates fouled me and I cried out,and Dwight said he thought all the tender white people had movedout of Highland Park.)Besides stealing trees and playing ball, another thing we did atnight that summer was sit around while Carol Baker cornrowedFrank's head. Cornrowing was big then, but just among blackpeople. This was before Bo Derek.I'd sit on Frank's porch and watch Carol working through Frank'shair, and listen to her fuss and scold and threaten to slap Frank if hedidn't hold still. As Carol got close to finishing, she'd swear she'dnever braid such a fine-haired jumpity fool ever again. But Carol
Page 393LISA LENZO 393braided Frank every week all that summer, and whenever she wentto slap him, her palm landed so lightly it was more like a stroke.Frank would reach up and take hold of Carol's hand, and Carolwould pull away and threaten Frank some more. Frank just smiledand fingered his braids. He liked being fussed over, and the tight,close, pale braids kept his hair out of his face, which was perfect forplaying basketball, and for stealing trees.In August of that summer, Frank's father had a heart attack anddied. Frank and I found him on the floor of his practice room withhis tiger-necked cello lying beside him. My mom said Frank couldcome stay with us for a year -we had one year of high school togo-but Frank wanted to stay where he was. He'd lived in thathouse all his life.Two weeks after Mr. Chimek's funeral, Frank decided that weshould steal a tree from downtown. He had seen its picture in thepaper next to an article about the new Blue Cross building. The treestood out in the foreground of the picture, a dome-shaped, leafymaple. So far we had stolen only locusts and oaks, the main kinds oftrees being planted back then. The maple looked almost too big tosteal, but we decided to check it out in person.First we smoked some marijuana. Then we drove downtown. Themaple looked even better in real life. Its hundreds of leaves wereperfect and huge, and it looked as if its branches had been set intheir upward, outward curves with a whole lot of planning andexpertise. But there were too many cops cruising around downthere-they never gave us a clean opening. At two o'clock in themorning we got on the Chrysler again, lit another pipe, and headednorth, back toward Highland Park.We hadn't gone a mile when Frank spotted the tree of heaven onthe freeway slope. Later, planting the tree on his lawn, Frank said,"I've thought of another name for our project: The Otto ChimekMemorial Grove." But when he first saw the tree of heaven, Frankdidn't mention his father-he didn't say anything at all -just pulledover onto the shoulder and looked at me with his high, shining eyes."What are you doing?" I said.Frank pointed at the tree."What?" I said. "You want that tree?"It wasn't the best-looking tree even from the car. Just your typicalghetto tree, that grows anywhere at all, but mostly in vacant lotsand from between sidewalk cracks. Not the kind of tree that anyone
Page 394394 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWplants, let alone steals. I looked at it, branches angling downwardslike palm fronds, then at the green sign hanging from the freewayoverpass just ahead: MACK 1/2 MILE. On our trips between downtown and Highland Park, we had seen the sign plenty of times, butwe hadn't even thought of stopping here before. This was a part ofthe city where black people didn't stop unless they knew someonewho lived here, and white people didn't stop here at all.The tree was growing close enough to the overpass that if a carcrossed overhead we could hide below, and if a car came down thefreeway, we could scramble up on top of the overpass. I tried not tothink about what we would do if cars came by both places at thesame time.Frank pulled on the hood of his black sweatshirt and tucked handfuls of his long braids inside the hood until none of the dozens ofplaits showed. I pulled on my black baseball cap. Then we got out ofthe Fairlane and started up the grassy slope.Old, dry litter cracked like glass under our feet. I looked at theoverpass to my left and felt like I was on another planet. All my lifeI'd seen freeway embankments and overpasses, but never from thisangle, the overpass at eye level, the embankment slanting under ourfeet, nothing between the overpass and us, nothing between thegrass and us, but the cool night air. Standing on that hill made thewhole world seem tipped and slanted - it seemed like the world hadbeen set on its edge.I spread the garbage bag beside the tree. Frank pushed the shovelin to its hilt eight times, cutting a circle around the skinny trunk. Hehad just got the roots separated into their own private clump whenwe heard a raggedy car in the distance, up on street level.Suddenly it seemed a bad idea to duck under the overpass. It cameto me that every movie that ended badly had people getting wastedin closed-in, concrete places. Frank and I glanced at each other.Then he ditched the shovel and I dropped the bag, and we ran therest of the way up the slope, and jumped out on the service drive andstarted walking along it as if we had not just run up there from theexpressway canyon.Soon we heard the raggedy car, or at least a raggedy car,approaching from behind us. We forced our breathing slow, tried toloosen our legs and shoulders. The car drew closer, and then alongside us. We turned our heads toward the car but kept walking. Thedriver, black as the car's upholstery, leaned his head out the win
Page 395LISA LENZO 395dow. "Can you please tell us how to get to the corner of Russell andPearl?" he asked, his voice a perfect imitation of a prissy whiteman's. Four or five others inside the car laughed. All of them wereblack. At least one was a girl.Frank smiled in the direction of the carload of people, trying toact as if he were relaxed enough to think their joking funny. He keptwalking. I kept step with him, wondering where we were going. Wewere getting farther from our car."You boys lost?" someone from the back seat asked."No," Frank said."Oh yeah?" the driver said, sounding black this time, "You surelook lost." More laughter came from the others.Frank glanced at the driver. "Yeah, I know we do," he admitted,just the right amount of blackness creeping into his voice - enoughto let them hear that he was not a total outsider, but not so muchthat he seemed to be making any sort of claim. We still kept walking, but we didn't say anything more. It was better to say too littlethan to say something wrong."Where you boys from?" the driver asked.This time Frank didn't answer.I steadied my breathing. "Highland Park," I said carefully, tryingto sound offhand and matter-of-fact, as if I didn't expect my answerto boost their opinion of us.The girl shrilled something wordless from the back seat."Highland Park!" the driver said. "They let you boys stay in Highland Park?""For now, I guess," I said.The driver eyed me more closely. Then he laughed -almost afriendly laugh-his lips breaking wide. He looked to be abouttwenty years old. He was wearing a light brown shirt zipped open athis throat. "And where you going later, man, when you got tomove?""I don't know - Romulus, or somewhere," I said, with true dejection at the prospect. I'd never seen Romulus, but I had it pictured asrows of dirty white shoebox houses that collapsed when the jets flewoverhead."Romulus," someone from the back seat said. "Where the f*ck isRomulus?""I know where Romulus is," the driver said. He jabbed his finger
Page 396396 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWin the air. "sh*t, you got to move, man, don't move to Romulus. Thewhites out there so mean they don't even like whites.""If I was white," the man in the passenger seat said, "I'd move toGrosse Pointe, Bloomfield Hills, somethin' like that.""If you was white," one of the men in the back seat said. "Listen tothe nigg*r: 'If I was white.' "The three in the back seat laughed loudly and easily. I let myselfsmile, but kept my own crazy laughter down in my belly."I got one other question to ask you," the driver said. The laughterstopped. I could feel all the ground I thought we'd gained slippingaway from us. "Why was you digging up that tree?"The trouble that had been floating around grew bigger andclearer, pressed at the quiet. My vision started shrinking inwards, Icouldn't focus, I could hardly see. I didn't look at Frank or at thedriver or anywhere."I know there's plenty of them raggedy trees in Highland Park,"the driver said. "So what I want to know is, what do two white boysfrom Highland Park want with a tree that's as common there asdirt? I mean, that tree is as common in Highland Park as nigg*rsare, am I right?""We've been digging up all kinds of trees, from northwest Detroit,mostly, and planting them in front of his house," I said, glancing atFrank. Frank was looking down at the pavement."You boys really are lost," the driver said. "This is not northwestDetroit."Frank kept on looking down. I couldn't see his eyes. Frank! Ithought, Do something! Save us! Frank had a way of winningpeople over to him, sometimes without saying a word. Too bad thiswasn't a carload of old people or women or girls. But even amongthe guys at school Frank was well-liked, for a white person.I thought of letting the men in the car know that Frank's fatherhad just died. I thought of letting on somehow that he'd died just lastweek, just last night. But as soon as I thought of it, I knew it wouldbe a mistake to bring up that subject at all."I don't think you boys really are from Highland Park," the driversaid. "I think you're from one of them suburbs where they let theraggedy white folks live. Taylor, maybe. Or Romulus."I thought of ways to refute this - name all the streets in HighlandPark, show the eraser-burn tattoos our sixth-grade classmates hadrubbed into our shoulders, at our request. But I thought that eraser
Page 397LISA LENZO 397burn tattoos might be a Highland Park black thing rather than ablack thing in general, and my and Frank's tattoos wouldn't haveshown up that well anyway in the dark, being white on white.In fourth grade, when our school was just about half black, theblack kids in our class made plans to build a spaceship and fly to themoon, blowing up the earth as they left. They talked about it oneday while the teacher was out of the room, said they wouldn't save athing on earth except the people they took with them, and startedcalling off the passenger list. They named all of the black kids in theroom, and then one of them said, "And Frank Chimek." "Yeah!"another boy said, "Frank Chimek is cool." After talking it over alittle, they added my name, too-Frank and I were the only twowhite people on earth they thought deserved to be saved.But of course I couldn't say this to those men in the car. I thoughtof all the times I'd wanted to convince someone of somethingconvince a girl that I was the guy for her, or a teacher that myexcuse was really real, or some guys that wanted to beat me that Ididn't deserve to be beaten.The driver said something about taking us back to the tree.A deep voice from the back seat called out, "What you going to dowith 'em, blood, lynch 'em?" The whole group laughed hysterically.I couldn't help smiling, though it felt like the smile of a crazy man."Let's lynch them and that sorry-ass tree," another voice from theback said. "Hang 'em all three from the overpass."The driver waited until the laughter died. "I don't like white boysstealing nigg*rs' trees," he said, "no matter how sorry the trees is, orthe boys. Y'all move over and make room for these boys."There was movement inside the car. A door clicked open. I jerkedas if the click had come from a knife or gun, and I guess Frank musthave moved too. "Wait! Wait!" someone screeched. It was the girl.She scrambled forward so that her wide face and thick, round armsleaned over the front seat. "Take off your hood," she said to Frank.Frank looked up from the street with that distant expressionpeople and dogs wear just before they get beaten. "Fool!" the girlsaid, slapping at someone in the back seat. "Don't be pulling on me.Take off your hood," she repeated.Frank looked at the driver."Go on," he said.Frank untied the string and pushed the hood back, and his blondbraids unfolded and fell all around him.
Page 398398 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW"I knew it!" the girl crowed. "They told me white folks couldn'tdo their hair like that, but I knew y'all could, I knew it. Comehere-let me see."Frank didn't move. He just stood there with his braids lying inlines against his scalp, snaking down around his shoulders, practically glowing in the dark."Damn, boy," the driver said, "did you get dunked in a tub ofbleach?""Maybe he's an albino," the girl said. "Maybe he's really black."She and the man sitting in the passenger seat started arguing."C'mon, woman-a white black man? Give me a break.""I saw a black albino once, man, in my social studies book. It wasa purely white black man.""Girl, you're talkin' about an oreo.""I'm talkin' about an albino-don't you know what an albinois?""Why don't y'all stop talking stupid?" the driver said. "The man isobviously white.""For real," the deep-voiced man agreed, "he's some kind of whitefreak.""Naw, another man from the back said, "he just wants to beblack.""Is that it, man?" the driver said to Frank. "Do you wish you wasblack?" Everyone in the car looked at Frank.Frank lifted his head, his blond braids tilting back, and looked atall the faces looking at him. "Right now I do," he said simply, hisface serious, but hardly afraid, a hint of pleasure at his joke showingaround his mouth and in his eyes.The men in the car laughed suddenly, with surprise. " 'Right nowI do,' " one of them repeated, and everyone laughed harder, withthe deep-voiced man saying "No sh*t! No sh*t!" over and over andbetween the laughter of the others.When the laughter finally stopped, there was a floating sort ofpause, like when you're standing on a teeter-totter with both endsoff the ground. The driver said something to the others that I didn'tquite hear-"Let's go," or, "Let them go." Then he turned back toFrank. "I don't know why in hell you want that tree, man," he said,"but if you still want it, go on and take it - then take your crazy assesback home to Highland Park or wherever it is you're from beforeyou run into some mean nigg*rs or the police. And next time you
Page 399LISA LENZO 399want to steal a tree, go on out to Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hillsand steal yourself a nice white tree, something like a pine tree, allright?""All right," Frank said.The driver spat out the window. The car rumbled off. Frank andI walked, fast, back to the freeway slope, and lifted the tree ofheaven into the garbage bag. Then we walked down the slantingground holding the bagged tree between us, checking the wide, greyfreeway for cars.The huge overpasses on either side were suspended at our level.We were leaning back against the pull of the slope, taking bigstrides. It felt like we were traveling between planets, like we werewalking down from the sky. It felt like we were aliens - aliens inboth worlds. But at least the world we were heading toward washome.
BooksVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.400-451http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:16
Sally RobinsonRobinson, SallyHeat and Cold: Recent Fiction by Joyce Carol OatesVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.400-414http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:17
Page 400SALLY ROBINSONHEAT AND COLD: RECENT FICTIONBY JOYCE CAROL OATESThe Rise of Life on Earth. New York: New Directions, 1991. Pp. 135.$16.95.I Lock My Door Upon Myself. New York: The Ecco Press, 1990. Pp.98. $15.95.Heat and Other Stories. New York: Dutton, 1991. Pp. 397. $21.95.To read Joyce Carol Oates is to be placed in the uncomfortably fascinating position of voyeur. From the early novels them and Wonderland toher most recent fiction, Oates has specialized in a narrative techniquethat intrudes upon the private pains and pleasures - but mostly pains - ofOthers. Her narratives often explore the dynamics of a voyeurism inwhich subject and object confront one another across a gulf of socialdifference. In some cases, the confrontation takes place between characters in the story; in others, Oates stages a confrontation between thereader and the object of that reader's gaze. In her preface to them (1969),Oates thematizes her relation to the underprivileged lives she narrates.Confessing that she has appropriated the story of a former student and, inthe process, has become fascinated with the "various sordid and shockingevents of slum life," she describes how the intrusion cuts both ways:"Their lives pressed upon mine eerily, so that I began to dream aboutthem instead of about myself, dreaming and redreaming their lives.Because their world was so remote from me it entered me with tremendous power..." In the process of envisioning the "remote" Other, thewriter is pressed to confront the security of her own position. While everywriter is, in some sense, a voyeur, Oates's fiction foregrounds the politicalvalences of a voyeurism in which a prying observer seeks the "sordid."400
Page 401SALLY ROBINSON 401Oates's politically charged negotiation of the writer's position vis-a-visthe Others on whom she trains her gaze situates her within the context ofpostmodernism. While her fondness for realist modes of representationmight place her outside the parameters of postmodern fiction as it hasgenerally been theorized, her sustained exploration of the politics of representing Otherness has much in common with a certain contemporaryproblematic. Oates's work participates in what Linda Hutcheon, in ThePolitics of Postmodernism, notes as "a general cultural awareness of theexistence and power of systems of representation which do not reflectsociety so much as grant meaning and value within a particular society."Like the postmodern anthropologist who questions the position fromwhich she represents the Others of Western culture, Oates's fiction raisesquestions about the politics of representations. Such questioning can produce a sharp critique of our assumptions about social positions as guarantors of knowledge, security, and power. But a voyeuristic narrative technique has risks, for it can place the writer (and the reader) in acomfortable position above those whose sad lives seem to compel Oates'sattention. Some of those risks become apparent in the short novel TheRise of Life on Earth in which Oates revisits Detroit and the world ofthem. In sharp contrast, I Lock My Door Upon Myself successfullyengages the problems of granting meaning and value to an "alien" life. InHeat and Other Stories, Oates employs a wide range of voices in what Isee as a sustained exploration of the connections between narrative perspective and social position.The Rise of Life on Earth is the story of a young woman namedKathleen whose life is marked by abuse: beat to a pulp by her drunkenfather, shuffled from one foster home to another, Kathleen dreams ofbeing a nurse. When she tones down her aspirations to become a nurse'saide, Kathleen meets a young intern, Orson Abbot, who uses her body asa passive and inert receptacle - for his sem*n, his drug-induced fantasiesand recollections, his verbal and physical battering. But this is only partof Kathleen's story of abuse, for she is not an "innocent" victim. We learnthat she, not her father, has killed her younger sister, that she has set afatal fire at her foster home, and that she indulges in a series of randommurders at the various hospitals and clinics where she works. As if thisunrelentingly bleak life pattern is not enough, Oates has Kathleen giveherself an abortion - with a surgical knife.The plot of this story is troubling, but what strikes me as even moretroubling is that the narrative voice participates in a de-humanization ofKathleen; placing her beyond the realm of human motive, intention, andeven consciousness, the narrator seems as disgusted with Kathleen's "cow
Page 402402 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWlike" physicality as Orson Abbot is. Descriptions of her, from the firstpage on, paint a subhuman creature:Kathleen Hennessy with her pie-shaped face, pie-shaped maturingbreasts, her pale, plump, soft, seemingly textureless flesh like thatof a mollusk pried from its shell... and her recessed eyes that weredarkly bright and alert, though betraying no expression; her delicate complexion riddled with tiny pimples like buckshot. There wassomething unsettlingly adult in her stoic resistance to pain and suchextremes of discomfort and physical humiliation she was obliged tobear at the hands of the hospital staff, and something precociousabout her small, pert, moist, pink rosebud of a mouth, a miniaturemouth, that reminded observers of a part of the female anatomythat is private and should not be exposed to casual eyes.The image of the mollusk is perfectly appropriate for Kathleen, as is thefinal comment about the private being exposed to casual eyes, whichpredicts Orson's reduction of Kathleen to a "c*nt." Kathleen is exposedagain and again in this story, and nothing much causes her to "betrayexpression." She has no memory and no volition; even her acts of violenceare beyond her conscious control and calculation. She seems the humanform sprung out of the non-human muck at the birth of the world, asdescribed in the science textbook from which the story takes its title. Asthe narrator tells us at the end of the story, Kathleen is to continue lifethrough a "succession of robot-selves."The narrator's objectification, and de-humanization, of Kathleen is anexample of the voyeurism that places the reader above the "sordid" detailsOates narrates. This is a painful story, and as I began the last chapterknowing that Kathleen would methodically perform the abortion onherself, I did not want to read on. The novel is not a tract on theimportance of safe and legal abortion, for Oates does not moralize herenor does she give any motivation for Kathleen's action. When, at the end,the narrator tells us that Kathleen does not contest the "price of herfreedom," I am left baffled, for "freedom" does not seem to enter into thepicture at all. Indeed, Kathleen has treasured the thought of her pregnancy, the only event in her life that prompts any response in Kathleen'sconsciousness - except for her almost religious devotion to her nursingduties.My problems with this novel are political rather than aesthetic: Oates'srepresentation of Kathleen so totally objectifies her that it confirms,rather than questions, middle-class attitudes toward the urban poor. Thereader of this story becomes fully complicit in this objectification ofKathleen and I see nothing in the story that would prompt a questioning
Page 403SALLY ROBINSON 403of the narrator's (or reader's) position in relation to her. Aesthetically, thisstory is admirable for the rich texture of Oates's prose. She deftly capturesthe kind of trance-like quality of Kathleen's engagement with the world,crafting sentences that unfold and circle, sometimes for pages. Thedescription of Kathleen's response to the hospital's instructions forhandwashing procedures conveys a rapture:Just as years before in an interlude in her life now virtually forgotten Kathleen Hennessy as a child of eleven had come to unexpectedbloom in a ward at Children's Hospital so now as a young womanof nineteen did she come to a yet more radiant bloom as a nurse'saide at Detroit Metropolitan Hospital where she was trained in suchmatters as handwashing procedures which came to fascinate her tothe point very nearly of trance as if she believed that such procedures as instructed by her superiors were clues to a fundamentalprinciple of the universe both the human world so difficult to comprehend let alone negotiate and the world beyond the human hitherto wholly incomprehensible, unfathomable thus in a sort ofwaking trance a small pinched smile on her face eyes lowered as ifin tremulous reverence she obeyed every commandment of suchmatters as handwashing proceduresWhile a sentence like this might not appeal to all readers, I find ithypnotically rhythmic. But as much as I am carried away by Oates'slanguage here, this virtuoso performance does not shake my uncomfortable feeling that Oates's New Directions audience is being invited tofetishize this entirely alien and utterly frightening life. To fetishize anOther means to see that Other only as a negative reflection of the Self,making difference a confirmation of identity.I Lock My Door Upon Myself shares with the other novel a hypnoticprose style, but here the story is told through the mediating consciousnessof the protagonist's granddaughter, who experiences a complicated identification with her grandmother Calla: "She was my mother's mother butnot my grandmother in any terms I can comprehend and if her madblood courses through me now I have no knowledge of it and am innocent of it." In the process of telling Calla's story, the narrator questionsher own role in imagining that story and asks: "how can I speak of thatwoman let alone speak for her who scarcely knew her?" The narrator'saccount of Calla's life is punctuated by unanswered questions that allpoint to the narrator's concern that she is appropriating Calla's story forher own purposes. These questions, in other words, signal the story'sexploration of the politics of representation: Who speaks? From whatposition? In whose interests?
Page 404404 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWThe narrator worries that in speaking for Calla, she is not allowingCalla to speak for herself. As the title of the novel makes clear, Calla isprotective of her secret lives and desires, and the narrator is self-consciousabout violating those secrets. This novel can be called metafictional in thesense that it explicitly thematizes the problems I have noted in the narrative stance of The Rise of Life on Earth. Published by the Ecco Press in aseries of "fictions in imaginative collaboration with works of art," thestory's inspiration comes from a painting by the nineteenth-century German artist Fernand Khnopff. It is easy to see why the painting, andespecially the title, intrigued Oates. The story she weaves around thispainting of a dreamy woman subtly and powerfully explores the gulfbetween public and private selves - or, more precisely, between a woman's self-representation and the world's representation of her.This is the story of a woman whose "wildness" is always the object ofpublic scrutiny. Orphaned when young, Calla dreams her way throughlife until she is asked to marry George Freilicht. She neither consents norrefuses, but seems, instead, to allow herself to be passively carried alongon the waves of others' desires. But Calla keeps herself distant from themarriage, her husband, and later her children, continuing to live a private life separate from the public one. Her "nocturnal selves" are morereal than her daytime self. To stress this division, Oates gives her protagonist both a public and a private name; she refers to herself as "Calla,"while everyone else except the narrator uses her legal name, "Edith." Shemeets and falls in love with Tyrell Thompson, an itinerant black waterdiviner, and proceeds to scandalize her family and the community. Significantly, it is only to Tyrell that Calla tells her "real" name. The loveaffair ends in typical Oates fashion, in violence: the two lovers go over awaterfall in a rowboat. Tyrell is killed and Calla locks herself into herroom, leaving the house only for funerals, and living out the remainder ofher life, fifty-five years, in almost complete solitude.This story is rich in the tradition of Faulkner: complex psychologicaldynamics and mysteries become the subject of an awed scrutiny on thepart of the narrating consciousness. The narrator merges with Calla, asindicated by the frequent italicized passages that signal a confusionbetween the two. The most striking of these is repeated several times, andhints at the story's exploration of regions of experience beyond conventional language: "If this is a dream it is not my dream for how should Iknow the language in which to dream it." Calla's dream and the narrator's dream are one because, as the granddaughter explains, "we arelinked by blood and blood is memory without language." The narratorstumbles over describing Calla in conventional terms, noting that suchphrases as "unnatural mother" and "white trash" do not get at the heart
Page 405SALLY ROBINSON 405of what Calla is. In the process of telling the story of Calla's unconventional life, the narrator experiences outrage at others' failure to understand her grandmother: "And that's the insult of it, how always it comesback to a woman being a 'good' mother in the world's eyes or a 'bad'mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her bodybetween her legs."In the "world's eyes" Calla's complex reality is reduced to her failure toconfirm that world's assumptions about what a woman is or should be;her desires, her specificity, and her point of view are denied by an objectifying gaze. It is the difference between the "world's eyes" and the narrator's eyes which suggests that Oates is critiquing the type of narrativeperspective she employs in The Rise of Life on Earth. I am not claimingthat Oates engages in self-criticism here, nor am I suggesting that I LockMy Door Upon Myself is a better book in the "disinterested" terms ofaesthetic evaluation, for I have little faith in the validity of such terms.What I am arguing is that I Lock My Door Upon Myself effectivelycomments on what I see as the politically problematic representation inThe Rise of Life on Earth of the "unknown" underclasses as subhuman.Whereas Kathleen is positioned as the disempowerd object of a knowingand superior gaze, Calla and the narrator merge into a complex doublesubject of the narrative. I am reminded here of Christa Wolf's The Questfor Christa T, another novel in which a female narrator considers thecomplex personal and political implications of telling another woman'sstory.Voyeurism depends on distance and difference and, thus, can be seenas opposing identification, which works through closeness and the bridging of difference. In The Rise of Life on Earth, the narrative voice probesKathleen's consciousness from a distance, constructing her as the Other,the "not-me." In I Lock My Door Upon Myself, Oates's use of a questioning, fully participating narrator facilitates an identification that bridgesthe gap between Self and Other. Despite Calla's mystery, then, she is notpositioned as alien or Other. In Heat and Other Stories, Oates experiments with a variety of narrative forms and modes of address and, aswe've come to expect from Oates, the stories construct many differentworlds. The collection is divided into three sections. In the first, Oatestrains her lens on the lives of privileged people who confront an othernessimposed on their lives. In the vein of her recent novel American Appetites, these first eight stories sketch a violent underside to lives whoseglittering surfaces are fragile. The characters who inhabit these slickworlds hover on the verge of revelation, but never quite get there. Whilethese stories thematize confrontations between self and other, subject andobject, security and violence, the narrative tone seems deliberately cold
Page 406406 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWand even indifferent. Whereas the narrative voice in The Rise of Life onEarth is clinical, these narrators appear indifferent toward the livesunder scrutiny. While the protagonist of the novel is objectified by thenarrator, these characters do not seem to compel Oates's interest enoughto be held up as alien or exotic objects. In the second section, where Oatesfocuses on the lives of America's urban and rural underclasses, the storieshave a strikingly different tone. Part of the difference can be accountedfor by her use of first-person narration in many of the stories, but I thinkthere is something else going on here. What I see in the contrast betweenthe two sets of stories is a difference in perspective based on social classand position. Working under the reasonable but unprovable assumptionthat Oates's imagined audience is comprised mainly of middle-class readers, we can come to the tentative conclusion that the characters in thefirst set of stories are not constructed as Others because they lack "difference." I suspect that, for Oates, these characters are too much like "us" tobe the proper objects of a voyeuristic gaze, even if the narrative perspective is distanced from the lives it narrates. Foreclosing on both voyeuristicengagement and identification, these stories thematize, rather thanenact, the problematics of storytelling that I am arguing place Oates in apostmodern context. In the third section, Oates moves into more eerie,less "naturalistic" terrain, where the confrontation with Otherness is displaced onto another plane entirely.In the first story, "House Hunting," Oates offers a metaphor for thedynamics of reading. Joel, the central character, expresses an uncomfortable excitement about entering the lives and homes of others, guided by awoman who has the "key" to them all:She had the key to every lock; only let her fit it into the door and thedoor opened and she led her client inside: Mr. Collier, who wasmade to feel uncharacteristically passive, helpless. He didn't like thefeeling. Then again, he did like it; there was something intimateand brazen, heady, as if with the air of the forbidden, about beingled by a woman he didn't know into the houses of people he didn'tknow, escorted through rooms in which strangers lived their secretlives. The first several minutes were the most acute; he felt shy,absurdly ill at ease, excited. As if he was being brought to a test ofsome kind, a challenge or a riddle, and would not be equal to it.This is the "challenge" that Oates mounts for her readers in these stories,which all have something of an "air of the forbidden." But Joel, like othercharacters in the first group of stories, fails to take up the challenge. Hesearches for meaning in empty houses, seeking to work through his griefover his wife's unsuccessful pregnancy. Imagining that the attic of one
Page 407SALLY ROBINSON 407particularly decrepit house might be the "place of revelation," he finds,instead, "nothing in this room but the space itself," and the narrator asks:"But what otherwise might there have been? What had he hoped tosee?"Joel's life is without "purpose," and the story ends with his havingacquired only the vaguest sense of renewed power and energy through hisexploration. "House Hunting" is one of the few stories in Heat which doesnot culminate in an act of physical violence. "Shopping," one of the beststories, is another. A ritual trip to a high-class suburban mall becomes theoccasion for a woman's freeing herself from her tyrannical daughter.Mrs. Dietrich, divorced from her husband and living the life of thewealthy suburban matron, lives through her teenaged daughter Nola,whose birth is the signal event of Mrs. Dietrich's life: "She told no one,but she knew the baby would be a girl. It would be herself again, rebornand this time perfect." Cliched as this may sound, the story goes farbeyond the ordinary in painting Mrs. Dietrich as the conventionalwoman whose experience becomes, in Oates's subtle tones, unconventional, miraculous, and violent.The rarified atmosphere of the mall-"the air is fresh and tonic"reassures Mrs. Dietrich who attempts to keep the immanent violence ofher relationship with Nola at bay. The product of her body has betrayedher, and violence erupts. Mrs. Dietrich is forced to confront her separateness from Nola and, in the process, the daughter becomes an alien being:Seeing Nola now, Mrs. Dietrich is charged with hurt, rage; theinjustice of it, she thinks, the cruelty of it, and why, and why? Andas Nola glances up, startled, not prepared to see her mother in frontof her, their eyes lock for an instant and Mrs. Dietrich stares at herwith hatred. Cold calm clear unmistakable hatred. She is thinking,Who are you? What have I to do with you? I don't know you, Idon't love you, why should I?Mrs. Dietrich's sense of "injustice" is purely personal, and does not extendto the bag lady she and Nola see in the mall. Refusing to let this woman'spresence detract from the pleasure of "serious shopping," Mrs. Dietrichhas no qualms about flaunting her privilege and spending her money.While Mrs. Dietrich fails to analyze the huge gulf between herself andthis woman- and Nola spouts some obligatory outrage over the womanwhile spending over $200 on a designer jacket-the reader is left tocontemplate the jarring effect of a contemporary world where Lord &Taylor coexists side-by-side with the disenfranchised. Mrs. Dietrich willreturn to her suburban home, and Nola to her prep school in Maine,neither of them having been much affected by the experience.
Page 408408 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWMrs. Dietrich's desire to hide the messy emotional outbursts which endthe story links "Shopping" with "Passion." In this story, the main character suffers from lack of passion, a lack brought home to him by his exwife's suicide. Dennis might well stand in for the narrative voice in manyof these first eight stories, as well as for the characters who fail at namingand understanding their experiences. The lack of language with which toarticulate sudden emotional turbulence seems to afflict the privilegedcharacters in all of these stories. Remembering his ex-wife's accusationthat he lacks "passion," Dennis associates this lack with a failure of language: "In his professional life he was a man of infinite tact, intelligence,presence; in his private life, he had always seemed to himself mysteriously undefined." A recurring dream strikes Dennis "as an image of hispredicament, yet to have defined that predicament, to have given it aprecise vocabulary: this was a task seemingly beyond him." Ironically, itis in investigating Rona's suicide that Dennis begins to experience "passion." But this, too, remains "undefined," and the story ends with Dennistottering on the edge of a revelation, not knowing what to do with thatpassion: "It frightened him, the emotion he felt - its crudeness, violence.He wondered was it passion. He wondered was it anything to which hemight give a name."In "Knife" and "The Boyfriend," acts of physical violence seem to forcethe victim to some kind of revelation; but that revelation is so vaguelydrawn as to leave the reader with a sense of dissatisfaction. I say this in ananalytic rather than judgmental spirit, for Oates seems to purposefullystructure these narratives around an anti-climax. In "Knife," Harriet andher daughter Bonnie are home alone, when two men break into thehouse. Disappointed with the lack of material possessions, one of themrapes Harriet. The two intruders mock Harriet's privilege, the rapistthreatening her verbally as well as physically: " 'You think you're hot sh*t,don't you? People like you'." During the attack, Harriet wonders, "Is thisrape? This? - as the man pried her legs apart, poked himself against her."Her primary response is shame, humiliation, and worry that the policeand her husband will blame her. Finally she decides to tell her husbandabout the rape - but only because she fears that keeping it inside will turnher "into a religious lunatic." The story ends: "And what would happen,as a consequence, would happen." The narrative voice here seems apathetic, as if Harriet's experience does not qualify as significant. Is itbecause an experience as violent as rape fails to shake Harriet enough? IsOates suggesting that Harriet "deserves" the rape, as a punishment for heruninteresting and complacent life? Is violence, for Oates, the only way tofind meaning, and then only if one acts violently in return?Some of these questions find tentative answers in "Naked," one of the
Page 409SALLY ROBINSON 409most compelling stories of the collection. The story is the proverbialnightmare of naked exposure made real: the unnamed protagonist findsherself completely naked, entirely vulnerable, and miles from her home.Enjoying an afternoon in a "suburban wildlife preserve [!]", the woman isattacked by a vicious group of black children, who take her clothes inwhat the woman feels is an outrageously unprovoked act of cruelty. Heroutrage is accompanied by her shame; she obsessively focuses on avoidinghaving to make a police report, for she fears appearing as a racist.The oft-repeated litany, "I am not a racist," punctuates this profoundexploration of the woman's subjective and social position. She alternatesbetween thinking of her attackers as "savages" who threaten to "devourher alive: set upon her like ravenous animals, tear the flesh from herbones with their teeth and eat," and thinking that she "deserves" theattack because of "the unwanted but undeniable privilege of her whiteskin." Oates subtly challenges this woman's secure conviction that sheharbors no racist sentiments and, simultaneously, challenges her readersto place themselves in the woman's position.[S]he was a woman in no way racially prejudiced who had grownup with blacks, gone to school with blacks, Chinese, Hispanics, andother minorities, as they were familiarly called, and she was determined to instill in her children the identical unjudging uncensoriousliberalism her parents had quite consciously instilled in her. So itdid not strike her, as perhaps it should have, upon occasion at least,that these minorities might look upon her as conspicuously differentfrom themselves and that, against the grain of all that was reasonable, charitable, and just, they might wish to do so and take satisfaction in it.Underneath this lovely liberalism we glimpse an absolute failure to seebeyond a certain point of view - and, perhaps worse, a willed ignoranceabout the possibility that the "Other" might have a point of view thatcould be trained on the self. Here, Oates delivers a ringing indictment ofa certain self-congratulatory liberalism, but, at the same time, managesto elicit sympathy for the woman who is, after all, the victim of a violentattack. Making her way home through the treacherous terrain hiddenbehind the clean surfaces of suburbia, the woman "was excited and yetdreamy too: standing for a long purposeless moment staring at the debrisof strangers, wondering at lives parallel to her own yet unknown to her."Stripped of the trappings of her "civilized" existence, and forced to facethe "wildlife" that infiltrates suburbia, she ponders her own vulnerability. The story transforms this woman from subject into object of a voyeuristic gaze, and Oates stresses the woman's fear that she might function as
Page 410410 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWthe raw material for someone else's story: "She would become a story, afiction."The second section of Heat challenges the subjective positions articulated in the first: here, the reader enters the idiosyncratically-drawnprivate worlds of underprivileged folks. In "Heat," two uncannily aliketwins are brutally murdered by a man who might or might not be "simpleminded." The narrator is a former classmate of the twins, Rhea andRhoda, who works to fill in the gaps of the story, to invent the murderbecause "I wasn't there, but some things you know." This story differsfrom others in this section, in that the violence remains untold, "the doorwas shut, the shade on the window was drawn," and the reader joins inthe narrator's morbid fascination with inventing the details of the murder. Closed doors and drawn shades are appropriate metaphors for avoyeuristic narrative- not unlike the cinematic technique of that masterof voyeurism, Alfred Hitchco*ck. The grisly details of the murder remainunspoken, but the narrator hints that the crime has a lurid sexual component. This becomes particularly clear when the narrator, years later,thinks back to Rhea and Rhoda while having sex in close proximity to thescene of the murder. Her (and our) voyeuristic fascination with this crimeis in sharp contrast to the indifference that marks Oates's representationof Harriet's rape.A number of the stories in this part of Heat explore the difficulties ofthe story-teller's position, her precarious relationship to her material. In"The Buck," the narrator confesses to an obsession with the story of anelderly woman who, in trying to save the life of a buck shot by a hunter,dies, her body literally merging with the buck's in a frozen tableau. Inintimate relation to her readers, the narrator says: "Each time I tell thisstory... I think that maybe this telling will make a difference. This timea secret meaning will be revealed, as if without my volition, and I will bereleased." The meaning the narrator finds is the meaning she creates, inweaving for Melanie Snyder a life marked by sexual and familial repression. Because of the way the story is framed it is clear that Oates iscommenting here on the dynamics of storytelling, implicating herself andthe reader, as well as her narrator, in a kind of voyeuristic exercise inwhich Melanie is explicitly framed as the object of a probing gaze.While the narrator in "The Buck" might be seen as the author's surrogate, Oates plays the part of ventriloquist in "White Trash," a storyguaranteed to raise the hackles of a politically sensitive white, middleclass reader- a reader not unlike the woman in "Naked." Here, we have afirst-person narrator, who, despite her direct address of the reader, nevertheless reveals herself to be painfully vulnerable to that reader's gaze.One of four stories in Heat which equivocates over the question of rape
Page 411SALLY ROBINSON 411versus consensual sex, "White Trash" is the story of another Melanie, aself-styled "white trash" woman who fetishizes a black jazz pianist, Mayweather Smith. The story virtually drips with the erotic energy of Melanie whose sexuality can only be characterized as masoch*stic. Referring toherself as both "I" and "Melanie," the narrator is split between subjectand object, a split that seems entirely appropriate to her experiences.Watching and listening to Mayweather, Melanie plots his seduction,"thinking, Mmmmm, Melanie, you're the luckiest woman alive." As abackdrop to the present action, which includes a sexual encounterthrough which Mayweather appears to take out his resentment of whitesupremacy on the pathetic target of Melanie's skinny body, Melanierelates a tale of abuse at the hands of various (white) lovers and anuncaring medical establishment. The two trade stories about injustices inthe world, Melanie's about the loss of a baby and Mayweather's about hisbaby brother killed by white police on the streets of Cleveland. No sentimentalist, however, Oates does not allow these characters to find anartificial solace in each other's arms. The sexual encounter is violent andunsettling in its depiction of racial and sexual dynamics - unsettling, precisely, to the reader whose voyeuristic gaze witnesses the event and isdenied an easy answer to the questions the story raises.The stories in Heat are unrelentingly violent. In "Sundays in Summer,"a young boy jumps off a bridge and is gored by a cable in the water."Leila Lee" ends with a son frenetically killing his father with an axe."The Swimmers" contains a shooting, and "Getting to Know All AboutYou" a brutal beating. In "Hostage," a young girl is saved from beingmolested by an itinerant, who is then repeatedly stabbed by her rescuer."Yarrow" ends with one cousin mowing down another in his car on an icyroad. In "Craps" and "Death Valley," the second appearing to be a retelling of the first, young women are subject to violent sexual attacks bymen, and in the second, the man fantasizes about the woman killing himwith a razor. Why is Oates so fascinated by violence, so drawn to scenesof blood and carnage? What pleasure does she expect her readers to getfrom this violence, from a complicity in morbid fascination? I confessthat I do not have answers to these questions, except to say that Oates'svoyeuristic imagination, like Hitchco*ck's perhaps, inevitably seeks out theshocking and sordid."Getting to Know All About You" provides a breath of fresh air, forhere, Oates gives us a welcome touch of humor, despite the story's depiction of a family inches away from disaster. In love with her mother Trix,the narrator lovingly renders that mother's idiosyncratic speech. Judith isan intelligent, alienated adolescent girl, whose narration of her family'sdeterioration is haunted by her sense of guilt over "spying" on her colorful
Page 412412 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWparents. Her brother Wesley speaks of the "politics of this family," epitomized by the disproportion of "before" and "after" photographs in thefamily album - before the children's births and after. (Trix refuses to becalled "Mother," claiming that it's an "absurd definition.") Oates givesher readers a voyeuristic look into this "dysfunctional" family, the story'shumor punctuated with the pathos of an impossible dream. The seemingly invincible Trix - who refers to turning thirty as "peeking over theedge into the abyss," and insists that drinking alone is "like, you know,making love alone. It lacks class" - regales the reader with her rich language and her indomitable spirit. But, lest the reader forget that this is anOates story, Trix ends up in the state mental hospital and Darrell on thelam from the police. If Judith and Wesley fear that they have violated thenorms of privacy, and even decency, in "spying" on their parents- theyblame themselves for what happens to Trix and Darrell - then the readershares in that fear. This story explicitly comments on the dynamics ofvoyeurism, suggesting that looking into others' windows, uninvited,might have dire consequences for the object of the gaze.The stories in the brief last section of Heat signal new territory forOates, where the ordinary becomes alien and terrifying. These stories, intheir exploration of a dark subterranean beneath the veneer of family life,cover the kind of ground that David Lynch investigates in his films. In"Twins" and "Why Don't You Come Live With Me It's Time" Oates againemploys the perspective of daughters who inquire into, but do not solve,the riddles of family legend. In the first, the girl's father, Lee, is hauntedby his vanished twin brother, Les. Obsessed with finding Les, Lee struggles to maintain an identity separate from his twin, but ends up beingeclipsed and destroyed. The daughter-narrator, in her turn, is haunted byher dead father, and ends by wondering: "Is this common? Will it getworse? Is it something you can die of?" "Why Don't You Come Live WithMe It's Time," an intriguing and engaging story, begins where "Twins"leaves off, with the narrator seeing her dead grandmother in her mirror.The story represents the grown woman's attempt to differentiate herselffrom her grandmother. In the process she comes to understand that hergrandmother, whom she adores, has a perspective (and life) of her own.This story contains a nightmare-like sequence, in which Claire imaginesher grandmother spiking her oatmeal with glass. Claire fears sleep andidentifies with her grandmother's insomnia-"but no one made the connection between her and me. Our family was that way: worrying thatone weakness might find justification in another and things would slipout of containment and control," not unlike the family in "Getting toKnow All About You."In "Family," a strange tale of a world and a family that has survived
Page 413SALLY ROBINSON 413some kind of industrial or nuclear disaster, Oates forays into sciencefiction territory. The story is partially a cautionary tale about the hazardsof a world drunk on its own technological progress. It is also a story aboutthe violence of families, transported to an appropriately horrific setting.Babies eat mothers, mothers kill babies, fathers mysteriously disappearbut the family stubbornly holds its ground, despite the death of the worldaround it. Here Oates explores a postmodern terrain where an alienreality has an uncanny similarity to the lived reality of American society.Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and some of Angela Carter's fantastic novels, this story chills because, despite its science fictiontenor, it seems all too familiar.The story is told from the point of view of a family member whodescribes, but does not analyze, the gradual deterioration of life in "thevalley." The story begins with a shocking description of industrial pollution and contamination as sublime:The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to befixed - neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal hazeof inexpressible sweetness (though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica)had eased into the valley from the industrial regions to the north.0.Above the patchwork of excavated land bordering ourproperty- all of which had formerly been our property in Grandfather's time: thousands of acres of fertile soil and open grazingland - a curious fibrillating rainbow sometimes appeared, its colorsshifting even as you stared, shades of blue, turquoise, iridescentgreen, russet red, a lovely translucent gold that dissolved to moisture as the thermal breeze stirred, warm and stale as an exhaledbreath.The family seems hypnotized by this "inexpressible sweetness" and theydisplay a frightening ability to adapt to an increasingly poisonous environment. Part of that adaptation includes forgetting life as it used to be;memories vanish, words evaporate, vocabulary changes, and the "new"world replaces the old. At the end of the story, a post-apocalypse spring isborn, and the family debates "abolishing the calendar entirely anddeclaring this the First Day of Year One, and beginning Time anew."This frightening tale warns against complacency and accommodation. Itworks."Ladies and Gentleman:" is also a nightmare tale that critiques theprogress-oriented pulse of a society that finds it easier to forget the pastthan to deal with it. This is satire on the model of "A Modest Proposal"and, along with the science fiction feel of "Family," suggests that Oates isonce again experimenting with new modes. The story takes the form of a
Page 414414 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWspeech by the captain of a boat to a group of aging men and women whoare being put out to pasture by their greedy children and grandchildren.The reader is made to feel trapped along with the passengers en route toThe Island of Tranquility where they will be left to die. The captainsuggests that "we" are being punished for failing to grant "our" childrenidentities of their own: "Ladies and gentlemen, you rarely stopped toconsider your children as other than your children, as men and womengrowing into maturity distinct from you."These last two stories mark a departure from what I have been arguingis Oates's place within the postmodern questioning of the politics of representation. Interestingly, in terms of their anti-realist mode, these two stories seem to point toward the possibility of Oates moving more fully andexplicitly into the postmodern. Indeed, Oates has entered this terrainbefore, with her revisions of romance form in Mysteries of Winterthurnand A Bloodsmoor Romance and with the meta-fictional and metahistorical Bellefleur. Joyce Carol Oates, of course, is not a writer who bowsto critical or generic orthodoxy, and it is difficult to place her within anyone strain of contemporary fiction. A writer of stunning range and imaginative reach, Oates, in my view, is most interesting when she leaves safeground to explore the complex psychological and political dynamics ofstorytelling. This exploration is what makes I Lock My Door Upon Myselfnot only the best of the three books, but a very good book indeed. Heat andOther Stories, as a collection, raises a number of interesting questions aboutOates's position in relation to the lives and worlds she constructs. That thestories about privileged characters utilize a different narrative voice andstance than the stories of the underprivileged suggests that Oates is fullyaware of the complicated ways in which fiction engages questions of socialposition. If, in scrutinizing the Others of American society, she forces herreaders to confront their own comfortable subjective positions, then she hasaccomplished a great deal. The white, middle-class characters in Heat aresubtly displaced from their empowered positions, both by the intrusion ofOtherness and uncertainty into their worlds, and by Oates's disinterestednarrators who frame these characters as unworthy of reader empathy oridentification. My discomfort with The Rise of Life on Earth stems frommy sense that Oates is appropriating a "sordid and shocking" life from avoyeuristic distance that leaves her readers safe and secure in their positionabove that life. Perhaps other readers will see what I have missed in thisnovel, for Oates does not strike me as a writer who unthinkingly representsany life. In her famous Balzacian desire to "put the whole world into abook," Oates just might revisit Kathleen's story and tell it from Kathleen'sperspective. Whatever she does next, even readers who are ambivalentabout Joyce Carol Oates can at least be sure that she will continue toshock- and to surprise.
Stephanie KicelukKiceluk, StephanieFlorence Nightingale: The Inner and the Outer DramaVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.415-424http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:18
Page 415STEPHANIE KICELUKFLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: THE INNERAND THE OUTER DRAMAEver Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters. Edited byMartha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard. Harvard University Press,1990. Pp. xiv + 462. $29.95.To gather and edit a collection of letters is not merely to assemble abook, but to assemble a life. When that life is as extraordinary as Florence Nightingale's (1820-1910), the task becomes formidable. It mustaddress certain questions of character, for we inevitably want to knowwhat drove such an awesome personality, what forces-both internaland external-shaped such an exceptional life. Happily, in selectingamong Nightingale's thousands of letters and private notes, Vicinus andNergaard have been guided by their interest in the formation and evolution of identity, both private and public. As a result, their volumeprovides a pristine window on the dynamic of the inner as well as theouter drama, illuminating the intricate mechanisms that linked Nightingale's "private conflicts [to] her enormously varied public responsibilities" (1). In this respect, Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale is a richresource not only for historians of medicine and nursing, and scholars ofVictorian culture and society, but also for those interested in women'sstudies, the social and personal construction of gender and identity, andthe psychology of genius and the gifted individual.Nightingale unquestionably possessed something of genius. Certainly,she had at her disposal enormous amounts of psychic energy, togetherwith an inordinate capacity for sublimation. She once said that hermother had "a Genius for Order," and perhaps that is where part of herdaughter's lay as well. A consummate tactician and organizer, Nightingale displayed rare powers of analysis and diagnosis and an incomparable415
Page 416416 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWgift for settings things right. When she presented her plans for reformingBritain's military hospital system before the royal couple, the Queenexclaimed, "'Such a head! I wish we had her at the War Office." The factthat she was not was due solely to an accident of birth - her sex.The subject of gender was a nodal point of much intellectual energyand soul-searching for Nightingale. She was fond of saying that womenhad no sympathy, by which she meant the ability to suspend selfcenteredness and engage with the concerns of the world at large. "Whycannot a woman follow abstractions like a man?" she wrote to her fatherwhen she was twenty-six. "[H]as she less imagination, less intellect, lessself-devotion, less religion than a man? I think not. And yet she has neverproduced one single great work of Art, or Science, or Literature.... Is itnot because [of] the habit of never interesting herself much, in any conversation, printed or spoken, which is not personal, of making herself &her own feelings the subject of speculation...?" Woman's short-sightedfocus on "her own experiences as the principal part of her life," Nightingale concluded, "renders her powerless to rise to any abstract good, orgeneral view. It cuts her wings, it palsies her muscles, & shortens herbreath for higher things.... She has fed on sugar-plums, her appetite ispalled for bread" (31). As Nightingale resolutely asserted, however, noneof this was to say that women were incapable of acquiring those qualitiesof character necessary for the accomplishment of great and noble works.If women were generally devoid of those qualities, it was because everything in Victorian society worked to deaden and extinguish them. The"conventional life of the present phase of civilization," she wrote to Cardinal Manning in 1852, "fritters away all that is spiritual in women" (62).Nightingale's own family was sufficient proof of that. Their traditionalnotions of women's abilities and roles were sorely inadequate to the challenge of comprehending the enigma in their midst. In appraising herparents' and sister's stance toward her, Nightingale predictably saw it as afailure of sympathy: "I must expect no sympathy, nor help from them. Ihave for so long craved for their sympathy that I can hardly reconcilemyself to this. I have so long struggled to make myself understood, beensore, cast down,... that I must not try to be understood. I know theycan not"' (50).In its depiction of isolated struggle and fervid aspiration, the story ofNightingale's life has a familiar aura about it; it summons up the oldChristian mythos of ascetic saints and maiden warriors who, forsakingworldly pleasures and conventional ties, answer to a higher, ineluctablecalling. When Florence was sixteen, God whispered in her ear, but shewas not yet ready to surrender to his will - to put aside the glamour of
Page 417STEPHANIE KICELUK 417childish things and forgo the glory and promise of a brilliant social life.She stood determined, however, to subdue her desire to "shine in society," and by the time she was twenty-four, her conviction that God hadcalled her to nurse the sick and infirm had crystallized. In the face ofthis conviction, everything else gradually lost its reality; her eminentand dashing suitor, her circle of admirers, her charmed life in the bosomof one of Britain's most wealthy and elegant families- all paled intoinsignificance: "All is like a dream,... the world, and the pink satinghosts in it, & ourselves most of all-if we could always be true toourselves, have a sacred trust in our intentions, we should need no othertruth....." (32) It was of no consequence to her that nursing was inthose days a sordid and disreputable occupation, the last resort of agingprostitutes and scullery maids. Longing to emulate the works of Christ,she prepared herself for great joy as well as great suffering; "[T]hink ofthe happiness of working," she wrote, "and working successfully, too,*. with the ecstasy of single heartedness," and "all desires... swallowed up in the one great craving after righteousness... " (32)As things turned out, however, it was not primarily her "love ofdisplay and glory" that Nightingale had to surmount; a far more insidious obstacle would test her resolve - her attachment to her family. Theconflict between her abiding sense of duty toward her parents and sisterand her own desires for herself was excruciating for Nightingale. At onepoint, assigned to the care and amusem*nt of her sister for six months,Nightingale wished for death: "I have no desire now but to die.... Onevenings that seem never to end-for how many long years I havewatched that drawing room clock & thought it would never reach theten & for 20 or so more years to do this.... This is the sting of death"(44). Unable to reclaim even a tiny portion of her day without guilt,Nightingale reasoned that her justification for having some time toherself was that she would be of more use to her family sane than mad.Desperate, she wrote a series of instructions to herself: "First, to spendone hour a day at least at the [village] school. Without this, I know it tobe impossible for me to preserve my being.... I shall be more capableof doing what they want the rest of the day, than if I gave way &destroyed myself by doing what they think they wish in company thewhole of the day - which I know to be impossible to me. I shall be morecheerful, less worn, more really obedient to their wish" (49).For nearly ten years, in an agonizing ordeal of separation and individuation, Nightingale struggled for psychic survival in the crucible ofher family. "[W]hat am I," she wrote at the height of her torment, "thatI am not in harmony with all this, that their life is not good enough for
Page 418418 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWme?... [W]hy, oh my God, cannot I be satisfied with the life thatsatisfies so many people. I am told that the conversation of all thesegood clever men ought to be enough for me- why am I starving, desperate, diseased upon it?" (47) In the end, Nightingale's hunger for a"nourishing life," her craving for righteousness," proved too intransigent. At the age of thirty-four, she finally entered upon her life's work.During the next decade (1854-64), this singular craving would standher in good stead, firing her imagination, steeling her will, and forgingthe remarkable legacy of her reforms.The signs of her fate seemed to have stamped themselves early onFlorence Nightingale's character. She herself noted that since the age ofsix, she had been consumed with the master passion of her life- the desireto do something, to be of service. "A profession, a trade, a necessaryoccupation, something to fill and employ all my faculties, I have alwaysfelt essential to me, I have always longed for, consciously or not...[T]he first thought I can remember & the last was nursing work...."(47) Her earlier biographers observed that as a child she was irresistiblydrawn to wounded things, bandaging injured animals and mending torndolls. Her taste in reading bore the same distinctive hallmark. At the ageof ten, she excitedly wrote to her mother that she had come upon "a verypretty book... consisting of short Sermons, and Stories showing theshortness of life, and suddenness of death" (14). As a young woman,while others of her sex were no doubt hiding novels of adultery undertheir pillows, Nightingale was secretly rising before the rest of her familyto pore over government documents and hospital reports. By the sametoken, during family trips to Europe, instead of making the grand tour oftheaters, drawing rooms, and spas, Nightingale would slip away to visitand collect data on hospitals, asylums, and slums.One establishment that made a special impression on her was inKaiserswerth, Germany-the site of a hospital, penitentiary, andorphanage where working-class and peasant women received basictraining in nursing and child care. On her second visit, Nightingalespent six weeks living and working there, absorbing all the experienceshe could and assiduously noting the operation and administration of aninstitution whose equivalent she dreamed of setting up in England. Inaddition to her training at Kaiserswerth, Nightingale came back fromher European sojourns with one other prize-her acquaintance withElizabeth and Sidney Herbert, the wealthy and prominent couple whowould play such a decisive role in her life's work.Upon her return from Germany in the fall of 1851, Nightingale wasdetermined to pursue her own chosen course in life, even at the cost of
Page 419STEPHANIE KICELUK 419her standing as a daughter, and her identity as a woman. "[Y]ou don'tthink," she wrote in imaginary dialogue with her mother, "that with my'talents' and my 'European reputation' & my 'beautiful letters' and allthat, I'm going to stay dangling about my mother's drawingroom all mylife - I shall go & look out for work, to be sure. You must look upon meas your son, your vagabond son, without his money" (55). Her sanity, atany rate, was of greater use to her than her gender. She had seen "thenumbers of [her] kind who [had] gone mad for want of something todo" (39). She had watched "the finest intellect & the sweetest temper"descend "thro' irritability, nervousness & weakness to final derangement," and she wanted none of it.In April of 1853, opportunity knocked: Elizabeth Herbert recommended Nightingale for the position of superintendent of an establishmentonly the Victorians could have named - the Institute for the Care of SickGentlewomen in Distressed Circ*mstances. Within two months, Nightingale had moved into her quarters on Harley Street and was overseeingarrangements for the new hospital. At first appalled by the idea, herfamily relented, and her father conferred his blessings in the sum of anannual allowance of 500 pounds. After nearly twenty years of familystrife and wrenching inner conflict, the suffocating web of family obligations and prohibitions had been rent. A year later, Florence heardperhaps with a small shiver of ecstasy - another voice whisper in her ear.It was destiny calling: war in the Crimea had been declared.On November 3, 1854, less than a fortnight after the calamitouscharge of the light brigade, Nightingale found herself on that fatefulpromontory overlooking the domes and minarets of Constantinople.Legend has it that her letter offering her services had crossed in the mailwith that of Lord Sidney Herbert, then Secretary-at-War who offeredher the superintendency of "the female nursing establishment in theEnglish General Military Hospitals in Turkey" (81). Little could shesurmise what awaited her and the thirty-eight nurses in her charge.Sitting on top of a clogged cesspool and decaying human waste, theBarrack Hospital at Scutari was a breeding ground for vermin of everykind. When Nightingale set her nurses to scrubbing the floors, wholesections gave way to rot and maggots. There were four miles of cots, attimes holding close to three thousand soldiers, packed so tightly thatNightingale could barely pass through. Soldiers were given "slipperbaths" every two months with a single sponge used "among manywounds." Many were half-naked and starving, bereft of sheets, blankets, mattresses, bandages, and eating utensils, all of which Nightingale's party provided. There was no laundry in sight, and not a single
Page 420420 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWpiece of soap, or basin, or towel to be had. Clogged pipes sometimesnecessitated the use of open tubs for privies. Amputations and othersurgical procedures were carried out in full view and in full hearing ofthe soldiers. In the midst of this infernal "sink of human misery," chaos,cholera, and dysentery flourished unchecked. The sheer physical horrorof it all was inconceivable. "There were moments," Lytton Stracheywrote, "there were places, in the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, where thestrongest hand was struck with trembling, and the boldest eye wouldturn away its gaze" (Eminent Victorians, 1913, 148).Nightingale did neither. Instead, she undertook to flush out the Stygian stables of Britain's military. If ever there was an instance of anirresistible force moving an immovable object it is that of Nightingaletaking on the British War Office. Upon her arrival at Scutari, she had atonce penetrated to the source of its madness. One sharp glance at thesufferings around her, and she understood that her main enemies werenot to be cholera and miasma but medical officers and inspector generals. On December 10, 1854, she wrote to Herbert: "The grand administrative evil emanates from home -in the existence of a number ofdepartments here, each with its centrifugal & independent action, uncounteracted by any centripetal attraction -viz, a central authoritycapable of supervising and compelling combined effort...." (96) Nosooner had she detected the absence of such authority did she form theintention to create it.Despite officials' vapid assurances that nothing was needed at Scutari, she set about feeding, clothing, washing, and nursing the Britishcommon soldier; she wrote his letters, devised a system for sending hisearnings home, and organized a range of recreational and educationalactivities. In short, she restored to him his humanity. Then she directedher attention toward the disgraceful state of medical practice at thehospital, urging that an operating room, a dissecting room, postmortemexaminations, and a system of record keeping were essential to its operation. Seemingly undaunted by any task, she undertook the responsibility of purveying for the army, riding on horseback or walking for hours,sometimes through "driving storms of sleet and snow," obstinately prying necessary supplies out of a system of purchase and distribution thatwas a cross between Kafka and Laurel and Hardy. "Urgent" requisitionshad to pass through eight separate departments; if an item was not instock, the requisition was simply thrown out. Supplies often travelledback and forth across the Black Sea several times without anyone realizing they were on board; others languished forgotten in the toils of theTurkish customs office.
Page 421STEPHANIE KICELUK 421Nightingale left Scutari in July of 1856. She returned to England withthe ghosts of the Crimean dead, vowing that their blood would notremain spilled in vain. For the next five years, she labored like onepossessed to expunge "the grand administrative evil" responsible for theimmeasurable and unnecessary human agony she had witnessed. Hermajor instrument was the Royal Commission on the Health of theArmy, launched in May 1857. In laying its groundwork, she had discovered to her horror that the mortality rate of soldiers at home stationswas twice that of the civilian population. Incensed by the army's continuing neglect in providing sanitary conditions for its men, she indignantly declared that it might just as well "take 1100 men per ann outupon Salisbury Plain and shoot them" (174). Desperate to spare futuregenerations of soldiers, she sifted through literally vanloads of statisticaltables, government files, and official reports, all the while inspectingand collecting data on scores of hospitals and barracks.By August of 1857, Nightingale was in a state of collapse and prepared herself for death. From this time forward, she assumed the life ofan invalid. Visions of Scutari continued to haunt her, fueling hermounting fury: "Not one man arose, either gentle or simple," she ragedin a private note, "out of all those thousands; either Officer or Private,to say This shall not be: to shew How it need not be; to suggest, or, ifnecessary, to force, at the risk of being shot, an organization to save theArmy" (189). Weak, pulse racing, sleepless, Nightingale worked on in akind of delirium. Establishing her bed and sofa as the headquarters ofBritain's alternate "war office," she gathered around her the best andthe brightest-a circle of influential statesmen, reformers and expertswhose centerpiece was Sidney Herbert -and molded them into herloyal cohort of vassals. These men were her very ears and eyes, her legsand hands, veritable extensions of her body and her will. Maddened bythe thought that nothing would come of her plans, she demanded theirunstinting labor, sometimes driving them to the limits of their physicaland emotional endurance, exacting merely the same kind of devotionand servitude once asked of her as daughter.By 1861, owing to the efforts of Nightingale and her contingent, themortality rate from disease at home stations had been halved. Thatsame year, the circle of symbiosis was irreparably severed: two of "hermen"- Arthur Clough and Sidney Herbert-died. In her grief, Nightingale spoke of her legs being cut off, and of the devastating loss of self:"In the Medea Jason says, 'What remains?' And Medea answers, 'I'....All are now gone. And there remains only half 'I'." (237) Writing toconsole her, Sir John McNeil could not have known how prescient his
Page 422422 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWwords would prove to be: "You are leaving your impress on the age inwhich you live and the print of your foot will be traced by generationsyet unborn. Go on - to you the accidents of mortality ought to be as thefalling of the leaves in autumn" (229).Even a cursory review of Nightingale's achievements takes one'sbreath away. She exposed to full view the administrative disorganization and ineptitude of the War Office; she set in motion educational andorganizational reforms of far-reaching consequence for military andcivilian life; she was the founder of modern nursing; she was the mastermind and driving force behind the Royal Commission of the Health ofthe Army, and the author of an 800-page report, "Notes Affecting theHealth, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army,"which formed the basis of the Commission's recommendations.Through her fierce determination and unfailing vigilance, Britain's military hospitals and barracks were renovated; a new system of statisticalaccounting was set in place, and an army medical school was established. And then, the unimaginable happened: the Army MedicalDepartment was revamped and brought into the modern era. Not content, Nightingale turned her eyes toward the army in India and spurredthe appointment of a Royal Commission on Sanitation to report onconditions there. She worked to improve the lot of the sick in prisonsand workhouse infirmaries; and through all this, she undertook thelabor of composing Notes on Hospitals (1859), the book which revolutionized the idea of the hospital and assured, as Strachey noted, thathenceforth there would be no great hospital in the world which wouldnot "bear upon it the impress of her mind" (183).How does one begin to understand a life of this magnitude, and theastonishing range of achievements that emerged under pressure of thatprodigious, indomitable personality? The nature of Vicinus' and Nergaard's edition, so replete with psychological nuance, is such that it notonly compels us to ask the question but to search out an answer. Theirjuxtaposition of Nightingale's public letters and private notes is a highlyeffective device that permits us to witness the construction of the publicpersona alongside the evolution of the private self, and the ever-shiftingrelationship between the two.One overriding connection that Vicinus' and Nergaard's selection elucidates is that between Nightingale's success in the arena of publicaffairs and the lessons she learned in the school of family politics. In aprivate note entitled "Butchered to make a Roman Holiday," she wentdirectly to the heart of the matter: "Women don't consider themselves ashuman beings at all. There is absolutely no God, no country, no duty to
Page 423STEPHANIE KICELUK 423them at all except family.... I have known a good deal of convents....But I know nothing of the petty grinding tyranny of a good Englishfamily. And the only alleviation is that the tyrannized submits with aheart full of affection" (54). In later life, Nightingale's ongoing battle ofwills with her family roused and energized her psyche. During theperiod of her great reforms, she simultaneously engaged in a continuousprocess of analyzing and chastising them. She never tired of justifyingher behavior toward them, and she never lost the opportunity to catalogue the many injuries and ignominies she had suffered at their hands.In an 1867 letter to her confidant, Benjamin Jowett, the Master ofBalliol College, Nightingale finally arrived at a crucial juncture ofinsight and resolution. Drawing an analogy between textual criticismand character analysis, she argued that women ought to undertake adispassionate exegesis of their family members. "It is just like Reviewwriting and reading," she says. One should never judge a book by itsreview, by the opinion of others; to "form a true estimate of it," onemust read it for oneself. The same principle applies to families: "Ibelieve half the misery in families would be done away with, if womencould really rise to 'forming a true estimate' of their husband's or theirfather's & mother's characters,... Nothing else will ever make the lifeof families endurable. Nothing else will ever prevent that willing martyrdom which does no good to the person who accepts it but only harm... No less would the Devourers be saved than the Devoured, if theydid but form a 'real estimate' of character. For it was often not thro'selfishness, it is from a lack of knowledge of the true value of a humanbeing that they accept the sacrifice, which 'profiteth nothing"'(275-76).Through a fortuitous combination of natural endowment and historical circ*mstance Nightingale spared herself such a sacrifice. But if herfigure calls to mind other giantesses who eluded the DevourersDorothea Dix, Susan Brownell Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe - it alsoevokes the Devoured - the generations of 'hysterical' and 'neurasthenic'young women who, trapped behind 'yellow wallpaper,' perished insickrooms, their spirits laid waste by "pink satin ghosts." Nightingale'ssanitary and nursing reforms played a crucial part in freeing the energies of a new generation of women. The transformation of the hospitalfrom a foul dumping ground for the indigent and incurable to an efficient and respectable haven for middle-class patients served to releaselegions of daughters from the servitude of nursing their sick and infirmfamily members.
Page 424424 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWIn the introduction to their section, Vicinus and Nergaard observethat their work is part of "the continuing reconsideration of FlorenceNightingale as a person who influenced not only her own age, but alsosubsequent generations" (2). They point out that the image of Nightingale and the nature of her accomplishments have, over the years, suffered distortion and misrepresentation. The most notorious source ofthese, they argue, is Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. "After reading his essay," they remark, "reform - whether of the army, the nursingprofession, or hospital architecture-fades into the background, as ifthese changes occurred naturally without human action, while Nightingale harassed busy men in positions of authority" (9). Here, I think,they do Strachey an injustice. It is true that three-quarters of the waythrough his essay -with Sir Sidney Herbert's entry into the story-avitriolic tone suddenly enters his account of Nightingale's modusoperandi. The sight of the "tigress['s]... claws in [Herbert's] quiveringhaunches" was perhaps too much for the squeamish Strachey, who hadhis own problems with the fairer sex. Whatever his shortcomings in thismatter, it was Strachey, nevertheless, who first debunked the worn,pallid myth of the delicate nursemaid who spent her energies wiping thefevered brows of Britain's soldiers. Strachey heartily applauded Nightingale's jettisoning of the social code that confined women on all sides,and he expressed the highest praise for her supreme heroism in the faceof all the forces arrayed against her and in the midst of horrors thatwould have undone most others. He spoke of her "unflinching courage,"her "indefatigable vigilance," her "superhuman equanimity." Thanks toher, "the reign of chaos and old night began to dwindle," and he meantus to understand this tribute not only in relation to the Crimean seat ofwar, but to Victorian England at large.The cultural alchemy that converted Nightingale into an Angel ofMercy and then to an Angel of Vengeance, the Lady with a Lamp into"the personification of the new Machiavelli," is fascinating to trace, andhas much to do with our society's apprehensions about female powerand ambition. In light of our failure -after nearly a century -to form"a true estimate" of Nightingale's character and achievements, perhapsshe herself should have the final say about them; "[W]here shall weseek," she writes upon her return from the Crimea, "... one who willfind the truth & tell it, in the way that it used to be told, in the waywhich colors a century, which rouses a generation, which spreads till itbecomes an organization of minds?" (190) No doubt a familiar voicewhispered in her ear: "Look within yourself."
Mutlu Konuk BlasingBlasing, Mutlu KonukThe American Sublime, C. 1992: What Clothes Does One Wear?Vol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.425-441http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:19
Page 425MUTLU KONUK BLASINGTHE AMERICAN SUBLIME, C. 1992:WHAT CLOTHES DOES ONE WEAR?Flow Chart. By John Ashbery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Pp.216. $20.00.Powers of Congress. By Alice Fulton. Boston: David R. Godine, 1990.Pp. 108. $16.95 (hb); $10.95 (pb).The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990. ByCharles Wright. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1990. Pp. 232.$25.00 (hb); $12.95 (pb).Flow Chart is John Ashbery's latest experiment; he continues to do histhing, but he knows better than anyone that experimental techniquesplay differently in 1992 than in 1962, let alone 1912. "One is doomed, /repeating oneself, never to repeat oneself, you know what I mean?" stateshis predicament. His oversize, long-lined, book-length poem has all the"avant-garde" markings, but he has no illusions that its formal discontinuities represent cultural opposition:What right have you to consider yourself anything but an enormously eccentric thoughnot too egocentric character, whose sins of omission haven't omitted much,whose personal-pronoun lapses may indeed have contributed toaugmenting the hardshipsilently resented among the working classes? If I thought that fora minute I'd... yet,remembering how you didn't want to get up today, how warmthe bed was and cozy, you425
Page 426426 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWcouldn't really begin with a proletarian, accustomed as they areto backbreakingtoil and so (you'd like to think) don't feel it that much. Besidesthey never read Henry James' novels.Just for the sake of argument let's say I've never done an honestday's workin my life. It's hardly heartbreaking news, nota major concern.This is an experiment without the authorization of either a politicalagenda or science, the other traditional appeal of the "new": "And as forme, sad to say, / I could never bring myself to offer my experiments thegift of objective, scientific I evaluation." Not only do Ashbery's "experiments" play into the system, but their "newness" is positioned as ananachronism. While the poem takes liberties with notions of "poems," bynow that is the norm, and Ashbery actually locates his poet as a wanderer"in the halls of the nineteenth century: its exhibits, / talismans, prejudices, erroneous procedures and doomed expeditions": "I must shade myeyes from the light with my hands, the light of the explosion / of theupcoming twentieth century."Whether Ashbery's "halls" are meant to hold the echoes of Wordsworthor not, Flow Chart may be best read alongside The Prelude. It is anautobiographical poem, recording "the origin and progress" of thepowers of the poet's mind - although Ashbery duly registers appropriatesuspicions about "progress," "poet," and "mind." It also reviews his published books: "John's report cards." Wordsworth could well be describingAshbery's project, beginning with the desire "either to lay up I Newstores, or rescue from decay the old I By timely interference"; drawingout "With fond and feeble tongue a tedious tale" in the "hope" that "Imight... fix the wavering balance of my mind"; and offering the"Song," "which like a lark / I have protracted," to the "Friend" as a "gift,"though "prepared" under the "pressure of a private grief, / Keen andenduring," in the confidence that "the history of a Poet's mind / Is labournot unworthy of regard." Both poems give a minute account of subjectiveresponses to events, whether cataclysmic or barely registrable by thoseless "elevated" sensibilities who lack as large a capability of "being excitedwithout the application of gross and violent stimulants." Ashbery's "egotistical" anti-sublime - consumed with "exquisite nitpicking" and putting"too fine a deconstruction" on everything that may or may not havehappened to "me," while days, seasons, and decades roll by "outside"reaffirms that "we moderns have to 'leave our mark' / on whatever we sayand do; we can let nothing pass without a comment / of some kind." Inother words, despite Ashbery's unrelenting irony, and despite the ironies
Page 427MUTLU KONUK BLASING 427that become apparent in juxtaposing him with Wordsworth, readingFlow Chart is an experience comparable to nothing so much as to readingThe Prelude.Wordsworth's assumption that "each man's Mind is to herself / Witnessand judge" holds for Ashbery: "Nothing is required of you, yet all mustrender an accounting." Indeed, legalistic terminology of trials, judges,and sentences abounds in his poem. If there is a "private grief" or aprivate accounting for some real or imagined failing or guilt, we cannotpossibly know it, so that everything registers on a "higher" plane asanother attempt, complete with its attendant anxieties, to justify theways of a "Poet's mind." Certain details - the presence of "John," recurrent plays on "Ashes," and vague references to family, sex, mourning,writing, history, and earlier poems - make for an autobiographical drift,which renders Flow Chart more compelling than recent Ashbery books,but as usual he denies us the "specifics" and even apologizes for his lapses:"forgive us / our stitch of frivolity in the fabric of eternity if only so thatothers / can see how shabby the truth isn't and make their depositionsaccordingly." We are left with the fact that "This is a poem," for it doesmeet the minimum requirements of allusions and line breaks: "be one ofthose / on whom nothing is lost. Organize your thoughts in random linesand, later on / down the road, paginate them." Ashbery's "random lines"do add up to "something like / my autobiography": "I say 'I' / because I'mthe experimental model of which mankind is still dreaming, though tomyself / I'm full of unworked-out bugs and stagefright." More, "I see I amas ever / a terminus of sorts, that is, lots of people arrive in me and switchdirections but no one / moves on any farther; this being, in effect, the endof the line, a branch-line / at that."Not clearly authorized to indulge in a more autobiographical reading,we must resort to a literary reading of such negative millennialism andtrace the fortunes of the humanist subject in postmodern times. "Somebody dust these ashes off, open / the curtains, get a little light on thesubject: the subject / going off on its own again," Ashbery seems to plead,and we can only agree, but no such luck; he and we are left with "thismound of cold ashes that we call / for want of a better word the past,"which "inflect[s] the horizon," "calling attention to shapes / that resembleit and so liberating them into the bloodstream / of our collective memory." As his autobiographical subject dissolves into a universal subject,our reading is deflected to an academic one, and there are enough allusions and meditations on writing to keep us going. Thus personal experience, self-accounting, and private trials are the subjects of the poem, butAshbery treats them as irrelevant to the reader, who is nevertheless askedto read it-to consume this product.
Page 428428 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWThis product sells "personal experience"- regrettably incommunicableand perhaps not entirely consequential - and "poetry," which is, regrettably, only a luxury for those who can afford such conspicuous consumption: "the coat I wear, / woven of consumer products, asks you to pauseand inspect / the still-fertile ground of our once-valid compact / with theordinary and the true." If we unravel this a bit, we see that we are askedto tailor Ashbery's "coat" to the canonical tradition, never mind theconsumer products. Despite the present straits of the "poet," he is "asking"us to reconsider the same "compact" that Wordsworth, for example,invokes to legitimate Lyrical Ballads: "It is supposed, that by the act ofwriting in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he willgratify certain known habits of association.... it will undoubtedlyappear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. They who have been accustomed to thegaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persistin reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have tostruggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will lookround for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species ofcourtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title." Here isAshbery: "I can tell you a story about something. The expression will bejust right, for it will be adjusted / to the demands of the form, and theform itself shall be timeless though / hitherto unsuspected." Thushis literature will have performed its dutyby setting you gently down in a new place and then speeding offbeforeyou have a chance to thank it. We've got to find a new name forhim. "Writer" seemstotally inadequate; yet it is writing, you read it before you knewit. And besides,if it weren't, it wouldn't have done the unexpected and by doingso proved that it was quitethe thing to do, and if it happened all right for you, but wasn'tthe way youthought it was going to be, why stillthat is called fulfilling part of the bargain.By interweaving Wordsworth and Ashbery at such length, I am suggesting that Ashbery practices his novelties with one eye on tradition.Dressing his "stories" for "the new financial age that offers better reception / to things of the future, like mine," is a marketing strategy, for he isinterested in selling: "For a dollar I could put it in the mail to you, / mylittle tract." This might sell better now than Whitman's "I do not say
Page 429MUTLU KONUK BLASING 429these things for a dollar" of more than a century ago. Indeed, "To the'newness' then, all subscribe": "So for / sixteen years I dazzled the constituents with sayings of a country I had never seen; they knew I / raved butthought it must always be so when men dreamed, but my darker /purpose never surfaced." "In fact," Ashbery continues, "we never see allthere is to see / which is good for business too: keeps the public returning /these days of swiftly eroding brand loyalty": "such / is the interestingclimate we live in." If he has a "darker purpose" that is not merely teasedinto being by his evasive, marketing strategies, it would be the very oldfashioned one of keeping alive, by keeping it in the dark, a private self.This, for me, is the pathos of Ashbery's project. Flow Chart confirmsthe cultural marginalization of "high" poetry by representing itself as akind of preserve where the subject- the endangered species -may bekept alive. No more an "agent" than a cog in the machine, Ashbery's poetattends to "the obscure reveries of the inward gaze," tirelessly registeringthe rhythms of his inner life and, just as tirelessly, enumerating the difficulties of writing. And his fashionable coat, woven of consumer products,offers camouflage and better protection than the entirely different"enterprise" of going naked. The intractable nature of the poem - as ofany Ashbery text -confirms that poetry does not make any difference,unless, perhaps, it markets difference. "The handwriting on the wall"says "return to your abstractions... life / has no need of you just yet."This knowledge floods the poet with sudden clarity and reaffirms hischarge: "I thought I should / sharpen my appearance, for that way lieslight, lies life, and yes I am / talking about new clothes as well." One mustadmire Ashbery's ability to have his cake and eat it, too, in these hardtimes. He keeps telling us that his poem is only about himself and couldmatter less; but it looks sharp and it pierces. He offers a product, novel incloth and cut, yet he keeps apologizing that, in substance, it has nocultural function. For the substance he quixotically sets out to preservecomprises the relics of the humanist subject, the "holy remnants of theburnished / mirror in which the Almighty once saw Himself, and wept."Flow Chart is not merely a parodic simulacrum of a Romantic poem; ithas a more serious undercurrent and, I like to think, a real investment incharting the fortunes of the subjective life, public as well as private.Ashbery's poem is how Wordsworth's project sounds today, indistinguishable from the ravings of a mind of "wavering balance." Yet Ashbery isimpelled to continue producing it in this way: "I have the feeling myvoice is just for me, / that no one else has ever heard it, yet I keepmumbling the litany / of all that has ever happened to me." Similarly, weare impelled to keep reading, not because we expect some ultimate "high"of revelation but for the intermittent "buzz" we get. With no "metaphysi
Page 430430 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWcal reasons," he goes on doing what he does because he has lost the"formula for stopping," as Jean Baudrillard remarks apropos joggers.After a while we lose the "formula," too, for Flow Chart is amazinglymoving- at least for one given to conspicuous consumption. The poemthat deploys an avant-garde style markets, after all, an elitist product,and it attracts us because it shows how "poetry" plays today within thelarger cultural discursive economies. In Ashbery's words, "You can't / canit and sell it, that's for sure, but it is a commodity, and someday all / willbe wiser for it." And, for some "specialists," it plays as a nostalgic preserve, helping alleviate certain anxieties: "I will show you fear in a handful of specialists."This fearful specialist would like to think, though, that Ashberyremains committed to preserve, "produce," or "enlarge" the capability "ofbeing excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants."That, in Wordsworth's terms, "is one of the best services in which, at anyperiod, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, isespecially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown toformer times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind." To keep alive the "discriminating powers ofthe mind" is, I would argue, Ashbery's "darker purpose," a downrightconservative aim that finds models in Wordsworth and James. In otherwords, I do not buy Ashbery's fashionable "coat"; while Flow Chart isdressed as a pure product of its culture, it is also a conservative critique,which "darker" and "worthy purpose" gives the author the "right to thename of a Poet."Or, at least, to the "label" of a poet. "Darkness" in Ashbery, early andlate, is associated with the personal, "a darkness of one's own." If hiswriting is designed to resist the erosion of the very idea of the personal,naturally he can't deliver his "message" or give us the clue to decode it.This is the "quite tiny key to success" he "hold[s] in his hand." He canleave behind only "clues... fated not to be found this time," a "trace / ofhis passing," or a "flicker of ashes in the grate." But here is another ironyof his career: "Because in the dark I you knew something and didn't tellit," "the notion / became a battle-cry and soon everybody was trying todisconnect his life and seal it I off, unsuccessfully." He registers an anxietyof influence in reverse, lamenting the appropriation of his stylisticsignature-his way of not telling. Since a flow chart diagrams a manufacturing process, Flow Chart is an appropriate title for the autobiography of a poet who keeps processing his personal experience into a meresignifier of what is most personal, so that it becomes cultural or literarycurrency, a simulacrum, a "guaranteed... label, which lasts forever."For Flow Chart is more personal than the personal can ever be, not
Page 431MUTLU KONUK BLASING 431only because our times are so "interesting" but also because life, asAshbery often reminds us, is a generic proposition, after all; it's anybody'slife. So why continue?howdo you keep going next time?And I told him for half a dime I'd quit and screwyou too, only that's not done, the verypillars of our civilization would crumble...... we the keepers of the trust... have tosomehow find the missing key.But how? "Where is the one who takes out the ashes, / leaves the keybehind"? And who would want to be this "one" anyway? What wouldthere be without the ashes? What if "these marginalia... are the substance of the text"? "What I if poetry were something else entirely, notthis purple weather I with the eye of a god attached, that sees / inwardand outward? What if it were only a small, other way of living?" What if"a pleasant, slightly numbed sense of wonderment" were all the readerwas vouchsafed? But who could brush off someone who says, "despite mybluster and my swaggering, / [I] have no real home and no one to inhabitit except you"? Plus, "if I am to be cast off, then / where? There has to bea space, even a negative one, a slot / for me, or does there?" And "Whereare the standard bearers? Why / have our values been lost? Who is goingto pay for any of this?" Or "Is it that I'm a sort of jerk?" In short, FlowChart is a very entertaining book, which moves us practically to tears:You get A for effort, but the road to hell is pavedwith good intentions. But I'll take the blight,thanks. I'm good at working under pressure,as indeed we all must be.Alice Fulton is another story. Her "coat," too, is woven of "consumerproducts," but hers is a skin-tight fit. Her relation to the reader and hernegotiation between private and public experience could not be moredifferent from Ashbery's. Although his evasive strategies preclude anyintimate revelations, his voice is intimate, and he always manages toaddress the "delicatest ear of the mind." Fulton's voice is never intimate:her volume is turned just a notch too high and tends, at times, to overshoot the inner ear. Her voice is public, and she usually speaks as "we";even when she uses "I," her experience is either representative or meant toinstruct or illustrate some larger truth - about how "we" experience, feel,behave, or should behave. She is also fond of dramatic monologues.
Page 432432 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWSylvia Plath's late work is a model for her fast pace, mixed diction,extravagant metaphors, black humor, and bravura. But Fulton combinesher flashy technical performance with something of Dickinson's taste formore philosophical and linguistic deconstructions, as well as something ofMarianne Moore's moral charge. Fulton is polished in what she does, andher flash hooks the reader. On the down side, she can be breezy and evenfacile. Her language has very little undertow; her accomplished verbalplay, for example, is on display and never gives a sense of making aconnection that might have taken the speaker herself by surprise as wellas the reader. Fulton appears always to be in full control, almost gearingherself to a classroom audience.Powers of Congress opens with "Cascade Experiment," which sets thetheater of Fulton's operations. It is addressed to "you," who could well bethe reader - though Fulton says she originally had God in mind. The oddcombination of an aggressive voice proceeding on a faith based on scientific authority suggests a certain anxiety about its audience. But the poemtargets "the shy one, lizard or electron," and her "advances / presumingyour existence" are personal overtures and forward rhetorical cascades,invoking scientific "progress" and amplifying in force and volume as they"fall" of their own gravity. "Passional" has directly to do with "faith," onwhich this poem rides:Because faith creates its verificationand reaching you will be no harder than believingin a planet's caul of plasma,or interacting with a cometin its perihelion passage, no harderthan considering what sparking of the vacuum, cosmologicalimpromptu flung me here, a periphrasis, perhaps,for some denser, more difficult being,a subsidiary instance, easier to graspthan the span I foreshadow, of which I am a variable,my stance is passional toward the universe and you.The poem deploys scientific terminology and invokes both cosmic andsub-atomic phenomena for purposes that have little to do with science -the possibility of a poet's addressing a "you." While this mix energizes thelanguage, it amounts to rhetorical overkill, which undermines the ostensible argument for the necessity of faith -unless Fulton intends to deconstruct "faith" as another word for "rhetoric," drawing "proof" from culturally authoritative discourses and pronounced with an eye to a skepticalaudience as from a pulpit. In any event, the poem is an "experiment" in
Page 433MUTLU KONUK BLASING 433"passional" posturing: it runs a test to determine whether this rhetoricsucceeds in making the speaker and "us" believe.Generally, Fulton's forms are neither traditional nor free. Tight butimprovised, they experiment with what I will call "systemic" orders thatenact the poem's function on another scale. This method makes for tautwork, but has its own dangers. In "Disorder Is a Measure of Warmth," forexample, the subject is the desire for cold perfections modeled on TVimages, and the form has a cold, syllabic look reminiscent of Moore, "aseach tailored wafer builds / its strict array." The form is not really syllabic, however, but a typographical simulation of a syllabic order, anddoes not dramatically engage the subject. Moore's formal grids, by contrast, do not coincide with but, indeed, cut against her content and thusallow the reader to observe the operations of form in the making ofmeaning. In Fulton, the form only reenacts "our" desire for cold purity,reproducing on a different scale the same discrepancy between what"we" are and what "we" desire that is the subject. Given this deep collusion between form and content, no legitimate ground exists for the critical "moral" we are supposed to get from the poem; hence the title provides it for us. "Disorder Is a Measure of Warmth" concludes, afterjudging the cold perfection of crystals, snowflakes, and Krystal ofDynasty as "ignorant things / that succeed in being / gorgeous withoutneeding to be / alive,"How deeply we,the products of chance collisionsbetween wrinkled linensfull of eccentricity and mission,want to be like them.Who is this "we"? Not me. And certainly not Fulton, unless she is judgingher "Krystalline" stanzas as aspiring to "ignorant" or dead orders. If "we"do not really "want to be like them," then the poem is disingenuous, arhetorical performance only; the only way it would work is if "we" reallydid want to be like them, an option the title rules out.Fulton's idea of systemic orders governing everything from personallife to the cosmos seems to derive from chaos science, which inspires hervision of universal patterns operating across systems and her "fractal"organization. "Powers of Congress" is such a "systemic" poem; its network of changes that make and break coheres so tightly, and each detailso resonates with the others, that it has to be quoted whole:How the lightstruck trees change sunto flamepaths: veins, sap, stem, all
Page 434434 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWon brief loan, set to give alltheir spooled, coded heat to stoves calledResolute: wet steel die-castby heat themselves. Tree, beast, bugthe world-class bit parts in thisworld - flit and skid through it; thepowers of congress tax, spend, lawwhat lives to pure crisp formthen break forms' lock, stock, and holdon flesh. All night couples pledgeto stay flux, the hit-run stuffof cracked homes. Men trim their quicklawns each weekend, trailing powermowers. Heartslaves, you've seen them: wiveswith flexed hair, hitched to bored kids,twiddling in good living rooms,their twin beds slept in, changed, made.A natural economy of metamorphoses, a socio-sexual home economics ofproduction and reproduction, and a political economy of taxing andspending all intersect with each other and repeat patterns of making andbreaking. Fulton presents one big nuclear (power) family living off thesurplus energy released by all this building and unbuilding. The poemhas a systemic-ecological take on things, and the systemic reading rides ona series of wordplays like "to stay flux" and "powers of congress," whichput poetic powers - to tax isolate phenomena, spend on general welfare,and legislate the economy of substitution-at the center. The laws ofnature, politics, and human intercourse all "congress" here under the signof poetry- the metamorphoses of metaphorical transformations.From one perspective such systemic thinking politicizes poetry; fromanother, it naturalizes politics. But either way, if it all coheres, whatgrants Fulton her critical distance? Whence the moral tone of the ending?If we limit our reading of "powers of congress" to a political one, then thepoem argues that what mediates and governs the relations between "tree,beast, bug- / the world-class bit parts in this / world" and the "hit-runstuff I of cracked homes" is political power. Since "powers of congress" issurely a multivalent term in this poem, however, the real power isdeflected from any historically specific legislation governing relationsamong humans or between humans and nature to poetic powers ofcongress - of assembling and inter-coursing between various transformational phenomena. It is not that metaphoric substitution does not exercisepower over what it traffics in, but that its power is immanent and systemic. Whether metaphor is naturalized as metamorphosis or politicized
Page 435MUTLU KONUK BLASING 435as of a piece with domestic and congressional economies and powerplays,a universalizing technique is at work, and a critical distance registers as awillful authorial insertion into what purports to be governed by systemiclaws. Thus the poem's condescending final lines and the imperious"you've seen them" do not sit well.When Fulton's strident tone, verbal agility, and moral-political purposes work together, she writes a strong poem like "Cherry Bombs." Butthen she does not speak as "we" here, even though the "I"'s experience isgeneric in being both biologically fated and culturally determined.Fulton has a talent for packing her language, and almost every line andevery word conspires with another to present the complex web of connections and collusions that regulate growing into sexual maturity and gender roles under the sign of war, as each boy and girl is conscripted for adifferent "selective service" unselected by the individual party. Both gender roles shape nature (shaving is required of both), and both bio-logicslead to bloodshed (menstruation and warfare): "At five I knew at twelve /the body's logic / would lead to blood, rah-rah // girly pom-poms." Violence is involved in the shaping of each role - "We grew toward an undoing / punctual as mutual" - yet the female fate is less easily glamourizedthan the male's. Fulton situates this partly biological, partly social undoing in a historically and economically specific setting: " 'It's what's upfront that counts' / sloganed the voice-// over selling filtered smokes," and"we" learn that it's not "our no-count // c*nts" that count as social currency but "the secondary sex / signs"-"the flatness developed in steps, //a corequake certain / to insinuate me up / despite my fast dissent."The poem tracks how social identity is determined by biology, genderroles, the military industrial complex, and a consumer economy. Howcan such a construct speak in a "personal voice," when the text is so tightlywoven? The final lines suggest that the illusion of innerness is part of theinnocence lost with childhood:No one could make menull and void."Would you rather be liquidatedor boiled in oil?"my sister's witch voicedrifted from the basem*nt.I thought about itthe rest of childhood, all day.
Page 436436 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWThe conscription into an "unselective" female service also prescribes thelanguage one learns to use, as this Dickinsonian passage suggests:At the beach I sawthe fate they called "expecting."Labor was a squeeze and screamwe couldn't play atmaking glamorous, like war.I wanted no part of that combat, nothank you...Please immunity. Please a dispensation."It wasn't that I wanted to be not / female," Fulton explains. "I wanted tobe female / as I was." There is no such "dispensation," though, no "immunity" or private fate. When the web is this tight, her public voice isjustified.Fulton explores language as learned over again-secondary languagecharacteristics, we might say - in other poems, like "Our Calling," a littlemanual of euphemisms, or "The Expense of Spirit," a chilling account ofthe "credits and debits of cold sex: / Release, power, what the back-tobasics f*ck-/ You on the subway adds up to," which indeed proves that"Earth and self get ugly when unloved. Cellulite / Skies where heavenstared!" And this kind of performance exacts a great expense, a "verylarge charge," which she well knows, for she slips in a subliminal acrosticmessage: TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS.And, on the whole, I wish she would. I wish Fulton would try for"more delicate" colors than her "behavioral geographer," bent on tracking credits and debits, has time to register; a more "precarious Gait" thanoverriding "cascade experiments"; and a more careful manner than heraggressive and saintly "stance" permits. Fulton has rich verbal resources,but I often feel manipulated and kept in my place -as a spectator onwhom she can practice, honing her skills and displaying her finery.Charles Wright's The World of the Ten Thousand Things collects TheSouthern Cross, The Other Side of the River, Zone Journals, and a newsequence, Xionia. Because his project is so obsessive and singular, thecollection adds up to more than the sum of its parts. While the journalpoems play off earlier poems and figures, they are even more rarified, lessburdened by the vanity of fully individuated titles, and more devotional,as in the root sense of "journal." Read against the earlier work, thejournals document what he has been telling us all along, that he is disap
Page 437MUTLU KONUK BLASING 437pearing word by word, "unspooling to nothingness, / line after line afterlatched, untraceable line." The poems gain in emotional power by theirplacement in a sequence; they show how just about a decade unravels, inso many lines.Wright aims for equity between his weaving and his unraveling asbetween the seen and the unseen:- We stand at the green gates,substitutes for the unseenRising like water inside our bodies,Stand-ins against the invisible:It's the blank sky of the page-not the words it's never the wordsThat backgrounds our lives:It's you always you and not your new suitThat elicits solicitude.But "it's" not even "you" in any real sense; "you," too, is a "stand-in" forthe "unseen," a "suit" wearing thinner thread by thread, rememberingless and less each day, "crossing out line after line." Thus he has to keepshuttling between the seen and the unseen. "I keep coming back to thevisible. / I keep coming back / to what it leads me into": "the word insidethe word. /... the tree and what the tree stands in for, the blank, / Thefar side of the last equation." Given the "immanence of infinitude,"Wright is absorbed in painstakingly querying and recording the minutestfluctuations of inner and outer weather, noting, with a Puritan's attentiveness, the least "sign"-of sin, grace, lapses, restorations."Notes from the provinces always start / With the weather," "MayJournal" starts, and that pretty well places Wright. Literally, his "province" is a non-urban setting; spiritually, it is his virtue of being alive;linguistically, his eccentricity to the one Word, his "true name" his ear isever co*cked for; and, poetically, his circling the "Cold-blooded father oflight," Ezra Pound, and the pantheon of poets he oversees. C6zanne's Aixen-Provence, disarticulating into dabs of paint, and a sense of Chineseoutposts perhaps also partake of Wright's "province." And "Xionia" maywell be its name. Wright's name for his house in Charlottesville (or so J.D. McClatchy reports), it is a Poundian ideogram superimposing theclassics (lonia), a spiritual home (Zion), and C6zanne's "zones," allcrossed with a certain Chinese wisdom and crossed out (X), and it lies notfar from Xanadu on the map.C6zanne seems to be the source of Wright's "zones." In an interview hesays: "There's a passage I came across in the letters of Paul Cezanne inwhich he says that colors were to him numinous essences beyond which
Page 438438 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWhe knew nothing -'the diamond zones of God remaining white.' For meif you replace the word colors with words and white with blank, youwould get how I try to find out what those 'zones' are. I admit that Ithink they exist; I'm just not very sure of them." His choice of "blank"rather than "silence" suggests that he has the space of the page in mind,and the passage gives a good idea of his compositional method. Thewords, the script of letters, point up the blank "behind" them, which hehopes is a transcendent blank, but he is not sure. The page also serves as amodel of the visible universe. Nature is insistently described in scripturalterms, as a code of signs: "I step through the alphabet / The tree limbsshadow across the grass, I a dark language / Of strokes and ideograms."Or:the little apples and pearsBuzz like unbroken codes on the sun's wire,their secret shoptalkThe outtakes we would be privy to,But never are, no matter how hard we look at them or listen.Still, it's here in its gilt script,or there, speaking in tongues.The things seen and the seen script point to the "blank," the "diamondzones- Exclusion's the secret: what's missing is what appearsMost visible to the eye:the more luminous anything is,The more it subtracts what's around it,Peeling away the burned skin of the worldmaking the unseen seen.Wright's identification of text and world, of word and thing, allowshim to create the illusion of a "signified," spiritual depth by remaininganchored in the scriptural surface. His foregrounds (of natural observation) and backgrounds (of personal and literary memory) work, likeCezanne's warm and cool colors, to structure space without using perspective. Wright composes by juxtaposing the "warm" language of particulars with the "cool" distances of abstractions on a flat, scriptural plane,without a rationalized perspective that narrative, for example, wouldprovide. He achieves the illusion of depth by sticking to an ever-presentflat plane, so that depth is always seen as "illusion" at the same time thathis surfaces wobble, shimmer, and recede. Yet we are always alert to thefact that he is composing word by word. Clement Greenberg's comments
Page 439MUTLU KONUK BLASING 439on Cezanne could as well describe Wright's technique: "The illusion ofdepth is constructed with the surface plane more vividly, more obsessivelyin mind; the facet-planes may jump back and forth between the surfaceand the images they create, yet they are one with both surface andimage." Wright's words are similarly liminal: they at once sever and linksurface description and anagogic depth. They are thresholds between theseen and the unseen, whether the signifier and the referent or natural factand spiritual depth. His transcendental dimension, then, is a function ofhis technique.He writes off similes and metaphors - "Nothing's like anything else inthe long run"-even while using them, for these "fetishes and figures ofspeech" are surface dabs of color only, and "likeness" is not what Wrightis after. He is after "the like that's like the like"; he seeks the absoluteidentity of absolute difference, or anagogy:What is it that jump-starts in verisimilitudeAnd ends up in ecstasy,That takes us by both handsfrom silence to speechlessness?The answer is poetry. Hence Wright's double focus:The Chinese say we live in the world of the ten thousand things,Each of the ten thousand thingscrying out to usPrecisely nothing,A silence whose tune we've come to understandTo transcribe the silent cries of "the ten thousand things," he has "Wordslike thousands of pieces of shot film": "Black words that disappear whenheld up to the light." Every thing and every word resolutely is, yet cancelsitself out, pointing to those "zones" we can get at only through such selferasure.In the Journals Wright subtracts more than before, so that the gessoedzones are more visible and luminous, and the light is more "solid" and hasmore "splendor," as in the later Cantos. For Pound, as ever, is Wright'sother guiding light. Just as The World of the Ten Thousand Things openswith "Homage to Paul Cezanne," one of the last poems in the book ("AJournal of Southern Rivers") begins by invoking Pound:What lasts is what you start with.What hast thou, 0 my soul, with Paradise, for instance,Is where I began, in March 1959 -my question has never changed.
Page 440440 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW"What you start with" is someone else's words, words that have caughtyour ear at the right time and place. Wright dates his beginning toreading Pound's "Blandula, Tenella, Vagula" at Sirmione, because thisparticular experience of reading proved words to be numinous essences,both rooted in the landscape and bespeaking absences. Wright's rewriting Pound resuscitates Pound's "sublime" moment, when nature"speaks" in the words of poets past, all the way back to Catullus.Indeed, Wright's voice is pure pastiche, as befits one who disclaimsvanities. The dead don't "care for the honk and flash of a new style";they only clamor, "Remember me, speak my name." And Wrightobliges and obliges, stitching entire lines from others into his text, letting them speak in his voice, and lending them his "garment," his page,his "white shirt." In turn, the dead "carry their colored threads andbaskets of silk / To mend our clothes, making us look right, / Altering,stitching." Like Pound, Wright inhabits an underworld, and he alsoknows that the dead demand blood for "soothsay." "To GiacomoLeopardi in the Sky" is one of my favorites in this mode; composed of remembered Leopardi lines ("you're part of my parts of speech"), thepoem has to end with a plea to Leopardi "on the other side of the sky" to"think of me," in turn, to re-member "me."And to whom on this side of the sky does such an "epistle in tatters"speak? Wright's voice is as far from being intimate as it is from beingpublic; it is the measure of his disembodiment in transit to "the otherside of the river." Wright has wrought for himself a distinctive idiom,which is capable of marvelous effects. On this side of the river, wemight wonder how his literary and metaphysical concerns place culturally. It's not that he doesn't write about public subjects; for example, in"A Journal of the Year of the Ox," he says a good deal about the Cherokee wars. It's just that whatever he talks about - Cherokee wars ortaking out the garbage or St. Augustine-he speaks without skipping abeat, so that everything dissolves into the one uniform band of hislanguage. Ashbery, too, reduces all to the uniform substance of hispeculiar language, but his language registers a wider spectrum of tones,dictions, and technical and figural discontinuities, so that he can saysomething like "In the unprincipled mire we walk about in today,nobody bothers even / to warn you about the perils of white slavery (tocite an extreme example), but then again / nobody is forcing you to saveyourself either," and have it register as a critique of both the "unprincipled mire" and critiques of it, thus serving as one (if "extreme") index ofour "interesting" times after all. When Wright brings up a subject likeCherokee history, however, I wonder if it is a good idea:
Page 441MUTLU KONUK BLASING 441The Long Island of the Holston,sacred refuge groundOf the Cherokee Nation:nothing was ever killed there.I used to cross it twice whenever I drove to the golf course.Nobody tells you anything.But Wright does:the Holston Peace Treaty,Ending, the first time, the Cherokee Nation.Imagine the way they must have feltagreeing to give awayWhat wasn't assignable,The ground that everyone walked on,all the magic of water,Wind in the trees, sunlight, all the magic of water.This use of history tells of neither the past nor the present; it onlyprovides local color for Wright's canvas, in the same way that theechoes of Dickinson and Faulkner provide texture. If I read him right,Wright's point is that literary language, itself a palimpsest of past poets'usages, absents and distances him from social and historical contingencies, just as it distances him from empirical, physical presence in thevery act of transcribing it. A sense of poetry's placeless, timeless otherness pervades his zones and journals. I am not questioning the validityof this position in itself; I am only wondering whether Wright's premisesequip him for such excursions into the "Cherokee Nation." He has a stylethat carries his signature and that rings truer, say, in the lines followingthe above passage on the very same page:The maple is flocked, and the sky is choked with cloud tuftsThat print a black alphabetalong the hillsides and short lawns,Block gutterals and half thoughtsAgainst the oily valves opening and closing in the leaves,Edgy, autumnal morning,April, stretched out at ease above the garden,that rises and bowsTo whatever it fancies.
Laurence GoldsteinGoldstein, LaurenceKeeping a Distance From the MoviesVol.XXXI, No.:3, Summer 1992, pp.442-451http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.003:20
Page 442LAURENCE GOLDSTEINKEEPING A DISTANCE FROM THE MOVIESFlicker. By Theodore Roszak. New York: Summit Books, 1991. Pp.592. $19.95.The Movie That Changed My Life. Edited by David Rosenberg.New York: Viking Press, 1991. Pp. 304. $21.95.His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art. By WendyLesser. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Pp. 294.$24.95.The first movie theater opened its doors to the public in 1895, in thebasem*nt of a Paris cafe. As the centennial anniversary of the cinemaapproaches it is worth pausing to ask some elementary questions aboutthis medium that has come to dominate modern consciousnesss andculture in so many ways. "Film is the modern art, the one to whichmodern man naturally responds," writes Stanley Cavell. But is thiscause for celebration? What if film is, in Diana Trilling's phrase, "themadness in our culture," a profound dissonance amplified millions oftimes by the technology of television and the print media until its iconsand folklore are virtually inescapable? Just as a group of anthropologistsonce reported penetrating to the inner sanctum of a religious sect in thewilds of Tibet, only to find on the altar a photograph of Laurel andHardy, so we might imagine ourselves, as in Theodore Roszak's latestnovel, discovering in the most distant desert island, among the palmtrees and sand dunes, an underground movie theater where latter-dayRobinson Crusoes amuse themselves to death by rerunning the flicks ofyesteryear. What causes for alarm or satisfaction should we find in anaddiction to visual pleasure so universal and seemingly so fundamentalto the human condition?442
Page 443LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN 443Novels about the movies are rare. Instead we have been satisfied withnovels about Hollywood, not quite the same thing. The assumption ofclassic fiction like The Day of the Locust or What Makes Sammy Run, aswell as more recent versions of the type like Robert Stone's Children ofLight and Gore Vidal's Hollywood, has been that anything made bypeople as corrupt, moronic, and perverse as Hollywood people, must sharethe limitations of the makers. When novelists have found the right trope,like Nathanael West's riotous premiere on Hollywood Boulevard, or thecocaine dependency of Robert Stone's starlet, the transfer has been persuasive. But just as an expose of the garment district is not likely to makereaders suspicious of clothes, so these indictments of the movie capitalnecessarily stop short of what we often feel to be their ultimate target,what Cavell calls "the ontology of film." Metaphors just can't go the distance, though they have helped to create the dialogue about filmgoing,such as it is, that pervades modern and postmodern literature.Theodore Roszak has been well-positioned to advance that dialogue, asindeed he does in his novel Flicker. A social critic whose mixed feelingsabout the counterculture earned him the respect of bourgeoisie and dissidents alike when he published The Making of a Counterculture in 1969,Roszak has also been an avid student of popular culture, using his knowledge to good purpose in all his writings. The erudition about the movies inFlicker does not sound like the quick-study of a fiction writer who cramsinto a year what he hopes will sound like a lifetime of acquired information. (Constant readers learn to recognize the anxious use of material obviously derived from encyclopedias rather than experience.) Rather, thethrowaway details and thematic depth of allusion to film history and filmtechnology suggest a long immersion in the arcana of cinema. The firstperson narrator, Jonathan Gates, rehearses the full range of responses tofilm available to modern readers. In his first contact with art film he callsthe light projected across the theater onto the screen "the miraculous fingerof God," and begins a lifelong study of "cinema theology"; less positively,movies are later called "the highest state of hypnosis"; and by the end of thenovel we hear references to the "crap culture" spawned by slasher movies,grade Z biker and bondage flicks, and at the furthest extreme "WorstMovie Festivals" where punks too marginal to be called a countercultureline up to laugh at the sleaze.The primal text underlying Flicker is Heart of Darkness, and one of thenovel's pleasures is watching Roszak touch all the bases as he leads hisinnocent narrator through a moral jungle toward the horror, the horror.The role of Kurtz belongs to Max Castle, a filmmaking genius who directeda few fascinating silent and early sound films, and then a lot of commercialjunk, before disappearing just as World War II got underway. Gates dis
Page 444444 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWcovers some unknown Castle films by accident, and fascinated by the eeriespecial effects and the mordant vision of life, he dedicates himself to the oldmaster's reputation, locating film after film, and gradually writing the firstbook-length study. As he sails down the river of time toward the personalsatisfaction and professional rewards he desires - he becomes a professor offilm studies at UCLA-he encounters some of the strange people whoknew Castle and who unravel for him the secrets of Castle's uncannyeffects. Gates learns that Castle devised an early form of subliminal filmingso that areas of the screen during his key scenes display flickers of obscenematerial that enhance the horrific effects of the movies a hundredfold. Healso learns that Castle was not simply a technician for its own sake, but wascarrying out a program by a secret church called Orphans of the Storm todegrade the human imagination, make it loathe the body and long forextinction of the species. "Exterminate the brutes" is the coded message ofCastle's horror films, and those of his 1980s disciple, Simon Dunkle, whosenauseating movies of repulsive sex and unending violence have begun toentrance the younger generation.Gates's efforts to find the truth about this sinister church finally bringhim in harm's way. Having combined elements of a quest novel, a satire, atreatise of social criticism, and a Bildungsroman, the novel graduallybecomes a kind of metahistorical detective story in the manner of UmbertoEco's Foucault's Pendulum, even to granting the Templars a role in the evilchurch's long struggle for mastery. Gates is no match for his antagonists,and the final scenes bring him, as the logic of the pastiche directs, to aconfrontation with Castle himself. The novel has its chapters of laboredexposition to remind us that Roszak is no Conrad, but it remains a pageturner to the end. Film fans who regret the gradual disappearance ofHollywood anecdotes in the story will be pleased to see the ontology of filmcome back in a big way before the fadeout.Jonathan's better angel in the book is a film critic named ClarissaSwan, modeled on Pauline Kael in many biographical particulars.Clare, as she's called, sees at once that Castle is a menace whose filmnoir subverts the glory of cinema, typified for her by Marcel Carn'smasterpiece, Children of Paradise. "[The movies] have a life, more realthan our so-called real lives," she says. "I was ready to believe there wassomething uncanny about the movies, a charm, a magic, somethingdemonic. They capture the attention so fiercely, they eat you alive.Movies aren't just movies." As Gates discovers to his misfortune, that'sthe problem: movies contain within themselves, in the very technologyof projection, a war between light and darkness, as the optical effectcalled persistence of vision compels the moviegoer to transform screenimages into dynamic and enduring acts of consciousness. The medium is
Page 445LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN 445the message, and so is the message. In the hands of psychopaths likeCastle and Dunkle, or the exploiters of innocence they represent, filmcan have a devastating impact on its audience, popularizing not onlyanti-social messages - these can be redemptive in an imperfect society -but anti-human messages of the kind Roszak, no less than Pauline Kael,clearly deplores in the culture at large.Just as Gates gazes intently at films to find "the movie within themovie," so the reader of Flicker becomes conscious of a book within thisbook. The smooth narrative, often comic, often informative about esoteric matters of lifestyle in the 1950s and the nether regions of experimental film, has buried within it a running Platonic dialogue betweenthe better and worse angels of the cinematic imagination. Is postmodern American culture chained inside Plato's cave, a dark Republicof media freaks so degraded by illusion that it believes "Bad isbest...Quality is the killer" and is increasingly persuaded that realityno longer exists? (Jean Baudrillard has become the prophet of thisunwelcome Word.) Or is film itself, as Clare insists, the means by whicha benighted public will come to realize the full truth of its being andbecome children of paradise at last? Roszak has written a novel thatposes the ultimate questions at the heart of darkness, one that we canusefully place, or teach, beside Conrad's premodern testament.The Movie that Changed My Life is a collection of 23 essays byeminent writers, each undertaking a different film. Despite the resonant title none of the authors claims a radical transformation - nothinglike Don Quixote driven mad by chivalric romances, or even Roszak'sprotagonist who recalls "The Great Change" in his life as an adolescentupon seeing Louis Malle's The Lovers, a work both erotic and artfulenough to persuade him that "I'd experienced the real thing. This waswhat it was all about-men and women together, the great guardedsecret of what they did and how they did it." Most of the authors arewary of crediting their careers, or the course of their lives, erotic andotherwise, to the movies-none is a filmmaker or film scholar, afterall -but each is willing to trace back to a primal film some kind ofempowerment that nourished the creative imagination, if only an obsessive metaphor or political message or gender mystique. The astonishingvariety of choices - who would guess that anyone would be influencedsignificantly by Our Vines Have Tender Grapes or The Women?makes this anthology a box of chocolates for the gluttonous filmgoer.Common to all the essays is what Geoffrey Hartman, writing on The
Page 446446 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWExterminating Angel, calls "the lust to have knowledge coincide withvisibles." Films appeal to "reality hunger" in the way they unmask forthe innocent eye all the imaginable physical and metaphysical activitiesthat constitute the truth of the human condition. A persistent theme inthe collection is the learning of gender roles and the rites of sexualityfrom the movies. At their best the essays register not only the occultpleasure but also the pain of such knowledge, either upon first viewingas a child/teen, or upon re-viewing in adult life when the bitter knowledge is appraised in retrospect. Francine Prose, for example, looksaghast at her juvenile enthusiasm for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,which she calls "one of themost repulsive movies ever made" not onlybecause it seems to glorify rape but because it celebrates the ease withwhich independent girls are transformed into housewives by phallicpower. Likewise, Joyce Carol Oates traces the unconscious appeal ofthe dreamlike Dracula and its charismatic title character. Dracula is thevery symbol of The Movies in the way he compels sexual surrender, agiving up of the independent self to his overpowering control: "To beraped- murdered-because we are irresistible-what solace!" But ifthe spectator is like Helen Chandler and the rest of Dracula's victims, sois he or she like Dracula, an incarnation of appetite, desiring theimmortal life endowed by other people's blood.Many of the authors see clearly that when movies weave such eerietales of enchantment and entrapment they are not only describing lifeoutside the theatre but the world of cinematic illusion itself. LeslieEpstein offers a useful distinction when he divides his essay into twoparts: the first about a p*rnographic film he saw as a teenager in aTijuana whor*house, meant only to stimulate patrons to go and dolikewise; and the second about a p*rnographic film (The Devil in MissJones) he watched dutifully on videotape in order to write the essay. Hepraises the first film, which precipitated his loss of virginity, for the wayit acknowledged sexual desire as a given in everyday life, and the circ*mstances that allowed him to swiftly fulfill his wish after achievingthis new-found knowledge. The second film nauseates him because it isin no sense a model for action but a pathological exhibition of violationand victimization that is unimaginable outside of a p*rnographic moviestudio. Its only saving grace is to summon in the viewer a humaneresistance to film imagery itself. A less lurid example is the fine essay byMeg Wolitzer on Hitchco*ck's Shadow of a Doubt. Wolitzer notes howfew classic films address the complex emotional lives of girls and especially "the chasm between male experience and female knowledge ofthat experience." In the film the teenage girl Charlie is fascinated by hercharming uncle Charlie, for whom she was named, and who visits her
Page 447LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN 447peaceful community and untroubled family. When she discovers that heis a serial killer, she has to grow up in a hurry and exorcise his spell uponher by declaring the truth to him- again, a model of the spectator'salert response to the seductive power of false representations thatinclude the cinema.Sexual politics is the model for world politics in this regard. LouiseErdrich contributes a good-humored essay- and unlike most books offilm criticism this one has wonderful wit -about how the movie Zhelped her make sense not only of the petty abuse of authority in themovie theatre where she worked as a popcorn maker, but opened herimagination to a world of global intrigue. (She notes that nobody in theNorth Dakota town came to see the movie.) Donald Hall recalls that anobscure film about the cruelty and terror of the Spanish Civil War, TheLast Train from Madrid, caused him as a child to burn his collection ofcards celebrating war, and to hide his toy soldiers. David Bradley writing on Birth of a Nation and Terry McMillan on The Wizard of Ozdescribe how African Americans are exposed to compelling white fantasies, and how they later answer back with their own narratives.All of the essays I've mentioned are first-rate, and there are others ofhigh quality, including Jayne Anne Phillips on Premature Burial andGrace Schulman on Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. If I had to nameone special favorite it would be Philip Lopate's meditation on RobertBresson's Diary of a Country Priest. Lopate finds in the "still, hushed,lugubrious, unadrenalated world of Diary" the austerity of spiritualexperience. Having resisted the rites of his Jewish upbringing, he discovers in the Catholic ceremonies no less than the lingering shots ofdoors, windows, and natural objects the indications of a transcendentvision that captures fleetingly the piety he has tried to arouse in himselfby occasional readings of the Torah or visits to the synagogue. Unlikemost films described in the collection, this one turns him away from thecreaturely and toward a purified world of dispossession (rather thancapture and violation) and emotional surrender. The film teaches himresistance in a very special way. "I took to the 'transcendental' styleimmediately," he writes. "It was obviously the missing link in my aesthetic education. Movies forced me out on a limb by introducing me to aconstellation of ritual and spiritual emotion that I could willinglyembrace so long as it was presented to me in the guise of cinematicexpression, but not otherwise." This sense of movies as secular scriptureinforms several of the essays, but none articulates it as richly and originally as Lopate's.Even in a chocolate box there are some bonbons to gag the palate (forme, the marzipan and coconut). Gordon Lish's essay on the stag film is,
Page 448448 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWin Truman Capote's immortal phrase, typing not writing. And HaroldBloom descends into tiresome self-parody on the subject of W. C.Fields's farce, The Fatal Glass of Beer: "Everything, every detail is fatalin this outrageous, frozen cosmos, where the high kick of the ex-chorusgirl Salvation Army lass inflicts upon the brotherless Chester the inevitable mark of Cain. The crime of breaking the tambourine is the equivalent of brother murder, and suddenly we see another of Fields's slyoutrages: the Snavelys are Adam and Eve, transposed to a frozen postlapsarian Arctic..." There is sometimes a tendency to indulge too muchin autobiography, as in essays by Valerie Sayers and E. M. Broner,when the assigned task is to hold a delicate balance between "themovie" and "my life." But the variety and profundity of most of theessays fulfills editor David Rosenberg's intention of delineating a "common culture based on cinema...small revelations of time, place, andcharacter, a shameless camera casting a spell on our unconscious."The parable of the cave in Plato's Republic informs the discourse offilm so ubiquitously that it has become something of a cliche. WendyLesser proposes another passage from Plato to work with for a while:the story in the Symposium about the division of original male beingsinto two parts, male and female. "After the division," Plato tells us, "thetwo parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, andthrowing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces,longing to grow into one....Each of us, when separated, having oneside only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is alwayslooking for his other half." Lesser remarks that when she came acrossthis passage she recognized in it the underlying thesis of the series ofessays she wanted to write about how women are constructed by men ina variety of arts. His Other Half considers fiction (by Gissing, Dickens,and James, among others), poetry (Randall Jarrell), painting (Degas),photography (Cecil Beaton), and film. I shall concentrate on the filmessays, and try to suggest the contours of her argument in the otherchapters.As with all polemical writings, the best place to start is by asking,who's the enemy in this book? What point of view is under assault eitherovertly or implicitly? Lesser does not disguise the fact that (some) feministcriticism has strained her patience and that she is hoping to correct misreadings of male-authored texts by proposing a non-oppositional methodof describing how men look at women in the mirror of art. The oppositional manner is best expressed in theories of "the male gaze" which
Page 449LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN 449emphasize how women are exhibited, especially in photography andfilm, as pliable objects for a voyeuristic male audience. The male gazeviolates the female space by inserting itself, penetrating and possessingwith voracious energy the bodies modeled for it in the media. Theoristshave been more or less sophisticated in stating the situation, but it usuallyadds up to a degrading scenario for spectator and fantasy-object alike. InLaura Mulvey's influential essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," for example- an essay Lesser does not cite, though she seems toduel with it throughout her book - we hear much of "fetishistic scopophilia" and "phallocentric sadism" and "the neurotic needs of the male ego."Using the Platonic rather than the Freudian/Lacanian model, Lesserfinds her way to a more generous and discriminating reading of narrativeart. She is not looking for villains and victims, but for the dynamicpsychological interactions that enable spectators (male and female) tomake fuller contact with their own bodies and with each other.Indeed, in writing about Marilyn Monroe, Lesser makes the pointthat "if a woman is to be sexy in the movies, she has to simultaneouslyseduce the men and the women in the audience." "Seduce" seems at firstglance to be an unfortunate word-choice here, because it evokes thevoyeuristic. But Lesser goes on to say, "The fact that this seduction doesnot entail real sex is also crucial. It's a public experience rather than aprivate one, and it hinges on our ability to imaginatively transformourselves (from women to men, from observers to participants) throughwitnessing the transformation of others." When Gloria Steinem looks atMarilyn Monroe she sees only "the lost Norma Jean, looking out ofMarilyn's eyes," the poor orphan exploited by studios, made to performlascivious acts that abuse the conscience. Lesser remarks of this andother commentaries that seek to render Marilyn into a one-dimensionalvictim, "Such attempts to save her from exploitation are themselvesexploitative." They deny to Marilyn the privilege that every writer,every person, demands for him- or herself, the pleasure of achieving"reality" by being observed, by being appreciated as a body occupyingspace in the world's body. This pleasure, which Lesser traces back to theinfant's delight in the attentions of the mother, is glorified in Monroe'sfilms as a type of the Platonic embrace. To resist on every occasion thevicarious pleasure of such an embrace is to radically narrow one's experience of art (and thus of life).I linger on the Monroe chapter because it shows Lesser's willingnessto take on case studies that seem to threaten her argument. The finalchapter on Barbara Stanwyck, which Lesser tells us will synthesize allher major points, takes fewer risks because it subordinates general conclusions to extended readings of very diverse roles. Stanwyck is not an
Page 450450 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEWobvious fantasy-object nor do her classic films model her delectably forthe male gaze. (For one thing, as Lesser notes, her hard-drivingworking-class persona, even in Double Indemnity, complicates eroticidentification.) In the Monroe chapter and the one on Hitchco*ck, however, Lesser must tread a minefield planted by feminist critics. Lesserwrites every sentence in these (and other) chapters with a wary alertnesss to possible objections, debating with epigrammatic skill, andreaching into the vast arcana of scholarship to secure her points. In theMonroe chapter, she makes excellent use of texts by Norman Mailer andArthur Miller to help construct her argument that the phenomenoncalled "Marilyn Monroe" existed only on film and that the promiscuousconfusion of her life ("lost Norma Jean") with her movies can often leadto sentimental and misleading conclusions. Lesser's own readings of thefilms are exemplary in their respectful attention to narrative intricacies.Because Marilyn was a public icon even before her major moviesappeared, these movies tend to be about iconicity, about how Monroe ispositioned so that "We, the viewers of Marilyn Monroe's movies, arecreatures of her dream" as much as the reverse. The Marilyn persona,then, is no cause for grievance, and least of all on her behalf. If onlythose critics who derive no satisfaction whatever from being admiredwere allowed to criticize the "exploitation" of Marilyn Monroe, therewould be no opposition at all for Lesser to contend with.The essay on "Hitchco*ck's Couples" is less successful than the Monroeessay. One reason is that Lesser begins it with an overextended discussion of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra as a model of the genderinteractions in Hitchco*ck films. Lesser often uses comparisons of thissort to make a vital point in her essays, as when Dickens and James aredeployed to set off some twentieth-century narrative situation; but inthese cases she builds on commentary earlier in the book. Another problem is that she moves too quickly to analogize the narrative situations inHitchco*ck's films with the act of filmmaking. Not only has this analogybeen overworked in Hitchco*ck criticism but it evades (by aestheticizingthem) some of the prominent "social" themes in Hitchco*ck's films, especially his treatment of the battle of the sexes. Nevertheless, the chapterargues persuasively that the spectator of thrillers is divested of hisfantasy-desire to "make over" the female figure by watching thedestructive effect of male control on screen women. Vertigo and TheMan Who Knew Too Much are her principal texts, and they are usefullycontrasted to Brian de Palma's inferior imitations. Like BarbaraStanwyck, Hitchco*ck's women are resilient and mature, and exhibitwhat is often a superior emotional strength in the films' plotting. Menand women in the audience can identify with them, and not just as
Page 451LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN 451charmers in jeopardy. Or rather, moving between the men and womenin these films, we enact the ideal of Plato's forlorn male, gathering whatwas once dismembered into a more comprehensive and humane self.Is it "invasive" and "intrusive" to watch people on the screen? Or dothey invite us to achieve an enhanced sense of reality by observing themas they achieve reality by being observed? "Seeing from the outside...isoften the closest we can get to feeling another's life from the inside,"Lesser remarks. One may feel when reading comments like this that theboundary between the movies and life is being eroded too glibly. Andyet why would anyone go to a movie or read a book if not to break freefrom the static narcissism of the domestic mirror in favor of the strangerself-discovery awaiting us in the mirror of art? The women in theserepresentations are forever locked in a private world-one thinks ofDegas's self-absorbed nudes, or Cecil Beaton's studies of Coco Chaneland Garbo and his sisters, or "A Girl in a Library" who provokes Randall Jarrell to say, "I am a thought of yours: and yet, you do notthink..." These solitary figures are not liable to violation. A good artistwill build into his artworks the means of evasion that secures dignity forhis women - the dignity that a spectator enjoys and learns to value aspart of the rite of moviegoing. This is not to say that the director doesnot maneuver us into feeling like intruders; obviously this is part of therhetoric of many films. But as Lesser observes of Hitchco*ck, along withhis manipulation "there is truly a kind of love in his relations with hisaudience (as there is between his heroes and heroines), and that kind oflove cannot exist apart from independence and mutual respect."Ultimately, then, our misgivings about film derive from a traditionalwariness about peering into the mirror that reflects back an unfamiliarface. We may see there the bestial aspect prepared by Roszak's madgenius Max Castle, or the Beauty Hollywood has often served up on themodel of Marilyn Monroe. Artists have always flattered themselves thatart is dangerous, an efficient cause of changing one's life. The movietheater, too, is haunted, and not just in Hitchco*ck films, by the shadowof death. Baudelaire said that if people seriously considered the dangersof the dream-domain they entered each night when they lay down tosleep, they could never shut their eyes. The movies have offered us thewaking antidote to such dangers, rehearsing them before the eye ofconsciousness. Whether the protective kiss film puts on our upturnedface is that of the desired (m)other, or of Count Dracula, is the persistent question entertained in our best film criticism.
Page [unnumbered]VQRThe VirginiaMichelangeloQuarterly ReviewA National Journal ofLiterature and Discussion-------------THE GREATNESS OFGEORGE WASHINGTONGordon S. WoodTHE METAMORPHOSESOFMICHELANGELOPaul BarolskyROMAN CATHOLICANGLICANECUMENICAL UNION:A CAUSE I CANNO LONGER SUPPORTThe Rt. Rev. John S. SpongFICTIONPaula K. GoverEdward FalcoFrances S. HoekstraBruce FlemingPOETRYThomas LuxAlbert GoldbarthKenneth RosenDavid LehmanRussell BahorskyW. D. EhrhartMark HallidayTHE GREEN ROOMNOTES ON Detail from Medici ChapelCURRENT BOOKS Florence, San LorenzoREPRINTS & NEWEDITIONS (photo: Ralph Lieberman)SPRING 1992Volume 68, Number 2
