Spring 2013 by FORTY-THREE NORTH

FORTY-THREE NORTH

is a student-reviewed journal that showcases the best critical writing by Hamilton students in the Humanities and the Arts. The name of the journal comes from Hamiltonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s latitudinal address, itself a point of cultural and academic convergence and divergence. FORTY-THREE NORTH is an interdisciplinary journal, housed in the Department of Comparative Literature, which aims to explore scholarship across a diverse range of disciplines from literary studies to art history, the study of languages, philosophy, the arts, and more. Hamilton students are encouraged to submit critical papers written in, but not limited to these fields.

forty-three north

Volume 2, Spring 2013

editors-in-chief

Bonnie Wertheim Kina Viola

editorial board

Jamie Lee Sean D. Henry-Smith

Emma Bowman

faculty adviser

Janelle Schwartz

layout & design

Kina Viola Matt Sherman

cover design

Matt Sherman

cover photograph

Sean D. Henry-Smith

contributors

Cooper Creagan

Lindsay Kramer

Evan Van Tassel

Arianne Bergman

Emma Laperruque

Adam Fix

Claire Gavin

contents A Note From the Editors

Friendly Competition: The Speech Community of Settlers of Catan

Social Consciousness in Madness

Apocalypse and Minority Falsification: Re-appropriation of the Zombie Symbol

We’re Not Out of the Woods Yet: Exploration of Trauma and the Human Connection to Nature

The Way We Define and Use Rape, Then and Now

Thoreau and Ghandi: From Civil Disobedience to Satyagraha

Cooper Creagan ’13

Lindsay Kramer ’13

Evan Van Tassel ’13

Arianne Bergman ’13

Emma Laperruque ’14

Adam Fix ’13

Cleaning Up the House: Language, Experience, and Notions of the Divine

Violent Love: The Appalazian Murder Ballad and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina

Reframing History: How the Soviet Union Became New Russia

Lindsay Kramer ’13

Claire Gavin ’13

Adam Fix ’13

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a note from the editors The Spring 2013 issue of FORTY-THREE NORTH showcases the astounding breadth of subject matter and style that can be found in Hamilton students’ critical written work. The essays we selected this semester form a cross-hatching of compass lines, an intersection of many different disciplines and directions. Students, faculty, staff, and members of the greater Hamilton community: FORTY-THREE NORTH is growing. The College’s newest publication has latched its roots onto the land at the top of the Hill. This semester, we received twice as many submissions as we did for last spring’s issue. We have a flourishing group of staff members—editors, designers, photographers—and, as always, an incredible resource in our writers. Immerse yourselves in these pieces. Begin with learning a new language—that of a board game, human experience, divine meaning, or Appalachian murder ballads. Discovery the history of a word you already know. Travel to Russia, evade the apocalypse, or claim it anew. Work with them chronologically, sideways, upside down. Read them out of order—from last to first or skipping though them as they catch your interest. Put the journal down, pick it up again, start fresh. Enjoy these papers. The work we received this year bridges thematic gaps and takes risks. We are wholeheartedly impressed. But, dear readers, we still have a long ways to go. Each year, we build a publication from the work we receive, and each year, FORTY-THREE NORTH will be different. The journal itself is still in its infancy, and we, your editors, see enormous potential for progress. Happy reading,

Kina Viola & Bonnie Wertheim Editors-in-Chief

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Friendly Competition:

The Speech Community of Settlers of Catan Cooper Creagan ’13

Cooper Creegan wrote the paper that appears here for my course entitled Ethnography of Communication (Anthropology 270W). In keeping with my favorite work in the field, Cooper takes something that he already loves doing and gains a new perspective with analytical notions derived from elsewhere. One does not have to kill amusement and conviviality to analyze it. And one can learn a great deal about what makes amusement and conviviality possible with the stance that Cooper takes herein. — Associate Professor of Anthropology Chaise LaDousa “Put it on the six, you want to fuck me right now.” This speech act, taken out of context, is at best meaningless and at worst offensive. However, after using Hymes’s categories of analysis to unravel this utterance’s message content, we will find that it is, in fact, a helpful suggestion from one friend to another. The genre in which the speech act took place – a board game called Settlers of Catan – has its own norms of interaction and register, both of which must be understood in order to glean any meaning from the utterance. Once we have explored these facets of the genre, we will gain a better understanding of the speech act as well the speech community that surrounds it. The scene of this board game lies in the nature of the game itself. Settlers of Catan is a competitive game of resource utilization, cooperation, and strategy played by three to six players at a time. Within the game, players create and break alliances, trade resources used to gain points in the game, and work together to keep the winning player from achieving victory. As such, the scene of a game of Settlers of Catan is complex: though the atmosphere • • •

is above all else casual and friendly, tension pervades the game (especially towards its conclusion) as each player vies for victory or laments over the hopelessness of their in-game situation. Such was the scene of the game that took place in my residence hall common room on a Tuesday night between 10:30 and 11:30PM. This game in particular consisted of four players, two of whom were familiar with the rules of the game (myself and a fellow student we will call Eric), and two who had never played before (we will call them Travis and Peerless). The addition of the new players altered the scene in a sophisticated way, mixing the competitive atmosphere with that of a teaching environment. In order to teach Peerless the game’s strategy, Eric actually went out of his way to assist Peerless, even when it was detrimental to his own in-game success. In one such instance, Eric advised Peerless thus: “Put it on the six, you want to fuck me right now.” Eric’s speech style points to the advisory nature of the speech act. In key, he was completely sincere. Neither sarcastic nor reluctant, Eric leaned forward and gestured to show Peerless how he ought

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to move the game pieces. His tone also reinforced his role as an instructor. Eric spoke loudly and hastily, eager to have his message heard before Peerless had time to make a different move. Through Eric’s speech style, we understand that the message content of the declaration, “you want to fuck me right now,” is not a vulgar invitation but a helpful suggestion. To grasp the message content, however, we need to examine the register of the speech community that surrounds Settlers of Catan. Throughout the game, the players used a variety of sexual terms to express in-game activity. After the game, Travis would lament that “we needed to screw [Eric] harder.” That is, we did not spend enough time working against Eric in the game, which allowed him to win. At another point during the game, after Travis impeded my progress, he told me I had been “cock blocked.” In this instance, the inability to move forward in the game was akin to being barred from sex. Because Travis was new to the game, we deduce that this sexual register is not exclusive to Settlers of Catan, but is instead a part of another speech community in the players’ collective speech field. Every player was an undergraduate college student in New York State, white, male, and somewhere between 18 and 22 years of age. Because all players shared these qualities, this sexual register is likely attached to the speech community of one or more of these identifiers (probably the latter two). Thus, when Eric tells Peerless that, “you want to fuck me right now,” he knows that Peerless will not assume he is asking for sexual favors. Rather, it was clear to all players that he meant, “it’s in your interest to do me a disservice because I am closer to victory than you are.” The disservice in question lies in the suggestion, “put it on the six,” an utterance that involves another, more game-specific aspect of the players’ register. To understand this game-specific register, one must have a rudimentary understanding of the rules of the board game. In Settlers of Catan, one wins by creating settlements and cities, each of which has a resource cost. Players collect resources (which are printed on playing cards) from numbered cardboard tiles that constitute the game board. Already, we can determine that “the six” is simply the tile bearing the number six. One refers to all tiles by their number; a player might reference “the eight,” “the three,” or “the twelve” in exactly the same way. But what should be put on this tile? The “it” that Eric mentions is a game piece called the robber, which Peerless was holding in his hand. When the robber occupies a numbered tile, the players that would normally gain resources from that tile no longer do so. “Put it on the six,” then, means to place the robber on the six-tile, thereby preventing Eric from acquiring more resources from this particular tile. Because Eric was winning, Peerless had best slow his progress. Furthermore, Eric is not just pointing to a random tile from which he gains resources; “the six” carries special significance. Every turn, a player rolls a pair of dice, receiving a number from two to twelve, which then determines which numbered tiles the players draw resources from. Numbers closer to seven are rolled more frequently, making six among the most common • • •

numbers and therefore more likely to provide resources to a player. By placing the robber game piece on the six-tile (instead of say, the two-tile or the twelve-tile), Peerless would slow Eric’s progress in the most severe way possible. Eric’s selflessness, then, manifests itself not only in the inconvenient nature of the robber, but in the magnitude of that inconvenience, as well. To see the extent to which the presence of new players changed the scene, we must compare this particular speech event – Peerless’s placement of the robber on the game board – to instances when veteran players are deciding where to place the robber. In my experience, whenever this particular speech event occurs in a game of Settlers of Catan, each player bids for the attention of the person placing the robber. In such instances, the players’ message form does not vary significantly from that of Eric. In fact, the register is often exactly the same: instead of suggesting that the robber be used to “fuck me,” as Eric does, players tend to suggest that it be used to “fuck him” or “screw her over.” The speech style, on the other hand, changes significantly. Whereas Eric’s speech style was earnest and instructional, the speech style of players in a normal game is often frantic or desperate; their key is very serious, as if to suggest that the fate of the game rests on the robber’s placement. In this contest for attention, each player talks over one another in an attempt to provide the best case for where to put the game piece (always suggesting, of course, that it be placed far from his or her own tiles). Certain players will even offer resources as a bribe to the player in control of the robber. We now have a norm of interaction for this speech event: if the person placing the robber is not new to the game, persuade him to avoid your tiles using any means necessary. Often, two to five players shouting advice in this way increases the tension and intensity of the scene. Clearly, the addition of the first-time players in our game somewhat relieved this tension; because Travis and Peerless had to be taught strategy, one could not be too ruthless when playing the game. Indeed, Eric consciously harmed his chances of winning for the sake of Peerless’s learning experience. Here lies another norm of interaction of Settlers of Catan: when there are new players present, help them to do as well as they can with the resources they are dealt. This norm helps to ensure that the new players will enjoy the game and want to play again. Travis and Peerless’s presence, therefore, made for a friendlier and less intimidating scene than that of a typical game of Settlers of Catan. That said, the tension was not completely absent from the scene. Although the purpose-outcome of Eric’s moment of selflessness was to help Peerless achieve victory, his purpose-goal was never to lose. Like the other three players, Eric intended to win the game, as evidenced by the fact that he did, in fact, win. Therefore, one’s purpose-outcome is the only sufficient factor to being a good sportsman in a game of Settlers of Catan – the purpose-goal is irrelevant, likely because it is assumed that everybody has the same purpose-goal: winning. We now have a third norm of interaction as a corollary to the previous one: once you have done as much as you can to give the new players a fair chance at victory,

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you are allowed to beat them if you can. From this observation, we can begin to deduce what the members of Settlers of Catan’s speech community value in a game. Winning is paramount, but only insofar as nobody in the game is playing with a handicap (such as not knowing the rules or optimal strategies). The most recent two norms of interaction, then, may serve yet another purpose: not only do they ensure that everybody enjoys themselves, but they also reduce the chance of an illegitimate victory. Which is more valuable to the members of Settlers of Catan’s speech community: legitimate, unquestioned victory or the amity and relaxation that accompany the game itself ? Of course, there is no single answer for all players of Settlers of Catan, but the conversation that took place after this particular game suggests that the purpose-outcome of the game was, in fact, to have fun. Immediately after Eric won, there was a short period of lamentation in which the losing players attempted to legitimize the extent of their success, discussing the moves they might have made. Travis spoke first, saying, “I had so much sheep.” Sheep is one of the five resources in the game; presumably, Travis would have used his sheep to build more settlements or cities. Immediately after, Peerless said, “I had a knight.” The knight is a tool with which he could have moved the robber away from his own tiles. In these utterances, Travis and Peerless share the purpose-goal of informing us that, with a little more time, they too might have had a chance at winning. By showing that they had the means of achieving victory, they tried to claim for themselves some of the esteem generally attributed to the winner. If the speech situation were to end here, it might appear that the members of this speech community value in-game victory most highly. After this period, however, the players quickly affirmed their enjoyment of the game. Peerless said, “I liked this,” to which Travis agreed, “Yeah, I enjoyed this.” Eric added that, “That was good.” These speech acts quickly changed the scene from one of somber regret to satisfaction. By ending the speech situation with these utterances, the players placed all the tension of the game within the context of having fun. In fact, ending the game on any other note – questioning the legitimacy of Eric’s win, for example – would have been considered unusual and probably rude. Here, we find one more norm of interaction: after the game is finished, acknowledge its status as a game and that you enjoyed it. We have identified four norms of interaction of Settlers of Catan: try to convince your opponents not to inconvenience you, don’t take advantage of new players, try to win if it doesn’t involve taking advantage of new players, and acknowledge your enjoyment of the game. However, there are contexts in which few or none of these norms are followed. While playing the game online, for example, pleading with your opponent is often considered juvenile, and new players are not educated so much as ridiculed for playing too slowly. The register, too, changes in other contexts. In this particular game, we used at least three other words for the aforementioned sheep resource: “bah,” “Abe,” and “Tim.” However, these synonyms for sheep only exist in our register because we • • •

created them. If I were to play Settlers of Catan with a stranger, I would refer to sheep as sheep, reserving “bah” or “Tim” for my friend group. That is, while we can use the speech acts in one game of Settlers of Catan to explore the values and norms of the game’s entire speech community, we must understand that we are limited to the individuals we are examining, and that speech communities intersect with one another and are filled with different varieties, just like language communities. Achieving a more accurate picture of the entire speech community would require many, many more games.

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Social Consciousness in Madness Lindsay Kramer ’13 At first glance, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s “The Memoirs of a Madman” (1912) and “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1889) share little. The former was published only posthumously, wavers between autobiographical essay and personal diary, and remains relatively unknown. The latter, censored and banned upon publication in Russia and throughout the world, is clearly a work of fiction, even though some readers believed Tolstoy actually murdered his own wife, and is still usually included in new translations of the author’s short stories. Yet, Lindsay Kramer finds a link that binds the two: both works feature narrators whose madness “betrays a […] critique of the hypocrisy and falsity of Russian society.” Through his central characters Tolstoy envisions this world as “seriously detrimental to human health and interaction,” according to Lindsay. Further, Tolstoy’s decision to frame both tales, albeit in different ways, provides a context that transforms these “social outcasts” into “enlightened” figures who try to “reconcile a life of faith” with the banality they witness about them. I have read thousands of essays for the “Madness, Murder, and Mayhem” course for which Lindsay wrote “Social Consciousness in Madness.” Very few have so closely adhered to the spirit of the title and subject matter of my class; none are better conceived and executed than Lindsay’s. Enjoy it.

— Associate Professor of Russian John Bartle

In his theoretical work What is Art?, Leo Tolstoy asserts that the goal of “good” art should be to uplift society and promote the brotherhood of man (145). He calls it “a means of union among men…indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity” (51-2). In much of Tolstoy’s later short fiction, pieces he similarly wrote post-conversion, the main characters undergo psychological transformations as they confront certain ills in their societies. But Tolstoy does not present purely didactic narratives in which the reader might find in the protagonist a simple model for his or her own moral attitudes and conduct. In “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “The Memoirs of a Madman,” the main characters border on, or purportedly fully embrace, the insane, and by the end of both stories have become, • • •

in many ways, social outcasts. They seem to make discoveries about the world to which others are ignorant, yet their seeming madness threatens to challenge the reliability of their claims and distances them from most other people within the worlds of the stories. However, their very madness, rather than discrediting their characters, betrays a deeper critique of the hypocrisy and falsity of Russian society. Much of “The Kreutzer Sonata” casts doubt on Pozdnyshev’s presumably reformed character. As early as the opening frame, Tolstoy begins to indicate that something is unnatural, or even unhealthy, about him. The narrator first describes Pozdnyshev as a “nervous” man “who kept himself apart” (135, 134). He explains that his “movements were abrupt and his unusually glitter-

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ing eyes moved rapidly from one object to another” (134). Pozdnyshev is not just socially awkward or uncomfortable; he sounds paranoid. During the train ride, he “carefully avoided…entering into any conversation with his fellow passengers” in the same way that he tries to avoid eye contact, and, when forced, he responds with “short and abrupt answers” to anyone who addresses him (135). Tolstoy hints that Pozdnyshev’s past has left some permanently damaging mark upon him. When Pozdnyshev does voluntarily join in the conversation, the narrator reports that “his face was red and a muscle twitched in his cheek” (139). In one moment, he is avoidant and remote, actively resistant to interaction, and in the next feverishly excited, emitting what comes to be a characteristic, and rather compulsive, “peculiar sound,” somewhere between “a broken laugh” and a “sob” (140, 139). All descriptions point to the image of a man who is, unsettlingly, unstable—not a man repentant, reformed, and at peace with himself. And these paranoid tendencies become markedly more noticeable throughout the course of the narrative, as Pozdnyshev recounts how he came to murder his wife. Even though he is acquitted for his wife’s murder, he does not maintain custody of his children and admits to the narrator, “You know I’m a sort of lunatic…I’m a ruin, a cripple” (162); and yet it is just this “cripple,” this madman, that claims he “know[s] what others are far from knowing” (162), who has “seen all the horror of what is” (143). Without the story’s frame, the reader might perceive Pozdnyshev as a once volatile man who, after committing a terrible act of violence, finds himself profoundly remorseful and quite literally sees the error of his ways. He is remorseful, certainly, but the frame of the story, the train ride with the narrator, shows that he has not recovered; he is still deeply troubled. With the frame, Tolstoy portrays Pozdnyshev as at once enlightened and broken—though broken in a way that no authority has recognized. He is not in prison, and he is free to travel. He’s mostly been forgotten, and this more than anything may be the source of his “madness.” For most of the story, the only one listening to Pozdnyshev is the narrator, and at the story’s end, he is the only other character from the opening scene to remain present. What seems to bother Pozdnyshev the most is that no one seems to acknowledge this evil and depravity that he has come to believe pervades Russian society: a patriarchal system that permits, if not encourages, male lewdness and female sexual vanity, undermining all later relations supposedly built on “love.” Even the narrator, who remains sympathetic to Pozdnyshev, is little more than a passive audience. Pozdnyshev believes his children “are living and growing up just like savages as everybody else around them,” but there is nothing he can do, for “they won’t let [him] have them and won’t trust [him]” (162). And the problem is not ignorance so much as people’s natural stubbornness regarding anything that points to their own flaws: “It’s easy to find out how much iron and other metal there is in the sun and the stars, but anything that exposes our swinishness is difficult, terribly difficult!” (162-3). Towards the end of the story, Pozdnyshev’s frustration and cyni• • •

cism transform into despair, for it seems that, perhaps, no one can understand without having transgressed the way he has. Looking on his wife’s death, he cries, “He who has not lived through it cannot understand…Ugh!” (194). Pozdnyshev even asks the narrator whether he is sure he wants to hear the story, and when he finally tells it, he finds—to his near devastation—that it still does not seem to matter. He and the narrator part ways, and Pozdnyshev is left alone. Although Tolstoy’s “The Memoirs of a Madman” does not begin with a frame, exactly, the narrative possesses a retrospective structure, moving backwards in time through the narrator’s life to explain how the narrator has gotten to the particular point at which the text begins; it is this structural ‘frame’ that, like the one in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” seems to complicate the protagonist’s position. The story begins with a date and the statement that on this particular day, the narrator has gone before the Provincial Government Board to be psychologically evaluated. The narrator tells the reader that the board has deemed him sane, though he maintains that “I myself know that I am mad” (303). The narrator then launches into an account of when he first began to recognize the development of his madness, tracing back to brief episodes when he was a young boy up to the stronger, and continual, manifestation of madness in his adult life. He introduces the final scene of the story by explaining that his “utter madness,” his real or most complete madness, “began later…by [his] going to church” (313), and it is this very episode that results in the narrator’s revelation. After he receives the Eucharist, he becomes aware of a group of beggars at the church’s exit, and it occurs to him “that this ought not to be, and not only ought not to be, but in reality was not” (313). Though he does not say so, the narrator is responding to what he recognizes as the hypocrisy of Orthodox Christianity, of the organized church. This is a faith that calls for charity, that professes love for the sinners as well as the saints and values modesty over material pride, and yet here, at the church service, the beggars are left at the exit. The narrator feels “touched” while sitting through the service, but it is when he sees these beggars that the falsity of its show becomes apparent (313). The awareness leads him to the recognition that “there was no longer the former [death] tearing asunder within” him, and he “no longer feared anything” (313). Tolstoy depicts the moment as a transformative epiphany, as the narrator asserts that “then the light fully illuminated me and I became what I now am”—but this “what,” for the narrator, is a madman (313). Irina Reyfman notes that, as the narrator “is self-aware”—and is “never…actually out of touch with reality” (331-2)—“the fact of his madness becomes suspect” (330). His madness is purely self-identified, and it arises out of the narrator’s belief that “true faith and insanity are the same” (Reyfman 332). The sentiment is not wholly dissimilar from that at the end of “The Kreutzer Sonata,” when all Pozdnyshev can do is cover his face and mutter, “forgive me” (195). There is the sense, in both texts, that the rehabilitated or converted societies that the protagonists envision are not quite rational or are not (or at least

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aren’t yet) attainable. Thus, the narrator’s madness in “Memoirs” speaks less to his psychological stability than it does to his view of Russian society. Although the narrator, upon experiencing this spiritual revelation, gives away all the money he is currently carrying and appears to leave the church happily “on foot talking with the peasants” (313), he still believes that such action is somehow irrational. He has found truth—realizing that this incident with the beggars “not only ought not to be, but in reality was not” (313)— but it is “mad.” And he tries his “utmost to restrain” himself at the meeting before the Board because he wants to bring change to society and therefore does not want to be sent to the “lunatic asylum” where he would be “prevent[ed]…from doing [his] mad work” (303, my emphasis). Despite the narrator’s hopefulness and determination, this contradiction remains unresolved, belying a deeper, unarticulated anxiety of whether this type of reform is ultimately realistic. In effect, neither of Tolstoy’s protagonists represents a model of conversion for other characters, or for readers. Instead, they reflect profound psychological conflicts in confronting a society they see as severely flawed and either unwilling or unable to embrace change—a society that is, in fact, seriously detrimental to human health and interaction but that the characters must live in, nevertheless. The two texts thus reassert Tolstoy’s belief in the imperative of art to seek after and encourage society’s betterment, in order to actualize a world in which full brotherly unity is possible. The protagonists’ troubles perhaps emulate Tolstoy’s own frustration with being yet “misunderstood” and his “continuing unease” in trying to reconcile a life of faith with the status quo (Reyfman 335, 338). Works Cited Reyfman, Irina. “Tolstoy and Gogol: ‘Notes of a Madman.’” From Petersburg to Bloomington: Essays in Honor of Nina Perlina. Ed. John Bartle, Michael C. Finke, and Vadim Liapunov. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2012. 329-339. Print. Indiana Slavic Studies 18 (2012). Tolstoy, Lev. “The Kreutzer Sonata.” Tolstoy’s Short Ficiton. 2nd ed. Ed. and trans. Michael R. Katz. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. 134195. Print. “The Memoirs of a Madman.” Tolstoy’s Short Ficiton. 2nd ed. Ed. and trans. Michael R. Katz. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. 303-313. Print. What is Art?. 1896. Trans. Aylmer Maude. Indianapolis, IN: Hack ett Publishing Company, 1996. Print.

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Apocalypse and Minority Falsification: re-appropriation of the Zombie Symbol Evan Van Tassel ’13

Evan wrote “Apocalypse and Minority Falsification” to fulfill his coursework requirements for the Comparative Literature Senior Seminar on Apocalypse. Evan’s essay arose in response to class discussions about the zombie’s end time presence in contemporary U.S. horror films like The Last Man on Earth. Beautifully written and thoughtfully argued, Evan’s paper extends and critiques Kyle Bishop Williams’s discussion of Black Power, white hegemony, and zombies in Hollywood films. Van Tassell’s incisive analysis demands that Black voices like Ishmael Reed’s in his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo necessarily participate in discussions about their own Black cultural and literary heritages. Van Tassell’s work is inspiring for it reminds us all that during a time when identity politics and calls to defend the Other are all the rage, the voices of subalterns must speak. Voices of Color must be empowered, not misappropriated.

— Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Anjela Mescall

The zombie has been a staple of American horror and apocalyptic culture since its introduction from Haiti into mainstream consciousness in the 1930’s. As Kyle William Bishop demonstrates in his 2010 text on the zombie cultural phenomenon, American Zombie Gothic, the undead creature has been employed by various American artists in the second half of the twentieth century to stimulate discussion of social issues related to race, class, and societal fears. Bishop’s overview, however, fails to consider the continued meaning of the zombie for those minority groups who claim its religious antecedent as part of their own history, an oversight which itself embodies the blatant appropriation of the zombie by American culture. In order to better understand the zombie’s place in today’s media, we must look to seminal texts by black writers who attempt to make sense • • •

of their own religious symbols, now so often misrepresented. Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, one of the most famous such texts, offers an effective foil to contemporary zombie depictions in American media and to Bishop’s text today. Mumbo Jumbo reflects a desire by some African Americans to re-appropriate the zombie myth, succeeds in reintegrating voodoo history into a new minority cultural identity, and, in doing so, explores the idea of cultural apocalypse. Historical Roots Our exploration of the zombie symbol and its contextual importance will benefit from an overview of its historical inception, and Bishop and others have provided ample research on 19th and early-20th century voodooism. According to Bish-

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op’s quotation of anthropologist Alfred Métraux, voodoo is “a conglomeration of beliefs and rites of African origin, which, having been closely mixed with Catholic practice, has come to be the religion of the greater part of the peasants and the urban proletariat of the black republic of Haiti” (Bishop 45). The resulting voodoo religion, which includes beliefs in a pantheon of gods known as loas, came to define the Haitian native population’s spiritual life. Voodooists did believe in the reanimation of corpses by bokor, although these were a smaller subgroup of witch doctor healers (houngan) who employed evil magic and thus represented a dark underside of the religious culture (Davis 47). As Bishop notes in his history of the zombie’s roots in Haitian voodooism, racist representations of voodoo in 1930s films concentrated primarily on the “savage” practices of cannibalism and zombiism, marking Haitians in general (and especially the black peasantry) as dangerous Others. Such popular films as Victor Halperin’s 1932 White Zombie introduced houngan as horrific and presented the terrifying “risk that the white protagonists—especially the female protagonists—might be turned into zombies (i.e., slaves) themselves” (Bishop 66). Thus the zombie became a manifestation of fears of white domination by indigenous peoples (or, rather, fears of a reversal of the traditional master-slave relationship). Bishop goes on to describe the zombie’s rise to prominence as a tool of social metaphor in 1960s America. While earlier representations of the zombie focused on (often racist) fears associated with slavery, he says, “the ‘new’ zombies of the late 1960s and beyond work as uncanny representations of other repressed societal fears and insecurities, such as the dominance of the white patriarchy, the misogynistic treatment of women, …” (Bishop 95). Filmmakers like George A. Romero in his Night of the Living Dead (1968) demonstrated the potential of zombies as horror movie villains: they could embody our cultural anxieties, reflect base desires in us, and raise issues of autonomy and personal responsibility. By the end of the twentieth century, zombies had been portrayed in film as everything from meaningless evil hordes to satires of Western consumers to sympathetic and pitiable lost souls. Long since removed from its roots as a mindless voodoo slave creation, the zombie came to be an important cultural symbol in its own right—instilled with its own agency and purpose, just as the zombies in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead had been instilled with a hunger for blood. The above exploration of the zombie symbol as presented in American films and outlined by Bishop is helpful in tracing the zombie’s , but it remains conspicuously incomplete without some consideration of present-day voodooism. Romero’s zombies aren’t reflective of any actual 1960s voodoo culture, and Bishop makes no mention at all of the responses to zombie representations by believers in voodooism or by their descendants in the United States. This lack may well be forgivable, considering the relatively small number of voodoo practitioners and the large influence of Hollywood, which might drown out minority • • •

criticism. Nevertheless, voodooism continues to exist in both Haiti and in America today, and it seems unreasonable to assume that American pop culture’s appropriation of the zombie myth goes unnoticed and uncontested as fair treatment of a legitimate spiritual heritage. It seems that American popular culture fails to recognize this appropriation of voodoo imagery. Even Bishop’s text, in tracing the history of the zombie, is written seemingly without responsibility to the still-present culture that supplied its own main character. This borrowing of the zombie symbol has somewhat disturbing implications: the Hollywood movie industry and American academia, if used as stand-ins for dominant white society, may be seen as the metaphorical bokors who are employing the zombie image itself as mindless slave labor for their own purposes—notwithstanding that those purposes have, at times, included explorations of racial oppression. The zombie image, like the white protagonists in White Zombie, has been stolen from its homeland and forced to act as a tool for American social criticism, stripped of its “old life” and sent to work. The zombie is thus a stolen artifact, used by mainstream (white) American culture without regard to its actual meaning for believers in voodooism. Mumbo Jumbo and the Task of Re-Appropriation The black American novelist and essayist Ishmael Reed, in his 1972 Mumbo Jumbo, explores issues of cultural ownership in relation to the larger issues of creative repression and community identity. Reed presents a story of (seemingly) historical fiction that not only challenges the Western white establishment’s oppression of voodoo culture but also acts as a a constructive endeavor in itself, legitimizing voodooism and minority movements in general and offering a lens through which to view minority oppression as a holocaust of meaning. Released in the wake of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and in the midst of the first zombie cultural boom as described by Bishop, Mumbo Jumbo can be seen as a product of and a response to this new era of zombie appropriation (14). The novel’s title alone refers to appropriation of black culture: the phrase “mumbo jumbo” is today used humorously to denote nonsensical speech despite its original Mandingo meaning (noted in the book’s first pages) of a “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away” (Reed, 7). It is not coincidental that Reed, having chosen this title, intends to address offenses against black religious beliefs and in his own way “put those spirits to rest”. This goal embodies a very different mindset than is found in Bishop’s text, where the question of appropriation is never seriously raised. The main action of Mumbo Jumbo takes place in 1920s Harlem and revolves around a voodoo houngan named PaPa LaBas and the outbreak of an amorphous cultural movement (specifically jazz and ragtime music) called “Jes Grew”. Jes Grew is labeled an epidemic by the mysterious Wallflower Order, a secret society of monotheists called Atonists whose goal is to preserve

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white Western authority. Supporters of Jes Grew seek a mythical Black Text that would act as their holy book (a metaphorical holy book for all minority cultures, including voodooism). In order to stop the spread of Jes Grew, the Wallflower Order begins a secret war in Haiti—the voodoo world center where the epidemic originated—and seeks to create a Talking Android, a member of the black community who could be brainwashed into undermining the movement from inside the community itself. Meanwhile, a militant black group known as the Mu’tafikah robs American and European museums of native artifacts and returns them to their countries of origin, usually in Africa. The novel includes fictionalizations of real-life characters and makes reference to many historical events, thus making it a conglomeration of history, conspiracy theory, and spiritual text. It is not difficult to conclude that the reclamation of cultural artifacts plays a major role in Mumbo Jumbo, and as we will see, the final target for Reed’s re-appropriation is the zombie itself. But evidence of repossession appears in the text before the zombie image is ever mentioned. The side-plot of the Mu’tafikah, whose only goal is to return stolen artwork to its non-Western homes, begins on page 15 and continues throughout the novel. It tells the story of, in a general sense, the re-appropriation of artwork to minority communities. Of note, however, is the fact that the Mu’tafikah are natives to the Western societies from which they are stealing: “Moving swiftly about Europe with the aid of sympathetic white students and intellectuals (yet unaffected by 1 of America’s deadlier and more ravaging germs: racism),” the narrator describes the Mu’tafikah, “they reap a harvest of their countrymen’s stolen work” [my emphasis] (Reed 83). This activism, it is highlighted, is taking place within a country by its own citizens on behalf of faraway lands. And although the Mu’tafikah’s re-appropriations aren’t concerned with voodoo artifacts in particular, they set up a storyline in which minorities are standing up for the cultural ownership of fellow minority groups. We will see this sense of collaboration again when Reed introduces voodoo imagery into the story. The Mu’tafikah, then, act as a general framework for the kind of re-appropriation that the main plotline will attempt for voodooism and the zombie. For Reed, it is important that this re-appropriation be completed by minority cultures themselves. We note the distrust of white involvement in the effort, even when it is well-intended: the Mu’tafikah are slaughtered when a white member of the group, Thor (whose name is perhaps too conspicuously reminiscent of white cultural heritage), is convinced by a corrupt policemen that he is wrong to betray his Western brethren. The policeman taunts Thor: “So you’d just say why bother about a civilization that is in need of young men? So you’d just fink out upon our glorious Western civilization; you would say why bother putting it back in stock?” Then, about the Mu’tafikah, “Them loafers, ne’er-do-wells, nihilists throwing pineapples at us. Look son” (113). Thor is convinced, leading to the violent deaths of many of his friends at the hands of the dirty police. This • • •

disturbing development, occurring soon after some Mu’tafikah members question Thor’s loyalty, seems to suggest that white sympathizers cannot be trusted with the actual act of re-appropriation. Thus a black voice is necessary to enact the kind of work that Reed is discussing. White representations (of zombies, for example), even if they intend to discuss race relations as Romero’s does, are doomed to undermine re-appropriation efforts by the authentic “owners” of cultural symbols. It is then left up to Reed, as a black American, to reclaim voodoo imagery (in general) and zombie imagery (in particular) for his community. Reclaiming the Zombie Symbol Having introduced the idea of cultural re-appropriation, Reed now embarks upon it himself, critiquing mainstream uses of the zombie and reclaiming it as an important voodoo religious artifact. As a voodoo houngan, Reed’s protagonist PaPa LaBas is of course one source of voodoo imagery in the novel—he leads a voodooist church, for example, and appears to keep a sort of shelter for loas, whom he must feed regularly to appease. The most striking voodoo image, however, is employed not by LaBas but by the Wallflower Order in its attempts, ironically, to stifle minority culture and the Jes Grew epidemic. In one of the few scenes featuring a mysterious leader of the Order at the society’s headquarters, it is revealed that the Order makes use of literal robot slaves who do their every bidding: “Various wooden, metallic, and plastic figures shaped like human beings, pet zombies and creatures ... speak to 1 another in code. Gibberish” (63). The group plans to apply this same idea to a human, reducing a black American to a mindless slave who can then discredit Jes Grew. This slave, officially named the Talking Android, is described as a “pet zombie [the Order] could use any way [it] wanted” (139). The use of the term “zombie” here is obviously deliberate, and it takes little imagination to see the parallels between Mumbo Jumbo and early zombie horror films: in films like the aforementioned White Zombie, dark magic bokors are shown to create zombies from black peasants, and the truly terrifying threat is that a member of the white community might be made a zombie as well, reversing the master-slave racial dichotomy. Here, we see the same scenario played out with opposite races: the pro-white Wallflower order, a mysterious religious cult, uses techno-zombies to do its bidding, and now plans to make a zombie (“android”) out of a black man, thus re-establishing the previous slave system. Reed has chosen to incorporate technological advancements into the story to emphasize the power of the Order, but the uses of the slave symbol, whether it is revealed as a zombie or a “robot”, remain identical. The decision to convert the zombie into a robot might even reflect the impossibility of true re-appropriation, a recognition that the zombie has been forever altered through its mainstream uses into something that is deemed more “modern” and even less human than its antecedent.

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And so, Reed’s satire and commentary is two-fold. First, he is calling attention to the Wallflower Order’s (that is, all of Western society’s) appropriation of the zombie for its own use. The Talking Android acts as an appropriate metaphor for the zombie as a symbol, and so its takeover by the Order reflects American culture’s use of the voodoo image for its own entertainment and critical pursuits. Consider Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, perhaps the most famous American zombie movie, in which the monstrous zombie becomes a metaphor for white American fears. “Approaching Romero’s first film from a psychoanalytic and culturally critical viewpoint,” Bishop says in American Zombie Gothic, “reveals the movie to be a devastating criticism of 1960s culture” (127). Both Romero’s use of the zombie and Bishop’s interpretations are just the sorts of takeovers that Reed is targeting: in Night of the Living Dead, the zombie symbol itself, like the Talking Android, has been reduced to a trope, stripped of its former significance (its “agency”, we may say) as a cultural artifact. Second, Reed is simultaneously re-appropriating the symbol by using it to make such a point. His employment of the zombie symbol as a way of exploring it marks a change in the zombie’s cultural history: for perhaps the first time, it is being portrayed in American culture from the point of view of the voodooist himself. Here we see the Mu’tafikah’s need for black membership firsthand: it is not simply Reed’s message that is important, but also the fact that it is being written by a black man, effectively reclaiming it for the black minority. Reed is telling a familiar story (even if the roles have been reversed), but it is the action of telling it from a black perspective that is important. And so, Mumbo Jumbo acts as a counterpoint to modern zombie representations as seen in Romero’s film and Bishop’s critical text. Where Night of the Living Dead only uses the zombie to discuss white fears in the 1960s and American Zombie Gothic only describes the zombie’s place in early Haitian culture, Reed’s novel explores the symbol’s continued influence on minority culture in America, marking a departure from the “traditional” mainstream use of the zombie while simultaneously reclaiming it for his community. Mumbo Jumbo is a way of fighting back against dominant (white) American society. “The very process of appropriation,” James C. Scott explains in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance, “unavoidably entails systematic social relations of subordination that impose indignities of one kind of another on the weak. These indignities are the seedbed of the anger, indignation, frustration, and swallowed bile that nurture the hidden transcript” (111). And while Scott is only considering subtly defiant expressions by subordinate groups, we could also apply the term “hidden transcript” to Reed’s zombie message, which, although expressed publicly, could be overlooked or misunderstood by readers with no knowledge of voodoo history. The indignities of zombie appropriation, which indicate a domination of voodoo culture, are what lead Reed to his “transcript” of re-appropriation. • • •

Validation of Minority Cultures PaPa LaBas’s success in thwarting the Wallflower Order marks not only an effective critique of mainstream appropriation of the zombie but also a legitimization of voodooism in general, paralleling the many movements in 1970s America that sought recognition of minority groups. LaBas is not simply a member of the black community but actually a houngan, and so his victory can be seen as a victory for the religion he represents. Reed does not mean to say that the Christianity of the Wallflower Order has been defeated by voodooism; it will continue to live on. He is also not suggesting that voodooism is the only viable religion; one need only consider the respectful treatment of the eccentric character Abdul Hamid’s Muslim faith to see that the aim is not religious dominance (Reed 40). Rather, LaBas’s success vindicates voodooism, allowing it to be accepted (hopefully) as a legitimate religion. In a conversation with Hamid concerning Islam’s and Christianity’s monotheism, LaBas ponders, “where does that leave the ancient Vodun [voodoo] aesthetic: pantheistic, becoming, 1 which bountifully permits 1000s of spirits ... So many it would take a book larger than the Koran and the Bible, the Tibetan Book of the Dead ... and still room would have to be made for more.” He is joined in by his friend Black Herman: “Granted that there are as many charlatans in our fields as in yours” (35). By drawing comparisons between voodooism and mainstream religions (citing their holy books and the vulnerability of each to corruption), Reed is elevating voodooism to a status worthy of equality with Islam and Christianity, although he does maintain that these monotheistic faiths can be dangerous. Mono- and pantheistic religions are fundamentally different, and he wants us simply to respect all options—none are objectively “correct” and none are flawless. Published in 1972, this message could be seen as a contribution to contemporary discussions of equality by the Black Panther Party, feminist and gay rights groups, and anti-war organizations. This validation seems to address some issues of cultural misrepresentation that Reed brings up throughout the novel. It is clear from the text, firstly, that Americans tend to have false views of Haitian voodoo. “Western man,” a Mu’tafikah named Berbelang says, “doesn’t know the difference between a houngan and a bokor. He once knew this difference but the knowledge was lost when the Atonists crushed the opposition” (91). Reed’s claim is that voodooism has been generally demonized by the Atonists (and more specifically by the Wallflower Order), who purged from the public mind any distinction between radical fringe practices (bokors who create zombies) and the common religion (houngan healers like LaBas). Critique of this generalization is warranted, as George Romero and Kyle William Bishop make the same mistake in their respective texts. Romero actually removes all reference to a voodooist source behind zombies, instead depicting them merely as horrific and bloodthirsty monsters. Bishop, in his history of the zombie films, does note

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that early American films generalized all Haitians into savages. However, his only mention of the word houngan is in reference to a ritual scene in the 1957 film I Walked with a Zombie, which presents the rituals as savage and frightening; otherwise he uses the term bokor, failing to differentiate between “dark magic” practices and common voodooism (Bishop 88). As a “Western man”, William Bishop (albeit unknowingly) implies that voodooism is indeed savage and overgeneralizes the religion, just as Romero and all of Hollywood have done since the 1930s. Reed’s treatment of voodooism hopes to counteract these misrepresentations by providing a realistic view of the religion. Reed goes on to suggest that American society as a whole has been founded on this misrepresentation of minority cultures. In a conversation with LaBas and Herman, an ally asks:

however, there are as many signs that re-appropriation is not always simple. When LaBas tries to rid a local girl of a loa who is possessing her, he fails despite his mastery of healing techniques. Afterward, Herman explains: You ought to relax. That’s our genius here in America. We were dumped here on our own without the Book to tell us who the loas are, what we call spirits were. We made up our own ... I think we’ve done all right. The Blues, Ragtime ... I’ll bet later on in the 50s and 60s and 70s we will have some artists and creators who will teach Africa and South America some new twists ... Doing The Work is not like taking inventory. Improvise some. Open up, PaPa. Stretch on out with It. (130)

What is the American fetish about highways? They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers. Because something is after them, Black Herman adds. But what is after them? They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress. We call it Haints [ghosts, lost souls]. Haints of their victims rising from the soil of Africa, South America, Asia. [my emphasis] (135)

The zombie imagery here is of course unmistakeable, and Reed is playing with it as a metaphor for a haunting of American values. The concept of manifest destiny, one can here argue, is entangled with the literal and figurative burying of minority culture. The “rising victim” is then that culture emerging to reclaim its artifacts as Reed himself does. The “rebirth” of buried subcultures is the “haunting” of the white majority. This scathing critique of American society is punctuated by an attack on Hollywood specifically, calling to mind the most influential outlet of the zombie image. As one character reads a newspaper about war in Haiti, she thinks to herself: “What was this about doughboy zombies? The tabs were becoming outrageous; as if the scandals of Hollywood weren’t enough they were playing up this matter on Haiti” (53). The “scandals” of Hollywood, for Reed, are not simply tabloid gossip but are in fact the many misrepresentations of voodooism and all minorities found in media like Romero’s film. Now, in Reed’s fictional world, these appropriations and falsifications are not enough; Haiti is being literally attacked by the Wallflower Order. The victory of voodooism at the novel’s conclusion not only validates it as a religion but also offers a counter to misrepresentations of voodoo in American society. “We must purge the bokor from you,” Berbelang tells Thor. “We must teach you the difference between a healer ... and a duppy that returns from the grave and causes mischief. We must infuse you with the mysteries that Jes Grew implies” (91). Here, Jes Grew comes to represent a recognition of minority cultural history, reminding us that these injustices can perhaps be reversed—or at least that minority beliefs live on outside of skewed Hollywood representations. The Need for Community Identity and Understanding For all of these cultural “victories” of voodooism, • • •

Herman believes that LaBas’s failure to help the possessed girl is a result of his reliance on his Haitian voodooism, implying that he is erring by remaining too inflexible to new ideas and must redefine his role in the community. James Scott speaks of these cultural growing pains: “Solidarity among subordinates, if it is achieved at all, is thus achieved, paradoxically, only by means of a degree of conflict. Certain forms of social strife, far from constituting evidence of disunity and weakness, may well be the signs of an active, aggressive social surveillance that preserves unity” (131). We will see that LaBas’s inflexibility provides an opportunity for union between disparate minority cultures, leading to a new identity formed out of collaboration. This need to redefine cultural identity underlies a discrepancy found when considering Mumbo Jumbo as a reversal of the early American zombie movies. LaBas, as our protagonist, is of course the hero of the zombie story, seeking out evidence and foiling the Wallflower Order’s plans of zombifying a member of his community. This resembles the traditional hero role in White Zombie, where the white man must save one of his own from zombification. But here we find an important difference: where the protagonists of White Zombie do not identify with Haitian culture and ultimately return home having preserved their humanity, the protagonists of Mumbo Jumbo in fact claim America as their home. They have historical ties to Haiti and Africa, of course, but the black population in Reed’s 1920s Harlem certainly considers itself American, concerning itself with political affairs and showing no signs of any desire to return to its various ancestral homelands (the Mu’tafikah wish to return artwork to its original home, but, as noted, work as countrymen within Western communities). LaBas has no other faraway land to which he will return and thus has no way to distance himself from the “savagery” of the Wallflower Order; he must, even after the events of the novel, continue to live in a country where he knows such savagery exists. According to Scott, the existence of a black American subculture offers opportunities for constructive dissent: “Social spaces of relative autonomy do not merely provide a neutral medium in which practical and discursive negations may grow … they serve to discipline as well as to formulate patterns of resistance” (119). This development thus facilitates the creation of a new cultural identity that re-appropriates cultural symbols and is more resilient to future injustices.

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LaBas, rather than relying strictly on his voodoo roots, must reconcile his beliefs with the cultural products of the present age. Reed is re-appropriating the zombie for black Americans, yes; but that doesn’t mean that a return to voodooism in isolation is his goal. The zombie has been altered by its uses in American media, and now Jes Grew is emerging throughout the country. It is not possible, like it is for the protagonists in White Zombie, to forget about these issues and leave forever. Instead, a new identity must emerge, one which joins respected voodoo history with the potential of future generations. Culture is not static, as LaBas has learned by the end of the novel, and all cultural heritages must come together in order to move forward into an age of minority understanding. Scott describes the formation of a singular subculture out of several disparate subordinate groups. “Once this occurs, of course, the distinctive subculture itself becomes a powerful force for social unity as all subsequent experiences are mediated by a shared way of looking at the world” (135). The idea of this “universal identity” is revealed most clearly in Mumbo Jumbo during a fictionalized history of Western culture given by LaBas in order to prove the Wallflower Order’s guilt. In this history, which makes up a considerable portion of the novel, the story of the Atonists is told, beginning with Egyptian worshipers of the god Set. Set comes to represent oppressive religions and is portrayed in opposition to his brother Osiris, the much-beloved dancing god, whom he murders. The historical account reveals that Osiris is responsible for the creation of a secret Text of dances (the same Black Text sought by Jes Grew) and that this Text was misunderstood by Set’s followers and ultimately fell into the hands of the Knights Templar (Reed 161-191). In including this history, Reed is drawing a relationship between Egyptian Osiris-followers and Harlem’s black community, establishing a common minority heritage that reaches back thousands of years. Berbelang’s description of Faust as a Western bokor earlier in the novel further emphasizes this universal community through a mixing of once-regional terms (90). Together, these two comparisons suggest that the struggle for minority recognition is not a separate fight for every culture but a larger, ancient goal of all mankind. As Scott describes, the mingling of these subordinate cultures creates a new unified community. For LaBas, this means that voodooism cannot be his only source of philosophy and power: he must also trust in the Jes Grew movement, wherever it leads. Voodooism and the zombie can be reclaimed, but they must continue to develop as parts of this new identity. It appears that LaBas’s telling of the world history near the end of the novel reflects his recognition of this need for cultural integration. At the novel’s conclusion, the Black Text has been destroyed and Jes Grew is waning despite the defeat of the Wallflower agents. But LaBas now knows better than to think that this is the end: “They will try to depress Jes Grew but it will only • • •

spring back and prosper. We will make our own future Text. A future generation of young artists will accomplish this ... What do you say we all go down to the restaurant and have a sandwich?” (204). LaBas, aware that his voodoo heritage is part of a larger American minority identity, finds comfort in the fact that his culture will live on in some new fashion, no longer believing that his traditional voodooism must be preserved. At least this time, the destruction of the Text does not lead to any cultural apocalypse, because the culture itself adapts and lives on. As Ken Cooper explains in his essay “The Whiteness of the Bomb”, Reed “avoids the simple platitude that history is cyclical—each generation is taught a culture’s rituals, and has the power to change or reject them” (Cooper 90). Voodooism has been changed, and it must continue to as it struggles for validation and acceptance. Likewise, Reed can re-appropriate the zombie, but it remains a part of American culture, and its uses in mainstream media cannot be ignored. Although uses of the zombie by Romero, Halperin, and others have been misrepresentative, they now contribute to the modern understanding of the symbol and must not be dismissed. Unlike Kyle William Bishop, whose treatment of the zombie only considers its strict uses by the American media and ignores its role as a fundamentally changed religious artifact, Reed recognizes the zombie’s need for true progress: it must move forward and gain acceptance as a legitimate piece of Haitian religious symbolism in the melting pot of modern culture, not retreat back into the individual heritage that produced it. Failure to adapt may lead to the extinction of whole cultural movements, a danger which is examined in the following section. The Apocalypse in Terms of Minority Misrepresentation Reed has effectively chastised American appropriation of the zombie symbol, reclaimed it for the black minority, and called for an integration of all beliefs into a larger minority identity that can fight oppression through subordinate unity (as described by Scott). But these endeavors are largely a set-up for his final task: to show that a failure to protect oppressed culture will lead to a figurative (and perhaps literal) apocalypse. In a revisionist take on 20th century history, Reed’s novel claims that the Wallflower Order is responsible for World War II and the 1929 Stock Market Crash and subsequent depression, both of which are “Crusade”-like measures taken to curb minority influence on Western culture (71). Fear of racial integration, then, leads to some of the most destructive moments in human history; Reed implies that these catastrophes could have been avoided if minority cultures had been accepted into the Western world. The argument may be more defendable as an explanation for the Holocaust and the outbreak of World War II than it is for the Great Depression, but Reed’s point is that cultural oppression leads to destruction. The argument continues with Berbelang’s description

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of Faust: “Soon [the Western man] will be able to annihilate 1000000s by pushing a button. I do not believe that a Yellow or Black hand will push this button but a robot-like descendent of Faust the quack will. The dreaded bokor, a humbug who doesn’t know when to stop” (91). This reference to atomic destruction speaks to the threat of nuclear war in Reed’s 1970s America. According to Cooper’s reading of Mumbo Jumbo, Reed “suggests that the bomb is itself a manifestation of conjuring by the dangerously messianic Judeo-Christian religion” (Cooper 90). Faust has become a bokor, an embodiment of only the dark sides of culture. The same could be said of Hollywood, which has also falsified voodooism as an evil savage religion. This falsification (or “conjuring”, to use Cooper’s term) has apocalyptic implications. We see this warning against falsification even more clearly during LaBas’s world history lesson. He explains that the Judeo-Christian figure Moses attempted to understand the ancient Text but lost sight of its true purpose, and when he finally tried to show it to the people, it destroyed them all: “Moses uttered The Work aloud. 1st there was silence. Then the people turned toward the Nile and they saw a huge mushroom cloud arise. A few minutes later, screaming of the most terrible kind came from that direction” (Reed 186). Set also misuses Osiris’s magic to try to please his people: “... being insufficiently trained the boker [sic] didn’t know what he was doing; he only knew Dirty Work and raised the temperature of Egypt to over 50,000 degrees resulting in something resembling an A-bomb explosion” (173). And so, we see a clear relationship drawn between false attempts to represent minority cultures and atomic destruction. On a figurative level, this atomic bomb will eradicate these cultures by removing their symbols from any authentic history; the zombie, for example, has come to occupy a specific space in the American cultural pantheon, and as a result it has lost its original meaning for voodooism (it is reduced, as it is in both Romero’s and Bishop’s texts, to a relic of a religion that is wrongly presumed lost). On a literal level, such falsification of other cultures can lead to distrust, hate, and the actual, real-life destruction of all humanity by nuclear weapons; wars like the Vietnam War, which was taking place when Reed was writing, are based on failures of understanding between cultures, have resulted in the annihilation of whole countries, and threaten to destroy the entire world. The collaboration of minority groups and the establishment of a universal community can protect minority cultures (and the whole world) from both of these forms of apocalypse by resisting falsification of cultural artifacts.

status as a cultural object. His novel stands as an appropriate foil to George A. Romero’s and Victor Halperin’s films and to Kyle William Bishop’s critical text, all of which demonstrate the zombie’s continued appropriation by the mainstream media. There is no sense, Reed says, in only considering past regional beliefs as Bishop does; instead, all cultures must come together and attempt to understand each other as dynamic entities in the present day. Cultural groups must fight to protect their own heritages and work to gain respect for their fellow minorities; they must stop mainstream culture from appropriating and destroying their symbols and traditions. Failure to do so has led to oppression throughout history and will continue to plague our society, even threatening to end it outright... and unlike the zombie itself, which always gets a second chance to rise from the grave, we might not be so lucky. Works Cited Bishop, Kyle William. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jeffer son, NC: McFarland &, 2010. Print. Cooper, Ken. “The Whiteness of the Bomb.” Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1995. N. pag. Print. Davis, Wade. The Serpent and the Rainbow. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Print. Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. Print. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Print. Many thanks to Professor Mescall and Arianne Bergman for general comments/feedback.

Conclusions This, ultimately, is Reed’s point: cultures must not be falsified, lest they be completely destroyed in their appropriations by other (i.e. Western) entities. Reed is doing his part by “rescuing” the zombie image from the hands of American popular culture, hoping to incorporate its historical roots into its present • • •

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We’re not out of the woods yet:

Explorations of trauma and the human connection to nature Arianne Bergman ’13

Arianne’s intriguing analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was written in the Fall of 2012. Her essay was originally penned as a final paper for Cplit 500, a senior seminar that explored contemporary American depictions of apocalypses both literal and metaphorical. Captivated by McCarthy’s emotionally moving descriptions of a father and son’s heart wrenching journey through countless dead natural landscapes, Arianne began to think about the need for more serious considerations of the novel in relation to the emerging field of nature studies. Departing from a critical framework based on James Berger’s idea that our post-modern world is already post-apocalyptic, Arianne brilliantly argues that McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic text reflects a key premise of nature studies: that we falsely alienate ourselves from nature, which we make worse by even using language like “nature” to express the non-human. She suggests that this traumatic split between the human and the non-human fuels our fascination with apocalyptic narratives. Written in clear, economic prose and argued convincingly, Arianne’s essay is a more than a term paper, but a call to action. We must seriously reflect on the consequences of our daily alienation from natural systems.

— Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Anjela Mescall

Life, or some semblance of it, after an apocalypse has become a prevalent and expanding theme in Western literature. Especially with the end of the Mayan calendar last December, visions of the apocalypse and what comes next have been flooding books, movies, comics – anything to express that fascination. But what if the end has already happened? In his text, After the End, James Berger addresses multiple ideas of the post-apocalypse, and provides a helpful framework for thinking about what comes, as the title hints, after the end. Citing the body of work from which he draws, Berger states that “the rhetorical gambit of much postmodern theory is that the “end,” or some end, has, in fact, already taken place, perhaps without our knowledge” (35). He implies that we’re already living in a post-apocalyptic society, but doesn’t say which • • •

apocalypse, how many, or how specific events might be affecting us. Berger does handle how we address such a situation, though – our trauma, resulting from an apocalypse which already happened, that we may or may not realize or understand yet, causes the apocalypse to manifest and haunt us in the stories we create to express that trauma, as in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road. I will be using this novel to illustrate and contextualize these ideas, since “more than bearing a message, the ghost is the message. Its very presence – its survival – is a sign pointing back toward a repressed or an unresolved traumatic event...the ghost is often a symptom not only of an individual crime but also of an unresolved social sickness that extends into the body politic of the

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present” (50). Berger is pointing to some social condition that does not make itself immediately known, but comes back through what he calls “ghosts”; apocalyptic narratives, like The Road, are one such type of ghost. Although Berger implies that characters are typically ghosts working within narratives, here it is the whole novel itself that bears and is the message to us as a society. In seeing the novel this way, as a subliminal indicator of our social conscious, we in fact see into our strained relationship with the natural world which seems to be so at odds with the man and the boy in the story. This novel proves specifically useful here because it, on one level, espouses our societal values – it is a tale of survival, and in America, “paramount value is placed on the figure and the testimony of the one who has experienced...What the survivor has survived is some trauma with cultural significance – some apocalypse” (Berger 47). Because the man and the boy, in their own ways, do survive an apocalypse, we treat them as credible and trust them for expressing and braving a trauma we’re not consciously sure we know. Apocalyptic texts centered on ideas of survival lend themselves especially well to an interpretation as ghosts because they tap into a deeper part of us, especially in mainstream Western culture, and especially in America – we live both after and during the apocalypse of separation from nature, and we created this situation entirely on our own, most notably in the Romantic period. Our alienation from natural systems and the natural world is a traumatic condition, and it is this that we struggle to express in the survival-based narratives of apocalypse that we create. They have become our way of dealing with that separation, and we read and write them in response to the negatives effects of that hidden trauma. Today, many of us take the idea of wilderness for granted, and assume that it has always existed as a concept and component of the human condition and of our relationship with our world, in much the way that it exists today. But American constructions of wilderness are complex and just that – constructed. The dichotomy of Man and Nature didn’t enter into the Western conscious until the Romantic period. In his article, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” William Cronon presents the term “wilderness” and the advent of such a psychological separation between humanity and the natural world, and takes care to point out the man-made nature of the split.1 Essentially, we have made an Other of something once part of us. The separation has led to a creation of hierarchy, which is one of its most destructive effects, as it can either prioritize man over nature and destroy through disregard, or it can devalue civilization and put Nature on a pedestal; neither notion is helpful or healthy to hold. “For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has

not fully infected the earth” (Cronon 69). The view that civilization, which necessarily implies humanity, exists only in opposition to nature and can do nothing but inevitably destroy it, is prevalent in the American mind, as Cronon establishes. This has deep roots in the idea of the frontier, and esteem for it. “This nostalgia for a passing frontier way of life inevitably implied ambivalence, if not downright hostility, toward modernity and all that it represented. If one saw the wild lands of the frontier as freer, truer, and more natural than other more modern places, then one was also inclined to see the cities and factories of urban-industrial civilization as confining, false, and artificial” (Cronon 77). There’s an opposition here that is has been expressed for the past couple centuries by this idea of frontier, a notion we can’t societally let go of or forsake. The novel is set in post-apocalyptic America, but its ultimate setting is frontier America. Cronon presents the frontier as a duality: on the one hand, “it is a savage world at the dawn of civilization, whose transformation represents the very beginning of the national historical epic.” On the other, “seen the bold landscape of frontier heroism, it is the place of youth and childhood, into which men escape by abandoning their pasts and entering a world of freedom where the constraints of civilization fade into memory” (79), and both of these inform and shape the novel. The world it portrays is harsh and success is based on a combination of willpower not to die, resourcefulness in bad situations, and sheer dumb luck. At the same time, it is an escape for the man, whether he knew he wanted reintegration and traumatic resolution or not, and our window into the world is largely guided by the innocent questions of a child who wants so badly to be heroic because it seems to him the right thing to do in this environment – he wants to help everyone he sees, even when it would be at his own expense,2 and is restrained from this (to his betterment) by the relic of the old world escaping into his, the man. Remembering nature as something innocent and pure and a space for heroism, which society soils by its very existence, precludes having a multidimensional relationship with either place, and creates a situation in which a person can only either live in a social setting, full of guilt for harming nature yet longing also to be part of it, or live in the woods and feel guilt for bringing humanity, therefore destruction, directly into nature. Creating nature reserves and launching wilderness conservation projects, going on safari tours or taking the family to Yellowstone – none of this serves to bridge the divide, because it is a purely mental one and cannot be solved by merely placing oneself temporarily in nature – it can only be solved by a change in thought, since “by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings... To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite

1 To summarize his argument in his own words, “Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation” (69). Cronon also outlines the change in meaning of the term from something akin to a wasteland to the modern usage, equivalent with terms such as “nature” and “wild,” adopted only within the last two centuries and indicating the shift in thought that took place.

2 This is manifest in his desire to save everyone they meet, ostensibly out of altruism. Of the people trapped in the cellar, he asks “They’re going to kill those people arent [sic] they? ...Why do they have to do that? ...And we couldnt [sic] help them because then they’d eat us too” (127) trying to understand why he can’t save them. Later he “looked like someone trying to feed a vulture broken in the road” (163), an image of hopeless and idealistic charity, when he insists that they feed the old man they pass, even though the man is thoroughly opposed to it.

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poles” (81). Holding either an overly positive view of nature or an overly negative view of civilization only reinforces that representation of both, and furthers the cycle of divide and hierarchy, longing for something we feel implicitly not a part of, and loathing for where we live and what we are. Since we cannot express or truly deal with these issues outside of the mental realm, we turn to ideas of fetish and trauma. “Eric Santner has described how narrative itself, the tool of working through, can function as a fetish object ‘consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place’...Telling the story of trauma in this case is not a method of working through but is itself a traumatic symptom” (Berger 27-28). Narrative as a fetish object provides a wildly convenient way to diagnose and analyze trauma, especially in cases, such as the one we’re discussing, where the victim is expressing trauma without being fully conscious of it. Arguably, McCarthy uses The Road, whether he is aware of this or not, to work through his own disconnect from nature, and it is narrative, not nature, that he fetishizes here. While narrative can be, as Berger says, “the tool of working through,” it is just as much a symptom of the original issue, and may not actually provide a framework to pull the victim out of a situation, merely responding to the trauma rather than truly moving beyond it. “Most of the time most of us would prefer to try to construct a narrative of working through...even though we cannot agree what such a narrative would be. And so our culture remains haunted by multitudes of ghosts, who are ourselves, the living symptoms of historical catastrophes, and we cannot determine how to respond to our traumatic histories” (Berger 52). By creating these post-traumatic narratives as ghosts, bearing the message, we are simultaneously creating ghosts of ourselves, representations of what happened but without any kind of real resolution or conclusion. We as readers and as society experience the novel as a ghost of McCarthy’s trauma, and therefore of our own as humans within the same culture, but we also ease our own distress in having our unregistered feelings articulated for us, that nature feels as if it’s something so far from us that the only way we could return to it is by destroying ourselves and turning the world into “the cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void...everything uncoupled from its shoring...sustained by a breath, trembling and brief ” (McCarthy 11). Discussing and quoting Ronald Granofsky, Lutz states that “ecological disaster...begets ecological trauma and... a ‘suicidal bent to humanity which does not bode well for its future’” (Lutz 9). These narratives serve the purpose of being an outlet for trauma and a way to gain insight on an unaddressed and unrecognized event. “Most important, the idea of trauma allows for an interpretation of cultural symptoms – of the growths, wounds, scars on a social body, and its compulsive, repeated actions” (Berger 26). Berger’s reading of Zizek allows us to use trauma as a tool to better understand ourselves and our societies. Narratives of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse neatly • • •

fit into what a post-traumatic narrative does, since “the study of a post-apocalyptic world is a study of symptoms and of representations that partly work through and partly act out the past that haunts them” (Berger Intro XV). Not only this, but apocalyptic and traumatic writings come from the same psychological place: A disaster occurs of overwhelming, disorienting magnitude, and yet the world continues. And so writers imagine another catastrophe that is absolutely conclusive, that will end this world. The initial disaster, which distorts and disorients – which, in a sense, is not an apocalypse in that it does not reveal – requires imagining a second disaster that is an apocalypse and thereby gives the first disaster retrospective apocalyptic status... Apocalyptic writing itself is a remainder, a symptom, an aftermath of some disorienting catastrophe. (6-7)

Interpreted this way, apocalyptic writing can actually be therapeutic to write or read, as it provides an outlet for envisioning an alternate scenario. Apocalypse in its truest sense provides the chance for revelation and renewal, two concepts which are not often possible in real-life traumatic situations. In constructing such narratives, the victim would then be able to re-envision the ending of a world, which he or she may feel they have already endured, but can re-imagine such an event imbued with purpose and reason that may seem lacking from what the victim suffered through originally. It is this that we are questing for when we create such narratives, and the traumatic divide from nature is no exception. To address this, though, we must look critically at what our relationship with nature even is in the first place. A common idea these days, worshiping nature as above civilization often becomes just that – a view of wilderness as connected to the divine or somehow more than this, ironically, earthly world. The waterfall in The Road illustrates this, in that it has kept going after civilization and humanity have faded out. It is also the waterfall and the redemptive, cleansing powers of water which are able to metaphorically wash nature clean of civilization: “they made camp by the river pool at the falls and washed the earth and ash from the morels” (McCarthy 40). The taint of civilization, represented by the ash3, is washed away by the enduring power of a nature that never stops. This is when the man and boy are some semblance of happy for the first time in the novel as well, which endorses the subliminal desire to wash away civilization in favor of the loftier and more noble idea of nature. These ideas of wilderness as more than man have deep roots in the Bible, though, from stories of Moses wandering in the wilderness to Adam and Eve being cast out into the wild. In Judeo-Christian tradition, wilderness “was a place to which one came only against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling” (Cronon 71). Despite these early negative associations, wilderness was nonetheless intimately connected with divinity – the wilderness nearly 3 I think it safe to assume that the apocalypse here was somehow manmade: “the clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions...the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass” (52). This sounds to me very much like some sort of military conflict, especially since it resolves into a world covered in ash that blocks out the sun, typical of how we imagine post-nuclear holocaust scenarios.

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tempted Moses into false worship, set the stage for Jesus to wrestle with Satan, and hid the female bearer of the Second Coming from the devil in Revelations – whatever the unfavorable causes may be for entering, it is a place one seems to leave with some renewed sense of Godliness, for having resisted or overcome some evil. It is this notion of overcoming that helps unite ideas of wilderness and apocalypse – both create the space for renewal through destruction and revelation. By the mid-1800s, nature came to be viewed as a holy place, in large part because this foundation was laid. “The possibility [of nature becoming sacred] had been present in wilderness even in the days when it had been a place of spiritual danger and moral temptation...in the wilderness the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between natural and supernatural, had always seemed less certain than elsewhere” (73). With a thinner veil between the worlds, then, which had great Biblical precedent, it’s easy to see how nature transitioned from a negatively spiritual place to a positively spiritual one, specifically through the idea of the sublime.4 This endowment of holiness, which exists in opposition to the grit and dirtiness inherent in Biblical interpretations of humanity (expressed by such concepts as original sin), furthered the divide between man and nature, and added a new element to the mix. The novel ends on this note, in its discussion of brook trout: “On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery” (McCarthy 287). After nearly three hundred pages of a desolate nature in ruins, McCarthy leaves us with this image of mystical and godly nature, but of even this as something lost. McCarthy is, rather explicitly, putting forward this loss of nature from humanity, this traumatic separation of ourselves from something both essential and implicitly beyond our true and full understanding. In deifying nature, we’ve also romanticized it. This is clear from the way we think about “getting back to nature” and living in the wild, often on the hunter-gatherer model.5 The novel imagines a return, albeit a dismal one, to this sort of lifestyle. The “bad guys” assume the role of hunter, capturing and eating their fellow

man as we see in the horrific cellar discovery. The “good guys” become gatherers, collecting fallen “hard and brown and shriveled” (120) apples and meticulously raiding houses and stores they pass, seeking every scrap of food, protection, and shelter. They are forced to always be hyper-aware of potential food sources to survive, and be able to spot “a small colony of [morels], shrunken, dried and wrinkled” (McCarthy 40) from just walking by a grove of dead trees. This split of the romanticized ideal of hunter-gatherer fuels predator-prey interactions between humans that directly mirror and evoke the wild nature we seek to re-inhabit. We romanticize childhood as well, and the boy is central to how we view man and nature in The Road, much of this stemming from “the importance Romantic writers place on human consciousness developing amidst physical nature” (Lutz 66). The boy was born after the apocalypse, so has never grown up in anything other than this idea of physical nature that Lutz references.6 Because of this, he understands and is a part of it in a way no one else can ever be, and we, as a society, envy him this, as both we and the Romantics “[valorize] childhood experience of nature... Childhood or the nostalgia for it are important points of departure for many environmental texts. If a sensitivity to nature is a precondition for enlightened ecological practice, then a childhood spent in contact with some form of nature is in turn a precondition for this sensitivity” (Lutz 69). This is why we read the boy as hopeful at the end – we, as readers, know that he’s learned how to “lie in the woods like a fawn” (McCarthy 118) and still go “running naked and leaping and screaming into the slow roll of the surf ” (McCarthy 218) in the ocean. He has learned how to embody nature and enjoy it, apocalypse notwithstanding, and his reconnection with nature in this way bridges that gap we feel as a society – he gives us hope that we, too, could someday perhaps do the same. Socially, morally, and spiritually, we have separated ourselves from the natural world that we are so intrinsic to, and that is so intrinsic to us. Any kind of divide that large within a society, especially one which manifests as a divide within each individual, must leave marks. We can think of such marks as the signs of the ideas of trauma already outlined. “Freud described how an overpowering event, unacceptable to consciousness, can be forgotten and yet return in the form of somatic symptoms or compulsive, re4 “Sublime landscapes were those rare places on earth where one had petitive behaviors” (Berger 22). Here, Berger is introducing Freud’s more chance than elsewhere to glimpse the face of God” (73). Cronon also notes theory that trauma remains with the victim and continues to affect that “the sublime was far from being a pleasurable experience” (73). Writers like them after the event itself is over, and alter how they move in the Muir and Thoreau played a large role in the development of this idea as it relates world. Beyond that, trauma is also something that is not experito nature. 5 Eustace Conway is a prime example of this being quite literally alive and enced until the traumatic event is over, so one is not aware of it well today – when I saw him speak a few years back, he told romantic stories of until then. As a society, we are at this point, because the trauma of life away from others in the wilderness, like wrestling a stag to death with his bare hands and making his own clothes from deer hide. However, “only people whose separation is ongoing – we are not and cannot be aware of it until relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for we remove that separation ideologically and get past the event. human life in nature” (80) because it’s actually incredibly difficult to live entirely Trauma can manifest, even physically, without the victim off the land, as any farmer will tell you. We idolize people like Conway because understanding what has happened: they fit into our romantic ideals of what life in the wild would be like, but forget that living in a meaningful relationship with the land means working with it, which includes more than just our impressions of what Native Americans must have done (ignoring, of course, that many tribes actually did farm). As the man and boy discover, living with nature is not always a picnic. • • •

6 Although such nature is a different concept for the boy and just about any living person, it is still ultimately the same concept under discussion here, especially in light of the interpretation of The Road as representative of the traumatic separation from nature.

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“character-building”? The logic of apocalypse is not far off:“In the post-apocalypse, desire and fear find their true objects; we see what we most want and most abhor. And these objects frequently are the same object” (Berger 12). Wilderness and apocalypse are creatures of contradiction and revelation, representing two ideas that seem in opposition but are necessary characteristics in our understanding of the terms, and claiming to lead us to look deeper at ourselves by showing us hidden levels we can’t access on our own. This quality lends both of them to traumatic expression, reaching an untapped level to non-invasively bring out the pulp through reflecting and Knowing this, we can work backwards from the created objects showing, rather than probing and potentially causing more damage. and find the original trauma by interpreting and contextualizing The man’s relationship to the woman express this most the fetishized objects, one such being apocalyptic narrative. This is clearly, as she is used to represent his relationship with nature as especially useful in cases like the American alienation from nawell. Most of his recollections of her are highly romantic, and ture, because it is not something we are totally conscious of, nor center around whatever part of nature he and the boy are currently it is something totally repressed – we are in that middle ground, in: in the forest, “his pale bride came to him out of a green and struggling to express something we are not sure we’re feeling, or leafy canopy. Her nipples pipeclayed and her rib bones painted what precisely it is that we’re experiencing and need to express in white. She wore a dress of gauze and her dark hair was carried the first place. Of course, apocalyptic writing necessarily deals with ideas up in combs of ivory, combs of shell. Her smile, her downturned eyes” (McCarthy 18); and on the beach, “he remembered waking of The End, but Berger offers a crucial insight into how exactly once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he’d it does so: “The narrative logic of apocalyptic writing insists that left steakbones from the night before...Lying under such a myriad the post-apocalypse precede the apocalypse. This is also the logic of stars...When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her of prophecy. The events envisioned have already occurred, have hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made as good as occurred. Once the prophecy is uttered, all the rest is the world just so and no different” (219). He remembers her most post-apocalypse. The mind of the writer, and of the believer, is in the context of nature, and in describing their moments together, already there, after the end” (6). The Road makes this even more talks as much of nature as of her, in the stars and the canopy and explicit, since the entire narrative takes place after the apocalypse, only hinting back to it and the times before but otherwise unaware the crabs. In these dreams and memories, she is his old ideas of naof them, expressing the man’s own traumatization. To express the ture, before he had to live in it, as something beautiful and romantic. After the apocalypse, when he is forced to daily confront the apocalypse, we must understand the apocalypse, so it has already realities of life totally in and with the natural world, his view shifts, happened, somehow. The conclusion that we live “after the end” makes apocalyptic narrative the perfect vehicle for handling issues and again is a veiled instrument of revelation. In the dream that opens the novel, “a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the of trauma, because it understands that the world is over and that rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and we already live post-apocalyptically – no other idea can so funsightless as the eggs of spiders...Crouching there pale and naked damentally represent and empathize with the premise of trauma, and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks because it is, simply, the same. We can see that post-apocalyptic narratives function to ex- behind it” (3-4). These are the same ways he describes his dead press deep social trauma, and that psychologically cutting ourselves wife – as we saw above, he remembers her in the forest as white, ivory, with the suggestion of nakedness; we also learn that she is off from nature through the creation of wilderness is itself traublind like the spider eggs (a symbol of motherly fertility as well) in matic. Less obvious is how perfectly the ideas of wilderness and frontier dovetail into and shape post-apocalyptic narrative. This is the image: he asks “Where are you going to go? You cant [sic] even based partly on how we have socially constructed wilderness to be see” (58). This creature is what nature has become, both to him and effectively to the world – an underground creature “tolling in apocalyptic, and partly on our unconscious realization as existing the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of outside of nature as a world-ending phenomenon. Both serve to reveal something greater than we believe we it and the years without cease” (3), just as anything remaining of 7 can see without them. “Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind natural bounty is relegated to the ground and earth. These dissembled expressions of nature through the symbolism of his dead a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural... wife are a product of the traumatic and apocalyptic conditions of we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and denarratives from above, and show the duality of his relationship sires” (Cronon 69-70). Nature is not, in reality, what we think it to be, because we redefined it with Romantic ideals, but we’re still 7 i.e. both the morels and the apples being found on the ground buried among dead leaves and ash, and particularly their discovery of the underground convinced that nature is what truly reveals us to ourselves – why else would we send our children into the woods on the pretense of bunker that contains more natural bounty (expressed as foodstuffs) than they have Freud began to recognize that it might be possible for someone to remember but not remember, to tell the story of a traumatic event and yet fail to acknowledge its effects. Something happened, yes, but it is over now and I am all better. This is the response Freud calls denial, or negation...Freud also describes the process of fetishization, in which an act of denial is played out in relation to a physical object. The object represents the event that did, and did not, take place...Symptoms in this view are not entirely unconscious and not entirely physical; they are also discursive and are not wholly repressed. (Berger 27)

ever seen above ground.

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with nature as both desire and fear, much like all post-apocalyptic yearning as Berger outlines. Dichotomies like this are partly set up by our view of nature’s uncompromising authenticity, and our resulting confusion about how to handle that. “It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity...it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are – or ought to be” (Cronon 80). We expect nature to yield revelation, as we expect from apocalypse, because we assume that essential truth lies in each of them, something undistilled and untouched by society. In the popular view, “wilderness [is] the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul” (80). We write apocalyptic literature as a means of social critique, and hold up nature as a way to see how far we’ve sunk as a species – the two are not so different. Nature functions well as post-apocalyptic because it reflects our desire to return to it. Nature deals in cycles of time, best expressed in the “death” and “rebirth” of the earth with the seasons. Frank Kermode points out that “broadly speaking, apocalyptic thought belongs to rectilinear rather than cyclical views of the world” (5) – but post-apocalyptic thought epitomizes the cyclical because it is a new start after the end of all things, not unlike spring growth following the absence of new life in winter. In the McCarthy text, we see this through the medium of the boy’s mother – he lost her and has been living without her, a sort of maternal winter, but at the end finds a new mother in this woman who “when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you” (McCarthy 286). If we again take mothers to be an essence of Mother Nature herself, we can then read this also as a return to nature and natural order. This cycling takes place on a much larger scale as well, though – our repeated creation of the post-apocalyptic through narrative reflects our own desire for a return to a cyclical, more natural view of life, nature, and time. We also want to return to that pure innocence that we hold nature to be – we think of it as our starting point. “For if wild land had been so crucial in the making of the nation, then surely one must save its lest remnants as monuments to the American past...to protect wilderness was in a very real sense to protect the nation’s most sacred myth of origin” (Cronon 76-77). We think of America as a land of frontier, and have a very real longing for the idea of starting over from what we had before8, and what we had before was only nature, our “nation in its pristine, original state, in the new morning of God’s own creation” (79). But this longing is misplaced – our true desire is to ease that great internal divide between ourselves and nature, and we narratively express that instead through our dual longing for a past that doesn’t really exist and a future that, at 8 Not unlike the trend we see in much post-apocalyptic fiction to recreate some semblance of the lost/forgone civilization – i.e. the formation of the new society of pseudo-humans towards the end of “The Last Man on Earth” (1964) • • •

least temporarily, ends existence.9 But this craving results in self-destructive urges and plays out in every apocalyptic text we write or read, ever – we’re deeply compelled by the idea of our entire world, lives, and civilizations being utterly destroyed, so much so that we have to make it happen again and again in various reincarnations, unconsciously struggling to express and make comprehensible the trauma we suffered when we defined ourselves as something essentially not nature and not natural. Again, this is shaped almost entirely by our definitions and perceptions, and we have to struggle with “the paradox that was built into wilderness from the beginning: ...if wild nature is the only thing worth saving, and if our mere presence destroys it, then the sole solution to our own unnaturalness, the only way to protect sacred wilderness from profane humanity, would seem to be suicide” (Cronon 83). The man’s wife, whom we have established as a natural figure, must also commit suicide for the same reason – he represents a sort of last bastion of the old society, a symbol for the old humanity which is mostly extinct, so for her, an embodiment of nature, to stay with him, she would be profaned and ultimately destroyed. The only way for her to remain this natural essence is suicide, as Cronon indicates. One of the strongest held tenets of the book is its implicit rejection of civilization, evident not only in this suicide drive, but also in the complete destruction of society having taken place long before the book opens. The text presents a view that “civilization contaminated its inhabitants... For all of its troubles and dangers, and despite the fact that it must pass away, the frontier had been a better place” (Cronon 78). The book recreates the frontier as the only reality, and in doing so, supports it over the civilization it has eradicated. Not only this, but “if civilization was to be redeemed, it would be by men...who could retain their frontier virtues even as they made the transition to post-frontier life” (Cronon 78). This is the ultimate reason why the end is hopeful, and the boy is a hopeful character: he is (or will be) that man who can keep the frontier values of his father (cite some of these here, such as not eating people, and resourcefulness in making snow-proof shoes, and knowledge of how to blend into forest) and simultaneously is making the transition his father could not, from the “rugged individualism” (77) of the frontier to life after it, with a family and religion 9 This selective view of nature and the frontier creates an escapist streak that further contributes to the apocalyptic bent of wilderness. We constantly talk about going into wilderness as “getting away from it all” and a “retreat,” somewhere we escape to; civilization and history are to be escaped from. “Wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared us...The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world” (80). We want to return to some time before, we want to escape where we are now, and our construction of nature makes that idea not only possible, but practically part of the deal. We use post-apocalyptic texts to create that backto-nature world, both desire and fear as Berger states, as a way to escape the problems we perceive in our society, and as a way of trying to escape the divide between man and nature that seems only conquerable with the destruction of our current lives and the institution of a new world order.

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provided by the boy’s new community: “We have a little boy and a little girl...[the woman] would talk to him sometimes about God... She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass fro man to man through all of time” (McCarthy 286). The boy is able to integrate these ideas into his own previous relationship with his father, as shaped by his experiences in the natural world. How to integrate frontier values with a post-frontier society is the ultimate question of the novel, and perhaps as well to our quest for some reconciliation of the divide we invented. We can’t go back to a sense of what life was like before we separated ourselves from nature, but we can find new ways to go forward and reintegrate ourselves into nature. In this, maybe the boy brings hope to more than just the book’s society – he brings hope to ours. Through changed attitudes towards nature and humanity, and acknowledgment of the trauma we have been living in as a society for the last two hundred years, we can begin to heal that gap and no longer need to write ourselves into apocalypse to deal with it. But there’s more to that than simply reuniting our selves. “By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too in that which at first seemed merely ordinary” (Cronon 88). This, too, is why we fascinate and create these worlds – we’re looking for new ways to examine ourselves, and need to put that which we have made into Other (nature) back into our familiar conceptions of self. “If the core problem of wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us to value, then the question we must ask is what it can tell us about home, the place where we actually live” (Cronon 87). The same goes for these apocalyptic narratives. At first glance, they seem to be utterly foreign, describing ideas and worlds that could not possibly be, until you look a little deeper and realize that we already live there, and created it for ourselves, and are our own only way out. Works Cited Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999. Print. Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Toward Rein venting Nature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 1995. Print. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending; Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. Print. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print.

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The Way We Define and Use Rape, Then and Now Emma Laperruque ’14

In this essay written for The Making of English (English 293), Emma responds to an assignment that asks students to “research the history and linguistic properties of a single English word, and tell its story. . . trace your word’s semantic, phonological, orthographic, and morphological changes from its origins (as far back as we know) to the present.” In telling the history of the word “rape,” Emma highlights the real-world implications of language evolution. In Middle English, the wide semantic range covered (and sometimes obscured) by this single word makes the interpretation of “rape” convictions difficult for scholars of medieval records. As Emma points out, the word becomes no less ambiguous in contemporary usage, despite (or even because of) increasingly detailed attempts to define it in legal discourse. Definitions of “rape” can vary dramatically among different states and nations, and each attempt to pin down a more precise meaning has profound consequences for the victims and perpetrators of sexual assault. Through the lens of a single word, this essay succinctly demonstrates the perils and possibilities of the ways we use language. — Assistant Professor of English Katherine Terrell

A month and a half ago, the federal government expanded its definition of “forcible rape.” Used since the 1920s to compile national crime statistics, the previous definition had been continually criticized by various victim advocacy groups for its inaccuracy and narrowness (Goode). While the old definition recognized “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will,” it disregarded instances such as forced oral and anal penetration, the rape of men, and cases involving alcohol and drugs. According to Lynn Rosenthal, the White House advisor on violence against women, the recent amendment is “about more than a definition. It’s about a change of our understanding of rape and how seriously we take it as a country” (quoted in Savage). More than with most words in the English language—the definition of rape holds severe • • •

personal and legal consequences. The word’s meaning is not implicit, synonymous, nor casually treated. It is not just intriguing, then, but imperative to analyze—and understand—the history, evolution, and contemporary conceptions of rape. Today, rape has four separate meanings; three of them have no relevance to the violent sexual act with which most people associate the word. First, as a noun, rape can refer to any one of the six divisions in the ancient UK country, Sussex, though this denotation is now deemed “only of historical interest” (Ayoto 431). Second, as another noun, originating from Latin rapum for turnip, rape can signify the Brassica rapa plant, which is “grown as fodder for livestock” and used “for [its] oil-rich seeds” (“Rape, n5”). Third, as another noun still, rape can denote “the stalks and skins of grapes left after

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winemaking and used in the manufacture of vinegar” (“Rape, n8”). This term derives from the French râpe for grape stalk and Latin raspa for bunch of grapes. The fourth, and “commonest,” meaning refers to a forced sexual encounter (Ayoto 431); it can represent either the act, as a verb, or the crime, as a noun. While the Oxford English Dictionary defines rape as “the act of forced, non-consenting, or illegal sexual intercourse with another person,” the term’s full significance cannot be reduced to such brevity (“Rape, n3”). The meaning has not only evolved over time, but continues to vary according to context: for example, a court of law versus a casual conversation, a court of law in the United States versus a court of law in the United Kingdom, and a court of law in New York versus a court of law in California. With such complexity in mind, we will explore the story of this particular meaning of the word. By studying the different uses of rape in ancient texts, one can achieve an etymological understanding of the word, and consequently a deeper awareness of its contemporary significance. Interestingly, the Middle English Dictionary contains multiple entries for rape in terms of “haste” and “hurry” (“Rape (n.(1))”). In his “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn” (circa 1385), Chaucer writes: “So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe, / It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape, / And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.” Here, he crossly attributes his scribe’s copying errors to “rape,” or careless haste. This Middle English noun derives from the Middle English verb rapen, which means “to make haste,” and originates via Old Norse from Old Icelandic, hrapa (“Rape (n.(1))”). Similar is the Middle English adjective rape, defined as “hasty; quick to anger,” found in The Tale of Gamelyn, circa 1350 (“Rape (adj.)”), and the adverb rape, “quickly, hastily,” found in multiple texts ranging from 1380 to 1425 (“Rape (adv.)”). With these records, the Middle English Dictionary also contains an entry for rape which more closely corresponds with the modern day meaning: “(a) forceful seizure of somebody or something; plundery, robbery, extortion; hasti ~, quick recapture…(b) the act of abducting a woman or sexually assaulting her or both…(c) booty, prey” (“Rape (n.(2))”). This particular word originates from Anglo-French rape and Anglo-Latin rapum and rapa. Its multifaceted definition seems to blend the Middle English notion of haste with the Modern English notion of sexual assault. One can imagine the inherent connection between the action of plundering a place— or body—and the idea of rapidity; surely, such criminal acts are undertaken with speed. Thus, while the contemporary definition of rape makes no specific mention to “haste” or “hurry,” such concepts certainly persist in the connotation of the word. According to, John Ayoto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, rape entered the Modern English vocabulary “via Anglo-Norman raper from Latin rapere, ‘seize by force’” (431). The Online Etymology Dictionary confirms and expands upon this etymology: Raper, which was used as a legal term, meant “to seize, abduct.” Rapere “was used for ‘sexual violation,’ but only very rarely” (“Rape, v.”). The contemporary implication of sexual assault was not recorded until the 15th century. The Middle English Dictionary • • •

provides several sources in which rape denotes sexual assault, and all of them are from the 1400s. Accordingly, while rape was originally associated with pillaging, seizing, and stealing, it linguistically evolved to apply these actions to women and their bodies, and take on the more savage denotation of sexual violation that it so strongly holds today. After identifying a word’s linguistic roots, one can begin to explore cognates, or related words that descend from similar sources. For rape, these include rapacious, rapt, rapture, and ravish (“Rapacious, adj.,” “Rapt, n.,” “Rapture, n.,” “Ravish, v.”). While these words are not synonyms for rape, their respective meanings help one see rape’s range of linguistic associations. Rapacious denotes “greedily desirous a) of a person…b) of a quality, action, etc., c) of a thing, esp. a part of the body” (“Rapacious, adj.”). Rapt and rapture respectively communicate “ecstasy” and “a state of passion” (“Rapt, n.,” “Rapture, n.,”). Ravish means “to plunder, rob, steal from” (“Ravish, v.”). These words have branched out separately from their origins, yet they all share negative connotations and echo common themes, like uncontrollable desire and destructive larceny. If one traces the cognates’ etymologies, their denotations become even closer with that of rape. For example, in a 1615 translation of Homer’s Odyssey, rapture is used to mean “sexual violation” (“Rapture, n.”). Though their meanings are not quite so similar to rape today, these relations illuminate the implications of and associations with the word. To commit rape, one must be “greedily desirous…of a person…[an] action [sex]…[and] the body.” The crime is often committed in “a state of passion.” During the act, one “plunders” another’s body and “robs” a degree of his/her purity. These cognates further explain rape’s etymological history, as well as further uncover our own connotations with the word. Considering that rape is not simply a word, but a criminal act, its legal definition must be studied and understood, in addition to its etymology. As the recent change in the U.S. government’s definition of “forcible rape” demonstrates, the exact denotation of this word is exceptionally critical. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “The precise legal definition of rape has varied over time and between legal systems” (“Rape, n3”). Fully explaining rape’s legality is an essay—or book—in and of itself. Here, the legal aspect of rape will be explored on a more comprehensive level: First, the legal definition of rape depends on the legal system. Thus, rape’s exact classification as a criminal act is different in England and America—not to mention within America. For instance, in New Jersey, sexual assault, or rape, is defined as “the penetration, no matter how slight, in which physical force or coercion is used or in which the victim is physically or mentally incapacitated” (“Field Operations Section,” “Legal Definitions”). This exact phrasing, however, does not apply to other states. Even within a state, there are various levels of sexual assault, each of which holds its own punishment. In Kentucky, rape statutes include one degree of sexual misconduct, three degrees of sexual abuse, two degrees of sodomy, and three degrees of rape; third degree rape warrants one to five years in prison, while first degree warrants 20 to 50. In

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Louisiana, classifications of rape range from “simple” to “forcible” to “aggravated”; the first can result in up to 25 years jail time, while the last amounts to life in prison (“State Rape Statutes”). As a result of constant debate and modification, the meaning of rape, in every state and every country, has altered over time. There is a constant push for clarification and improvement, as evidenced by the word consent’s role in rape state statutes, and how it is more and more explicitly explained in laws: Can a drunk person give consent? A drugged person? A minor? These questions are increasingly debated over and legally answered. In Colorado, consent is defined as “cooperation in act or attitude,” while in Nebraska, “without consent” means that the “victim expressed a lack of consent through words” (“State Rape Statutes,” my emphasis). The meticulous attention to detail concerning the legal wording of rape proves how significant the definition of a word can be. Even as rape can be punishable by a lifetime in prison, however, even as it physically violates, and emotionally scars, even as it represents one of the most horrific crimes in any society—the word has become a slang term in Modern English, meant for humor. An article in the Huffington Post cites this growing phenomenon: “The word ‘rape’ is generally used by high school students either negatively, to represent mental or physical injury or damage, (‘Wow, that math test totally raped me.’) or positively, to represent beating, winning, or acing something. (‘Oh yeah, I just raped that math test.’)” (Cohen). At Hamilton, one can clearly see this contrast between the serious and the insensitive treatment of rape: During orientation, first-year males are required to attend an assembly entitled “She Fears You,” for education on rape culture on college campuses. To respond to rape accusations, the College has a Harassment and Sexual Misconduct Board, which students and faculty serve on. Simultaneously, students casually and comically toss around the word rape in everyday conversation. Such contemporary, humorous treatment of rape is further evidenced in the YouTube video, “Grapist,” which has almost 10 million views. In it, a man pitches a grape soda advertisement to an ad agency. The spokes-character for the soda is the “Grapist,” who sneaks into children’s bedrooms in the middle of the night and “grapes them in the mouth.” One (shocked) ad agent comments that the commercial is “obviously a rape scenario,” which the creator vehemently denies; the other ad agents find the advertisement appropriate and amusing. The video feeds on hyperbole and ridiculousness: In the end, the skeptic ad agent buys the “Grapist” ad, in which a grape-costumed adult male chases children around screaming, “Come here kids, I’m going to tie you to the radiator and grape you!” (“WKUK-Grapist). Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler recently spoke out the growing humorous usage of rape. In her article, she cites recent Facebook pages that endorse statutory rape: “I am over

being told I don’t have a sense of humor, and women don’t have a sense of humor…We just don’t think that uninvited penises up our anus, or our vagina is a laugh riot” (Ensler).

As this new slang version of rape develops, and as more and more people protest it, one can see how flexible—and significant—a word’s meaning and usage are. Not only does rape’s definition change based on when and where you live, but it continues to change today in complex ways: While some activist groups lobby the government for the improvement of rape’s official definition, others more simply and thoughtlessly expand its meaning through colloquial conversation and viral videos. Even after hundreds of years of accumulating connotations of violation, violence, illegality, and defilement, the word rape remains as malleable as any other. Works Cited Ayoto, John. Dictionary of Word Origins. New York: Arcade Pub lishing, 1990. Print. Cohen, Mari. “Teen Slang: Why the Word ‘Rape’ Should Never Be Used Casually.” HuffingtonPost.com. The HuffingtonPost. com, Inc., 12 Jan. 2012. Web. 17 Feb. 2012. “Field Operations Section.” New Jersey State Police. State of New Jersey, n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2012. “WKUK-Grapist.” YouTube.com. YouTube, 2 April 2009. Web. 17 Feb. 2012. Goode, Erica. “Rape Definition Too Narrow in Statistics, Critics Say.” NYTimes.com. The New York Times Company, 28 Sept. 2011. Web. 17 Feb. 2012. Ensler, Eve. “Over It.” HuffingtonPost.com. The HuffingtonPost. com, Inc., 11 Jan. 2011. Web. 17 Feb. 2012. “Legal Definitions.” Rutgers.edu. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 31 Oct. 2006. Web. 17 Feb. 2012. “Rapacious, adj.” OED.com. Oxford English Dictionary, 2012. Web. 17 Feb. 2012. “Rape (adj.).” Quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med. Middle English Dic tionary, 2001. Web. 17 Feb. 2012. “Rape (adv.).” Quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med. Middle English Dic tionary, 2001. Web. 17 Feb. 2012. “Rape (n.(1)).” Quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med. Middle English Dic tionary, 2001. Web. 17 Feb. 2012.

people…justifying [rape pages on Facbeook] as a joke. I am over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I am over

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Thoreau and Gandhi:

From Civil Disobedience to Satyagraha Adam Fix ’13

Adam Fix’s essay brings together the life and politics of two influential thinkers, Thoreau and Gandhi. Although Thoreau and Gandhi have been commonly associated with one another previously, scholars of both leading figures have been neglectful in providing detail about the relationship between these great Nineteenth and Twentieth century thinkers. Fix effectively argues that while the Thoreau’s politics of civil disobedience was not adopted by Gandhi wholesale, Thoreau’s approach nonetheless provided critical terrain upon which Gandhi made his own contribution to politics with the formulation of satyagraha, or truthforce. Moreover, Fix persuasively demonstrates that Thoreau’s impact on Gandhi may be seen not simply in the articulation of satyagraha, but more importantly in the development of Gandhi’s sarvodaya communities, which have had a life long beyond the period of nationalist struggle in India. The reader is left with Fix’s conclusion that without Thoreau, Mohandas K. Gandhi may not have been able to transform himself from a barrister to an activist and emerge a leader for South Africa, India, and the world.

— Associate Professor of History Lisa Trivedi

Gandhi’s debt to the transcendentalist writings of Henry David Thoreau at first seems insultingly obvious. Just as no biography of Gandhi is complete without brief mention of Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, nearly every work on Thoreau reminds readers precisely from whom Mahatma Gandhi gained many of his satyagraha principles. Walter Harding described Civil Disobedience as “Gandhi’s textbook for his campaign in India,”1 and Gandhi himself wrote in 1931 that “the persons who have influenced my life as a whole in a general way are Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, and Raychandbhai.” He then quickly added “perhaps I should drop Thoreau from this list.”2 Gandhi considered “civil disobedience” 1 Harding, Walter Roy. “Thoreau’s Ideas.” In A Thoreau handbook. New York: New York University Press, 1959. 131-173, pp. 51 2 Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. 2nd rev. ed. New Delhi: Publica• • •

primarily a “suitable English translation”3 for satyagraha and in a 1935 letter asserted point blank that “the statement that I had derived my idea of civil disobedience from the writings of Thoreau is wrong.”4 Gandhi eventually decided even civil disobedience “didn’t convey everything I had in mind” and adopted instead the mantle of “civil resistance.”5 Based on these claims, Thoreau merely told Gandhi what he already knew but could not put into words, tions Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1969. 45:95 3 Rosenwald, Lawrence. “The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience.” In A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau. By Cain, William E. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 153-179, pp. 172 4 CW61:401 5 CW 58:54

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providing Gandhi confirmation of preconceived notions of passive resistance rather than a wellspring of new ideas. This does not imply that Thoreau had negligible influence. In 2000 Lawrence Rosenwald asserted that Thoreau gave Gandhi’s still malleable ideas “concreteness and unsystematic pragmatism,”6 whereas Nick Gier observed that Thoreau provided “an intellectual framework”7 for Gandhi’s yet untested satyagraha. Gandhi discovered Thoreau during his first satyagraha campaign and carried Thoreau’s essays with him throughout his numerous imprisonments.8 Hind Swaraj, Gandhi’s 1909 political manifesto published just three years after discovering Thoreau, cited both Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle in the attached appendices.9 Gandhi’s worldview included many facets , from his Sarvodya utopian community to his Brahmacharya belief of celibacy and personal health. It is satyagraha, Gandhi’s chief political doctrine, that is undeniably indebted to Thoreau. Contrary to Rosenwald’s assertion that Gandhi merely admired “Thoreau’s local protest” against taxation,10 Gandhi took from Thoreau substantial and wide-reaching ideals on self-discipline, modern civilization, and proper government that he permanently incorporated into his satyagraha movement. Although he formulated his core notion of satyagraha before first picking up Civil Disobedience, Gandhi found in Thoreau a moral companion during his first major political struggle, a fellow patron of civil resistance who refined and modernized fundamentally Eastern ideas and helped transform Gandhi from an activist South African barrister to the deeply ideological Mahatma. Gandhi discovered Thoreau during satyagraha’s inception. In 1929 Gandhi wrote his friend and Thoreau biographer Henry Salt that he read Civil Disobedience first “when I was in the thick of the passive resistance struggle” of 1907.11 At the Second Round Table Conference in London in 1943 Gandhi told American reporter Webb Miller that he read Walden first in 1906.12 Regardless, having translated and published portions of Civil Disobedience for his South African journal Indian Opinion in September and October 1907,13 Gandhi found Thoreau either during or very shortly after his protest of the 1906 Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act, his first bona fide act of nonviolent resistance. In contrast to his later emphasis on authentic Indian culture independent of Western influence, Gandhi during these early years from 1906 to 1909 sought to introduce satyagraha to a wider worldly audience and undoubtedly found Thoreau an invaluable resource. In 1907 Gandhi read Salt’s biography of Thoreau “with great pleasure and equal profit”14 and 6 Rosenwald, pp. 173 7 Gier, Nick. “Three Principles OF Civil Disobedience.” Letters, Arts & Social Sciences. http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/civil.htm (accessed April 25, 2012). 8 Harding, pp. 200 9 CW 10:84 10 Rosenwald, pp. 162 11 CW 41:553 12 George Hendrick. The Influence of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” on Gandhi’s Satyagraha. The New England Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Dec. 1956), pp. 462-471, pp. 463 13 CW 7:212 and 7:304 14 CW 41:553 • • •

for the next few years Thoreau remained ever-present in Gandhi’s Indian Opinion writings. Indeed, Gandhi’s writings from 1907 to 1921 contain over twenty direct references to Thoreau.15 Gandhi’s appropriation of Thoreau occurred rapidly. Gandhi probably did not read Civil Disobedience until a few months after the 11 September 1906 “advent of satyagraha” (Hendrick mistakenly cites this date as 190716), but he could only have been elated to find opinions17 so closely mirroring his proclamation that day that “so long as there are even a handful of men true to their pledge, there can only be one end to the struggle, and that is victory.”18 “[Thoreau] went to jail for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity”19 Gandhi wrote in October 1907, in between his own first and second imprisonments. His satyagraha ideas already firmly established or not, one can only imagine the significance Gandhi took of going to jail after reading “under a government that imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”20 Appropriately, Gandhi read the bulk of Thoreau’s works while imprisoned21 and wrote shortly after his release that happiness comes of “going to jail for the sake of the motherland.” By 1909 Gandhi demanded that those truly devoted to satyagraha principles “go to jail again and again” and let all else follow “as a matter of course.”22 Thus, a mere three years after the famous meeting at the Johannesburg Empire Theatre, Gandhi had fully adopted Thoreauvian ideas as his own. Throughout his South African campaign Gandhi frequently cited Thoreau’s writings on the duty to resist unjust laws. In a passage of Civil Disobedience Gandhi quoted for Indian Opinion, Thoreau compared government to a machine, noting that “all machines have their friction, and possibly this [machine] does enough good to counterbalance the evil [friction].”23 Thoreau then almost instantly reconfigured his machinery metaphor, claiming that “when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized [as law]… let us not have any such a machine any longer.” Under a just state, friction represented unavoidable but tolerable corruption. Under an unjust state, in which evil “friction” such as American slavery is institutionalized as law, as the “machine,” civil disobedience provided a different kind of friction: friction needed to grind the machine to a halt. Gandhi’s position that “there is no obligation imposed upon us by our conscience to give blind submission to any law”24 employed this metaphor 15 Collected Works, vol. 7-19 16 Hendrick, pp. 466 17 Thoreau, Henry David, and Henry Seidel Canby. “Civil Disobedience.” In The Works of Thoreau, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937, pp. 798. Addressing his abolitionist constitutes, Thoreau wrote that “if one HONEST man…ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.” 18 CW 14:157 19 CW 7:304 20 Thoreau (Civil Disobedience), pp. 798 21 Hendrick, pp. 469 22 CW 9:182-184 23 Thoreau (Civil Disobedience), pp. 792 24 CW 7:211

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verbatim in 1907. Gandhi described the Asiatic Registration Act as “evil legislated…friction with machinery provided for it”25 before imploring his readers to resist the machine out of duty and moral responsibility. In the same issue of Indian Opinion, Gandhi further asserted that “Thoreau’s examples and writings are at present exactly applicable to the Indians in the Transvaal.26 While Gandhi possessed his own politics prior to 1907, Thoreau crystallized Gandhi’s ideas on proper civil resistance, allowing Gandhi to apply their shared political theory directly to the South African satyagraha. Both men rejected standing law codes and implored their followers to find justice within themselves. Famously declaring “that government is best which governs least,”27 Thoreau qualified that such government would only occur “when men are prepared for it” (Thoreau 789). Thoreau favored a community of just and disciplined individuals over a domineering state, and consequently Thoreau’s political influence abounds in Hind Swaraj. Gandhi asserted that “if we [Indians] become free, India is free” and defined Indian Home Rule as “when we learn to rule ourselves.”28 This ideal government vision, fleshed out as “true Home Rule,”29 held the same central tenants as Civil Disobedience; individual discipline eliminates the need for government, “the law never made men a whit more just,”30 and corrupt government such as the British Raj existed because of the people’s inability to discipline and rule themselves. Hind Swaraj occasionally reads like a self-help book rather than a political doctrine because political protest formed only one component of satyagraha; Gandhi’s emphasis on self-discipline united individual and national salvation as equivalent terms. Gandhi’s utopian government, most clearly articulated in a 1939 letter that referenced Thoreau, was an “enlightened anarchy in which each person will become his own ruler,” where “the national life becomes so perfect as to be self-controlled.”31 Thus Thoreau’s notion that (invariably corrupt or inefficient) government is inversely proportional to self-discipline formed a key part of Indian Home Rule, the central focus of Gandhian political theory. Thoreau’s and Gandhi’s politics do not align perfectly. Gandhi repeatedly reminded Indians that they had only themselves to blame for letting the British “please us by their subtle methods and get what they want from us.”32 Thoreau on the other hand attributed slavery, the greatest sin of an overbearing state, not to the weakness of the enslaved but to the unwillingness of the free American people to resist such obvious evil. Gandhi still handily applied Thoreau’s teachings to the South African colonial environment, but in Gandhi’s case the chief victims of injustice also bore the responsibility of fighting injustice. Moreover, Gandhi’s message took on an immediacy that Thoreau’s writings lacked: Tho25 CW 7:212 26 CW 7:217 27 Thoreau (Civil Disobedience), pp. 789 28 Gandhi, Mahatma. Hind Swaraj; or, Indian Home Rule. Breinigsville, PA: Dodo Press, 2009, pp. 40 29 Gandhi (2009), pp. 38 30 Thoreau (Civil Disobedience), pp. 791 31 CW 68:265 32 Gandhi (2009), pp. 19 • • •

reau implored his countrymen to fight injustice for moral reasons, whereas Gandhi presented satyagraha not merely as a moral imperative but as a means to combat their own real oppression. While it rarely hindered Gandhi’s arguments, this distinction perhaps illustrates why Gandhi alone transcended ideology and rose to the level of political leader. Although often considered the father of peaceful protest, Gandhi later recognized that Thoreau “was not an out-and-out champion of nonviolence.”33 As Rosenwald observes, Thoreau’s brand of nonviolence represented a “practical preference,” never a “first principle;”34 in A Plea for Captain John Brown, Thoreau condoned violence “in circumstances in which [violence] would be by me unavoidable.”35 Thoreau’s civil disobedience meant moral and rational but not dogmatically nonviolent activism; this is in part why Gandhi never considered civil disobedience and satyagraha synonymous terms. Nevertheless, Gandhi found Thoreau “legitimately available” because of Thoreau’s “pragmatic focus on a particular action.”36 Gandhi admired the Thoreau who authentically practiced his morals and “went to jail for the sake of his principles and suffering of humanity;”37 violence versus nonviolence was a practical rather than moral choice for Thoreau and hence made little difference to Gandhi. Gandhi did not acquire his nonviolent ideas from Thoreau, but neither did Thoreau’s occasional acceptance of violence prevent Gandhi from absorbing Thoreau’s larger message. Gandhi infused Thoreau’s civil disobedience with his own nonviolent moral code. Rosenwald speculates that Gandhi interpreted differently the “civil” component of Thoreau’s work. Thoreau likely utilized “civil” to describe the actions of citizens within a state, whereas Gandhi understood “civil” as “peaceable” or “respectable.”38 While certainly not mutually exclusive, these differing usages illustrate a fundamental metamorphosis Thoreau’s ideas underwent as they traveled east. Thoreau emphasized man’s moral duty to resist, if not outright combat, injustice within his own state, asserting that “it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of [wrong], and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.”39 Considering violence the antithesis of Truth, Gandhi brought nonviolence to the forefront of his campaign, commanding satyagrahis to resist violence in all its personal, political, and spiritual manifestations. This is why Gandhi discarded passive resistance as a “weapon of the weak”40 that permitted violence when the occasion demanded it and adopted civil (i.e. nonviolent) resistance “as the moral dedication of the strong.”41 Thus Gandhi 33 CW 19:466 34 Rosenwald, pp. 170 35 Thoreau, Henry David, and Henry Seidel Canby. “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” In The Works of Thoreau, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937, pp. 842 36 Rosenwald, pp. 171 37 CW 7:304 38 Rosenwald, pp. 173 39 Thoreau (Civil Disobedience), pp. 795 40 CW 19:466 41 Fox, Richard Gabriel. Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, pp. 135

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mixed Thoreauvian protest politics with his own morality, adopting nonviolence as a nonnegotiable axiom rather than a practical imperative. Gandhi’s growing distain of Western materialism also coincided with reading Thoreau. No modern reader can hear Thoreau’s opinion that “the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor”42 without immediately thinking of Gandhi, carrying his walking stick and clad in a khadi loincloth. Of course, Gandhi always preferred simple living, taking considerable time in his autobiography to describe his vegetarian diet and modest clothing habits. Despite this, Life Without Principle undoubtedly reinforced Gandhi’s notion that “real profit”43 had little to do with material wealth. Writing that “the ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward” and asserting that “the aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living…but to perform well a certain work,”44 Thoreau shoved materialism to the sidelines and praised the inherent value of a life well spent. Although Gandhi took a less individualistic approach in Hind Swaraj by linking his materialist critique to national liberation, he similarly transcended the Western notion that value could be measured in dollars and cents. Gandhi observed that “one man can plough a vast tract by means of steam engines and can thus amass great wealth,” before sarcastically adding: “this is called a sign of civilization.”45 Thoreau’s famous proclamation that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone”46 perfectly encapsulates Gandhi’s attitude towards material wealth expressed in Hind Swaraj. Moreover, it is not until after reading Thoreau that Gandhi incorporated this anti-materialism into his political argument. Thoreau wrote that “the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity.”47 Gandhi applied this same argument to British India, claiming that “we like [English] commerce” and that “we keep the English in India for our base self-interest.”48 Like Thoreau, Gandhi blamed corrupt government on individual self-interest and merged his criticism of Western materialism with his anti-imperialist movement. Further, where Civil Disobedience decried materialism as distraction from one’s moral duty, in Walden Thoreau’s critique became a crusade for the freedom of man; Thoreau accused those born with large inheritance of “digging their graves as soon as they are born.”49 Gandhi made the same logical progression. Asserting in an October 1909 letter that that railways and material indulgence were the “true

badges of slavery of the Indian people, as they are of the Europeans,”50 Gandhi accused Indians of becoming just what Thoreau feared: “tools of their tools” and “serfs of the soil.”51 While direct causality is impossible to prove, Gandhi’s renunciation of Western materialism, not just as a needless luxury but as a full-fledged form of slavery, evolved under Thoreau’s guidance and mirrored Thoreau’s own critique. Even Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement found support in Thoreau’s work. Although Lisa Trivedi mentions Tolstoy and Ruskin’s contributions to the Gandhian critique of industrialism and commercialism,52 she notably leaves out Thoreau, perhaps considering Thoreau’s economic influence negligible in comparison to the broad capitalist critique offered in Ruskin’s Unto This Last. It is Thoreau, however, who specifically employed clothing to represent the simple, commerce-free life Gandhi later extolled, writing that “it is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can…live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.” Thoreau continued that “the principal object [of the factories] is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched,” and declared that “I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing.”53 Gandhi applied the same critique to the Manchester mills, arguing that European clothing (often used interchangeably with factory-produced clothing) fomented, rather than eradicated, savagery.54 Although Swadeshi as an Indian nationalist movement originated in Bengal in 1905, Gandhi did not officially incorporated khadi into satyagraha until 1920,55 more than a decade after reading Thoreau’s renunciation of factory clothing. Gandhi’s anti-industrial critique drew from many sources, but few addressed the moral and practical value of simple, homespun clothing as Thoreau did. Drawing many of his own ideas from sacred Hindu scripture, Thoreau transmitted to Gandhi fundamentally Eastern ideas rewritten in a modern context. Thoreau’s Eastern influences present most heavily in Walden and Life Without Principle; he referenced the Bhagavad Gita in Walden56 and translated the ancient Hindu text The Transmigration of the Seven Brahmans from French into English (not formally published until 1932). Thoreau much admired the Hindu Yogis and claimed in 1849 that “to some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a Yogi.”57 Arthur Christy speculated that Thoreau’s retreated to Walden Pond in an imitation of Yogi conduct, “a very natural gesture on the part of a man

42 Thoreau, Henry David, and Henry Seidel Canby. “Walden.” In The Works of Thoreau, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937, pp. 253 43 Thoreau, Henry David, and Henry Seidel Canby. “Life Without Principle.” In The Works of Thoreau, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937, pp. 810 44 Thoreau (Life Without Principle), pp. 811 45 Gandhi (2009), pp. 16 46 Thoreau (Walden), pp. 298 47 Thoreau (Civil Disobedience), pp. 793 48 Gandhi (2009), pp. 19 49 Thoreau (Walden), pp. 247

50 Hendrick, pp. 470 51 Thoreau (Walden), pp. 268, 247 52 Trivedi, Lisa. Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007, pp. 5 53 Thoreau (Walden), pp. 260-261 54 Gandhi (2009), pp. 16 55 Trivedi, pp. 1-4 56 Thoreau (Walden), pp. 282 57 Christy, Arthur, and New York association. The Asian legacy and American life; essays. New York: John Day Co., 1945, pp. 48

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who was temperamentally an ascetic.”58 Just as Gandhi received from Thoreau confirmation of his beliefs, Christy described the transcendentalist interest in Orientalism as “a search for historical evidence and experience to vindicate the fundamental principles of their thought.”59 Christy continued that “[Thoreau’s Puritan heritage…enabled him to strip the Yoga practice of all the superstition and inhuman self-torture native in India” and focus on finding “the One Bottom of the universe.”60 Thoreau, like Gandhi, was a man of the world, following exclusively no one faith but melding Eastern ideas and his Christian tradition into a modern philosophy. Gandhi so readily adopted Thoreau not because Thoreau’s ideas were Eastern per se, but because Thoreau worshipped a similar universal Truth encompassing both East and West. Thoreau reinforced Gandhi’s ideology and pushed him to new limits. Early in his South African campaign Gandhi found in Thoreau a rare kindred spirit who “practiced what he preached” and whose “essay has been sanctified by suffering.”61 Later in life, Gandhi thanked his “American friends” for having “given me a teacher in Thoreau who furnished me through his essay ‘Duty of Civil Disobedience’ scientific confirmation of what I was doing in South Africa.”62 If Thoreau did not directly inspire satyagraha, he fueled the flames of resistance and kept Gandhi’s movement alive as it endured its first true test. Moreover, Gandhi recognized that Thoreau’s argument was “written for all time” and extended far beyond a Massachusetts tax protest. When Gandhi published Hind Swaraj in 1909 he unified his views on civil resistance, nonviolence, modern civilization, and self-discipline, all while claiming “humbly to follow Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson and other writers, besides the masters of Indian philosophy.”63 While not new to Gandhi, Thoreau’s writings distilled Gandhi’s core ideology from a loose collection of related moral and political positions to a coherent satyagraha doctrine. Satyagraha was never an imitation of civil disobedience, but satyagraha would not have been the same without the writings of Thoreau. Thoreau thus enabled Gandhi to realize his full potential as the greatest 20th century torchbearer of nonviolent resistance and self-discipline.

Works Cited Christy, Arthur, and New York association. The Asian Legacy and American life; essays. New York: John Day Co., 1945. Collected works of Mahatma Gandhi. 2nd rev. ed. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1969. Fox, Richard Gabriel. Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Gier, Nick. “Three Principles OF Civil Disobedience.” Letters, Arts & Social Sciences. http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/civ il.htm (accessed April 25, 2012). Harding, Walter Roy. “Thoreau’s Ideas.” In A Thoreau Handbook. New York: New York University Press, 1959. 131-173. George Hendrick. The Influence of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedi ence” on Gandhi’s Satyagraha. The New England Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Dec. 1956), pp. 462-471. Gandhi, Mahatma. Hind Swaraj; or, Indian Home Rule. Breinigs ville, PA: Dodo Press, 2009. Rosenwald, Lawrence. “The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience.” In A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau. By Cain, William E. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 153-179. Thoreau, Henry David and Arthur Christy. The transmigration of the seven Brahmans. New York: W.E. Rudge, 1932. Thoreau, Henry David, and Henry Seidel Canby. The Works of Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937. Trivedi, Lisa. Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

58 Thoreau, Henry David and Arthur Christy. The transmigration of the seven Brahmans;. New York: W.E. Rudge, 1932, pp. xvii 59 Christy (1945), pp. 48 60 Thoreau and Christy, pp. xx 61 CW 7:217, 7:304 62 CW 76:358 63 CW 10:189 • • •

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Cleaning up the House:

Language, Experience, and Notions of the Divine Lindsay Kramer ’13

From its first pages, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying presents its readers with a welter of idiosyncratic equations—mathematical operations inflected through the web of language, or vice versa—distilled to an exquisite particularity in one or another of the uniquely contoured alembics that are the novel’s multiple narrative consciousnesses. To grasp an equation’s operation is to understand something occluded but fundamental about a given narrator’s psychology and about the events that throw the narrators together. Sometimes it seems easy—“My mother is a fish”—but “is” is never really straightforward here. The extraordinary triumph of Lindsay Kramer’s essay is how thoroughly, in a very few pages, it illuminates the mostly occulted mind at the book’s heart. Lindsay connects Addie Bundren’s self-reckoning to her curt reflections on both words and numbers, showing how Addie’s profound misapprehension of language’s functioning is, in spite of itself, acutely revealing of the calculus governing her relationships with husband, children, and former lover. Lindsay’s own language is as generous and inviting as Addie’s is dismissive, and equally as astute about what Addie doesn’t get as it is about what she does.

— Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Benjamin Widiss

In As I Lay Dying, Addie Bundren serves as the focal point, and driving force, of the novel’s primary plotline, yet the most we hear from her directly occurs in a single chapter which she (presumably) narrates posthumously. Perhaps as striking as her ability to narrate at all is her argument on the ineffectuality of words, an argument that through the difficulty of her prose feels at once self-evident and, by its very nature as narration, self-contradictory. Despite her professions against the power of words, Addie’s section most clearly illuminates her relationship to the rest of the Bundren family as she perceives it, not simply because Addie narrates the chapter, but because her understanding of human existence is intrinsically linked to her understanding of language. With her first pregnancy, Addie explains that she “learned • • •

that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at” (171). For Addie, words are only approximations to actual experience, and poor ones at that. The only people who need words, she argues, are those who have not experienced that which they are using words to describe: “I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not…that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride” (171-2). At the same time, Addie recognizes that, at least in the society in which she lives, words mediate human interaction. She asserts, “we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching” (172).

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Just as words can only approach the meaning they seek to convey, people, using words, can only attempt to intimately engage with one another. And this restricted level of interaction tellingly occurs not “through” words, but “by” them, for they obstruct more than they facilitate. Words, as Addie sees people use them, are “just the gaps in people’s lacks” (174), empty shapes and sounds (173), and her relationship to Anse is just as empty, born and maintained not out of feeling but duty. For her, living is “terrible” (171), a persistent aloneness. After giving birth to Darl, Addie feels her whole life will be reduced to her role as a wife and mother, to “the duty to the alive” (to life on earth), which in her experience has so far only meant continued isolation and resigned obligation (174). Addie cherishes her affair with Whitfield because, unlike her marriage, it exists purely as experience—physically and emotionally felt experience—beyond the confines of societal norms and independent of language. In her meetings with Whitfield, she considers sin as “the clothes [they] both wore in the world’s face” (174). This sin is nothing inherent in her person but rather something she dons; it is a garment of the everyday, of societal demand, which she can remove. When together, she and Whitfield exist outside of society, and while they do so, they “shape and coerce the terrible blood”— what Addie earlier calls the “duty to the alive”—“to the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air” (175). In effect, Addie sees their affair as pushing against language, establishing an interpersonal connection which words cannot achieve. Faulkner further emphasizes this conception in the lack of reported dialogue. Here, Addie and Whitfield share no direct exchanges; we only know what she “would think” of him and what she “would think…him as thinking” of her (174). Neither one verbally articulates the nature of their relationship, and it subsequently remains meaningful. This understanding of Addie’s view of language and human relations helps explain the detachment she feels towards her first two children. She writes, “My children were of me alone” (175). They are not hers, only of her—as though she, like a word, were only a vessel (173). Neither are the children inherently Anse’s—she “gives” them to him (174). Addie earlier insists that her aloneness “had never been violated until Cash came. Not even by Anse in the nights” (172). She considers her relationship to Anse an act of duty, mediated by language, and thus devoid of meaning. Consequently, Cash and Darl do not naturally belong to either Anse or Addie because they are born out of a relationship that has no real connection. They are “of the wild blood boiling along the earth” (175), part of the life she wishes to escape. In the aftermath of her affair, Addie feels caught in a kind of limbo, a seemingly endless stretch of her current, meaningless earthly life, seeing “no beginning nor ending to anything” (175). Then she discovers she is pregnant with Jewel, and it is then she professes to know “at last” what her father meant when he said “the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead” (175), a sentiment perhaps less nihilistic than it may first seem, describing not an “end” so much as a deliverance. • • •

Jewel, the product of her affair, is the only one of Addie’s children not born of the “world,” of the same earthliness (and therefore sinfulness) as the others, but conceived instead in a real, tangible connection between people, in that wordless place outside of society. Jewel is hers—maybe the only thing Addie has ever felt belonged to her, the only thing of hers with any meaning. By this token we can better understand what Addie means when she tells Cora that Jewel will be her salvation (168). Created not in sin but apart from it, in the same kind of “voicelessness” in which Addie hears “the dark land talking of God’s love” (174), Jewel embodies Addie’s closest connection to the divine. Having given birth to him, Addie feels “the wild blood boiled away” (176), as though finally released from her obligatory ties to the world. In its place “there was only the milk, warm and calm” (176) as she lay there with him—not a far leap, maybe, from Moses’ vision of paradise, the land of milk and honey, described in the Book of Exodus. Jewel signifies the most “meaning” that Addie believes she can achieve; thus, she feels her only remaining earthly task is to fulfill her marital obligation to Anse. So Addie “gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel” and then “Vardaman to replace the child [she] had robbed him of ” (176). Although she professes to finally understand what her father said, in life being a preparation for death, Addie holds “that he could not have known what he meant himself, because a man cannot know anything about cleaning up the house” (175-6), about this experience of bringing children into the world. The statement seems to suggest some spiritual privilege women may hold over men, but Faulkner complicates the notion with the position of the final two Bundren children. When Addie explains that Anse now “has three children that are his and not mine,” she refers to Cash, Darl, and Vardaman (176). In Addie’s equation, Dewey Dell negates Jewel; she is the cancellation, the counterweight, leaving a void which Addie must then fill with Vardaman as a replacement. Faulkner thus places Dewey Dell, the only girl, in this uniquely liminal state, creating a tension which Addie either does not address or does not even recognize. And though Addie believes she is not one of those “people to whom… salvation is just words” (176), Faulkner provides little, if any, indication of where it is she is currently speaking from. This, it seems, we must extrapolate for ourselves, as Faulkner puts even more weight on the language already present and draws our attention to the information he conspicuously withholds. Works Cited Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. 1930. New York: Vintage Inter national, 1985. Print.

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Violent Love:

The Appalachian Murder Ballad and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina Claire Gavin ’13

In “Violent Love: The Appalachian Murder Ballad and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina” Gavin succinctly and compellingly delineates the impact of Appalachian murder ballads on Dorothy Allison’s brilliant Bastard Out of Carolina. As Gavin notes, these ballads--with their roots in 16th and 17th century English Broadside traditions--were re-popularized in mid 20th century country western music with which Allison was quite familiar. Reading Bastard Out of Carolina through the themes and structures of this violent and often misogynist genre provides readers with a vibrant, finely nuanced and original insight into Allison’s breathtaking narrative. This insight is most resonant in Gavin’s analysis of Allison’s treatment of the relationships between Annie Boatwright and Daddy Glen, and centrally between Annie and her daughter Bone, as Bone productively disrupts and rewrites her mother’s own Appalachian murder ballad.

— Elizabeth J. McCormack Associate Professor of Women’s Studies Vivyan Adair

Peggy Dunn Bailey, in her article “Female Gothic Fiction, Grotesque Realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison Revises the Southern Gothic,” argues that Allison’s novel belongs to the Southern Gothic tradition because of its “representation of grotesque characters, situations and events” (288). In her analysis, Bailey views Bastard as being thematically linked to the works of Emily Bronte and William Faulkner. However, while Allison’s text is undoubtedly a gothic novel, it is not solely influenced by this tradition. Set in Greenville, South Carolina, Bastard is also heavily informed by “hillbilly” music, particularly Appalachian murder ballads, that its young female protagonist, Bone Boatwright, would have heard on the records and radio stations she loves so much. By examining Allison’s novel in the context of the Appalachian murder ballad, we can gain a greater understanding of Anney Boat• • •

wright’s relationship with Daddy Glen, and the way her daughter Bone writes against this narrative. The Appalachian murder ballad has its roots in the 16th and 17th century English broadside ballad tradition. Both the English and American ballads functioned as a kind of oral storytelling with impersonal narrators and violent, usually misogynistic themes. First popularized in America during the 19th century by way of Francis James Child’s Popular English and Scottish Ballads, murder ballads enjoyed a renewed popularity in the mid-20th century when they were performed by artists such as Johnny Cash. Many of these ballads feature different versions of the same story: a young girl is seduced by a man who, when the girl displeases him either murders or seriously injures her. One of the most famous murder ballads, “On the Banks of the Ohio,” which was performed

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by Cash and many others, ends with the lines, “I’ve killed the girl I love/Because she would not marry me.” In murder ballads such as this one, violence is seen as a consequence of love, as proof of its intensity. “On the Banks of the Ohio,” and all murder ballads like it, feature an acceptance of violent love that in many ways mirrors the Southern Gothic’s focus on “obsessive preoccupations” (Bailey 271). In Bastard Out of Carolina, Bone’s mother Anney’s relationship with Daddy Glen closely conforms to the stories of the murder ballads that would have been on the radio at the time. She is only twenty-one when she marries Glen, and while she has been married once before and has given birth to two children, she is still innocent enough to believe that she can achieve the life she wants through wishful thinking: “Maybe, she kept telling herself, maybe he’ll make a good daddy” (Allison 15). However, from the very beginning of their relationship, Glen is consumed by violent jealousy: “He would have her, he told himself. He would marry Black Earle’s baby sister […] and kill any man who dared touch her” (Allison 13). Glen’s words echoes those of the murderous lover in “On the Banks of the Ohio”: “only say you’ll be mine/In no other arms entwined.” Love, in both the novel and the ballad, is defined by possession. Bone, as the oldest of her mother’s daughters in the tight-knit Boatwright family, internalizes the lessons she is taught by Anney. Thus, when Anney refuses to leave Glen, even though she knows he beats her daughter, Bone believes her step-father’s violent behavior is her fault: “I was the one who made Daddy Glen mad” (Allison 251). Anney believes that her marriage is of primary importance, to the detriment of Bone’s self-esteem: “Mama thought that keeping me out of the house and away from Daddy Glen was the answer” (Allison 233). To cope with her exile, Bone turns to music, singing along to the music of “Marty Robbins, Kitty Wells, Johnny Cash, Ruth Brown, Stonewall Jackson, June Carter, Johnny Horton” (Allison 137): the modern-day singers of murder ballads. Music functions as both a form of escapism and a reification of Anney’s example, therefore confusing Bone’s understanding of her place and worth in her family. Daddy Glen’s violent rape of Bone at the end of the novel completes the narrative of the “real-life” murder ballad. Bone says that Glen “drove his sex into me like a sword” (Allison 285), and thus, Glen’s sexual penetration of her stands in for the actual murder at the end of “On the Banks of the Ohio”: “I plunged a knife into her breast.” In keeping with the ballad’s tradition of love proven by violence, Glen easily justifies his actions to Anney by saying “I just wanted you to come home, for us all to be together again” (Allison 289). Anney reinforces the love-at-all-costs message for Bone when she refuses to accept that her husband truly is the monstrous rapist of her daughter: “And I just loved him. You know that I just loved him so I couldn’t see him that way” (Allison 306). By taking Glen back, Anney proves to Bone that their world is the world of the murder ballad, a place where the only relationship that gives meaning is the heterosexual romantic relationship • • •

marked by violence. After an initial fit of rage, Bone seems to accept her mother’s lesson. She sits on the porch of her Aunt Raylene’s house in silence after Anney’s disappearance, resembling in her passivity the corpse of the murdered girl in “On the Banks of the Ohio.” However, Bone ultimately writes against the story of her mother and the larger cultural story of the murder ballad through her relationship with her aunt: “When Raylene came to me, I let her touch my shoulder, let my head tilt to lean against her, trusting her arm and her love” (Allison 309). Bone says at the end of the novel, “I was already who I was going to be” (Allison 309), and while we do not know what becomes of her, it is clear that she is someone who rejects the primacy of violent love for the support of a matriarchal family structure. Even more so than Daddy Glen, Anney is the character in Bastard Out of Carolina who invites the most scorn. She sacrifices Bone for the survival of her relationship, giving her body to Glen to do with as he pleases, all without suffering a scratch herself. While it is easy to hate Anney for what she allows to happen to Bone, just as it is easy to hate murder ballads for what the suggest should happen to women, it is possible that an alternative reading can rehabilitate the image of both. Allison herself has suggested that by leaving Bone in Raylene’s care with her “legitimate” birth certificate, she saves her daughter from Glen’s abuse and gives her a ticket out of the oppressive life she would have otherwise had (Bailey 279). Similarly, one could argue the reason that many Appalachian mothers passed murder ballads onto their daughters was to warn them against entering into the kind of lives they themselves had. Bastard Out of Carolina and murder ballads such as “On the Banks of the Ohio” through their stark portrayal of domestic violence can be seen as undermining the very narrative they are depicting. Works Cited Allison, Dorothy. Bastard out of Carolina. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Dutton, 1992. Print. Bailey, Peggy A. “Female Gothic Fiction, Grotesque Realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison Revises the Southern Gothic.” Mississippi Quarterly 63.1/2 (2010): 269. Print.

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Reframing History:

How the Soviet Union became New Russia Adam Fix ’13

Adam Fix’s paper, written for an advanced seminar on the Soviet Union as a multi-national state, is a sophisticated consideration of how the USSR imagined itself within the flow of history. The Bolshevik Russians saw not only themselves as the culmination of Marx’s historical materialist process leading to communism, but also the hundred or so non-Russian peoples who made up the entire state. The problem that confronted them in the 1930s was that, contrary to Marx’s prediction, national identity did not disappear with the advent of socialist economic relations. The Bolsheviks had to accommodate strong Russian cultural pride while creating new nations that would ultimately merge with Russia on the road to class-based communist internationalism. Here Adam analyzes the role that historians played in that complex and paradoxical process.

— Professor of History Shoshanna Keller

Throughout the first decade of its existence, the Soviets radically reengineered both the cultural identity of the USSR and its position in world history. Recognizing the Marxist principles of class struggle and historical teleology as far too intangible a foundation on which to foster Soviet patriotism, the Bolsheviks in the 1930s gradually adopted a more populist conception of history that positioned the USSR not as a mere construction in a predetermined teleology but as a full-fledged nation of the oppressed masses. With the USSR barely ten years old, they had no choice but to turn to Mother Russia to provide the masses with the comprehensible national identity pure Marxism so conspicuously lacked. Although once sworn enemies of the Russian establishment, the Bolsheviks by the mid-1930s launched a series of Rus• • •

sian education reforms to graft Russian culture over the multiethnic patchwork that constituted the USSR, creating a new definition of Soviet culture that was at once uniformly Russian and international. These reforms, spurred on by the practical necessity of a uniform culture and national identity, aligned the Bolsheviks with progressive Russian leaders of the past and rebranded the USSR not as an entirely new entity but as a continuation of Russia’s thousand-year state-building tradition. Thus the Bolsheviks merged Russian and USSR history into a single, all-encompassing continuity that positioned them as the inheritors of both the international working class movement and the Russian national legacy. The Bolsheviks in 1923 considered themselves nothing less than the messianic architects of history’s last, greatest epoch.

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As the progressives who broke tsarism’s stranglehold on Russia and accelerated the inevitable train of history to its final, socialist endpoint, the Bolsheviks established the USSR as a government for the proletarians that would sustain and propagate the socialist movement until the world’s first truly Marxist society emerged. The Soviets depicted the USSR as not only a classless but largely cultureless state that unified previously distinct peoples under class consciousness and eventually eliminated ethnicity. The USSR existed only to serve the workers’ movement, and thus filled a very specific historical role. The Bolsheviks, in turn, represented the proletarians of the world rather than any particular nationality, and the USSR both reinforced the supremacy of the proletariat and severed ties with Russia’s bourgeoisie-dominated past. The Bolsheviks, in eschewing cultural and ethnic trappings in favor of a rigorously classist interpretation of world history, positioned themselves as the chief defenders of the proletariat class. The USSR, the culmination of all historical progress, heralded an entirely new, never before seen stage of history. Fitting with this Marxist model, the Bolsheviks sought to foster socialism individually within each soviet republic. A view originally posited by Lenin, Soviet “affirmative action” followed the logic that internationalism could emerge only after states developed their own national identity (Martin (An Affirmative Action Empire), 68-69). Considering nationalism instrumental to modernizing a region and disregarding the accompanying cultural divisions as at worst temporary nuisances, the Soviets implemented the policies of korenizatsiia to push each region, one by one, towards socialist revolution. In encouraging the development of a native ruling elite and the native language within each region (73), the Soviets placed the parts over the whole; the USSR in 1923 operated not as a nation unto itself but as the summation of its individual cultures, each with their own history. Whatever else he meant when he declared these cultures “national in form, socialist in content” (74), Stalin sought to develop socialism on the national, rather than international level. Advocating a “decolonizing rhetoric” (74) that promoted smaller nationalities and staved off Russian domination outside of Russia, the Soviets in 1923 viewed the USSR chiefly as an accumulation of socialist states and vehemently opposed enforcing any single overarching culture. By the 1930s, the Soviets transformed themselves from accessories in a preset historical process to the chief defenders of the oppressed masses. Accepting the USSR as the only socialist state “in the midst of a capitalist encirclement” (Brandenberger (2002), 28), the Soviets recognized that Marxism alone could not provide the ideological foundation necessary to sustain such a vast, multiethnic, yet poorly educated and underdeveloped state. Seeking a straightforward historical narrative as a “catalyst for patriotic sentiment” (30), the Bolsheviks reframed history such that the people of the USSR, not the abstract class divisions, took center stage. While previously defined largely in Marxist sociological terms, history in the 1930s began emphasizing “heroes of labor” (29) over the working class as a whole; Soviet government now rep• • •

resented not Marx’s proletariat class, but the people in the Union who constituted that class. Similarly, figures such as Nicholas II supplied definite historical shape to the once abstract notion of corrupt autocracy as the reactionary enemy of socialism. Thus the unification of nations under socialism, while still the ultimate end of history, gained new importance. While previously mere components of Marxist historical progression, modernization and socialism became the people’s best defense from oppression, be it from the bourgeoisie within the society or from European imperialism. After a decade of soulless class rhetoric, the Soviets finally began tapping in to the classic “us vs. them” ideologies that characterized nationalism. The search for a “usable past” (41) upon which to build national identity spurred an ideological shift from esoteric Marxism to Soviet state patriotism that repositioned the Soviets as the champions not of an abstruse class category but of all the poor, downtrodden people of the world. The Bolsheviks could not, however, pull nationalism out of thin air. The search for a usable past reflected the larger trend towards a “culturally uniform Soviet population” (Blitstein 253) that the Bolsheviks increasingly viewed as instrumental to the development of Soviet patriotism. Now that the USSR was a state of individuals rather than classes, those individuals required a consistent cultural identity. Following the 1932 failure of korenizatsiia in critical regions such as Ukraine (Martin (Linguistic Ukrainization), 77), the Soviets no longer perceived the USSR as a union of equally valuable and developed cultures. Rather, in seeking a uniform Soviet identity while retaining the internationalism required by their Marxist roots, the Bolsheviks formulated a conception of the USSR that promoted Russian, both their most widespread and most modernized civilization, as the grand, all-encompassing culture under which smaller nationalities could join together. Most apparent in an education system that required the teaching of both Russian and the native language of a region (Blitstein 253), this policy propagated for the first time a uniformly Soviet culture throughout the entire USSR. Russification did not signify the total abandonment of Soviet affirmative action. Unlike bourgeois “masking ideologies” (Martin (An Affirmative Action Empire), 69), Russian culture, in bringing underdeveloped nationalities into the modern world, united and strengthened rather than divided the socialist movement. Regions retained their own national elites and thus were not marginalized in a political sense. However, recognizing that almost every local Soviet elite remained linguistically (and thus culturally) Russian even after a decade of linguistic korenizatsiia (Martin (Linguistic Ukrainization), 75), the Soviets redefined cultural relations within the USSR. Rather than a conglomeration of autonomous nationalities, the Soviets now governed a multiethnic state blanketed by Russian; each region preserved its own autonomy and language at the local level, yet also existed within an overarching Soviet society. Far from masking class consciousness, this Russian envelopment would guide undeveloped peoples towards the socialism they could not develop independently. Thus Russian culture,

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as the common medium of discourse in the USSR, also became the common culture of Bolshevism. The Soviets, no longer leading a cultureless proletariat state, began to depict the USSR as both a union of nations and a continuation of Russian history. When Stalin claimed that “the Russian people in the past gathered the other peoples together” (Brandenberger (2002), 47), he implicitly rejected the notion of a multiethnic state and considered the history of Russia the single, linear history of all peoples under Russian influence. While largely abandoning Marx’s class-based dialectic, the Bolsheviks nevertheless retained the Marxist faith in the unequivocal benefits of modernizing and unifying diverse peoples under a single state. They did not perceive regions like Ukraine or Georgia inherently Russian in character, but rather asserted that these regions, too weak to form developed nations in their own right, depended on Russia for modernization and thus fit into the same grand narrative. Furthermore, tsarism’s collapse marked no discontinuity in this narrative. Positing that the Russian people “have begun that sort of gathering again now” (47), Stalin positioned the internationalist USSR as a continuation of that same noble Russian tradition. This perspective, allowing the Soviets to rehabilitate Russian progressive heroes such as Peter the Great, linked the USSR not to a dialectic chain of class conflict but to the much more familiar narrative of Russian state building. The Bolsheviks, like the tsars before them, united diverse nationalities, and in revolutionizing these smaller peoples under Russia’s wing, created a union far greater than the sum of its parts. By redefining Russia as both a nation and a unifying force that modernized and assimilated weaker nationalities, the Bolsheviks assumed leadership of both the Russian people and the internationalist movement. Paradoxical as it may have seemed, they became both nationalists and Marxists. The Bolsheviks did not so much rewrite as reframe history. Although they initially advocated the inevitable and desirable world socialist revolution and modeled the USSR after the “worker’s paradise” of classical Marxism, such bloodless rhetoric proved incapable of mobilizing the popular support such a large and culturally heterogeneous state required. The Soviets thus discarded the old, multiethnic approach to USSR history in favor of a single, uniform narrative that preserved the internationalist ideology and primacy of the working class while utilizing Russian culture to enforce a single, comprehensive Soviet identity. The USSR became a culture of people, not proletarians, and evolved from a loose confederation of autonomous socialist states to an indivisible socialist nation in its own right. No longer bound to the abstract needs of the Marxist dialectic, the Bolsheviks by the 1930s gradually transformed the USSR into a multinational, yet also inherently Russian, state. They thus merged the “militant proletarian internationalism” (Brandenberger (2001), 276) that drove the October Revolution with the Russian cultural identity needed to consolidate the new regime. Just as Russia reemerged in the Bolshevik rhetoric as Soviet prehistory, the USSR, in both its newfound historical legacy and cultural identity, became new Russia. • • •

Works Cited Blithstein, Peter A. “Nation-Building or Russification?” A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. By Ronald Grigor. Suny and Terry Martin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 253-274. Print. Brandenberger, David. “…It Is Imperative to Advance Russian Nationalism as the First Priority” A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. By Ronald Grigor. Suny and Terry Martin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 275-299. Print. Brandenberger, David. National Bolshevism: Stalinist mass culture and the formation of modern Russian national identity. 1931-1956. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print. Martin, Terry. “An Affirmative Action Empire” A State of Na tions: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. By Ronald Grigor. Suny and Terry Martin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 67-90. Print. Martin, Terry. “Linguistic Ukrainization, 1923-1932.” The affirma tive action empire: nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. 75-124. Print.

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