Semicolon Fall 2023

What We’re About Semicolon and Symposium are the official publications of the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council at the University of Western Ontario, published bi-annually. For more information, follow us on Instagram at @ahsc_pubs or email us at ahscpubs@gmail.com.

Previous editions are available online at issuu.com/ahscpubs.

Semicolon is the academic journal for the AHSC. It accepts outstanding A-level essays written for any undergraduate courses in the Arts and Humanities.

Sharing one’s work can often be daunting. The Publications team thanks you for your submissions and your trust in us.

Vice President of Publications: Julia Piquet Associate Vice President of Publications: Abbie Faseruk Academic Managing Editor: Samantha Ellis Creative Managing Editor: Asha Saha Social Media Coordinator: Mabel Zhao Copy Editor: Katherine Barbour Copy Editor: Kiersten Fay Cover Designer: Emma Hardy Layout Designer: Chahat Ghuman

Volume 11 Issue 1 Fall 2023 An Arts and Humanites Students’ Council Production

Copyrights remain with the artists and authors. The responsibility for the content in this publication remains with the artists and authors. The content does not reflect the opinions of the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council (AHSC) or the University Students’ Council (USC).

Letter From the Vice President Hi there, Thank you for picking up one of our AHSC official publications. A wonderful team of editors and designers has come together to bring this collection to you, and I am excited that you, dear reader, get to finally hold our efforts for the fall semester of 2023 in your hands.

Our theme for this semester was “Art for Art’s Sake!” This term was first used

by Victorian writers and critics as a reminder that there always remains the possibility of thinking outside the box of our societal norms. Art should have no obligation to the world; it should not be measured in terms of its “usefulness”. Art should exist simply as art. Some questions I asked you to consider when submitting were: what is art? What does it mean to you? Is art a reflection of your personal experiences or a reflection of the world? Are those the same?

I am thankful for all this semester has brought. Amazing graphics on our social media, mind blowing pieces of art, fiction and academic essays for publication, a successful writing and arts contest, and an outstanding venue with delicious food for our launch event, and much more. Above it all, I am thankful for the Publications team - these collections could not have come to light without your continuous effort and care.

To Abbie: you have been a force to be reckoned with this semester. You have been a rock for me to lean against, and this is as much my publication as it is yours. Thank you.

To the rest of the Publications team: you have all exceeded my expectations, and I am eternally happy that I hired each and every one of you.

To you, my reader: Happy reading!

All my warmest wishes, Julia Piquet

Vice President of Publications

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Table of Contents “We Forget to Forget”: Memory, Trauma, and Love in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant By: Gray Brogden Nymphomaniacs, Mothers, and Exotic Allure: Subversive Female Figures in Police Procedural By: Faith Caswell Two-Faced Smiles: Dismantling the Model Minority Myth By: Siddharth Maheshwari The Legend of Madame Krasinska: An Unsellable Essay By: Rachael Langdon An Experiment in Contradiction: Metapoetry in Ada Limón’s “The End of Poetry” By: Heather Stanley “Haven’t we made the dungball large enough?”: Meta-Narratives and the Dung Beetle in Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? By: Claudia Kindrachuk Hall of Mirrors and Recursive Reflections By: Faith Caswell Beware the (Evil) Eye: Power, Patriarchy, and Surveillance in Lives of the Saints By: Annika Thornton Aesthetics in Publishing: Examining the First Edition of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis By: Annika Thornton

“We Forget to Forget”: Memory, Trauma, and Love in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant By: Gray Brogden

Soucouyant is a self-proclaimed “Novel of Forgetting,” but it is also a novel of “forget[ting] to forget” (32). It is the story of a woman struggling with dementia and the story of her son struggling to care for her while also reconstructing a traumatic past to which he has no direct connection. Through the symbol of the soucouyant and an analeptic and fragmented chronology, the novel explores themes of remembering and forgetting, cultural memory and trauma, and the strength of a mother and son’s love.

Soucouyant is a novel that frequently jumps back and forth in time. Scenes from the present day, when the narrator returns home after being away for two years, mix with the narrator’s childhood, the day he left, his time spent away, the mysterious Meera’s past, and his mother’s, Adele, life from her childhood to her immigration to Canada to her relationships with her husband and children. The jumbled chronology of the novel mirrors the fragmented memories of Adele as her dementia progresses. The narrator remarks early on in the novel on the irony of his mother’s condition, stating she could “string together a litany of names and places from the distant past…but she [could not] accomplish the most everyday of tasks” (47), a fitting observation for a novel whose narrative thread is constantly interrupted by stories out of time: Adele’s arrival in Canada (47-51), the brother’s high school experience (158-159), and Meera’s crisis of identity (154-166), to name a few. While the novel divulges a substantial amount of information, covering the lives of several characters across multiple countries, it refuses to conform to a standard plot. Even the tale of the novel’s namesake creature, the soucouyant, crops up in fragmented remembrances at multiple points in the story’s chronology.

The story of the soucouyant; that of a traumatic incident of Adele’s childhood, is not told in full until the last novel of the chapter: “She saw a soucouyant. It happened long ago in a faraway place, one morning when the sun was only a stain on the edge of the earth and the moon hadn’t yet gone under.

She was a young girl fleeing upon a path so old that none could remember its origins. An out-of-the-way path, her ankles painted cool by the wet grasses” (173).

This paragraph begins the narrator’s recounting of the entire soucouyant saga, interspersed by the narrator and Adele’s conversation on the day the narrator left, two years before the beginning of the novel. However, fragments of this story appear throughout the book, starting on page 22, with the first mention of the town “Carenage.” We see pieces of the story crop up often in conversations between Adele and her son: “Soucouyant…I saw one in the morning…my ankles painted cool by wet grasses” (23); “It happen one fore-day morning when the sun just a stain on the sky” (45); “But the woman had

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in fact been burned” (115). The repetition of various elements of the soucouyant story throughout the novel, at all different points in the novel’s chronology, mirrors Adele’s experience with dementia. She often tells fragments of stories to her son, memories slipping in and out of each other, combining and breaking apart, just as the flow of the novel moves in and out of past and present.

While the subtitle “A Novel of Forgetting” refers plainly to Adele’s experiences with dementia, Chariandy complicates the issue of forgetting by suggesting that it might sometimes be the best course of action: “it’s foolish to assume that forgetting is altogether a bad thing” (32). In the interview “Spirits of Elsewhere Past: A Dialogue on Soucouyant,” Chariandy states, “forgetting is perhaps how we first survive a traumatic event” (813), suggesting that forgetting can be a powerful tool for survivors of violence and trauma. Forgetting can allow survivors to distance themselves from the traumatic event that happened to them. In the novel, forgetting as a form of protection manifests itself in the form of the soucouyant, as Delisle points out: “[t]he trauma of the fire has become distorted in Adele’s mind, resurfacing in the story of the soucouyant” (4). However, as the novel states, “The problem happens when we become too good at forgetting. When we forget to forget, we blunder into circumstances that we should have avoided” (Chariandy 32). As Adele’s condition worsens, she begins to “forget to forget” and unknowingly shares the stories of her past that she had been intent on hiding from her son. Because Adele struggles with memory, she inadvertently tells her son about her past throughout the narrator’s life: “She told me over and over again of her encounter with the creature…other things too, especially later, when she couldn’t help herself…She told, but she never explained or deciphered. She never put the stories together. She never could or wanted to do so” (136). Adele never wanted to pass on her trauma to her sons, but through her condition, she inadvertently did in bits and pieces, in stories that came out without intention or discussion.

Adele’s stories are fragmented and incomplete, and tales she never meant for her son to hear.

However, as Chariandy states in “Spirits,” “because Adele is now forgetting her past in Trinidad, the burden of memory is thrust upon her Canadian-born and raised son” (813). The past Adele tells is a puzzle the narrator has to piece together since, as a second-generation immigrant, “he doesn’t have anything at all like absolute or infallible access to the past” (“Spirits” 813). As the narrator collects the various stories from his mother, the narrator has to find external ways of making them make sense. He receives help from his librarian, Miss Cameron, who supplies him with history books. However, even these books remind him of his disconnection from his heritage: “My history is a travel guidebook. My history is a creature nobody believes in. My history is a foreign word” (Chariandy 137). Because of his mother’s condition and her unwillingness to share her past, the narrator struggles with his connection to

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his history. However, through his mother’s accidental storytelling, he is forced to come face to face with a very traumatic past.

Much of the novel encompasses the narrator’s struggle to comprehend his mother’s fragmented past and how that past connects to him. He is “dealing with the return of the past—not as straightforward communication, but as obscure references, lingering and almost inexplicable moods or feelings, even ‘foreign’ references and words themselves” (“Spirits” 813), all of which causes a substantial amount of strain. There is evidence throughout the novel that points towards the confrontation of this problematic past being the primary motivator for the narrator to have left his mother two years before the start of the story: “It’s not like I wanted to hurt her. I didn’t plan any of this. I had to get away” (85). The narrator was unable to find a way to reconcile all the broken pieces of his mother’s past to the point where he could no longer stand to be around in it, something he ends up expressing to Meera in a fit of frustration: “Because when you live with anyone that long, they tell you all sorts of things without ever meaning to do so” (82). In a way, the narrator running away is also an attempt at “forgetting,” albeit unsuccessful, as he eventually has to return and face both his mother and the memories she has unknowingly and unwillingly given him.

His return home might be the strongest indicator of the power of family bonds in the novel, as the narrator states: “I wanted to see her again. I wanted to see the life in her face. I longed for her as any son would for his mother, even so, frightening a mother as she had become” (33). Despite his mother’s condition, despite all the stories of a past trauma he is still struggling to understand, the narrator cannot stay away. He is drawn to his mother, just as he is drawn to her troubling and complicated past, because she is his mother, and her past is his past. As the narrator spends the last few months of his mother’s life with her and Meera, he “negotiates inherited and unwilled diasporic memories, recuperating them into personal narratives that serve to witness his mother’s trauma and reinforce the bonds of familial belonging” (Delisle 2). His final act in the book of telling and retelling the full story of the soucouyant and his confrontation with his mother finally restores Adele’s fragmented memories into one cohesive narrative. His last words to his mother two years ago, “I didn’t want to tell a story like this. I just wanted you to realize that I knew. That I was always close enough to know. That I was your son, and I could hear and understand and take away” (195), illustrates not only how much the narrator always knew and understood, but also his willingness to bear witness to the traumatic events of his mother’s past and carry that forward as part of his own personal and cultural identity.

Throughout Soucouyant, Chariandy expertly weaves a story of memory, trauma, and love embodied by the relationship between mother and son. The title creature symbolizes past trauma and a

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bridge that brings together mother and son, past and present, and forgetting and remembering. As the reader uncovers Adele’s past in bits and pieces, their journey through the novel mirrors the same path her son forcibly takes: one that was slow, painful, and disjointed but ultimately brought him closer to understanding who he is and where he came from.

Works Cited Chariandy, David. Soucouyant. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007.

---.“Spirits of Elsewhere Past: A Dialogue on Soucouyant.” Interview with Kit Dobson.

Callaloo, vol. 30, no. 3, 2007, pp. 808–17. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30139278.

Accessed 9 Feb. 2023.

Delisle, Jennifer Bowering. “‘A Bruise Still Tender’: David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Cultural Memory.” Ariel, vol. 41, no. 2, 2010, p. 1–21.

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Nymphomaniacs, Mothers, and Exotic Allure: Subversive Female Figures in Police Procedural By: Faith Caswell

The figure of the nymphomaniac in police procedural fiction threatens both masculinity and patriarchal order, reflecting anxieties about changing gender dynamics in the wake of the Second World War. Sex has a primarily structural function in post-WWII crime fiction, being intrinsically linked to the plot as it often prompts the crimes. Aside from its inherent link to violence, sex also plays a significant role in the depiction of female characters. Whether a woman’s description is explicitly in sexual terms or her observations of her body are merely sexual, sexual potential defines female characters—or, instead, she is what the male protagonist imagines her potential to be. In McBain’s Cop Hater (1958)1 and Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s The Laughing Policeman (1970)2, three forms of perverse female sexuality emerge: the dangerous and alluring nymphomaniac, the corrupt maternal, and the exotic or foreign beauty. These frameworks align with ripples of anxiety related to gender tensions in the decades following the War, predominantly resulting from women crossing boundaries of previously accepted gender constructions. Through these subversive frameworks, it becomes clear that sex—when enacted through female agency and desire—disturbs masculinity and, by extension, patriarchal order.

There is a wide range of representations of sex and female sexuality in police procedural fiction.

Sex directed towards an individual man enhances his masculinity; however, when a woman’s sexuality is uncontained, it becomes a threat to masculine power. In Cop Hater, Carella’s love interest, Teddy, exemplifies a singularly devoted woman who inflates Carella’s masculinity. Teddy is the epitome of purity, and being both deaf and mute, she can literally “hear no evil, speak no evil”: ‘her face was her speaking tool, and she spoke in exaggerated syllables, even to Carella, who understood the slightest nuance of expression in her eyes or on her mouth’ (47). The potential for sexual deviance is removed because Carella’s representation is of the only one who can truly understand her. In this way, Carella possesses Teddy; symbolic ownership of women is a powerful, core element of masculinity in these texts. Teddy’s devotion to Carella is explicit throughout the novel: ‘She sat facing the door, knowing it would be hours yet, but waiting for the knob to turn, waiting for the knob to tell her he was there’ (123). He completely occupies her thoughts as the only man she desires. Thus, their sex is framed as a tool of intimacy rather than a catalyst for violence or something performative or theatrical, like Alice _________________________

All quotations from Cop Hater are taken from Cop Hater (London: Orion, 2003).

All quotations from The Laughing Policeman are taken from The Laughing Policeman (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2009), trans. Alan Blair.

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later stripping for Hank (89-94). Similarly, in The Laughing Policeman, the sexual relationship between Strenström and his girlfriend, Åsa Torrell, enhances their relationship rather than catalyzing violence or murder. Åsa’s involvement in the investigation demonstrates an equal partnership between the couple. In contrast to this wholesome representation of sex, the nymphomaniac characters of Alice and Teresa disturb masculinity and political order as their sex and promiscuity prompt the crimes, playing a structural and threatening role in the novel.

In Cop Hater, Alice is an alluring woman whose excessive sensuality categorizes her as a nymphomaniac. Alice is “a personality dictated by the demands of a body that could look nothing but blatantly inviting… He had the feeling that she would suddenly explode into a thousand flying fragments of breast and hip and thigh, splashed over the landscape like a Dali painting” (149-50). Her entire personhood is not only intrinsically tied to her sex, but her body makes demands of her behaviour, indicating her uncontrollable and uncontainable sexuality. She is both an explosion about to cause severe damage and an abstract work of art. Through this metaphor, she is simultaneously threatening and captivating, carefully balanced against her sexual prowess. Mercer attests to Alice’s power over him, saying that he could not eat or sleep for thinking about her (181). Mercer believes he would not have murdered if Alice’s affection had not been the end goal, and thus, he cannot be held solely accountable for the crimes. Readers feel a level of sympathy—or, at the very least, pity—for Mercer since he is a victim of so-called sexual manipulation. Ultimately, it becomes clear that Mercer, as the perpetrator, is only secondary in blame to Alice as the calculating femme is fatal. They are both sentenced to death despite Alice never lifting a finger.

Alice’s sexual exorbitance seeps into male spaces, taking over the masculine with a dominating female presence. As Carella enters Alice and Hank’s apartment, he observes that ‘This room had been designed for Mrs Bush, designed for femininity, and the Male Animal be damned’ (146). In comparing the feminine to the ‘Male Animal,’ Carella explicitly rejects the feminine in favour of a primal, physical “maleness.” Carella indicates that enhancing the feminine necessitates a degradation of the masculine, and he feels suffocated by the room’s overwhelming femininity: ‘The femaleness reached out to envelop him in a cloying, clinging embrace’ (147). ‘Cloying’ suggests that feminine excessiveness is so sweet that it is sickening, while the ‘clinging embrace’ indicates a manipulative enticement which aims to strip the masculine of its power. Carella’s anxiety upon entering this room implies a broader cultural anxiety about the feminization of male workspaces. A predominant narrative of post-war discourse was the belief that women should return to the traditional domestic sphere. This attitude was challenged by the many women who were unhappy with the request to return to pre-war roles of maintaining the

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home and family. 3 More women were involved in the American workforce and politics than ever before.

This number would continue to increase through the years. 4 As a genre that speaks to current fears and anxieties in the society it reflects, crime fiction reveals that reworking sex roles in the decades following WWII was a complex and tense process.

In The Laughing Policeman, Teresa is ‘a nymphomaniac, ready for anything’ (163) and her sexual condition is impliable as the cause of her own murder. Teresa’s sexuality is framed similarly to many female characters in crime fiction; she is responsible for crimes committed by men, even those enacted against herself. 5 Teresa was forced into having sex with an acquaintance, but rather than being framed as an act of rape or manipulation, Teresa is said to orgasm twenty times and then ‘started running about like a bitch in heat’ (163). She experiences an explicit moment of becoming a sexually subversive figure rather than the alternative of being born that way. Her friend says that before becoming sexualized, ‘Teresa was the most moral person imaginable,’ being raised in a strictly Catholic, highmiddle-class household (163). This moment of sexual boundary-crossing makes Teresa’s nymphomania even more threatening, as it seems to suggest that women, regardless of their upstanding morals or class position, might also descend into a similar perverse lifestyle after experiencing excessive sexual gratification. Her sexual response is so hyperbolic that it is clear Sjöwall and Wahlöö are intentionally establishing a level of irony, perhaps to draw attention to the police system’s failure to acknowledge that Teresa was the initial victim of assault.

Teresa is a figure of boundary-crossing, as she ‘tumbled right down the social ladder’ into prostitution and poverty (163). This dramatic fall from a comfortable socio-economic standing radically upends the class system in Sweden while also challenging its moral expectations. 6 Since Teresa’s body is uncontrollable by the Swedish class system, her murder does not ‘embody any conventional class politics. It does, however, annihilate a threat to the very totality of the system itself—a female body that is undisciplined and undetermined by any particular class’. 7 Teresa disturbs masculinity by annihilating male power by making ‘them fall prey to her’ (164). She further disturbs their masculinity, as ‘she never left them alone and was impossible to satisfy’ (164). Not only does she invade their masculine space and challenge their independence, but their inability to satisfy her sexual needs implies a level of ineptitude in each man with whom she sleeps. As her body symbolically unsettles not only the political _________________________

Alexandra Rutherford, “‘Making Better Use of U.S. Women’ Psychology, Sex Roles, and Womanpower in PostWWII America,” Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 53: 3 (2017): 228-45. 230.

4 Rutherford, “Making Better Use of U.S. Women,” 229.

5 Dawn Keetley, ‘Unruly Bodies: The Politics of Sex in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck Series,’ Clues: A Journal of Detection, 30: 1 (2012): 54-64. 60.

6 Keetley, ‘Unruly Bodies,” 62.

7 Ibid.

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order of the nation but also the masculinity of each man she sleeps with, her murder is the only way to remove this threat. Even within the police system, she is not a victim. Larsson’s speech about the ‘swine’ who do anything to preserve their families and reputation refers to the Forsberg who performed the massacre on the bus rather than the Forsberg who murdered Teresa (215).8 Teresa is even implied to have manipulated and abused the younger Forsberg;9 her death is therefore not only framed punishment for her lifestyle but to an extent, as retributive justice.

The figure of the corrupted maternal is presented in these fictions, offering another framework of perverse female sexuality. This figure disturbs masculinity because the gap between the dichotomic figures of the “mother” and “whore” closes through sexuality that is too liberated or excessive.

Masculine power is unable to retain its control over these feminine sexual binaries, and once these boundaries become permeable, the masculine capacity for control over women’s sexuality is weakened.

The women who run the brothels in Cop Hater add the prefix ‘Mama’ before their names, indicating the presence of some form of maternal relationship (73). While the maternal is non-existent in the sense of birth-giving, it exists insofar as these women are mothers to the brothel. Sex work contradicts the wholesome characteristics associated with motherhood, so the alliance of maternity with this occupation forms a perverted motherhood. However, there is a desire to associate Mama Luz with a wholesome feminine ideal: ‘She was scrupulously clean and smelled of lilacs. Her complexion was white as any complexion can be, more white because it rarely saw the sun. Her features were patrician, her smile was angelic’ (76). The emphasis on features that indicate comfort and calm is revoked as immediately as it is given; despite looking like someone’s mother, she is not due to her engagement with prostitution. This giving and taking away is reflective of an anxious conflation and separation of the maternal with sex.

Alice is another pervasive figure of the anti-maternal. According to Carella, her ‘hip bones were wide, flesh-padded, a woman whose body had been designed for the bearing of children—but somehow [did not] seem the type. He could not visualize her squeezing life from her loins. He could only visualize her as Hank had described her—in the role of a seductress’ (146). It is evident that masculine anxieties towards female power and agency prevent the roles of seductress and maternal from being entirely compatible. Alice being childless, but her body has supposedly been ‘designed for the bearing of children’ suggests that she has failed the “purpose” of her body, subverting nature by becoming a seductress rather than a mother. Questions of the working mother emerged in the postwar era, particularly in America, as people were concerned with its impact on child development. In _________________________

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Ibid.

Ibid.

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1958, an article in the Ladies Home Journal entitled “Should mothers of young children work?” where psychiatrist John Bowlby connects child delinquency with maternal absence, arguing that mothers should not be employed because it caused ‘child maladjustment.’10 These fears of changing motherly dynamics relate to the figure of the corrupted maternal in police procedural fiction as the sexualized mother is written in parallel to other changing patterns of motherhood, like the movement away from domesticity. The sexualized mother is not the same as the working mother, but similar anxieties arise in response to each of these behaviours.

In the 1950s and 60s, there was an influx of Czech, Hungarian, Polish Jew, and Portuguese immigrants to Sweden in an attempt to flee the authoritarianism of their homeland.11 In this post-war era, challenges emerged with the integration of immigrants as Swedish identity was increasingly focused on speaking the Swedish language and adopting national values.12 Teresa is a Portuguese immigrant.

Her sexuality and ethnicity become directly linked when Larsson calls her a ‘Portuguese whore’ while speaking to Rönn about the murders (215). The nymphomaniac figures of three of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s early novels are also not Swedish: Teresa is Portuguese, Ari is Hungarian (The Man Who Went Up in Smoke), and Roseanna is American (Roseanna).13 Their foreigner status is aligned with their formlessness as characters. In her analysis of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s fictional bodies, Dawn Keetly notes that these nymphomaniac foreign women are associated with liquids, further enhancing their sexual fluidity and symbolic disorder.14 Forsberg disposes of Teresa’s body in the rain to wash away evidence; Ari is a swimmer and moves Beck’s hand to feel the wetness between her legs; and Roseanna’s body is found drifting in the water.15 Formlessness is threatening because it is uncontainable, and Teresa’s formlessness is two-fold: she is both a foreigner and a nymphomaniac.

In Cop Hater, Alice also embodies an exotic threat to masculinity, as her description features her as a foreign beauty despite being American. Her body reminds Hank ‘of the pictures he had seen in National Geographic at the dentist’s office, the time he’d had that periodontal work done. The girls on Bali. Nobody had breasts like the girls on Bali. Except maybe Alice’ (90-91). Alice seems, to him, an exotic woman who does not adhere to American beauty standards. She symbolically participates in boundary-crossing by aligning her character with a foreign figure. For Hank, this creates a more intense sexual enticement, while for Carella, this exoticism threatens his masculinity and self-control. _________________________ 10 Rutherford, “Making Better Use of U.S. Women,” 239.

11 Ann Towns, “Paradoxes of (In)Equality: Something is Rotten in the Gender Equal State of Sweden,” Cooperation and Conflict, 37: 2 (2002): 157-179. 166.

12 Towns, “Paradoxes of (In)Equality,” 161.

13 Ibid., 162.

14 Keetley, “Unruly Bodies,” 62.

15 Ibid.

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While in her apartment, Carella ‘felt like the last male alive, surrounded by bare-breasted beauties on a tropical island surrounded by man-eating sharks. There was no place to run to’ (146). Alice’s character is untameable because her body is distinctly “un-American.” She is removed from American standards and moral expectations and is thus more unpredictable and unknowable. Her untameableness enhances her allure, danger, and seductive appeal.

The Laughing Policeman grapples with the tension between labelling women “nymphomaniacs” while also asserting that women have a right to sexual pleasure. Cop Hater is not written with the same approach, as Alice—the nymphomaniac femme fatale—is almost entirely to blame for the murders.

The nymphomaniac, the corrupt maternal, and the alluring foreign beauty are three forms of perverse female sexuality demonstrated in these police procedural narratives. In the decades following WWII, gender dynamics and attitudes towards women’s right to sexual liberation were slowly being radicalized and changed. Social reconstruction was not immediate, but the destabilizing process remains palpable in texts emerging from the period. Through these subversive frameworks of feminine sexuality, it becomes clear that when sex has been instigated or participated in excessively by women, it can disturb masculinity and, more widely, patriarchal order.

Bibliography Keetley, Dawn. “Unruly Bodies: The Politics of Sex in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck Series.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 30, no. 1 (2012): 54-64.

McBain, Ed. Cop Hater. London: Orion, 2003.

Rutherford, Alexandra. “‘Making Better Use of U.S. Women’ Psychology, Sex roles, and Womanpower in Post-WWII America.” Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 53, no. 3 (2017): 228–45.

Sjöwall, Maj and Per Wahlöö. The Laughing Policeman. Translated by Alan Blair. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2009.

Towns, Ann. “Paradoxes of (In)Equality: Something is Rotten in the Gender Equal State of Sweden”. Cooperation and Conflict, vol. 37: 2 (2002): 157-179.

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Two-Faced Smiles: Dismantling the Model Minority Myth By: Siddharth Maheshwari

For this essay, I am engaging the model minority myth in its discourses and applications, specifically across North America and, broadly, the Global North. This ‘theory’ is applied to Asian Americans as a stereotype, classifying them as hard-working, no-nonsense, technologically gifted, mathematically superior and willing to forego labour rights and personal time for the sake of service and productivity. The model minority myth directly correlates with other stereotypes like the Asian ‘tiger mom’ and either a scientific or computer boy nerd. These stereotypes are not only harmful to Asians by ignoring the diversity of Asia but also to other racialized groups by comparing them with the ‘model minority’ in a divisive, decontextualized manner.

Thesis statement: Positive classifications assigned to Asian communities under the model minority myth are surface-level perceptions with underlying, harmful stereotypes that inform positive ones. These stereotypes result in derogatory rhetoric and action against racialized communities while also pitting them against one another.

I will begin the essay with a brief description of the model minority stereotype and perceptions in public discourse. This will be followed by a history of immigration into the US, focusing on Asian imigrants. Concurrently, I will address the shifting narratives regarding Asian Americans as they are shaped by immigration policy and social, political and economic dynamics. Immigration policy will be one of the ubiquitous themes throughout this paper for its role in constructing and influencing the identity and geographical base of migration, consequently affecting the ethnic make-up of the US and problematizing various issues and race relations. For the argumentative portion of the paper, I will rely on the sources I have referenced to dispel common misconceptions that work in myriad ways to deny rights and considerations not only to Asian Americans but also to other historically oppressed racial groups in the US. I will also focus on specific immigrant groups like Indian Americans, Sikhs and Chinese Americans to provide examples for my arguments. Within my arguments, I will look at positive stereotypes, negative stereotypes, racial wedge components, representation and more as they exist within the model minority discourse. Lastly, I will posit some suggestions for how these issues and tensions may be remedied or, at least, be addressed and put on a path to resolution, reparation, and reconciliation. While model minority is a distinction extended to Asian Americans (where Americans refers to North America), this is in and of itself, is a barrier in defining it. This categorization is applied to a specific territorial group (immigrants of Asian heritage), but that in turn homogenizes a diverse

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populace. Pertinent characteristics understood in dominant perception are not adopted for all immigrant populations from Asia. This begs the question as to what constitutes the model minority trope. From the history of the term and the discourses surrounding it, there isn’t a concrete answer. However, when we look at changing perceptions of Asian immigrants and the way that they’ve been treated, the operationalization of model minority and other terms classifying them reveals much. Stressing the complexity in history and fluidity in terminology and attitude allows us to understand how changes come about. It enables a holistic picture, something that model minority tropes do not afford to Asian migrants.

While I attempt to do this, the focus of this essay is on dismantling the notion that the model minority myth largely consists of positive tropes. The initial premise of some of these generalizations may sound appreciative but they are based on harmful assumptions and are used to deprecate the rights and demands of non-immigrant populations like Indigenous Peoples and African Americans (descendants of enslaved people). This is also where perception, convenience and differing value systems enter the frame. In the rest of the essay, I’ll touch on these themes as they are interspersed throughout various discourses under the larger topic.

The overarching stereotype largely encompasses work ethic and discipline, categorizing Asians and Asian immigrants as extraordinarily hardworking. There is nothing wrong with being hardworking, but the undertones and coding around said classifications are heavy. They point to valuing an influx of workers whose labour rights can be undermined, who will forgo their time and whose desperation to fit in can be used against other populations who are more vocal for their rights and being treated better.

Following chronology and the history of the classification of the model minority, the popular perception of migrating Asians has not been uniform. The terminology of the model minority is relatively recent; it is also preceded and succeeded by more overt and offensive stereotypes. Anti-immigration legislation in North America has a long and convoluted history, starting in the late 19th century. The first antiAsian immigration act, the Page Act of 1875, debarred felons, contract labourers, and women “imported for the purposes of prostitution” from China, Japan, or “any Oriental country” (Teng). Far from the model minority, East Asian immigrants were reduced to equal the status of criminal, valued only for cheap labour and sex work. California was the first state to implement anti-Asian legislation; this was soon followed by the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Legislation in the late 19th century laid the foundation for racist anti-immigration policy and characterizing Asians as criminal and sexually immoral. In a similar period, Canada also passed the Chinese Head Tax, which levied a $50 fee on immigrants from China and other Asian ethnicities. At the time, this was a significant amount, and on top of that, only men were allowed and could not bring their wives, children or any family with them. North

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American governments have consistently controlled immigration through policy since the 19th century and, consequently, dominant narratives on immigrants’ character and ‘morality.’ The categorization of ‘coolie’ also emerged in this period, with the Californian act of 1862 titled the ‘Anti-Coolie Act.’ The term ‘coolie’ encompassed the early, openly derogatory stereotypes about mostly East Asian peoples.

US legislators and the overall population maintained these assumptions without any evidence. For a relatively new nation-state complicit in colonization, apartheid, slavery and genocide, I equate the demonization of immigrants to insecurity stemming from those actions. It is comparable to more recent panic around the great replacement theory, statistically and factually false, driven by paranoid fears that what they did might be done to them by immigrants or those whom they have victimized.

Racist and anti-immigration legislation continued for a whole century, from the first Californian act to the 1965 Immigration Act, when the Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) holder population almost quadrupled. So when and how did the model minority classification come about? The literature does not quite answer that question in definite terms. From the coining of other categories, though, like Asian Americans in 1968 coinciding with the beginning of favourable immigration policies, it is safe to say that the term was operationalized around this time. The sudden flip from a century of institutionalized racism and the subsequent shifting of the dominant narrative from coolie to model minority is indicative of a self-serving attitude. It functioned as a U-turn to pacify a population that had just received more access, rights and privileges. A pivot of convenience, borne out of the fear that has plagued North America since its inception- that those whom they oppressed would fight back and attempt to do what was done to them. This action is reflected at a legal level, as the 1965 Immigration Act enacted employment-based preference and family reunification. In other words, federal policy has helped to recast the racial trope of Asian Americans from coolie to model minority (Junn).

Evidence that model minority stereotypes were readily embraced in this period from the murder of Vincent Chin by two white men in Michigan in 1982. In the documentary on the same incident that we watched for this class, responses from the perpetrators and their families, white people in general and the government steeped in modern minority stereotypes. The perpetrators, who pled guilty to manslaughter, were merely fined $3000 and were not sentenced to any jail time. While the perpetrators claimed that Vincent Chen attacked them first, this claim contradicted all physical evidence and eyewitness testimonies. Additionally, Vincent himself was essentially beaten several times to the point of near death. Despite such violence in an atmosphere of public displays against Japanese automobiles for how the local industry was being affected by the economic protectionist policies of the Japanese, the perpetrators denied any feelings of animosity. Also in play here are monolithic assumptions about

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Asian identity, considering that Vincent Chin was Chinese. One of the perpetrators pointed to his daughter’s tutoring of an Asian kid as evidence of his favourable attitude toward Asian immigrants.

Interviews of the family of the perpetrators and other white people in the community remarked on the life of the perpetrators being over despite minimal consequences and muted social backlash. I infer strong undertones of the model minority assumption that Asians’ rights in North America are secure, and because of their character, they are not mistreated. This incident was treated without recognition or gravity by the government, white society, and the judiciary. It was dismissed as an isolated incident despite unprecedented protests by racialized communities. From the murder of Vincent Chin and the following discourses, it is arguable that model minority stereotypes have historically contributed to tangible harm, and their use is to convenience white society in North America.

Following the chronology, I will now address modern categorizations of Asian people.

This categorization, of course, includes the model minority but also the ‘yellow peril’ and labels of ‘terrorist’ thrown at Muslim and brown Asian folks. In the 21st century, model minority stereotypes are commonplace. They are not simply stereotypes of that order but inform a more prominent myth: that Asians are the model minority. Of course, this does not refer to all Asians but a select category that usually references Chinese and East Asian populations (Korean, Japanese, and more). More recent literature also makes a case for considering Indian Americans under model minority status. However, again, this encapsulates a limited number of Indians, usually the North-West Indian mainland and not South, North-East or Indians from the extreme North. Asia is the world’s largest and most populous continent, containing more than half of humanity.

Nevertheless, these monolithic generalizations of Asian identities dominate popular perception in the Global North. Asian is treated interchangeably with East Asians, while the largest singular population microcosmically identifies other regions like South Asia. While these misconceptions do not directly correlate with model minority stereotypes, they are part of a larger culture of ignorance that informs more harmful and commonly held assumptions. The literature on model minority stereotypes is extensive, and it impresses upon us that they are commonplace, pervasive, and institutionalized. So, when something like COVID-19 manifests globally, a drastic rise in anti-Asian violence and hostility can be swept under the rug. In an April survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 32% of Asian American adults — a more significant percentage than any other racial or ethnic group — said that they feared someone might threaten or physically attack them (Jin). In response, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act in May 2021; it was meant to expedite hate crimes related to COVID-19 and direct resources toward making the reporting of hate crimes more

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accessible. Despite increased news coverage of various attacks against Asian Americans and the upcoming legislation, the LAAUNCH survey, conducted between March 29 to April 14, found that 37% of white Americans were not aware of increased incidents of hate crimes (Jin). As such, even with protective legislation against recorded surges in discriminatory rhetoric and violence, ignorance remains ubiquitous and provokes the continuation of this cycle.

Along with the history of racist legislation and dominant perception, in past periods of national tension, especially during times when the U.S. has been at war with Asian countries, anti-Asian racism has similarly risen (Jin). While this is well-documented against East and South-East Asian communities, more recent examples also depict this phenomenon against South and West Asian groups. In the past few years, hate crimes against Sikh and South Asian ethnic roups have also intensified. This statistic is in addition to the drastic post-9/11 hike in Islamophobic violence and vitriol. Islamophobic attitudes are embedded in the Global North and manifest towards anyone who is perceived to be Muslim; this essentially means anyone brown or Arab-looking. I have personally been on the receiving end of Islamophobic comments despite not identifying as Muslim and having a very Hindu name. The timing of this violence is especially eye-catching as Indian Americans are making a solid case for occupying the status of ‘the model minority’ alongside East Asians. Indians share many of the stereotypes that are generally assumed with Asians, such as exceptional technological and mathematical prowess, extraordinary discipline, lack of personal boundaries and a commitment to work that border on devotion.

The rising preponderance of tech CEOs, politicians, and financial leaders of Indian heritage in the Global North, like Rishi Sunak and Sunder Pichai, is being treated as a testament o the success of model minority theory.

Moreover, this is a complicated situation because of the broad acceptance of model minority narratives by non-diaspora Indians. Internalizing such idealized representations provides a sense of ethnic and self-pride that, as a group, ‘we made it’ and ‘have been accepted’ within the mainstream culture (Mahalingam). Specifically for Sikhs, the Milwaukee Gurdwara shooting was a myth-buster in terms of assumptions of security. Misidentification with Muslim men has devastating implications for Sikh men, a recurring phenomenon also witnessed with the murder of Vincent Chin, who was Chinese and misidentified as Japanese. The treatment of these groups exposes the duality of model minority stereotypes like elevated social status, minimal experience of racism and discrimination and security of rights. The problem is not just misidentification; it is the dichotomous treatment of minority groups based on convenience. Besides, misidentification does not eradicate stereotypes or speak to their absence. Lastly, classifying Indian Americans as a model minority ignores the range of intersectional

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experiences of this diaspora.

In this concluding paragraph, I aim to summarize my arguments with some thematic reflections on the body of this paper and offer an approach to deconstructing model minority stereotypes. One of the most archetypal themes in these discourses is inconsistency and shifting narratives, particularly when examined chronologically. Tracing the history of immigration to North America from the 19th century shows us how dominant narratives of Asians changed from coolie to model minority to ‘yellow peril’ after covid-19. The insult of ‘yellow peril’ is not new but has returned violently. Historically, Asians are equated with exotic diseases and filth; this was witnessed in 19th-century migration and highlighted previously in this paper. Xenophobia has never been absent from North America, just dormant till Asians are in the spotlight. Americans, Canadians and people from many other countries responded to the coronavirus pandemic by resurrecting the aspersion of yellow peril with rhetoric, policy, protests and violence. The coronavirus was referred to as the ‘China virus,’ public demonstrations like the Canadian trucker convoy spewing xenophobic rhetoric were commonplace, and Asian people were being harassed and physically attacked while out and about just minding their business. Almost overnight, the dominant narrative of Asian Americans (East and Southeast Asians) flipped from model minority to yellow peril.

Shifting narratives are characteristic of North Americans’ attitudes towards immigrants, and historically, white Americans have jumped on any excuse to shift from microaggressions to harassment and violence.

Since COVID-19, there have been over 1,150 incidents of anti-Asian racism across Canada (Liu). This statistic is in addition to numerous incidents in the US as well. East Asians living in North America have faced the brunt of worsening geopolitical tensions with Asian countries, COVID uncertainty, travel restrictions and more. Such dramatic changes in popular perception underscore the reality of model minority discourses as a strategically wielded tool. It disparages immigrants to distract from real issues, creates scapegoats to avoid accountability and incites unhealthy competition between racialized minorities. Its proclaimed upliftment is performative and embraced conditionally- when it is convenient and beneficial to white society. Anti-Asian racism inextricably entangles North American societies and institutions, and as such, the first step to removing it is to acknowledge its history and present.

As my paper argues, the evidence is all around us but disregarded. Acknowledgement, understanding and education are all crucial to deconstructing its propagation, and these must be enacted holistically, systemically, systematically, and intersectionally. While the complex, wicked problem of racism requires more complexity to address, the model minority myth can be put to bed with the simple truth that it is quite false.

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Bibliography Jin, Connie Hanzhang. 6 Charts That Dismantle The Trope Of Asian Americans As A Model Minority .

25 May 2021. Web Page. 29 March 2023.

Junn, Jane. “From Coolie to Model Minority: U.S. Immigration Policy and the Constitution of Racial Identity .” DuBois Review (2007): 355-373. Document.

Liu, Helen. “From Model Minority to Yellow Peril: The Shifting Narratives of Asian International Students.” Journal of International Students (2023): 79-84. E-Document.

Mahalingam, Ramaswamy. “Misidentification, Misembodiment and the Paradox of Being a Model Minority.” Sikh Formations (2012): 299-304. Document.

Teng, Emma J. “”And This Is What He Did”.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature (2022): 215-223. Web Page.

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The Legend of Madame Krasinska: An Unsellable Essay By: Rachael Langdon

In the 19th century, judging books by their covers was a habit encouraged by the Aesthetes, and some would say the cover is far more important than the words held within it. When in an archive surrounded by beautiful books, the ones that stand out tend to have little to offer. An edition of The Legend of Madame Krasinska by Vernon Lee, published by Thomas B. Mosher, is an example of such a book. This book has no gold embossing, bright leather cover, or thick spine; nothing to attract attention to it, which is why the elements of this book become so fascinating. Why would Thomas B. Mosher, a publisher in Portland, USA, choose to publish a little-known essay by Vernon Lee? The aesthetes have an answer: there is no reason. Thomas B. Mosher is the perfect example of ‘art for art’s sake’ and the aesthetic idea that art does not need to serve a purpose. From the simple design elements of the book to the intriguing choice of a Caduceus stamp on the back, a reader can understand why Mosher published this book and appreciate both the look and content of this bound essay in a heightened way.

At first glance, this book is unremarkable. It was the smallest of the books and was made entirely of paper. On a shelf full of books made with the sole purpose of being beautiful, this one seemed so simple in comparison. The book comes in two parts: the book and the box holding it. The box has a floral pattern, with the title written on the side. This portion possesses the most colour, the florals made of pink, green, and brown. Though there is no ribbon on this specific book, an identical binding of a different Lee essay (also published by Mosher) contains a ribbon to close the box. Hence, this copy had that feature in the past. The book is rather plain, with a simple beige cover with the title and author embossed in the corner. The only attribute that stands out is the first letter in the title, a ‘T,’ embossed in red ink instead of the regular black, and extraordinarily ornamental when next to the basic print of the rest of the title. The red ink returns on the title page, highlighting both the title and the publication date, although the author and publisher’s names are printed in black. Inside, the actual essay is displayed plainly. Consistent imagery can be found in sparse decoration throughout the book: a book on the title page, a mirror surrounded by plants before the foreword, a woman’s face within plants before the introduction, and the same plants at the end of both the foreword and essay. The text itself is evenly spaced within heavy margins, extending what would be a relatively short essay to more than 70 small pages. The perceived length of the essay is further extended by the copious blank pages before and after the text. With around eight pages left blank on either side and the natural thickness of handmade paper, it feels as though reading this essay would take much longer than the hour it would truly take. Every

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element of this binding was a conscious choice by the publisher, which is why one element stands out from the rest: a Caduceus is stamped uncentered and unevenly on the back of the book. This symbol alone tells a lot about the publisher’s intentions in publishing this essay and explains his other choices in designing this book for publication.

The Caduceus is a symbol from Greek mythology whose use represents commerce, trade, and negotiation, all directly opposing aesthetic ideals. Aesthetes did not care for the marketplace to sell goods; instead, they cared about the creation of the art before it ever hit the shelf. Its presence in this book is odd, both because of its strange placement and because it is against the idea of the book itself.

Within commerce, the purpose of a book is to be sold, to make money, and to further the development of society. However, Mosher did not publish this essay for that purpose. Instead, he chose a little-known essay by Vernon Lee—who has much more popular works—and made it to be looked at, not read. There is no mass market for a book like this. Therefore, the book’s publication does not focus on making money. Thomas B. Mosher created this binding of The Legend of Madame Krasinska because he wished to, due to an enjoyment of the essay itself and his adherence to aesthetic principles. So, the purpose of the Caduceus on the back must be ironic. Mosher stamps the symbol of capitalism on his existing book to go against it. Every decision made by Mosher surrounding the design of this book is fueled by his desire to combat the idea that a book should be made to be sold. He creates a tiny binding of a singular essay, puts it in a box, and dares anyone to buy it.

Looking at this book with this new understanding gives the reader a much greater appreciation of the work of Thomas B. Mosher. He has published a nearly unsellable book, and undoubtedly one that was not simple to create. For one, the paper is handmade, presumably by Mosher himself. Not only has he created sheets of paper to produce this essay on, but he also includes countless blank pages.

The blank pages have no purpose, and Mosher included them to show them off. Some portions of the book also contain red print instead of the classic black. The red printing serves no purpose—it does not emphasize a higher meaning in the words—but is included because it was possible. He puts extra effort into the design of the box containing the book, something that is not only unnecessary to read the book, but actively prohibits it from being read easily. All these choices contributed to a higher cost to produce this book, but that contributes to the art of it. Mosher spent more money than he needed to make the book prettier. In a society that focuses on function over form, publishing this book revolts against this idea. When read today, it confuses the reader at first. They look for a deeper meaning in the blank pages, red text, and box, but none exists. It is difficult to grasp, as society has only further developed the idea that everything must serve a purpose. Through reading this book—a proper reading, including the

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physical properties—the reader starts to question this fact, and that was always the goal of Thomas B. Mosher.

Though the reader does not know Thomas B. Mosher, they now know his love. His time and care towards this little essay show his love for it, whether it be Vernon Lee’s essay or the art of creating it. This binding of The Legend of Madame Krasinska is more art than a book. Every piece of it reflects Mosher’s appreciation for the art of a book and an appreciation for the aesthetic idea of ‘art for art’s sake.’ He is a perfect example of an aesthete, and this binding is only one of the many actions in his life that prove that. Every element of this book comes together as a piece of art, and the reader can appreciate it more. Now, this book sits in an archive, no more purposeful but just as meaningful. This book is pointless, and it is beautiful.

Works Cited Lee, Vernon. The Legend of Madame Krasinska. T.B. Mosher, 1903.

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An Experiment in Contradiction: Metapoetry in Ada Limón’s “The End of Poetry” By: Heather Stanley

Guiding Question: Why does Limón choose to use a poem, “The End of Poetry,” as her mode of expression through which to critique poetry? More specifically, how does her use of contradiction throughout the poem help to demonstrate both the power and the limitations of poetry as a means of communication and an art form?

I will assume that the title was the first line you read on this page. If so, within the time it took for your eyes to scan down from the title to the beginning of this paragraph, an idea formed in your mind of what this essay might resemble. In titling her poem “The End of Poetry,” Ada Limón makes a bold statement that immediately provokes curiosity in the reader precisely because she directly references her medium - poetry - in the title. This indicates that the reader is about to experience a work of metapoetry.

Counterintuitively, in writing “The End of Poetry,” Limón adds another poem to the existing collection.

Although the poem’s content conveys a frustration with poetry as a mode of expression, it is also evident that poetry is still a powerful tool, at the very least, for evoking pathos. A similar contradiction can be found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s parable “The Death of God.” Nietzsche uses the aphorism “God is dead” to catch the reader off guard and to present a revolutionary idea in simple terms (line 16). However, he later realizes, “I have come too early … my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men” (lines 27-28). This acknowledgment of his philosophy being “too early” can be interpreted in two ways: as an admittance that God is not yet dead and that humanity is not ready to accept his death. At the end of the parable, Nietzsche uses the imagery of churches as “tombs and sepulchers” to metaphorize God as an idea that is outdated but still revisited (line 36). Both “The End of Poetry” and “The Death of God” are titles that hyperbolize the author’s message to make a stronger impression. While Nietzsche admits that God is perhaps not quite dead, Limón’s poem is not a declaration of the end of poetry as an art form but an acknowledgment of its limitations in today’s society and a call for its repurposing.

Throughout “The End of Poetry,” Limón repeats the word “enough” to express her exasperation with elements of poetry and the world around her. The line “enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy” condemns the tendency of poets to oversimplify and overcomplicate simultaneously (line 3). Take the word “chiaroscuro”: “technique employed in the visual arts to represent light and shadow as they define three-dimensional objects” (Britannica). The word is lengthy and multisyllabic, yet it describes creating distinct contrast. Poets often use antonyms and imagery to create a “chiaroscuro”

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effect through their writing, but reality is almost always a gray zone. The other items in Limón’s list, “thus” and “prophecy,” refer to the poet’s inclination to use flowery language to make grandiose but oversimplified conclusions or predictions. There is not always one answer, one saviour, one definition of good versus evil, or light versus dark. Nietzsche argues that all truth is relative because humanity’s hubris prevents us from observing the world objectively. In his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche proclaims, “if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself” (1). The capacity for language and creating art such as poetry does not mean humans are more significant than other life forms. We can prophesize about our greatness, which promotes an egoistic view of humanity that has led to carelessness, especially regarding our relationship with the earth.

Limón overtly critiques the poet’s perceived duty to and connection with the earth when she says, “enough of the pointing to the world, weary / and desperate” (lines 15-16). The line break after “weary” serves as a pause, and – noting that this line falls toward the end of the poem’s run-on sentence – it is also a sign of the author’s exhaustion. The ambiguity of the line allows for the interpretation of either Limón, the world, or both as “weary / and desperate.” Regardless, there is a clear sense of the poet’s feeling of burden. It is unclear whether this burden lies in interpreting the world for others or within the confines of poetry itself. Perhaps the two are conflated. Either way, if it was not already evident that poetry has its limitations, Limón makes this point painfully evident in the last line of the poem, when she pleads, “I am asking you to touch me” (line 21). This line is viewable as a response to a question Nietzsche poses in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” He inquires, “[i]s language the adequate expression of all realities?” (2). In asking to be touched, Limón implies that language is not enough. She craves a physical, personal connection that cannot be satisfied through writing words that others then read. Again, there is an irony in Limón’s choice to voice her dissatisfaction with poetry through a poem.

There is also irony in writing a formal analysis of a poem whose author craves face-to-face interaction and emotional intimacy. In meticulously examining “The End of Poetry,” am I not doing the opposite of what Limón wants? Nevertheless, how can humanity be inspired to take action – to truly benefit – from poetry without the semantics of analyzing it? These questions, which have arisen from a close reading of “The End of Poetry” and from connecting it to the works of Nietzsche, reveal precisely why Limón utilizes contradiction in her metapoetry. Despite her vexation with poetry as a discipline, she recognizes its ubiquity as an artistic outlet and a method of interpreting the world. It may not be the most effective or rewarding method, but she cannot escape it. Like Nietzsche, Limón is an experimental

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writer. She toys with form, with breaking the fourth wall, with intentional hypocrisy. In doing so, the reader senses and empathizes with her frustration and exhaustion. Thus, regardless of whether the poem promotes change, it does what all art forms fundamentally strive to do: make people feel.

Works Cited Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “chiaroscuro.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 July 2023, www.britannica.com/art/chiaroscuro. Accessed 29 September 2023.

Limón, Ada. “The End of Poetry.” The New Yorker, 27 April 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/the-end-of-poetry. Accessed 27 September 2023.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Austin Community College, www.austincc.edu/adechene/Nietzsche%20on%20truth%20and%20lies.pdf.

Accessed 27 September 2023.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Death of God.” The Gay Science, translated by Thomas Common, SophiaOmni, 2005, www.sophia- project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/nietzsche_ deathofgod.pdfAccessed 27 September 2023.

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“Haven’t we made the dungball large enough?”: Meta-Narratives and the Dung Beetle in Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? By: Claudia Kindrachuk

In the selected passage, the image of a dung beetle rolling its ball takes on a significance that

has all-encompassing implications. Just as the dung beetle uses its hind legs to push its ball, looking backwards while pushing forward, the narrator continually pushes into the future and unabashedly looks back. His preoccupation with history and the past reinscribes the meta-narratives of Western capitalism/ colonialism that he tries to challenge, resulting in more opportunities to challenge them. Therefore, he becomes stuck in a loop of perpetuating and criticizing these narratives, constantly self-correcting.

Furthermore, the image of the dung beetle rolling its ball reveals the narrator’s deep anxiety about perpetuating these meta-narratives. Just as the dung beetle is drawn towards the nest of its predator, the burrowing owl, in pursuit of its dung, perpetuating the meta-narratives of Western capitalism/ colonialism will only lead to certain doom.

The narrator’s questions in the selected passage often participate in the meta-narratives of capitalism and colonialism. The passage begins with, “Is there enough time left?” (Powell 12), characterizing time as a resource, a capitalist mode of thinking. Introducing the image of the dung beetle rolling its ball, the narrator says, “Are there important things? Are we as a species rolling together the great dungball of the importantly done into itself […]?” (Powell 12). By questioning whether anything is essential prior to the presentation of the image, the narrator implies that the dungball is unimportant to the story. This line of questioning is also a Western capitalist mode of thought. Dominant capitalist modes of thought equivalate importance with monetary value or the ability to generate revenue. The ball of a dung beetle does not fit into either of these categories but is definable as essential in three other ways. Firstly, it is important to the dung beetle, which relies on it for survival – the dungball serves as a breeding ground and nutrient source (Jones, paraphrasing). Secondly, it is crucial to the Earth’s ecosystem, to which it contributes by dispersing seeds (França et al., paraphrasing) and enriching soil quality (Brown et al., paraphrasing). Thirdly, it held significant religious and cultural significance in Ancient Egypt: the beetle rolling its ball represented the sun god pulling the sun across the sky daily (Hill, paraphrasing). The narrator’s implication that the dungball is unimportant leaves out these other ways of defining importance – environmental, cultural, religious, and relative to experience – leaving room only for cold, hard numbers. Thus, the narrator’s stream of questions and implications participate in capitalist modes of thought.

Of course, capitalism and colonialism go together, and the narrator perpetuates a colonialist

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mindset as well. He begins the second paragraph of the selected passage with, “Would you like to have been a conquistador—perhaps a benign one?” (Powell 12). The word “conquistador” refers to the Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who colonized much of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries.

These conquests were particularly violent and bloody, hence the narrator’s hasty addendum of “perhaps a benign one?” (Powell 12). However, he continues, “Perhaps I mean not a conquistador but merely a world-class explorer and discoverer” (Powell 12), associating violent colonization with these positive descriptors. The colonization of the Americas has long been framed in positive terms of exploration and discovery to justify the atrocities committed, especially in American and Canadian schools. Through this association, the narrator participates in this carefully crafted meta-narrative of colonial justification.

Additionally, the construction of this sentence, separating exploration and discovery from the violent conquistador with the word “merely,” implies that exploring and discovering are somehow lesser without the violence of conquest. This sentence also perpetuates the meta-narrative of colonialism.

Finally, he refers to exploring as “peripatetic dungball rolling up” (Powell 13). The word “peripatetic” can mean simply moving from place to place. However, it can also refer to an Ancient Greek philosophical school comprised of “a series of philosophers of whom Aristotle was the first and by far the most significant” (Furley). Early in the novel, the narrator asks, “Do you recall the passion you had as an undergraduate for philosophy?” (Powell 2), suggesting that the reader should understand this reference to the Peripatetic school. Having established that the dungball represents what we determine is essential – “rolling together the great dungball of the importantly done into itself” (Powell 12) – he implies only Western philosophy is important by calling it a branch of Ancient Greek philosophy, the bedrock of Western thought. Of course, spreading Western thought by ‘civilizing’ the natives is a large part of the colonial mindset. In these ways, the narrator participates in the Western meta-narratives of capitalism and colonialism, even as he tries to push back against them.

Despite the narrator’s best efforts to challenge dominant meta-narratives, his preoccupation with the past reinscribes them, resulting in more opportunities to challenge them. As a dung beetle faces backwards to roll its ball, looking back to the past informs how the narrator rolls his own ball. In the conquistador question, the specific phrasing of “have been” (Powell 12) situates it in the historical reality of conquistadors, as opposed to some hypothetical scenario where conquistadors have returned to the modern day, laying the groundwork for the implied colonial justifications outlined above.

Thus, his focus on history contributes to his participation in the meta-narratives of capitalism and colonialism. However, the self-corrections reveal a commitment on the narrator’s part to challenge these narratives – the hasty correction of “perhaps a benign one?” (Powell 12) to the conquistador question

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shows both an awareness of the violence inherent in colonialism and a desire to move away from it.

Nevertheless, this, too, is a participation in colonial meta-narratives: colonial powers often portray themselves as benevolent forces in the lives of the colonized, a kind of big brother or father figure who does these things for the natives’ good. Therefore, the narrator is in a continuous loop of criticizing and perpetuating; the ball keeps on rolling.

The image of the dung beetle rolling its ball further reveals the narrator’s anxiety about perpetuating these meta-narratives. After he worries, “Should we make the dungball larger? Haven’t we made the dungball large enough?” (Powell 13), his questions build to an apocalyptic vision. He begins by asking, “Did you know last Wednesday we were to have begun observing the Tertiary Protocols?”

(Powell 13). A protocol is an official procedure, and the capitalization of the term makes it seem even more official and bureaucratic. Additionally, “tertiary,” meaning third in level or order, attaches a sense of importance to the term. The number three has cultural significance, including the Holy Trinity in Christianity and the repetition of three items or incidents in fairy tales and folk stories (three wishes from a genie, the three little pigs, and more). These associations work to construct a sense of anxiety on the part of the reader, which the narrator inflames by asking, “Are you much disturbed by not knowing what they are, and that our failure to observe them will equal our doom?” (Powell 13). Failure to observe an official protocol leading to certain doom recalls something like an atom bomb or school shooter drills – an association the narrator encourages by asking, “Do you quite credit that there are burrowing owls?” (Powell 13). To burrow, of course, is to tunnel underground, which recalls hiding in an underground bunker.

Additionally, the burrowing owl is a predator of the dung beetle – it spreads its feces around the entrance to its bunker to lure in dung beetles to eat (“Burrowing Owl,” paraphrasing). So, the narrator worries that the pursuit of what we deem as necessary – rolling the dungball, perpetuating Western meta-narratives of capitalism and colonialism – will only lead to certain doom: death, annihilation, apocalypse. Indeed, for many, it already has.

To sum up, the image of the dung beetle in the selected passage illuminates the narrator’s tendency to fall into dominant modes of thinking, his commitment to challenging capitalist/colonial meta-narratives, and his immense anxiety about perpetuating these meta-narratives. Looking back to the past reinscribes the narratives, resulting in more opportunities to challenge them, which creates a loop of perpetuating and criticizing. The ball keeps rolling, and the helpless little beetle cannot see where he is going.

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Works Cited Brown, Jacqueline, et al. “Dung Beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) Can Improve Soil Hydrological Properties.” Applied Soil Ecology, vol. 46, no. 1, 2010, pp. 9–16., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apsoil.2010.05.010.

“Burrowing Owl.” All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Burrowing_Owl/overview#.

França, Filipe, et al. “Selective Logging Effects on ‘Brown World’ Faecal-Detritus Pathway in Tropical Forests: A Case Study from Amazonia Using Dung Beetles.” Forest Ecology and Management, vol. 410, 2018, pp. 136–143., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2017.12.027.

Furley, David John. “Peripatetic School.” Oxford Classical Dictionary, 7 Mar. 2016, https://oxfordre.com/classics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.001.0001/acrefore9780199381135-e-4870;jsessionid=37A81F093BCD9CFB6EB162A7F1757B0E. Hill, J. “Khepri.” Khepri - Ancient Egypt Online, Ancient Egypt Online, 2010, https://ancientegyptonline.co.uk/khepri/.

Jones, Richard. “All Praise the Humble Dung Beetle.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Jan. 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-humble-dung-beetle180967781/.

Powell, Padgett. The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.

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Hall of Mirrors and Recursive Reflections By: Faith Caswell

Murmur by Will Eaves is as it sounds: a low-frequency novel humming with the whisper of suffering dampened by social ejection, its noise felt only through one’s membrane as the pain revealed through its pages is resoundingly, and quietly, human. Winning the Wellcome Prize (2019) and being shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize (2018), Murmur is the most awarded of Eaves’ eight novels, short fictions, and poetry collections. The first chapter was initially published as a short story and shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award (2017). However, according to an interview with BBC Open Book (2019), Eaves completed the rest of the novel before its opening chapter. The Absent Therapist was also shortlisted for the Goldsmiths (2014), and similarly to Murmur, is a small but high-powered novella that also experiments with narration, voice, and consciousness. Murmur begins with the journal of Alec Pryor, a mathematician and ex-cryptographer at Bletchley Park, undergoing chemical castration – the alternative punishment to spending two years in prison for the charge of gross indecency. Pryor is a mirrored image of Alan Turing in the post-war years. Narrated in three parts – journals, letters and dreams, and a return to journals – Murmur lays bare the interiority of a traumatized consciousness.

The microscope definition of this novel reveals the fragility of borders between reality and dreaming, pushing these boundaries so far one can almost imagine the book holding up its hands and saying, ‘I don’t believe there is a realm of truth.’ (Eaves 106).

To enhance their realism, Eaves constructs Pryor’s dreams with purposeful inconsistencies.

In one dream set at the Fun Fair, there are first ‘no toy stalls with quoits and bagged-up goldfish for prizes,’ but a few pages later, ‘Mother and son are keen to play hoopla and win some fish’ (Eaves 158).

While Murmur is not attempting anything particularly innovative with its dream narratives, these scenes reach beyond the realistic haze to reveal the more significant breakdown of Pryor’s drug-riddled mind.

His early dreams are often strides between memories from his repressed unconscious, with relatively coherent linearity, simple dialogue, and semi-fixed temporality. Throughout the novel, the deterioration of Pryor’s mind becomes devastatingly evident, perhaps most acutely through his increasingly incomprehensible dreams, which transpose into a hallucinatory fracturing of his real and dream selves.

As Woolf writes in The Waves, ‘I am not one and simple, but complex and many,’ Alec sees himself in a similar mode, an Other: ‘I am […] A thing inside my head and far beyond myself’ (Eaves 80). Pryor responds anxiously to this division of self, saying, with painstakingly obvious falsity, that ‘We cannot be outside ourselves’ (80).This claim does not have the grace to pass as an irony—something said

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and not meant—because Pryor is speaking (and lying) only to himself in his dream state. Instead, his contradictory assertion reveals only a terrain of anxiety about the disjunction between his dreaming and conscious state, the latter of which is already breaking down as a result of his hormone treatment.

After sessions with his court-ordered Jungian psychotherapist, Anthony Stallbrook, Alec’s dream state continually uproots his childhood memories of Christopher Molyneux, his closest friend and romantic love interest. In one particularly coherent dream, Christopher and Alec swim across the lake to Wargrave School at night (Eaves 59). This dream fragment temporarily permits access to Christopher’s thinking, with particular scene moments constructed in free indirect discourse. As Alec swims ahead, Christopher’s positive ruminations about him bubble to the surface, breaking on impact as we remember that these dreams are narrated only by Alec’s consciousness; whatever Christopher seems to be mentally articulating are only dream constructions of the former’s grieving memory. The effect of Eaves’ curious use of free indirect speech is yet another reminder of Pryor’s mental splintering. Within these dreams, Alec and readers always remember that he is perpetually doubled: he is himself but also the ‘man in the mirror’ (Eaves 69) In a letter to June—a fellow ex-cryptographer at Bletchley Park and his platonic soulmate—Alec writes about the groupthink involved in social responses to homosexuality, articulating that, ‘Plenty of those who condemn me probably do not feel, deep down, I’ve done much wrong, or care particularly one way or the other’ (Eaves 89). It would not be a novel inspired by Turing if one did not engage in the discourse surrounding his social and medical denunciation. In Murmur, this focus is interestingly placed on the ingenuity of Turing’s condemnation. While the cultural attitude to homosexuality is both intolerant and abusive, the individual, in many cases, is neutral. For Eaves, it is this great disparity that is cause for concern. Pryor/Turing undoubtedly feels the consequences, but Murmur argues that, in many ways, they are rendered inconspicuous for their lack of social volume after the initial impact: We agree not to look. It is a simple but profound contract of the collective subconscious with the truth.

If you speak the truth, or do something that indicates how human beings function, regardless of the law, regardless of moral superstition, then people will turn against you, and you must never underestimate how fearful and weak most people in a large body, like a government, or university, or even an office, actually are. Once you have been isolated in this way, you can be dismissed (Eaves 28).

Pryor’s indictment of the ‘collective subconscious of the truth’ is an ironic appeal to the uncertainty surrounding what is “right.” The ‘contract’ and ‘agree[ment]’ are measured by human terms, which are inherently fallible rather than objectively or morally correct. As groupthink and fear dominate this social contract, the punishment for a crime committed privately is invisibility; one is condemned to suffer alone, in silence, attended only by the murmurs of a life that no longer exists.

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Turing was twenty-six when Disney released Snow White, and his interest in the tale was shared with his running friend, Alan Garner, who claimed they were both particularly fascinated by the poisoned apple. In the second half of Murmur, as Pryor’s dreams become increasingly hazy and feverish, he overlays figures in his own life onto the story of Snow White. Pryor imagines that ‘He bites into the flesh of Malus pumila,’ or Paradise Apple, subtly referencing the Genesis scene of Adam and Eve (Eaves 66). Eaves’ decision to establish a relationship between the poisoned apple and the Biblical narrative is particularly striking against Pryor’s condemnation by the state; as the government interprets Alec’s homosexuality as a criminal indulgence in immoral sexual pleasure, his punishment is the injection of hormones that poison his mind and body. Pryor is contradictorily both Snow White and Adam/Eve, recalling June’s question: ‘How can you be the blameless sufferer from a condition and a criminal—and a sinner—at the same time?’ (Eaves 72). The negotiation of these terms (‘sufferer,’ ‘criminal,’ ‘sinner’) is never entirely resolved in Murmur, as there remains a chasm between these terms’ social and personal classification. Turing himself may have grappled with these questions before he tragically took his life at age forty-one, with a bitten apple found beside his body and an autopsy revealing cyanide poisoning.

Turing’s question also absorbs Murmur: can machines think? Pryor believes that they can, and ‘If a machine appears to think, why should we go on insisting it does not?’ (Eaves 88). Turing’s question is not really about the inherent consciousness of machines but about the possibility of putting consciousness in and the potential consequences of this scientific feat. On one level, it seems as if Pryor glorifies the unfeeling part of machines that cannot become connected, which develops a: higher-order consciousness, of which our private thought process and yearning are a part, implies a disconnection from the group. The heart must be broken, the mind cut off behind a look, its feelings and its godlike intuition trapped, or else it has no heart. It has no mind (Eaves 50).

If the requisite for a heart and mind of ‘higher order consciousness’ is a division from the group, machines—devoid of emotional connection and vulnerability—can reach this standard. However, on another level, Pryor becomes increasingly unnerved as figures appear in his dreams showing human physicality (i.e. presenting as his work colleagues) but speaking as if they are machines or something else in the realm of the posthuman. For Pryor, machines have the potential to become too human, and this shrinking gap between familiar and unfamiliar, human and nonhuman, produces anxiety surrounding the difficulty of determining these categorical boundaries.

Throughout the novel, Pryor anxiously contends with the drugs actively impacting his sense of self, transforming him into what feels like a machine-like being. This transformation is not the fear of becoming unfeeling and disconnected like a machine, but that this unfeelingness and disconnect will

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make his past irretrievable to memory: ‘The fear is not the change, it is the loss of, well, one’s past. It is quite like the fear of becoming a machine, in fact’ (Eaves 70). Pryor is moving throughout Murmur from one state to another, worrying about the pieces left behind in his transition. The loss of one’s past necessitates a partial loss of the self, marking Pryor’s devastating realization that his failing ability to organize memories is simultaneously an inability to know his present self. The fear of turning into a machine is symbolically corroborated as the drugs in his system cause him to lose traces of his past, primarily evident in the breakdown of his coherent childhood dreams.

Eaves engages with Freud’s essay “Das Unheimliche” (1919) in Murmur quite explicitly; Pryor describes the mirror reflection as ‘always uncanny’ and his dreaming conflation of his and Molyneaux’s voices as ‘unheimlich’ (Eaves 115;142). The experience of coming up against the uncanny is a principally important theme in this novel, as Pryor’s mental deterioration amalgamates in a sense of division from itself. Eaves said he felt ‘slightly in exile from myself,’ leading him to think about reflections and doubles: ‘if I don’t recognize myself in the mirror, does the reflection have its own identity, its own uncanny unheimlich autonomy?’ (BBC Open Book Interview 2019). In nearly all his dreams, Pryor writes about himself as a ‘he’ and sometimes doubles the tense to simultaneously describe his consciousness as ‘I’ and ‘he.’ This sense of self-alienation is a repeated sensation in Alec’s dreams, in which the ‘man in the mirror’ seems to be an entirely separate corporeal entity: ‘I am still beset by the man in the mirror. He is with me nightly, daily [...] he is a man, I think, and a man in distress, a prisoner of some description?’ (Eaves 39). Of course, individuals are meant to understand that this man ‘in distress,’ ‘this prisoner,’ is Alec himself, but the preface, ‘I think,’ reveals a deeper repression than him simply not recognizing himself; his pain is so buried that he cannot even be sure what he sees is a man, not least a man in suffering.

Pryor’s dreams of childhood and memories of losing Christopher to tuberculosis make it evident that Eaves is interested in Freud’s ‘return of this repressed’ (Freud 17), but when he sees the uncanny self in the mirror, it is also because the drugs have forced him to undergo a bodily transformation: ‘I had my body changed against my will […] and that has altered what I took to be my mind’ (Eaves 159). His reflections are distorted because his interiority and exteriority do not match, and his body and mind are no longer consistent with the Self he has known: ‘Is it me? Is it not me? Is it not me, yet?’ (Eaves 21).

This particular line reminds me of Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953), written as a continuous monologue from a single character, in an ambiguous and dreamlike-setting. In the final phrases of the novel, Beckett’s unnamed narrator writes, ‘you must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on’ (Becket 414). As well as their rhythmic similarity, both lines hint towards the utter persistence of their suffering and disoriented

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speakers. Beckett’s novel indirectly responds to the exhaustion of war-torn Europe while Eaves works through Pryor as a medium for approaching the same contextual devastation on a microscopic, personal scale.

In hand with the dry and desolate landscape usually associated with modernism, fractures and fissures were also characteristic of British literary consciousness in the early twentieth-century War years. Murmur, though written in 2019, reflects a mind occupying the early 1950s, wrought with discombobulation and a general disillusionment with society’s functionality—it is these traits that feel reminiscent of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which is characterized as an intentionally scattered and fractural response to the collapse of society following an intensely violent age. In aligning with this tradition, Eaves situates his novel as an object of immersive retrospection, or a medium of ‘behindsight’ (Eaves 43). Readers are pulled into a time of different international instability, a circumstance which is intimately connected with the corresponding political and medical homophobia that degrades Pryor’s sense of self. Modernism’s uncertainty of resolution and endings is also present in Murmur; while most are familiar with the tragic end to Turing’s story, Alec is not exactly Alan; what happens to the Murmur narrator remains inconclusive, a possible flint of hope left behind in the final pages.

Pryor’s dreams towards the end of the novel are increasingly interested in meaning, constituting an observable difference from the disillusioned helplessness of the character in the novel’s early sections. At the opening, Pryor writes that ‘simple addition has human meaning only because I am there to observe it and call it addition. However, it certainly happens. Perhaps the larger process, too, is unmeaningful. If life works, it works’ (Eaves 22). At this moment, Pryor feels that life is a mechanical and calculatable phenomenon, divorced from any subjective beauties attributed to it by a more positive (and possibly, in his view, less rational) mind. Pryor identifies human observation as a necessary element in meaning-making, and the fact that he feels unobservable in his suffering (‘I am reckoning with a deliberate retreat from the world’ (Eaves 17)), makes his pain feel meaningless. This observation transforms by the end of Murmur, in which Pryor begins to feel that mere mortality gives life meaning: ‘That limit, material mortality, gives what I do, the work I wrestle with, the friends I love, the fears I feel, meaning. The more we value what goes on in spite of our loss to ourselves—the more we seek the survival of afterlives not ours—the more life means’ (Eaves 161).

To be certain, Murmur is not meant for readers with only an afternoon to spare—do not be deceived by the short page count—it is a novel that demands not to be rushed but rather to be read slowly and read again. As this book is concerned with bodies or the physical component of a thing, it may be helpful to look at the word ‘murmur’ itself as it appears on the page. The sloping of letters

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resembles a heart rate monitor, each undulation indicating a new pulse. Pryor corroborates this relationship late in the novel: ‘the pulse of fear has stopped and its murmur, taking my thoughts down as if by dictation, has faded’ (Eaves 177). The murmur is the continual, internal whisper of that suffering object, and as Pryor begins to acknowledge and accept the trauma carried within him, the noise of the murmur dims. This novel is devastating, hopeful, dreamlike, painfully real, and human at its very core. It seems that, perhaps, there is a murmur within us all.

Bibliography Beckett, Samuel. “The Unnameable.” Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable.

Grove Press, 1958.

Eaves, Will. Murmur. Bellevue Literary Press, 2019.

“Will Eaves on Alan Turing; The Moon in Fiction and Poetry; Afrofuturism.” BBC Open Book Interview, 4 July 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006dnk.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Translated by Alix Strachey, Sammlung, Fünfte Folge, 1919.

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Beware the (Evil) Eye: Power, Patriarchy, and Surveillance in Lives of the Saints By: Annika Thornton

In Nino Ricci’s novel Lives of the Saints (1990), the Italian village of Valle del Sole is influenced by religion, superstition, and strong social behaviour expectations. Cristina, the mother of the novel’s narrator, Vittorio, behaves independently of social expectations by having an extramarital affair while her husband resides and works in Canada. However, the community’s condemnation of sin is also related to a larger pattern of patriarchal domestic violence in the community. Cristina’s desire for freedom is not just an act of personal agency but is also a desire to find solace in a healthy, non-abusive relationship with a man. Thus, the novel redeems Cristina because she understands and resists the oppressive religious and patriarchal power structures that govern her community’s behaviour.

Christian superstition and notions of sin are essential forces of social regulation and culture in the village of Valle del Sole. They function in a manner that resembles Foucault’s discussion of “Bentham’s panopticon” (200); the panopticon functions by creating “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (201). The people of Valle del Sole believe themselves to always be under the gaze of the Christian God and, therefore, avoid and condemn sinful behaviour.

However, not only is Cristina’s affair a sin according to Christianity, but the snake which bites her in the stables serves as an omen of something even more sinister: “Snakes, whatever their other properties, were agents of the evil eye, which the villagers feared more than any mere Christian deity or devil” (Ricci 6). The superstition of the evil eye causes “[t]he villagers [to avoid] anyone or anything that had been touched by the eye, as if there [is] a peril that the affiliation might spread by contagion” (60). Though the “evil eye” (60) knows no Christian morality, the fear of the invisible eye resembles the guard tower in the panopticon in that those marked by the evil eye receive treatment as contagious vectors of fate’s punishment. Since the people of Valle del Sole refuse to associate with Cristina because of her association with the snake in addition to her sin of adultery, the evil eye’s superstitious power serves as an instrument that upholds the oppressive Christian ideology, ultimately contributing to Cristina’s social exile.

Hence, Cristina dually faces social rejection as a result of a power structure motivated and reinforced by both Christian and Pagan mythologies.

Cristina’s rejection of the religious superstitions in the community does not simply originate from her arrogance or selfishness; she questions the intentions and morality of those in her community whose actions often contradict Christian morality. The panopticon’s ability to enforce power necessitates that “the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that

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he may always be so” (Foucault 201), but because Cristina questions the authority of religious institutions and figures to dictate morality, she uncontrollable through God’s gaze. She recognizes that others abuse religion for self-serving purposes. Most prominently, the priest, Father Nick, pockets monetary donations given by families to the church for his gain: “My mother called Father Nick’ our fatted calf’— since he’d taken over the parish, she said, the church had gone to ruin, because all the money he collected went into his own pocket” (Ricci 46). Cristina also questions, “Why should you defend the priests?”

(54) despite judgment from her friends because “They’re no better than the rest of us” (54), reiterating her skepticism of priests’ representation of God and Christianity. Instead, she diverges from the precise rituals of the church and maintains a relationship with God in her way, telling Vittorio: “I say [the hymns] in my head . . . God can hear what you’re thinking” (44). Cristina believes that the church’s representation of Christian morality does not necessarily align with the word of God and, therefore, refuses to let the community’s version of Christianity restrict her freedom.

The celebration “La Festa della Madonna” (83) in Valle del Sole further confirms Cristina’s mistrust of Christianity and religious institutions. Despite the poverty of the village’s residents, “village loyalty [assures] that even the poorest families” (83) would contribute to “festival expenses” (82–3). The festival is a source of village pride and celebration of their saint; however, the spectacle causes financial strain for many low-income families. Despite the intention to hold a religious celebration, the festival poses concrete financial detriments to the low-income families in the village, contradicting notions of Christian charity. In a sermon at the festival, Monsignor Felano from Rocca Secca supports Cristina’s belief that individual enforcement of Christian values through social ridicule can be misguided. He attempts to remind the people of Valle del Sole of the burdens the Virgin Mary had to face throughout her life: Mary was “such a woman . . . as you might see walking down the streets of this village” (94), and the gospels “don’t tell us . . . of the shame she must have endured from skeptics who did not believe in a virgin birth” (94). Thus, Monsignor Felano advocates compassion and sympathy for Cristina due to her perceived sin and condemns the shame the Valle del Sole community tries to impose on her. The festival’s events undercut the church’s moral intentions, therefore supporting Cristina’s skepticism towards the church as a source of moral judgment.

Though the influence of Christianity and superstition is a critical cause of Cristina’s rejection from society, there is a pattern of domestic violence in the community, which further explains why the women seek to distance themselves from Cristina but also justifies why Cristina takes solace in a positive relationship with a man. Maria, a former friend of Cristina, tells Giuseppina, “You know what they’re saying about her in Rocca Secca . . . As if everyone was blind. Walking around like a princess”

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(Ricci 55). However, Maria expresses an even greater fear that Cristina’s husband, Mario, will find out about the affair: “One way or another he’ll find out. They always do” (56). Maria implies that extramarital sexual relationships are not uncommon in the community and that there is a prevailing fear among women that their transgressions will fall under their husbands’ gaze. Moreover, women in the village cannot risk association with Cristina out of fear of punishment for condoning her sinful behaviour. There is further evidence of domestic abuse in the community that reveals how men use violence to control their wives’ behaviour. Maria tells Di Lucci, “We’ll see what happens when [Mario] gets his hands on her. He’ll crack her skull, you remember what he was like, just like his father” (184). Vittorio also describes his grandfather as “a grim unlikeable man, [with] a constant rage seeming always to smoulder within him” (25) and recalls that “he had always been mean to [Vittorio’s] grandmother” (25). The pattern of violent behaviour in Mario’s family also explains why Cristina feels justified in having a healthy sexual relationship with a man. Cristina loses faith in the religious and social beliefs of her community because they tell her she must remain loyal to her husband regardless of his violence. Thus, the abusive behaviour of men in Valle del Sole constitutes another system of surveillance that upholds the patriarchal power relations in the community and seeks to control women’s behaviour.

The hypocritical behaviour of men who have affairs while separated from their wives even appears outside of Valle del Sole during Cristina and Vittorio’s voyage to Canada. When the ship’s third mate, Darcangelo, discovers that Cristina is pregnant, he suggests she and Vittorio move to a second-class room that “the captain usually keeps . . . open for—well, let’s say a friend” (Ricci 228). However, after arriving in the room, the captain’s wife mistakes Cristina for her husband’s pregnant mistress.

Despite the chaos and confusion, Cristina assures the woman, “We’ve both been tricked—the captain’s friend isn’t coming aboard this trip, they must have put me here to confuse you. I don’t know anything else about it, except that they tried to make fools out of both of us” (234). Though the captain is the perpetrator of adultery, he attempts to conceal his sin by tricking his wife, and Darcangelo facilitates this lie rather than condemning adultery.

Furthermore, the captain and Darcangelo punish Cristina by implicating her in the lie because she is pregnant and travelling without a husband, demonstrating the affinity of men to surveil and punish women to whom they have no personal connection. By calmly assuming control of the situation, Cristina exhibits her awareness of the men’s cruelty and places the responsibility on the men for the situation.

Though the patriarchal double standards for men’s and women’s sexual transgressions exist both in and outside Valle del Sole, Cristina sees through the hypocrisy of gendered power relations. She refuses to let those powers vilify her for her behaviour.

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In Lives of the Saints, Cristina’s sexual impropriety shocks and contradicts the religious and social standards of her community in Valle del Sole. However, the novel redeems her character because she stays true to her values of personal freedom rather than succumbing to the oppressive power structures that attempt to control women’s behaviour in her community. Her defiance is not a consequence of arrogance, as her neighbours so often think, but is instead a conscious critique of and resistance to the systems of power in the world around her.

Works Cited Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1977, pp. 195–228.

Ricci, Nino. Lives of the Saints. Anchor Canada, 2020.

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Aesthetics in Publishing: Examining the First Edition of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis By: Annika Thornton

Published in 1905, Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis is a letter describing Wilde’s own experience of imprisonment after receiving a conviction for sodomy. In De Profundis, Wilde reflects on his life leading to his imprisonment and the implications of his way of life. The physical published form of the book itself thus creates an aesthetic experience which forces its reader to engage with the book as a work of art despite the text’s sombre tone.

The book’s physical form, size, weight, and paper make it easily readable in various settings and provoke deep contemplation of its contents. The dimensions of the book are small enough that the book can be easily transported and comfortably held while reading. The book is also light in weight, considering its size, making it easy to take out of the home to read comfortably in a public space or while relaxing at home; it does not require a formal manner of reading at a desk. The reading process thus allows for slow, relaxing contemplation over a long period in which the reader can easily pick up and put down the book at will rather than forcing a restrictive, intensive, uncomfortable reading process. Even in the present day, the book is comfortable to read. The paper is high quality, has not faced significant degradation, and thus has no distinct or pungent smell. However, though the book is light, the paper inside is thick and heavy, meaning the reader must exert extra effort to turn each page. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Walter Pater argues that the aesthetic critic “regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind” (1507). He further argues that every one of these sensations are “continual[ly] vanishing away” (1512), creating a “strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (1512). To engage with these sensations and embrace their fleeting nature, “is success in life” (Pater 1512). Thus, in the brief extra moment it takes to turn the page because of its weight, the book itself forces the reader to contemplate the experience of one page as its impression disappears and embrace the fleeting moment before moving on to the next.

The page layout also allows the reader to slowly contemplate the ideas on the page and relish the reading experience. In his essay “The Ideal Book,” William Morris states that the “hinder edge (that which is bound in) must be the smallest member of the margins, the head margin must be larger than this, the fore larger still, and the tail largest of all” (184), a layout to which De Profundis adheres to perfectly, creating a beautiful page that is not overly crowded with text. The text is in a serif-type font that is not too large or small in size and is not too bold or thin, allowing the reader’s eyes to move from one

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word to the next quickly. Moreover, the page has much more white space than black space. The body of text remains within a small, equally sized rectangular space on each page with large margins in the proportions specified by Morris. There are also larger-than-average spaces between the words, and the text is justified, causing the writing to fit neatly into the rectangular shape with clear, uniform borders. As a result, there is approximately an equal amount of text on every page. The compact blocks of text on each page restrict the page to a small quantity of writing and, therefore, fewer ideas. By reducing the amount of writing on the page, the layout of the book avoids overwhelming the reader with content and instead forces the reader to direct their full attention to a few ideas; the words and ideas have room to breathe on the page and in the mind of the reader. Since the reader is not distracted by the large quantity of writing on the page, they can immerse themselves more in thought and fully engage with the aesthetic experience of reading.

The intricate design of the cover elevates the book to the status of an object of visual art as well as a piece of literary art. The cover is deep blue, evoking a sense of melancholy in Wilde’s letter. There is a gold border around the front cover of the book and gold detailing on the top and bottom of the spine.

The title and author on the spine are also written in gold, attributing material and aesthetic value to the book and its contents. On the cover is a circular gold emblem depicting a bird entangled in a set of horizontal and vertical bars resembling a cage. These bars represent the prison bars confining Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment, and the bird is Wilde himself. Therefore, the emblem metaphorically compares Wilde to a bird whose freedom has been taken away but attempts to rebel and escape its imprisonment.

Thus, as it is composed in prison, the work itself can be considered an artistic attempt to escape and rebel against the institutions which place him there, though he cannot physically escape. Wilde can exercise his creativity and create something beautiful despite his art reflecting his personal suffering. However, though he creates something beautiful in composing the letter, Wilde violates one of his aesthetic principles in “The Preface” to his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray: “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim” (41). Although Wilde may not have intended for the letter to be published, publication allows the letter to become elevated to the status of art. Since the letter describes Wilde’s suffering and elucidates information about his life, Wilde as a writer is inseparable from his work of art, thus failing to achieve “art’s aim” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 41). Therefore, like the bird, Wilde attempts to escape the confines of his imprisonment. However, he cannot entirely escape through his creativity and writing because imprisonment stifles his ability to follow his aesthetic philosophy. Instead, he is overcome with emotion and suffering and must be introspective and visibly self-involved in his writing; violating aesthetic principles becomes a prison.

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The various physical elements of the first edition of Wilde’s De Profundis establish the book as a work of art and a beautiful book. However, the beautiful elements of the physical book also manipulate how the reader approaches the reading process and text, influencing the work’s interpretation.

Works Cited Morris, William. “The Ideal Book.” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, vol. 1, 1893, pp. 179–86.

Pater, Walter. “Studies in the History of the Renaissance.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., Norton, 2006, pp. 1507–13.

Wilde, Oscar. De Profundis. London, Methuen, 1905.

---. The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Norman Page, Broadview, 1998.

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