Archive, Ephemerality, and Texts from Last Night

“If we consider performance as of disappearance, of an ephemerality read as vanishment and loss, are we perhaps limiting ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by our cultural habituation to the logic of the archive? [...] in privileging an understanding of performance as a refusal to remain, do we ignore other ways of knowing, other modes of remembering, that might be situated precisely in the ways in which performance remains, but remains differently?” (Schneider 98)

In thinking about the Schneider article, we were struck by the idea that there might be a way to resist vanishing, and what it would mean to read a kind of text that has perspectival ephemerality--i.e. that one person views as naturally disappearing, but another saves for an archive of sorts. One of the more current examples is Snapchat, but we decided to dig up some 2009 goodness and give you Texts From Last Night, from Woman on the Edge of Time and The People in the Trees.

From Woman on the Edge of Time

From The People in the Trees

Refusal of the Totality

They're made out of meat.

By Terry Bisson: link here.

Imperial Dietetics on Ivu'ivu

Hey! This article talked about Pacific Islanders!  That’s really exciting.  Okay, moment over.

It would be very easy to pair up sections of Tompkins's article with The People in the Trees, as she addresses many themes also central to this text:  imperialism, eating, bodies, sex, assimilation, exoticism, and many more.  For instance, one of the perplexing aspects of the experiences of protagonist, Dr. Perina, on the island is the conflict between his relationship with food compared with that of the natives.  Every item of consumption is foreign, if not exotic:  Spam, manama fruit (a fictional breadfruit type-thing that grows on a tree with scales), vuakas (a small monkey the islanders eat as delicacies), and, of course, the opa’ivu’eke (the magical turtle consumed when one reaches age 60 and subsequently achieves immortality). Furthermore, Dr. Perina’s encounters with the Ivu’ivans becomes sexually charged after his discovery of a pederastic initiation ritual.  While the island itself is not colonized, the neocolonial forces of global capitalism deplete the island of its every food source and then the bodies of its natives, and finally, Dr. Perina adopts dozens of the Ivu’ivuan children for what first appears to be for their education and assimilation, but end up victims of his sexual appetite, bringing full-circle Yanagihara’s allegory of imperialism.  

Since there are so many avenues to explore in this pairing, I might use this text as a way to challenge the students to develop the skills that they will need for essay writing, specifically in integrating a secondary source for their end of term research paper.  This assignment is, of course, for the same course (ENL 180, Univ. of California) for which they read my award-winning Norton Anthology last week (yes, future-me definitely won awards for that masterpiece).  In the class, I would then try an exercise in which they use their collective close reading skills to practice writing strong analytical paragraphs for their essays.

Here’s how it might work:  I’ll put a series of quotations from the primary text up on large sticky-note paper around the room, say 6-8 quotations for a 20-ish person class.  Then, after having read the Tompkins article, they can pair a quote from the secondary source that they feel can either support, complicate, expand, etc, the primary source quotation, and then with their classmates who also like that particular quote, work on crafting an analytical paragraph  on the large sticky-note using close readings and interpretation.  After the groups have written their paragraphs, we all walk around looking at the sticky-notes in a "gallery walk," marveling at their wonderful work.  For example, they might see this quote:

“She took the slippery bits of Spam from our palms, sometimes with her mouth (her puckering lips, wet and vaguely vaginal, kissed against me) and sometimes with the flat of her hand; she seemed not to use her fingers--and waited until she fell asleep flat on her back, all of us watching her by Tallent’s flashlight” (99).

And pair it with this one:

“In Graham’s story from the 1830s food and sex emerge as central themes in a premonitory fantasy  of imperial expansion.  Here commodity consumption and the desire for land serve as a catalytic desires for interactions across national, regional, and ethnic differences [...] Absorbing these alien others and “Americanizing them” is  a constant preoccupation in a nation that is both militarily aggressive and open to successive waves of immigration.”

And maybe they could talk about imperialism, or food, or the sexualization of the “foreign” body, or consumption of that body, or maybe her mouth...maybe they could talk about how her mouth is a vagina.  Maybe.

Shelley, Stoker, Chen, Derrida, The Walking Dead comics, and a book that snarls and bites

I found Chen’s “Toxic Animacies” to be a promising point of entry for teaching Shelley’s Frankenstein. I can see assigning this piece in a course on monsters and monstrosity (a course I can’t wait to design). The theme of invasion, the potential for toxicity to breach boundaries of imagined purity and security, opens the way for a discussion of how such infiltrations are figured in literature and what they might say about our ideas of what constitutes a monstrous threat—and, conversely, what constitutes purity.

Chen posits that “the queerest bioterrorist is the one who is remote, racialized ‘otherwise,’ and hybrid” (271). I would add to this list “fecund.” The danger of reproduction, replication, contagion, or contamination beyond the point of the initial breach seems to be ubiquitous in the representations of such monstrous threats (e.g., the default mode of dietary and other environmental toxins is to "cause cancer" rather than, say, make your heart stop). Certainly some prominent literary and film monsters illustrate this fertile potential: werewolves, vampires, and zombies alike are able to infect others—thus reproducing themselves and perpetuating the bio-not-bio-threat. Interestingly, in Frankenstein one of the most salient examples of a threat to sacred, pure domestic safe zone occurs after Victor refuses to continue his work on the female mate the creature has demanded. The creature vows to visit Victor on his wedding night, at which point he murders Victor’s bride in her bed. Both injury and revenge center upon marital—and potentially reproductive—relations.

The reproductive potential skirted around in this revenge plot suggests an interesting parallel between the Original Threat to correct life-giving (the creation of the monster) and the Ultimate Threat (the monster reproducing). I found this line fascinating and would probably use it as a starting point for a group discussion: “The mediation of [toxins] in and around categories of life [. . .] undoes lead’s deadness by reanimating it” (272). I would be interested in helping the students parse and think through this line. What does Chen mean by “mediating”? What does it mean to offer both “in” and “around” as approaches to “categories of life”? And most importantly, why “reanimating” rather than simply “animating”? This line in particular offers a series of potentially productive stumbling blocks to prevent too quickly accepting an easy, binary conception of life/not-life. It’s in this line where I think Chen’s argument challenges itself.

Not only does Chen's article privilege animacy over life in considering the personified toxic threat, it suggests that its life-status is irrelevant: “Toxins sometimes bear the threat of death to a protected life, but whether or not they ‘are’ alive is not the issue” (272). I’m not so sure. It might not always be at issue, but on the other hand, it’s striking to note how many figures of invasion—especially contagious invasion—involve an unstable, mutable boundary between life and non-life. I am thinking here of zombies, vampires, and of course the animate, intelligent creature Victor Frankenstein fashioned from dead tissues. These threats are absolutely queered; they occupy a third space along the alive/not-alive binary. They are also hybrid in the agent/object sense: they are both victim and perpetrator, both poisoned and poison.

At this point I would produce a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) dramatically from within the folds of my black satin cloak and read to the students the passage about the need for vampires (the unholy undead) to sleep in consecrated earth. And as a fun prank, I would then assign Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy”! Right? Perhaps not, but I would certainly consider it as a reading for any grad students who might be taking a cross-listed version of this monstrously exciting class.

Bread and Empire in "Bartleby"

Kyla Tompkins' "She Made the Table a Snare to Them" can be read as a kind of historical primer for understanding the importance of the mouth in the 19th century. At times linked with dietary and consumption habits, at other times a symbolic representation of sexual desire, the mouth is seen as the primary channel for regulating the individual as well as the target of corrective measures for misguided behavior.

The essay centers on a reading of Sylvester Graham, the famous anti-Onanist advocate, whose work links "the cultural history of wheat and bread to vice, morality, and national formation" and allows Tompkins to read Foucault's biopower (thus addressing regulation) into Graham's project (54). Ultimately, Tompkins observes these connections between food and control as an important part of early American discourse: "Antebellum reformist food ways serve as allegories through and against which imperialism and its attendant anxieties are managed and rendered inevitable" (77).

Although Tompkins explicitly cites the relevance of this paper for scholars working on Melville, she only mentions the author twice by name: once at the outset, and once comparing Alcott's periphrasis to Melville's periphrasis in Moby Dick. The lack of Melville analysis after announcing the paper's connection to Melville is either an odd oversight or a suggestion that this work be taken up by others. With this in mind, I would set my undergraduates searching through "Bartleby the Scrivener" for evidence to support Tomkins' claims. Ideally they would locate (a) an episode with bread, (b) one of Bartleby's refusals that is followed by silence, or (c) the physical description of Bartleby that we might be able to speculate about.

I think after letting the students loose in the text, I would reign them in and focus on doing a close reading of a particular passage in relation to "She Made the Table." This passage from "Bartleby" on Ginger Nut cakes and the eponymous office assistant would work well for this activity:

Copying law papers being a proverbially dry, husky sort of business, my two scriveners were fain to moisten their mouths very often with Spitzenbergs, to be had at the numerous stalls nigh the Custom House and Post Office. Also, they sent Ginger Nut very frequently for that peculiar cake--small, flat, round, and very spicy--after which he had been named by them. Of a cold morning, when business was but dull, Turkey would gobble up scores of these cakes, as if they were mere wafers--indeed they sell them at the  rate of six or eight for a penny--the scrape of his pen blending with the crunching of the crisp particles in his mouth. (14)

Some guiding questions I might ask: does the depiction of the office characters and their consumptive habits seems to align with Tompkins analysis or not? How is this complicated by the lawyer's critical stance on their consumption as getting in the way of the workers producing for him. Further, how can we think of Bartleby's hiring--is this a pro or anti-imperialist gesture, and can we say for sure either way? Why does Ginger Nut take his name from the cakes he purchases for the office, and why might this be significant? What, if anything, can we say about the sexuality of the office workers, and later, Bartleby? Of course, there is much more, but this would be a significant start to the conversation.

Pick Your Poison … It May Save Your Life

So. As I was taking exception this week to Mel Y. Chen's supposition that our society seeks mainly to preserve the perfect white child living in our midst, this photo of a billboard showed up on the front  page of the Friday Modesto Bee. Mind you now, Livingston (where the billboard resides) is a small valley farming town; the census shows 76% of the residents to be hispanic. One would assume there is an equal percentage of Hispanic children in the town. Yet who gets top billing when a group gets a collective bee in its bonnet about toxins in the food supply? (Chen wins this round … )

Now for the rest of my post:

Mel Y. Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections” has kept me thinking all week. I struggle with her desire to push theory close to (for me) the absurd. Katherine has a nicer way of saying this: “Chen’s prose is dense, and several of her lines of argumentation push at the boundaries of what we expect to see in an article.” Chen has me whipping all over the place, trying to reconfigure images with which I am most acquainted with the new pictures she draws for her readers.

My last nursing position was with Stanislaus County Department of Public Health. I worked in the maternal-child health department and overheard many conversations re: exposure of patients to environmental agents. While the majority dealt with farm worker-parents exposure to pesticides (Modesto is a farming community,) there were more than enough conversations that revolved around our county’s children’s exposure to lead, either through disintegrating poisoned paint in their homes or from ingestion of candies brought in from Mexico and marketed in small ethnic grocery stores that our clients frequented. The outcome can be horribly devastating, is terribly sad, and is almost entirely preventable.

As a public health nurse, however, I never observed a white male child suggestively and longingly lick a toy train. Rather, I observed many children of all colors going about their day in an environment that (through no fault of their own) was silently hostile to them. Chen takes these children’s stories and weaves them with sexual overtones, links them with the American myth of Manifest Destiny, and then rides with them on the transcontinental railroad West until she arrives at her theory of U.S. capitalistic addictions that plunders other countries. Fuel for these addictions is extracted from poor workers who labor under toxic conditions to keep Americans happy with never-ending inexpensive products, until those same Americans turn on the workers when those products become environmentally unfriendly. Specifically we rejected China who sent us lead-laden Thomas the Trains; I remember too when we rejected Great Britain for sending mad-cow disease, Southeast Asia for distributing SARS virus to the world, and—as is the case now—West Africa for its export of Ebola.

Which brings me (finally, you say) to how I would incorporate this information into a discussion of Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Someday I would like to lecture in one of the many Health Science Humanities courses developing as I write this in professional schools across the globe. Chen gives me a unique opportunity to introduce students to humanities’ theory that can relate to their chosen profession; her work is perfect to stimulate conversation in the health science classroom. I would concentrate on sharing Chen’s personal description of trying to survive in a world in which her health was at the mercy of the next woman wearing perfume or man carrying cleaning rags who happened to cross her path. I would hang Chen’s story on whichever medical or nursing model the class utilized so that it would inform not only the students’ sensibilities and empathy, but also would lend itself to formulating diagnosis, planning, and interventions for care. Chen’s story is unique but sooner or later, we’ll all have a story to tell of how toxins affect our lives. Many of us will deliberately encounter those poisons when we try to save our lives.

Medicine is all about toxins in one form or another. The toxins are either killing us or curing us. Health Science professionals spend their days balancing the pros and cons of injecting the sick human body with poison agents that will make them well again. Virtually every treatment that will heal in small amounts will kill in large ones (liver-toxicity in Tylenol, anyone?) Chemotherapeutic agents are calibrated everyday and then administered to willing humans by nurses gowned, masked and double-gloved to protect them from the toxic substances. Radiation therapists implant radiation rods into willing patients to soothe solid tumors and buy time for patients who must refuse to longer cradle their children or pets because of the dangerous radiation being emitted from their body.

It would take but a few minutes for students to recall the therapies they’ve administered and their healthy fear in handling the poisons. They could then contemplate their patients’ responses to knowing a lethal substance that could potentially kill them was being utilized to stave off a disease that was likely to kill them sooner.  We’d spend some time discussing how people get to the point that they consider ‘poisoning’ their already poisoned bodies. How strong is the will to live? What pain will one tolerate to buy a few more weeks, months, or maybe even years? And, what if it’s not worth it in the end, what if the scarring from the toxic agents takes a toll greater than the initial disease?

There is a plethora of poetry written by survivors about the horrors and the healings of chemo and radiation therapies. There are also boatloads of books dealing with the same. Pale Horse, Pale Rider presents an interesting example of “toxic cures”: as I noted last week (and won’t bother you with again this week), the protagonist Miranda (and her real-life doppelganger, Katherine Anne Porter,) were both saved when they were probably minutes from death in the end stages of influenza with an experimental injection of strychnine. You might recall Miranda’s silent scream as the painful toxin raced throughout her body when the poison was administered. We move to the very limits in our attempt to cure the ill; we hope we don’t push too far and lose our patients. More than that, we hope that if our toxic concoctions save our patients’ bodies, they will still have their minds to take home with them.

I know I’ll continue to grapple with Chen’s work for a long time. It has been interesting to see how many of us have chosen to blog on this piece and from how many different angles we’ve tackled it. Such a multi-faceted article can only enrich our future discussions.

Post coming later...this is all I can think about right now.

"Lethal sweetness socks tots": animating theory, animating a cereal box

Probably what I've outlined below is too ambitious, even for advanced undergraduates-- I welcome y'alls input on that.

If I wanted to teach Mel Chen’s "Toxic Animacies", I think the first thing I would have to do is spend some time discussing the points in the article that I think would be difficult for an undergraduate reader: namely, Chen’s prose is dense, and several of her lines of argumentation push at the boundaries of what we expect to see in an article. 

I think it’s worth it to try to show students how to be patient with texts like this. For me, this involves reading them with the kind of critical eye we bring to science fiction (or any fiction), rather than asking if the world described in theory matches up with our experience. In other words, I think that (from a pedagogical perspective) it would be useful to treat theory as requiring a readerly logic of “what if?” rather than one of “what is?"

So instead of starting with the Chen piece, I would start with “Heat Death of the Universe” and a discussion of genre. 

• This short story has actually been the source of a lot of debate about genre: it was published in a science fiction magazine, but the SF community is split on whether it is SF or not. What do you guys think?

I've seen this particular question asked in classes before. It tends to create interesting debates about genre.

I’d spend a couple of minutes on how science fiction is defined at various points by various theorists:

• a sort of ‘predictive’ logic of SF (beginning with the early pulps)
• which was reframed by New Worlds (the magazine in which this story appears): editor M. Moorcock tries to move from intensive engagement with technology, the future, and “outer space” to an engagement with speculative approaches to “inner space.” 
• Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement”: 
• meaning that it deals with unfamiliar/strange objects, situations, and locations (estrangement), 
• but it is possible to approach these instances of “strange newness” using a cognitive approach, making sense of the relationship between them and the “real world”

Then I’d ask what aspects of Zoline's short story are speculative, in the sense of creating estrangement and cognition. I'd take a few responses before moving on, once I got a sense that students understood the concepts outlined above.

Transitioning to ‘Toxic Animacies,’ I would encourage students to think of this piece of theory in a similar way— what kind of world would we have to imagine for the theory to make more sense? As I was saying before, I feel like there are parts in Chen's piece that use complex language and are hard to parse, and then other parts that may be easier to understand but might be either emotionally uncomfortable or hard to believe.

Two such moments, at least for me, are:

(1) The section in which Chen riffs on the idea of "black children licking the peeling walls of their unmaintained dwellings" and the (unrepresentable, but surely there?) image of a little white boy licking Thomas the Tank Engine, “playing improperly with the phallic toy” (270-1). For me at least, this was a tiny bit unconvincing, if deliciously controversial. I have never envisioned either of these scenes!

In discussing this with students, I would try to guide them to the idea of looking at this image as a stylistic device. The the idea of interpenetration, permeability, and radical vulnerability to others (and the assault on traditional white masculinity this implies) seems to hold up even if we don't buy the queerness of licking Thomas the Tank Engine. 

• “If this were a kind of science fictional representation, we wouldn’t say 'I’ve never seen a two-headed alien in real life’, and stop there. We would ask what the author is DOING with the two-headed alien— why are they depicting it, rather than ‘is it possible?’. Instead of asking if it’s plausible, lets ask what Chen is trying to represent with this image."

(2) This might lead us into the section in which Chen writes personally about her experiences with multiple chemical sensitivity. Here I think it would be good to give students time to express their responses to Chen’s description of intoxication and vulnerability. 

• Who among us has never used scented laundry detergent, deodorant, cigarettes or skin cream? How should we feel addressed by this section of the paper? I for one feel guilt and anxiety about being toxic, which threatens to slide into frustration and anger at her “sensitivity” to me.

• What kind of world does Chen live in, and what does it draw her attention to? Her experiences may seem “estranged” from our own (or maybe not?), but they DO let us see the “real world” differently.

Finally, time permitting, I would bring us back to “Heat Death,” and ask students if we can find scenes that help us understand what Chen means by ‘animacy.’ She writes that while "animacy has no single definition," part of it is "a quality of agency, sentience, or liveness." She encourages us to "ask not 'who is alive, or dead,' but 'what is animate, or inanimate, or less animate'; relationally, we can ask about the possibilities of the interobjective, above and beyond the intersubjective” (280). 

As a candidate passage for finding “animacy” in “Heat Death,” (should students be less than forthcoming), I would turn to the description of a box of frosted flakes which participates in the kind of narratives of toxicity Chen describes. I’ve included an image of the passage below, instead of a big block of text, so I can pretend this entry is shorter than it would be otherwise.

I wish I could conduct a detailed close reading of this passage for you all now, but I’m really pushing myself to stop at two pages, for all of our sakes. So suffice it to say that I think the way that the box is designed to “appeal” to children begins to bleed over into a sort of animacy. The box undergoes a transformation here from being “appealing,” (i.e. having properties of classical sculpture) to launching a series of appeals, a “blatted” discourse with the children (to which they enthusiastically respond). And then there is this maternal paranoia about why the cereal box is so communicative: Sarah already hears "the decay set in upon the little white milk teeth, the bony whine of the dentist's drill,” and fears the cereal must cause a “special cruel cancer in children.”

 (animating a box of frosted flakes, p.1 )

 (a special, cruel cancer p.2)

There's more than enough here for chewing through some of the Chen, though admittedly it diminishes her point about differential risk exposure: I'd have to bring that up specifically, perhaps by noting the brilliant moment where she talks about the NY Times' assumption that cheap McDonalds toys certainly may be toxic, expensive trains should not be. 

Toxicity in Silas Marner

Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” covers a lot of ground, touching on lead poisoning, queerness, race, and her personal experiences being treated as toxic on the street.  The wide range of topics can seem noncontiguous, a fact Chen herself acknowledges by noting the essay “seems at first to float outside queerness,” until it reaches section two (265).  However, the breath that Chen can cover in the essay also nicely highlights how widely applicable her theories of toxicity can be.  Chen writes:

“Toxins — toxic figures — populate increasing ranges of environmental, social, and political discourses. Indeed, figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion: so an advice columnist might write Keep a healthy distance from toxic acquaintances, while a senator up for reelection decries the ‘toxic’ political atmosphere” (266).

If I were teaching an undergraduate class in which the students were reading Chen and Silas Marner together, I would like to use this statement about general ideas of toxicity to start the discussion.  This way, the students would be able to think about toxicity at least partially on their own terms, rather than trying to read Chen directly onto Elliot and saying, “Well, Chen says X thing about toxicity and queerness, so where in Silas Marner can I find X thing being demonstrated?”

We would start out brainstorming characters or scenes in the book that we think demonstrate toxicity.  Three things I hope would come up:

1. The opening scene where a young Silas Marner is accused by a friend of stealing money.  His religious community draws lots to determine if the accusation is true, then expel him from the community when the lots declare him guilty.
2. Eppie’s mother, Molly, a poor opium addict who dies on her way to publicly declare the wealthy Godfrey Cass is her husband.
3. The factory that has been built in the place where Silas Marner lived as a young man.

Once we had our list of toxic people and places, we would write them each as a heading on the board, then brainstorm what seems particularly toxic about them.  Some things we could note (though probably in fewer words on the board!):

1. Silas’s religious community sees immorality as toxic, since they must literally distance themselves from it.  Conversely, one could argue that the community, which judged him unfairly, was toxic to Silas because his expulsion leads to the depression that characterizes him for much of the book.  The friend who framed Silas for the theft could be the “toxic acquaintance” alluded to in the Chen quote because he destroyed their friendship.
2. Assuming this is the same class in which we read the Armstrong article and Silas Marner together, I would like the class to draw parallels between Armstrong’s argument about women who do not properly fit into Victorian society and toxicity.  Note that Eppie’s mother, a drug addict and someone who seems to be a single mother (since her marriage was secret and to someone far above her social status) must die.  The community wants nothing to do with her and the book has no way of fitting her into the happy ending.  The drugs themselves are also toxic to Eppie’s mother and contribute to her death.
3. The factory is literally emitting toxic fumes into the air.  The density of the buildings is also problematic, as Eppie says, “I’m like as if I was stifled…I couldn’t ha’ thought as any folks lived I’ this way, so close together.  How pretty the Stone Pits ‘ull look when we get back!” (179). 

After we have some major thoughts about what makes each person, place, or thing toxic, we would discuss what each does or does not have in common and what a definition of toxicity might be.  Most likely, we would conclude that anything can be toxic, that what one considers toxic might depend on one’s point of view, and that toxicity is generally considered to be contagious in some way (even if not literally so).

This would also be a good place in the discussion to talk about Chen’s definition of animacy: “Animacy is built on the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification” (265).

There is not much opportunity for racialization to occur in Silas Marner, a book of small cast and therefore little diversity in just about any sense of the word.  However, we could expand the concept of animacy to discuss how concepts and inanimate objects are othered, how toxicity is generally something associated with women or with the unnamed “faraway” place Silas came from and can only briefly return to for a supremely unsatisfying visit.  We might additionally discuss what the effect of othering a town that seems to be literally a couple days’ walk away vs. what the effect of othering a different continent is.

Overall, I hope this lesson would encourage the students to think about the general theoretical ideas being proposed in the Chen article are and how they might apply to a primary text.

Toxic Virgins, Queer Relations

The following is an outline for a teaching discussion about John Lyly's Gallathea using Mel Y. Chen's "Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections" as a lens.

Consider the following passages from the Chen: 

A toxin threatens, but it also beckons. It is not necessarily alive, yet it enlivens morbidity and fear of death. A toxin requires an object against which its threat operates; this threatened object is an animate object — hence potentially also a kind of subject — whose “natural defenses” will be put to the test, in detection, in “fighting off,” and finally in submission and absorption. (265)

Toxins — toxic figures — populate increasing ranges of environmental, social, and political discourses. Indeed, figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion[. . .] (266)

1. Considering Chen's definition of "toxin," what are the toxins in John Lyly's Gallathea? Maybe a more appropriate question would be who are the toxins? 

What are the roles of the citizens, the Danes, and the gods in creating a society that fears toxins? How do the Danes enact toxicity? Can the Danes be considered a racialized, toxic other?

2. Are Gallathea and Phillida toxins? Remember that the sacrifice to the Agar must be "the fairest and chasest virgin in all the country," which appears to fall under the requirements of Chen's "new kind of purity" (266), since outward beauty and sexual absistence can be see as manifestations of purity and innocence.

View the following clip:

3. How does toxicity function according to temporality? Once intoxicated, is a subject or object always toxic? This is, at least, the running joke in Monsters, Inc., in which the character "George Sanderson" is constantly subjected to new detoxifying regiments. If Gallathea and Phillida are toxic, when did they become toxic? Does their impending gender/sex transformation at the end of the play detoxify them? Consider the following passage from Chen: "Unlike viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they are better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives" (281-82).

4. The Rafe/Robin/Dick subplot is often ignored among critics and scholars, for various reasons. Even though the subplot appears to be a low-brow, simple farce that makes fun of dimwitted servants, some of the brothers health is endangered as they work for different masters, which can be seen as an early modern echo (if we can echo back in time) of the Chinese workers who are exposed to lead paint. Chen says of the Western concern (or lack thereof) for these workers: "the conditions of labor needed to be made just visible enough to facilitate the territorial/state/racial assignation of blame, but not enough to generally extend the ring of sympathetic concern around the workers themselves" (269). Can these servant brothers be compared to the Chinese workers? Does the play encourage us to pity or sympathize with the servant brothers, or are the just visible enough for "blame," but not enough for "the ring of sympathetic concern"?

Carnal desires, both sexual and alimentary

Reading the chapter from Tompkins’s book – Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century – made me strangely hungry. I also couldn’t help but think of Hsuan Hsu’s lecture the other week on paleofiction and race. If wheat, as followers of Grahamite thought proclaim, makes people moral and balanced, what would they say about those who follow paleo diets or are gluten free today??? Are they simply masturbating ALL THE TIME?

But back to Thompkins, teaching, and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

A satirical brothel scene from 1784 via the British Museum. More party, boobs, and booze, less food.

I’d want to dig into the imperialism that Tompkins connects with food, the connections of “diet and racial supremacy,” as well as issues of gender and control (54). The role of women connected to food ties into my previous post about capitalism and prostitutes. Here, though, Tompkins explains Graham’s concerns with food and women, specifically the role of matron as producer of bread and thus sustainer of the domestic order (71). This matron figure contrasts with the girl whose “excessive lasciviousness” Graham describes just a bit strangely (79). She doesn’t eat right, so no amount of moral instruction could prevent her from “self-pollution” and trying to get with the dudes. In other words, excessive sexuality is a threat to this moral code.

Let’s say we’re still in my upper division undergrad course on erotic literature from the 1600s to today. Since the class would be looking at texts from the 19th-century, just as Tompkins does, I’d use her ideas to influence a class devoted to food and erotica. In preparation for class I’d ask students to find one or two instances of food in the text and how they see it being used. They could pick from Memoirs or one of the other books we would have read by then.

I’d then put students in pairs or groups of 3 (depending on class size) and have them share what they came in with to each other. We’d then attempt to classify the different usages of food in the texts and see if there was any pattern in terms of time or space. Since I don’t have that syllabus written (yet), here are some examples from Memoirs:

• PLOT DEVICE: When Fanny sees Charles, the love of her life, for the first time, he’s sleeping off a night of drinking in the brothel’s parlor. Next to him “still remain’d the punch-bowl and glasses, strow’d about in their usual disorder after a drunken revel” (34). Here drink equals negative excess/decadence, but is also the means through which Fanny meets the man she will eventually marry. And it allows her to escape Mrs. Brown’s awful brothel.
• METAPHORIC: Fanny talks about “that store bag of nature’s prime sweets” when feeling up one of her many lovers as well as the “balsamic sweets” of ejaculate during sex with Charles (83, 42). The dizzying round of sex Fanny and Charles have their first day together is also described as a “feast” (43).

There are also lots of dinners in the text, though they are served by others and never made by Fanny. She is not a bread-maker or baker. Breakfast, if mentioned, is chocolate. Clearly she is a lady of excess whose passions are inflamed, perhaps in part by the exotic foods she eats.

After looking at these usages in the texts themselves, class would conclude with a broader discussion of the relationship between food, sex, and power, connecting the texts we’d read through this lens of eating.

I don’t think I would necessarily have the students read this selection, but would pull out some of Tompkins examples to share with them. If it was a grad seminar, they’d get the chapter paired with a 19th-century text. If I was feeling clever, I'd make sure people had brought food to share so that we weren't all starving by end of class.

The Train-Licking Boy

As I was reading the Chen article, I was continuously trying to figure out how to tie the Chen to Edelman’s queer theories and somehow then to Maisie and teaching. I was therefore not surprised when Chen did in fact mention Edelman; not surprised because really she had to at least acknowledge his theories in her argument. Chen writes of Edelman, “Signal to queer theory’s interest in queer relationality, Lee Edelman takes up a psychoanalytic analysis of queerness’s figural deathly assignment in relation to a relentless reproductive futurity” (278). It didn’t seem to me that she really elaborated on how “queerness’s figural deathly assignment” plays into her argument beyond being a point in queer history’s treatment of life and death and consequently its relationship to toxicity (please correct me if any of you would disagree with this assessment). This is the moment when she brings toxicity more explicitly into parsing the boundaries of the body:

Toxicity straddles boundaries of “life” and “nonlife,” as well as the literal bounds of bodies, in ways that introduce a certain complexity to the presumption of integrity of either lifely or deathly subjects. While never undergoing sustained theorization in queer theory, toxicity has nevertheless retained a certain resonance there and a certain citational pull. (279)

I personally felt it would’ve been more helpful for her argument to discuss Edelman’s treatment of children in relation to the train-licking boy “that must not be allowed to become toxic: he must not be mentally deficient, delayed, or lethargic. His intellectual capabilities must be assured to consolidate a futurity of heteronormative (white) masculinity, which is also to say that he must not be queer” (271). That, however, might’ve shifted the focus of the article. Nonetheless, if I were teaching this article, I would focus specifically on Chen’s discussion of toxicity related to (non)reproductive futures. I would have my students specifically explore the following aspect of Edelman’s theory, and come up with a question in their respective texts (for the purposes of this post, I suppose we would be reading What Maisie Knew, though I think there are other late Victorian texts that might better serve this purpose) that links the two:

Edelman investigates the ramifications of treating the child as a symbol for the future rather than an individual. Edelman writes, “Historically constructed…to serve the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural identifications, the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 11). Using Lacan’s lectures, Edelman crafts a theory of sinthomosexuality with which he challenges the assumption that non-procreative sex is destructive because it threatens a heteronormative ‘love-based’ society by refusing to buy into the future as represented by children.

Perhaps a question a student or I might generate would be: How does Chen’s train-licking and consequently mentally deficient child queer the future represented by children that society holds, in Edelman’s opinion, “in perpetual trust” as a symbol of the reproductive and therefore non-queer future?

To better contextualize the importance of the child as the site of society’s future, and therefore the metaphorical death of the individual child that makes the real child become a specter, we would read all or part of Katherine Bond Stockton’s book The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, who considers the ramifications of forgetting the individual child in favor of managing that child’s fictitious innocence on which society depends for the reproduction of the heteronormative future: “This kind of growth is made palpable, as I plan to show, by (the fiction of) the ghostly gay child – the publicly impossible child whose identity is a deferral (sometimes powerfully and happily so) and an act of growing sideways, by virtue of its future retroaction as a child” (Stockton 11, her italics). I would explain that rather than looking at the child as a site of the future or the fantasy possibility of retroactive adult discovery like Edelman does (which is very Freudian), Stockton proposes that instead of growing up, children today are subjected to managed delay, “the notion that children should approach all things adult with caution and in ways that guarantee their distance from adulthood” (Stockton 91), and so ‘grow sideways.’

To link the novel to Chen, Edelman, and Stockton, and the above aspects of their respective theories/ideas/opinions that I would hone in on, I would posit that Maisie’s body acts as an impenetrable tomb into which information, often toxic information, enters and from which it never again emerges after she initially decides to seal herself off from her parents. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post linking Maisie and Moretti, James writes that Maisie “was the little feathered shuttlecock that they fiercely kept flying between them. The evil [her parents] had the gift of thinking…of each other, they poured into her little gravely gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle” (James 12). Maisie, however, zips her lips and eventually refuses to recite this information; she breathes in the toxins, and in an attempt to control her situation, she lets them recirculate in her body rather than expelling them, and in this self-poisoning she takes great pleasure: 

"She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been the centre of hatred and a messenger of insult, and that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so. Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed no longer. She would...repeat nothing, and when, as an tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure altogether new" (James 13).

The question throughout the novel therefore becomes, what does Maisie know? Even the reader cannot quite make her body of knowledge his or her own, cannot co-opt or appropriate the personal narrative tucked into her brain. We can only hope to understand by the end of the novel whether or not she has managed to maintain some semblance of a sense of self and agency (arguably, she has not, but that’s my attempt to interpret what it is that Maisie knows). Maisie therefore becomes illegible, an almost-specter in the text, the “ghostly gay child” whose “identity is a deferral” because it is only while she is a child that her parents can continue to use her for their purposes; they delay her adulthood and therefore delay the reproductive future, unwittingly creating a version of Edelman’s sinthomosexual, the figure that rejects the future-based social order; Maisie becomes the train-licking boy. But as Chen and the novel suggest, “We need not assign the train-licking boy so surely to the nihilistic underside of futurity or to his own termination, figurative or otherwise” (281). I'll leave you with that titillating thought.