Interpreting *By the Sea*: A Retrospective

I was fascinated to look back through my posts from this quarter and trace the trajectory of my analysis of By the Sea. Even though the topic of each week’s post was contingent upon the random articles that comprised that week’s readings, my thinking in fact developed along a clear line. (Perhaps this is a function of my usually choosing a general idea in the novel to think about before even reading the critical essays.) Back in October I chose By the Sea as my primary text because I knew and liked the novel, and, importantly, because I had never written about it and knew that my pre-existing interpretive framework was quite basic. There was however one topic that I knew interested me in the novel, what had made me remember it from that class I took my junior year of college: the motif of maps. My first two posts of the quarter, connecting the text to Chakrabarty and Anderson, followed directly from this interest. I am not in the least surprised by the conclusion of my first post—I still hold to it, as well—that perhaps this novel is asking us to locate a common humanity only in people being “fellow children of dislocation.”

Along those lines, I'm surprised that I never got the chance to discuss a related issue: that of homes, homelessness, and inheritance. I mentioned so many times the plot wherein Saleh takes possession of Latif’s childhood home, but I guess because I didn’t find any of the secondary readings to speak quite to this question, I never got to it. Instead, my third and fourth posts show a pivot in my thinking about the novel. They reveal the point at which I started to focus more on the intersection of storytelling and resistance, connected but not limited to Saleh’s use of “Bartleby.”

The idea that most inspired me emerged in my fifth post, dealing with Spivak. Throughout the quarter I’ve been considering the implications of By the Sea’s role as a postcolonial novel, and Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism helped me clarify that thinking. Every post I wrote deals with the ambiguities and contradictions inherent to the postcolonial subject; how Saleh and Latif are constantly straddling two worlds; how they participate in, attempt to participate in, or look down upon the discourses of those two worlds. One way in which this comes out is through irony, which I point to in my first and last posts. As a critic of this text, I am constantly running up against this dichotomy and trying to figure out how the protagonists and the novel itself value Zanzibari and British systems of knowing in opposition to one another. To quote myself explicating the Spivak a few weeks back:

Her article argues that, if we read [the Subaltern Studies group’s] work against the grain, we can see them strategically essentializing the subaltern in order to confront the difficulty of giving the subaltern a voice (or locating the subaltern’s voice), which is actually the paradox of anti-humanist criticism: that it too essentializes, “the object of [its] criticism [is] irreducible” (Spivak 13). In deliberately and strategically projecting the lessons of subaltern studies onto deconstructionist criticism at large, she notes, “the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic” (Spivak 16). (Bamert)

This idea really helped me think through the narrating (and therefore vocal) postcolonial subject as a limit case. The constant back and forth and questioning of value systems in the novel, the hypocrisy sometimes exhibited by Saleh and Latif, can be read as part of this paradoxical critique of Western humanism. I’d probably say now that my very broad-stroke reading of By the Sea is that it is about the interpretation of stories. The novel enacts many varied interpretations, and it lends itself to yet others. I wouldn’t say that this is a big departure from how I read the novel before writing these posts, but it certainly does situate my interest in postcolonial dislocation and mapping within a broader and better defined discursive context.

(Thanks also to Tom and Katherine for some great collaborative post writing that helped me develop my interpretation of the novel!)

Tips and Tricks (possibly banal and/or obvious but still helpful)

I've been thinking about the Berman lecture and the question that Averyl posed to Kathleen and Hsuan yesterday [to paraphrase]: "What practical advice can you give me for getting my (frequently insurmountable-feeling) work done in 6 years?"

I can't promise you that you will get the work that you need to get done in 6 years. Sadly, I am even less able to promise you that there will be a job that you will be happy with after you are done with your PhD. However, in the vein of Kathleen's promise to you that you will receive support throughout your process, I can give you some possibly banal, probably obvious, but nevertheless helpful tips and tricks for getting the work done. Know that I myself took far longer to get many of these tips through my thick skull than I should have, and I'm still training myself to follow some of them today. But it is never too late to start:

1) Make lists. Digitally, manually, both. I have Google calendar reminders, reminders on my phone, documents on my computer, and a collection of post-its all over my workspace with to-do lists. Some of these (post-its and calendar reminders) are lists of what I need to do this week, or even one day out of the week. On my computer, I have word docs of lists related to writing/research projects, broken down into several steps. Note that you probably can't list all the steps, since you don't know what they will be yet. But you can make a general list or notes about what you know you need to do now.

Some to-do lists, such as the ones where you list your teaching prep, meeting, and laundry needs, are probably self-explanatory. But the research/writing ones might not be.  So here's a sample of one of my own -- a current writing/research lists that looks something like this:

ARTICLE REVISION
(for an article on "Their Dogs Came With Them" by Helena Maria Viramontes that I've received feedback on and need to submit to a journal during Winter qtr.). Note that this list is not necessarily in order. Note too that I also already have a draft of this article -- a first draft would probably require a different kind of list. And finally, be aware that I should be writing during this entire process -- I wouldn't be able to or feel the need to complete all of these steps on the list before revising parts of the article. 

1. Read/take notes on articles/book chapters collected on "Dogs."

2. Collate notes and see what I agree with or what supports my argument, and what I disagree with or will position my argument against .

3. Rethink central argument about practices of translation and mistranslation in the novel. Go through novel again and review/rethink quotes that support my argument.

4. Think about how I will consider/situate my argument about the novel in relation to the field of Latina/o Studies more broadly. Review my notes on articles/book chapters in order to consider this.

5. Go through my own article again, and write up new notes/outline for it. Pay attention to each paragraph and find the main point of each. If there isn't one, fold paragraph into another one or omit it. Be sure that article flows as a coherent narrative.

6. If necessary, write up outline again.

2) Related to the list-making: Find the times in your week when you will be working on research/writing projects. Schedule these times in the same way you might schedule an appointment or a meeting.

Ideally, you should be working on these at least a little bit every week-day, though obviously you will be factoring in other times as well. Sometimes this might mean 30 min per day, sometimes it might mean an entire weekend.

I have found that "binging" on research and writing DOES NOT work for me. At this stage in my life, it isn't even possible -- even if I wanted it to be -- due to family/personal needs. You may well be at another stage in your life. But regardless, it will benefit you to practice, enhance, or begin "regular" work habits. This doesn't mean that you will never "binge" again, but at least you will have some practices to fall back on when you are ready.

3) Exercise. It doesn't matter what this looks like. Some people swear by running, others do weekly yoga, others walk or bike. It will clear your mind and break you away from your computer. It is an excellent way to think through a project or problem. I have had some of my best ideas while on long walks or while running. Be ready to make a note about any of these ideas when you are done!

4) Carve out time to pay attention to yourself and others. Whether this is an outing with friends, time with a partner, a walk with your dog, or a playdate with kids, make time for these activities just as you make time for your students or for your research/writing. Related to this: whatever your responsibilities might be to a partner, children, pets, AND your own self-care, treat this time as "non-work" time to the extent that you can. If you schedule in your work time, it is easier to schedule in your "me" time.

5) Form working groups with other grad students.

Last week the grads who've taken their prelims discussed "prelim reading groups" that they've formed with other students; many other students form writing groups at the diss. stage to exchange their work. I cannot stress this enough. You will feel camaraderie and accountability, both of which are helpful for the often-solitary pursuits of academic study.

6)  On the lists/scheduling: DO NOT abandon these efforts during the summer. Your lists and scheduling may be far less intense during the summer months, but they should still be present.

 I realize that some people might be more naturally "organizational" than others. I also realize (believe me) that such forms of organization can feel confining and even "corporate" in the vein of EVERYTHING that I disliked about Berman's lecture. [Bartleby's "refusal," anyone?] Perhaps these organizational skills can even feel antithetical to (often highly mythical) notions about creative license or the creative process.

But the bottom line is that we all must wear multiple hats as intellectuals, academics, and PhD candidates, no matter what career or life path we land on in the end. And I have found that such attention to time and schedule helps me preserve the passion for creativity, for intellectual study, and for my students. And it also helps me function as a person with a life to lead.

Again, however, I cannot stress enough the importance of study/research/writing groups with your peers. You need companionship, solidarity, and connection through your intellectual endeavors. This is the SINGLE most important thing that I learned in graduate school, and I still regret that I didn't stick to a consistent writing group then. It can feel terrifying or embarrassing to share material you are not sure about or that you feel isn't ready. Do it anyway. Your peers will welcome and forgive drafts or pieces of drafts because you are all in the same boat, doing the same thing. And the accountability is just a bonus.

I hope this helps! (and I hope I don't sound too much like your mom might have) :)

 



 

Fiction, Genre, and the Epistemology of “Real”

“Of course it’s happening in your head… but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” - Dumbledore

Justice argues that side-stepping the question of belief in studying medieval miracle narratives results in the construction of medieval subjects as caricatured idiots or sinister charlatans who “speak either in a cynical and nearly sociopathic detachment from the truth-content of their words, or in a nearly delusional bondage to interests they do not even recognize as the source of those words” (11). After taking apart this claim that modern medievalist scholarship imputes either delusion or sociopathy onto medieval writers, we asked ourselves why Justice’s scoldings seemed both to ring a bit true and to miss the mark. On the one hand, he makes important points about the dangers of projecting modern ideas about “truth” onto medieval writers, while at the same time he appears to do exactly that when he imagines only two possible implications of modern scholars’ choice not to take up questions of belief on his terms. We easily identified a third possibility, which is that acknowledging the “imaginariness” of hagiographical narrative need not necessarily constitute an accusation of either fraud or idiocy. In fact, only if we impute to medieval writers our own epistemology of “real”--which posits a line between “empirical” and “imaginary” and privileges the material over the imaginary as “real”--does it follow that they must either be deluded or attempting to delude others. Considering the possibility of an epistemological conception of truth with different boundaries from our own seems to offer a resolution.

We suspect that it is the limitations of our own modern taxonomies of truth and “reality” which make it difficult for us to imagine a writer of miracle narratives who is neither maliciously lying nor naively credulous. Using such rigid categories of “real” and “not real” privileges one interpretation of the texts over other interpretations. This is problematic for us as scholars and teachers of literature, because assuming that medieval visionaries could only have been either delusional or fraudulent can color how modern readers approach and interpret their writing. Miracles are not “real” in a material sense and therefore not real by our modern “material-trumps-imaginary” test of realness, but the same test and hierarchical binary between material and imagination did not necessarily burden medieval writers. We wonder if perhaps it’s just our post-Enlightenment bias that makes us (or rather, Justice) think of it as an insult to point out that something is “only” imaginary.

Recognizing that this bias is problematic raises questions about how we taxonomize literature based on its adherence to a particular conception of the “real.” Fantasy, realistic fiction, science fiction, historical fiction, memoir, history: all of these terms are freighted with assumptions about the nature of truth and what is or is not “real.” And so we found ourselves focused on the implications of Justice’s argument for genre. And we were pretty excited.

Silas Marner

George Eliot’s work often walks the line between realism and romanticism, and Silas Marner is no exception.  On one hand, Kathryn Hughes can write that the book “is actually intent on showing a particular patch of the Warwickshire countryside at a precise historical moment.  And from remarks made both by the narrator and Squire Cass, it is clear that the historical moment occurs during the French Wars of 1793-1815” (185).  On the other hand,  Jonathan Quick is able to argue that in Silas Marner, Eliot “is making a deliberate effort to modify, even to abandon, the insistent work-a-day realism that obtained in her previous work” (288).

Both critics are right.  The town of Raveloe is small, provincial, and gritty, and the people who live there have complex characters and motivations.  Yet unlikely things happen there: an orphaned girl wanders into Silas’s home and saves him from despair, the gold that was stolen from Silas reappears when it will do him the most good.  Characters generally get their happily-ever-afters, and they attribute their happiness to God.  For some reason, however, critics do not want to acknowledge that Silas Marner can do both things, be in both places at once; the wealth of articles focused on determining “the genre of Silas Marner” attests to that.

Declaring that Silas Marner is either realism or romanticism, however, is limiting.  Choosing a side in the debate means pitting the aspects of the novel against each other, choosing one set to focus on (that is worth focusing on).  Even introducing the question of whether Silas Marner is realism or romanticism is akin to asking whether the story is realistic and is potentially a road to dismissing the elements that are not.  Yet the point of the novel may be that all its aspects are real, just in different ways, because choosing to believe the child you found on the road is a gift from God to give your life purpose does give your life purpose—whether or not a God was involved.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Pale Horse, Pale Rider is referenced in a myriad of different genres. It is considered by some to be a memoir, although the author, Katherine Anne Porter, declared it not a memoir, despite the obvious parallels to her own life. Because of its modest length, it is frequently referred to as a novella. Porter detested the word ‘novella’, calling it a "slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything." Commonly, the title “historical novel” accompanies descriptions of the text because of its setting in the late WWI era, specifically 1918, during the last wave of influenza pandemic that swept the world. Porter preferred “short novel” when readers insisted on placing her book in a pigeonhole.

Does it matter how one describes a work when presenting it to a reader? Does a ‘pigeonhole’ affect the mindset with which a reader enters into the text? I suppose that if I referenced Pale Horse as a novella—and the reader channeled Porter and imagined a “slack, boneless, affected” book—I could anticipate a significant negative coloring of the work in the reader’s mind. But if I called it a “historical novel,” I might appeal to a reader hoping for an inventive novel resting firmly on non-fiction bones.  Call it “memoir,” and a different reader altogether would probably show up, someone hoping for an interior glimpse into the author’s world, preferably an author with a stimulating life to relate.

The words in the book stay the same; the title of the work and the author of the work remain the same. The only thing that changes is the lens through which we ask the reader to frame the story. But in specifying a certain lens, perhaps we do to Pale Horse what Justice says interpreters of medieval miracle stories do: we subtly influence what we want the reader to see in the text. Now, in 2014, centuries after the Middle Ages and decades after the 1918 pandemic, we must use caution in focusing our spectacles on either era and calling what we see “truth.”

Frankenstein

It’s difficult to map these ideas about genre perfectly onto Frankenstein, but they certainly apply. The novel’s place in the category “Romantic literature” is more firmly fixed than Silas Marner’s, perhaps, but it also stakes a claim on the “realistic fiction” label, and it’s hard to talk about Frankenstein and genre without discussing the unresolved critical question of whether or not the novel is “science fiction.” The controversy lies partly in the complete lack of “science” in Shelley’s fictional narrative. She does not include laboratory scenes or attempt to describe Victor Frankenstein actually doing the science. The appearance of the creature is dependent upon scientific practices that Mary Shelley does not even try to reproduce textually. The absence of science in the narrative means that a reader cannot debunk it action by action but rather can only doubt the probability of the result. Shelley (to borrow Katherine’s phrasing from last week) has not attempted to replicate science in the sense of “what is” but rather as a “what if”. In this sense, despite the novel’s lack of representations of scientific practices (fictional or otherwise), it bears some marks of belonging within the science fiction category.

Today, science fiction and fantasy are both discussed critically under the umbrella term “speculative fiction,” which denotes the un-real-ness of “fiction” (a term that otherwise lumps together literary prose with outright lies) as well as the culturally sanctioned subset of imaginative work known as “speculation.” Literary fiction is an exceptional category carved out as a safe space in which narratives that are not “real” in an empirical sense but which we nonetheless embrace for their potential to represent the real. We also embrace fiction that breaks from a strictly representative mode (realistic fiction) and moves into a mode of imaginary work that does not represent materially-possible scenarios but rather speculates on impossible but interesting alternatives. I wonder if Frankenstein’s contested claim to the title of “first science fiction novel” has more to do with our conceptions of “science” (it’s material, empirically observable, and you do it with tools) and “fiction” (it didn’t happen like this, but what if…) than with Shelley’s motivations. I suspect that a similar explanation applies to Justice’s examples.

Final answer:

Our takeaway from Justice’s article is that we should take care to remove our 21st-century lenses when introducing a text to readers (or when reading about a text ourselves prior to delving into the material) to avoid the epistemological pitfalls he describes. We need to avoid the “durable doublet” with the “curious, asymmetrical relation” that he wraps his thoughts around. We should be neither didactic in our approach (trying to explain away a story by rationalizing ‘why’ the author tells the story) nor put a perceptual spin on a piece (indicating that the author wrote what he wrote because he had no deeper knowledge that might have clarified his piece had he been more educated.) Rather, we should be open to all considerations of a text, view it from multiple points, give the text latitude without forcing it into whichever box we find fitting on a particular day or in a particular era (forgive us--we know we are forcing this article into an ENL 200 box for the sake of this blog post).  When we avoid temporally- or culturally-bound labels, avoid declarations of what is real as if that signifier is fixed, we can read texts from the past with proper respect to a time and place we may never fully understand.

Works Cited

Hughes, Kathryn.  Afterword. Silas Marner. By George Eliot. New York: Signet Classics, 2007. 184-190. Print.

Quick, Jonathan R. Silas Marner as Romance: The Example of Hawthorne. Nineteenth Century Fiction. Vol. 29, No. 3 (Dec., 1974), pp. 287-298

Briana Wagner, Sally Lochowski Tanaka, Jessica Gray

Justice Pits Belief Against Reason: We Disagree

We both really liked the Justice article—the ways in which it critiques how criticism operates, in particular—and we were therefore surprised when our discussion led us to a critique of an underlying assumption that Justice makes in his argument. In talking about the role of belief systems in our texts, we explored how, as Justice says, “doubting and investigating the miraculous begin almost simultaneously with believing it” (Justice 19). Justice encourages us to break out of an assumption that belief is separate from other modes of “cognitive experience,” by drawing upon Aquinas’ model of faith in which “the formulary of belief is not that which goes without saying, the plush carpet of presupposition, but that which has to be said, and then said again, because saying it provokes reactive intellectual energy” (Justice 13).

By applying this model of faith solely to the question of miracles (i.e. events that occur for supernatural rather than natural reasons), Justice might be selling Aquinas and Augustine’s reading of human perception short. We realized that Justice’s model assumes the givenness of a person who experiences the world as an Enlightenment subject of reason. Doubt must be a part of and simultaneous to belief because reason tells us that miracles are likely not believable. Justice penetrates the opacity of the medieval believing subject—whom criticism has frozen “into an idiot deadpan behind which either of two extreme possibilities might lie: they must speak either in a cynical and nearly sociopathic detachment from the truth-content of their words, or in a nearly delusional bondage to interests they do not even recognize as the source of those words” (Justice 11). But he does so by locating doubt within their belief system, implying that medieval subjects have trouble believing (as we ourselves do, or would) because of the self-evidence of natural law. We are not accusing Justice of anachronistically inserting an Enlightenment subjectivity into too early an era, which would fall directly into the trap Justice is warning us against: namely, assuming that medieval mindsets are inherently impenetrable to us. Rather, the protagonists in our texts reveal to us the belief systems under which we operate in the contemporary moment; these characters want to think and behave as rational, Enlightenment subjects, but they remain in the orbit of belief systems. It is not simply that belief is an act of will over an otherwise rational intellect. It seems, at least in our texts, that belief is as built-in as rationality; the mind struggles rather to distinguish between and reconcile the two.

Is it really the case that we (21st-century scholars) can’t identify with the perceptual account of belief? Answering that question is complicated by our own systems of belief and knowing, which adhere faithfully (at least in part) to a world characterizable by a scientific framework. Thus, when Sarah Boyle, protagonist of “Heat Death of the Universe,” begins to meditate upon the “second law of thermodynamics,” which “can be interpreted to mean that the ENTROPY of a closed system tends towards a maximum and that its available ENERGY tends towards a minimum,” the reader is free to interpret this as a factual clarification. Never mind that Boyle’s own perceptual experience provides her with little evidence that “a time must finally come when the Universe ‘unwinds’ itself, no energy being available for use,” nor that the imagery this brings to mind is far more reminiscent of the apocalyptics of medieval manuscripts than of anything that might correspond to our “reality”: “She thinks of the Heat Death of the Universe. A logarithmic of those late summer days, endless as the Irish serpent twisting through jewelled manuscripts forever, tail in mouth, the heat pressing, bloating, doing violence” (Zoline 3).

In fact, the more we discussed the role of knowledge systems reflected in “Heat Death,” the more we realized that Sarah Boyle is seeking the sense of security or certainty that a “factual” account of her life might supply, but in doing so she is really operating on religious and mythological registers as much as she is reflecting facts about the world. Drawing from her religious “texts,” namely “children's dictionaries, encyclopedias, ABCs and all reference books,” which leave her “transfixed and comforted at their simulacra of a complete listing and ordering,” Sarah writes notes to herself around the house.

[On the] lid of the diaper bin she has written in Blushing Pink Nitetime lipstick a phrase to ward off fumey ammoniac despair. "The nitrogen cycle is the vital round of organic and inorganic exchange on earth. The sweet breath of the Universe." On the wall by the washing machine are Yin and Yang signs, mandalas, and the words, "Many young wives feel trapped. It is a contemporary sociological phenomenon which may be explained in part by a gap between changing living patterns and the accommodation of social services to these patterns." (Zoline 3)

This passage’s blending of magico-religious (“to ward off … she has written” or the use of buddhist iconography) and the factual/authoritative is symptomatic of the story as a whole. By seeking to participate in the “factual” world by gleaning meaning from it or considering herself a part of it, Sarah cannot help but slip between the banal and the miraculous, the workings of her own perceptual world and the workings of a world which exceeds her and which must be taken upon faith or authority.

A glance at the world of Sarah Boyle shows how this blending of belief and fact operates within the framework of Enlightenment reason, but in By the Sea, this picture is complicated. The protagonists of the novel must negotiate a Western standard of rationality alongside a  postcolonial heritage that seems to function similarly to medieval culture as seen by Western critics: that is, Western colonizers relate colonized subjects to mysticism and an immature historic past.

Toward the end of By the Sea, Latif comes to Saleh’s apartment to hear about Saleh’s backstory. Their pasts and their family histories are deeply interconnected—most importantly, Saleh took possession of Latif’s family’s house, and now he has come to Britain using Latif’s father’s name and passport. The novel gives the two protagonists’ competing, but not mutually exclusive, accounts of what happened in their pasts. The characters seem to privilege the truth that can be imparted by rational knowledge over their culture’s traditional mode of Islamic storytelling. Latif in particular, who is an English professor in London, introduced by Rachel to Saleh as “an expert on your area” (Gurnah 65), makes the association of Zanzibari religious and folkloric traditions with a historic past that is inaccessible, or at least incomprehensible, to the rational Western subject. The following comments that Latif makes to Saleh imply that he perhaps looks at his “nativity,” his childhood, as being “native” in that other sense:

“I think I imagined you as a kind of relic, a metaphor of my nativity, and that I would come and examine you while you sat still and dissembling, fuming ineffectually like a jinn raised from infernal depths. Do you mind me talking to you like this?”
“If you have to,” I said. “Which jinn do you have in mind? Which jinn sitting still and dissembling, fuming ineffectually?”
“Do you mean which story?” he asked, smiling, frowning, trying to tease out a memory. “I can’t remember. I have an image.”
“Horned? Does the jinn in the image have a horn? One horn in the middle of a huge forehead? … ‘Qamar Zaman,’” I said, “That story has the stillest, shiftiest jinn in the whole A Thousand and One Nights. With a horn in the middle of his forehead. My favourite jinn, an utter grotesque, which is how you imagined me.”
“No, no, definitely not ‘Qamar Zaman,’” he said. “I know that story very well.”
“Well, which, then? You’re the expert.” (Gurnah 169–170)

In this game of chicken, Latif realizes that he doesn’t want the jinn he was thinking of to be a particular jinn, because that demonstrates that he has been thinking on the level of mythology. By denying the specificity of “Qamar Zaman” and saying “I know that story very well,” he calls upon his status as literary scholar, as if his knowledge of English literature means he has rationally studied and critiqued the stories of his childhood. But he has already admitted that he had an image of the jinn he’d pictured Saleh as, and Saleh’s ironic appropriation of Rachel’s term for Latif as an “expert” calls into question Latif’s distance from this folklore. He wants to think of himself as a rational subject, trying to find the truth of what happened, but he finds himself operating within the traditional belief system of storytelling and jinns.

In conclusion, we recall the moment in Justice’s article where Christina of Markyate has a vision that the abbot wore the wrong color the day before—this is so extraordinarily miraculous that her supporters realize they hadn’t actually believed in miracles before then. The abbot discovers that “what he has used as a convenient heuristic premise is actually the rudest fact: it is not as if she can see him; she just can see him. He thereby learns to believe what he believes” (Justice 17). In addition to this being a truly delightful moment, it seems clear that the medieval believers Justice describes are not merely Enlightenment doubters overcoming their rationality with the force of will. Rather, it seems that they can’t necessarily tell the difference between believing and knowing, or faith and reasoning. We think our characters (and humans in general) have this problem too.

Eating Away at the Foundation (Jess and Averyl)

Averyl and I are considering the ways in which documenting the subversive via acts that contravene the cultural standards of moral rightness set forth in our respective texts conversely gives these subversive acts power, as Greenblatt asks: “But why, we must ask ourselves, should power record other voices, permit subversive inquiries, register at its very center the transgressions that will ultimately violate it?” (50). Then, however, we want to posit that these narratives--Gallathea and What Maisie Knew in this specific instance--open up cans of subversive worms in their respective societies, worms (to continue the metaphor) that may destroy and undermine the stability of cultural systems of power (think worm-eaten supports that can no longer hold the weight of their structure), or, can be incorporated into these cultural systems in a manner that nurtures, enriches, and even strengthens such systems (think gardeners putting worms in their gardens to aerate and fertilize the soil).

In a nutshell, without the worms: Subversion happens --> it becomes a social possibility that undermines cultural norms--> we acknowledge it, usually through cultural strife --> it is then incorporated into our cultural lexicon until we don’t see the original problem, thereby once again restarting the cycle of subversion by investigating a new threat and thereby again giving it power it might not have otherwise obtained on its own. (We are happy to explain this in more depth, just ask).

Before tying this to our novels, we want to briefly point out that Greenblatt’s argument is rather Foucauldian. Greenblatt writes, “Thus the subversiveness which is genuine and radical—sufficiently disturbing so that to be suspected of such beliefs could lead to imprisonment and torture—is at the same time contained by the power it would appear to threaten” (48). Foucault similarly wrote of silence counterintuitively awarding power to the entire discourse of sexuality in The History of Sexuality, “Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.” (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 1508). I.e. because we condemned sex acts (among other things) to silence, we actually exploded the discourse by finding new ways to discuss it (which is admittedly a bit of a sweeping overview, but we wanted to throw it out there).

On to the textual cans of worms...

Gallathea is an extremely subversive text: the same women who disobey their state and the gods in escaping to the forest also undermine patriarchy, heteronormativity, and even the economic system of inheritance by desiring to marry each other. At the very moment in which it appears that Gallathea and Phillida’s actions have called into question nearly every single institution of early modern English culture, Neptune--a literal deus ex machina--agrees to transform one of the virgins into a man so that they can enter into a heterosexual union. By transforming one of the virgins into a man, Neptune also transforms all of their subversions into reaffirmations of the play’s constructed hierarchies. It is not simply coincidental that the gods reaffirm cultural hierarchies through subversive characters; incorporating subversion into systems of hierarchy is the only way to affirm such systems. The marriage promised at the end is, in Elizabethan comedy, a trope that signals the confirmation of kyriarchy and the submission to authority.  Perhaps the only truly subversive moment in the play is that the play ends before the sexual transformation and the marriage can happen.

In What Maisie Knew, James deconstructs the nuclear family by exploring a new and subversive construct: divorce. The “Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857” established marriage as a legal contract rather than a sacrament and moved divorce proceedings from the ecclesiastical (i.e. the church) to the civil courts (wikipedia source and more cool information about this). What Maisie Knew was published in 1897, at which point it could take years to get through the divorce courts and people could, via newspaper updates, follow the story like your best Kim Kardashian gossip. It is postulated that in fact James got his inspiration for this novel from one such ongoing divorce story published in the papers. In our subversion cycle we outlined, then, James takes a controversial/subversive issue (dissolving a marriage no longer “sacred”), applies it to a family so we can observe the effect it has on a child, but then wraps up the narrative in the only more-or-less culturally acceptable way: he has Maisie leave with Mrs. Wix, the only woman who can somewhat adequately perform the role of motherhood. Without her, Maisie would be left to either fend for herself, which doesn’t gel with our conception of innocence and childhood, or she would be forced to choose between her real parents and her pseudo-parents (her stepparents get together as their own couple) in an uncomfortably adult capacity that she’s not equipped to handle. Now, however, divorce is no longer subversive, so it’s almost odd to analyse it.   

So, if subversion is only something that can be seen once it is incorporated, what are we not seeing? We want you to consider this clip about framing cultural narratives relating to Ferguson:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/you-are-promoting-a-certain-narrative-ferguson-protestor-confronts-cnn-reporter/. Is this an example of a veteran reporter dealing with an angry, out-of-control protester, or is it a deconstructive moment in which American media is exposed simply as a person who speaks into the camera louder than anyone else?

We leave you with this Greenblatt quote: “The historical evidence, of course, is unreliable; even in the absence of substantial social pressure, men lie quite readily about the most intimate beliefs.”

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