The Channel 2010 by Ryan Healey

the channel

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montréal, Canada

Copyright © The Channel: The Department of English Undergraduate Journal, McGill University, Montreal Canada, 2010 Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press 3430 McTavish Street, Montreal QC, H3A 1X9, Canada Editorial selection, compilation and material © by the 2010 editorial team of The Channel and its literary contributors The Channel is an academic journal of McGill University with literary submissions by its undergraduate students studying in the Department of English. Printed and bound in Canada by the McGill University Printing Services. All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted and cited from external authors, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Channel logo is a trademark of The Department of English Undergraduate Journal and may not be reproduced without the written consent of The Channel’s editorial board. Cover art by Aquil Virani. Layout and design by Aya Tomioka.

The Channel The Channel Volume 3, Issue 1 The Department of English Undergraduate Journal

Featuring Essays By Annabel Lane Avinash Kanji Eric Leinveer Klara Du Plessis Luke Neima Senior Editors (Editors-in-Chief) Catherine Knowles William Robinson Kathleen Keenan (Online) Aya Tomioka (Design Preanka Hai Sarina Isenberg Matthias Lalisse Binoy Zuzarte

Rosa Aiello Anna Robinson Jessica Sharpe Stefanie Miller Robert Leclerc Assistant Editors Ryan Healey Frances Kim Max Karpinski Carolyn Rowan Natalie Martiniello

Editorial Consultant Lauren Welsh

Academic Advisor Web/Online Advisor Miranda Hickman

Monica Popescu

Contents Foreword Acknowledgements

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1 Annabel Lane

2 Avinash Kanji

3 Eric Leinveer

4 Klara Du Plessis

5 Luke Neima

6 Rosa Aiello

7 Jessica Sharpe

8 Anna Robinson

9 Stefanie Miller

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10 Robert Leclerc

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Social Justice: A Laughing Matter? The Implications of Humour in the Works of Marie Clements and Tomson Highway The Bard Apprenticeship: Orality in No Sweetness Here “You can teach an old dog literary tricks”: Analyzing Michael Ondaatje’s use of Dogs Masking or Unmasking? Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry “Relations of Utter Interdestruction”: Circuits of Energy in Women in Love Wallace Stevens: Achieving Spiritual Heroism through Painterly Abstraction “Till they almost forget they live”: The Cenci, Hebrew Melodies, and the Materiality of Representation Odd Girls Out: The Production, Distribution, and Reception of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1950 to the Present Pacing Round the Cage: Errol Morris’s Epistemology of Confinement The Fetish of Democratic Media: A Phantasmatic Critique of News and Democracy The Contributors

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Foreword To reduce the essays of this year’s edition of The Channel to a single unifying theme would be to undermine the tantalizing breadth and depth of our selection for 2009-2010. With papers on vastly different periods and subjects, drawing from a wide range of methods and ideas, we strove to choose the most relevant, eloquent, and stimulating essays possible. Yet there are innumerable threads of connection between each of the papers, and we certainly invite you to seek them out! The difficulty of the selection process was amplified by the strength of the sixty-six submissions that we received. It took a task force of eleven talented and enthusiastic editors, but even then we must admit to forgoing the publication of many excellent works. Those that did end up in the journal are, in our humblest of opinions, the most representative of the great and multifaceted products of undergraduates in the three streams – Literature, Cultural Studies, and Drama & Theatre – of the Department of English at McGill. The Channel has certainly taken a leap forward this year, expanding not only in breadth of subject matter, but in length as well (from sixty pages in Volume 1 to one hundred and thirty in Volume 3). Our increasing accessibility is thanks, in large part, to our online expansion: you can visit our bourgeoning website at http://www.englishjournal.mcgill.ca. We are so grateful to have been named AUS’ Publication of the Year for 2008-2009, and we hope that Volume 3 of The Channel will continue to be a testament to the caliber of work produced by the extraordinary undergraduate students in our department.

Catherine Knowles William Robinson

Acknowledgements

WE WOULD LIKE TO THANK Professors Hickman and Popescu for taking time to provide guidance on this creative and academic project. We also extend our gratitude to the Department of English Students’ Association, whose commitment helped to ensure that the third annual edition came to fruition. Special thanks to McGill-Queen’s University Press for the beautifully printed copy you are now holding, and to Aquil Virani, who created the art work on our cover. We would also like to thank The Channel’s former Editor-in-Chief, Kate Hart, for her assistance and advice. We also appreciate the support of our generous sponsors: The Department of English at McGill University, the Department of English Students’ Association, the Arts Undergraduate Society, and the Students’ Society of McGill University. Last but not least, we would like to thank those individuals who contributed to the success of this journal by submitting an essay, informally lending a hand, or otherwise participating in the community without which this journal would never have happened.

The Editors

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1 Social Justice: A Laughing Matter? The Implications of Humour in the Works of Marie Clements and Tomson Highway ANNABEL LANE

Social Justice: A Laughing Matter?

The Implications of Humour in the Works of Marie Clements and Tomson Highway ANNABEL LANE In response to the severe challenges facing Aboriginal communities in Canada, playwrights Marie Clements and Tomson Highway use the medium of the stage in a way that uniquely addresses issues of Aboriginal identity and experience, ultimately building multiple layers of community. Despite the highly disturbing nature of their subject matter, Clements’ The Unnatural and Accidental Women and Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing employ unexpected humour to forge connections across boundaries of space, time, and culture. The use of humour affirms the vitality of the Aboriginal community, and creates a new level of community between the audience members and the world of the play. At the same time, the plays’ inclusive methods implicate audience members in the painful social issues unfolding on the stage, forcing a destabilizing re-evaluation of their own relationship to the violence – a process that is crucial for theatre that hopes to engender social change.

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Through the incorporation of humour, Clements and Highway nourish a spirit of survival and renewal that is uniquely Aboriginal. Reid Gilbert notes that “ironic humour” plays an integral role in Aboriginal culture (54), and Native playwright Drew Hayden Taylor recognizes a “Tricksterish spirit permeat[ing] almost all work presented as native theatre” (65-66). This quality has played an integral role in Aboriginal struggles with colonization, the reserve system, residential schools, and societal racism. Mohawk actor Gary Farmer, who performed in the premier of Dry Lips, asserts that Aboriginal communities would not “be existing today” if not for “the ability to laugh”. He calls humour “a means of survival, the only means” (qtd. in Fagan 204). Taylor reinforces this interpretation, declaring that “Even in the darkest moments, there were always sparks of humour. I think that’s how we survived 500 years of oppression. It was our humour that kept us sane” (qtd. in Nunn 82). The unique use of humour to address trauma in Dry Lips and The Unnatural and Accidental Women represents the continuation of this Aboriginal tradition. Clements and Highway strengthen the Aboriginal community in a way that transcends the bounds of their texts. The elements of humour in their plays have different implications for non-Native audience members. Robert Nunn notes that “The humour is

coming from a very specific cultural frame of reference, which the White spectator does not share but cannot help but be aware of ” (81). This use of humour can have a destabilizing effect on non-Native audiences. At the end of a presentation in which Highway discussed the abuses inflicted upon him in a residential school, the author summed up with a smile, “I had to get out of there. I just couldn’t swallow it anymore.” When audience members maintained grave expressions, “Highway laughed, ‘It’s a joke! Don’t you get it?’” (qtd. in Fagan 104-106). Both authors employ humour not only as a vehicle for recovery from trauma, but also to undermine stock responses of sympathy from mainstream audiences and encourage a more direct involvement with the world of the plays.

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In Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing, Highway demonstrates a use of humour similar to that of his residential schools presentation in his effort to address the struggles of seven Indigenous men living on a reserve, dealing with the aftermath of their own troubled pasts. The play is a dream-vision of Zachary Jeremiah Keechigeesik, in which he examines the reserve’s violent emotional undercurrents in vivid dramatizations. The process is an example of what Fagan sees as a potential for Aboriginal writers to “self-reflexively examine the potential and limits of…indirect and humorous communication” to confront cultural trauma (204-205). Despite the highly disturbing nature of many of Dry Lips’ scenes, Highway uses the character of Nanabush to subvert even the most painful moments. Nanabush is a supernatural figure from traditional Aboriginal mythology, whom Highway defines as “Essentially a comic, clownish sort of character… [who] straddles the consciousness of man and that of God, the Great Spirit” (“A Note on Nanabush,” Dry Lips 12). Jerry Wasserman notes further significance to Nanabush as “a theatrical sign of…healing” (33). In Dry Lips, Nanabush is an ever-present spirit, shifting form between characters or moderating the drama from her jukebox perch on the upper level of the stage. Nanabush exudes playful and irreverent mischievousness, which she intersperses within the play’s action. At the play’s opening, Nanabush orchestrates the set up of Zachary and the unfolding of the play’s sequence of events with indulgent pleasure (16). She intervenes in one of the play’s most emotionally intense moments, when Big Joey and Dickie Bird, both reeling from Dickie Bird’s brutal rape of Patsy Pegahmagahbow, finally acknowledge their relationship as father and son (107). Dickie Bird’s agony and guilt lead him to attempt suicide, using the gun in his father’s hands. Yet when the gun anticlimactically fails to go off, Nanabush steps in just before the set fades to black and derails the seriousness of the image. She makes the Marilyn Monroe in the poster behind the two men fart in a bizarre parody of the scene: “a little flag reading ‘poot’ pops up out of Ms. Monroe’s derriere, as on a play gun. We hear a cute little ‘poot’ sound” (107). The dramatic irony undercuts the impulse of a non-Native audience to take refuge in

simple pity. Furthermore, Nanabush’s irreverence affirms the continuity of a stubborn sense of Aboriginal vitality and healing spirit. More than simply a figment of Zachary’s dream, Nanabush’s presence persists even into the “real-life” scene that concludes the play. Highway has expressed the conviction that “Without the continued presence of this extraordinary figure, the core of Indian culture would be gone forever” (“A Note on Nanabush,” Dry Lips 12), and he confirms that this essence did not abandon the Aboriginal community “when the White man came” (13). The final image of familial love and unity between Zachary, Hera, and their child is one of survival, full of positive potential for the future (130). As the image fades to black, “Hera peals out with this magical, silvery Nanabush laugh,” which mixes with the laughter of the baby—Nanabush and her spirit of humour are deeply involved in Highway’s hopeful vision for the Aboriginal community. At the same time, the way Highway incorporates Nanabush is highly relational to the audience. Most of her actions are fully visible only to the audience, and most of her humour is solely for the audience’s benefit—such as the Marilyn Monroe manipulation. Being on the “in” side of Nanabush’s mockery creates a sense of intimacy between the audience and Nanabush, drawing even a non-Native audience into the world of the play.

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While The Unnatural and Accidental Women does not feature an explicit Nanabush figure, Clements similarly employs supernatural aspects to forge connections through humour. Like Highway, Clements deals with Aboriginal trauma in her exploration of the murders of ten Indigenous women by a White, male barber in Vancouver. While much of her play is serious in tone, Clements invokes the spirits of the women as quirky, warm characters who connect with each other and the audience through their humour and witty banter. As with Highway, Clements builds intimacy between the audience and the spirits of the women. This is particularly true in the second act, when the spirits of the dead women inhabit the apartment of the protagonist, Rebecca, and watch over her actions unbeknownst to her, thus echoing the position of Nanabush in Dry Lips. The scene’s humour is fully accessible only to the audience and the spirits, who are aware of the comic situation in its entirety. In this exchange, for example, Rebecca stumbles sleepily through the crowd of women, who only the audience can see and hear: MAVIS: Watch where you’re going, big feet. […] VERNA: Right on my little toe. Not this way or that, but right on my baby toe. VALERIE: This… in a handicapped zone. MAVIS: Well, you better hope she doesn’t park on your toe. VALERIE: Oh yeah. Too late—she just parked on my toe with the

corn. What the hell is this? VERNA: It’s the fuckin’ toe walk. REBECCA: Fuuuuck ouch… Fuck you, wall. ALL: Fuck you, big head. REBECCA: (to wall) What did you say? Silence. That’s what I thought you said. VALERIE: (mimicking) That’s what I thought you said. (67-68) Despite the wry tone of these comments, they are not mean-spirited. Rather, they resemble good-natured familial teasing and bickering; the women will later demonstrate their affection for each other and Rebecca. The moment’s homey absurdity undercuts a simplistic view of the women as tragic, passive victims, while connecting the audience to the spirits of the women in a way that even Rebecca is not. In both plays, the audience finds itself becoming a privileged partaker in “injokes” with select characters. In working to dissolve the boundary between play and spectator, and involve the audience directly in the plays’ humour, Clements and Highway encourage the formation of a new community within the theatre. Implicitly, they invite the audience to question its own role in the social injustices depicted.

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Physical gags and visual puns such as in the above scene play a crucial role in both plays. By evoking instinctive laughter from the audience, Clements and Highway draw audience members into further unwitting investment in the plays and a more intimate engagement with the plays’ painful issues. Highway weaves irresistible slapstick humour throughout the serious subject matter of Dry Lips, similar to the way he employs Nanabush’s influence. This element is present from the play’s outset, as a bewildered Zachary awakes naked in Big Joey’s house: “[Zachary] grabs a cast iron frying pan and slaps it over his crotch, almost castrating himself in the process. Ooof! BIG JOEY: Over easy or sunny side up, Zachary Jeremiah Keechigeesik?” (Dry Lips 18). The comical exchange immediately undermines potential audience expectations of a straightforward, sentimental social justice production. Later, Highway further complicates the relationship between humour and emotional pain. In the midst of a heated confrontation between Simon Starblanket, Spooky Lacroix, and Pierre St. Pierre over Dickie Bird’s traumatic birth in a local bar, Zachary bakes a pie with single-minded determination (86). Spooky offers him a salami instead of a rolling pin and chilli power instead of cinnamon, in glints of humour that twinkle mischievously within the surrounding tension (86). At the end of the scene, Zachary triumphantly holds up his completed piecrust in ironic contrast to the horrifying memory of the birth just relived by the men: “It worked!” (95). Highway disrupts the impulse to react to the community’s painful issues with customary, distanced sympathy. In evoking laughter in the midst of trauma, Highway implicates the audience in the complexity of the community’s experience.

Clements blends humour into her portrayal of Aboriginal trauma to a similar effect. In one of The Unnatural and Accidental Women’s most striking scenes, Valerie confronts a dresser that speaks in a man’s voice (26-31, 4751). At first, their feisty exchange has a slapstick quality, such as when Valerie slams the dresser’s groping hand in its own drawer, declaring, “that’s a bad dresser,” or with the various puns on “drawers” (30). The situation’s novelty piques interest and amusement. Clements shifts unsettlingly, however, from playful banter to the troubling invocation of Valerie’s two sons, whose voices the dresser conjures from its drawers. As Valerie’s desperation to connect with her children emerges, the dresser launches a brutal physical attack that leaves her unconscious, and in a sickening culmination of the sinister undercurrents from their previous exchange, stretches out a hand and “reaches down across her chest fondling her breasts” (51). The shocking combination of the initial absurdity with Valerie’s genuine pain derails the stock responses that a traditional portrayal of racism, sexism, and a mother’s separation from her children might evoke.

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In using humour to emphasize the quirkiness and humanity of their characters, Clements and Highway combat the tendency of mainstream culture to minimize Indigenous people into generic tropes. Yvette Nolan, Aboriginal playwright and president of the Playwright’s Union of Canada, notes that “the appetite for Native stories, for Native experience, is tempered by a certain set of expectations” from mainstream audiences (97). These reduce Aboriginal people to “the wise Indian,” “the quaint Indian,” “the funny Indian,” “the funny but wise Indian,” or “the Indian as victim” (97, 99). In the case of the women featured in The Unnatural and Accidental Women, the Vancouver media portrayed them as this last category—victims, whose fates were “familiar” and typical of their culture (Banting 84). Sarah Banting notes that, “Newspaper attention had focused on the barber and only the most scandalizing details of the women’s deaths: their nakedness… their unnaturally high blood alcohol levels.” The newspaper was “blind” to “the details of love or passion” in their lives (82-83). Clements attempts to redress this particular injustice by conjuring the spirits of the women as unique individuals, partly through the depiction of their senses of humour. Valerie’s comebacks, for example, reaffirm her independence of spirit, and build audience support for her on a personal level. Clements grants the women further warmth and vitality through their good-natured bickering in the second act. Through the script, the women finally obtain the recognition and connection with others that Clements feels was missing in their human lives (Banting 83). When Verna tells the other women about reading the Alcoholics Anonymous Bible on the toilet, she explains forlornly that, “I kept having to introduce myself. There was always a big silence after I said, ‘Hi, my name’s Verna.’ It left me kinda empty” (70). The melancholy yet comic image grants the audience a glimpse

into the human aspect of Verna beyond the label “alcoholic.” Furthermore, the other women come immediately to her rescue, responding together, “Hi, Verna.” The interaction works to create healing potential and strengthen the community of Aboriginal women. Though Highway does not aim to redress a specific misrepresentation such as that committed by the Vancouver Sun, the stunning diversity of his characters also undermines the codification of Aboriginal peoples. In terms of its effect on mainstream audiences, the humour in Dry Lips and The Unnatural and Accidental Women takes on a greater destabilizing quality in light of certain culturally specific factors. Direct references to White culture deflate mainstream value judgments (even as the humour draws the audience in). Some of Dry Lips’ most humourous moments involve subverting symbols from “high” White culture, including allusions to Greek drama, Shakespeare, and James Joyce, and turning them into farcical tools. For example, Nanabush responds to Zachary’s impassioned entreaty to “god” in typical trickster fashion by appearing only to the audience sitting on a toilet-throne, “wearing an old man’s white beard and wig, but also… sexy, elegant women’s high-heeled pumps. Surrounded by white puffy clouds, she/he sits with her legs crossed, nonchalantly filing his/her fingernails” (117). Sheila Rabillard notes the way Highway places these supposedly sophisticated conceptions on the same level as pop culture elements such as Marilyn Monroe and Kitty Wells, in an “estranging use that refuses to accept the cultural products of the dominant society according to that society’s estimations” (21-22). Clements does not employ such subversive tactics to the same degree, but she does include references that problematize mainstream values. She connects Marilyn and Penny’s “hair dreams” to White cultural icons Farrah Fawcett and Pat Benetar, desires that the barber manipulates to lure the women to their deaths (45).

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The use of Native languages in the two plays also complicates the connections formed with non-Aboriginal audiences. While both scripts are written primarily in English, Cree and Ojibway play prominent roles at crucial moments, granting only Native audience members full access to the emotional content. The scenes in The Unnatural and Accidental Women during which Clements incorporates traditional Native songs are powerful regardless of full comprehension, but do create a distinction between Native and non-Native audience members (58-61, 64-65). Mainstream audience members become marginalized, in a reversal of relations in general Canadian society. Characters in Dry Lips likewise switch into Cree and Ojibway at important moments. In a live performance, an audience member who does not speak these languages will miss nuances and emotional cues, including Patsy/Nanabush’s kind effort to connect with Dickie Bird, and the complete commentary on the hockey game (98, 124-125). Even scenes that are somewhat self-explanatory mark the difference

between audience members. Hera correcting Zachary’s bumbled Ojibway is surely a warmer, funnier moment to an Ojibway speaker, just as only an English speaker would appreciate the difference between “sharts” and “shorts” (129). Audience reactions to the plays performed live have often been unexpected. Aspects specific to individual productions such as the venue and actors have an important effect on audience reception of the elements outlined in the playtexts. Banting notes that, “Audiences are powerful” and possess the agency to interpret scenes onstage freely (84). No matter how original and subversive a text may be, mainstream audiences may still regard on-stage events as merely “representative,” and “typical” examples of the Aboriginal experience (84). In the case of The Unnatural and Accidental Women, aspects of the original live performance seem to have discouraged this impulse. The small theatre promoted an “immediate feeling of intimacy” (84), which would enhance the relational power of the text’s humour. Banting also notes the powerful stage presence of the actors—crucial for effective connection with the audience (8284). This seems to have served an important role in performances of Dry Lips as well, where even the most negative critics recognized the “irresistible” charm of Graham Greene in bringing to life the eccentricity of Pierre St. Pierre (Baker 89). Early productions of Dry Lips, however, seem to have contained aspects overly estranging to audiences. The fact that much of the audience left the Royal Alexandra Theatre’s production after the first act (Drainie C1), implies an outright rejection of Highway’s controversial work, rather than a willingness to engage with its troubling subjects. While critic Bronwyn Drainie sees this as a comment on mainstream attitudes (“Clearly, a single play cannot make a revolution”), critic Jay Scott claims that the venue “robbed [the play] of intimacy” (qtd. in Filewood 45). The “vast house” of the Royal Alexandra prevented audiences from connecting with the characters on an individual level, placing them instead “in a humanist field” (Scott qtd. in Filewood 45).

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Highway and Clements both answer the call of playwright Yvette Nolan not to “pander” to the dominant culture by portraying only the expected Native models (Nolan, 98). Drainie likewise praises the Royal Alexandra Theatre for pushing Dry Lips’ issues “under the noses of wealthy White audiences who prefer viewing the plight of the downtrodden at a romantic distance.” Yet Dry Lips inspired controversy among both mainstream and Native audiences (Filewood 45), as a scathing review by Aboriginal critic Marie Annharte Baker demonstrates. She finds the humour and content derogatory to female Native viewers, going so far as to compare the experience of watching the play to being “called a ‘squaw’ in public and be[ing] defiled by prejudice” (89). Well-known Native author Thomas

King expressed similar repulsion, calling Dry Lips an “aberration” (Drainie C1). These negative reactions may be natural products of Highway’s attempt to “expose the poison” as a positive step towards healing (Lyle Longclaws, qtd. in Highway, Dry Lips 12). However, the extreme nature of the trauma Highway depicts seems to have blocked Baker and other Native viewers from recognizing the more positive aspects of the play. Baker begs Hera Keechigeesik to “Please say something positive about being a Native woman, besides the breeder bit! Please” and dismisses the character completely when the scene does not fulfill these expectations (88). Yet Baker’s gaze misses the subtlety of Hera’s interaction with Zachary, the fact that in teaching him Ojibway she strengthens Aboriginal culture, and that in her willingness to play hockey she demonstrates her independent spirit (Dry Lips 129). Even the line upon which Baker lands with the most resentment— “just what I need, a puck in the left tit” (129)—is not frivolous, but an ironic echo of Nanabush in the hockey game. Ultimately, Baker reacts with a reductive tendency not distant from that of common mainstream attitudes. Interestingly, Thomas King has also been accused of minimizing the Aboriginal experience through the stock “funny-but-wise” characters on his radio show, The Dead Dog Café (Nolan 98). The plays of Marie Clements and Tomson Highway demonstrate the potential of theatre to address issues of social justice in a meaningful, impactful way. Through their incorporation of humour into traumatic subject matter, they promote the healing and strengthening of Aboriginal communities. At the same time, the techniques in both plays work to subvert the expectations of mainstream audiences. Reid Gilbert notes that, “If the goal of a playwright is actually to effect change, it is necessary that the writer derail reception” (128). Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and The Unnatural and Accidental Women manage both to derail reception and maintain a spirit of warmth and community, making the plays not simply works of theatre but vehicles of social justice.

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Works Cited

Baker, Marie Annharte. “Angry Enough to Spit But Dry Lips Hurts More Than You Know.” Canadian Theatre Review 68 (1991): 88. Print. Banting, Sarah. “Being there: Stage Presence and The Unnatural and Accidental Women.” West Coast Line 53 (2007): 80-85. Print. Clements, Marie. The Unnatural and Accidental Women. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2005. Print. Drainie, Bronwyn. “Highway play a challenging stop on the road to understanding.” The Globe and Mail 20 Apr. 1991: C1. Print. Fagan, Kristina. “Weesageechak Meets the Weetigo: Storytelling, Humour, and Trauma in the Fiction of Richard Van Camp, Tomson Highway, and Eden Robinson.” Studies in Canadian Literature 34 (2009): 204-26. Print. Filewood, Alan. “Receiving Aboriginality: Tomson Highway and the Crisis of Cultural Authenticity.” Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Ed. Rob Appleford. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2006. 37-48. Print. Gilbert, Reid. “Marie Clements’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women: ‘Denaturalizing’ Genre.” Theatre Research in Canada 24.1-2 (2003): 125- 46. Print. Highway, Tomson. Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Toronto: Fifth House Publishers, 1989. Print. ---. “On Native Mythology.” Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Ed. Rob Appleford. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2006. 1-4. Print.

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Nolan, Yvette. “Selling Myself: the Value of an Artist.” Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Ed. Rob Appleford. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2006. 95-105. Print. Nunn, Robert. “Hybridity and Mimicry in the Plays of Drew Hayden Taylor.” Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Ed. Rob Appleford. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2006. 74-94. Print.

Rabillard, Sheila. “Absorption, Elimination, and the Hybrid: Some Impure Questions of Gender and Culture in the Trickster Drama of Tomson Highway.” Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Ed. Rob Appleford. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2006. 4-31. Print. Taylor, Drew Hayden. “Alive and well: Native theatre in Canada.” Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Ed. Rob Appleford. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2006. 61-68. Print.

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2 The Bard Apprenticeship Orality in No Sweetness Here AVINASH KANJI

The Bard Apprenticeship

Orality in No Sweetness Here AVINASH KANJI How does one convey a rich and multifarious oral culture in writing? This question is at the crux of the Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo’s collection of short stories No Sweetness Here. The manner by which literary scholars addressed orality in Aidoo’s work has been mediated by a variety of factors including the relatively recent development of the written form as a means of expression in African culture and the complicated interaction between pre-colonial modes of expression, particularly oral, and the colonial enterprise that sought to undermine the use of traditional art forms as tools for communicating the existential reality of colonised peoples. In Frantz Fanon’s words: “[b]y a kind of perverted logic, [Colonialism] turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it” (154). In being sympathetic to African writers reclaiming old traditions, literary scholarship has for the most part preserved the binary between written and oral, an antagonism which does not account for the dynamic relationship between the written text and the act of performance. In addition, it disregards the nuances of the oral tradition itself: in particular, the aesthetic distinction between oral text and oral performance. In light of this complexity, I interrogate the graphic/ oral dialectic of Aidoo’s text and propose a reading of her work based on an understanding of the reader as a “narrator in the making,” a performer of the text. Whereas a polarising discourse has hitherto been required to stake a place for oral traditions in literary scholarship, the acceptance of these art forms as a primary mode of literary expression requires a more articulate approach– one that accounts for the rich interplay between oral traditions, modernity and the written form.

Kanji

An especially insidious manifestation of the colonial enterprise within its academic corporation was the view that the oral traditions of colonised peoples were inferior to the literate cultural institutions of the West. Indeed, as early as the eighteenth century Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts a correlation between the complexity of language and a society’s advancement in relation to its “primitive being” (Spurr 103). As David Spurr notes of Rousseau, he “appropriates the logic and precision of language embodied in writing to Western European culture” (103). Rousseau’s reasoning denounces societies utilising oral communication as “primitive” (103), since oral transmission does not contain the “logic and precision” (103) of writing, the basis of Western literate societies. This argument survives unchanged into the twentieth century

with scholars such as Jack Goody, for whom Abiola Irele recognises, “orality represents an incapacity to handle logical processes and amounts to a less assured mode of manipulating the world; literacy [relating to the written] thus provides the sole basis of civilized life” (75). While Goody emphasises the disadvantages an oral culture has in the development of a scientific method and technology (“an argument that has its merit” (Irele 76)), the view that oral communication lacks precision and rationality implies that it is less suitable to expression, and hence to artistic communication, than written text. This idea is a fundamental assumption of the graphocentric definition of literature as written works, “whose originating form and final point of reference is their existence as written textuality” (Finnegan 165). It is in response to this conceptual (and institutional) context, that African artists in the late twentieth century “undertook to re-examine and overhaul… the image of their culture that had long been advertised by outsiders” and demonstrate that “Africa has had, since time immemorial traditions that should be respected and a culture to be proud of ” (Okpewho 83-84). As a member of the African literati who undertook to reclaim their traditions, Ama Ata Aidoo proclaims: “I totally disagree with people who feel that oral literature is one stage in the development of man’s artistic genius. To me it’s an end in itself ” (qtd. in Pieterse 24). However, there emerges for Aidoo a conflict between her allegiance to the oral form and the benefits of the written, particularly in the latter’s aptitude for spatial and temporal stability. She concedes that with the written text in the coloniser’s language, “one gets the chance with communicating with other Africans outside Ghana, […] - if you have any message- [you can] carry your message over to more people outside” (qtd. in Pieterse 22). Writing is integral to her vision of a Pan-African identity. She maintains that: “whatever was left for us to recoup cannot be done unless we [‘the global African world African-American, African-Caribbean and so on’] see ourselves as a people” (qtd. in Needham 125). Thus the transcription of the oral tradition into written forms is the “area of an active and focused self-consciousness” (Irele 78) for artists invested in an African community.

Kanji

Innate to any verbal culture is its oral literary texts. They are formed by a varied engagement with language, in which artistic texts are characterised by the “degree of elaboration in [their] speech” (Irlele 80). Irele distinguishes three forms of language which negotiate the division between common speech and artistic text: pragmatic communication, figurative and rhetorical language, and “organized” (80), or stable, oral text. Most significant in this formulation is the idea that proverbs, which are a central feature to African speech (Irele 80; Okpewho 89), act as a link between figurative language and “organized text” (80)

in that they can become “formulaic” (80). That is, cultural conventions can be established which specify the use of proverbs for various contexts. Thus any African writer working out of an oral tradition may utilise original, as well as culturally prescribed, figurative language in the form of proverbs. Proverbs also highlight the discrepancy between oral performance and oral text: their usage is not limited to verbal performance, and so, can easily be expropriated by written narrative forms.

Oral performance and oral text differ in terms of key formal, aesthetic and narrative elements; significantly, the oral performance is not limited to its verbal narrative: its execution conveys a diversity of sensory information, including auditory, visual, acoustic, kinesic, proxemic, and tactile (Finnegan 172). The aesthetic principles which mediate one’s engagement with the performance and with the verbal text may, therefore, diverge. This is evidenced by the duality of genre indicative any such performance: on the one hand, one’s aesthetic expectations are framed by genre in the textual sense, as with “the explanatory tale” in the Igbo tradition (Okwepho 89), which is ascribed to the oral text and does not differ according to performance; on the other, by genre in the performance sense, which comprises the “information provided to orient the spectator as to what genre of […] performance she/he will be witnessing, which should in turn influence his activity as a spectator” (Balme 68). These (performance) generic codes may be interpreted differently by an African audience as compared to a Western one, for instance, in the degree to which the spectators interact with the performers. Thus each performance of an oral text will differ in relation to the cultural codes of the audience, but also, according to more practical factors such as the availability of venue, lighting, visibility and so forth. In addition, certain formal elements, such as rhythm and refrain, mediate between the text and performance in that they are encoded into the textual narrative, but are also necessitated by the challenges, conditions, and style of the oral performance. When interpreting an author like Aidoo, who promotes the performance aspect of her work, one must recognise its dynamism and complexity, and particularly, the interplay of temporality between performance and written representation.

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As mentioned above, the concept of temporality plays a central role in the formation of an oral text. These texts are not completely fluid, changing with each performance, as some might suggest (Finnegan 168); instead, their variability is concomitant to that of the social institutions within which they disseminate. This is because the propagation of an oral text requires either the “mobilization of the entire culture” (Irele 76) or the designation of specific state or social structures employed with the retention, propagation and composition of narrative. This is evident in the ubwwiiru poetry of the nineteenth century Rwandan dynasty, where poets had to endure a rigorous apprenticeship, in which they mastered the “vocabulary, imagery and subject matter” (Gunner 68) of

extant narratives, and which in turn informed the production of new narratives. Oral narratives are sensitive to social disturbances and reflect the stability of the society in which they disseminate; ubwwiiru narratives were thus largely lost in the decline of the Rwandan dynasty (68). In addition, the intimate relationship between orality and social structures may inform the often contradictory, geographically uneven effects of colonialism on the oral tradition. Thus the relative scarcity of colonial infrastructure in rural areas may have contributed to their cultural isolation and therefore facilitated the preservation of oral tradition. Conversely, urban centers, which were more closely intertwined with the colonial state, were more reliant on literate modes of communication. This is reflected in the rural-urban divide in Aidoo’s short stories. In “The Message” the news of the caesarean section, which disseminates orally within the village, is revealed to be a misinterpretation of the written message from Maami Amfoa’s urban dwelling relative. In reality, this divide is not impassable, as is demonstrated with Aidoo herself: her own migration from rural to urban demonstrates the possibility of urban centers as the loci of creolization, a place where creative synergy is formed between the oral traditions of the migrants and their new found written forms. No Sweetness Here is testament to this, for Aidoo is engaged in what Okpewho calls an “exploitative” (88) relation to the oral tradition since she makes select use of its elements in her written work; however, this interaction can also manifest itself in the “translation” or “adaptation” (86) of the traditional oral texts.

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In order to appreciate the intricacy of Aidoo’s text, one must erode the binary between the written work and the oral performance and question Ode Ogede’s claim that, “the transposed oral form… and the actual oral event… are, of course, two entirely different activities” (77). In fact, the written text engages in a dynamic relationship with the oral performance: the text informs the performance as a score, crib sheet or memory cue, and results from it, in the form of a dictated transcription (Finnegan 168). In light of this, one can view Aidoo’s written text, No Sweetness Here, in relation to the oral performance of the text in two ways: first through the reader’s mental “en-performancing” (175) of the written text, where the reader may situate herself either on an extradiegetic level as the spectator in relation to the author as storyteller, or within the story’s diegesis as a silent spectator. For instance, in “In the Cutting of a Drink” the reader can either imagine herself within the story’s narrative as an audience member witnessing the narrator’s recollection of his experiences or she could imagine the author telling him a story about the act of storytelling. The second way in which the reader can position herself is as the “narrator in the making,” where she engages with the text with the intent of performing it, in a similar manner to which an actor participates with a script. Aidoo’s assertion, “if I

have a good short story by somebody, I would want to either have the person reading it to an audience or telling it to an audience” (Pieterse 24), corroborates this interpretation, for ideally, she prefers the people reading her short stories to be the ones performing them. The rest of the “audience” is to engage with her works as the spectators of an oral rendition. The benefit of the reader as a “narrator in the making” is that she is more attuned to the aesthetic elements of performance that are encoded in the typography of No Sweetness Here. Aidoo frequently utilises the technique of italicisation to convey non-verbal information; for instance, the emphasis of her character’s nonverbal utterances: “Whopei” (124), “Eheh” (123) and “poo” (38) alert the performer of the work to a change in intonation. Italicisation also denotes specific cultural references as with her accentuation of “the Mines” (120) and the “The Tailless Animal” (128) in “Something to Talk About on the Way to the Funeral” and “Other Versions” respectively. The performer must communicate by intonation or gesture that “The Mines” (120) refers to Tarkwa, a city that has substantial gold reserves, while “The Tailless Animal” (128) is a colloquial phrase for a lorry. Aidoo also employs the ellipsis to convey information that extends beyond its conventional use as an indication of omission or introspective pause. For example, when Kofi from the story “Other Versions” brings home money for his mother, she exclaims: ‘“I have never slept to dream that I shall live to see a day like this…. Now I too have got my own man who will take care of me….”’ (129). The flustered manner of her speech implies that the ellipsis is an indication to the performer to include some form of excited intonation, sound effect or movement, such as a dramatic gasp.

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The “narrator in the making’s” engagement with the text is also informed by Aidoo’s rich usage of narrative techniques; she supplies typographical and textual clues directing the performer’s approach to changes in point of view and focalization. “The Message” typifies the mélange of narrative perspective indicative of her oeuvre: here, Aidoo makes extensive use of dialogue in direct discourse, as is the case with the opening, which narrates the conversation between a “scholar” (42) and the “old Esi Amfoa” (46) from the third person point of view. The narrative later switches to a first person perspective with Esi Amfoa as the narrator. This change is indicated when her utterances and thoughts are no longer designated with quotation marks. Additional information is provided by the fact that old Esi Amfoa is addressed by her friend as “Maami Amfoa” (40), a more personal appellation than “Esi.” Another shift occurs when the story is no longer focalized through Esi Amfoa, but rather through Kobina, as indicated by the fact that Kobina is tasked with getting the taxi driver, Draba Anan, to wait for “Nana Amfoa” (40), presumably

by the same speaker who referred to Esi as “Maami Amfoa” (40). However, the narrative remains in first person, which is evidenced by Esi Amfoa’s interjection (not framed by quotation marks), “O…God. / O / O / O / Poo pity” (41), in the middle of Kobina’s and Draba Anan’s conversation indicating that she is hearing the dialogue from afar. Likewise, Esi’s dialogue in the taxi is not framed in quotation marks, the effect being that the story is once again focalized through Esi. The narrative structure undergoes its final transition at the conclusion of the story when it shifts once more to the third person point of view, but this time with the use of free indirect discourse. When old Esi Amfoa sees young Esi Amfoa, the narrator observes that: “The old person somersaulted into the room and lay groaning, not screaming, by the bed. For was not her last pot broken? So they lay them in state even in hospitals and not always cut them up for instruction?” (46). The use of free indirect discourse alludes to the numerous shifts in narrative. The textual information that indicates the shift in narration is essential to the performance of the piece, as it dictates the voice, intonation and gestures the performer should employ. Thus the typographical and textual information provided by Aidoo is essential in the production of No Sweetness Here’s presentation aesthetics and an important consideration in the interpretation of the works themselves. Although the written text and the oral performance of Aidoo’s work are distinct, they are by nature complimentary. Moreover, the insertion of the two into a binary tends to blur the nuances within the oral tradition itself, particularly the aesthetic and formal distinctions between oral text and oral performance, an acute observation of which is central to any analysis of Aidoo’s work. My interpretation of the reader as “narrator in the making” is one facet of this interpretive potential which accounts for the “performative” aspect of Aidoo’s work. For as the institutional biases of Western academia are gradually eroded, the sympathetic interaction with African written works will take on a form that is less combative in nature and be more attuned to the pulse of a vibrant literature concerned, as Irele aptly acknowledges, “with the nature, possibilities, and formal modes of literary expression itself ” (78).

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Works Cited

Aidoo, Ama Ata. No Sweetness Here and Other Stories. New York: The Feminist Press, 1995. Print. Balme, Christopher. “The Performance Aesthetics of Township Theatre: Frames and Codes.” Theatre and Change in South Africa. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. 65-84. Print. Brutus, Dennis, et al. “Panel on South African Theatre.” A Journal of Opinion 6.1 (1976): 47-57. Print. Elder, Arlene. “Ama Ata Aidoo and the Oral Tradition: A Paradox in Form and Substance.” Women in African Literature Today: A Review. Ed. Eldred Jones, et al. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1987. 109-118. Print. Fanon, Frantz. “National Culture.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith, Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 153157. Print. Finnegan, Ruth. “The How of Literature.” Oral Tradition 20.2 (2005): 164-187. Print. Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. “The Consequences of Literacy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5.3 (1963): 304-345. Print. Gunner, Liz. “Africa and Orality.” African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Eds. Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson. Marden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 67-71. Print. Hill-Lubin, Mildred. “The Storyteller and the Audience in the Works of Ama Ata Aidoo.” Neohelicon 16.2 (1989): 221-245. Print. Kanji

Irele, Abiola. “Orality, Literacy, and African Literature.” African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Eds. Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson. Marden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 74-81. Print. Isidore, Okpewho. “Oral Literature and Modern African Literature.” African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Eds. Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson. Marden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 83-90. Print.

Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney and Ama Ata Aidoo. “An Interview with Ama Ata Aidoo.” The Massachusetts Review. 36.1 (Spring 1995): 123-133. Print. Ogede, Ode. “The Defense of Culture in Ama Ata Aidoo’s No Sweetness Here: The Use of Orality as a Textual Strategy.” International Fiction Review 21.1-2 (1994): 76-84. Print. Pieterse, Cosmo and Dennis Duerden. “African Writers Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews.” New York: Africana Pub. Corp., 1972. Print. Pfaff, Francoise. “African Cities as Cinematic Texts.” Focus on African Films. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. 89-106. Print. Spurr, David. “Negation.” The Rhetoric of the Enpire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 92108. Print.

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3 “You can teach an old dog literary tricks” Analyzing Michael Ondaatje’s use of Dogs ERIC LEINVEER

“You can teach an old dog literary tricks” Analyzing Michael Ondaatje’s use of Dogs ERIC LEINVEER In Express Yourself Beautifully, the only biography of Michael Ondaatje, Ed Jewinsky delves into Ondaatje’s love of dogs. During their early summers at Blue Roof Farm, the Ondaatjes—Michael, his wife Kim and their children—were often accompanied by what Jewinsky calls “the chaos produced by a large brood of children and an equally large brood of dogs” (90). While many dogs spent time at the Ondaatje’s farm, only Wallace and Flirt actually belonged to the family and only Wallace—a droopy-eared basset hound—was Michael’s favourite pet. Over his time spent at Blue Roof Farm writing The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Ondaatje began to teach Wallace a variety of tricks—such as barking “O Canada”—and even entered him in a local basset hound contest, in which Wallace won first prize for having the longest ears of any dog in the greater Kingston area (Jewinsky 90). While such anecdotes do not provide much in the way of insight into Ondaatje’s writing, they do shed light on Ondaatje as a quirky individual, aside from being an accomplished author, whose awards range from a Booker Prize and numerous Governor General’s Awards to this medal for raising a hound with thirteen-inch ears. Just as this pet-owning story gives readers a window into Ondaatje’s eccentric personality, Ondaatje’s writing makes use of dogs as a literary tool that exposes more about his characters and the social constructions that surround them than could normally be exposed by a narrative relying solely on human-to-human interaction.

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In many of his works, Ondaatje strives to break down the notion of the “left-handed margin,” [sic] a poetic term for freeing oneself from the stagnant comforts of accepted literary tradition. He believes that once a writer breaks past this safety barrier, “new tension [arises] from where you didn’t expect it. Removing the secure limit of how far art can take you” (Jewinsky 73). Ondaatje, I argue, uses dogs as a means to break through this “left-handed margin” of literary limitations. In a 1999 interview with JC Kenny, Kim Ondaatje voiced the opinion of both her and her ex-husband when she claimed that “our race is so arrogant” and that “animals in so many ways are so much more intelligent than we are.” Ondaatje conveys this intelligence in his novels by granting dogs profound connections to his complex characters and their surroundings. In this essay, I will examine how Ondaatje uses canine interactions to interrogate and to elucidate the foggy details of his stories and the characters within them. Whether he is delving into character construction, clarifying narrative developments, interrogating social boundaries or conveying an intangible sense of madness,

Ondaatje consistently uses dogs in a manner that is at once inventive, playful, and complex, and beyond the confines of the “left-handed margin.” In many of Ondaatje’s novels, his use of an omniscient narrator’s poetic prose denies characters a high level of introspection and instead defines them primarily by the details of their physicality. Ondaatje’s use of dogs follows this tradition by highlighting the predominantly physical interactions between dogs and their owners in order to provide insight into some of his more complex characters. In In the Skin of a Lion, Caravaggio is a thief whose entire mode of operation becomes embodied by his dog, August. When describing Caravaggio’s close interrelationship with August, Ondaatje writes: The dog was his salvation. He had a quick bark, like an exclamation—one announcement, take it or leave it—enough warning for his master as far as the dog was concerned. On the job they behaved like strangers—Caravaggio strolling along one side of the street and August aimless on the other. When he entered a house the dog sat on the lawn. If the owners returned early the dog would stand up and give one clear bark. Moments later a figure would leap from a window with a carpet or suitcase in his arms. (203-204)

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By rendering August as Caravaggio’s accomplice rather than a mere pet, Ondaatje begins to probe the important paradox of Caravaggio as a distinctly independent character who is forced to rely on others. Caravaggio could presumably have trained August to take a more active role in the robberies—such as investigating homes before Caravaggio’s illegal entry—but Ondaatje makes it clear that the role of the dog is just as much defined by the owner as the dog itself. By describing August’s notifying bark as “enough warning for his master as far as the dog was concerned,” Ondaatje grants the dog a certain amount of autonomy, although August continues to fulfill the function of an obedient pet. Just as Caravaggio will not accept any more outside help than is absolutely necessary, August’s role in Caravaggio’s robberies is dictated by the most limited amount of involvement that is necessary to ensure the mission’s success. Within this working relationship, Ondaatje places the owner and his dog on independent yet parallel trajectories. With both of their names referencing a great painter of the past—Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Pierre-Auguste Renoir—Caravaggio and August are referentially presented as equal craftsmen instead of merely man and dog. This act of pairing is essential to Ondaatje’s writing, for insights provided into each character are frequently mirrored by similar traits in their respective canine partners.

Ondaatje reworks this technique of pairing dogs and masters in The English Patient. Unlike Caravaggio’s strong push towards personal independence in In the Skin of a Lion, his participation in WWII and the subsequent loss of his thumbs seemingly castrates his earlier drive for autonomy and independence. As a result of this transformation, Caravaggio’s relationship with his newly found dog takes on a profoundly different appearance. Even as Caravaggio and his nameless pet are first introduced to Hana and the English patient, they are seen as a single interdependent entity: “the Englishman saw Caravaggio then and his jaw dropped. It must have seemed to him that the dog—now blocked by Hana’s back—had turned into a man. Caravaggio collected the dog in his arms and left the room” (56). Unlike the distinct freedom and detachment that defined the pairing of Caravaggio and August, the war removed Caravaggio’s thumbs and left him alone—not by choice—which compels him to rely on this newly-formed canine relationship as a necessary act of survival in a harsh wartime environment that he was not prepared to live in on his own.

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This reconfigured mode of reliance comes into play when Kip finds “Caravaggio asleep on the library sofa with the dog in his arms. The hound watched him as he paused at the door, moving as little of its body as it had to, to acknowledge it was awake and guarding the place. Its quiet growl rising above Caravaggio’s snore” (113). While this interaction echoes August’s earlier role as a lookout dog, Ondaatje grants Caravaggio’s new pet a heightened level of power and awareness. Whereas August would have given a small yelp that could be heard by the ever-attentive Caravaggio of In the Skin of a Lion, this scene has Caravaggio vulnerable and unaware of the intruder in his less assertive state of slumber. The dog must now compensate for Caravaggio’s personal lack by taking control of the situation and being the sole force to drive off Kip. Caravaggio’s new dog, which he describes as “an old mongrel, older than the war” (58), also mirrors Caravaggio’s dwindling confidence, aging body, and defeated demeanor throughout this intertextual transition between the first novel and its sequel. Caravaggio’s meditation on his second pet demonstrates an awareness that both he and his dog are “older than the war” and that neither will be able to get back to the life that they led before 1939. Readers can imagine that in an earlier time, The English Patient’s dog might have been lively and independent—much like August— but that time and the brutality of wartime life has reduced it to the same worn-out state as Caravaggio. By making a concerted effort to pair Caravaggio with dogs that share his essential characteristics, Ondaatje provides Caravaggio with a level of introspection through his interaction with his pets. Ondaatje engages in a more complex investigation of the pairing between dog and master in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, where dogs and masters are still

accurately matched, but only through a process of unnatural mutations. In one anecdotal section of this fragmented work, Sallie Chisum explains that basset hounds were originally bred in France “for all those fat noblemen whose hounds were too fast for them when they went hunting” (59). Since there was no type of dog to naturally complement these obese men, Sallie describes the breeding process in which “they got the worst and slowest of every batch and bred them with the worst and slowest of every other batch and kept doing this until they got the slowest kind of hound they could think of ” (59). Instead of the natural process of pairing and mirroring which occurs between Caravaggio and his two dogs, the basset hounds are presented in a much more sinister light of unnatural bio-manipulation, which prompts Sallie and Billy to describe this breed as the “strangest looking thing” that “looks pretty messy” (59).

In Divisadero, dogs serve again as a metaphorical means of penetrating the cold exterior of a private personality. While reflecting on growing up with their stone-faced father, Anna describes how she and her sister Claire had to take a doglike approach to gaining affection from their father. Anna illustrates how “now and then our father embraced us as any father would. This happened only if you were able to catch him in that no-man’s-land between tiredness and sleep, when he seemed wayward to himself. I joined him on the old covered sofa,

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By establishing this initial revulsion toward unnatural pairings, Ondaatje sets up his readers for the most perverted and grotesque form of mirroring, found in John Chisum’s story of Livingstone’s mad dogs. In this story, Livingstone, who “had been mad apparently…decided to breed a race of mad dogs… by inbreeding” (60). The dogs play a very important investigatory role in this story because nobody knew that Livingstone had gone mad. Even Chisum says that, “he seemed a pretty sane guy to me” (60). As a result of Livingstone’s extremely private nature, the only way that Chisum is able to judge his insanity is through the manifestation of his mental degradation: his inbred race of mad dogs. By describing how “their bones grew arched and tangled, ears longer than their feet, their tempers became either slothful or venomous and their jaws were black rather than red” (60), Ondaatje uses the grotesque mutation of these dogs to embody Livingstone’s monstrous internal evolution. This process continues until “they found Livingstone [and] there was almost nothing left of him,” for he had been eaten by his dogs. The mirroring process between Livingstone and his dogs becomes an overwhelming experience as his dogs turn into the sole embodiment of Livingstone’s madness without replicating his more human aspects of personal restraint. As Livingstone is overcome by his private madness, Ondaatje conveys this transformation through the mutating process and the final triumph of Livingstone’s spaniels, with their rabid psychosis consuming Livingstone in a symbolic act of self-cannibalization.

and I would lie like a slim dog in his arms, imitating his state of weariness— too much sun perhaps, or too hard a day’s work” (11). Through Anna’s canine performance, Ondaatje grants dogs—and consequently Anna—a high level of emotional acuity, which facilitates human affection and emotional connections where they would not otherwise occur. While this transformation allows Anna to have an intimate moment with her father, the performative nature of their encounter is reminiscent of the incestuous mutated dogs in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, pointing to an instability that is rooted in unnaturally connected relationships. Whereas Caravaggio’s naturally paired relations to his dogs result in sustainable and productive connections, the unnatural performance of Anna’s intimate moments with her father preludes the inevitable deterioration of their unstable relationship. When the father finds out that the fifteen-year-old Anna has taken a farmhand as her lover, his violent outburst sets into motion a series of events that splinter the entire family for the duration of the novel.

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Ondaatje grounds his explanation and understanding of other human relationships within his characters’ interactions with their dogs. In doing so, he begins to define dog ownership as a means of unwitting self-exposure, in which human emotions can be relayed through a canine intermediary, bypassing the complex constraints of the human mind. In Rat Jelly, Ondaatje’s poem titled “Flirt and Wallace” probes deeper into dog ownership within the author’s own family. In the poem’s first stanza, Ondaatje constructs his dog’s relationship with his son, writing that “the dog almost / tore my son’s eye out / with love, left a welt of passion / across his cheek” (36). While the third line’s insertion of “with love” grants the dog loving motives, Ondaatje uses the uncontrolled nature of this encounter to illustrate that his son is not the properly paired owner of the dog—presumably the family’s basset hound Flirt—and therefore cannot predict the animal’s actions. As a result of this improper pairing, there is a chaotic backlash, instead of an insight-generating process of mirroring. In contrast, the next stanza explains that “the other dog licks / the armpits of my shirt / for the salt / the smell and taste / that identifies me from the others” (36). Ondaatje has a very intimate emotional and bodily connection with “the other dog”—presumably his favourite dog, Wallace—allowing him to have a more relaxed routine of identification and affectionate ownership. In Ragas of Longing, Sam Solecki claims that the poem’s “focus is on the dogs as animals, as something other than human, even though their names make an anthropomorphic gesture” (89). While the more savage acts of the last stanza consolidate this distinct human/dog differentiation, I would suggest that the poem places a larger emphasis on the act of pairing, with Ondaatje’s son and Flirt being compared to him and Wallace as examples of failed and successful inter-species chemistry. As Ondaatje’s closing line specifies, both dogs “graze our bodies with their love,” but

only Ondaatje and Wallace are able to form an understanding that removes the dangerous level of animalistic unpredictability from their partnered embrace. By contrast to the varying familial relations in “Flirt and Wallace,” “Loop” portrays a dog that is freed from the constraints of ownership. Unlike Ondaatje’s more reserved dog who takes “30 seconds dismounting from a chair,” Loop is described as: …the one who appears again on roads one eye torn out and chasing. He is only a space filled and blurred with passing, transient as shit—will fade to reappear somewhere else. He survives the porcupine, cars, poison, fences with their spasms of electricity. Vomits up bones, bathes at night in Holiday Inn swimming pools. (46)

And magic in his act of loss. The missing eye travels up in a bird’s mouth, and into the sky. Departing family. It is loss only of flesh no more than his hot spurt across a tree.

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Without the restraints of a master, Loop is able to become a completely autonomous being, free from the rules and protections of human society. This differentiation is clearly articulated through the recurring use of a “torn out” eye. Whereas Ondaatje writes that Flirt “almost / tore my son’s eye out / with love” (emphasis mine), Loop is only seen in blurred flashes, “one eye torn out and chasing.” With his eye intact, Ondaatje’s son still maintains a semblance of panoptic human control over his encounter with Flirt. In contrast, Loop’s eye has been completely removed, which serves as a symbolic allowance to let him escape from the rules of society or, as Ondaatje writes, to “leave behind all social animals.” Ondaatje continues to flesh out this act of societal separation in the third, fourth and fifth stanzas:

He is the one you see at Drive-Ins tearing silent into garbage while societies unfold in his sky. The bird lopes into the rectangle nest of images and parts of him move on. (46) Within the third stanza, Ondaatje confirms that an element of ownership is contained within the lost eye. He equates the loss of the eye to the dog’s act of marking territory with “his hot spurt across a tree.” Therefore, by severing himself from the watchful eye of ownership, Loop is able to transcend his traditional role as a submissive pet, taking claim of the societies that “unfold in his sky,” under his own watchful eye. Whereas ownership gives Flirt and Wallace the luxurious order to “graze our bodies with their love,” Ondaatje frees Loop into an existence that condemns him to “vomit up bones,” while giving him the freedom to roam the streets without supervision. Released from the responsibility of mirroring and adapting to an owner, Loop is now able to probe and to interact with the underbelly of society. With this newfound capacity, Loop functions as a creator of meaning and a facilitator of understanding within the areas that he roams.

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Throughout Ondaatje’s novels, dogs continue to reappear in his narratives as catalysts towards understanding and insight. Often occupying a highly personal position in a character’s life, dogs reveal the hidden personal traits, secrets, or longings of private individuals. In The English Patient, the eventual naming of Caravaggio’s dog provokes the English patient to expose his true identity, which had been obscured by wartime confusion. On the night when the residents of the villa are trying to name the dog, the English patient “put out eight names. Five of them were obvious jokes. Then three names. Cicero. Zerzura. Delilah” (163). Caravaggio identifies these names as being related to Axis spies, confirming the English patient’s identity as Count László Almásy, a Hungarian WWII spy-helper. Ondaatje recasts dogs as a reflection of their owners as a means of orchestrating Almásy’s downfall. In his attempt to give the dog an identity, Almásy inadvertently reveals too much about his own, giving the dog’s presence the power to compel truth-telling. Divisadero also makes use of dogs as a tool for facilitating mental connections and cultivating truth. Towards the end of the novel, as Lucien reflects upon his younger years, he dwells on the “incidents that might have altered him as this person here, now” (247). Ondaatje constructs this passage so that as soon as Lucien remembers “the dog” that blinded him in one eye, “an overlooked life came rushing into his dun-coloured canvas tent,” which caused him to think, “strangely, not of his family but about Marie-Neige, with whom he

had rarely spoken since marriage” (247). Within both Almásy and Lucien’s minds, dogs act as a privileged shortcut to their most repressed memories. Just as Almásy’s own ambiguous past serves as the blank screen upon which many characters in The English Patient project their own memories and desires, dogs are repeatedly used as gateways to personal revelation and interpersonal exposure. In Divisadero, Ondaatje once more uses a dog as a means of interpersonal exposure in the initial scene surrounding the rabid dog’s attack on Lucien. As Roman and Marie-Neige transport an injured Lucien into town they are trailed by the vicious dog: “the young wife kept looking back, if not at Lucien, then at the dog in the growing distance. She had always wanted a dog in her life and had tried persuading her husband. Now she would never have one. She reached back and took Lucien’s hand for a moment” (206). Ondaatje uses the fleeting presence of the rabid dog to embody many aspects of Marie-Neige’s life that are doomed to go unfulfilled. By placing Marie-Neige’s physical contact with Lucien at the end of the paragraph, Ondaatje brings Roman’s disallowance of her deeply personal desire for dog ownership into direct contact with his burdensome position as her unloved and unloving husband. With the rabid dog as the connecting thread, Ondaatje implies both the dream of dog ownership and a romantic future with Lucien to be related aspects of Marie-Neige’s innermost desires that “now she would never have.” Ondaatje paints Marie-Neige’s wished-for connection to dogs as a highly personal bond, allowing it to act as a gateway to her most intimate longings. While Ondaatje’s use of dogs often gives access to more serious aspects of thought and emotion, he also uses dogs to probe the nature of social boundaries, particularly those pertaining to sex. A number of Rat Jelly poems use dogs as an extension of an individual that facilitates sexual transgressions. In “The Strange Case,” Ondaatje’s first stanza is quick to establish a sense of oneness between his desires and his dog’s actions:

With the first line admitting that “my dog’s assumed my alter ego,” Ondaatje presents himself and the dog as a single being with two egos, which outlines a definite split between them. By adding that the dog “has taken over,” Ondaatje

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My dog’s assumed my alter ego. Has taken over—walks the house phallus hanging wealthy and raw in front of guests, nuzzling heads up skirts while I direct my mandarin mood. (20)

creates the impression of a battle for complete control against his dog. While the dog eventually “wins,” Ondaatje’s authority remains firm as his own sexual impulses are satisfied. Within the next stanza, Ondaatje’s interactions with the babysitter are defined by a moment of synthesis between himself and his dog, in which “the dog leaned forward / and licked her ear.” But instead of giving a typical reaction of offence in the wake of this presumably sexual advance on Ondaatje’s part, the babysitter “seemed more amazed / at my driving ability / than my indiscretion.” By aligning himself with the dog, Ondaatje commits this sexual transgression through his canine extension, while avoiding the typical societal injunctions barring such acts. In this way, dogs are privileged over humans, since they are able to cross the hardened social boundary of unwanted sexual advances, suffering minimal consequences and garnering only momentary confusion in return. Without knowing if it was the speaker or his dog that committed the indiscretion, the babysitter’s reaction is consequently the same for both parties. This moment of transgression consolidates the connectedness of the speaker and his dog, while also emphasizing the liberated societal position that results from this uncanny synthesis.

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In “Postcard from Piccadilly Street,” Ondaatje’s speaker remains an autonomous individual, but his dog is still used to transcend typical sexual boundaries. In relation to the way that his two dogs watch his sexual acts, Ondaatje describes dogs as “the unheralded voyeurs of this world” (19). Yet while “The Strange Case” locates the poem’s sexual impulse in the dog that is sitting “in the dark back seat,” “Postcard from Piccadilly Street” presents the speaker as the driving force of sexual exploration. He writes that when the dog is nearby during sex, “it is a catching habit having a spectator,” in part because its presence “appeals to the actor in both of us.” The dog’s presence is thus used to probe the speaker’s own sexual fantasies and performative desires. As watchful beings, dogs are able to extend the possibilities of sexual acts within the private sphere without carrying the real risks and consequences that are typically associated with monitored acts of public sex. Within Ondaatje’s fantastical 1982 memoir, Running in the Family, Lalla is presented as an overly aggressive woman who constantly challenges the comfort zones of others. As the first woman in Ceylon to have a mastectomy, Lalla’s fake breast, or the “Wandering Jew” as she calls it, becomes an object of discomfort and confusion for many people in the home. But while the servants “were mystified by it… the dog, Chindit… would be found gnawing at the foam as if it were tender chicken” (124). Just as the basset hound in “Postcard from Piccadilly Street” has no

awareness of the voyeuristic nature of its presence in the bedroom, Chindit’s treatment of the fake breast serves to demystify this object of discomfort within the home and deconstruct Lalla’s aggressive eccentricities. What was once an object of social silence and awkwardness is quickly transformed into Chindit’s favourite chew toy. By removing dogs from the social context of potentially perverse scenarios and then confronting these incidents from a canine perspective, Ondaatje probes these episodes to render them socially harmless and in need of societal reassessment. One of the most intense ways in which Ondaatje deploys dogs to break through the “left-handed margin” is by facilitating his characters’ transition into madness. Whereas The Man with Seven Toes—Ondaatje’s long sequence of expressionist poems based on an Australian legend—creates a world that is ruled by surreal landscapes and foggy events, it is dogs that both lead Mrs. Fraser into this hazy world and then confirm her disbelief once she is there. As the story begins, “she woke and there was a dog / sitting on her shoulder” (10). Later on, her devolution into madness is confronted when Ondaatje writes, “lost my knife. Threw the thing at a dog / and it ran away, the blade in its head. / Sometimes I don’t believe what’s going on” (27). These two dogs serve as transitional bookends, signalling her entrance into the exoticized world of Fraser Island and then consolidating her disorientation within this bizarre space.

Ondaatje reuses this descriptive technique when he uses dogs as a manifestation of his father’s madness in Running in the Family. In one of the numerous retellings of his father’s train escapade, Ondaatje describes how his

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As discussed earlier, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid makes a clear link between dogs and madness within John Chisum’s story of Livingstone and his incestuous spaniels. While I have already investigated this story, I would like to reemphasize the way that Ondaatje relies on the progressive mutation of the spaniels to act as the sole manifestation of Livingstone’s madness. Chisum clearly states that “no one knew about this” act of incestuous breeding and that the dogs fulfilled a potentially therapeutic function for Livingstone. Because these animals were bearing the weight of Livingstone’s tormented state, Chisum and others perceived Livingstone as perfectly sane, when he was actually at the height of his madness. The incestuous nature of the spaniels’ mutations was a highly effective way for Ondaatje to capture the evolving madness of Livingstone’s solitary character through Chisum’s third-person narration. By compartmentalizing Livingstone’s madness within the fifty incestuous spaniels, Ondaatje constructs a tangible representation of Livingstone’s mental condition, clarifying the extent of his mental instability through the use of a difficult third-person narration.

father, Mervyn Ondaatje, was found by his friend Arthur, “walking towards him, huge and naked. In one hand he holds five ropes, and dangling on the end of each of them is a black dog. None of the five are touching the ground” (181). By detaching the dogs from the ground, Ondaatje makes these animals into a literal extension of his father’s “one arm as if he ha[d] supernatural strength.” While this initial description cultivates an image of a man who is in control of these wild animals—one dog for each of his five powerful fingers—Ondaatje delves into the volatility of his father’s madness by explaining how “this scene had no humour or gentleness in it. The dogs were too powerful to be in danger of being strangled. The danger was to the naked man who held them at arm’s length, towards whom they swung like dark magnets” (182). Through the use of these five wild dogs, Ondaatje is able to convey both the power and instability that is embodied by a person in a state of madness. While his father is given a temporary “supernatural strength,” he is still in a position of great danger if his madness— embodied by the five wild dogs—ultimately overcomes his vulnerable naked body. This scene provides the liberal possibility of death by self-consumption, such as that suffered by Livingstone. The image of a “magnetic” pull also depicts madness as a perpetual threat that can only lead to a single outcome: Ondaatje’s father was always doomed to live a distraught existence. The presence of multiple dogs in this scene further conveys how his father had “captured all the evil in the regions he had passed through and was holding it” (182). Through this description, his father’s madness is granted a metonymic quality, which extends to the unhealthy atmosphere that seems to have permeated throughout Ondaatje’s memories of Ceylon. Similar to the spaniels’ embodiment of Livingstone’s mental instability, the five dogs held by Mervyn serve as both a threat of madness and a temporarily contained manifestation of its presence within both Mervyn and the country of Ceylon, a place that Ondaatje presents as a hotbed of luxurious frivolities, horrendous accidents, and rampant alcoholism.

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Throughout his body of work, Michael Ondaatje gives us dogs that are both highly intimate partners and threatening forces of animalistic unpredictability. In both cases, dogs emerge as a very useful investigatory device that extends the possibilities of character development past traditional literary conventions. Ondaatje’s dogs become both extensions and reflections of their owners, which can bring clarity to the construction of characters or complicate our interpretation of their intentions. As dynamic literary tools, these dogs are privileged over any other remotely sociable animals that appear throughout Ondaatje’s six novels and thirteen books of poetry. While his use of dogs provides readers with a more intricate understanding of characters such as Caravaggio, Livingstone and Lalla, it also elucidates a more complex vision of Michael Ondaatje as an author. With the use of this canine lens, Ondaatje desires to define his characters not only through

their individual actions, but also through the way that they impact and interact with the space and beings surrounding them.

Works Cited

Jewinsky, Ed. Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully. Toronto: ECW Press, 1994. Kenny, JC. “Kim Ondaatje’s Blueroof Farm.” AgriNews. Nov. 1999. Web. Ondaatje, Michael. Divisadero. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. ---. In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1996. ---. Rat Jelly. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1973. ---. Running in the Family. Toronto: Emblem Editions, 2001.

---. The English Patient. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. ---. The Man with Seven Toes. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1971. Solecki, Sam. Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

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---. The Collected Works of Billy The Kid: Left Handed Poems. Toronto: Anansi, 1970.

4 Masking or Unmasking? Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry KLARA DU PLESSIS

Masking or Unmasking

Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry Klara Du Plessis What Is Confessional Poetry?

“I think my poems come immediately out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have. But I must say, I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except, you know, a needle or a knife or whatever it is. I believe one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience. That one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut box and sort of mirror-looking narcissistic experience.” – Sylvia Plath, Interview with Peter Orr, 1962

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Critics generally associate Sylvia Plath with the Confessional poetic movement originating in the 1950s and 60s in North America. Famous for its creed of drawing from autobiography and personal psychology as poetic inspiration, Confessional poetry has often received critical response focusing on individual, at times sensational, details of the poet’s life and emotions mirrored in the writing. True to form, many Plath scholars have pathologized her poetry by emphasizing biographical details, such as her multiple attempts and final decision to commit suicide, as well as her overall sensitivity. Steven Gould Axelrod, for example, professes that “Plath’s poems plunge into the contradictions of midtwentieth-century Anglo-America selfhood,” and that her poetry exposes “material meant to be taken as personal” (73). Similarly, David Holbrook begins his extensive study of Plath’s poetry by elucidating that he “attempts to use interpretations from psychoanalysis and other kindred disciplines to improve our understanding of the poetry of Sylvia Plath.” He goes on to explain that “the poems are often […] clearly autobiographical […and] I must also talk about the woman as revealed in the poems” (1-2). Last but not least, in a destructive review of Winter Trees, Webster Schott fumes that Plath is the “high priestess of the confessional poem, master of the poem as intimate weapon, snake lady of misery […] Sylvia Plath was a sick woman who made art of her sickness” (3). The predominant trend throughout opinions such as these cited above is, firstly, that Plath is a quintessential Confessional poet and, secondly, that this Confessional urge leads her to open herself to the public eye, to lay herself bare to scrutiny and, most importantly, to unmask her most intimate self in a series of

highly personal poems. However, Plath herself, in a 1962 interview conducted by Peter Orr of the British Council, refutes the idea that she is creatively inspired by personal experience only. In fact, she even goes as far as to suggest that any writing based on personal experience, without having been manipulated “with an informed and intelligent mind,” is as restrictive as “a kind of shut box.” While she acknowledges that personal experience is a valuable and legitimate source of poetic inspiration, she also feels that it is necessary to move beyond that, not simply to splash personal experience onto the page, but rather to craft this experience until it becomes worthy of being poetic content. Based on Plath’s own evaluation of her poetry, as well as the nature of poetry in general, one may problematize not only the categorization of Plath’s poetry as Confessional, but also the broader definition of Confessional poetry. Combining the two strands of personal experience and poetic manipulation, it is possible to envisage an alternatively defined branch of Confessional poetry, which is less about unveiling the poet’s life and psyche and more, on the contrary, about masking them. While the poet does tap into the recesses of his/her past, he/she simultaneously molds this past, renders it less personal and more artistic, attempting eventually to screen his/her intimate source of inspiration and to leave a creative product in its place. Dissatisfaction with Conventional Confessional Poetry: Plath’s “Tulips” and “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.”

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“Tulips” is commonly considered a principle example of Plath’s most Confessional poems, at least according to the conventional interpretation of the term. As Jeannine Dobbs points out, “Tulips” is truly based on a real life “personal experience […] Ted Hughes says she wrote ‘Tulips’ after being hospitalized for an appendectomy in March of 1961” (21). Indeed, on an even more conceptual level “Tulips” may be viewed as a poetic representation of the key unmasking characteristic of Confessional writing. Lying on a hospital bed in the care of the nurses and surgeons, the speaker is exposed, resigning her person, her whole identity, to the evaluation and scrutinizing investigation of others. She claims, “I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses / And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons” (6-7), and later, “I have let things slip […] my loving associations […] I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books / Sink out of sight” (22-27). Having relinquished both her material and mental self, she feels “Scared and bare” (25). She loses the sense of being an individual in control of her own life, becoming instead an object of curiosity for the people around her. She experiences everybody and everything as gazing at and analyzing her: “My husband and child smil[e] out of the family photo; / Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks” (20-21), “now I am watched. / The tulips turn to me… [I lie] Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips” (43-47), etc. The poetic speaker’s internal space has been invaded; others know too much about her. She becomes common property and is left with the uncomfortable sense that “I am nobody” (5), that

“I / […] lie with my hands turned up […] utterly empty” (29-30), that “I have no face” (48). The speaker’s personal exposure is traumatizing. In direct contrast to Charles Molesworth’s statement that “language itself provided [Confessional poets] their salvation, that the redeeming word could set right what the intractable world of egos, projects, deceits, and self-destructions had insidiously twisted” (64), Plath here creates a poetic voice that shrinks from her self-induced exposure; this is a voice that is aggravated, rather than cured, by revealing her personal experience to the other characters and objects in the poem. From her vantage point these persons and objects are all hostile: “they hurt me,” she says of the tulips (36). The tulips, being the subject of the poem after all, take on especially menacing proportions. The poetic speaker thinks that “The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals” (58), that “Their redness talks to my wound” (39), even dangerously reopening this wound so that “it opens and closes / Its bowl of red blooms […] And comes from a country far away as health” (60-63). The inimical forces surrounding and gazing at the poetic speaker may also, by extension, be understood as the wider reading public. Verbally uncovered for the world to see, or rather read about, Plath feels “flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow” (46). In fact, returning to the metaphor of “a kind of shut box” from Peter Orr’s interview, Plath’s own dabbling in Confessional verse leads her to affirm discontentedly that she is now like her “patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox” (19).

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It is significant to contrast this passive vulnerability Plath endures in “Tulips” to “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” a poem with a similarly medical scenario, but with the poetic speaker not as the object of the action, but instead as active surgeon performing the operation herself. Instead of being exposed “bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley” (“Tulips” 25), the shift in power relations allows the poetic speaker to exclaim: “The body under [the scalded sheet…] is in my hands” (“The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” 6). Conducting the operation herself, the speaker physically opens and explores this body: “these organs! / I worm and hack in a purple wilderness. / The blood is a sunset. I admire it. / I am up to my elbows in it” (19-22). She can analyze this human being until it is dissected elementally into “an arm or a leg, / A set of teeth […] a pathological salami” (33-36). She has the agency to do whatever she pleases with this body, to cut into it, to change it, to add “a clean, pink plastic limb” to it (40). Not only is she investigating the body, but she is also manipulating its representation. Once the operation is over, she has created something: “It is a statue the orderlies are wheeling off. / I have perfected it” (31-32). Having asserted the operation as a craft, one may take the analogy a step further, suggesting that “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” exemplifies the alternative to the Confessional poetic mode employed in “Tulips.” Whereas the poetic speaker is still opening and exposing a human body, she is simultaneously controlling and maneuvering how this disclosure takes place. As Plath selfrecommends, the speaker is here “able to manipulate [her poetic subject] with an informed and intelligent mind.” In fact, she even imbues the poem with

technical craftsmanship by rhyming end-words in the seventh and last or eighth and last lines of each stanza; for example, “white” and “light” (7, 10) or “swim” and “limb” (38, 40). When this rhyming pattern breaks off in the last stanza of the poem, the poem’s creational act has been completed and the poet can continue to another one: after all, “a small blue light/ Announces a new soul” (41-42). Unlike “Tulips” where the end of the poem coincides with a conclusive move towards death (the opening of the wound, a sense of being far away from health, etc), “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” concludes with the speaker’s affirmation that “I am the sun, in my white coat” (49). Here, Plath initiates the notion of poet as surgeon and as craftsman, using exposure, but tinkering with it until a unique poem is formed. Unmasking in order to Mask: Snodgrass’s “W.D. Sits in Kafka’s Chair and Is Interrogated Concerning the Assumed Death of Cock Robin” and Sexton’s “Anna Who Was Mad”

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W.D. Snodgrass and Anne Sexton are often showcased as model writers of Confessional poetry. In their respective poems, “W.D. Sits in Kafka’s Chair and Is Interrogated Concerning the Assumed Death of Cock Robin” and “Anna Who Was Mad,” however, these poets render the Confessional logic of laying the poet’s ego bare somewhat problematic. On the one hand, they are elevating the conventional Confessional logic to the highest possible degree, both directly inserting their names or initials into the poems. On the other hand, one cannot simply accept that the poetic characters with the names of their authors are necessarily doubles of them. In fact, in his poem with its comically elaborate title, Snodgrass seems to be using his own initials not in order to promote the Confessional mode of writing, but rather to make fun of it. For one, positioning the alleged W.D. as sitting in “Kafka’s Chair” and being interrogated about the death of the nursery rhyme figure Cock Robin already situates him in a surreal environment. Furthermore, the poem as a whole may be read as a satire on confession or Confessional poetry as such. Everything about W.D. is questioned: “name, age, sex, race, genus/ Specific gravity and species; / Hat size, color of hair and penis” (5-7). The interrogator probes into every aspect of W.D’s identity, but in contrast to the Confessional expectations, receives not a single answer. Even when hinting that “A simple yes or no is all / We want; the truth always shines through. / Thank you” (21-23), W.D. offers no reply. He refuses to answer the question of whether he “Signed a confession” lately (18). If he were to respond to the questions in this poem, he would be partaking in a Confessional discourse. Instead he resolutely declines giving away any information about himself. The questions remain unanswered and become ridiculous, a reprimand not only to Confessional poets, but also to its readership who laps up the intimate, sensational details such as the “Texture and frequency of faeces” (8). Using his own initials, Snodgrass is thus not disclosing but rather negating the Confessional urge towards disclosure. He deliberately adds aspects of ambiguity to blur the identity of W.D. At the beginning of the poem, for example, the interrogator clarifies, “Now ‘W – we’ll call you ‘W’, / Okay? We like the friendly touch” (1-2). Calling him “W” instead of the “W.D” of the poem’s title already suggests an extra distancing from Snodgrass’ own person.

Saying that “we’ll call you ‘W’” also implies that it might only be a pseudonym applied during the cross-examination and neither the character’s real name nor an indication of an intrinsic connection to Snodgrass. Likewise, asking whether “your last pap test/ Turn[ed] pink or blue” queries W.D’s gender (11-12). A pap test is, of course, associated with gynecology and thus the female sex. One would expect that if W.D. were indeed Snodgrass’ alter ego then he would at least be male. Snodgrass obscures who this W.D. actually is. Is he Snodgrass? Is he Snodgrass’s doppelganger? Is he only Snodgrass’ fictionalized character? Sexton continues to question the validity of the assumed direct-link connection between the author and poetic persona with regard to Confessional poetry. As Diane Middlebrook verifies, “Sexton resisted the label ‘confessional’ [and] preferred to be regarded as a ‘storyteller.’ Sexton emphasize[d] that she considered the speaking ‘I’ in her poetry as a literary rather than a real identity” (209). This view of herself is appropriate to Sexton’s poem “Anna Who Was Mad.” Creating a character called Anna, a name that resembles her own, “Anne,” she fashions a literary alter ego. Assuming for a moment that the first person “I” is Sexton herself, the poem may be understood as a splitting of Sexton into her real and literary identities. The “I” and Anna are indeed very intimate: the speaker talks about “our pillow” (12, emphasis added) and takes it for granted that Anna will be able to give “a report on the condition of my soul. / Give me a complete statement of my actions […] Number my sins on the grocery list” (20-24). If Anna truly knows all this information about Sexton and she is also the literary embodiment of her, then one could suppose that she is the personification of a possible Confessional desire in Sexton’s writing. Yet simultaneously she is the one writing: Sexton orders her to “pick up the Parker Pen I gave you” (32). She goes even further, entreating Anna to “Write me” (33). Anna is not asked to write about Sexton. Anna is told to write Sexton. Writing about Sexton would lead to some sort of biographical text. Writing Sexton, however, implies a certain degree of fictionalization. Anna may answer all the questions Sexton asks about herself in the poem (“Did I turn up your earphone and let a siren drive through? / Did I open the door for the mustached psychiatrist?” (2627)) in whichever way she pleases. Writing Sexton means creating her identity; she may portray Sexton in a positive light just as easily as from a negative angle. Du Plessis

Instead of Sexton creating her poetry by means of self-exposure, her poetry, on the contrary, creates her. If Anna were to write, then she would be creating the first person “I” in the poem; she would be writing a fictional character or a literary identity. It is thus no wonder that Sexton ends the poem reducing “Write me” to simply “Write” (33-34). Having attempted to engage with the Confessional mode of writing, Sexton has come to understand that it only leads to the same measure of fictionality as when one simply writes. In the respective poems of Snodgrass and Sexton, employing their own names and suggesting an unmasking of their egos, paradoxically, induces a masking of their private identities.

Being Masked Behind Alternate Identities: Plath’s “Purdah” and “Lady Lazarus”

It would be absurd to assert that Plath has no Confessional elements in her poetry. Her poems are admittedly characterized by a high level of emotional baggage that she vents in various ways. The content of some of her poems may even be traced back to real life experiences: the death of her father, the birth of her children, periods of hospitalization, suicidal urges, etc. It is also true, however, that Plath often tweaks these autobiographical sources of inspiration, pushing them to a slight degree of inaccuracy. To cite a quick example, she professes in “Daddy” that “I was ten when they buried you” (57), whereas it is common knowledge that her father died when Plath was only eight years old. Having a certain degree of commitment to the conventional Confessional mode of writing, on the one hand, Plath does, on the other hand, develop techniques to distance herself from her poetic speaker, poetic subject matter and poetry in general. Similar to Snodgrass and Sexton’s employment of their own names in order to achieve a sense of personal masking, Plath speaks through different voices in the different poems, voices of characters clearly external to her own ego. In doing so, she hangs a veil between herself and the reader, only indirectly— if at all—communicating her life and emotions. Reading Plath’s “Purdah” analogically yields an interesting parallel to this type of masked Confessional writing. One may interpret the curtain, or the veiled dress, which allows the speaker’s husband to believe she is a “small jeweled/ Doll” (53-54) while she actually hides a “lioness” (55) underneath, as a metaphor for the distance between the true facts of Plath’s life and the details she portrays through her poetry.

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In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath veils her personal suicidal attempts and urges behind a fictionalized, feminized reinterpretation of the biblical Lazarus. Throughout the poem, there are explicit references to concealing imagery: Lady Lazarus being wrapped in multiple shrouds, which get discarded layer by layer, for instance. The poetic speaker also exhorts her “enemy” to “Peel off the napkin” (10-11) in order to disclose “The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth” hidden underneath (13). Later, she likewise advises the “peanut-crunching crowd… [to] unwrap me hand and foot— / The big strip tease” (26-29). In J.M. Coetzee’s article “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoyevsky,” he puts forward the interesting hypothesis that it is impossible to tell the ultimate truth about something. He writes: “the self cannot tell the truth of itself to itself and come to rest without the possibility of self-deception” (291). Instead, truth is like an onion, one layer lying beneath another, only being understood skin by skin, a fact being true solely until a “deeper truth” is discovered (292). Lady Lazarus’ strip tease may be read as the systematic de-layering of deeper and deeper truths. Each time she dies and is reborn again she unwraps one layer of her shrouds and moves one step closer to an understanding of herself. After the first unveiling the facial features are exposed: “The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth” (13). After the second unveiling she has already moved through the “skin” to the “bone” (33),

figuratively progressing deeper into her body and perhaps even into the recesses of her psychology. Exposing layer after layer of truth, it should still be remembered, however, that these truths belong to Lady Lazarus and not directly to Plath. Writing through an assumed identity, Plath detaches herself from any straightforward association with Lady Lazarus’ plight. Plath frees herself from the fetters of outspoken Confessional writing, exploring and exploiting the psyche of a fictional character in order to relay the poetic message she wants to communicate. Unmasking through Masking Prosody: Plath’s “Daddy”

In a series of close readings entitled “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Technical Analysis,” John Frederick Nims shifts gears away from the multiple biographical or contextual interpretations of Plath’s poetry and into a study of her intricate prosodic characteristics. Throughout this article, he taps into “the sense of language and of metaphor; the throat-produced sounds of [Plath’s] poetry; the physical rhymes that invigorate it,” arguing that the reader may learn a lot about the content of the poem by going back to an examination of the fundamentals of poetic practice (138). Indeed studying the child-like sound patterns, rhymes and repetitions in her poem “Daddy,” it comes to light that Plath is, true to Nims’ theory, employing these prosodic elements in order to create an infantile identity, to create a voice through which to speak, a voice which is nonetheless not her own.

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Plath clarifies that the speaker is a child through the very title of the poem, “Daddy,” being the infantile way of addressing the more officialsounding Father. This childishness then develops throughout the poem with words like “Achoo” (5) and “gobbledygoo” (42) as well as the repetitive diction highlighting an underdeveloped vocabulary that a child might use: “You do not do, you do not do” (1), “And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack” (39), “the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you” (49-50, emphasis added), etc. Nims particularly emphasizes the recurring rhymes of this poem, pointing out that in “Daddy” the “rhyme becomes an obsession. Perhaps never in the history of poetry has the device carried so electric a charge… Over half of the lines end in the oo sound, and of these nearly half are the one word you” (144). This repetition of “you,” both in the end-rhymes and within the poem as a whole, and the details about what this “you” has done to the poetic speaker, signals a kind of telltale logic on the speaker’s part. The speaker would like to expose the various wrongs Daddy committed against her: dying early, being associated with a “Luftwaffe,” an “Aryan eye,” a “Panzer-man,” “a swastika,” etc. (42, 44-46). Using the childlike personality created through the poem’s prosodic elements, the speaker can more radically express the poetic situation than an adult speaker without being inhibited by politically correct notions about complex GermanJewish World War II and fascistic history. She quite openly talks about “An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen,” insinuating racial stereotyping with lines like “I began to talk like a Jew” (31-34).

On the one hand, the speaker’s child-like status allows her to denounce her Daddy just as children sometimes tell on a naughty friend or sibling. Exposing the bad things he has done and cannot reveal because he is already dead, she takes over the job of making a Confession for her Daddy, albeit with a touch of the immature temper-tantrum. On the other hand, the juvenile voice of the poem intensifies the speaker’s own Confession that she has both intensely aggressive feelings towards and even a desire to kill her Daddy (“Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time—” (6-7)). The image of a child rejoicing at the fact that “There’s a stake in [her father’s] fat black heart” aggravates the horror of the confession tenfold (76). A child who is able to discard the authoritative figure of the father with the climactic exclamation “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” provides a much more harrowing disclosure than if a grown-up woman, perhaps even Plath herself, were to express her frustration at her father (80). The poetic speaker’s assumed infantile identity behind which Plath masks her own anger at her father thus supplies the reader with this intensely expository poem. Demonic Possession and New Confession: Foucault, and Plath’s “Fever 103°” and “In Plaster”

In Plath’s poem “Fever 103°,” there is a definite sense that an external transcendental force is acting upon the poetic speaker, and the speaker is then giving voice to the experience. There are, for example, two contradicting strands

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In a series of 1974-75 lectures on abnormality in sexuality, Foucault skims over the medieval phenomenon of demonic possession of ecclesiastics, usually targeting secluded nuns. Chloë Taylor gives a detailed account of what an act of possession would typically look like: the victim “fell into convulsions, cursed their confessors, writhed at their feet, seeking them out erotically and in some cases getting them killed […] simultaneously confessing that it was the devil that made them do so” (3). Foucault emphasizes the fact that the possessed person’s body is a stage where a triangular battle ensues between the possessing demon, the confessor who wants to exorcise the possessed person, and the possessed person herself who is torn between a sense of vulnerability in the demon’s grasp and a desire to be free of the devilish occupation. More important in context of this paper is the verbal component of possession. Being thrown into hysterical convulsions, the possessed woman simultaneously desires to confess this possession. As Foucault explains, “she is someone who confesses, and who does so spontaneously” (205). The possessed woman is thus, at the same time, crying out on behalf of and against the demon. The possessed woman is incited towards expression through the double-sided situation she is in. It is significant to develop the possession-scenario as applicable to a broader frame of reference. Some of Plath’s poems, for instance, may be read effectively through a possessedConfessional lens. In other words, while the poetic speaker is expressing highly personal sentiments, or even perhaps Confessional ones, she is only doing so because she is influenced by some larger, abstract, maybe even mystical, force.

of narrative resembling the good and evil impulses warring within a possessed woman. Plath herself wrote of “Fever 103°”: “This poem is about two kinds of fire – the fires of hell, which merely agonize, and the fires of heaven, which purify” (“Script for the BBC Broadcast” 194). To start with, there is the demonic force, “[t]he tongues of hell,” infiltrating all five senses (2). “Tongues” suggests both the sense of speech and taste. Then the hellish fire is heard as “tinder cries” (8), is scented as the “indelible smell” (9) and felt as “the low smokes roll” (11). This fire is entering the female body, occupying each of its senses, taking it over. In contrast, there is the fire of light the speaker experiences after having exposed herself to “Three days. Three nights. / Lemon water, chicken / Water” (31-32). After undergoing a period of, one may even say, religious fasting and seclusion, the poetic speaker suffers her way towards purity. As Christ ascending to heaven, she also feels that “I am going up, / I think I may rise…“ (43-44) and that she is once again “a pure acetylene / Virgin” (46-47). This strand of fire is thus attempting to exorcise the hellish fire from the speaker, to purify her.

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There is another important element of fire in “Fever 103°,” which Plath does not mention in her short encapsulation of the poem. This third ingredient is the sexual fire burning throughout the text. Harking back once again to the medieval possessed nun torn between the bad and good poles of demon and confessor, the speaker here inserts her own libidinal urges between the hellish and heavenly fires. “[F]lickering, off, on, off, on” (29), the poetic speaker is like “a huge camellia / Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush” (41-42). Her “sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss” (30) and “All by [her] self ” (41) she lets “beads of hot metal fly” (45), inquiring, “Does not my heat astound you?” (40). It is not going too far to argue that the poetic speaker is experiencing the bliss of self-induced orgasm. “All by myself ” (41) and not with “him / Not him, nor him” (51-52), the speaker is nonetheless “Attended by roses, / By kisses, by cherubim” (48-49) reaching “Paradise” in the process (54) and mirroring this attainment of complete satisfaction through the sudden implementation of four consecutive lines of slant rhymes: “cherubim,” “mean,” “him” and “him” (49-52). Heightening her self-induced sexual gratification with this awareness of poetic language practice, Plath in the same gesture suggests that the act of male sexual possession is undesirable, that “Darling […] Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God…” (28-36). Wedged between, on the one hand, a sense of distaste for the demon/man’s sexual possession, and on the other, a demonic (at least from the medieval Christian perspective) lust for selfsatisfaction, the poetic speaker broaches a sensitive topic, artfully navigating her way through the two fiery currents trying to overtake and conquer her. Returning to Foucault, one may agree that “[t]he body of the possessed is a multiple body that is somehow volatized and pulverized into a multiplicity of powers that confront each other, a multiplicity of forces and sensations that beset it” (207). Under the influence of these battling forces the poetic speaker is able to talk about the intimate subject of masturbation. One may ask, is the speaker

now truly partaking in a Confessional discourse? Perhaps. But certainly not in the manner outlined by most conventional definitions of Confessional poetry. Plath’s poetic speaker is not simply rehashing personal experience. Instead of disclosing something about her personality or past, the speaker rather feels that “My selves [are] dissolving” (“Fever 103°” 53). Instead of solidifying her identity by expressing it on paper, the poem only further destabilizes it. At this point it is interesting to glance at Plath’s poem “In Plaster.” Sketching a scenario in which the poetic speaker is suddenly divided into two beings (“There are two of me now: / This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one” (1-2)), her own physical person and a ghostly version of her who “doesn’t need food… [and] is one of the real saints” (4), this poem initiates the compelling notion of the poetic speaker possessed by herself.

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While the ghost-self is living within the poetic speaker and “wouldn’t exist... Without [her] because she gave her a soul” (15-16), the two selves also combat each other just like the various elements within the possessed nun’s body. Whereas the poetic speaker “blamed [the ghostly self] for everything” (10), she can also feel this ghostly self “criticizing [her]” (30). Partaking in the ambiguous logic of possession with the nun being both controlled by the demon and wishing it away, the poetic speaker here too is in a double-bind, being in “a kind of marriage, being so close” (51), yet simultaneously desiring nothing more than “collecting my strength… [and] manag[ing] without her” (55). The poetic speaker experiences the ghostly self as repulsive: “[s]he lay in bed with me like a dead body / And I was scared” (6-7) and later, “[l]iving with her was like living with my own coffin” (48). The poetic speaker would prefer to have her ghost-self exorcised, but also realizes that “I wasn’t in any position to get rid of her. / She’d supported me for so long I was quite limp— / I had even forgotten how to walk or sit” (43-45). If it is impossible to exorcise the ghost self, then the only solution is probably to work with her. Possessed by an alternate aspect of herself, the speaker can make use of this possession to break out into poetic speech, to blossom into verse, poetically exposing the ghost self as a means to revenge herself on her. Masking herself behind herself, the poetic speaker is able to envisage a new definition of Confessional writing. Confessional poetry is not about unmasking the poetic speaker’s interiority, but rather about masking this interiority by means of unmasking an alternative, constructed self.

Works Cited

Axelrod, Steven Gould. “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. Ed. Jo Gill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 73-89. Print. Coetzee, J.M. “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoyevsky.” Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Atwell. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1992. 251-293. Print. Dobbs, Jeannine. “Viciousness in the Kitchen: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic Poetry.” Modern Language Studies 7 (1977): 11-25. Print. Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975. Eds. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2003. Print. Holbrook, David. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. London: The Athlone Press, 1976. Print. Middlebrook, Diane. “On ‘Her Kind.’” Modern American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Web. 8 Mar. 2005. Molesworth, Charles. The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979. Print. Nims, John Frederick. “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Technical Analysis.” The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Ed. Charles Newman. London: Indiana University Press, 1970. 136-152. Print. Du Plessis

Plath, Sylvia. “Interview with Peter Orr.” London: The British Council, October 1962. Print. ---. “Daddy,” “Fever 103°,” “In Plaster,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Purdah,” “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” “Tulips.” The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. Toronto: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008. 158-162, 222-224, 231-232, 242-247. Print.

---. “Script for the BBC Broadcast ‘New Poems by Sylvia Plath.’” Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. 193-194. Print. Schott, Webster. “The Cult of Plath.” Washington Post Book World 3 (1972). Print. Sexton, Anne. “Anna Who Was Mad.” The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. 312-313. Print. Snodgrass, W.D. “W.D. Sits in Kafka’s Chair and Is Interrogated Concerning the Assumed Death of Cock Robin.” Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems. New York: BOA Editions, 2006. 144. Print. Taylor, Chloë. The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal.’ New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. Print.

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5 “Relations of Utter Interdestruction” Circuits of Energy in Women in Love LUKE NEIMA

“Relations of Utter Interdestruction” Circuits of Energy in Women in Love LUKE NEIMA In Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence creates a narrative of seduction that arises out of fatalistic forces of energy. Energies underlie characters’ psyches, informing their actions and determining their attractions. Seduction in the novel is not based upon free agency, then, but upon the need to express or gather this energy. Desire itself is represented linguistically by the text as a magnetic or electric attraction that stems from the unconscious; energetic language is infused into the narrative, and characters have no control over their energies except insofar as they allow themselves to become vehicles for the spontaneous expressions it demands. The narrative focus on pressures of energy affects the way the novel progresses – relationships between characters develop efficiently and fatalistically. Lawrence develops his conception of unconscious energies in his essays, and they are an important component of his unique naturalist ideology. The narrative expression of energy in Women in Love is divided along the ideological lines present in Lawrence’s essays: the mechanical, industrial energy that characterizes the relationship of Gudrun and Gerald is contrasted to the natural energy that moves between Birkin and Ursula. Circuitry as a metaphor, however, underlies both ideological perspectives. The function of energy in the text surpasses the ideological differences imposed upon it, and asserts its own, autonomous power of determination.

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In his essays Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, D.H. Lawrence outlines a model of the psyche that he says is “deduced from [his] novels” (15). Lawrence’s model creates a “great complex circuit [...] within the individual” (232). The psyche, he argues, is composed of four planes of horizontally polarized spiritual nodes. The lower plane consists of the creative center of the solar plexus and the assertive power of the spinal ganglia. Its corresponding upper plane is comprised of the sympathetic heart and the objective knowledge and strength of the shoulders. At puberty, two other polarities are created: a deeper plane between the “hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion” – the sympathetic center of the posterior, and the individualistic center of the loins – and a higher plane between the mental determination of social ideals, and the individualistic spontaneity of the will (185). These different nodes of spiritual power create limits and walls within the body and are separated like the voltaic cells of a battery. Each individual cell operates based on the division of its half cells and their reciprocal reactions create voltage, or the vitalistic energy of life. The horizontal polarizations are complemented by vertical polarizations that divide the body into

a grid; the vertical continuity of negative poles represents individuality, while the positive polarization represents sympathy. The different centers have different functions as they are polarized by the will: the lower center, for example, creates a “headstrong temper and masterfulness,” while the upper center creates “critical objectivity [...and] the plaintive bullying of love” (41). This system is the structural skeleton for the technique of psychological realism Lawrence uses in Women in Love. The need to exert energy pervades the novel. In the wedding of the first chapter, the groom chases after his bride “like a hound,” expressing the instinctual pressure of his animal energy (21). Shortly thereafter the two sisters come across Gerald swimming naked and his independent force attracts Gudrun. The kinetic energies of swimming, running, dancing, and rowing are accompanied in the novel by the mental energies of work, discussion, courtship, and creation. The atmosphere at Breadalby, for instance, is “mental and very wearing” (93). As people talk there is “an accumulation of powerful force [...] powerful and destructive” (101). Birkin is described as being just as destructive as Hermione – regardless of idea, the mental exertion of energy is an aggressive force. At the water-party, the sisters isolate themselves and express artistic energy. While Ursula sings, Gudrun thinks of her “at the center of her own universe” and gets a “sense of her own negation,” knowing “that she must always demand the other to be aware of her, to be in connexion with her” (185). Artistic expression is a self-sufficient use of energy and creates an attraction. Gudrun dances in order to connect her internal energies to her sister. The act of dancing encourages Gudrun to test “some secret power in herself ” on the cattle that approach the two girls (187). She subsequently pulls energy out of the cattle, feeling an “electric pulse from their breasts running into her hands” (187). Gudrun’s expression of energy, like Ursula’s, is a self-validating process. Later that evening, Diana Crich dies because she persisted “in dancing on the cabin roof of the launch” (212); the spontaneous expression of her will leads to her death. In the context of the chapter, Diana becomes a foil for the dangerous dancing that the sisters engage in earlier that evening. Throughout the novel, energy is presented as volatile and dangerous. Neima

In his Fantasia of The Unconscious, Lawrence argues that electricity is a better symbol for the rudimentary aspects of the life of consciousness than the unconscious of Freud, saying, “it is no use talking about life and the unconscious [...] you can talk about electricity, because electricity is a homogeneous force” (212). Metaphors of energy are, for Lawrence, a more pure representation of the forces at work within a person’s psyche. His psychic ontology leads to a dynamic principle of energy. He writes that “there can be no vivid relation between two adult individuals which does not consist in a dynamic polarized flow of vitalistic force or magnetism or electricity” (106). Lawrence’s argument implies dynamism: the forces of energy

underlie the processes of character development to a point that precludes distinctions of a purely ideological nature. The monadic makeup of energy is distinct in each individual, and this energy determines the sort of ideology a character espouses. The narrative description of romance and relationships in Women in Love is filled, correspondingly, with metaphors of magnetism, electricity, fire, light, and motion. The energies of individual characters attract or repulse each other in a fatalistic, unconscious way. When Gudrun first sees Gerald at the wedding something in him “magnetize[s] her” (15). His powerful attraction causes her to wonder, “is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?” (16). The somewhat excessive romantic sentiment that accompanies her first glimpse of Gerald emphasizes the exaggerated power of internal energies in the novel. The word “arctic” itself describes a cold energy that is an aspect of the circuitry of Gerald’s character, and his arctic energy is fatalistically reclaimed by the natural energy of the Alps (16). Like Gudrun, Birkin also perceives the cold energy that determines Gerald’s existence. Birkin thinks of Gerald as one of the “wonderful demons from the north,” and then foretells Gerald’s fate to die “by perfect cold” (287). Furthermore, Ursula’s first glimpse of Birkin also displays a range of unconscious energy: he “pique[s] her, attract[s] her, and annoy[s] her” (22). Her first impression is expanded upon as the novel progresses, but the basic elements of her feelings for Birkin never change. Birkin piques her interest with his ideology and attracts her physically, but the friction between them is never resolved. In a similarly fatalistic fashion, Birkin is “unconsciously drawn” to Ursula at Breadalby; the next line of the narrative asserts the fatality of his attraction to her: “she was his future” (102). The prophetic aspect of the novel is arguably tied to the predictability of forces of energy and their outlets. Throughout the novel, energy brings characters into relation together and determines the ways in which any two characters in the novel may interact.

Neima

In his Study of Thomas Hardy Lawrence argues that the nature of man is a wheel of motion that rests upon the inert axel of a woman. The man himself should be the “motion” of a woman’s “motionlessness” (56). A microcosm for relationships of energy between men and women early in the novel occurs between Gerald and the bohemian Minette. After the two meet, Gerald gives off his characteristic “electric power,” and feels that “she was fated to come into contact with him” (71, 73). When Gerald and Minette leave the bar she is “at one in her motion” with Gerald, and this alignment of their kinetic energy represents the sexual attraction between them (79). In the taxi she passes “into him in a black, electric flow [...] like a magnetic darkness” (80). This attraction results from the wilful power of the negative nodes described in Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious. The narrator describes Minette’s energy as being “concentrated at

the base of [Gerald’s] spine like a fearful source of power” (80). His assertion of will from the lower, negative pole draws Minette’s sexual submission through an “electric comprehension” that acts without their having to communicate openly (80). When Gerald speaks to Halliday about sleeping arrangements, his limbs fill “with electric force, and his back […] with slumbering fire” (83). The assertion of his will to consummate his desire for Minette causes him to feel voltage in the negative, individualistic part of his body. The next day Minette becomes cold to Gerald, and the narrator reveals her intention to “have complete power” over Halliday (89). She has her own motive in the sexual exchange: she gives Gerald a physical, sexual expression of energy in exchange for a mental power over Halliday. Neither motive is privileged by the text itself; the underlying forces of energy, by nature impartial and determinate, validate both expressions of self-interest. The relationship between Birkin and Hermione is an example of a failed exchange of sexual energy. Hermione is “static and mechanical,” and her lack of passion repulses Birkin (110). When Birkin begins to resist her openly, she thinks that “his presence was destroying her” (117). “Shocks of electricity” run down her body and she hits him with a stone of lapis lazuli. As she does so, “a flame” drenches her “like fluid lightning” and she achieves a “consummation” (117). Once Birkin disrupts the intellectual circuit between them through an explicit verbal rejection, she acts with physical energy in an attempt to destroy him. The energy of her mental attraction, repelled, is subverted into a physical energy against him. Hermione feels no guilt, only “righteousness” and “conviction of her own rightness of spirit” (121). Birkin himself does not bear a grudge towards Hermione; his continued relationship with her makes him complicit in her justification of physical violence through the intuitive understanding of determinate mental energies. Both are aware, at some level, that any expression of energy is innately self-validating. Furthermore, the various attempts to exchange, master, and express such energies comprise all of the conflict in the novel.

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When Gerald masters his horse at the railway crossing, these three forces are all at work simultaneously. The industrial energy of the train is opposed to and repels the animal energy of the horse, which is then channelled and controlled by the dominating energy of Gerald. Gerald’s force has a “mechanical relentlessness,” and as he asserts himself upon the horse, the horse begins to strike its hooves “mechanically” as well – its natural energy is circumvented by Gerald’s will, and aligned to his mechanical nature (124). While Ursula expresses her repulsion by yelling out at Gerald, Gudrun is unconsciously attracted by Gerald’s “magnetic domination” – his expression of energy charges her with desire (126). When she next sees Gerald, she feels “an electric vibration,” and decides that “Gerald was her escape from the [...] automatic colliers” (133). Gerald and Gudrun fully recognize their compatibility in the way they handle the rabbit Bismarck. As

Gudrun dominates the animal, Gerald sees “with subtle recognition, her sullen passion for cruelty” (270). They are both filled with the negative polarization that leads to dominance. Cruelty is not denigrated in the text, as it is understood to be a factor of psychological circuitry. In a similarly determined way, when Gerald tells Gudrun he loves her, he cannot find “sufficient mechanical control to save himself,” and he gives himself to her in “a strange, electric submission” (192, 197). His attraction to her is entirely unconscious; the negative and mechanical nature of his mental processes prevents him from establishing a conscious, positive connection with her. His animal energies need to be expressed, and they express themselves automatically. Gerald himself has no control over the process. Ursula and Birkin’s relationship is the positive, sympathetic alternative to the negative, mechanical polarity between Gerald and Gudrun. The use of fire and light in Lawrence’s description of Ursula is linked to the sympathetic polarity she represents. Ursula is continually described as “transfigured with light,” and Birkin desires this, telling her “there is a golden light in you, which I wish you would give me” (218, 281). He is very direct about what energy he wants from her and the way in which he wants to get it: through “the perfection of the polarized sex-circuit” (225). He hopes to create a “paradisal unit” in their duality – to achieve a perfectly balanced exchange of energies between them (417). When Ursula and Birkin argue on the island by his mill house, they rouse “each other to a fine passion of opposition” (140); the energy of their argument creates a balanced circuit. As they look at each other they are both “suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire” (144). Their connection balances their mentalities, allowing them to create natural “fire” energy independent of each other (144). Sexual energy emerges despite the pair’s intellectual disputes on a conscious level; that they argue over ideological issues is irrelevant to the fatalistic process of their desire.

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In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes that sex is a means of refreshing one’s self, and sexual activity does not differentiate between positive or negative attraction. There is no difference between the “purposive, constructive activity” of the positive polarity and “passionate, purposive destructive activity” of the negative polarity (187). What is important is the creation of a purposive sexual current. As Birkin and Ursula have sex, his “flood of electric passion” creates this kind of “rich new circuit” between them (353). Their sexual connection is “a force in darkness, like electricity” (358). The natural energy that was initially used to describe them reverts to the same electric energy typically connected with mechanical action, suggesting the fatality with which they are drawn together. They also have anal sex, “at the back and base of the loins,” in a place “deeper than the phallic source” that provides them with “ineffable riches” (354). The physical conjunction of the loins to the anus, when considered from the perspective of

Lawrence’s model of the psyche, would create a perfect polarization between positive and negative centers. When they engage in “bestial” acts of intercourse again in the Alps, Ursula finds the experience “repulsively attractive” (464). The language here describes the contradictory energies at work: ideologically, Ursula is opposed to the act and repulsed, but she is also attracted unconsciously by the circuitry of physical energy. Gudrun creates a similarly strong connection to Gerald while she combs her hair. Gerald approaches Gudrun from behind and the force of his unconscious energy almost causes her to “fall down at his feet [...] letting him destroy her” (467). The magnetism between them in this front to back polarity creates a “battle between [Gudrun’s] ordinary consciousness and [Gerald’s] uncanny, black-art consciousness” (466). Gudrun gets Gerald to turn around by asking him to get something out of her bag and, conscious of the powerful energetic force that determines their interactions, decides never to turn her back to him again. Regardless of how close a connection the circuit of sex can create, such connections are impermanent in the novel. When Birkin proposes to Ursula, she thinks of his pledge as a “challenge,” and is “prepared to fight him for it” (299). Gudrun also forms a resolve “to combat” Gerald when they are alone in the Alps (465). Both sisters approach relationship as a conflict, and the way in which their relationships disintegrate reflects the self-interested individualism they both maintain. Gudrun compares herself to Cleopatra, who “reaped the essential from a man, she harvested the ultimate sensation, and threw away the husk,” by which she means she uses Gerald (505). By the end of the novel, Birkin and Ursula’s energy fizzles out as well. Ursula is aware that “she could not let go a certain hold over herself [...and that] they were never quite together” (490). Ursula is continually annoyed by Birkin’s need for another, and the words “she stayed there for a week or two” imply that she leaves shortly after the novel concludes (541). Their relationship, like the others in the novel, deteriorates due to conflicts of individualistic interest.

Neima

Earlier in the novel, Birkin criticizes Gerald for focusing on business and “ignoring the demand of the soul” (226). Gerald tells Birkin that he “live[s] to work,” as they take the train early in the novel, and subsequently says that his life “is artificially held together by the social mechanism” (61, 64). In the Study of Thomas Hardy, Lawrence says that “work is a form of non-living, of non-existence, of submergence” (33). Birkin, extending Lawrence’s critical view, suggests “love,” the “one really pure single activity,” as an alternative to work (Women 63). Both work and love in the novel, however, are merely channels through which dynamic energy is expressed. The problem of this energetic model of life is by nature existential; it has no underlying ideological aim. Earlier in his essay on Hardy, Lawrence criticizes the ordinary man whose “personal horror is of finding himself with nothing to do” (52). The characters in Women in Love find themselves confronted

by the same horror, and they are all propelled by this fear of meaninglessness. The novel begins with the two sisters talking over their plans for the future and the sisters, “confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm,” debate marriage as a means to fulfillment (11). The narrator describes Birkin as not having “any definite rhythm, any organic meaning,” Gudrun is described as “a restless bird,” and Ursula feels a similar restlessness, thinking that unless something happens to her she “shall die” (58, 104, 214). After an argument with Ursula, Birkin concedes that “his spirituality was concomitant of a process of depravity, a sort of pleasure in selfdestruction” (348); it offers no real purpose. Gerald, having “done all the work he wanted to do,” finds himself “in an agony of inertia, like a machine that is without power” (300). Gerald tells Birkin that the only two things there are to distract oneself are “work and love,” but Gerald can no longer work and he is no good at love (301). The characters are avoiding stasis. The pursuit of love only creates the illusion of purpose, and is only one of several channels for energy.

Neima

Evelyn Cobley, in her work Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency, explores the ideology of efficiency in Women in Love. She focuses on the Taylorism of Gerald’s industrial innovations in his mines, but she also asserts that these notions of efficiency extend into his character. Cobley uses game theory to describe Gerald’s relationships; his proclivity towards individuality causes him to continually choose “collectively self-defeating options” (215). Gerald’s refusal of Birkin is an example of his choosing social laws over love in an attempt to defend himself from being hurt in a social relationship. Cobley also aligns Birkin to efficient capitalism, examining his purchase of an antique chair in chapter twenty-six. Birkin’s relationship to the model of industrial efficiency can be paralleled to Gerald on a psychological level as well. Birkin is also ruthlessly efficient, but with love, not business. When Ursula visits Birkin on what would be their first date the first thing he asks is for her to “pledge” herself in a “final and irrevocable” way to him (Women 161). After they sleep together, he goes to their house to propose and is turned away. Birkin quickly turns his proposal for ultimate emotional unity onto Gerald, asking him to make a “Blutbrüderschaft” with him without any “sloppy emotionalism” (232). Birkin wants the most efficient emotional connection possible. Love and business in the novel are ideological channels through which one channels energy; energy itself is the primary force, and demands efficiency regardless of the way in which it is directed. The act of sleep balances the exertion of physical energy in the novel, and becomes a symbol for the rejuvenation the male characters take from the women. Gudrun’s love makes Gerald feel peace “for the first time in his life [...] his first great sleep of life” (199). As Birkin and Ursula sleep together on the ship, the narrator states that, in a similar way, it “was the first time that an utter and absolute peace had entered his heart” (438). Birkin tells Ursula that he wants

“love that is like sleep, like being born again” (208). When Ursula asks why he should want such a thing, he says “so that it is like death – I do want to die from this life” (208). In Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence describes the “pure polarity between life and death” (163). He asserts that “each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death” (163). Sleeping creates a circuit between living individuals and the earth: it presages the final end of the circuitry of life. Sleep, as a means of polarizing life energy, is on the same level as work or love in the novel’s hierarchy of energetic activity. Though Lawrence privileges love in his critical writing, in Women in Love the action of sleep unites love with death. Evelyn Cobley argues that Gerald’s suicide at the end of the novel is a submission to the death drive. In his work The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud writes that life is the cause of its own continuance, and leads to two trends, “the sexual instinct or Eros,” and the “death instinct” or the instinct for destruction to which Cobley refers (30). Freud describes the movement from love to hate and links it to the relationship between Eros and the desire for death. Despite Lawrence’s personal distaste for Freud, a similar relationship between instinctual desires arises in Women in Love. After the death of Diana, Ursula meditates on how “death is a great consummation […] a development from life” (Women 214). She thinks of how it is “better [to] die than [to] live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions” (216). Cobley argues that Gerald’s instinct for death is an example of the apocalyptic fatality with which Lawrence wanted to portray industrialism (214). Because of the way energy is built into the narrative, however, death becomes a channel for energy in a way that moves beyond social critique. Before Gerald turns to Gudrun after the funeral, he finds himself at the graveyard and finds “one center” in the darkness (382). He already realizes the appeal of death, but only chooses this center for energy after the center of love has run its course. The vacillation between drives depends on some hypothetical “displaceable energy” (Freud 34). In Women in Love, that energy is the unconscious, dynamic life that underlies the characters. The deterministic, scientific influence of energy inevitably creates a circuit between life and death; a metaphysical materialism arises out of the textual determinism of energy. Neima

The circuit between Lawrence’s critical writing and his novels is far from apodictic, and the use of energy within the text implies a deterministic organization of relationships that surpasses the vitalism and naturalist ideology that Lawrence espoused critically. The forces of energy are not parsed by the different ideologies within the novel, but instead present an underlying psychic model that is imposed equally on all of the characters in the text. Love in the novel is not a pure alternative to business; love is merely an alternative, and is no more valid than work, sleep, or death. The unconscious, determinate force of energy remains the selfish basis for

the novel’s conflicts and development. Critically, Lawrence rejected the idea that “any form of pure, balanced polarity between two vital individuals [can] be in any sense selfish on the part of one individual” (Psychoanalysis 227); this assertion depends on the idealization of a perfect scientific circuit, one that is not present in Women in Love .

Works Cited

Cobley, Evelyn. Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2009. Print.

Neima

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. London: Hogarth P, 1962. Print. Lawrence, D.H. Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. New York: Penguin, 1960. Print. ---. Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Print. ---. Women in Love. London: Penguin, 1960. Print.

6 Wallace Stevens Achieving Spiritual Heroism through Painterly Abstraction ROSA AIELLO

Wallace Stevens

Achieving Spiritual Heroism through Painterly Abstraction ROSA AIELLO

In Wassily Kandinsky’s book On the Spiritual in Art, he called the state of the early twentieth century “the nightmare of materialism,” a time characterized by “unbelief, lack of purpose and ideals” (10). The early twentieth century was a bachelor who needed some miracle to bring meaning to his life. Then one day, this bachelor had a child, and he called that child modern art: as Kandinsky once said, “every work of art is a child of its time” (10). Whether or not he had read On Spirituality in Art, Wallace Stevens was as acutely aware of the spiritual deficiency of his time as was Kandinsky, and as urgently as Kandinsky, Stevens saw his artistic role as an ideological responsibility. It was in the common recognition of and anxiety about society’s wide-spread “unbelief ” that Stevens saw the greatest kinship between the modernist poetic and painterly projects: “poet and painter alike work in the midst of essential poverty in spite of fortune” (Necessary 171). The artistic response to the problem of modernity was manifested in the modernists’ increasingly experimental and increasingly abstract forms of expression (Kandinsky 10). Kandinsky believed that imitative, representational art was essentially material, while abstract art was essentially spiritual (10). Furthermore, he believed that “spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which it is one of its mightiest agents, is a complicated but definite and simplified uplifting movement. This movement is one of perception” (13-14). In order for the spiritual life that both Kandinsky and Stevens imagined to be realized, art and poetry bore the responsibility of renovating and reviving the activity of perception.

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In keeping with these beliefs, explorations of the act of perception formed the basis for much of Stevens’s prose works, some of which are compiled in The Necessary Angel as well as in his poetry. In reading his poetry, Stevens hoped the reader might “become an ignorant man again / and see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it” (“Supreme Fiction” 13-15). In these works, Stevens scrutinized the notion of perception by the same means as did his visual artist contemporaries: through abstraction. Stevens believed that painterly abstraction techniques had the power to illuminate and to explain the basic structure of reality, which was one of the fundamental aims of his poetry. It makes sense, then, that Stevens should emulate the techniques of abstraction with which the painters of his day were experimenting, such as abstraction and simplification of compositional elements, the abstraction of a thing from its environment, and the analytical decomposition through abstraction that characterized the cubist artistic style. We may trace his use of these techniques in

poems such as “Study of Two Pears,” “A Dish of Peaches in Russia,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In doing so, Stevens encouraged a resistance to the automaticity of observation, and thus sought to awaken in the reader an awareness of the reciprocally constructive relationship that exists between reality and perception, and of the vital role of the imagination in this constructive process. It is important to first examine the reasons that modernist painters turned to abstraction for their particular ideological project. Philosopher T. E. Hulme was an instrumental figure in theoretically substantiating the modernists’ fascination with abstraction (MacLeod 204). Hulme based his theories on Wilhelm Worringer’s notion that art history could be summed up in two opposing inclinations: empathy – an impulse that reflects “a secure, confident relation to the world” (204) and results in “an organic, humanistic art like that of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy” (204) – and abstraction, which reflects “an anxious, fearful relation to the world” (204) and results in “a stylized, geometric art, as in African, Egyptian, and Byzantine art”(204). Hulme classified the modernist sensibility as the latter category, as the movement was “fundamentally opposed to the Christian humanism of the Renaissance tradition… express[ing] itself most fully in the hard, clean, geometric shapes characteristic of modern machinery” (204). Proof of Hulme’s theories is traceable in the art movements of the time, as well as in much of modernist poetry. Ezra Pound’s poetics, for example, made an explicit call for “hardness” and “clarity of outline” (MacLeod 14). Along with many other poets and painters, Stevens also followed these theoretical lines; he wrote poetry that was often patently non-representational, and devoted an entire section of his manifestic “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” to the task of outlining the importance of abstraction in art. He unambiguously entitled this section “It Must be Abstract.”

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Not only was Stevens’s tendency towards abstraction consistent with his contemporaries’ views of society, but it was also instrumental to his particular poetic project. Art “Must be Abstract” (“Supreme Fiction” 380) because it is only through abstraction that the painter or poet can operate on their audience’s imagination, and resist automatic acceptance of the world as we observe it. Beginning with post-impressionism, modernist art made a conscious turn away from the representational art that had been the norm for so many centuries; in this turn, art was already engaging with the viewer’s imagination simply by forcing her to find meaning in art that was not supplied by the straightforward objects of imitative art. According to Stevens, “an imitation may be described as an identity manqué. It is artificial… it is lifeless and that, finally, is what is wrong with it” (Necessary 73). Kandinsky agreed that “an effort to revive art-principles of the past” (9) – ones that were almost exclusively based on imitations of reality – “at best, can only result in work of art resembling a still-born child” (9). All art that is not striving to imitate reality supplies instead images that approach reality through resemblance. The concept of resemblances foregrounds many of Stevens’s claims about the capacity of art to enhance the reality of our perceptions. Art, according

to Stevens, “in the act of satisfying the desire for resemblance touches the sense of reality, it enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it” (Necessary 77). In contrast to the mind’s passive reaction to direct imitation, Stevens saw the act of creating and recognizing resemblances as being “an activity of the imagination” (79). Furthermore, since Stevens believed that the imagination was “a thing in continual flux” (149), a thing that was variable across time and place, and that was dependent upon individual experience (143), it makes sense that Stevens looked to visual art to activate his poetic imagination. He believed painting to be a medium that allowed for universality and fluctuation in interpretation. In Stevens’s view, “the permissible reality in painting wavers with an insistence which is itself of a value” (149) – a wavering that is not always possible in poetry, unless of course, the poet should choose to borrow from painterly techniques in his poetry writing. One type of painterly abstraction that we may locate in Stevens’s poetry is the abstraction of compositional forms through the use of pure colour and geometric shapes. The technique is abstract in two ways: first, it reduces a thing to its basic compositional elements, isolating colour and form as they exist independently of their representational utility, and secondly, it distils a thing to its most basic recognizable elements, and thus the thing approaches an essential state. The post-impressionists were the first of their time to experiment with this technique, and Paul Cézanne was one of the first artists of the Impressionist movement to take the techniques further into abstraction: he “retain[ed] the Impressionists’ broken brushstrokes and their use of pure colour, [while adding] weight and volume by emphasizing the underling geometric structure of objects” (MacLeod 195). Consider Cezanne’s Still Life with Quince Apples and Pears: the colours Cezanne uses may be easily identified simply as red, green, yellow, and orange. We need not turn to particularities in colour such as peridot, mint, aquamarine, sunset, chartreuse, saffron, mustard, or tan to feel that we have accurately described the image. Similarly, the fruits are made up of regular circles and curves, ignoring the subtle irregularity of natural shapes.

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While it is important to resist reducing the modernist poets’ impulse towards the visual arts to simply an ekphrastic impulse, as did Elizabeth Loizeaux in her book Twentieth Century Poetry and the Visual Arts, we should note the similarity between Stevens’s “Study of Two Pears” and this painting. Stevens approaches the pears by focusing on the compositional elements of colour and form in a post-impressionist painterly style. Like Still Life with Apples, “Study of Two Pears” represents the fruits in elementary terms: “they are yellow forms / composed of curves / bulging toward the base. / They are touched red” (5-9). This play with colour and form is repeated throughout the poem. The second, fourth, and sixth stanzas deal with the interplay between form and colour, while the third stanza isolates the form of the objects: “not flat surfaces / having curved outlines. / They are round / tapering toward the top” (13-16), and the fifth stanza isolates

the colour of the objects: “The yellow glistens. / It glistens with various yellows, citrons, oranges and greens / Flowering over the skin” (17-20). William Carlos Williams explains abstraction in this way: “What we are seeking is the least common denominator in the means of expression: in painting, color, bereft of all other reference; in the poem, the unaccented line” (qtd. in Altieri 14). In his own poetry, such as “The Red Wheel Barrow,” Williams also focuses on simplicity of form and colour, limiting his visual descriptions to “red” (3), “white” (7), and “glazed” (5), though he did not delve so far as Stevens did into painterly technique. “Study of Two Pears” fuses Williams’s two statements, by conveying the least common denominator of painting through poetry. With this gesture, Stevens is also conveying the least common denominator of visual perception. The isolation of compositional forms is what Charles Aliteri calls a “decreative gesture” (18), which brings the reader into an awareness of the equally compositional action in perception, and the role the imagination plays in this process. Stevens cites Leo Stein’s “On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures” to describe the imaginative construction that occurs in all acts of perception: I put on the table… an earthenware plate… and this I looked at every day for hours. I had in mind to see it as a picture, and waited for it to become one. In time it did. The change came suddenly when the plate as an inventorial object… a certain shape, certain colors … went over into a composition to which all these elements were merely contributory… What had been begun was carried out in all directions. I wanted to be able to see anything as a composition and found that it was possible to do this. (qtd. in Necessary 162)

Furthermore, by reducing objects to their essential characteristics, this technique of abstraction emphasizes the object’s resemblance to other things. Just as the reduction of a thing to its most elemental parts underscores the composition of reality, so too through the recognition of resemblances do “we examine… the significant components of the structure of reality” (71).

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There is an automaticity to unself-conscious observation: we see objects in their entirety, as gestalts, without appreciating the complex cognitive mechanisms that, using the lines and colours that compose these objects, lead us to recognize and classify them. Through a concentrated implementation of the imaginative capacity, such as the one Stein performed, an observer may abstract the individual elements that contribute to our apprehension of the whole: “in the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. / The world must be measured by eye” (“On The Road Home” 14-15). As Stevens puts it, “imagination is the clue to reality” (Necessary 139) – a reality which remains unattainable without a self-conscious use of the imagination. It is the use of pure colour and geometric form that brings the reader into a sharper understanding of the parts that make up every object in our world, and thus brings the reader into a sharper understanding of the compositional act of perception.

Without the title, “Study of Two Pears,” the poem would no more be describing a pear than an apple, a lemon, a mango, or some other similar object; likewise, Cézanne’s various still life works present the viewer with objects that are easily discernable as fruit, but only vaguely as the particular fruit that the title indicates. Both Stevens and Cézanne are therefore playing with our conception of objects as defined and fixed by concentrating on the process of observation, categorization, and identification. It is strange, since the abstraction of this poem seems to encourage resemblance, that the speaker should explicitly discourage the reader’s doing so by stating that “the pears are not viols, / Nudes or bottles. / They resemble nothing else” (“Study” 2-4). The pears do in fact resemble these other objects in their similarly shapely curves and tapering tops. Finding resemblances is an automatic act, like the other acts of perception that we have considered, and therefore discouraging our natural inclination will not in effect prevent the reader from finding resemblances, but will bring to light her tendency to do so. Since finding resemblances is an unconscious exercise, the reader will perform it unknowingly if the speaker of the poem does not point out the act by discouraging it. Rather than imitating the act of perception, the poem works against the automatic acts of perception, such as composition without reflection, recognition of a thing by its gestalt, and identification of resemblances. As a result, “The pears are not seen / As the observer wills” (23-24), but, as Stevens might suggest, the reader is privileged with a glimpse of the pears at a higher fidelity to reality.

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Another painterly technique of abstraction that Stevens uses in his poetry is the isolation of a thing from its environment. This form of abstraction is the underlying principle behind any still life painting, including those of Cezanne that we have already examined. It is therefore also featured in “The Study of Two Pears.” One of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of “to abstract” describes the type of abstraction to which I am referring: “to separate in mental conception; to consider apart from the material embodiment, or from particular instances” (OED). This definition leads us to understand this type of abstraction as providing the viewer/reader with an essentialized form of an object. By isolating a thing from its environment the viewer/reader becomes inclined to consider an object as an idea rather than as an individual instance of a thing: an object as it exists in its idealized form. Stevens proposes that we must see things as ideas in order to cleanse ourselves of the preconceptions that prejudice perception: “How clean the sun when seen in its idea, / Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven / That has expelled us and our images…” (“Supreme Fiction” 10-12). This isolation of objects from their environment, of dividing the world up into its constituent parts, is the primary goal of Stevens’s volume of poetry Parts of a World. The title of this book speaks directly to the act of abstraction. This use of “a” instead of “the” in the title suggests that the poet is creating a world of his own, rather than simply describing the world as it is. The poet imagines a world that, like Plato’s world of forms, is more

pure: “The poem, through candor, brings back a power again / That gives a candid kind to everything” (“Supreme Fiction” 11-12). This poet’s world is clean in its remoteness like “the remotest cleanliness of a heaven” (11). In other words, by isolating things from their context in the world, abstraction produces poetic content that “refuses all questions of scene and setting, in order to emphasize questions of how artifacts produce significance” (Altieri 338). In the purified world of poetry, we recover the notion of resemblance; it is through resemblance that these isolated artefacts produce significance, and approach the ideal, since “it is not too extravagant to think of resemblances and of the repetitions of resemblances as a source of the ideal” (Necessary 81). In Stevens’s estimation, poetry “makes one thing resemble another… the eye does not beget in resemblance. It sees. But the mind begets in resemblance… as the painter makes his world within a world” (76). While it is impossible to create even a fictional world where art may reside absolutely free of the ideological constraints of time and place, when an object is separated from its context, the viewer/reader’s perception is not encumbered by the historical and ideological markers of the object’s surroundings, lending a greater degree of universality to the work of art, and approaching what Stevens called “a fundamental poetry” (145): Without the traps of ideology, he could adapt to poetry the testimonial, self-referential dimension of art explored in painting. An art that enacts what it asserts can be said to finesse ideology, because its assertions do not depend on relating to the world through propositional, or even dramatic, chains of inference that have obvious dependencies on beliefs within a particular social order. Rather, one can imagine appealing to levels of experience abstract enough to engage fundamental, recurrent needs and desires. (Altieri 322)

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Free from “the traps of ideology” (322), the observer may make free associations between the thing observed and the thoughts floating through her mind, which is the basis for the formation of resemblances. Stevens’s poem “A Dish of Peaches in Russia” from Parts of a World deals with the free associations that may arise from an individual’s sensual experience with an abstracted object. The speaker encounters a dish of peaches, a subject that might be rendered in a still-life painting. The speaker concentrates on the sensual particulars of the peaches as an artist might do: “large and round, / Ah! And red; and they have peach fuzz, ah! / They are full of juice and the skin is soft” (11-12). Immediately he is transported because the peaches “are full of the colors of my village / And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace” (13-14). Nothing in the environment signalled these associations; it was the peaches qua peaches that led him to these rich and emotive images. The speaker is engaging his imagination by searching for the things that these peaches resemble, and he is rewarded for his imaginative efforts: “if resemblance is described as a partial similarity… it complements and reinforces that which the two dissimilar things have in common. It makes it brilliant.” (Necessary 77). As he senses the

peaches, it is as if they are speaking to him: “I taste these peaches, / I touch them and smell them. Who speaks?” (“A Dish” 1-2). Fittingly, Stevens believed that through the recognition of resemblance, “the thing comes to life” (Necessary 77). Surrealist artists also practice this form of abstraction, though rather than eliminating the surrounding environment or placing the object in a neutral environment, they place the object in an unlikely environment. Rather than creating a world of forms, this relocation of objects renders the composition unsettling, absurd, or humorous. Stevens plays this same trick of incongruity with his poetry. Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” presents an object in an unusual environment, and thus creates the same sensation of strangeness and absurdity that characterize surrealist art. Like Dali’s paintings which “oddly juxtapose recognizable objects in order to create a kind of dream image or hallucinatory vision” (MacLeod 213), Stevens placed a jar incongruously “upon a hill” (“Anecdote” 2). Through this type of abstraction both the surrealists and Stevens “sought to free the irrational powers of the unconscious mind” (MacLeod 213), such as those unconscious processes involved in perception. While the image of a jar sitting on a hill is undeniably strange, and while the environment does acknowledge and respond to the unusual presence of the jar, the language that describes the happening is unexpectedly matter-of-fact. The jar is described in its banality as “round upon the ground… the jar was gray and bare” (“Anecdote” 7-10), thus giving the reader the sense that the jar, even in its pre-eminence, is rather commonplace. Through the nonchalant juxtaposition of unlikely objects and environments, this poem lends a normality to abnormality, thus exposing the abnormality in our concepts of normality: “we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them, the work ‘concepts’ means concepts of normality… the imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal” (Necessary 154). From surrealist poems like “Anecdote of the Jar,” we learn that the notion of inherent normality is simply indicative of our ignorance to the role of the imagination in the construction of the familiar, yet another example of the automatic acts of perception about which painterly techniques of abstraction enlighten the reader.

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The third technique of painterly abstraction in Stevens’s poetry is the most complex and most anti-representational. I will call this type of abstraction analytical abstraction since it draws from the second movement of cubism, dubbed “analytical cubism” (Macleod 198). This movement included painters such as Braque and Picasso, who “so thoroughly analyzed (or broke into smaller parts) objects that they became hardly recognizable” (200). Works that employ this type of abstraction engage in a decomposition and rearrangement of the parts of a thing in an effort to better understand the nature of the thing, or to distance the viewer from what she assumes to be reality of the thing. Stevens’s account of his first encounter with the work of Jacques Villon demonstrates the value that Stevens granted to the cubist art techniques: I was immediately conscious of the presence of the enchantments of intelligence in all his prismatic material. A woman lying in a hammock

was transformed into a complex of planes and tones, radiant, vaporous, exact. A tea-pot and a cup or two took their place in a reality composed wholly of things unreal. These works were deliciae of the spirit as distinguished from delectations of the senses and this was so because one found in them the labor of calculation, the appetite for perfection. (Necessary 166) Though Stevens’s poems do not often exhibit mathematical precision in their metrical or stanzaic construction, the reader may nonetheless find moments of this same “labor of calculation,” such as his use of geometry and numbers in his construction of multiple perspectives in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” As with our comparison of “Study of Two Pears” with Cezanne’s still life, let us consider L’Oiseau, a print of Villon’s, as a work of visual art that it might be helpful to keep in mind as we think of “Thirteen Ways” through cubist techniques of abstraction. Again, this is not to suggest that “Thirteen Ways” is ekphrastic of l’Oiseau, or that viewing L’Oiseau in any way led to Steven’s writing “Thirteen Ways,” but simply to aid in highlighting the similarity between their techniques. The geometry in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is probably its most obvious emulation of cubist abstraction. The blackbird is “out of sight” (35) yet remains the point of focus, acting as an index of geometric measurement – defining the circumference, or “the edge / Of one of many circles” (36-37). The introduction of jagged geometric elements such as the “twenty snowy mountains” (1), or the “icicles [that] filled the long window / With barbaric glass” (18-19), also incite the reader to imagine the angular forms like those in Villon’s print; and, as someone might do upon viewing a cubist work of art, the reader begins to conflate these sharp geometric forms with the acute angles that make up the sharpness of the blackbird’s wing, beak, or foot. The reader thus becomes more cognizant of the frequency of her misperception: that a mountain, a shard of glass, a bird may each be mistaken for the other. It is possible to see a blackbird where there is no blackbird as the man who “mistook / The shadow of his equipage for blackbirds” (45-46), and it is equally possible not to see a bird where one does exist, as the “men of Haddam” (25) who, trapped in their imagination, do “not see how the blackbird / Walks around the feet / Of the women” (27-29). Aiello

The geometrical shapes also uncover how, with varying degrees of diversion from realism, “cubism introduces a new way of representing threedimensional objects… the painter is free to break apart the object and distribute its pieces about the canvas as the composition requires” (MacLeod 200). This shattering of reality as we know it frustrates and confounds the viewer/reader, making her uncomfortable with her own perceptions. In its complexity, cubism is a difficult artistic style because we are forced to conflate, extrapolate, and imagine if we hope to arrive at an understanding of what that the work of art might be representing. As Stevens prescribes, the most effective moments of perception are only possible when we may “be in the difficulty of what it is to be” (“Supreme Fiction” 20-21).

Cubist techniques allow the artist to present its subject in multiple moments and from multiple perspectives simultaneously, which is in large part responsible for the complexity of cubist works: “the painter can show the back and the front of a chair at the same time, for instance, or paint a face with one eye viewed frontally and the other in profile” (Macleod 200). Stevens uses this technique of multiple perspectives to depict the blackbird. In the first stanza the reader sees the blackbird as a single “eye” (“Thirteen” 3) among the angular geometric shapes of “twenty snowy mountains” (1), reminiscent of the notorious abstracted eyes of Picasso’s portraits. In the fourth stanza, the blackbird is indistinguishable from “a man and a woman” (11). In the sixth stanza the blackbird is its own “shadow” (20, 23). In the ninth, it is a thing “out of sight…the edge / Of one of many circles” (35-37). In the eighth and tenth stanzas the bird is simply identified by its sound. As the title of the poem portends, all thirteen stanzas present a different way to view the blackbird – geometrically, metaphorically, synesthetically, speciously – without one view being privileged over any other. The division and numeration of the stanzas lends equivalence to the different perspectives so that, as in a cubist painting, the reader apprehends these multiple perspectives all at once. The reader “does not see these separate figures one by one, and yet see[s] only one” (“Supreme Fiction” 13-14).

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These cubist techniques of abstraction are deconstructive gestures that Stevens uses to destabilize our idea of fixed reality. These techniques even question the possibility of any reliable, observable reality, since “abstraction is the contrary of ‘truth,’ because it has force as a process, rather than as a statement… this process claims both to be and to account for reality” (Altieri 334). In other words, it is from our fluctuating impression of truth that our perceptions form and change, and vice versa: “Our sense of these things changes and they change, / Not as in metaphor, but in our sense / Of them” (“Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight” 13-15). We must understand that reality is necessarily unstable, since it depends on the activity of the imagination, and the imagination is necessarily unstable since it is constantly forming and changing as it moves through experience. One image will therefore not suffice to define the blackbird, since it exists as many things equally and simultaneously. But even with thirteen perspectives we do not gain direct access to the reality of the thing, which is the frustrating insolvency of artistic creation. Succeed as it might in bringing us closer to reality, we remain at a distance. The advantage that art affords, however, is that after we have encountered these poems and works of art, in the distance of observation we now find perspective where we once found only an inscrutable blur. Through the use of painterly techniques of abstraction, Wallace Stevens succeeds in engaging the reader’s imagination and increasing her awareness of the process of perceiving – this much is sufficiently clear. What might not be as clear is how this renovation in the reader’s awareness serves a social need. In fact, in drawing this direct line between Stevens’s poetry and painterly abstraction, we might seem to be only promoting the idea of Stevens as a dandy figure, preoccupied with aesthetics and detached from problems of the real world. Many critics have argued

this point, and Yvor Winters went so far as to call Stevens’ aestheticism “hedonistic” (MacLeod 120). Using Stevens’s words in his own defence, however, “it would be tragic not to realize the extent of man’s dependence on the arts” (Necessary 175). Stevens held the Nietzschean belief that “God is dead” (MacLeod 120), and so Stevens, like Kandinsky and so many other modernists, sought to replace this spiritual void with art: “the poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea… It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning” (“Supreme Fiction” 1-3). “In an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent” (Necessary 171), without modernist artists’ assertion of the vital role of art, and of the imagination, and without “poetry and painting [acting]… as a compensation for what has been lost” (171), the world was arguably at risk of descending into spiritual despondency. Stevens looked to visual art for his techniques, and so “brought poetry and painting into relation as sources of our present conception of reality, [and] of a kind of life, which it seems to be worth living… which is the heroic subject of all [artistic] study” (176). So far as cognitive and spiritual existence is concerned, Stevens’s poetics prove that artists of his kind should not be dismissed as hedonists, but instead given the heroic task of saving society from the unspiritual.

Aiello

Works Cited

“Abstract.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd Ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Web. Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Print. Kandinsky, Wassily. On the Spiritual in Art. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946. Print. Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print. Macleod, Glen. Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Print. Qian, Zhaoming. The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Print. Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1951. Print. Stevens, Wallace. “A Dish of Peaches in Russia,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “On The Road Home,” “Study of Two Pears,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1954. 224, 76, 430-1, 380-410, 203-4, 196-7, 165-84, 92-4. Print. Aiello

7 Odd Girls Out The Production, Distribution, and Reception of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1950 to the Present ANNA ROBINSON

Odd Girls Out

The Production, Distribution, and Reception of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1950 to the Present ANNA ROBINSON Considering the overt homophobia of the mid 20th century, it is surprising that the period of 1950-1965 saw a “Golden Age”1 in lesbianthemed pulp fiction, in which mainstream erotic fiction and the queer subcultures of Greenwich Village were brought together as strange bedfellows in an unprecedented phenomenon of lesbian textual representation. The various contingencies of the formation of the texts: production, promotion (specifically the characteristic covers), distribution, circulation and reception were unique to this new genre. Often poorly-written, the pulps illustrate that their cultural value can be attributed to the extra-textual elements which help to shape their meanings.

Robinson

After World War II, the paperback book industry experienced a dramatic expansion, increasing the accessibility and affordability of literature to wider audiences, thus beginning a reconfiguration of literature’s place in society (Barale 534). 1950 saw the launch of the Gold Medal Imprint of Fawcett Books, the first company to begin publishing paperback originals. In their first year, they published Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks, a semi-autobiographical account of lesbianism in a London women’s barracks during WWII. It sold over two million copies in its first five years. Its great success underscored the economic benefits of publishing lesbian-themed material.2 Gold Medal went on to publish hundreds more, including some of the most sympathetic treatments of lesbian love, which Yvonne Keller has identified as the sub-genre of “pro-lesbian pulps” (Keller 388). These tended to be written by women, often queer, with a female protagonist and less explicit sex scenes.3 However, the majority (Keller estimates 85%) of pulps can be best categorized as “virile adventures,” commonly written by men with a male protagonist. Michele Aina Barale warns us against viewing the proliferation of lesbian subject matter in the mainstream as an indicator that lesbian desire was given validation – albeit unliterary, cheap, transient validation – and to view this as progress from the sexological treatises carefully hidden in libraries (235). However, in reality, this phenomenon does not indicate a mainstream acknowledgement of lesbian desire so much as a realization of the economic capital that the colonization of lesbian desire could provide. Once censorship laws were relaxed, the production of lesbian pulp fiction all but ceased as a result of robust sales of pornographic titles. What Stephanie Foote calls the “paperbacking revolution” (170) does not only refer to the new genre of paperback originals, but also references new book distribution methods. Lesbian pulps were available in drugstores, kiosks, bus terminals and train stations, and thus could be purchased in almost any American

town, no matter how small or remote it was, providing lesbian representation for even the most isolated of women. This purported revolution overthrew the supremacy of urbanite and college-town readers, who had access to the very few bookstores in the United States before the war, as most stores were in large cities or centered around institutions of higher learning (Foote 170). Since they were not released in hardcover, the publication of over five hundred lesbian-themed pulps was able to pass largely unnoticed by the literary establishment and deemed not even worth regulating; Ann Bannon describes how “the critics ignored the books in droves.” This was despite their extensive distribution and huge sales. Reed Marr’s Women Without Men was in the top ten bestselling paperbacks of all publishers in 1957 (Walters 84). This disinterest from the intelligentsia did not correspond with the immense popularity that the pulps enjoyed in the working classes. At around 25¢ each, pulps were emphatically affordable. This, combined with their non-elitist avenues of distribution, resulted in a high rate of availability and circulation, not only through the official means of sale, but also from being passed around among friends. The shared physicality of the books themselves forged connections between lesbians, and lessened the need to make the often terrifying coming-out statement that purchasing such a book entailed. The issue of censorship and the curbing influence it had on the plotlines of the pulps is a key site of discourse about the true liberty of the author. Jerome McGann has continually emphasized the multiplicity of sociological factors in the production of texts even before and during their publication.4 Publishers required their authors to include either a last minute conversion to heterosexuality, suicide, or committal to a mental hospital for their lesbian protagonists. These were necessary narrative devices to protect the pulps from government censorship and ensured that obscenity laws would not prevent their distribution through the mail system (Keller 390). Women’s Barracks is a noteworthy early attempt at government censorship, brought before the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952 as an example of the corrupting nature of the paperback industry. However, the book was ultimately allowed to remain in circulation because it contained a “moral” – that is, homophobic, lesson (Davis 13). Robinson

The sheer volume of production, the “dizzying array” of titles as well as the fact that they were paperback originals meant that there was little critical interest in the pulps from the established mainstream press (Keller 404). As such, the publishing houses did not expend time or capital on promotion; instead they relied on self-promotion in the form of gaudy covers. As Jerome McGann has pointed out, “every literary work that descends to us operates through the deployment of a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes, on one hand, and the bibliographic codes on the other” (The Textual Condition 43). In lesbian pulp fiction, the bibliographic codes had especial importance, often to the detriment of the linguistic content. It was not unheard-of for authors to be asked to alter their plotlines in order to incorporate an element the artist had included

on its cover, and even books with no homosexual theme adopted a lesbian pulp-like aesthetic to attract readers (Keller 404). The distinctive covers followed an easily recognizable format that employed, or perhaps helped to formulate, culturally agreed-upon code terms for lesbian desires. As a result, the lesbian-themed pulps are invariably “frank” depictions of the “sensitive subject matter” of the “twisted” or “strange” loves of “twilight women.” Accompanying these key trigger words was a recognizable iconography of lesbian desire, conceptualized through sexological discourses as a kind of gender inversion. Thus the covers often depicted an innocent looking femme in a state of undress being gazed upon by what Esther Newton has memorably termed the “mythic mannish lesbian.” Also common was a distant male figure looking at the foregrounded lesbian arrangement from afar, effectively foreshadowing the obligatory return to the safe folds of heterosexuality. This visual setup pronounced a specific lesbian type and created an expectation that the characters within the pulp would conform to these known, and consequently less threatening, lesbian identities.

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The importance of the book’s materiality in the form of the cover is emphasized in the way that publishers re-released lesbian books originally marketed as serious literary fiction as cheap pulps. Perhaps the most famous lesbian book of the 20th century, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), attracted great controversy for its depiction of lesbianism, despite its serious cover and pseudo-scientific (and therefore supposedly non-titillating) approval, signified by the “appreciation” of sexologist Havelock Ellis. When published as a 25¢ pulp in 1951, it went virtually unnoticed – not because levels of homophobia in society had subsided, but rather because lesbian desire best escaped societal censure not through high-brow culture, but through the “protective subterfuge of genre conventions” (Nealon 752). The mainstream press did not deign to review pulps, enabling them to pass largely unseen and without conservative outrage. The pulp covers’ titillation of their audience de-politicized their potentially revolutionary message into an ostensibly exploitative and homophobic exercise in male heterosexual pleasure. They do not look threatening: they look cheap, sexy and disposable. Patricia Highsmith’s Price of Salt (1952) was released in hardcover with a rather dull cover – a plain illustration of scattered salt under what is rather an obscure title (Keller 396). Its literary credentials are evident by the fact it was considered worthy of a review in the New York Times, and it achieved moderate sales (Kuda). The following year it was republished with the characteristic tropes of pulp: a predatory and sophisticated older woman leering over a young girl, a ruggedly handsome man in the horizon alongside the text: “A love society forbids.”5 In its pulp incarnation, sales rose dramatically. This not only illustrates the distributive power of pulps, but also the fact that once The Price of Salt became

materially indistinguishable from the other pulps, its content became indistinguishable as well. Yvonne Keller goes as far as to suggest that it is “less content than cover that defines lesbian pulp as a genre” (393) with respect to the fact that both The Price of Salt and The Well of Loneliness were just as successful in their pulp manifestation as the other pulps of their time, and that they appealed to a pulp audience, the majority of whom would not have owned a hardcover book. The question of intended audience is particularly relevant when examining pulp fiction. Pulp fiction was unlike earlier lesbian publishing, which was typified by the highly coded and pronoun-changing works of Willa Cather, H.D. and Virginia Woolf, and the lesbian fiction published by the new feminist lesbian presses of the 1970s which stressed the expression of realistic lesbian desire. The period of 1950 to1965 was an anomaly in the short history of lesbian publishing in that lesbianism was presented directly (in fact pulps helped to bring the terms “lesbian” and “homosexual” into the common lexicon) and written largely by unsympathetic males with solely economic motives. Since Yvonne Keller has estimated that only around 16 pro-lesbian pulp writers existed, it can be deduced that for the majority of pulps, authorial intention was to create a book that would appeal to popular forbidden fantasies about lesbianism. Even the early lesbian writers, if Vin Packer’s testimony is representative, did not write with an expressed pro-lesbian agenda. Packer explains: “[Spring Fire] was not aimed at any lesbian audience, because there wasn’t any that we knew about” (Keller 392).

Yet the assumption that authorial intent would have any influence on the text has been challenged in modern post-structuralist and New Critical dialogues.

Robinson

Nevertheless, by 1957 when the lesbian pulp genre had firmly established itself as a profitable industry, lesbian writers had read the pulps and indeed started to write some themselves, forming an “industry within an industry” (Walters 84).6 Valerie Taylor, for example, was driven to write pulp with the intention of depicting real people, rather than the one-dimensional stereotypes that existed in the “virile adventures” (Keller 392). Many writers of the “pro-lesbian” pulps “actively wrote against the genre’s norms” (392) in the 1950s, yet they could not entirely avoid the influence of their publishers. McGann identifies this process as part of the “textual condition” – that writers will consider their intended audience despite the inescapable “noise” (in this case, censorship) in their creative process (43). This subversion was possible because the sheer volume of production made regulation difficult, and also because of the ways in which pro-lesbian authors worked within the confines of a “moralistic” ending to nonetheless portray sympathetic and informative vignettes of lesbian life. Spring Fire’s ending, for example, is utterly unconvincing: the dialogue is overwrought with dramatic clichés before an almost comical conversion to heterosexuality. Mitch realizes that “she didn’t hate [Leda], she didn’t hate her at all, and it was then she realized she had never loved her at all” (Keller 390). This lack of narrative credibility helped to provide the opportunity for revolutionary and resistant reading.

Pleasure was not solely garnered from the 15% minority of “pro-lesbian” pulps. Taking Samuel Beckett’s question “What does it matter who is speaking?” as a starting point, as Foucault does in his article “What is an Author?” it is possible to examine the author-reader relationship in the formation of lesbian pulp fiction (225). Considering the widespread disavowal of the author’s “authority” in modern textual criticism – and even his or her “death” (Barthes 223) we could answer the question “What constitutes lesbian literature?” as Dorothy Allison does, by assigning the reader with extreme interpretative authority so that “every book is a lesbian book.” The multiplicity of textual meanings stems from the specific mental processes and personal history of the reader, not from a sense of finding the “truth” presented by an author, a fallible concept (Barthes 224).7 However, there is a commonality evident in lesbian appreciation of the pulps, especially in the usage of metaphors of food. Donna Allegra needed the pulps the “way [she] needed food and shelter for survival” (Keller 385) and Lee Lynch searched for the pulps like she was “searching for [her nourishment] like a starveling” while Joan Nestle calls them “survival literature” (Nealon 750).8 Stanley Fish has explained such commonality in reading strategies with the concept of “interpretive communities” (Fish 352), and warns against the assumption so inherent in literary criticism, that texts themselves (via the author) have agency. Thus, readers were sometimes able to compartmentalize the tales, mentally separating the narratives of love and desire from the narratives of tragedy through what de Certeau would term “bricolage” (174). Meaning can be forged in opposition to the overarching heterocentric discourses using the homophobic narratives presented in the pulps.

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Considering lesbian readers’ complex relationship to the pulps, it is problematic to claim that the author is completely dead and buried. The fact that lesbians such as Donna Allegra could gain such nourishment from the pulps while also admitting that they “rotted [her] guts and crippled [her] moral structure” (Keller 386) suggests that the meaning of pulps cannot be relegated to the readership alone, and that perhaps “the author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning” (Foucault 230), subtly guiding the reader in a process of collaboration. Similarly, Wolfgang Iser emphasizes the process of obtaining textual meanings as a “constitutive activity” (293). The reader is encumbered by authorial intention, as both the author and reader’s roles are “mutually restrictive and magnifying” and the reading process involves a system of “blanks” and “gaps” (Iser 293). Thus, erotic depictions of women allowed a space for the expression of lesbian desires, yet the desolate state to which lesbian desire leads within the narrative complicates the ultimate interpretation found in the nexus of both. Carol Seajay’s habit of refusing to read the last 20 pages of pulp novels – the narrative’s compulsory return to heterosexuality – indicates that while reading strategies can be developed to challenge authorial authority, it is much more difficult to read a work oblivious to some form of intended meaning (Foote 176). It is in this way that interpretative strategies form the text rather than rise from them, and allowed Seajay to experience the texts as shorter entities (Fish 355).

The reception of the pulps has dramatically changed since their “Golden Age” in 1950-1965. They are no longer carelessly discarded after use or ignored by the press. By contrast, a select few have been deemed legitimately part of the lesbian canon and anthologized accordingly. The pulps’ decidedly unliterary quality, their overt homophobia and their ephemeral physicality certainly hindered their path into the lesbian canon. The pulps do not have inherent value (literary or otherwise), “they have been valued because they have been read” (Foote 176). Yet the lesbian literary establishment – which in part owes its existence to the formation of a public (but by no means monolithic) lesbian identity – has been reluctant to acknowledge the pulps as integral to the history of lesbian writing. This is ironic considering lesbian pulp fiction’s role in the development of the lesbian community, since representation is essential to identity formation as Foucault has theorized and the pulps “put the word ‘lesbian’ in circulation as never before… their truly impressive quantities helped create the largest generation of self-defined lesbians up to that point” (Foote 387, 405). Furthermore, this sense of shared identity was in part formed through the shared physicality of the books, as Barbara Grier notes in her description of the pleasure she got from the coffee stain on her version of We Too Are Drifting by Gale Wilhelm. This stain was a trace of an extant lesbian readership and another lesbian’s touch (Foote 176-7). The establishment of a lesbian literary canon has only occurred in the post-Stonewall era. The first extensive anthology of specifically lesbian fiction was published in 1994, edited by the respected lesbian historian Lillian Faderman.9 Despite Faderman’s concession that the first lesbian books available for her to read and “help explain [her] to [herself]” were the pulps, she implicitly dismissed them as the excusable pastime of a young lesbian but not a scholar. In the anthology’s first edition, Faderman includes hundreds of pulp titles, but assigns them the label “trash,” subsequently removing the “trash titles” in the second and third editions (Keller 386). This reflects the classic criteria of the Literary Canon: Faderman denounces the pulp, a lifeline for rural and working class lesbians, in favour of the “real literature” she read in her university English class (Landow). Following Janice Radway, it can be argued that the lesbian canon functions by excluding certain types of readers, not simply particular books. Robinson

Nevertheless, literary value was eventually ascribed to certain pulps, through what seems to be an arbitrary process reliant on the personal tastes of the lesbian literary elite. This process arguably ascribed greater meaning and depth to the pulps that gained entry into the canon. Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker, for example, survived the culling of “trash” titles from Faderman’s ground-breaking anthology but is arguably rather indistinguishable from other contemporary “prolesbian” pulps. Unsurprisingly, as Leah Price has argued in relation to the cultural production of value, the Beebo Brinker books have elicited more examination by scholars on the subject than any other lesbian pulp, and examining the history of its various editions helps explain to why.

First released as a paperback original in 1957 by Fawcett’s Gold Medal, Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out enjoyed the success that lesbian-themed pulps were accustomed to at the time. By the mid 1970s, the Arno Press series of homosexuality published Odd Girl Out for the first time in hardcover, complete with cloth, dust jacket and a strong binding. Consequently, it became visually indistinguishable from “serious” literature, and the permanence of its form implicitly stated its worth. Foote sees this as evidence of the press’ “power to re-assign cultural capital,” a site of cultural struggle especially in the case of marginalized groups (Foote 180; Bourdieu 77). The Naiad Press, a specifically lesbian venture, further shaped the cultural value and meaning of Odd Girl Out by stripping Ann Weldy of the anonymity of her pseudonym Ann Bannon within a genre which placed no value on the idea of the author as an unique artist. Included in the Naiad Press edition was her biography and picture, again mimicking the conventions of high-brow literature. Today, the Cleis Press edition is amongst their best-selling titles, published with a cover reminiscent of the original pulps, and employing similar titillating descriptions, in what can only be an ironic and lesbian-directed manner.10 The Cleis Press has finally managed to restore the original sense of cheap thrills, which would have been present upon first publication but was lost in the serious editions of the 1970s and 1980s. Lesbian pulp fiction is a unique literary phenomenon in that its cultural value does not stem from its literary qualities, but from its production, promotion, circulation, distribution and finally, its modern reception. It is these factors of materiality and sociology, exterior to the text itself, which have forged its meanings and significance, both for a voyeuristic heterosexual male audience as well as for a lesbian population craving community and representation. Despite the undeniable homophobia inherent in the pulps, readers were able to garner hope through resistant reading and thus lesbian pulp fiction, like other literary genres, developed a somewhat problematic canon and a newfound wealth of scholarly attention and appreciation.

Robinson

Notes

The term “Golden Age” to describe the period in question is thought to have originated with Barbara Grier, and is used by Yvonne Keller in her article “‘Was It Right to Love Her Brother’s Wife So Passionately?’: Lesbian Pulp Novels and U.S. Lesbian Identity, 1950-1965.” 1

This figure only refers to the United States; many more were sold worldwide. However, since Publisher’s Weekly which is used to calculate sales, only looks at

bookstore’s records but most pulps were sold in other venues, these figures are most probably an underestimation. By “overt homophobia” I mean they lack some of the insensitivity of the “virile adventures” but legal issues over censorship still governed their ending. However, the journey to the tragic end contained more positive images for lesbians to absorb. See Christine Smallwood, “Sapphic Soldiers.” 3

Some examples of lesbian writers of lesbian pulp fiction are Patricia Highsmith (Claire Morgan), Marion Zimmer-Bradley (who wrote under various names), Marijane Meaker (Vin Packer and Ann Aldrich). Women’s Barracks, while exploiting and ultimately denouncing lesbian sexuality, was not overtly homophobic and reassured Gold Medal that such depictions could be uncontroversial. This no doubt influenced the high proportion of pro-lesbian pulps they produced. 4

This clearly questions the relative simplicity of the Shannon-Weaver communication model; Robert Darnton’s “Communications Circuit” is appropriate here. 5

See colour photograph insert in Andrew Wilson’s Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. 6

Although, Tereska Torres claims in a 2005 interview she was unaware of the status of her book as a lesbian classic until “recently”. This is possibly because since she was not a lesbian, she did was not part of the dialogue that formed within contemporary nascent lesbian communities. As such, I would venture to suggest that heterosexual male authors were also unaware of their gay audience (see Smallwood). 7

Stephanie Foote goes as far as to suggest that it is the sexuality of the reader that determines the sometimes fine line between “lesbian fiction” and “pornography.” Thus, a lesbian reading The Flesh is Willing by Dorcas Knight or Another Kind of Love by Paula Christian by the very fact of her lesbianism ascribes meaning greater than the simple sexual titillation its assumed heterosexual male readers obtained from the same text. There is little scholarship on the impact (if any) of lesbian pulps on heterosexual females and homosexual males, if indeed there was an influence at all. 9

Faderman divided the anthology into six categories of lesbian fiction: romantic friendship, sexual inversion, exotic and evil lesbians, lesbian encoding, lesbian feminism and post-lesbian feminism, yet no pulp fiction! 10

For example, the cover quotes a review from the Chicago Free Press: “Sex. Sleeze. Depravity. Oh, the twisted passions of the twilight world of lesbian pulp fiction.”

Robinson

Works Cited

Allison, Dorothy. “Every Book is a Lesbian Book.” Salon.com. Salon Media Group Inc., Jun. 1999. Web. 1 Mar. 2009. Barale, Michele Aina. “When Jack Blinks: Si(gh)ting Gay Desire in Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, Inc., 1993. 604-15. Print. Bannon, Ann. “Introduction.” I Am a Woman. Berkeley: Cleis Press, 2002. Dec. 2001. Web. 1 Mar. 2009. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2002. 221-5. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Field of Cultural Production.” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2002. 77-103. Print. De Certeau, Michel. “Reading as Poaching.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 165- 76. Print. Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of Books?” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2002. 9-27. Print. Davis, Kenneth C. “The Lady Goes to Court: Paperbacks and Censorship.” Publishing Research Quarterly 11.4 (1995): 9-32. Print.

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Faderman, Lillian, ed. Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian and Bisexual Literature from the 17th Century to the Present. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Print. Fish, Stanley. “Interpreting the Variorum.” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2002. 350-9. Print. Foote, Stephanie. “Deviant Classics: Pulps and the Making of Lesbian Print Culture.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31.1 (2005): 169- 90. Print. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2002. 225-31. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction Between Text and Reader.” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2002. 291-7. Print. Keller, Yvonne. “‘Was It Right to Love Her Brother’s Wife So Passionately?’: Lesbian Pulp Novels and U.S. Lesbian Identity, 1950-1965.” American Quarterly 57.2 (2005): 385-410. Print. Kuda, Marie J. “Highsmith: Another View.” The Women’s Review of Books. Dec. 2003. Web. 12 Mar. 2009. Landow, George P. “The Literary Canon.” Brown University. n.d. Web. 24 Mar. 2009. McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Print. ---. “The Socialization of Texts.” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2002. 39-47. Print. Nealon, Christopher. “Invert Desire: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction.” New Literary History 31.4 (2000): 745-64. Print. Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9.4 (1984): 557-75. Print. Price, Leah. “Cultures of the Commonplace.” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2002. 327-36. Print.

Smallwood, Christine. “Sapphic Soldiers: Tereska Torres Interview.” Salon.com. Salon Media Group Inc., Aug. 2005. Web. 15 Mar. 2009. Walters, Suzanne. “As her hand crept slowly up her thigh: Ann Bannon and the Politics of Pulp.” Social Text 23 (1989): 85-101. Print. Wilson, Andrew. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print.

Robinson

Radway, Janice. “A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month-Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class Desire.” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2002. 359-72. Print.

8 “Till they almost forget they live” The Cenci, Hebrew Melodies, and the Materiality of Representation JESSICA SHARPE

“Till they almost forget they live”

The Cenci, Hebrew Melodies, and the Materiality of Representation JESSICA SHARPE Come, I will sing you some low, sleepy tune, Not cheerful, nor yet sad; some dull old thing, Some outworn and unused monotony, Such as our country gossips sing and spin, Till they almost forget they live: lie down! So, that will do. Have I forgot the words? Faith! They are sadder than I thought they were. (Shelley, The Cenci, 5.3.123-29)

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The study of textual history helps to recall how and what texts were, materially, throughout the timeline of their transmission. How does Beatrice almost forget the connotative implications of a culturally embedded “outworn and unused monotony?” How are modern readers able to consider texts like Shelley’s The Cenci and Byron’s Hebrew Melodies as marginal to their poetic oeuvres? The text Beatrice tries to recall has been transfigured by the age of its outworn and over-spun representation in her society, so that its original embodiment has nearly been forgotten. Consider this phenomenon in the texts of The Cenci and Hebrew Melodies as generically confused and resistant to their modes of textual existence. Both works struggle against their intended forms of representation, as will be seen specifically in The Cenci with Beatrice’s Song (“False friend, wilt thou smile or weep”), and more generally in Byron’s collection of poems, Hebrew Melodies. Modern readers tend to forget that these texts ‘lived’ in vastly different forms than those in which they are set in today. “Beatrice’s Song,” for instance, was first born into a text meant for visual representation but was sentenced for a long time to remain on the printed page. However, throughout its textual history, it has been subject to verbal and visual performance as well as musical collaborations. Conversely Byron’s Hebrew Melodies began as a musical collaboration but steadily became anchored in print while divorced from its musical accompaniment. The fate of these texts for modern readers has been channeled by the cultural trends and forces with which they participate or resist. The tension between this participation and resistance in the initial stages of their transmission has mediated their mode of textual existence to the forms of these works that readers experience in the modern day. In 1974 Burton Pollin conducted a comprehensive study of musical compositions based on Shelley’s poetry, and found no less than 1256 instances of musical settings to selected poems. Pollin attributes this abundance of

musical representations of Shelley to the growing interest in national melodies in the Romantic period, as well as the perceived explicit instruction for musical accompaniment in the many Shelley poems that include “Song” or “Hymn” in the titles (v). Such an instance is found in Beatrice Cenci’s song, “False friend, wilt thou smile or weep,” which was set to music for the first time by Henry Hugh Pearson, and published by J. Alfred Novello, in London, 1836 (Pollin 92). Priced at four pence it was no doubt simple sheet music (92). This, however, reveals that though The Cenci was banned from the stage at the time of this musical publication, parts of it were read regardless, and there was a demand for the poetry within to become mediated through a different art. This estimation is bolstered by the next instance of “Beatrice’s Song,” composed by James William Davison and published by Duncan Davison, in London 1845 (31). The piece is “number three” of Vocal Illustrations of Shelley, priced at 5 pence (31). There is solid evidence here that a decade after Pearson’s first published musical interpretation of “Beatrice’s Song,” the practice of setting Shelley’s poetry to music was deemed popular enough to create more and to combine multiple compositions in book form. In its early life, the poetic text of The Cenci sought alternative media within which to represent its suppressed subject matter.

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To understand the marginalized situation of Hebrew Melodies in Byron’s oeuvre today, we must embark on a historical study of both the representational and textual history of the poems. I mean by ‘representational’ their medium of performance; that is, whether they were reproduced in musical composition or in poetic texts. The textual history of Byron’s Hebrew Melodies was influenced by Murray’s decisions as publisher to remove the text from its musical setting and place it into a more popularly accessible format (Mole 114). But Murray’s separation of Hebrew Melodies’ words and music definitively affected the future representation of the work as well (114). His publishing strategy sought to obtain a wider readership base in the middle class, who could afford to buy an octavo version of the poems, but did not own a piano and were therefore alienated from the market for Nathan’s first folio edition. Nathan’s first edition, a crown folio of Hebrew Melodies1 (1815), was priced at one Guinea, decorated with engraved ornamental borders, and included engraved musical settings to accompany Byron’s twelve poems (Ashton 210). Murray responded with his 1815 demy octavo edition of Hebrew Melodies,2 which, priced at 5 shillings, 6 pence, contained 24 poems plus an extra one, “On the Death of Sir Peter Parker” (212). The tension between the larger and smaller, more economical, formats of Hebrew Melodies continued in the years subsequent to its first publication. Murray’s project to standardize Byron’s works included putting Hebrew Melodies into the familiar (octavo) format for Byron, for approximately five to six shillings (Mole 110). But the volumes of Hebrew Melodies that Murray and Nathan respectively envisioned were at odds with one another. In 1816 Nathan once again published Hebrew Melodies3 in the same crown folio format, priced at one guinea, while Murray was downsizing in format and price, and also including more poems for less of the cost. Nathan’s format tended to remain larger, more expensive, musical, and designated for the

upper class: even with a new edition4, “newly arranged, harmonized, corrected, and revised, with appropriate symphonies and accompaniments,” the price of 15 shillings was still more expensive and bought fewer poems than Murray’s editions (Ashton 218-19). Another 1815 Murray edition of Byron’s Works…In Four Volumes5 sold for 28 shillings, and contained Hebrew Melodies in the fourth volume (Ashton 21415). Ashton’s note accompanying his bibliographic entry for this edition is worth reiterating: One leaf… has been added in Vol. I to the Table of Contents of the four volumes, giving the contents of the Hebrew Melodies. Twelve engraved plates have been inserted throughout; each is imprinted: ‘Published by John Murray, Albemarle Street, [Dec.] 1, 1814.’ These are the plates advertised in [Hebrew Melodies]. (215) Remarkable about this edition is how Murray emphasizes the inclusion of Hebrew Melodies. It also reveals Murray’s claim to have published Hebrew Melodies in 1814, before Nathan in 1815, suggesting that he was the first ever publisher. Murray’s scheme in this action is evident as part of his strategy to appropriate Hebrew Melodies into the oeuvre that he wanted to create and control for Byron (Mole 110).

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Murray’s actions contributed significantly to the content of Hebrew Melodies ultimately being relegated to the printed page (preferably in one of Murray’s own editions) instead of musical performance. The conflicted material history of Hebrew Melodies has also causally influenced its marginalization in Byron’s oeuvre. In subsequent printings of Byron’s collected works, its status and position within the collection is reflective of its problematic materiality. Ashton lists The Works of The Right Hon. Lord Byron,6 a two-volume collection in demy octavo format printed for John Murray in 1815, as indicative of the poems’ marginalization (214). A note by Ashton records that “[t]he binder determined the order of the contents in this instance,” and incidentally Hebrew Melodies closes the second volume (214). Similarly, the Paris reprinting of The Complete Works with a biographical and critical notice by J. W. Lake7 (1825) was published in seven volumes, with Hebrew Melodies located in the seventh. These volumes are organized not chronologically by date of composition, but appear to have been eclectically edited, as Lake professes himself to admire Byron’s poetry though not his dramatic works (Vol. I, “A Biographical and Critical Notice on Lord Byron”). With Lake’s stated preference in mind, it is possible that Byron’s works are presented and ordered according to popularity – with Childe Harold in the first volume, and Don Juan following in the next two. Hebrew Melodies is placed in the last volume among a miscellany of other poems, parliamentary speeches, and suppressed works. In an 1829 publication authored by Nathan, Murray’s influence is finally seen: the new book, called Fugitive Pieces and Reminiscences of Lord Byron,8 contains “an entire new edition of the Hebrew Melodies, with the addition of several never before published” (Ashton 221).

The rhetoric of the title page to this volume is appealing in the way that Murray attempted to be with his own 1815 Hebrew Melodies: it offers extra content and presents itself in a non-assuming crown octavo, priced at a comparably low eight shillings, six pence (221). While Hebrew Melodies was severed from its musical forms early in its publication history, Shelley’s suppressed Cenci found expression through the continued musical performance of “Beatrice’s Song.” A musical performance releases the poem from the fixity of the pages of a book; in a new musical setting, a poem can gain new life. In setting “Beatrice’s Song” to music, composers freed the poem from the context of its banned dramatic narrative, and thus allowed it to retain a material form in spite of a context hostile to its themes. Lawrence Kramer, in his study of the convergence of music and poetry, makes the argument that, “poetic connotation and musical combination would cohere through the mediation of the rhythm by which both turn time into form. And with that mediation as a context, even the less discussable, more sheerly qualitative tacit dimensions might take on new associations” (10). For Kramer, the idea of “discussability” refers to an abstract musical notion of discourse; but considered linguistically, the term is applicable to the plot of The Cenci and its tension with (non) “discussable” language. As a musical composition, “Beatrice’s Song” is freed from the political and social connotations of its context in The Cenci. If the conversion of text to song is taken to require a kind of reading of a text, in both the critical and performative sense of the term, it is then “an activity of interpretation that works through a text without being bound by authorial intentions” (127). The Cenci in song is thereby not as politically dangerous to Shelley as its printed text would be.

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Still, the fact that The Cenci was predominantly a printed text greatly influenced its modes of transmission and its material reproductions. The Cenci was bound to the book as its medium of representation for almost seven decades before it reached visual representation on the stage. Before this, the printing of Shelley’s dramatic text resembles Murray’s treatment of Hebrew Melodies, in that its material form is entirely unremarkable. The 1821, second edition of The Cenci9 was sold in demy octavo format, containing a plain title page with no half-title, and was priced at four shillings, 6 pence (Wise 52). In this form Shelley’s Cenci closely resembles Byron’s smaller books politically, financially, and socially. Indeed, also like Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, The Cenci’s dissemination within this format may have contributed to its marginalized status in future editions of Shelley’s collected works. In the 1834 edition of Shelley’s The Works,10 The Cenci is situated in the very end of the second of two volumes. Whether its status is therefore in this case intended to be forgotten, neglected, or, alternatively – memorable, is difficult to ascertain. However, if the location is compared to that of Hebrew Melodies in the seven-volume collection of Byron’s Complete Works (Paris: 1825) – located in the last volume among the poetic miscellany – The Cenci’s position suggests rather a similarly confused or misunderstood existence in Shelley’s oeuvre.

“[O]nce separated, music and poetry tend to become nostalgic for each other,” writes Kramer (3). But Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, as poetic texts, drift continually from their musical settings. This separation is due to the tension between Nathan’s musical goals and Murray’s business agenda. Byron’s texts resist musicalization because of the success of Murray’s publishing tactics over Nathan’s, and Byron, merely the poet, has no control over the fate of his collection. Effectively Byron is defined by “a promotional apparatus that increasingly seemed to impose someone else’s agenda on him” (Mole 100). The tension between textual and musical media may be exacerbated by the theoretical notion that a composer creates a song out of his own reading of the poem; “[b]ut this act of exclusion [of other readings]… necessarily evokes the specter of a counter-reading that seems to radiate from the poem being appropriated, to be what the poem ‘wants to say’” (Kramer 127). Kramer’s study here speaks less to Byron than to Murray, who sought to appropriate the collection of poems so that they would fulfill his agenda: that the poems ‘say’ what he wanted them to say. That is, that in their lyrical parameters they were of one piece with Byron’s complete works (Mole 100).

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An understanding of the materiality of The Cenci and Hebrew Melodies in past as in present incarnations depends upon knowledge of the history of its dissemination. Mole argues that, “[t]he ways in which Byron’s poems were first marketed may still affect our focal points within his corpus” (114). This key observation also holds true for The Cenci, as Shelley’s 1821 second edition is as physically or superficially unremarkable a book as the inexpensive 1815 edition of Murray’s Hebrew Melodies. Though The Cenci went through several representational media throughout its textual history – importantly, the form of song – its marginal status in modern editions almost forgets its original and early forms of representation. Murray’s publishing victory over Nathan is manifested in the early reprints of Hebrew Melodies: American presses reprinted them in 1815 in duodecimo format, emulating Murray’s more economical model (Ashton 215-16). However, the residual tension between Byron’s text and the uncontrollable cultural forces of publishers and readerships precludes our reading of it as a musical composition, in a way that prevents clarity about its place in Byron’s oeuvre. Cultural forgetfulness annihilates the musicality historically found in Shelley’s “Beatrice’s Song,” and Byron’s Hebrew Melodies. The historical misdirection of these texts’ materiality leads us to misremember how they lived for the artists and their first readers.

Notes

Braham, I. & I. Nathan. A Selection of Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern with appropriate Symphonies & accompaniments. London: I. Nathan, 1815. 1

Lord Byron. Hebrew Melodies. London: John Murray, Albermarle-Street, 1815.

Braham, I. & I. Nathan. A Selection of Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern. London: I. Nathan, 1816. 3

Nathan, I. A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern. Newly Arranged, Harmonized, Corrected, and Revised, with Appropriate Symphonies and Accompaniments. London: J. Fentum, 1824. 4

Lord Byron. The Works of the Right Honorable Lord Byron. In Four Volumes. London: Printed for John Murray, Albemarle-Street, 1815. 5

Lord Byron. The Works of the Right Hon. Lord Byron. In Two Volumes. London: John Murray, Albemarle-Street, 1815. 6

Lord Byron. The Complete Works, with a biographical and critical notice by J.W. Lake. 7 Vols. Paris: 1825. 7

Nathan, I. Fugitive Pieces and Reminiscences of Lord Byron. London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Co., 1829. 8

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts, Second Edition. London: C and J Ollier, 1821. 9

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Works. 2 Vols. London: John Ascham, 1834.

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Works Cited

Ashton, Thomas L. Byron’s Hebrew Melodies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Print. Lord Byron. The Complete Works of Lord Byron with a biographical and critical notice by J. W. Lake, Esq. 7 Vols. Paris: Baudry, 1825. Print. Kramer, Lawrence. Music And Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print. Mole, Tom. “The Handling of Hebrew Melodies.” Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 98-114. Print. Pollin, Burton R. Music For Shelley’s Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography of Musical Settings of Shelley’s Poetry. New York: Da Capo Press, 1974. Print. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts, Second Edition. London: C and J Ollier, 1821. Print. ---. The Cenci. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works. Eds. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill. Oxford: University Press, 2003. 314-399. Print. ---. The Works, Vol. II. London: John Ascham, 1834. Print. Wise, Thomas J. A Shelley Library: A Catalogue of Printed Books, Manuscripts and Autograph Letters. London: Dunedin Press; Privately Published, 1924. Print.

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9 Pacing Round the Cage Errol Morrisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Epistemology of Confinement STEFANIE MILLER

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Pacing Round the Cage

Errol Morris’s Epistemology of Confinement STEFANIE MILLER We shall not cease from exploring And at the end of our exploration We will return to where we started And know the place for the first time. (T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”) “It isn’t that we aren’t rational. We are rational. But reason has limits,” Robert Strange McNamara asserts near the close of Errol Morris’s film, The Fog of War. McNamara’s words reflect Morris’s career-spanning and ongoing obsession with the limits of human and individual rationality, which is synchronous (but also discordant) with his passion for objective truth-seeking. Morris explores instances of breakdowns in rationality in his films on both a small scale – in Gates of Heaven, Cal Harberts’s asserted belief “in a supreme being who does not differentiate in bestowing his benevolence on all species of life” (Gates of Heaven) is juxtaposed with a close-up of his feather-covered hat – and on a large scale – Fred Leuchter’s motivated irrationality in Mr. Death, for example. “For Morris,” explains Carl Plantinga, humans are constitutionally incapable of understanding themselves or the world around them. Thus when nothing immediate is at stake, for example, the guilt or innocence of a man on death row [in The Thin Blue Line], Morris takes deeper interest in the stories people tell and the web of beliefs they weave than in whether those beliefs are true or false. Morris seems to think that most of them are false. (47)

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Morris, deemed “the eleven minute psychiatrist,” has always been interested in the sort of people most would label as freaks, oddballs, psychotics or geniuses (Hughes 2006). Relying on the interview – a technique loosely based on Freudian psychoanalysis – as the backbone of his films, Morris, over the course of his career, has developed techniques which maximize the potential for a loss of control in his subject, whom will then slip into extremely personal or damning confession, self-contradiction, nonsensicality, or some combination of these. Through the process of the interview emerges a subject presenting her own subjective worldview, which often proves to be a fantasy disconnected from the empirical world. “Part of what I love about documentary,” says Morris, is this idea that you can reinvent the form every time you make one. And you can create visuals that are really strange. Oddly enough, that are severed

from reality. They’re not reenactments, per se. They’re not show-and-tell. They’re, properly speaking, impressionistic. They’re dreamscapes that you’re creating to go with interview material. (“Eleven Minute Psychiatrist”) These impressionistic sequences reflect the subjective fantasy worlds that Morris extracts from his subjects during the interview process. Morris’s dreamscapes are not reflections of truth, but illustrations of how objective truth is slippery and elusive. The truth can sometimes be so complex as to be unreachable, even by rational individuals, as in The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure, or can be ignored or devalued by self-deceived and/or selfinterested agents, as in The Thin Blue Line and Mr. Death. Morris’s interviews, and the impressionistic images he creates to go along with them, reflect his deep concern with how human fallibility and the limits of human/individual rationality ultimately interfere with objective truth-seeking. This paper will examine how Morris’s interview techniques enable the emergence of his subjects’ internal fantasy worlds, which, revealed though Morris’s impressionistic sequences, in turn serve to expose Morris’s view of the limited capacity humans have for discovering truth— the caged quality of human nature. In particular, I will trace the path of two metaphors – the cage and the reflection – through Morris’s oeuvre, focusing my discussion on films made since the invention of the Interrotron, and particularly on Mr. Death and The Fog of War.

allow[s] Morris to dissolve completely into the cinematic apparatus, thereby closing the dynamic circuit between camera and viewer and intensifying the

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The Interrotron, so named by Morris’s wife Julia Sheenan in order to evoke the combination of terror and interview (also, interrogation), was developed by Morris in the mid 1990s on a series of commercial shoots. Although one can detect the beginnings of the Interrotron in earlier films such as Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line, where Morris would place his head next to the camera in order to create the effect of the subject gazing into its lens, its first use in a feature film was not until 1997’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. To create the device, Morris altered a pair of teleprompters to transmit moving images instead of words. Seated behind a curtain “like the wizard of Oz,” with his interview subject facing one or more camera(s), Morris and his subject can see and speak to each other without physically being face-to-face (Ebert 2001). “People, if anything,” says Morris, with a hint of irony, “feel more relaxed when talking to a live video image. My production designer, Ted Bafaloukos, said, ‘The beauty of this thing is that it allows people to do what they do best. Watch television’” (“13 Questions and Answers”). Intermediating technology, according to Morris, removes the pressure of speaking face-to-face, compelling the subject to speak more openly. The Interrotron thus creates physical distance between interviewer and subject while simultaneously increasing intimacy, constructing a space for the subject’s personal fantasy world to emerge. The Interrotron, argues Shawn Rosenheim,

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viewer’s cathexis to the screen. The device intensifies the psychoanalytic valence of the film camera, operating as the equivalent of the impassive analyst in classical Freudianism. (318) In classic Freudian psychoanalysis, the patient lays on a couch, while the analyst sits on a chair behind, out of sight. The concealment of the analyst is meant to generate a more garrulous response in the patient. Morris – perhaps consciously, perhaps unwittingly – borrows from psychoanalytic technique. His “enforced silence” likewise embodies the impassive analyst, as uncomfortable silence tends to compel one to speak (“13 Questions and Answers”). “I had this three-minute rule,” explains Morris, “that if you just shut up and let someone talk, within three minutes they will show you how crazy they really are. And it has happened time and time and time again” (“In Conversation with Errol Morris”). Morris’s method of interrogation thus does not fall in line with journalistic hardball questioning, which is designed to pressure subject into speaking. Rather, it aligns with psychoanalytic detailed inquiry, which involves asking specific questions that build on or clarify what the analyst has said. Time, too, is Morris’s ally. The longer the interview, the more fatigued the subject becomes, and the more likely it is that he or she will slip into nonsensicality or confession. “I’ve done interviews in one day that went on for fifteen, sixteen hours,” explains Morris. “And at a certain point, the control over what they’re saying breaks down; it becomes different. It becomes really powerful, and for me, real. It becomes out of control” (“In Conversation with Errol Morris”). This breakdown in control over speech which so interests Morris is akin to the breakdown or loss of control – also called a Freudian slip – which fascinates Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysts.

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The Interrotron allows Morris a first person view of his subjects – as they look into Morris’s eyes via the device, they look straight into the camera, and thus straight into the viewer’s eyes. The result is that the viewer replaces Morris as interrogator and judge. The “Megatron,” “son of Interrotron,” is Morris’s 2001 upgrade (Ebert 2001). To construct the Megatron, ten to twenty cameras are added, which constantly shift position during an interview in order to shoot the subject from various angles. In editing, Morris alternates between these angles, which include a range of close-ups. These close-ups, often of the eye of the subject, are frequently disconnected from the image that follows by quick cuts to black, evoking the blinking of an eye. The Interrotron thus produces both audio material, which reflects the subject’s interior world, and visual footage that aims to access the same interior space. The images captured with the Interrotron are later juxtaposed with other visual material in order to create impressionistic dreamscapes. Morris’s obsession with oddballs can be traced back to his days as a graduate student at Berkeley, where he began to interview mass murderers such as Ed Kemper and Herbie Mullin, under the guise of writing a thesis on criminal responsibility and the insanity plea (never completed). This interest would

eventually lead him to Plainfield, Wisconsin, where he conducted research on local serial killer, Ed Gein. When asked in an interview about his long-spanning interest in serial killers, Morris explains: There’s this black box inside our skulls, and you think you know what’s going on in there, but it’s not clear you do. I like to point out that we have a very limited understanding of other people, but we think we have a better understanding of ourselves. (After all, our brains are resident inside of us.) But I think that, too, is an illusion. Murder raises the stakes. Murder constantly forces us to ask questions about ourselves and about other people. (“The Eleven-Minute Psychiatrist”) “Black box” refers to a system that can receive and transmit data without a need for any knowledge of its inner workings. The term also conjures the image of a commercial airplane crash as related by major news networks, where the search effort is always centered on finding the black box, which has recorded all activity in the cockpit and thus will unlock the mystery of the crash. A television, too, is a sort of black box, able to receive and transmit information without the viewer needing to know how it operates. I would posit that Morris’s interest in fallen figures – Fred Leuchter, Robert McNamara, the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal, convicted murderers – stems from an interest in unlocking these unusual black boxes. Through the interview process he attempts to answer a basic but difficult question: what were they thinking? Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, a film that features a circus lion trainer and a man who designs zoo displays for mole rats, rather unsurprisingly features cages. Dave Hoover, lion trainer, explains his view of lions and their cages in a voiceover: Once they’ve established [that ]… this is their cage, this is where they eat... This is where they sleep... This is where they drink... All their creature comforts are connected with that cage. They don’t particularly want to leave it. They don’t really consider themselves caged... Outside the cage is the cage... Inside is their world. (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control) Miller

The accompanying visual sequence opens with a shot of Hoover speaking to the Interrotron, but Morris soon cuts away from the interview set, opting instead to feed us images of circus-going crowds, as seen from inside the lions’ cage. A pixilated cartoon image of a woman’s eye, widened in terror, closes the sequence. This not-so-subtle conflation of humans and circus lions suggests that these humans are what Harry Frankfurt describes as wanton – agents with first order desires (“I want to watch people balance poles on their heads”) but no second order volitions (“I desire to want to watch people balance poles on their heads”).1 The cage here signals a limit of human rationality; humans, lions and mole rats all share the same cage, not having fulfilled the requirements for what Frankfurt

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calls “personhood.” These agents are thus caged by their limited rationality and capacity for truth-seeking: outside of the cage is a truth which is unknowable and unreachable, both because they are so limited and because they limit themselves. Following Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., whose opening credit sequence is an overture of irony. To superhero-style music, a blue glow, and flashes of Frankenstein-evoking lightning, Fred Leuchter – who sits slightly hunched and gazing blankly outward inside of what looks like a giant birdcage placed atop a pedestal – is revealed. Leuchter is ironically elevated to the status of (mad) scientist; however, the elevated cage also represents a limit of rationality of a different, and perhaps more serious sort. Near the end of the film, Morris asks Leuchter the important question: “Have you ever thought that you might be wrong, or do you think that you could make a mistake?” “No, I’m past that,” Leuchter responds. “When I attempted to turn those facilities into gas execution facilities and was unable to, I made a decision at that point that I wasn’t wrong” (Mr. Death). To decide that your belief could not be wrong indicates a second order volition: Leuchter is making a decision here about what his will is. The elevated cage thus marks a leap from the wanton-esque limits of mere agents in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control to the rational limits of a person in Mr. Death. From the first bar of overture music, Morris ironically undermines Leuchter’s belief that no mass murder occurred at Auschwitz. This belief is later refuted by experts, who state that Leuchter’s methodology in carrying out experiments at Auschwitz was unsound, and the project unscientific. “To me,” says Morris, “the real task is to look at [Fred Leuchter] and try to figure out what is going on here” (Grundmann and Rockwell 53). What is interesting for Morris is that Leuchter believes what he desires to be true; he is motivationally irrational, or, in other words, massively self-deceived.2 The audience’s first glimpse of Leuchter is caged, and illuminated only partially and briefly, as jolts of electricity emit traces of light. Our next view of Leuchter is, once again, only fragmentary. The minute-long sequence that follows the opening credits is worth outlining in some detail:

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1. A black and white, medium close-up of Leuchter’s bespectacled eyes, seen in the centre of the frame, reflected in the rearview mirror of the car he is driving. 2. An extreme close-up of Leuchter’s hand on the steering wheel (still in black and white). 3. Next, in colour: a ¾ profile shot taken from the right, and slightly behind Leuchter, which still captures his eyes in the rearview mirror. 4. A close-up of Leuchter’s speedometer, in black and white (he’s doing about 46 mph).

5. A medium close-up of a compass on the dashboard, bearing SSE (still in black and white). 6. An extreme close-up of Leuchter’s right ear, cheek, and spectacle lens, through which we can see a partial, distorted image (still in black and white). As this sequence runs, we hear Leuchter say the following, in voiceover: I became involved in the manufacture of execution equipment because I was concerned with the deplorable condition of the hardware that’s in most of the state’s prisons, which generally results in torture prior to death. A number of years ago, I was asked by a state to look at their electric chair. I was surprised at the condition of the equipment and I indicated to them what changes should be made to bring the equipment up to the point of doing a humane execution. (Mr. Death) Our view of Leuchter in this sequence is thrice refracted: once through the camera’s lens, a second time by the rearview mirror, and yet again by Leuchter’s glasses. Furthermore, the image is filmed in black and white, distancing us even further from the real – from truth.3 As is typical of Morris’ work, the images and words of this sequence do not correspond, instead making surprising but meaningful overlaps: the equipment inside the car standing in for execution equipment, for example. By providing multiple angles of Leuchter’s eyes and head, Morris seems to question the state of Leuchter’s own thinking and seeing apparatuses: should changes not be made there as well?4 The above sequence could be read as inspiration for the one-and-a-half minute long “epilogue” section of The Fog of War, which is strikingly similar: 1. An imposing, Doric-columned stone building, filmed at an angle from the interior of a passing car: windshield wipers swipe. 2. An extreme close-up of McNamara’s eye – the lens of his spectacle reflecting the street outside.

4. A shot from behind and to the right of McNamara, capturing the right side of his face (in focus) and the world beyond, partially through the right lens of his glasses (out of focus). The image is grainy. 5. A medium close-up of McNamara’s face, reflected in the rearview mirror (in the top right of the frame), with a view of the windshield and moving wiper, behind. Outside of the car is an overexposed white.

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3. A close-up of McNamara’s hand on the steering wheel of a Ford car.

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6. Another reflection of McNamara in the rearview mirror, with the mirror now occupying the bottom half of the frame; the top half shows the same bleached sky, with the odd partial glimpse of a passing tree. 7. Medium close-up of McNamara’s head, viewed from front/right, with the street passing in the background. 8. Extreme close-up of McNamara’s eye, with reflections on the lens of his glasses creating warped, dreamlike moving images. 9. Extreme close-up of McNamara in ¾ profile, with the street passing in the background beyond the car’s window, and reflections caught again in his spectacles. As with the sequence from Mr. Death, a voiceover accompanies the images, here a conversation between McNamara and Morris, in which McNamara states: “I don’t want to go any further with this discussion. It just opens up more controversy. I don’t want to add anything to Vietnam. It is so complex that anything I say will require additions and qualifications” (Fog of War).5 “What ‘the fog of war’ means,” McNamara explains, just prior to the epilogue, is that “war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily” (Fog of War). Murderers, as was earlier mentioned, have long fascinated Morris. In war, the “black box inside our skulls” extends to encompass a collective groupthink. As McNamara intimates and Morris illustrates, war is a highly mechanized process with little transparency, difficult to halt once put into motion. Assigning blame or responsibility to individuals for particular acts also becomes difficult or problematic, and scapegoating often occurs. In other words, the war creates one big black box.6 In going to war, we go down the rabbit hole.7

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The above sequence acts as a metaphor for “the fog of war.” By layering reflections and refractions, giving his footage a granular quality, and providing multiple angles of the exterior of McNamara’s thinking and seeing apparatuses, Morris explores both his much quoted thesis, “truth is not guaranteed,” and his fascination with human fallibility. Is Morris ascribing the same sort of motivated irrationality to Robert McNamara as he does to Fred Leuchter? The short answer is no; although McNamara could be self-deceived about certain aspects of his involvement in certain wars, his writings, as well as his cooperation in Morris’s film, suggest that McNamara is at least attempting to answer the important question: “Have you ever thought that you might be wrong, or do you think that you could make a mistake?” McNamara, though responsible for human death on a scale far exceeding anything Leuchter has accomplished, nevertheless grapples near the end of his life with quite Morrisian questions: What were we thinking? Where did we go wrong? Could it have been different?

Driving, to nowhere in particular, evokes again the image of the lion pacing in circles round its cage. We shall now, then, appropriately return to where we began—to T.S Eliot and the epigraph of this essay, which McNamara tearfully quotes in The Fog of War: We shall not cease from exploring And at the end of our exploration We will return to where we started And know the place for the first time. From the pet-corpse carrying golf-cart in Gates of Heaven and Steven Hawking’s suped-up wheelchair in A Brief History of Time to the aimless driving in Mr. Death and The Fog of War, Morris’s work offers a vast array of vehicular movement. “Where are they going?” thus seems an apt and ironic question (as does, What is Morris driving at?). In Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, robot scientist Rodney Brooks notes a connection between intelligence and mobility: “Higher-level level intelligence, whatever that is, is pretty easy once you have the ability to move around, hunt, chase” (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control). But at what point does a being achieve “higher-level intelligence?” “Move, hunt, chase” all seem to belong to the realm of first order desires, rather than any “higher” order – although if you asked Morris, he might say that most humans do not evolve much beyond these basic desires for creature comforts. In response to a particularly flurried and hectic sequence from the same film, Ira Jaffe recalls a remark from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: “We all realized we were… performing our one and noble function of the time, move. And we moved!” (134). Here, the emphasis on “move” suggests that only the gesture, not the destination (move where?), is important. Like the myth about the goldfish only having the capacity to remember for three seconds, so that every trip around the fishbowl it sees the world anew, Morris believes that “you can’t change human nature. It tells you that all of the other lessons [in The Fog of War] are valueless, that the human situation is indeed hopeless” (Lecture 2005). And so we are trapped in our cages, driving round in circles, bound by the limits of our own rationality. Miller

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Notes According to Frankfurt, beings able to form first order desires (e.g. I want a beer) qualify as “agents,” whereas “personhood” is reserved for those agents who can form second order desires (desires about their desires – e.g. I desire to not want a beer). An agent who is unable to form second order volitions is labeled “wanton.” “The essential character of a wanton,” writes Frankfurt, “is that he does not care about his will. His desires move him to do certain things, without its being true of him either that he wants to be moved by those desires or that he prefers to be moved by other desires.” (11) 1

For a detailed discussion of the conditions for self-deception alluded to here, see Mele, Alfred. “Self-Deception without Puzzles.” Self-Deception Unmasked. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 50-131. 2

Morris’s interest in purported photographic realism is the subject of his latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, and also a frequent subject of “Zoom,” his blog for The New York Times. 3

This sequence also counters the end of the film, where after his “fall,” Leuchter has no car, and cannot even seem to get a ride as a hitchhiker: “He came from nowhere and he went back to nowhere,” David Irving utters as we see Fred walking along the side of a highway toward the camera, blurring and ultimately disappearing. 4

The full dialogue is as follows: EM: After you left the Johnson administration, why didn’t you speak out against the Vietnam War? McNamara: I’m not going to say any more than I have. These are the kinds of questions that get me in trouble. You don’t know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear. A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. A lot of people think I’m a son of a bitch. EM: Do you feel in any way responsible for the War? Do you feel guilty? McNamara: I don’t want to go any further with this discussion. It just opens up more controversy. I don’t want to add anything to Vietnam. It is so complex that anything I say will require additions and qualifications. EM: Is it the feeling that you’re damned if you do, and if you don’t, no matter what? McNamara: Yeah, that’s right. And I’d rather be damned if I don’t. 5

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Morris further explores these ideas in Standard Operating Procedure.

Part of Morris’s Academy Award acceptance speech for The Fog of War reads:

“Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we’re going down a rabbit hole once again. And if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I’ve done some damn good here. Thank you very, very much.” “Down the rabbit hole” also accurately describes my reaction when watching one of Errol Morris’s impressionistic sequences.

Works Cited Ebert, Roger. “Errol Morris: Megatron, Son of Interrotron.” Chicago Sun Times 30 Jan. 2001. Web. Eliot, T.S. “Little Gidding.” Four Quartets, an Accurate Online Text. Jun. 2000. Web. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Dir. Errol Morris. Sony Pictures, 1997. DVD. Frankfurt, Harry. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 5-20. Print.

Grundmann, Roy and Cynthia Rockwell. “The Truth is not Subjective: An Interview with Errol Morris.” Cineaste 25 (2000): 4-10. Print. Hughes, James. “The Eleven-Minute Psychiatrist.” Stop Smiling Interview of Errol Morris. Mar. 2006. Web.

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Gates of Heaven. Dir. Errol Morris. MGM, 1978. DVD.

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Jaffe, Ira. “Morris’s Forms of Control.” Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch. Ed. William Rothman. Albany: SUNY Press: 2009. 19-42. Print. Kerouac, Jack. On The Road. New York: Penguin. 1976. Print. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. Dir. Errol Morris. Lions Gate, 1999. DVD. Plantinga, Carl. “The Philosophy of Errol Morris: Ten Lessons.” Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch. Ed. William Rothman. Albany: SUNY Press: 2009. 43-59. Print. Poppy, Nick. “An Interview with Errol Morris.” The Believer. Apr. 2004. Web. Rosenheim, Shawn. “Interrotroning History.” The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media. Ed. Marcia Landy. London: The Athlone Press, 2001. 316-29. Print. “THE FOG OF WAR: 13 Questions and Answers on the Filmmaking of Errol Morris by Errol Morris.” Errolmorris.com. FLM Magazine, 2004. Web. The Fog of War. Dir. Errol Morris. Sony Pictures Classics: 2003. DVD. “Werner Herzog in Conversation with Errol Morris.” The Believer. Mar. 2008. Web.

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10 The Fetish of Democratic Media A Phantasmatic Critique of News and Democracy ROBERT LECLERC

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The Fetish of Democratic Media

A Phantasmatic Critique of News and Democracy ROBERT LECLERC Some of the most pressing socio-political questions concern the democratic shortcomings of the news media. These questions pertain to the failure of various normative expectations—accessibility and accuracy of information, public responsibility, decentralized ownership—that have come to be commonplace amongst media theorists. Insofar as they remain within these parameters, journalists and scholars will inevitably have to confront their idiosyncratic attachments to various commitments, many of which have regrettably led to pragmatic and theoretical dead ends. There is, on the one hand, the explanation that news media have failed to perform their democratic function—a task which usually involves adverting to matters of professional ethics, corporate responsibility, journalistic education and sociological history. On the other hand, there is the explanation or consideration of the ideological coordinates that structure various commitments to democratize the media; the latter is the task of this paper. A distinction is also to be made between theoretical and practical considerations. While both inevitably overlap, it is crucial not to conflate the two projects. This is a work of critical media theory and while there is an implicit ethical dimension built into a critique of ideology, its concern is nonetheless conceptual insofar as it looks to open up, however modestly, alternative approaches to radical media theory.

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A media theory informed by recent work in psychoanalysis and Marxist theory—specifically Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian Marxism—might be a first step in such a direction. This essay has a defensible bias: media theory need not be exclusively concerned with democratic projects—much less with left-wing prerogatives—but in the event that it is, it requires a critical check on its various commitments and assumptions. If theories of the press can be concerned with prescribing normative tasks for the media (see Christians et al. 2009), then one might consider this work as a preliminary check on the ideological conditions that sustain these ideals. Ideology operates in conjunction with other theoretical frameworks and its application hardly trivializes contemporary media scholarship; in fact, it has more to do with beliefs in action than with unmasking social illusions. Zizek’s psychoanalytic reworking of the notion of ideology shifts the focus of attention away from what people know towards what they do, that is, to the persistence of actions in spite of what one knows. It is my contention that democratic discourse functions through a certain fetishistic disavowal in media theory and practice. Furthermore, I dispute the idea that an incessant demand to democratize media is a condition for serious media reform. Taking Michael Schudson’s (1995) discussion of journalism and democracy as a starting point to a consideration of ideology within the discourse on news media, this paper

will address two fantasies that structure democratic commitments: the fantasy of transparency—as it relates to journalistic objectivity—and the fantasy of participatory inclusion in contemporary techno-culture. These are not exclusive but they do carry a certain conceptual weight within media debates. Both these fantasies are constituted by a disavowal and both seem to fetishize the democratic potentials of news media in such a way as to foreclose the possibility of further theoretical speculation and practical reform. Democracy at Possibilities?

Distance:

Suspended

Illusions

Radical

According to Schudson, journalists commonly “still adhere to a loosely sketched classical ideal of democracy” (211). Classical democratic theory grants an inherent rationality—or a relative capacity for common sense—to a genuinely active citizenry who, through “collective initiation, discussion and decision of

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To the extent that news media remains a self-professed watchdog for “informed self-government,” there is a rather pressing need for conceptual and pragmatic reconsiderations of its potential role in contemporary democracy (McChesney 17). Contemporary radical media theory posits that journalists must exhibit a democratic commitment to a “continual elimination of concentrations of social power [and] to enable every person to participate equally in all societal decisions” (Christians 179). However, it is a fundamental critical weakness for ‘radical’ media theorists to consider the democratic function of media without critically accounting for the limits of democratic discourse. In other words, a critical assessment of ‘existing’ democracy is necessary. This position is not to be mistaken with adopting a ‘realistic’ view of democracy (as Schudson would have it). Rather, it requires a willingness to theorize beyond democracy or, at the very least, admitting that democratic theory need not be the exclusive horizon of political thought. Suffice it to say that this paper is not prepared to advance alternative political frameworks nor does it claim a definite theory of democracy. As it stands, the notion of ‘democracy’ is not only increasingly complex, but it is also becoming intellectually vacuous (at least within various progressive circles); at the very least, it lacks conceptual clarity insofar as it continues to be appropriated by a coterie of individuals whose political sensibilities fundamentally differ. Inasmuch as this remains an ideology critique, the task is to assess the extent to which certain types of democratic beliefs are fetishized—and perhaps become inadvertently counterproductive—within media studies and journalistic practices. Beginning with a critical discussion of Michael Schudson’s The Power of News, I propose to address the democratic beliefs of working journalists. That is, what sort of democracy do they believe in? Furthermore, I question the legitimacy of certain implicit assumptions, specifically, Shudson’s democratic dichotomy. His argument offers a convenient segue into a thorough discussion of ideology and the function of media and democracy within it. It also signals a potential deadlock for radical media theorists looking to evoke substantial change.

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policy,” seek a “recognized common good” (205). From this it follows that informed citizens require credible and reliable news. There are obvious drawbacks to this model and Schudson accounts for these. Following Walter Lippmann and Charles Lindblom, he admits that it is pragmatically naïve and, in all probability, unattainable. Further, he considers that theorists and scholars have seriously questioned the efficacy of such a model, but he reasons that the more sober and realistic assessments of democracy at best trivialize the role of news media. Journalists, he claims, “should be self-consciously schizophrenic in their efforts to perform a democratic political function” (211). That is to say, working journalists understand—to varying degrees—the realities of contemporary politics but they ought to continue to “champion the kind of democracy that political scientists say we have little chance of achieving” (212). Such a position can, at the very least, provide an excellent guide for the journalists. There are two misguided positions in this argument, and I will consider them shortly. First, Schudson sets up a dichotomy between optimistic (classical) and realistic (sober) democracy without accounting for the possibility of a third critical position. This has the unfortunate effect of substantially limiting the range of theoretical and political possibilities. Second, his ‘schizophrenic’ proposal is an ideological move par excellence. Taking a cue from the work of Slavoj Zizek, Chantal Mouffe, and Jodi Dean, I propose that radical media theorists adopt a critical position that necessarily entails a thorough re-examination of democracy proper. Their respective work in political theory—while certainly not exhaustive—makes a very strong case for re-considering the theoretical and political assumptions of democratic theory and for admitting a widespread failure to consider its pragmatic shortcomings. In the space at my disposal I can offer only a reason as to why such a theoretical shift would be beneficial; a thorough review of current political theory is beyond the scope of this paper. Furthermore, I will elaborate on Zizek’s fetishistic formula for belief to explain—at least in part—the relation between democracy and media.

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To envisage news media adopting a democratically optimistic position, and worse, admitting such a position to be necessarily fictive, is a conceptual mistake; it confuses being realistic with being critical. Being a realist entails accepting a given condition of choice and opting for a kind of calculated pessimism. In Schudson’s argument, Lippmann’s ‘realist’ model, while ruthlessly pointing out the limits of classical democratic theory, nevertheless accepts its terms. It further admits that because “there is no other solution” democratic expectations should be considerably scaled down (206). My contention is that Schudson’s dichotomy presents media theorists with a false choice by failing to theorize outside certain democratic parameters. In this sense, being critical entails a necessary pessimism— not unlike Lippmann’s—that negates the intellectual standstill proposed by realists. In other words, it is a direct refusal to accept the choice between an optimistic (yet unrealistic) classical democratic ideal and a sober, realistic model that admits intellectual and political defeat. Contemporary radical political theory

has identified this dilemma and offered several ‘neo-democratic’ proposals (see Dean, Democracy and Other; Mouffe, The Democratic, On the Political; Zizek, The Sublime Object, For They Know, “Georg Lukacs;” Laclau and Mouffe). For all intents and purposes, it is sufficient to propose that radical media theory must consider the potential drawbacks of limiting media analyses to a democratic discourse. Schudson’s second point—his ‘schizophrenic’ proposal—returns this analysis to a critique of ideology. In Zizek’s political ontology, actions and beliefs go hand in hand and they are to be distinguished from knowledge. Actions manifest an “underlying belief that persists, regardless of what one knows” (Dean, Publicity’s Secret 5). His theory draws on Octave Mannoni’s psychoanalytic formula for fetishism, “I know very well… but nevertheless,” to explain that belief, rather than simply being a subjective state, is “radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people” (Zizek, The Sublime Object 34). According to Schudson’s proposal, then, it is not an “article of faith” among journalists that their work contributes to a democratic state; it is a matter of belief (Jones 32). The distinction is crucial insofar as beliefs can be invoked at a distance, or as Mannoni puts it, “at a remove” (Boucher 116). Working journalists as well as some media scholars maintain a tender relationship with certain illusions which they nevertheless regard as illusions. Zizek coins the term “democratic fundamentalism” to refer to the way in which democracy is radically immune to contestation (Zizek, “Georg Lukacs” 176). The distinctive force of democracy is its de facto exclusion of everything that is not democratic. Following Zizek, the inadequacies of media democracy in practice—increased concentration of power, government propaganda and infotainment—need more democracy; anything else is unacceptable.

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Recall that a central formal feature of ideology is distance, “the very dimension that is generally regarded as a defense against direct interpellation” (Vighi 32). In this sense, democracy functions at a distance for working journalists insofar as it requires a certain disavowal. It also testifies to the ease with which radical media scholars take democracy for granted as a theoretical and political framework. This tenuous relation arises, in one important respect, from a failure to openly admit the theoretical inadequacy of contemporary democratic theory to confront—and to take precedence over—global capital. Constitutional democracies, as they exist in contemporary North America, collude with global capital. They presuppose fundamental neo-liberal assumptions about the benefits of “growth, investment, and profit” (Dean, Democracy and Other 76). To put it bluntly, they privilege the wealthy. It does not follow that economic disproportions are linked causally with constitutional democracies; it simply means that existing democracies politically legitimize certain power dynamics. After all, the wealthy have no trouble invoking the benefits of democracy as a political ideal (76). This essay cannot hope to elaborate on the incongruities and tensions within democracy. Rather, it is resigned to grant that theoretical tensions do exist and as such, they require displacement or denial. Journalists know very well that their conception

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of democracy is not possible but nevertheless they act as if it were; in other words, they try to create a world in which “a classical notion of democracy makes sense” (Shudson 223). For Schudson, this is an unreachable goal but it offers a tentative framework for journalists. This is perhaps the best one can hope for. A great deal of media punditry concerns itself with the extent to which theory can have real effects on the day-to-day experience of working journalists. Zizek draws attention—and here I follow him entirely—to the ways in which actions produce social reality: they produce the beliefs that really matter. That most journalists admit that classical democracy is not realistic under the current circumstances is beside the point; their actions suggest otherwise. They suggest a cautious belief in the possibility of democracy, a belief that retains its strength through their tautological journalistic practices. Social reality is further sustained, according to Zizek, by a “fantasy of what things are like” (Dean, Publicity’s Secret 8). If only journalists were more objective and more accurate and if only information was more available and more accessible, then democracy could flourish. Ideology critique operates at the level of the “fantasy that sustains belief [and] that informs action” (8). These fantasies account for the inconsistencies that amount in the social body. They are not to be confused with wishful thinking but rather, on a much more fundamental level, they keep desires and goals perpetually out of reach and intact. The following sections outline two fantasies that structure commitments to democratize the media. In other words, the fantasy of transparency and the fantasy of participatory inclusion partially account for the incongruities that emerge within media and democracy; they function as what ifs. The task is to locate their respective antagonisms—that is, what they require and how they are inconsistent—and draw attention to the ways in which they disavow blatant internal discrepancies while simultaneously keeping democratic media aspirations intact. They can be considered as ‘micro-disavowals’ functioning within the democratic discourse. Objectivity and Epistemic Inconsistencies: The Fantasy of Transparency

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Journalistic objectivity is constituted by conceptual and political incongruities. Both of these require elucidation insofar as they are irrevocably tied to democratic endeavors. Conceptually, the notion of objectivity is marked by philosophical and epistemic inconsistencies, that is, it requires conflicting demands. Politically, objectivity is considered necessary for a democratic media while simultaneously it legitimizes power relations (Hackett and Zhao 161). Given the relative brevity of this paper, I simply want to stress the way in which journalists persist in certain actions conducive to traditional practices of objectivity—to various degrees I gather—despite what they know and openly admit to be otherwise. Furthermore, I maintain that this fantasy of transparency accounts for and secures some of the failures of media democracy in practice. That is, democratic deficits can be partly attributed to the fact that journalists fail to implement objectivity’s ideal. Failing to live up to X necessarily implies that X is

tenable; in this case, the legitimacy of objectivity as a pillar of journalism is itself highly contested. For the sake of my argument, I focus exclusively on objectivity as it appears in journalistic practices, sidestepping the socio-historical accounts of why and how news media came to adopt this “regime” (1). The point is not to dismiss objectivity altogether (as it is fashionable within many postmodern circles), but rather to put forth a tentative definition of news objectivity with the intention of drawing out its implicit tensions (both epistemic and political) and emphasizing the extent to which it requires a disavowal. Following Hackett and Zhao, I grant that journalistic practices are shaped by “a regime of objectivity—an ensemble of ideals, assumptions, practices, and institutions—which has become a fixture of public philosophy” (1). Not only are they imbued with various philosophical assumptions but the very concept of objectivity also carries a certain epistemic weight. In fact, conceptually, it holds contradictory imperatives that further render it problematic. The legacy of positivism—the philosophical “belief that the real world exists independently of the consciousness of the observer”—within the epistemic framework of journalistic practices is rather vexing, especially if one considers the attacks that have rendered it seriously flawed (109). Still, it seems to have tapped into a popular regime of common-sense philosophy and it remarkably continues to dictate workaday thought and practice. Journalists are expected to “reflect the real world with accuracy, fairness and balance.” They are in a position to best do so as detached observers who employ “neutral language and professionally competent reporting techniques” (111). This framework, while implicitly naïve, should not obscure the fact that to this day it continues to “provide the terms of reference within which journalists usually debate and defend their craft” (112). Interestingly, journalistic objectivity is also distinguished by an adherence to balance and accuracy, both of which are epistemically inconsistent.

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In their pursuit of objectivity, journalists are required to be accurate, reporting the facts as they are and allocating validity and coverage to different viewpoints. Barring any political and economic motivations, a closer look reveals that these imperatives are necessarily not conducive to truth-telling, at least not in the ways that journalists imagine them to be. For one, accuracy is conditionally linked to various positivistic assumptions about truth-gathering and truth-telling. It implies that things have an ontological status independent of subjects; it also implies a certain self-evidence of facts and the various methods of acquiring them (114). Whereas journalistic accuracy involves epistemic commitments to absolute facticity, balance seems to invite a relativistic relation to truth and knowledge. According to Hackett and Zhao, balance “assumes that different ‘world-views’ all have their own (limited and partial) validity, without any one of them being able to lay claim to final, objective truth” (115). Thus, on the one hand, in their truth-telling endeavors journalists are asked to report value-free facts while at the same time granting the possibility of truth to a plurality of sources. The result is a rather uneasy blend of epistemically incompatible claims. Of course, it may be true that journalists

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do not concern themselves with the philosophical underpinnings of their profession. It does not follow, however, that conceptual inconsistencies have little or no practical relevance. It seems fair to posit that, in fact, they have far-reaching consequences on the authority and actions of news media and journalists. Objectivity is further problematic once one considers its political function. For one, it is said to “provide a legitimation for established power relations” (161). As critics have remarked, what passes for objectivity “is the acceptance of a social reality shaped by dominant forces of society” (Parenti 52). The rhetoric of objectivity—so the argument goes—is invoked as a kind of noble requirement and a good indication of professionalism when in fact it simply enables journalists to function as mouthpieces for the power elites. While the characteristics and practices of objectivity have fluctuated and developed over time, they still continue to function as a failsafe for uncritical thought. Ultimately, as journalist Britt Hume notes, “What [reporters] pass off as objectivity is just mindless neutrality” (54). For instance, journalists are required to use credible sources in order to sustain their facts, but when the available sources are “frequently representatives of powerful institutions,” the ‘facts’ are often radically skewed and misleading (Hackett 34). This process amounts to nothing short of ritualized phoniness, where journalists appear to be critical and adversarial under the pretense of objectivity. Daniel Boorstin finds this epitomized in what he calls “pseudo-events,” events that have been staged in order to be reported (11). Journalists tread murky water when they start assuming that such phony objectivity is desirable. Conversely, objectivity nevertheless seems democratically necessary. Good journalism, if it is to perform a democratic function, ought to be objective. This tenet is widely accepted as a commonsensical requirement for an informed citizenry and is often juxtaposed against the dangers of government-controlled news media in Communist China and Russia (Jones 31). In an environment where information is partial, biased, or simply false, self-government is an illusion.

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The functional complexity of objectivity and its link to democracy entails a complex and negotiated relationship with journalists. One way to understand the hold of objectivity within journalistic practices (and within some media theory as well) is to consider the extent to which it remains caught in an ideological web. Objectivity is kept at a distance in much the same way as democracy is. In fact, even for working journalists, “the concept that news should be objective is increasingly treated within the profession as old-fashioned and outdated” (82). Of course, one is left to explain why the tenets of objectivity continue to be ‘acted out’ and why they still carry a great deal of weight within the general public. The fantasy of transparency—that ultimately, information, news and events can be transmitted to the public with honesty, truthfulness, and ease—helps account for the ways in which objectivity keeps democratic aspirations and commitments alive. In spite of the overwhelming evidence that journalistic objectivity is both conceptually and politically incongruent, it continues to be invoked as necessary for a democratic media. Insofar as fantasies keep desires perpetually out of reach, objectivity in

this sense can be said to sustain a continued allegiance to democratizing the media while altogether keeping it from actually occurring (since it is readily admitted that journalistic objectivity is a lofty and unreachable goal). Publicity and its Discontents: The Fantasy of Participatory Inclusion

Differing from the abovementioned analysis, the fantasy of participatory inclusion operates most obviously through a dialectical relation with democratic aspirations. The link between news, new media, and democracy intrinsically overlaps with the ideal of publicity. Insofar as they conjure up ideals of access, participatory inclusion, and diversity of discussions, new media appear to have legitimized the realization of the public sphere. In other words, “the values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies” (Dean, Democracy and Other 23).

The perception that new media can revitalize democratic politics is certainly not without its faults. On one level, it assumes that the effects of the Web—in its supposed realization of the lauded Habermasian public sphere—will be predominantly beneficial. That is, it presupposes that access to information is favorable in and of itself. Barring the fact that access to the media remains unequal to begin with, one must account for its structural and political similarities with old media. Political communication and information in cyberspace “can be just as

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To this end, theorists and activists eager to make grand pronouncements in service of progressive politics have been inclined to, in various degrees, make a fetish of contemporary techno-culture. The transformation of news media in techno-culture has also regrettably led to various pseudo-democratic rhetoric and recent findings suggest cautious—if not pessimistic—expectations of fundamental change in the current political climate. In keeping with the tone of this work, it is the latter issue that will be critically addressed. While I critique techno-culture’s pervasive hold on the democratic imagination, it does not follow that the Web cannot be a source of democratic potential nor does it minimize contemporary work in new media studies. It simply considers one relation between democratic commitments and web-based media. This section is indebted to Jodi Dean’s recent work on techno-culture, democracy, and neo-liberalism. Following her work, I posit that the injunction to democratize the media through cyberspace eliminates the distinction between the “circulation of content and official policy” (20). The fantasy of participatory inclusion—the belief that all citizens can participate and be accounted for in public debates and that news media need not be limited to strictly reporting the news but can now engage (via questions, comments, suggestions) with the public—glosses over this incongruity to secure a continued investment in democratic commitments. For all intents and purposes, this section focuses exclusively on traditional news media, specifically the CBC and its use of web-based interaction.

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biased, manipulative, propagandist, disinformational, distorted, cynical and xenophobic as in the conventional channels of present-day mass media” (Christians 231). In Canada, corporate cross-pollination from one communications technology to the next has Bell Globemedia, CanWest, and Quebecor owning Web portals in the same way they own newspapers, magazines, television and radio networks, productions houses, cables, and satellites (Hurtig 168). According to James Curran, web-based activism’s failure to democratize the media is a result of its inability to change fundamentally “the underlying economic factors that enable large media organizations to maintain their market dominance” (227). This alone ought to be enough to encourage a tentative skepticism towards new media’s seemingly “unlimited space and access for expression, information, dialogue and propagation of new ideas” (Christians 235). Granted, modern telecommunication systems have substantially toppled centralized media at least to the extent that information is radically more accessible and abundant. That being said, it seems rather misguided—even intellectually irresponsible—not to be wary of news corporations’ (specifically in this case, the CBC’s) recent turn to assorted audience participatory projects or worse, to ascribe to them various populist ‘readings’ of audience re-appropriation and re-contextualization. To examine this issue in more detail I turn to Dean’s distinction between the circulation of content and official policy. If there is one critique to take away from contemporary pseudoparticipatory endeavors in news media, it is this one.

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The prevailing discourse of “liberal individualism” concerning the impact of the Internet on democratic practices coincides with postmodern claims to individual freedom, diversity, choice, intimacy, fluid subjectivity, and free expression. According to Lincoln Dahlberg, this rhetoric extols the possibilities of new media to “free rational citizens from the constraints of party and ideology, [where they] can make their own choices in a large market of ideas and policies” (231). This discourse, rather than allow for the possibility of substantial sociopolitical movements, results in the proliferation of fragmented, personalized politics that culminates in a relentless circulation of affective content. In her work on contemporary techno-culture, Dean recognizes this disconnect between content and policy, and draws attention to the failures of technocratic democracy to form “strong counter-hegemonies” (Dean, Democracy and Other 22). The circulation of content refers to the spirited exchange of citizen opinions via blogs, podcasts, e-mails, radio, television call-in shows, and even text messaging. In this sense, ‘opinions’ are elevated to the highest esteem. That is, it seems democratically commonsensical to grant the importance of people’s ideas and thoughts regardless of their truth-value. It is surely a sign of a flourishing democracy when citizens can voice their opinions at will without the impediment of various power structures. In the mean time, however, this flow of information operates separately from actual state policies. In other words, the “institutional or state components of the system seem to run independently of the politics that circulates as content” (20). It is a sobering fact that can hardly be overlooked. Critical content or dissident views, when they are covered and reported on, are treated as “just another story

or feature, […] just another topic to be chewed to bits by rabid bloggers, […] just another opinion offered into the media-stream” (21). All the while, it is business as usual for policy makers. The circulation of content finds particular fruition in the CBC’s endorsement of web-based interaction. It has become fashionable within news corporations to adopt ‘interactive’ projects whereby citizens can comment on news stories, pose questions, or raise issues. For example, the CBC’s website allows readers to post web commentaries on reported news and subsequently to engage in cybernetic debates amongst themselves. This conception of participation-via-opinion links neatly to the notion of balanced reporting discussed in the above section, culminating in various affective and politically inconsequential ‘debates.’ In fact, the very idea of balanced reporting—in giving equal weight to conflicting views—seems to invite debate, giving the impression of democratic forces hard at work. Bloggers, activists, and average citizens can voice their opinions on various stories and current events: Is global warming a paranoid hoax or not? Should he/she have received a harsher sentence? Should I get the swine flu vaccine? Global warming is considered a fact by most of the scientific community and yet “many news stories ‘balance’ their coverage by giving significant weight to the views of a small minority of skeptics who are sometimes industry shills” (Jones 84). Serious issues become trivialized as subjects of water cooler debates or blogging rants. Lastly, one cannot overlook the fact that the discursive parameters are de facto in place; a journalist will not alter his news story in order to cater to the hundreds of responses he receives. The danger lies in having both parties ‘satisfied.’ On the one hand, journalists feel complacent in the democratic process by allowing citizens to openly contest their work. On the other hand, citizens feel they have had a significant say in matters of current affairs.

Conclusion

To discuss media and democracy is inevitably to confront conditions of oppression, if by oppression one has in mind systemic inequality and injustice. For much of Anglo-American theory, oppression entails being oppressed by something ‘out there’ (in this case, the media conglomerates); it is a conception of power that invokes diametrical oppositions between the status quo and ‘the people.’

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It is true that citizens may not all believe that the CBC offers truly democratic potentials by allowing them to express themselves. However, recalling Zizek’s contention that actions suggest an underlying belief, it becomes clear that the hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of cybernetic debates, blogs, rants, and opinions indicate a sustained belief in the inclusive potential of the Internet. People may react cynically if pressed to explain the democratic benefits of their actions, but they nevertheless continue to make ample use of these technologies. The fantasy of participatory inclusion is not exclusive in news media but it keeps the desire to democratize the media alive and intact.

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The power-elite ought to be opposed by both ‘the common folk’ and the grassroots media in the name of democracy. This essay addresses these issues by calling for a critical assessment, founded on contemporary radical political theory of the democratic assumptions that fuel the abovementioned commitments. Furthermore, it concerns itself with the kind of attachments structuring and impelling those commitments. Drawing on Zizek’s theory of ideology, this essay identifies two fantasies that perpetuate a fundamental commitment to democratize the media: the fantasy of transparency (as it pertains to journalistic objectivity) and the fantasy of participatory inclusion (as it pertains to new media and democracy). The assumption being that, if one grants that democracy is itself incongruent, then it need not be the ultimate horizon of political thought. It follows that the task at hand is to locate various forms of attachment that persist in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. Tautological expectations coupled with incessant demands to democratize media are rapidly rendering most self-professed leftleaning scholarship anemic. At the very least, this essay opens up new alleys of discussion for radical media theorists.

Works Cited Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Print. Leclerc

Boucher, Geoff. Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek. Ed. Geoff Boucher, Jason Glynos, and Matthew Sharpe. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005. Print.

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Christians, Clifford G. et al. Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Democratic Societies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Print. Couldry N. and Curran James. Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Print.

Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Print. ---. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism & Left Politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. Print. Hackett, Robert A. Remaking Media: The Struggle to Democratize Public Communication. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Hackett, Robert A. and Zhao, Yuezhi. Sustaining Democracy?: Journalism and the Politics of Objectivity. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998. Print. Hurtig, Mel. The Truth about Canada: Some Important, Some Astonishing, and Some Truly Appalling Things All Canadians Should Know About our Country. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2008. Print. Jones, Alex S. Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print. Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London; New York: Verso, 2001. Print. McChesney, Robert Waterman. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Print. Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London; New York: Verso, 2000. Print. ---. On the Political. London; New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. Parenti, Michael. Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Print. Schudson, Michael. The Power of News. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do. London: Verso, 1991. Print. ---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. Print. ---. “Georg Lukacs as the philosopher of Leninism.” Georg Lukacs, A Defense of History and Class Consciousness. Trans. John Rees. London: Verso, 2000. Print.

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Vighi, Fabio and Feldner, Heiko. Žižek: Beyond Foucault. Basingstoke, England; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

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The Contributors ANNABEL LANE is in her final semester as an English Literature and Humanistic Studies major. She likes peanut butter and apples.

Growing up in Johannesburg, the City of Gold has remained a spiritual home for AVINASH KANJI; all of his intellectual and artistic work to date can be thought of as mapping his return from the margins of the Montreal metropole. Completing his Honours degree in English Literature, it is in fact the literature hailing from Africa and early twentieth century Russia, which provoke his most piquant ardour. He is thrilled to have contributed in some small way to the vibrant and enthusiastic culture of the English department, which The Channel has been so gracious in promoting. ERIC LEINVEER is a U3 student from Toronto, Ontario. He is currently completing a Joint Honours Program in Cultural Studies and History. Along with his interest in Michael Ondaatje, Eric is presently researching and writing about Gordon Lish’s impact on twentieth-century American fiction, focusing on Lish’s editorial relationships with Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel. In 2009, he was the recipient of the English Department’s Kay MacIver Memorial Prize and Charles William Snyder Memorial Scholarship. After graduating this semester, he is looking forward to eating eggs Benedict, napping, and reading, while searching for gainful employment.

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KLARA DU PLESSIS is a U3 English Literature and German Studies joint Honours student at McGill University. She is passionate about twentieth-century poetry, in particular how poetic voice is manipulated and experimented with, and is currently completing her English thesis on Plath’s poetry. She works as editor-in-chief for Scrivener Creative Review and founded Writing Pamphlet, a publication exploring poetics through the medium of poetry itself.

LUKE NEIMA is the third of four children, and hopes to learn more about the world as it appears to his siblings. He is thankful for all the hard workers, talented musicians, dedicated teachers, subtle thinkers, generous lovers, loyal friends, honest colleagues, and steadfast acquaintances.

So far, ROSA AIELLO has had great fortune in her life: wealthy in all the things that money cannot buy. Born in the year of the Rabbit, and under the sign of the fish, she has overcome her meek and slippery fate, finding great strength in her family and in her community. Rosaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interests are many, some of which include: swimming, writing, lasagna, stop-motion animation, cats, and infinity. She hopes to make a living some day as a thinker, a maker, or a teacher of some kind. ANNA ROBINSON is half-way through a conjoint Law and Arts degree at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, with a double major in English and History and a minor in French. She was on exchange at McGill during 2009.

JESSICA SHARPE is an English Literature and History student in her graduating year. Her interests include studying the readers of poetry in the Romantic and Victorian periods compared with 20th century listeners of pop music, the history of recipe writing, and the function of typography in modern printed and digital communications. As her McGill career ends she looks forward to trying her hand at writing in the blogosphere, and spending time reading anything she wants, anytime. She comes from Toronto.

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STEFANIE MILLER has worked as an English language teacher in Seoul, Republic of Korea, Vung Tau, Vietnam, and Prague, Czech Republic, as well as a server and bartender in many fine establishments throughout Eastern Canada. She holds a BFA from Concordia University, where she studied contemporary dance and video production, and is pleased to be currently enrolled in the Cultural Studies program at McGill. ROBERT LECLERC is a third year Cultural Studies major with minors in Philosophy and Communication Studies. His areas of interest are varied but they inevitably converge on the democratic (or political) potential for media technology. Such interests include: nineteenth and twentieth-century European philosophy (in particular German idealism and Marxism), contemporary Continental philosophy (specifically Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek), media and democracy (Darin Barney) and political theory (predominantly Jodi Dean, Zizek and Adrian Johnston). He envisions radically shifting current trends in media scholarship; for the time being he hopes to continue on to Graduate studies in Communications and Media Theory.

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