The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism - Volume 5

The Madison Journal

Literary Criticism

is a peerreviewed UW-Madison publication devoted to publishing outstanding essays of undergraduate literary analysis. The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism accepts unsolicited submissions analyzing any form of literary criticism in 8-20 pages. Articles will be chosen for their originality, eloquence, internal coherence, and quality of academic research. Papers must be written in English, although they can analyze the literature of another language. Any submissions or questions may be directed to mjlc@rso.wisc.edu or http://english.wisc.edu/theMJLC. of

Funding for the issue was generously provided by The Kemper K. Knapp Bequest through the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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his fifth volume of the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism forges on in the path of previous years. We continued to publish authors from around the world, to make the journal available online, and received over 200 submissions from undergraduate literary critics. This year, we did have a “first”: one author, Fin Le Maitre, has two essays in this volume (a complete surprise to the staff after our thorough blind review process). For our interview, we decided to turn back to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and spoke with the engaging and passionate Ramzi Fawaz about his new book on comic books and radical politics. Our goal remains to publish undergraduate literary criticism that too often goes underappreciated. As this volume shows, these authors have a lot to contribute to the critical conversation, and the MJLC’s job is to gain them entry. We would like to thank the Kemper K. Knapp Bequest Committee for their ongoing support in our fifth year of publication. The UW-Madison Department of English, especially our advisor Professor Monique Allewaert’s guidance, Karen Redfield’s encouragement, and Ramzi Fawaz’s energy, was indispensable in creating this volume. Finally, we thank all the undergraduates without whom this journal would not exist: a talented board of editors, both new and old; a host of authors whose work we had the pleasure of reading and whose dedication to literary criticism is the journal’s raison d’être. We hope their commitment makes this volume a pleasure to read.

Alexander Sherman and Meghan Stark The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, Editors in Chief

Editors in Chief Alexander Sherman Meghan Stark Associate Editors Sarah Easton Rachel Fettig August Glomski Cody Kour Madeleine Michaelides Christopher Petersen Laura Schmidt Sarah Smiley Lucas Weaver Albert Zygmunt Faculty Advisor Monique Allewaert Cover Art & Publication Design Meghan Stark

Fiction as “cultural work”: The Pedagogical Project of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland

By Alexandra Pollak Page 10 Between the Acts: A Literary Call to Arms

By Grace Schwartzenberger Page 26 “A Mind of Metal and Wheels”: Technology, Instrumental Reason, and Industrialization in The Lord of the Rings

By Doron Darnov Page 36 The Moon and its Double: Metafiction, Realism and the Dialectic Novel Tradition

By Fin Le Maitre Page 56 “Mourning Untimely Consumes the Sad”: Novel Modes of Eating, Relating, and Grieving in Thoreau’s “Solitude”

By Sydney Jones Page 68

A Parish Boy’s Stasis, Society’s Progress: Morality and the Inverted Bildungsroman in Oliver Twist

By Fin Le Maitre Page 80 “You Actually Have to Take a Position. You Have to Believe in Something” An Interview with Ramzi Fawaz Page 92

Fiction as “cultural work”:

The Pedagogical Project of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland

By Alexandra Pollak

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n her essay “The Rape of the Text: Charlotte Gilman’s Violation of Herland,” critic Kathleen Lant argues that the narrative centrality of Terry’s attempted rape and the intrusion of “masculine” (Lant 299) ideas and literary tropes constitute a “rape” of the “feminist ‘body’ of [the] novel” (Lant 292) and undermine its ideological potential. Lant suggests that “the questions Gilman sets before us” are: “will the virtuous, feminine Herlanders resist the unwanted advances of the intruders? Will the men corrupt Herland, or will Herland’s ideology be maintained?” (Lant 299), implying that Herland’s focalization through men is in fact an intrusion of male narrative authority. Beyond male narration and the centrality of Terry’s attempted rape to the novel’s plot, Lant also asserts that, in adapting, combining, and embracing two “masculine” forms of narrative— “the Story of Adventure” and “the Love Story” (Lant 296)—Gilman “corrupt[s]” her “sentence, her novel, [and] her ideology” (Lant 296). Lant believes in a pristine Herland, existing prior to and beyond the novel, to which Gilman grants men access, compromising its security. According to Lant, Gilman not only fails to “tell a story that move[s] beyond the ‘masculinized’ literature she professed to deplore” (Lant 304), but also defiles an extant feminist utopia that, as a result of this defilement, the reader never experiences. But Gilman, ever conscious and critical of the masculinist tendencies of fiction, does not foolishly admit into Herland the patriarchal ideologies she seeks to reject.

Rather, the components of Herland that Lant alleges undermine Gilman’s utopian vision in fact serve to advance Herland as a pedagogical instrument.

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Lant’s critique of Gilman’s narrative choices reveals her fundamental misunderstanding of the didactic function of utopian literature and the novel’s educational effect.

Gilman’s educational process is one of ongoing, gradual transition, intensified by the layered perspectives of the reader, Van, Van’s companions, and the Herlanders themselves. The multilayered perspective provided by the companions serves as a foil for Van; observing the hypermasculine Terry’s difficulty assimilating into Herland, for example, helps Van understand the myriad ways his own interpretive frameworks operate within a rigid gender binary. As Van becomes more critical of his Ourlandian values and the signifier/signified relationship is thrown into disarray—a result of the incompatibility of an Ourlandian signifier and a Herlandian signified—the definition of the word “woman” becomes unstable.1 As he reconstructs meaning within an ethical, Herlandian interpretive framework, Van observes the codependence of the categories “man” and “woman,” each a stable, coherent identity category only in reference to the other. Additional perspectival distance allows readers to extrapolate beyond Van’s personal learning process: Herlanders are not merely foreign women, but rather a different species of human entirely. As we follow Van through the novel’s course of relearning, these pedagogical developments cohere into a framework of interpretation strongly at odds with Ourlandian values. Van’s evolving point of view helps the reader develop a Herlandian perspective in time for the novel’s concluding interpretive test, Terry’s attempted rape of Alima.

Lant misunderstands the significance of this event in failing to understand Herland’s broader pedagogical project, and she deems it, alongside many more of the novel’s teaching moments, a breach of the text’s purported feminist values. The novel aids the reader in constructing an interpretive framework to justify Gilman’s choices, rather than consigning them to a “corrupt[ion]” contrary to her political and social projects. This framework understands rape as merely a horrible crime, as opposed to the horrible 1. In With Her in Ourland, Gilman’s 1916 sequel to Herland, “Ourland” is Van, Jeff, and Terry’s world of origin. I will use this term and variations on it to refer to the world from which Van and the reader originate.

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crime of specifically women’s lives. Herland, as a pedagogical project, is a project of transforming consciousness: by leading Van through a world incompatible with his own, Gilman forces Van—and her readers—to confront and reject the deep and often invisible misogynist biases of her own contemporary culture.

Gilman adamantly believed fiction affects social and material conditions, claiming, “The makers of books are the makers of thoughts and feelings for people in general. Fiction is the most popular form in which this world-food is taken” (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 6). Gilman’s idea of “worldfood” suggests the substantiality and even the near-materiality of the ideas literature expounds; as critic Carole Kessler asserts, “Gilman subscribes to a literature that can be called cultural work, can enact social changes, can function as social action, can convey alternative versions of human action” (CPG, 6). Gilman does this in Herland through an emphasis “upon process [and] upon technique,” instead of “narrowly upon goals” (DTD, xvii), a focus that, contrary to Lant’s assertion, mandates a male presence within the text. As they enter Herland, the male travelers “confront reversals of their previous sense of everyday life” which throw them into a state “of ambiguity and transition” (CPG, 71). This process of transition and translation by which Van evaluates Ourlandian language, cultural values, events, and behavior from a Herlandian perspective is the novel’s foremost pedagogical device, and necessitates Van’s foreign, male presence. But translation is an imperfect art that risks complicating the concepts it attempts to communicate intact. Kessler asserts that “Gilman deliberately invokes misogynist mythology so that she can demonstrate its false nature as unverified assumption” (CPG, 71), which Gilman accomplishes by showing the absolute impossibility of importing Ourlandian truths into Herland intact. Ourlandian values become incoherent without certain sexist frameworks of meaning to uphold them. As Van discovers the arbitrariness of femininity, he recognizes his own imprisonment in the viselike grip of the Ourland gender binary and slowly pushes his interpretive frameworks beyond it. As his consciousness evolves, words lose the ability to dictate women’s inferior social status that they possess in Ourland. By revealing the culturally contingent nature of 12

language, identity, and meaning, the novel’s ongoing process of translation enables a radical reimagining of culture and individual behavior; the sanctity of Ourlandian values is lost in translation.

Lant discusses the didacticism of Herland, noting that the comparisons the Herlandians draw between their world and Van, Jeff, and Terry’s world “are always educational; they change our minds and our consciousness just as they seem to reshape the narrator’s consciousness about the inevitability or ‘naturalness’ of sex-roles and sexuality” (Lant 294). Gilman intended Herland to be a pedagogical instrument and employed narrative techniques to that end, exploiting the traveler’s function in science and utopian fiction.

Van, Jeff, and Terry are paired with Herlandian tutors and embark on a learning process that constitutes the majority of the novel. Even outside their language-learning sessions, their tutors chaperone them and often engage them in casual catechisms about Ourland, sobering the trio with the morbid realities of poverty, disease, and discrimination. These moments of learning and realization lead the reader, along with the trio, through a process of ideological realization, disassociation from traditional values, and growth into new frameworks of belief. This happens time and time again: Zava prompts them to consider sexual double standards when she asks why women, but not men, are called virgins before “mating” (Herland 47), and she forces them to realize their paternalistic self-delusion—that men gallantly liberate women from work—by prompting Jeff to admit that “seven or eight million” (H 62) impoverished women have to work. Van observes: “their lines of interrogation would gradually surround us and drive us in till we found ourselves up against some admissions we did not want to make” (H 52). The trio exhibits the potential of the traveler convention in utopian literature to help readers observe and critique their own (presumably) internalized principles.

This does not fully refute Lant’s critique—why are the travelers men?

(Does this not further the likelihood of their “rape” of the text?) Their presence allows a more thorough evaluation of the text’s “feminist body” (Lant 292). Critic Georgia Johnson asserts that the use of three men “makes them more representative of their culture than one man would be,” and that Van, 13

Jeff, and Terry are Gilman’s “caricatur[es] of recognizable attitudes towards women” (Johnson 56). Each of the men represents a different stereotypical male attitude, but their function is not primarily to depict how diverse “attitudes degrade and demoralize” (Johnson 56). Having three men in Herland with strongly typified personalities complicates the pedagogical process by providing additional opportunities for observation, critique, and self-reflection well beyond those offered by the formal Herlandian education. Each individual does not just compare himself to the new culture but also to his companions who, although different, together represent a set of cultural mores he subscribes to as well. Gilman does not just present the “machismo-aggressive” Terry and the “balanced“ and “reasonable” Jeff as clichés of masculinity for Van’s and our own critique: she forces Van to realize that he, although temperate and understanding, is nonetheless a product of the same culture that produces the masculinities of his friends that he comes to reject (Johnson 56). Therefore, he possesses the same “machismo-aggressive” and exaggeratedly-paternalist ethical and evaluative frameworks that his friends do.

Van’s increasingly critical attention to his friends’ characters reflects his own evolution as he absorbs Herlandian cultural norms. At the outset of the novel, Van describes Jeff as “full of chivalry and sentiment” and lauds him for “idealiz[ing] women in the best Southern style” (H 11). Eventually, however, Van realizes that this idealization is founded on the presumption of women’s weakness. Jeff “idealized women,” Van explains, “and was always looking for a chance to ‘protect’ or to ‘serve’ them,” when the Herlanders needed “neither protection nor service.” Jeff’s formerly commendable “gallantry” has become a “difficulty.” Van’s final critique of Terry is far more severe, but remains similar in substance – Terry’s strengths on Ourland are morally objectionable on Herland. Initially, Van professes to like him, and calls Terry “a man’s man, very much so, generous and brave and clever” (H 11). But even at this early point he describes Terry circuitously, avoiding what we learn to be Terry’s “machismo-aggress[ion]” (Johnson 56) and full-blown violent predation, but calling Terry’s “views about women” not “anything so polite as ideals” and calling his character “the limit” 14

(H 11). The extremity of his companions’ personalities initially promises just a quirky and amusing expedition dynamic, but once within Herland, it forces Van to revise his own ethical system as these characters personalities reveal themselves. Jeff and Terry exaggerate misogynist Ourlandian qualities that would be invisible without Herland’s foil. As they remain in Herland, Terry’s conduct becomes more and more abhorrent; Van confesses that he “hated to admit […] how much Terry had sunk in [his] esteem” (H 75), and believes Jeff feels the same. “At home,” he says, “We had measured [Terry] with other men, and, though we knew his failings, he was by no means an unusual type. We knew his virtues too, and they had always seemed more prominent than the faults” (H 75). At home, Terry is embedded in Van’s notion of the “usual,” which is determined by Ourland’s structuring (and necessarily invisible) systems of meaning, language, and valuation, systems that forgive and even exalt Terry’s “man’s man” mentality. Herland, however, throws Ourland’s epistemology into sharp relief and helps Van to realize the deplorable nature of the Ourlandian “usual.” In Ourland, each of the three is “by no means […] unusual”; in Herland, their differences are so exaggerated that Van realizes the skewing effects of Ourland upon his perceptions of the world. This layering of perspective is necessary for the novel’s rigorous interrogation of Ourlandian meaning. During his stay in Herland, Van not only learns the Herlanders’ language, but also undergoes a process of unlearning that exposes the complex cultural definitions underlying his language.

Van begins to question his definition of woman almost immediately upon arrival in Herland. The travelers find themselves surrounded by older women that Terry deems “Colonels” (H 22) and whom the trio initially writes off as unimportant because, as Van admits, “‘woman’ in the abstract is young […] and charming” (H 22). The powerful presence of the “Colonels” who seize and confine them is contrary to Van’s idea of middle-aged women who “pass off the stage” (H 22) as they age and thus implicitly exit the category of “woman.” Unlike Van, who immediately begins to reflect and redefine his conception of “woman,” Terry clings fast to his definition, which becomes increasingly inconsistent and absurd. He excludes the “Col15

onels” from his fantasy of “Feminisa” (H 9) and hopes instead to engage with the country’s “real girls” (H 31)—presumably “young,” “charming” and sexually available. He reinforces Van’s earlier observation of woman “in the abstract” and denies the “Colonels” occupancy in his definition of women because they are not “real girls.” The Herlanders’ behavior towards the travelers is uncomplicated by gender bias: Jeff notes, “They don’t seem to notice our being men […] They treat us—well—just as they do one another” (H 32). Unlike the travelers, who initially adjust their behavior towards the Herlanders because of their femininity, the Herlanders treat the male travelers simply as fellow humans. To them, the travelers’ maleness is only “a minor incident” (H 32). When after a lecture, Terry is surrounded by only Herlandians who lack any identifiable feminine traits, he denounces their womanhood entirely: “Call those girls!” he complains, “Boys! Nothing but boys” (H 87). Without the physically feminine characteristics that identify women in Ourland, and because they do not unquestioningly exalt Terry, these Herlanders do not meet Terry’s standards for womanhood and immediately become men to him. But Terry does not merely denounce unfeminine women as men—he denounces them as inhuman. As the Herlanders discover more and more about Ourland, Terry exasperatedly exclaims, “They aren’t human—they’re just a pack of Fe-Fe-Females!” (H 81). And the travelers’ Herlandian tutors advance the critique Terry’s unreasonable rigidity makes explicit; Somel insists that, beyond “distinctive features” of sex, there are “characteristics enough which belong to People” (H 90). Van, she says, is “more like [them]—like People” (H 90). This is high praise, and also a radically reorienting perspective: in behaving towards the Herlandians without the dehumanizing Ourlandian bias against women, Van endorses a category of genderless, all-inclusive human citizenship. Ourland standards for gender identity preclude women from participating in the “human,” and in Herland, he discovers the irrationality and injustice of the Ourlandian bias against women and the ethical necessity of classifying women as “people.”

As Van learns to resist the Ourlandian distinction between “women” and “People,” he discovers the origins of Ourlandian women’s sexual appeal. “Those ‘feminine charms’ we are so fond of,” he explains, “are not 16

feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please” men out of necessity (H 60). As Van struggles with the relative celibacy of his and Elladora’s marriage he realizes that the Herlanders are “women, plus” (127).

They possess some desirable qualities of Ourlandian women “plus” the desirable characteristics of genderless humanity. He learns that in Ourland, women’s sexual appeal consists of differences created and maintained by men. “We men have our own world,” he says, and when “we get tired of our ultra-maleness [we] gladly turn to the ultra-femaleness” (H 128). Recalling Terry’s exclusion of women from “human” and the implicit assertion of maleness as humanity, Van’s evaluation can be read as a diagnosis of men’s fetishization of women’s non-human qualities. And in order to maintain their sense of masculinity as well as sate their sexual appetites, men must keep women in a state of “ultra-femaleness,” of partial humanity. The Herlanders’ status as full humans eradicates their sexual appeal: Van declares that Herland is “anything but seductive” (H 128) and that the “numbers of human women” (H 128, italics mine), as opposed to nonhuman Ourlandian women, “made them anything but alluring” (H 128). Elladora denies Van the “feminine [sexual] response” by refusing to “withdraw” and encourage his pursuit and instead provides “a little too much of her society,” and so “obtrud[es] in the foreground of [his] consciousness as a Fact,” or, as a desexualized human and “Ideal mind” (H 128). Van essentially quells his libido in a number of days, after a period of contemplation—an exceptional feat, and one that allows Gilman to elaborate the complexities of women’s dehumanization and the consequences of denying women “human” status.

Terry’s ideals emerge as more regressive and dangerous as the novel progresses. Unlike Van and Jeff, “Terry [comes] to no such conclusion[s]” (H 60) about Herlanders and masculine conceptions of Ourlandian women. When Van admits his sunken opinion of Terry, he explains that Terry’s “intense masculinity seemed only fit complement to [the] intense femininity” (H 75) of Ourlander women, further emphasizing the binary structure of Terry’s gender ideology. Terry becomes almost a parody of performative masculinity and misogyny as Van’s perception slowly aligns itself with the Herlanders’. Terry sinks dramatically in Van and Jeff’s esteem, and Van’s 17

observations reveal that Terry is making a child- or animal-like spectacle of himself before the Herlanders, one that warrants condescension, disgust, and embarrassment. Van notes that Terry would “storm and flourish quite a good deal” (H 66) although “nothing seemed to amuse [the Herlanders] more; they would gather around and watch him as if it was an exhibition, politely, but with evident interest” (H 66). When Van admits his tarnished opinion of Terry, he explains that Terry’s “intense masculinity” is “all out of drawing” (H 75). “Measur[ing]” (H 75) Terry against Herlanders allows Van to diagnose the binary structure of Terry’s gender ideology and the misogyny of his ideals and behaviors that spring from it. Van’s acquired ability to diagnose Terry’s misogyny demonstrates his ability to diagnose the underlying binary structure of Ourlandian gender ideology. Gilman must enlist male Ourlanders to be her novel’s travelers since Van’s maleness and the multiplicity of the travelers are what enable the shortcomings of the binary of male human/woman other to emerge organically within the novel.

Although Lant concedes that Gilman “cannot delineate Herland without characterizing its relation to men” (Lant 298), she insists that this male presence goes beyond necessity and overwhelms Gilman’s attempted feminist ethos. She conceives of Herlanders as extant within the same gender binary as Ourlandian women, and rebukes Gilman for permitting male entrance to the text and jeopardizing Herland’s utopian separatism. In implying that Gilman succumbs to the binary structuring of gender—women must be characterized by their relation to men—she herself lets that binary obscure her reading of Herland and underestimates the scope of Gilman’s imaginative project. If the travelers were the men of Ourland and the Herlanders were the women of Ourland, as Lant seems to infer, the travelers and the Herlanders would indeed need each other to maintain coherent identities, and Gilman would be depending on precisely the gender ideology she hopes to reject. But Lant’s reading of Herland is not nearly as radical as Gilman’s writing of it, for the travelers are both the men and women of Ourland, and the Herlanders are an entirely different species of human.

Such a defense of Herland hinges upon premises later popularized by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, in which she argues for dichotomous 18

but mutually exclusive categories of “man” and “woman.” De Beauvoir writes, “[Woman] is defined and differentiated with reference to man[…] she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (de Beauvoir 13). Furthermore, it is through this act of othering that man erects and maintains himself as a subject. “The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One” (de Beauvoir 14), she writes. In Terry’s case, we can also conclude that a man’s establishment of himself “as the One” requires the existence of the Other, and therefore, the enforcement of Othered status. Without the Other, the One ceases to be the One, “the Subject,” “the Absolute,” “the essential.” This accounts for much of Terry’s confusion and rage: his foremost characteristic is his gender identity—being a “man’s man”—and without the “Other,” Ourwomen, to uphold Terry’s conception of his masculine identity, he fears losing his status as a subject. Conversely, without a “One,” there is no “Other,” no “incidental,” no “inessential.” So can the Herlanders be the “Other” and “incidental” women of Ourland—just isolated from conventional society and with some cultural innovations—whom Lant accuses Gilman of failing to protect? No: a world existing only of Others would be definitionally incoherent. These Herlanders are not displaced Ourwomen; they have evolved into a different species of human, suggested by the Herlanders’ parthenogenetic reproduction. They are no longer trapped within the dualism of Ourlandian gender.

Their freedom from the dualism of Ourlandian gender makes the travelers’ entanglement in that dualism all the more obvious. Terry’s standards for admission into the category women—youth and “feminine charms” (H 60)—constitute a set of attributes that oppose and affirm his masculinity.

“What does a man care for motherhood,” he exclaims, “when he hasn’t a ghost of a chance at fatherhood?” (H 60). Unless Herlandian women make their existence worth his while by encouraging his self-aggrandizing “machismo-aggression” (Johnson 56), Terry deems them male or nonhuman.

As Terry’s sense of self becomes less stable without an Other, he demonstrates an immaturity and interpersonal hostility that in fact demean him and diminish his status as a subject; without an object, he cannot sustain his 19

Ourlandian subject status, and therefore his life becomes a struggle to exist as half of a binary that has become unintelligible and obsolete. His immaturity, hostility, and eventual violence present him as increasingly alien and even nonhuman. As Lant asserts, “Terry cannot and will not be educated by the Herlanders” (Lant 303). Terry’s refusal to “be educated by the Herlanders” effectively depicts precisely who Terry is, or, what qualities Terry boasts that are so at odds with Herlandian culture. His obstinacy heightens the contradictions between his ingrained misogyny and the humanist ethics of the Herlandians, a dynamic that provides Van deeper critical understanding of the misogynist values underlying Ourlandian culture.

Terry’s conception of “women” includes a number of foundational assumptions. He believes that “women enjoy being mastered” (H 129) and “run after” (H 19); he expects “submissiveness” (H 99) and “natural yielding” (H 99). These definitions oppose Terry’s own masculine qualities—Van points out that Terry is bored by Herland because it offers him “nothing to oppose, to struggle with, to conquer” (H 100). This is also shown in his definition of wife as “the woman who belongs to a man” (H 117). When the three Herlanders first refuse to cohabit with the travelers, Terry exclaims that they “might as well not be married at all” (H 124), revealing that the Ourlandian conception of marriage is necessarily sexual. But in the case of Terry’s exaggerated masculinity, “belong[ing]” in marriage means a husband’s irrefutable entitlement to his wife’s body. Later, describing Terry’s attempted rape, Van piteously relays, “to hear him rage you’d not have believed that he loved Alima at all—you’d have thought that she was some quarry he was pursuing, something to catch and conquer” (H 130). Van asserts that Terry’s behavior does not resemble “love,” when in fact Terry’s conceptions of “woman” and “wife” cast Alima as his “quarry” and necessitates his “pursu[it],” “catch,” and “conquer” to realize the ideals of Ourlandian marriage. Within this semantic framework, consent is an impossible concept—husbands have unimpeded sexual access to their wives, because even in the case of refusal, all “women enjoy being mastered” (H 129).

Lant interprets the attempted rape as a sacrifice of feminist values to patriarchal brutality, asserting that “[Terry’s] action does not simply demon20

strate the violence and cruelty with which he imposes on the Herlanders a brutal, patriarchal world view. His act also uncovers the shameful secret at the heart of Gilman’s novel: “that […] this story is […] exclusively impelled by the ‘sex motive’” (303). Lant’s argument hinges upon the centrality of Terry’s attempted rape to Gilman’s narrative structure: she accuses Gilman of “structur[ing] her novel around Terry’s struggles with the Herlanders” that “end in that most base and inhuman weapon in the war between the sexes – rape” (Lant 303). But Lant’s interpretation of the significance of the attempted rape is constructed within an already “brutal, patriarchal” world view: she loses pace with Gilman’s radical imaginings by evaluating the events that take place in Herland by an Ourlandian metric, precisely the mistake she accuses Gilman of making.

Lant cites the conception of rape popularized by feminist activist Susan Brownmiller in her book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.

Brownmiller famously asserts that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Brownmiller 312). She argues that rape is not an “individual crime” but a “political act” that has served throughout history to terrorize and oppress women and has been justified by myriad untruths. With his belief that all “women enjoy being mastered,” Terry exemplifies the reprehensible myth that “all women want to be raped” (Brownmiller 313). But the notion that “all women want to be raped,” indicates that Brownmiller’s entire cultural critique is first an “Ourlandian” one, and second, contingent upon a historical inheritance drastically unlike Herland’s process of separation and isolation from the rest of humanity. Lant asserts that Gilman allows Terry to employ “that most base and inhuman weapon” against vulnerable women—language reminiscent of Brownmiller’s metaphors of war and military might—and then “corrupt[s]” her novel by allowing Terry’s behaviors to terminate the men’s time in Herland and therefore to determine the arc of the plot (Lant 303). Terry’s attempted rape, however, does not simply bring Herland to a close, and therefore obliterate any further potential engagement with the feminist utopia. Rather, it synthesizes Van’s evolving critiques of Terry and Ourlandian values, demonstrating the ways marital 21

rape in Herland is, in stark contrast to Ourland, an absurd, degrading, and most importantly unfathomable act.

Because the Herlanders are not the “all women” to whom Brownmiller refers, Gilman does not “corrupt” her novel with Terry’s attempted rape.

By including it, she reveals the evolution of Van’s ideology and the efficacy of the novel’s pedagogical work. Terry’s crime seems more abhorrent in Herland because there are no preexisting cultural structures that endorse and obscure rape as violence and violation. When Brownmiller explains, “Rape is something awful that happens to females: it is the dark at the top of the stairs […and] unless we watch our step it might become our destiny” (Brownmiller 313), she makes a dramatic claim about the power of rape culture to inscribe psychological fear. Women’s psychological “train[ing] to be rape victims,” and men’s belief that “all women want to be raped” (Brownmiller 312, 313) are forms of indoctrination internalized early in life, before people even “learn to read” (Brownmiller 313). In Herland, however, rape is not something that “happens to” anybody, and Alima certainly has not lived her life fearing rape “at the top of the stairs.” Van reminds us that “a court in [his] country” (H 131) would have deemed Terry “quite ‘within his rights’” (H 131), heightening the extremity of Ourland’s biases by evoking these differences in the aftermath of a crime that the novel situates as unacceptable and absurd. Although Alima is enraged—and in fact wants Terry killed—her anger does not stem from a lifelong fear of rape. Gilman ensures this by eradicating men from Herland two-thousand years before the story’s present, with all the women “who remember[ed] men” (H 58) long dead, providing the Herlanders with ample time to surmount Brownmiller’s brand of psychological training. Gilman does not nearly subject Alima to the women’s feared “destiny,” the “inhuman weapon in the war between the sexes”; she illustrates and underscores precisely the inhumanity of the crime, which within an Ourlandian framework would have been obscured

by Terry’s “rights.”

When Lant interprets the travelers’ visit as a violation of Herland’s utopia, she overlooks the absence of the Ourlandian gender binary, which accounts for the travelers’ definitions of “woman” and underlies Brown22

miller’s psychologies of rape, and therefore maintains it in her own reading. Herlanders are different biologically and psychologically from Ourland women; they are not the “inessential,” but entirely human without reference to men. Van’s experience with his companions and their joint semiotic evolution (or lack thereof) are the “process[es]” Gilman employs to write Herland as a pedagogical instrument. But Lant’s incorrect reading contains within it an accurate observation: that it is impossible for any Ourlander to completely imagine Herland. Gilman’s alleged inability to represent a positive, independent women’s utopia free from the necessity of male reference does not fail insofar as she uses the layered perspectives of the male travelers to perform “cultural work” upon the reader, but rather because it is necessarily impossible even to imagine the independent, utopian woman. But Herland is not a manifesto or vision for a positive society. By focalizing her critique of language and culture through the travelers’ experience, Gilman prompts readers to consider the ideology beneath their own language and culture.

Gilman constantly reveals the shortcomings of Van’s ability to accurately observe and derive meaning from Herland as he himself realizes the expanse of what he has not realized. This goes beyond the material phenomena of Herlandian culture, which Van learns constantly through Gilman’s interpolated manifesto-like explanation of Herlandian religion, education, and professional practices. He also realizes his own inability to discern what the Herlanders think and feel, particularly about him and his companions.

Writing long after his experience in Herland, Van notes: “All that time we were in training they studied us, analyzed us, prepared reports about us, and this information was widely disseminated about the land” (H 89). The Herlanders, “with the lightest touch […] had figured out a sort of skeleton chart as to the prevalence of disease” (H 142) and “even more subtly” (H 142) discerned facts about Ourland’s “poverty, vice, and crime” (H 142).

Their tutors’ powers of discernment remain mysterious, and Van’s realization of his perceptive limitations is temporally staggered since it is scattered throughout the novel as well as in his own present beyond the novel’s end.

By limiting Van’s knowledge of the increasingly impressive Herlanders, Gil23

man maintains the possibility of an independent, coherent Herlander identity that exists without reference to Ourland’s gender binary, although not perfectly knowable to an Ourlander such as herself.

The impossibility of extricating womanhood from Ourlandian values does not foreclose Gilman’s project; in fact, it expands the project’s potential. Gilman’s “utopian vision” is of a vast expansion of semantic possibility, “reveal[ing] a world of possibilities and potentials available to women” (CPG, 69). The Herlanders hope “to reestablish a bi-sexual state” (H 88) is not their yearning to be reunited with the male “One,” but the successful conclusion of Gilman’s “thought-experiment” (CPG, 69). She has “emulated the scientific method” by “removing one variable to discover how another will function on its own” (CPG, 69) and “force[ed] readers to question boundaries defining behavior assumed acceptable on the basis of gender” (CPG, 7). Kessler argues that “fiction presents to our imaginations concrete possibilities that we may not have realized” (CPG, 6), suggesting that, although utopias are not themselves concrete, the possibilities they reveal as they upend accepted cultural and semantic orders are. Thus, we must take Herland’s process of ontological upheaval, facilitated by the male travelers, as more significant to Herland’s effectiveness as an educative tool than its coherence as a pristine and unviolated feminist utopia. Gilman provides through fiction not a detailed “blueprint” (CPG, 80) of a society in which woman is “One,” but an investigation and critique of gender ideology that exposes the power of sexist cultural values to permeate language and determine the material, physical realities of women.

Works Cited Brownmiller, Susan. “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape.” In The

Essential Feminist Reader 2007, edited by Estelle B. Friedman, 311-317.

New York: Random House, 2007.

De Beauvoir, Simone. “‘Introduction’ to The Second Sex.” In The Second 24

Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory 1997, edited by Linda J. Nicholson, 11-18. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland, the Yellow Wall-Paper, and Selected Writings. Edited by Denise D. Knight. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Johnson-Bogart, Kim. “The Utopian Imagination of Charlotte Perkins

Gilman: Reconstruction of Meaning in ‘Herland.’” Pacific Coast Philosophy 27, no. 1/2 (1992): 85-92.

Johnston, Georgia. “Three Men in Herland: Why The Enter the Text.”

Utopian Studies, no. 4 (1991): 55-59.

Kessler, Carol Farley. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Towards Utopia

with Selected Writers. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Kessler, Carol Farley. Introduction to Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by

United States Women Before 1950, edited by Carol Farley Kessler.

Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press: 1984.

Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Rape of the Text: Charlotte Gilman’s

Violation of Herland.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8, no. 2

(1990): 291-308.

25

Between the Acts: A Literary Call to Arms

By Grace Schwartzenberger

I

n her final novel Between the Acts, posthumously published in 1941, Virginia Woolf explores what it means to produce a work of art in a time of war. This final work can be seen as an attempt to break free from the conventions of the novel, to explore a new form of metafictional prose-poetry that questions the value and purpose of the art inside it as well as the art of the novel itself. Over ten years earlier, Woolf expressed in her diary a desire to create this new novelistic form: “I think it must be something in this line — though I can’t now see what. Away from facts: free; yet concentrated; prose yet poetry; a novel & a play” (Woolf, Diary v.3 p.128). Preceded by The Waves (1931), another of Woolf’s literary experiments infused with elements of the dramatic, Between the Acts marks a departure from her previous novels. The Waves, a collection of monologues voiced by six characters across multiple decades, indeed fulfills the vision described in Woolf’s diary. It drifts fluidly between poetry and prose, its sections separated by lyrical descriptions of the time of day. But Between the Acts combines theatre and literature in an entirely new form, the very structure of which fundamentally transforms the relationship between the text and its readers. Set in the liminal space of “Mid-summer, 1939,” in what Patricia Klindienst Joplin views as “the last interval of ‘normal’ life before Britain ceased to be a spectator and became an actor in the war,” the novel represents a shift in the function of the work of art (92). No longer can the frivolous entertainment of peacetime suffice as a worthy endeavor; rather, Woolf suggests that the art of modernity must bear a new social responsibility.

In Between the Acts, Giles Oliver’s dramatic reaction to the pageant in light of the atrocities of war reflects this shift in the reception of art and the modern individual’s growing sense of social responsibility in wartime. His 26

inability to fulfill his civic duty toward humanity tortures him, and he feels that “this afternoon he wasn’t Giles Oliver come to see the villagers act their annual pageant; manacled to a rock he was, and forced passively to behold indescribable horror” (Woolf BA 60). The art of modernity produced in a time of war must accomplish something more, must enlighten, inspire, and bring together its audience members. It has a social responsibility that is twofold: to compel its audience to think about the world and their impact on it, and to unite people in an act of communal creation. By appropriating the traditional form of the Edwardian pageant-play through her surrogate author Miss La Trobe, Woolf creates a metafictional work of art that functions on many levels as a literary call to arms, a declaration of the new art of modernity and an invocation to audience and readers alike to act their own parts in the world.

Woolf introduces the emerging social responsibility of art through the news stories read by the inhabitants of Pointz Hall at the beginning of the novel, far before the pageant even begins. When Isa Oliver reads the newspaper in the library of Pointz Hall, taking it from her father-in-law’s sleeping hand, she experiences the powerful impact art can have on social consciousness. The narrator suggests that “for [Isa’s] generation the newspaper was a book,” simultaneously indicating a widening of the social consciousness of the modern individual and an increase in the entertainment- or shock-value of modern life (BA 20). When Isa reads the news report of the rape of a young girl at Whitehall, a story so shocking and “fantastic” it could very well have come out of a novel, she experienecs a visceral reimagining of the scene of the crime: That was real; so real that on the mahogany door panels she saw the Arch in Whitehall; through the Arch the barrack room; in the barrack room the bed, and on the bed the girl was screaming and hitting him about the face, when the door (for in fact it was a door) opened and in came Mrs. Swithin carrying a hammer. (BA 20)

''Isa experiences a melding of art and life, witnessing the power of art to open one’s eyes and make one feel a reality. Just as the war crimes on the home front have acquired a shockingly fictional quality, the “art” of 27

modernity has gained a social dimension, informing its audiences of the social issues and atrocities that surround them. The story has a powerful impact on Isa even beyond transporting her to the scene of the crime, as the mere thought of the story haunts her throughout the novel. The girl’s scream rings in her ears even while thinking about the mundane details of the pageant: Every year they said, would it be wet or fine; and every year it was — one or the other. The same chime followed the same chime, only this year beneath the chime she heard: “The girl screamed and hit him about the face with a hammer.” (BA 22) It is precisely this sense of social responsibility in art made for the modern generation, of the potential it possesses to inform, enlighten, and transform its audiences, that Miss La Trobe identifies with and attempts to express through her pageant.

Miss La Trobe’s pageant, the event that makes up about half of Woolf’s novel, represents an appropriation of the traditional form of the Edwardian pageant-play that is adapted to suit the social responsibilities of a modern work of art in a time of war. As explained in Ayako Yoshino’s essay “The Modern Historical Pageant,” the Edwardian pageant-play, a popular art form that thrived in the early 20th century, focused on renewing a sense of English patriotism and pride in local heritage by “refer[ing] almost inevitably to rural and antiquarian ideals of Englishness” (Esty 246). Its purpose was to remind its audiences of their rich local and national histories, to celebrate the past in the face of the destructive forces of modernity. Pageants intentionally omitted two elements of England’s history: religion and modernity. They were meant to promote sentimental patriotic spirit and community, and any modern political issues or potentially controversial historical blemishes were avoided (Yoshino). According to Joshua Esty in his essay “Amnesia in the Fields,” the typical pageant-play “presented a series of historical episodes linked by prologues and epilogues, narrative and dramatic choruses, musical interludes and long parades” (248). While the pageant of Woolf’s surrogate author Miss La Trobe reflects the structural organization of the conventional Edwardian pageant-play, comprised of numerous 28

prologues, epilogues, choruses, and musical interludes, La Trobe’s appropriation differs greatly in its rendering of English history and attention to the present moment.

La Trobe’s unique representation of English history exhibits a strong departure from the conventional content of the Edwardian pageant-play.

According to Esty, “the typical pageant would run from Roman times to the Revolution, culminating in a final scene where the besieged and glorious townsfolk resist the Cromwellian usurper” (249). Not only does La Trobe’s pageant culminate in the present day rather than the Revolution, it also tells a history of literary achievements in place of military. The victories of the British forces are replaced with pastiches of historical literary movements. As explained by Esty, “skipping such major events as the Magna Carta and the Revolution, the pageant condenses English history down to four scenes: Elizabethan drama, Restoration comedy, Victorian melodrama, and the present day” (260). La Trobe’s appropriation comes much to the disappointment of Colonel and Mrs. Mayhew, representatives of conventional audiences who expect a finale “with a Grand Ensemble. Army; Navy; Union Jack” and cannot comprehend why La Trobe would “leave out the British Army” (Woolf BA 179). “What’s history without the Army, eh?” they ask (BA 157). This substitution of the literary for the military and complete omission of mentions of war undoubtedly nods to the pacifism promoted

by Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group. Perhaps La Trobe’s adaptation of the traditional pageant-play illustrates a Woolfian desire to rewrite England’s history as one of peace instead of destruction.

The focus of La Trobe’s pageant on the present moment undoubtedly marks its largest departure from the conventions of the Edwardian pageant-play. La Trobe’s shining moment, in which she forces her audience to reflect upon themselves and the present moment, directly contradicts the Edwardian desire to harken back to a romanticized English past free of the struggles of modernity. As mentioned in Yoshino’s essay, the originator of the Edwardian pageant-play, Louis Napoleon Parker, intended to distract audiences from the “modernising spirit which destroys all loveliness and has no loveliness of its own to put in its place, is the negation of poetry, the ne29

gation of romance” (Parker 143). But while the traditional pageant intended to “project the absence of historical change…dissolving linear time into the seductive continuity of national tradition,” La Trobe’s pageant embraces and draws attention to the present (Esty 249). In an expression of metatheatrical experimentation, La Trobe forces her captive audience to experience the present moment by showing them “ten mins. of present time. Swallows, cows, etc.” without a single actor on stage (Woolf BA 179). La Trobe then follows with the pageant’s climax, breaking from theatrical convention by incorporating the audience into the pageant. She reflects her audience with “anything that’s bright enough to reflect” in an attempt “to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present-time reality” (183, 179). Such an act requires the audience to contemplate their own role in England’s history. And this forced self-reflection is far from complementary. Rather, a disembodied voice invites the audience to “break the rhythm and forget the rhyme. And calmly consider ourselves. Ourselves…Liars most of us. Thieves too” (187).

Even if her audience is unsure of the specific meaning intended by the pageant, La Trobe’s work is a success in that she inspires people to think, to reflect upon their own effects on the world. The audience is “left asking questions” and wondering if this questioning is in fact “what she meant” (200). By reflecting and drawing awareness to the audience, “ourselves,” who are “sitting here on a June Day in 1939,” La Trobe not only defies the conventions of traditional theatre but also manages to unite the audience in a form of collective artistic expression (183, 179).

The ability of La Trobe’s pageant to unite the audience and bring together people of all classes accomplishes a social goal that is just as powerful as inspiring audiences to contemplate their role in history. Having collaborated to create a work of art, having sat through the “cruel” torture of being reflected “as [they] are, before [they have] had time to assume” the various disguises they wear in everyday life, the audience feels bound together by a strong collective spirit (184). Upon leaving the pageant, they are left with a sense that “we act different parts; but are the same” (192). Thus the pageant acts as Miss La Trobe’s gift to the world, exhibiting a trope found in much of Woolf’s fiction. La Trobe’s pageant unites people in much the same way 30

as Clarissa Dalloway’s party in Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner in To the Lighthouse. Though, as Esty mentions when comparing Miss La Trobe and To the Lighthouse’s visionary painter Lily Briscoe, with Between the Acts “Woolf has shifted emphasis from private production…to collective reception” (268). The differences between progressive artist Miss La Trobe on one hand and Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay on the other represent a similar shift to the importance of the collective. Mrs. Dalloway’s party and Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner each function as a unifying force for members of their own private spheres, primarily bringing the people of only a certain social class or society together. Miss La Trobe’s pageant, however, defies social divisions by reaching the entire town. Upon leaving the pageant, the audience — comprised of everyone from “Eliza Clark…of the village shop” (Woolf BA 83) to the wealthy Oliver family of Pointz Hall — yearns to stay united: “O let us… keep together. For there is joy, sweet joy, in company” (Woolf BA 83, 196).

Not only are the audience members united with each other, but they are also united as fellow creators with the artists themselves through their incorporation into the pageant. Miss La Trobe’s metatheatrical climax is a function of a communal art form that cannot be realized without an audience; it is created not simply by one author but by the entire community. It fulfills, as phrased by Yoshino, an “act of collective social healing, bringing people together.” Recognizing the increasing social responsibilities of modern art, Woolf’s focus in her final novel shifts to unifying a broader audience and to seeking a level of universality that surpasses superficial social boundaries.

Furthermore, by employing a surrogate author to create her appropriated Edwardian pageant, Woolf distances herself from the artistic practice and emphasizes the social dimension of creating a work of wartime art. Through Miss La Trobe, Woolf employs a mise-en-abyme structure, in which many meta levels nest within each other in infinite regress like Russian dolls, to create a Chinese box of authorship (Baldick). Miss La Trobe acts as Woolf’s authorial surrogate for the pageant, and, as Esty suggests, in turns creates her own surrogate through the gramophone that voices her words throughout the pageant (Esty 265). This mise-en-abyme structure has the effect of obscuring or making invisible the true author, of separating 31

any one creator from the work itself. This structure of surrogate authorship shifts the function of the work of art from private to public, mirroring the shift in the nature of Woolf’s characters’ mechanisms of unification, from the private gatherings of Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay to the public pageant of Miss La Trobe. The focus no longer rests on the individual artist but on the impact of the art itself; the art created becomes something greater than the self. Woolf thus illustrates the modern concept famously described

by Roland Barthes as “The Death of the Author.” Barthes writes of French theorist Stéphane Mallarmé’s works: “it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is…to reach that point where only language acts” (143). Likewise, it is the pageant (or the novel) that speaks for itself, the community created that matters.

As Joplin suggests in “The Authority of Illusion,” it is “the author’s loss of control [that] marks the birth of meaning” (97). Joplin goes on to explain this “meaning” achieved by the death of the author, emphasizing the importance of the collective: Meaning cannot be one or the product of one mind in Between the Acts; the focus is not the individual, nor the artist, not “I” but “we,” the group. Communication and community, dialogue rather than monologue, shared meaning rather than autonomy and originality are at issue. (98) Modern art focuses on process not product, on creating a communal force rather than a perfect work. Therefore, the focus shifts from artist to audience, from creator to recipient. As Melba Cuddy-Keane illustrates in her essay, “it is in creating, not in her creation, that [La Trobe’s] true victory lies” (279). Though La Trobe may at times consider her pageant a failure and wish to “write a play without an audience,” it is “her dedication to process rather than to control [that] becomes her way of overcoming defeat” (Woolf BA 180, Cuddy-Keane 279). Similarly, it is the novel itself that gains meaning through Woolf’s authorial invisibility. By distancing herself from the role of creator, Woolf promotes her conception of the modern work of art as a collaborative form with a social responsibility.

As discussed in the plethora of scholarship and criticism on Between 32

the Acts, the combination of La Trobe’s appropriated pageant-play form and this progressive element of invisible/communal authorship brings people together in a productive way. It makes a political statement and provides an antithesis to the mass audiences of fascist dictators rising on the Continent.

The pageant-play promotes community without celebrating the authoritarian vision of any one leader. As suggested by Esty, the pageant-play expressed “just enough collective spirit to bind people together, but not so much as to trip over into the frightening power of totalitarian group ritual” (247).

Patricia Klindienst Joplin’s essay “The Authority of Illusion: Feminism and Fascism in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts” delves further into analysis of the pageant as a potent force of anti-fascism. She suggests “Woolf understood, as did [Walter] Benjamin, that fascism has a counterpart in … art that reproduces a relationship of dominance and submission between author and reader (or audience)” (100). It is for this reason that Woolf creates a surrogate author to distance herself from the role of creator, and that La Trobe hides behind a tree when her audience wishes to congratulate her. And La Trobe’s desire to remain invisible throughout the pageant is not unusual. Because of what Esty terms the pageant-play’s “communitarian ethos,” “Edwardian ‘pageant-masters’ defined the town itself as the ‘author’ of a given pageant” (Esty 248). Though La Trobe experiences moments of intense artistic ownership, at times feeling that “audiences were the devil” and that “this is death, death, death….when illusion fails,” Joplin suggests that “in her finer moments, Woolf’s playwright becomes the author as anti-fascist” rather than “author-as-tyrant” (Woolf BA 180, Joplin 90). By removing themselves from the role of all-powerful creator, by emphasizing the integral role of the audience, and by practicing a form of communal art, Woolf and La Trobe create works of art that promote communal creation and stand against the forces of fascism on the rise in 1939.

In creating a work of art that obscures its authorship and promotes a sense of social enlightenment, Woolf creates a literary call to arms that exhibits the social dimension of the modern work of art and inspires both the metafictional audience and the novel’s readers to take action. From Isa Oliver’s newspaper to the town’s pageant to the novel itself, Woolf reveals 33

that the art of modernity produced in a time of war has acquired a social responsibility to enlighten and inspire its audiences. Ultimately, the text ends with an invocation to the reader that mirrors Miss La Trobe’s plea that the audience members reflect upon their own roles in history. Referring to the story “between the acts” of the strained relationship between George and Isa Oliver, the narrative voice reminiscent of a stage direction speaks: “Then the curtain rose. They spoke” (Woolf BA 219). These final words of the novel, the final words of Woolf’s literary canon, act as an invocation, inspiring the audiences both real and fictional to take action. No longer are they passive audience members, “manacled to a rock” and unable to act (60). Instead, having been made to reflect upon their own roles in modernity, they are finally ready to speak to one another. By metafictionally representing an appropriation of the pageant-play that exhibits the new social responsibility of the modern work of art and inspires its audience to expand their social consciousness, Virginia Woolf in Between the Acts creates a final invocation to her audiences to act their own roles in the course of modern history.

Works Cited Baldick, Chris. “mise-en-abyme.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.

Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Web. 7 June 2014.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text. Trans.

Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-148. Print.

Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “The Politics of Comic Modes in Virginia Woolf’s

Between the Acts.” PMLA 105.2 (March 1990): 273-285. JSTOR. Web.

29 May 2014.

Esty, Joshua D. “Amnesia in the Fields: Late Modernism, Late Imperialism,

and the English Pageant-Play.” ELH: English Literary History 69.1

(2002): 245-276. Project MUSE. Web. 29 May 2014.

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Harker, Ben. “‘On Different Levels Ourselves Went Forward’: Pageantry,

Class Politics and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf’s Late Writing.”

ELH: English Literary History 78.2 (2011): 433-456. Project MUSE.

Web. 29 May 2014.

Joplin, Patricia Klindienst. “The Authority of Illusion: Feminism and

Fascism in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” South Central Review

6.2 (Summer 1989): 88-104. JSTOR. Web. 29 May 2014.

Parker, Louis Napoleon. Journal of the Society of Arts. (22 December 1905).

Putzel, Steven D. Virginia Woolf and the Theater. Plymouth UK: Farleigh

Dickinson UP, 2012. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. New York: Harvest/Harcourt, 1970.

Print.

–––––. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Vol. 3. New

York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. Print.

–––––. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne

Trautmann. 6 vols. London: Harcourt Brace, 1976-1980. Print.

Yoshino, Ayako. “The Modern Historical Pageant: Commodifying Locality.” Society for Critical Exchange. University of Houston-Victoria.

Web. 25 May 2014.

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“A Mind of Metal and Wheels”:

Technology, Instrumental Reason, and Industrialization in The Lord of the Rings

By Doron Darnov

I. Introduction fter beginning The Lord of the Rings, one of the first things we learn

about hobbits is that “they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skillful with tools” (Lord 1). For the hobbits of the Shire—along with many other races and characters that dwell in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth—natural ecology is imbued with an inherent sense of pastoral and environmental value. In their rejection of complex machines and preference for simple tools to cultivate the earth and sustain their agrarian lifestyle, hobbits reflect a willingness to respect and preserve the natural quality of their environment. This respect is largely derived from the fact that hobbits do not equate the value of nature with utility. For them, well-treated land does not just represent their livelihood and way of life, it is also “their favorite haunt”: the land itself carries an aesthetic and sentimental quality. As far as hobbits are concerned, the value of nature is not derived through commodification but through a sense of nostalgic agrarianism and environmentalism that comes with living harmoniously within nature.

Not all creatures in Middle-Earth share the same environmental respect that hobbits demonstrate. Saruman and Sauron, Tolkien’s primary

A

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antagonists, view the natural world as an object which can be used to fuel the flame of military industry. To these characters, nature is only valuable insofar as it can be exploited in their quest for power and domination. At the heart of this conflict between nature and industrialization lie the physical reality of technological progress and the concept of instrumental reason.

As Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans write, “Tolkien clearly associates Saruman with great harm to the environment and, more specifically, with technological progress that comes at the expense of life, nature, and the earth” (200). Though specifically referring to Saruman, this idea also equally applies to Sauron. Not only does technology equip us with the proper machinery to harvest the earth at unprecedented rates, but it provides the theoretical justification that refraining from doing so squanders an opportunity to seize and better the future. Thus, technology provides the theoretical and literal machinery that enables us to view nature as an instrumental means rather than an independent end in itself. The industrial process allows us to replace an aesthetic or nostalgic appreciation of nature with a utilitarian vision that appreciates the material gains produced through the exploitation of nature.

In Tolkien’s work, two distinct perspectives of understanding the earth emerge: like hobbits, there are those who respect the earth for its intrinsic value, and, like Saruman and Sauron, there are those who view it as industrial fuel. Tolkien therefore begins to align the industrial consumption of nature with a sense of evil, because the destruction of nature is used for explicitly evil purposes by inherently evil characters. Saruman and Sauron convert the wholesome and inherit goodness which Tolkien attaches to natural ecology into the oppression and domination of other beings and the earth itself. It is this relationship between good, evil, and nature that I will continue to explore in order to understand how and why Tolkien uses the two antagonists’ industrialism and anti-environmentalism to foster a connection between evil and instrumental reason, where the former is made manifest through the latter. I will begin by turning to Saruman and his domain of Isengard in order to see how Tolkien represents the drive towards over-industrialization in terms of an instrumental and oppressive 37

approach towards nature, and I will consider how this approach anticipates an extension towards the domination of human beings. Next, I will turn my attention to Sauron’s Mordor and Tolkien’s mythological character of Melkor in order to see how this mentality reaches its culmination in the form of total ecocide, and what happens when the ideology of instrumental reason is not restricted to the natural world, but is also applied to sentient living creatures. In doing so, I hope to illustrate just one facet of the critical significance of Tolkien’s work, demonstrating why Tolkien’s message is perhaps even more important and prescient today than it was in his own time.

II. Saruman and Isengard: Power over Nature Because much of my analysis centers around the wizard Saruman, and because much of what we learn about Saruman is revealed to us through his interactions with the ent Treebeard, it is worth spending some time examining exactly what ents are and what their place is in Middle-Earth. Through Treebeard, Tolkien gives a voice to nature, and, in this way, any account of Tolkien’s critique of industrialization must, at least in part, situate itself around what this voice directly tells us.

As Gandalf explains to King Theoden, ents are “the shepherds of the trees” (Lord 549)—they exist to protect all growing things in Middle-Earth that cannot protect themselves.1 Appropriately, though not quite trees themselves,the physical appearance and constitution of ents reflects their relationship to the natural world. When Merry and Pippin first enter Fangorn Forest and meet the ent Treebeard, Tolkien writes that: They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. It belonged to a large Man-like, almost Troll-like, figure, at least fourteen foot high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck.

1. In Tolkien’s legendarium, Ents are created by Eru—“The One”—by the request of the goddess-like character Yavanna, who is the “Giver of Fruits” and “lover of all things that grow in the earth” (Silmarillion). Yavanna is, in many ways, Tolkien’s personification of the mythological notion of “mother Earth.” She gives life to the world in the form of ecology. Yet, After recognizing the vulnerability of her creations, Yavanna petitions Eru to help protect them, and he answers this petition in the form of the ents.

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Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide, was difficult to say. At any rate the arms, at a short distance from the trunk, were not wrinkled, but covered with a brown smooth skin. The large feet had seven toes each. The lower part of the long face was covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends. (Lord 463) Among the adjectives Tolkien uses, “fourteen foot high,” “sturdy,” “green and grey bark,” “bushy,” “twiggy,” and “mossy,” cultivate a sense of ecological materiality that highlights the connection between ents and nature.

Even more explicitly, instead of referring to Treebeard’s “body,” Tolkien uses the word “trunk” and therefore solidifies the idea that ents are more akin to trees than to men, or for that matter, any of the other anthropomorphic races in Middle-Earth.2 The depiction of Treebeard as a figure with “a tall head, and hardly any neck” also creates a sense of anatomical similarity between ents and trees, both of which lack very much external differentiation between the lower and upper “trunk.” Furthermore, Treebeard’s “large feet” with “seven toes each” suggest a symbolic resemblance to the roots of a tree, which fuse and fasten its foundation to the earth itself. Ents are just as much a part of the natural ecology of Middle-Earth as the trees they are meant to protect.

There are two more ways in which Tolkien specifically aligns Treebeard to natural ecology: his age and his name. Gandalf explains to Legolas that Treebeard is “the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth” (Lord 499).3 Treebeard is thus connected to the 2. Readers familiar with Peter Jackson’s film adaptation will also recognize the physical proximity between ents and actual trees; in the second film, Merry and Pippin even initially mistake Treebeard as a tree that they attempt to climb in order to escape a pursuing orc, only to realize they are mistaken after Treebeard opens his eyes and breaks the camouflaging illusion of his “bark.” Although it appears Tolkien’s ents are not actually quite as mistakably tree-like as Jackson’s, Tolkien’s representation is still just as effective.

3. There is some debate surrounding this question of Treebeard as the “the oldest living thing” in Middle-Earth because Tom Bombadil, a separate character who many critics interpret as another symbolic personification of nature, also declares that he is in fact the oldest.

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earth through his age: he is almost as old as Middle-Earth itself. Tolkien treats the natural world as particularly significant to Treebeard above all others because Treebeard can see how the landscape of Middle-Earth has been shaped by the aggregate impact of generations and millennia of external use. Moreover, there is a sense that Treebeard does not merely observe the land, but is in fact fundamentally part of the land. After Merry and Pippin ask for Treebeard’s name, he responds by telling them “Fangorn is my name according to some, Treebeard others make it. Treebeard will do” (Lord 464). Gandalf later confirms this in the aforementioned conversation with Legolas when he states, “Treebeard is Fangorn, the guardian of the forest” (Lord 499). Treebeard is not just a part or resident of Fangorn Forest, he is Fangorn Forest, in name, essence, and purpose.

Yet Tolkien makes two key distinctions between ents and trees: while trees are locked to the ground and lack any means of external communication (except, of course, with ents), ents can not only travel freely but can also voice their thoughts and opinions through speech. In this way, ents are able to use their physical mobility to defend trees, and as creatures that are also a part of the ecology they oversee, ents give a voice to nature. The discursive and critical significance of this voice is clearly not lost on Tolkien or his ents; it is with good reason that we learn about Saruman’s industrialism through Treebeard. As Fangorn, Treebeard represents what forests and ecological victims would likely be saying if they could speak for themselves.

Much of Treebeard’s message to Merry and Pippin concerns the way in which Saruman’s industrialism manifests a technological and instrumental domination of the earth. Treebeard explains to Merry and Pippin that “[Saruman] is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve Various critics of Tolkien have noticed this contradiction, but it is ultimately unknown if Treebeard is older than Bombadil or vice versa, or if Tolkien was even ware of this contradiction himself. Regardless, the point can be equally applied to Bombadil or Treebeard; wether consciously or unconsciously on Tolkien’s part, it is no coincidence that the two characters who vie for the position of “the oldest living thing in Middle-Earth” both have a symbolic connection to nature.

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him for the moment” (Lord 473). Here, we see an immediate relationship between “Power” and machine technology in which “growing things” are appropriated to “serve” Saruman. This relationship also expresses why Tolkien sees technological industrialization as its own kind of domination. For Saruman, as for enlightenment thinkers like Francis Bacon (who first gave rise to the perception of nature as an object that can be instrumentalized), “nature is perceived as neutral, disenchanted. Matter has no intrinsic significance.

It is, therefore, open to manipulation and alteration” (Held 152). In contradistinction to Tolkien’s hobbits, nature does not hold any unassailable value to Saruman’s technological “mind of metal and wheels.” Therefore, placed into this “disenchanted” state (a phrase which has additional significance in relation to Tolkien’s works for reasons I will discuss later), the “manipulation and alteration” of nature comes to fruition through the instrumental reduction of nature into mere industrial fuel.

Before considering Tolkien’s work any further, I will first briefly turn to this notion of “instrumental reason,”—a term I have alluded to but not quite elucidated to this point—in order to provide a better theoretical understanding of how this concept manifests in the world of Middle-Earth.

The idea of instrumental reason, though most closely associated with the German Institute for Social Research, has historical roots which far predate the Institute itself. It was Hegel who first began to tie these roots together in his critique of enlightenment science. As David Held explains: For Hegel, the Enlightenment is marked by the dominance in the intellectual world of universal scientific consciousness. The concept of science Hegel had in mind was Francis Bacon’s, for whom scientific knowledge is potential power—the instrument or tool which can be used to master nature. Science is the key to the control of nature and (as Bacon well recognized) of human beings. (151) Instrumentalization signifies the culmination of a process in which an apprehended object (in this case, enlightenment science) is utilized as an “instrument or tool” for the domination of a secondary target (nature, ecology, and eventually human beings). In this way, the instrumental process operates precisely by ignoring the inherent goodness of both the means set towards 41

domination as well as the object to be dominated. What Hegel discerned in Bacon’s approach to science was the latter’s disregard for the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and the potential good that can spring from it—instead, Bacon valued science because he believed it could be used to “master nature” and perhaps even human beings. This implies that nature and human beings lack any intrinsic value for themselves, or, at the very least, they lack enough internal value for Bacon to be concerned about the act of subjugating them. At the same time, this process of instrumental domination is particularly striking because of the way in which the instrumental value of the weapon is subsequently absorbed into its victim. In One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse writes that “the science of nature…projects nature as potential instrumentality, stuff of control and organization” (153). Just as science is perceived as an instrumental object which can be used to “control nature,” nature is then viewed as “potential instrumentality” and is likewise seen as an object awaiting our “control and organization.” In the same exact way that scientific knowledge loses its intrinsic value once it is set towards external domination, so too does nature lose its intrinsic value once it is dominated by the external world.

As Tolkien demonstrates, the problem is not solely that individuals instrumentalize science in order to dominate nature, but also that this secondary act of domination enables a more hostile third act: the violent domination of human beings. For example, Saruman’s “mind of metal and wheels” illustrates how science, and the machine technology it produces, form the first instance of instrumentalization in which the value of scientific knowledge is arrived at through its ability to dominate others. In the subsequent act of industrial deforestation—the drive to “make growing things… serve him”—the power potential of Saruman’s industrial technology reaches a point of actualization over the ecology of Fangorn Forest. Yet, this is not the end of the cycle. Upon receiving this violent manifestation of the power held by instrumental science, Fangorn is not simply a recipient of instrumental power, but itself begins to resemble the potential for another act of instrumentalization. This is precisely because harvesting and burning wood allows Saruman to fashion Isengard into his own industrial and military 42

center. In the exact same way that science is viewed as an “instrument or tool which can be used to master nature,” nature itself is then viewed as an “instrument or tool” which can be used to master human beings. It provides a source of energy capable of heating furnaces to the point where weapons, armor, and other military necessities can be manufactured on an industrial scale. Even at the Council of Elrond, which takes place well before Merry and Pippin meet Treebeard, Gandalf explains that during his imprisonment at the hands of Saruman he “saw that, whereas it had once been green and fair, [Isengard] was now filled with pits and forges” (Lord 260). The transformation of “green and fair” into “pits and forges” represents a paradigmatic shift in which the value of nature does not stem from any inalienable property, but rather from the ability to convert nature into industrial energy.4 Finally, this converted energy, which is itself extracted through a process of chopping, reaping, and burning—or, in short, of domination—solidifies itself in the form of cooling iron which will later be used to wage war. Thus, as Horkheimer and Adorno write, “[w]hat human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings” (2).

For Saruman, an instrumental perspective of knowledge that seeks to dominate nature through technological industrialization turns into an instrumental perspective of nature that seeks to dominate humanity through war and violence.

In his conversation with Merry and Pippin, Treebeard illustrates how this paradigm shift takes place by describing Saruman’s attempts to learn about nature only because he desires to subjugate and exploit it. In Middle-Earth’s distant past, before the events of The Lord of the Rings take place, there was a time when Saruman would enter Fangorn to speak with Tree4. As Dickerson and Evans note, Jackson’s film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring also portrays this shift away from nature and towards industrial power. They write that “One of the most compelling images in the movie The Fellowship of the Ring is of Saruman’s transformation of Isengard from an ancient, positive symbol of the powerful and wise Númenóreans in a beautiful woodland bordering the forests of Fangorn into a seat of military power: part strip mine, part clear-cut, part factory, part military base” (194). Thus, even in the film, we still see how instrumental power is itself capable of instrumentalizing its victims.

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beard. Treebeard explains to Merry and Pippin that “[h]e was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen. I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself; but he never repaid me in like kind. I cannot remember that he ever told me anything” (Lord 473). This unequal exchange of information between Saruman and Treebeard begins to show Saruman’s unsavory intentions. If he believes that knowledge is valuable simply because wisdom is intrinsically good then Saruman should have no reservations about sharing information and ideas with Treebeard. The fact that he refrains from doing so implies that for Saruman, knowledge is only valuable insofar as it can be used to achieve some external end or goal, and if Treebeard is to discern this goal, it will prevent Saruman from accomplishing it. Saruman wants to learn about the forest, but his unwillingness to reciprocate the favor indicates an instrumental view of knowledge in which, because knowledge is power, an uneven exchange represents a victory.

It is only after Saruman unleashes his orcs into the forest that Treebeard recognizes Saruman’s true intentions. Treebeard explains to Merry and Pippin that: “Some time ago I began to wonder how Orcs dared to pass through my woods so freely…Only lately did I guess that Saruman was to blame, and that long ago he had been spying out all the ways, and discovering my secrets. He and his foul folk are making havoc now.

Down on the borders they are felling trees – good trees. Some of the trees they just cut down and leave to rot – orc-mischief that; but most are hewn up and carried off to feed the fires of Orthanc. There is always a smoke rising from Isengard these days.” (Lord 473) Saruman was “eager to listen” to Treebeard because learning “things that he would never have found out by himself” about Fangorn allows Saruman to send his orcs through the forest unimpeded. In his desire to discover Treebeard’s “secrets” for his own benefit, Saruman displays the same logic championed by enlightenment thinkers like Bacon, who only expressed a desire to understand nature so that they could command it themselves.5 Sa5 There is also yet another way in which Tolkien’s language begins to align Saruman with

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ruman’s instrumentalization of knowledge therefore passes into the instrumentalization of nature; having learned everything he can from Treebeard, Saruman channels this knowledge towards industrializing Fangorn Forest.

Moreover, while Saruman’s orcs “make havoc” by “felling trees” so they can bring back wood to “feed the fires of Orthanc,” Saruman’s second act of instrumentalization leads to a third: the instrumental domination of nature portends a violent domination of sentient creatures. The constant smoke of Isengard presents a continuous reminder that the bloodstained weapons of Saruman’s armies can only exist in the first place because the trees of Fangorn—“good trees,” as Treebeard says—are sent to Isengard to keep its furnaces burning. Furthermore, Treebeard’s mention of the trees which the orcs “just cut down and leave to rot” illustrates how an instrumental and industrial view of nature inevitably justifies unchecked, thoughtless, and violent abuse. Thus, Tolkien demonstrates how Saruman’s military-industrial process rests on a foundation of instrumental reason that consists of appropriating knowledge towards the domination of nature, revealing how subjugation of the environment allows for the subjugation of sentient beings.

As an extension and protector of the natural environment that Saruman threatens, Treebeard becomes something of a miner’s canary as he warns Merry and Pippin about the Saruman’s instrumental process and what this process foreshadows for the rest of Middle Earth. As Fangorn is instrumentalized, Treebeard recognizes that the apprehended and objectified victim of instrumental power is never seen as an end in itself, but is always re-appropriated towards the instrumental apprehension of a new subject. Therefore, the sense of domination and oppression previously ascribed the specific historical figure of Francis Bacon. Though the phrase can not be located in any of Bacon’s existing works, he is often said to have written that nature must be “bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.” Here, we see that Treebeard’s use of the word “secrets” may carry the specific intent of invoking Francis Bacon, particularly when we consider the similar contexts within which the word is used: Saruman, like Bacon, is also attempting to discover nature’s “secrets,” and applies this knowledge to a process of violent industrialism which Treebeard would undoubtedly identify as torture.

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to the instrumental process is twofold: an initial act of domination occurs when Saruman begins destroying the forest leading to a second instance in which the resources Saruman acquires from the forest are redirected towards manufacturing military weapons and armor that will be used to kill others in turn. Saruman’s instrumental approach to nature endangers far more than Fangorn Forest—though of course, this would still be a weighty loss in and of itself. There is, however, yet another evil power in Middle-Earth that far surpasses Saruman and affirms the importance of heeding Treebeard’s message, substantiating the idea that the instrumental domination of nature is deeply connected to the instrumental domination of human beings.

It is to this power that I will now turn my attention.

III. Sauron, Mordor, and Melkor: Power over the Self In all of Tolkien’s legendarium, Sauron emerges as Middle-Earth’s most formidable and enduring villain and as Tolkien’s greatest symbolic manifestation of evil itself.6 In a letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien describes Sauron as “a reincarnation of evil, and a thing lusting for Complete Power” (Silmarillion xvii). This emblematic relationship between Sauron and evil is heightened by Sauron’s lack of physical form. As Dickerson and Evans write, “Sauron’s voice is never heard directly in The Lord of the Rings—nor do we see his face—which no doubt contributes to the potency of the abstract quality of evil he represents” (198). Sauron’s incorporeality is what makes his character as symbolically impactful as it is. However, it is precisely because Sauron is formless that his evil power must be channeled through a physical, instrumental object: the ring itself. Therefore, just as Sauron represents evil in the “abstract,” so too does his ring represent the idea of in6. Some readers may argue that it is not Sauron but Melkor who claims the title of Tolkien’s “most formidable and enduring villain.” Although I do believe there is an argument to be made on Melkor’s behalf, I have bestowed the title upon Sauron, mostly due to the simple reason that the narrative style of The Lord of the Rings, (compared to that of The Silmarillion), leaves the reader much more thoroughly acquainted with Sauron-as-villain than with Melkoras-villain. Also, as Tolkien’s letter to Milton Waldman reveals, Tolkien himself viewed Sauron (and apparently not Melkor) as “a reincarnation of evil…”

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strumentalization in the abstract. What the ring expresses, above all else, is Sauron’s desire to instrumentalize evil by crafting it into a tangible form. It is important to note that Sauron’s purpose in creating the ring is also rooted in an explicit desire to control others. Before creating his own ring, Sauron first aids the elves in creating three powerful rings of their own, but these rings are only meant as bait; Sauron secretly crafts his own master ring “that contained the powers of all the others, and controlled them, so that its wearer could see the thoughts of all those that used the lesser rings, could govern all they did, and in the end could utterly enslave them” (Silmarillion xix).

The ring is a literal instrument of evil, an object that exists with the inherent purpose of controlling others and making them serve its owner in the same instrumental fashion with which Saruman attempts to industrialize Fangorn. Through the ring, Tolkien again suggests a profound connection between instrumentalization and the drive to dominate and “enslave”—one that includes an exponentially intensified version of the environmental destruction carried out by Saruman.

When Sam, Frodo, and Gollum arrive at the Black Gate, Tolkien’s description of Mordor—this being the first direct physical description he gives in the entire work—sustains and elevates this relationship between instrumentalized evil and ecological ruin. He writes: “…here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness.

The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.

They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing—unless the Great Seas should enter in and wash it with oblivion. “I feel sick,” said Sam. Frodo did not speak.” (Lord 631-632) 47

In “defiling” the land to the point that it is “diseased beyond all healing” and so that “nothing lived, not even the rotten growths that feed on rottenness” Sauron accomplishes what we can only describe, as Patrick Curry notes, in terms of a complete “ecocide” (66). But even worse than this, Mordor is an environment that is deleterious enough to make Sam sick and render Frodo incapable of any speech whatsoever. As a “lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void,” the very environment of Mordor takes on a property of evil and aggression. Mordor is not just lifeless: it is also overtly hostile.

This description of Mordor as a place of evil, however, complicates the evidence of instrumentalization that I have already illuminated. In contrast to Saruman’s case, Tolkien gives few explicit details on what exactly causes this degradation; we see no pits or furnaces of the like favored by Saruman, nor any other signs of industry at all, for that matter. Although Sam and Frodo’s ultimate destination of Mount Doom signifies the existence of at least one major volcano in Mordor that could perhaps be responsible for the ash and “fire-blasted” rock, it does not appear that this alone would be enough to account for the evil and malice that permeates Tolkien’s description. If one of Tolkien’s goals in writing The Lord of the Rings was to illustrate a relationship between industrialization and evil, how do we see this relationship materialize in his description of Mordor when there is no evidence of actual industrial activity?

After Sam and Frodo enter Mordor later in the novel in hopes of finishing their quest, Tolkien provides a clue to this riddle, suggesting that Mordor is in fact a product of the same industrial mentality as Saruman’s Isengard. After the two wonder how Sauron is able to feed and sustain his armies from such a “dead…burned and choked land,” Tolkien answers through his narrator, writing that “[n]either [Sam] nor Frodo knew anything of the great slave-worked fields away south in this wide realm, beyond the fumes of the Mountain…Here in the northward regions were the mines and forges, and the musterings of long-planned war” (Lord 923). This passage indicates that the lack of “mines and forges” in Mordor is from the land being barren for so long that the maintenance of such agro-industrial infrastruc48

ture would be pointless. Consequently, we can confirm that because Sauron and his servants instrumentalized, mistreated, and abused the land, it fell to its current status “beyond all healing.” Mordor is the final stage towards which Isengard—and, by extension, Fangorn Forest—is gradually progressing.

This passage also reaffirms the relationship between industrial instrumentalization and military subjugation, as Sauron’s “slave-worked fields” are the location for his “musterings of long-planned war.” Tolkien’s connection between industrialization and evil therefore extends to a connection between industrialization and militarism.

This passage as well as the one before it both allude to Sauron’s use of slaves, illuminating that there is more than one type of instrumental power at work in Mordor. The concept of slavery is of central importance; earlier, I discussed how an instrumental approach to nature threatens large-scale military violence against humans and portends the instrumentalization of sentient beings. Slavery is the fruit that instrumentalization bears (even if, as the case may be, it is likely orcs rather than humans that are being enslaved— though Tolkien never specifies this). The rise of commercial and industrial agriculture—which is only possible through an instrumental approach to nature—produces a need to instrumentalize sentient beings, as extracting nature’s resources necessitates labor. Tolkien’s emphasis on the relationship between slavery and industrial agriculture makes Sauron’s institutionalization of the latter resemble “mechanized, large-scale factory farming of the kind that has become prevalent in the modern world of agribusiness or the agricultural collectives of totalitarian regimes. It is agriculture of the most oppressive kind: that of slave labor” (Dickerson and Evans 191). This “mechanized” industrial process represents the historical culmination of Bacon’s instrumental vision—it is the very pinnacle of our human capacity to view the environment as a scientific object, and, in so doing, “master nature.”

However, the fulfillment of this vision also relies on oppression and slavery.

Thus, we witness a final movement in which the instrumentalization of the scientific process, having already passed into and victimized the environment, now firmly returns to human subjects through slavery in the same ruthless subjugation as the land. Just as Sauron’s ring is born out of a desire 49

to “enslave,” he reflects this same instrumental desire in his enforcement of agricultural and industrial slavery. Thus, it is no coincidence that those who dominate the land of Middle-Earth also seek the domination of all other sentient beings—both of these actions stem from one and the same mentality: the ability to see people and things as objects that lack intrinsic virtue and, therefore, can be instrumentalized and appropriated.

Although not directly related to Sauron himself, Tolkien’s legendarium contains a more explicit example of scientific power being exercised over autonomous beings in a way that instrumentally converts and disparages them. In The Silmarillion, we briefly learn about how orcs come to exist in Middle-Earth. According to the text, the elves believe that Melkor, Tolkien’s villainous mythological antecedent to Sauron, imprisoned captured elves at his stronghold of Utomno, where “by slow arts of cruelty [they] were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes” (50). Founded through a quasi-scientific process of bioengineering, Tolkien’s orcs are a product of instrumental power and reveal how this power functions through an ability to apprehend, deconstruct, and altogether redesign a subject by reducing it to a degraded “mockery” of what it once was. This is precisely what we see in Saruman’s attempt to industrialize and deforest Fangorn, in Sauron’s utter destruction of the land that is to become Mordor, and in his enforced practice of slavery itself. In all of these cases, including the example of Melkor, what we are seeing is the way instrumental power is a power that seeks to convert what is naturally good into a “corrupted and enslaved” version of its former self. Thus, after beginning with a positive vision towards the ideal of scientific knowledge, environmental beauty, and an intrinsic sense of human inviolability, we finish with the appropriation of science as a tool that oversees industrial wastelands and oppressed slaves. Elves and orcs form the “bitterest foes” for the same reason that Treebeard despises Saruman; in both cases, the former of each pair is resisting its own instrumental conversion, the pressing reality of which is forced upon them in the form of the latter.

This contrast between “natural” elves and their instrumentalized orc 50

counterparts and the significance to this distinction becomes even more explicit when we consider what elves represented to Tolkien himself. In a letter, Tolkien writes that “the elves represent…the artistic, aesthetic and purely scientific aspects of the humane nature raised to a higher level then is actually seen in men. That is: they have a devoted love of the physical world, and a desire to observe and understand it for its own sake and…not as a material for use or as a power-platform” (Letters 236). Tolkien’s elves suggest the “artistic” “and “aesthetic” beauty behind a “purely scientific” and decidedly non-instrumental approach to knowledge. Guided by this perspective, elves care for and seek to understand nature “for its own sake” and not because it can be converted towards other goals. It is because elves form such an immaculate depiction of the scientific ideal that it is so noteworthy that their “bitterest foes” are a product of Melkor’s bioengineering—this very mode of creation represents the instrumental corruption of the “artistic, aesthetic and purely scientific aspects of the humane nature” which elves embody. In this sense, we gain a more profound understanding of what Tolkien means when he writes that Melkor creates his orcs “in mockery of the elves.” While elves value scientific learning for its own sake, orcs value it because they see how it can be used to violently subjugate others. While describing orcs in The Hobbit, Tolkien’s narrator tells us “[i]t is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them” (62). Just as Melkor corrupts elves by instrumentally transforming them into orcs, these orcs then reflect their origins by corrupting the elves’ “artistic” and “aesthetic” approach to knowledge by instrumentally applying this knowledge towards bolstering their ability to “[kill] large amounts of people at once.” Orcs are not just a “mockery” of elves insofar as their creation marks an instrumental perversion of the values the elves symbolically represent, but also because through their actions, orcs use these values to wreak death and destruction.

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Conclusion — Magic, Enchantment, and “The Real World” Tolkien himself expresses a similar argument to my own in his philological essay “On Fairy-Stories.” There, Tolkien creates a centrally significant distinction between what he refers to as “magic” and “enchantment.” He writes that: Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose.

Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World. It does not matter by whom it is said to be practised, fay or mortal…it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills. (Reader 73) For Tolkien, any object or product of expressive creation can only reach the status of “enchantment” if it is produced with the intention of artistic “purity.” In other words, “enchantment” as Tolkien understands it is what stems from our willingness to create things simply because the act of creating a “Secondary World” is valuable in itself. “Magic,” in contrast, “is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills.” The “enchantment”-“magic” distinction is the same as that between artistic and instrumental value. Both “magic” and instrumental reason show the world through an inverted lens which is constantly oriented outward towards the future rather than inward towards the present.

According to this appraisal, nature is not valuable for intrinsic enjoyment, but because it represents the potential for industrial power and growth. But as Tolkien understands and constantly illustrates, even internal value can be distorted and poisoned, noting in one of his letters that “magic” also manifests in “the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating” (Letters 146). Likewise, instrumental reason is a power that operates through its ability to corrupt and dominate what is intrinsically good. Thus, Saruman believes in the power of Treebeard’s knowledge for an instrumental end and, in a similar vein, Tolkien’s elves represent the potential beauty behind scientific discovery, but Melkor fashions this potential beauty into a “mockery” by bioengineering his orcs. The subjugating and corrupting 52

impulse that Tolkien identifies as “magic” is closely related to the idea of instrumental power, making Tolkien’s critique of the former naturally extend to a critique of the latter as well.

However, the “technique” of “magic”—or, for that matter, instrumentalization—is not solely confined to the pages of fantasy novels; it also manifests in our very own real world whenever people, like Saruman, Sauron, and Melkor, view objects and people in terms of their external power potential rather than their internal value. Our own rate of ecological consumption would no doubt put even Tolkien’s Mordor to shame; according to a 2012 report compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in the ten years leading up to the study, the earth suffered an average annual net loss of approximately 5.2 million hectares (slightly more than 20,000 square miles) of rainforest each year—scaled down, this rate is equivalent to the destruction of roughly 2.3 square miles of rainforest every hour of every day (State 9). Such figures would only be accessible to Saruman and Sauron in their most blissful dreams—and to Treebeard in his worst nightmares. If our world lacks a sense of “enchantment”—as it evidently does, or such destruction would not exist—then this is because we too, like Saruman and Sauron, have sacrificed it to the “magic” of industrial technology. But if there is any hope for a desperately needed re-enchantment, perhaps it lies in a return to Tolkien’s vision of the simple, pastoral, and nostalgic appreciation of “good tilled earth.” As Dickerson and Evans note: “Before any reforms can be initiated and implemented, the imagination of our culture must be reached, and this is best done through art and literature—especially through myth. In his legendarium…

Tolkien provides just the sort of highly engaging work of imagination required, one that may play an important role in the transformation of contemporary culture.” (4) If we are to re-enchant the world, then perhaps art and literature represent our best means of doing so; after all, what better road could we hope to take to the human imagination than brushstrokes on canvas or the pages of a book? As such, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth stands as a supreme example of 53

an artistic and enchanting view of the natural world—as well as a pressing reminder of what this world looks like when we forget to value it.

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Held, David. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas.

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Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment.

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Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964. Print.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” The Tolkien Reader. Del Rey Books.

1966 —-.The Hobbit. New York: Random House Group, 1982. Print.

—-. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Print —-. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Silmarillion. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston:

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Tolkien, J. R. R., Humphrey Carpenter, and Christopher Tolkien. The

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Print.

State of the World’s Forests, 2012. By Food and Agriculture Organization

of the United Nations. Rome: n.p., 2012. Print.

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55

The Moon and its Double: Metafiction, Realism and the Dialectic Novel Tradition

By Fin Le Maitre

The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun; The sea’s a thief, whose liquid splurge resolves The moon into salt tears . . .

(Timon of Athens IV. iii. 436-440) The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.

(Vladimir Nabokov 80)

A

seemingly perpetual sunset lights the town of New Wye in Vladimir

Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). Poet John Shade and self-appointed commentator Charles Kinbote therefore write their works in a state where neither sun nor moon reigns supreme. If Shade is analogous to the sun and Kinbote, (that “arrant thief,”) analogous to the moon, they wrestle with each other only to find that neither poet nor academic can dominate his opponent completely. Their light shines equally when Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s commentary combine to form Nabokov’s symmetrical novel. Though Pale Fire’s dominant mode is decidedly metafictional, the book suggests 56

both a functional and symbolic model for the relationship between and realism and self-reflexivity—between pure, mimetic art and self-criticism. As such, the book serves as a helpful lens through which to view the opposing generic traditions that Ian Watt and Robert Alter propose in their respective monographs, The Rise of the Novel (1957) and Partial Magic (1975). In The Rise of the Novel, Watt argues that realism is the novel’s defining mode, and he begins his account of the novel’s history with Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding. Alter responds to Watt’s exclusivist theory by arguing in Partial Magic that self-reflexivity is the novel’s defining mode, and accordingly locating the beginning of the genre with the metafictional Don Quixote. The example of Pale Fire, along with the novels that each theorist invokes in his argument, suggests that the two modes can exist alongside one another—not in the form of rival traditions, as Alter implies, but as mutually dependent modes. Watt’s realistic tradition and Alter’s self-reflexive tradition form dialogic poles in a common tradition, each defining itself in relation to its opposite.

The fundamental differences between Alter and Watt arise from Watt’s decision to ignore self-reflexivity and form his generic canon around the emergence of realism. As both theorists write, realist novelists shared a common aim to represent “reality” in their works by creating depictions that seemed, at their best, to be entire and unmediated. The question that naturally follows is whose reality did the realists attempt to depict and what was the nature of this reality? Ian Watt writes that “the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it” (11).

Realism for him, then, is less a designation of subject matter than one of artistic attitude—it is a mode of presentation that entails depiction large enough that it becomes almost tangible, by a means unobtrusive enough that it seems almost to disappear. Watt’s traditionalist assumption that the realistic mode is the novel’s “defining characteristic” allows him to create a cohesive narrative of the novel’s rise that begins with Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson (10). Realism of presentation is the characteristic that Watt claims to be most representative of the novel, for it provides a definition of the genre “sufficiently narrow to exclude previous types of narrative 57

and yet broad enough to apply to whatever is usually put in the novel category” (Watt 9). As Alter suggests in Partial Magic, however, one sees different kinds of “realisms” in the works that Watt excludes from his tradition (8687): if Richardson employs a “realism of presentation,” Cervantes employs an “epistemological realism” (86-87). Realism of presentation, he implies, is an arbitrary criterion by which to judge a novel.

Alter therefore eschews a tradition of realistic presentation for one of self-reflexivity. The writers in his self-reflexive canon make representation itself their characteristic object of representation, thus emphasizing the very conventions that Watt’s realists try to hide. Somewhat ironically, both metafiction and realism of presentation emerged formally from a common concern with for the relationship of signifiers to the things they signified—a common “semantic problem,” in Watt’s phrase (Waugh 3-4; Watt 28). Ian Watt writes that realist novelists confronted the fact that “words did not all stand for real objects, or did not stand for them in the same way” by using language that operated in a way “more largely referential” than the language in other genres (28, 30). Doubtless, Watt here means language that seems to correspond more closely to objects in the “real world.” The language characteristic of metafiction is equally referential, however, referring to its own status as language as well as to objects outside of the text. As Alter hints, the “semantic problem” that Watt describes has since emerged as something of a semantic crisis (“A Question of Beginnings” 7). Writers in the metafictional mode respond to the arbitrary relationship between signifier and object not by trying to find language that better refers to the object, but by using language that calls attention to itself, openly displaying conventions of literary representation, and with them the “semantic problem” of representation (Patricia Waugh 3-4). Thus, readers witness Don Quixote reading Don Quixote or Hamlet watching Hamlet, to a potentially jarring effect (Borges 196).

A more recent example is Pale Fire, whose characters continually test the boundary between the fictional and real world (Nabokov 102). Diegetic writers Shade and Kinbote both demonstrate awareness of their role as creators, as well as a vague understanding that they are actors in some larger 58

script (86). “Man’s life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem. Note for further use,” reads Shade’s poem in a couplet that serves as a mise en abyme for the novel as a whole (IV. 939-940). Indeed, Kinbote’s commentary on these lines is similarly recursive: “If I understand the correct sense of this succinct observation,” he writes, “our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece” (272).

As Kinbote here speaks with apparent naivety of his status as literary creation, he simultaneously alludes to the most significant “semantic problem” of Pale Fire (Watt 28). This is one of the few notes in which Kinbote does “understand the correct sense” of the poem; in nearly all of the others, his commentary diverges widely from the meaning of the poem (Alter 185).

Thus, the titles that supposedly connect each of Kinbote’s notes to a line of Shade’s poem serve only to emphasize the arbitrary relationship between commentary and poem, signifier and signified.

While Alter locates Pale Fire at the height of his self-conscious tradition, it would be hard to imagine Watt going even so far as to label the book a novel: Nabokov subverts realism, after all, by self-consciously drawing attention to the very problem that Watt’s realists were most eager to solve (or at least to minimize). The dominance of such metafiction in Alter’s tradition and the corresponding near-absence of metafiction from Watt’s tradition may suggest two paths that run different courses because they begin in different places. In “A Question of Beginnings,” Alter argues that the choice of where to locate the beginning of the novel genre determines its character and its canon. He asserts that a narrative of the novel’s rise that began with Don Quixote rather than the work of Defoe and Richardson would make “the confrontation between reading and living, the problematic of fiction making . . . the pre-eminent novelistic concern, and not the realism of presentation” (2). Watt’s argument for Defoe and Richardson as the paradigmatic novelists, he implies, relies on a teleological view of the novel’s development—a view that extends from these two writers and defines the novel narrowly as a work that fits within its realist canon (4). Accordingly, Alter’s decision to begin his narrative of the novel’s rise with Don Quixote represents a radical divergence from Watt; it is an identification of self-con59

sciousness, of overt artifice, as the novel’s characteristic mode as opposed to realism.

Whereas Watt offhandedly dismisses Don Quixote from the generic canon as more mythic than novelistic, Alter dedicates the entire first chapter of Partial Magic to a discussion of the work (Watt 85). He addresses his criticism of Watt and other theorists for their overly exclusive pictures of the English novelistic tradition (“A Question” 4; Partial Magic ix): “One measure of Cervantes’ genius,” writes Alter, “is the fact that he is the initiator of both traditions of the novel; his juxtaposition of high-flown literary fantasies with grubby actuality pointing the way to the realists, his zestfully ostentatious manipulation of the artifice he constructs setting a precedent for all the self-conscious novelists to come” (Partial Magic 3-4). While Watt would doubtless dispute this assertion, it nonetheless allows Alter to sketch a more inclusive history. He does not discount Balzac and James in the way that Watt discounts Cervantes, Fielding, and Sterne; and he maintains his contention that self-referentiality is a mode intrinsic to the novel itself.

Thus, Alter begins his book by exploring the metafictional Don Quixote, just as Don Quixote begins his travels by exploring a library.

Yet Alter, like Quixote, must eventually leave the library, and attempt to reconcile the self-consciously literary with the avowedly realist. In contrast to Watt, who does not touch on self-reflexivity, he deals at length with the nineteenth-century realist novelists in a chapter whose title, “The Self Conscious Novel in Eclipse,” implies two traditions. Whereas Watt contends that realism flourished because of bourgeois revolutions in England and France, Alter argues that it dominated the genre because of the geopolitical upheaval of the period, as well as a dawning social awareness of the role of the individual in history (Watt 300; Partial Magic 93). Alter responds explicitly to Watt, in fact, when he notes that the leading Russian novelists began their work long before any bourgeois revolution. The Napoleonic wars, he argues, better explain the realist novel’s virtual hegemony during the period.

Responding to the apparent nature of historical change as a totalizing force, and to the catalyzing role of individuals within history, Alter maintains that realist novelists attempted to dominate and order the world around them 60

(Partial Magic 93, 100-101); they played out the saga of Napoleon merely by attempting to render in type a complete picture of human historical experience (112). These writers were therefore too preoccupied with history to write self-consciously, Alter argues: “For the nineteenth-century novelists, fictional invention often seems virtually a mode of action and as such cannot afford the luxury of self criticism” (102).

Alter nevertheless asserts that self-conscious features continued to appear in nineteenth-century realist novels. With the title of the chapter, he suggests that self-consciousness did not end with the nineteenth-century; realism simply obscured it. Even in the most manifestly realist works, he identifies elements of suppressed self-consciousness. Balzac, for instance, models several of his characters partially on himself (110-112). Nevertheless, consistent with what he identifies as a realist’s urge to order and dictate, Alter concedes that Balzac wrote himself into his novel to better control his narrative—not to represent his own role in the act of narrative creation (110-111). Alter similarly points to the self-consciousness of Vanity Fair, in which Thackeray explicitly depicts himself as a writer engaging with literary conventions (115). Again, however, he qualifies his claim: Thackeray’s self-consciousness appears only sporadically and seems almost to disappear behind his tendency towards realist presentation (116).

Rather than a single tradition with a single mode, Alter imagines two traditions whose paths may cross, causing one to “eclipse” the other. The image recalls a similar metaphor in Pale Fire, with its two seemingly opposed modes of diegetic creation. Shade, the sun, and Kinbote, the thieving moon, likewise enact a struggle for supremacy between mimetic art and self-conscious criticism. Yet the novel’s title suggests a productive opposition—a dialectic wherein the moon’s opposition reproduces the sun’s fire in a way that is at once imitative and unique. This may be an instructive image, for if the eclipse metaphor Alter proposes suggests two traditions as opposed to Watt’s single tradition, his examples suggest two dialectic poles within a single tradition. It makes sense, given the elements of self-consciousness he identifies within nineteenth-century novels, to see self-consciousness and realism as modes that can exist simultaneously, even within the same work.

61

Thus, Richardson’s epistolary novels can both allude to their own creation and epitomize Watt’s realist ideal (Watt 192), while Thackeray and Balzac can typify realism and border on metafiction.

Perhaps these two coexistent poles are most visible in Tristram Shandy, which Alter and Watt both claim to varying degrees for their respective traditions. Although the book is self-reflexive, Watt argues that Sterne’s technique is typical of realism and places him in the lineage of Defoe and Richardson. At the same time, he attributes some of the more metafictional aspects of Tristram Shandy to Sterne’s attempt at creating a realistic representation of human consciousness (291). When Sterne endeavors to create the ultimate “realist” representation of time’s passage by turning an hour of his protagonist’s life into an hour’s worth of reading, he fails, Watt writes: “it will always take Tristram much more than an hour to write down an account of an hour of his own experience, and so the more he writes and the more we read, the more our common objective recedes” (292). While Watt acknowledges that Sterne has created a parody, he writes as though the author’s self-reflexivity removes him from the “common objective” of the novel; as though it is not realism of presentation that Sterne parodies, but “the novel form itself” (292). As Watt sees it, Sterne’s self-consciousness disqualifies him from being “the supreme figure among eighteenth-century novelists,” for the simple reason that it precludes him from being a true novelist (291).

As with Don Quixote, Alter’s decision to dedicate an entire chapter to Tristram Shandy suggests that he feels no ambivalence about Sterne’s place in the generic canon; indeed, he begins this chapter with Viktor Skhlovsky’s assertion that “Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature” (qtd. in Alter 30). Of course, “most typical” is something of an oxymoron, and Alter suggests that Sterne is exceptional among novelists for his extreme fulfilment of a generic tendency toward criticism of “literary artifice” (34, 37). Alter remarks little on the realism of presentation that Watt finds in Sterne, besides to note that it plays against the reader’s ongoing awareness of “the labyrinth of literary and linguistic conventions (Watt 291; Alter 4041). The qualified privilege of place that Watt assigns to Sterne for “very 62

careful attention to all the aspects of formal realism,” alongside Alter’s unshakeable argument for the self-consciousness of Tristram Shandy, suggests that the work may belong to both traditions. Indeed, it seems to contain the requisite modes for inclusion in each.

Just as Tristram Shandy showed its duality in the time leading up to the nineteenth-century realists, James Joyce’s Ulysses played a similar role in the time directly following “the eclipse” (Alter 144). Both Watt and Alter are unequivocal in their embrace of the novel. For while Alter and fellow metafiction scholar Patricia Waugh both note the self-conscious aspects of Ulysses, Watt calls the it “the extreme culmination of the formal trend that Richardson initiated”—an assessment characteristic of his one-track view of the novel’s “rise” (Alter 144; Waugh 6-7; Watt 206). Watt bases his judgement on Joyce’s totalizing depiction of human consciousness, his apparent attempt to catalogue individual interiority as Balzac had catalogued society (Watt 206; Alter 93). A passage typical of this immediate, realist presentation might be Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, were it not to culminate, as Alter notes, in a self-conscious appeal to her maker: “Oh Jamesy let me up out of this” (144). Indeed, Patricia Waugh argues that Ulysses was one of a number of works that proposed the idea that realism was impossible—that realists were doomed to create “epistemological,” as well as literary, fictions (6-7). One sees Joyce’s concern with conventions, Alter likewise suggests, in the sections of the novel where the writer creates an image of unmediated consciousness while simultaneously parodying various literary techniques (144). Like Tristram Shandy, Ulysses seems to embody both self-reflexive and realist modes, such that Alter speaks of a “paradox” (144): How could a work realistic to the point that Watt describes it as “the climax of the novel’s development” at the same time negate the idea of realism? The possibility of such a “paradox” indicates once again that the two modes are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, the modes are mutually reliant in a way that is most obvious in the formal structure of metafiction. As Patricia Waugh writes, novels like Pale Fire must lean on “fictional illusion” to demonstrate the problem of representation. (6). Only by displaying illusions can their writers proceed sys63

tematically to expose and critique them. Thus, in Pale Fire, Nabokov often represents the world in the manner of Watt’s realists while simultaneously drawing attention to the conventions of representation. “The force propelling him is the magic action of Shade’s poem itself, the very mechanism and sweep of verse, the powerful iambic motor,” writes Kinbote, imagining the assassin Gradus in flight (Nabokov 136). Nabokov here makes words perform the very functions they would normally only represent, effectively drawing the reader’s attention to the distance that separates signifier and signified. Beyond the tension between reality and representation that this creates, a further tension emerges between the lifelike autonomy of a character that can expose the artifice of his world, on the one hand, and his status as part of this artifice, on the other. This interplay between “realistic” representation and self-conscious critique is essential to the function of Pale Fire as metafiction; the critique relies on its object for its existence.

Similarly, realism of presentation involves a self-conscious rejection of self-reflexivity. As Ian Watt writes, the realist writers first defined their mode in opposition to the “literary expectation that they would use language as a source of interest in its own right” (28); those most devoted to the realist cause used only “referential” language, in his phrase—language, that is, which referred to things more tangible than language itself (30). The use of such a technique requires a “subordination” of the novel’s many voices to a single voice (Waugh 6). Most important among these may be the self-conscious voice of the metafictional mode, which Alter argues disappeared into eclipse in the nineteenth century. Yet even as realism came to dominate the novel, it doubtless continued to define itself in negative terms as much as positive. The nineteenth century realists rejected self-consciousness as they embraced total representation; they rejected the patronage of Cervantes as they embraced the patronage of Richardson. They defined realism dialectically as they opposed metafiction.

Rather than one monotone tradition, as Watt argues, or two, as Alter contends, one might therefore imagine the novel as a single dialectic tradition of two parallel poles, metafiction and realism; and while many novels fall between these poles, even those that are unambiguously of one or the 64

other look to their opposite mode to define themselves. Works like Tristram Shandy and Ulysses can epitomize both Watt’s line of realistic novels and Alter’s line of self-reflexive novels. At the same time, works seemingly antithetical to one line or the other can engage with both by excluding or suppressing their opposite. This tradition naturally has two beginnings, for it is hard to discount the influence of either Cervantes or the eighteenth-century English realists on subsequent novels. The relationship between the two poles is ultimately analogous to the one between Shade and Kinbote in Pale Fire. Although Kinbote is Shade’s opponent—obscuring, as he does, Shade’s work with his commentary—his is a productive opposition. As John Haegert writes, Kinbote creates a work of art that rivals the supposed object of criticism for brilliance: “In this context both critic and artist, lunar thief and solar source, are said to assume an equal authority and complementary importance, one equidistant between them, as it were, yet finally dependent upon their mutually reflecting surfaces” (420-421). The value of such a rivalry is less apparent in the component parts of the novel than in the product of their opposition, the novel Pale Fire itself. Similarly the two poles of metafiction are far less significant than the novel tradition they run through and form. If both modes have not always been visible at the same time, neither have the sun and moon. Yet visible or not, the novel depends on their sustained opposition, just as the illumination of the night and the movement of the tides depends on the sun and moon always being at odds.

Works Cited Alter, Robert. “A Question of Beginnings.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12.2-3

(2000): 213-226. Web. 11 April 2014.

---. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 1975. Print.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories 65

& Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. Trans. James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1962. 193-197. Print.

Haegert, John. “The Author as Reader as Nabokov: Text and Pretext in

Pale Fire.� Texas Studies in Literature and Language 26.4 (1984): 405 424. Web. 09 April 2014.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Vintage International, 1989.

Print.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding.

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971. Print.

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67

“Mourning Untimely Consumes the Sad”:

Novel Modes of Eating, Relating, and Grieving in Thoreau’s “Solitude”

By Sydney Jones

T

hree years before Walden was written, Henry David Thoreau’s beloved brother died prematurely from lockjaw, spending his last, painful hours in the younger Thoreau’s arms. In a period of deep mourning, Thoreau experienced sympathetic manifestations of his brother’s affliction. Branka Arsic recounts, “he ravaged his body, developing symptoms of John’s illness, as if wanting to die his brother’s death in an effort to blur the boundaries between survivors and the dead” (Memorial Life). Enacting the agonies of his lost brother, Thoreau viscerally resisted the more traditional conception of grieving as a distanced, controlled, and ritualized practice. He did not want to “achieve closure” or to “work through it,” as so many of our contemporary self-help books prescribe. Instead, he underwent the bereavement in some mysterious, vital, and inarticulable way. Though Thoreau eventually recovered from this torturous communion with his dead brother, traces of the experience, as well as his preoccupation with the concept of mourning, remain actively embedded in Walden. For instance, in “Solitude,” Thoreau mobilizes a new theory of consumption and bodily interaction that ultimately clarifies the few, brief sections overtly involving mourning. By reimagining the way we eat and touch other bodies as, to quote materialist Jane Bennett, a “turbulent, immanent field in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve, and disintegrate” (Bennett xi), Thoreau believes that we can condition ourselves to grieve in more open, embodied, and fluid ways. The stakes of this adjustment are high: Thoreau’s 68

non-normative mode of loss figures the griever as fundamentally caught up in the surrounding world, eschewing the abstracted and violent will to power that characterizes more conventional expressions of bereavement.

In “Solitude,” subverting the normative method of grief begins in more grounded terms, with a new vision of food and bodies. Even in the first lines of “Solitude,” Thoreau is already radically reimagining the way eating and consumption operate. He announces: “this is a delicious evening…when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore” (1). The words “delicious” and “imbibe” mark Thoreau’s relation to the night as mediated by consumption, but it is certainly not conveyed in conventional alimentary terms. To begin with, the “I” here is elided: he does not drink in the night, but his body—and more specifically, his skin—“imbibes” it. The mechanism for “taking in” becomes not simply a channeling, a movement through the mouth into a digestive path that seamlessly incorporates outside matter into the body, but a process more related to the early French roots of “imbibe”: “imbiber to soak or penetrate with moisture, (reflexive) to be soaked or penetrated with moisture” (OED “Imbibe”). The reflexivity implied in this definition also functions in Thoreau’s description, as he figures his form as a porous site of interaction between two “bodies.”

Letting the night in through his skin, his version of “consuming” involves, as Jane Bennett puts it, “a series of mutual transformations in which the border between inside and outside becomes blurry: my meal both is and is not mine; you both are and are not what you eat” (49). In other words, the “I” does not dominate and control the intake of the night, but rather two material entities—the body and the night—approach each other on equal terms, merging and soaking into each other in an untamable flux.

Thoreau’s masterful, “eating” self recedes even further as his walk continues, and he claims that he “[sees] nothing special to attract [him], [as] all the elements are unusually congenial to [him]” (Thoreau 1). In contrast to the appetitive body, which is attracted to foods according to personal taste and need, Thoreau’s constitution is radically open. He has entered a realm in which the special, the specific, and the singular no longer apply, as everything is congenial—“kindred, sympathetic” (OED “congenial”), relat69

ed through some vital, shared core—to him. He seems to suggest here that all natural objects, humans included, are fundamentally equal and co-substantial; like Bennett, he has a Spinozan “faith that everything is made of the same substance” (Bennett x). This impersonal, undiscriminating aspect allows Thoreau to mingle porously with the scene, imbibing and being imbibed, not directing his contact with the outside world but allowing it to wash over him and into him. In a society where “to want” is considered an inherent part of consumption and identity formation, proof of an agentive, active subject, Thoreau subversively “[enters] into an assemblage in which the I is not necessarily the most decisive operator…[challenging] the idea…that what people ‘want’ is a personal preference entirely of their own making” (Bennett 40). Refusing to orient himself toward matter through a flawed dichotomy of actor and object, desirer and end-goal, Thoreau instead exists in rich, reciprocal communion with all natural objects.

But this communion is not always idyllic; the energies Thoreau imagines can also prove unstable and disconcerting. As the chapter wears on, Thoreau continues to clarify the darker terms of his vision of the bodily relationality—often in ways that do not involve literal eating, but which clearly invoke the logic of his initial, porous mode of consumption. Describing the habits of those who visit his remote home, Thoreau writes: They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had called in my absence…and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away. (2) Here again, Thoreau subverts the image of the consumer who has constant control over the objects around her—as well as their interactions with her body. For instance, the willpower of the visitors seems to play a minor role in their movements; whether “intentionally or accidentally,” all are ultimately compelled to reach out to touch and fiddle with the fragments of nature. Whatever the callers may believe, “intention” is not the only force 70

at work here. In fact, the passage undermines the very concept of a coherent “I” that could produce such an intention. We are witnessing the guests’ contained bodies coming undone before our eyes, as they shed radioactive “traces” which encapsulate pieces of their essential condition. Thoreau’s assertion that the “sex or age” of the person remains embedded in the trace hints at the ability of the dropped things to conjure up aspects of the forms that held them; the absent body can be summoned by the relic it has handled. Even in the present perfect continuous phrase, “one has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring” (italics mine), the ghostly outline of the ring-weaver emerges, his actions raised before us in the present, out of the apparently immobile artifact. If this is a locus of consumption, it becomes unclear who exactly is consuming—changing, affecting, using—whom. As vital energy apparently passes between human and non-human in a strange logic of transference, the body appears less of a dominating, mastering, and incorporating force as much as a “site where ‘doing’ and ‘being done to’ [become] equivocal” (21), in Judith Butler’s words. As she proceeds to argue, “the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own” (21).

If, like Thoreau, we consider the skin as the surface through which we encounter a world filled with other materialities, energies, and beings, then we must accept that we are always vulnerable to a wide array of unpredictable, transformative interactions. The body is not so impregnable as “modern subjects” would believe.

Though there are certainly vulnerabilities inherent in Thoreau’s new conception of body-object relationality, it also creates opportunities for novel, if capricious, forms of compensation. Contemplating a rain shower, he writes, “the gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing” (Thoreau 4). Here, Thoreau suggests that nature has its own concept of balance and “worth,” a type of value totally unrelated to intentional, teleological, and human work such as hoeing. The phrase “good for me” situates the “good” not as an absolute value, an unconditional state in the vein of “God saw that it was good,” but as a positional, relative—and perhaps bodily—orientation; if 71

some consider nature’s rhythms to be “drear and melancholy,” it is because they cannot see the way that what is “bad” in one sense (the beans will not be hoed, Thoreau must stay inside) can simultaneously prove regenerative in another (the beans will be watered). As critic Mitchell Breitwiesser points out, Thoreau recognizes that in nature there is often “an unexpected return gotten from [a] wreck…but a return that might remain unexploited were one to remain in the sorrow of severed affections” (145). Only by shedding his personal, original desires (the appetitive wants of the farming “I”) can Thoreau remain open to the novel opportunities that nature supplies.

But Thoreau’s new vision of what constitutes “good” consumption continues to be tested. He imagines his wishes even more violently canceled: “If [the rain] should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass in the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me” (Thoreau 4). The predictable, calculated process whereby the beans and potatoes would grow, and later strengthen Thoreau’s body through direct incorporation, is foreclosed. But by detaching himself from a personal, subjective view of the situation, Thoreau acknowledges nature’s overarching logic of compensation: the grass in the uplands would thrive, even as the seeds rot. In this new orientation, he views natural cycles as “good for [him]” in ways more nuanced than the simple augmentation of his individual body; the wild, ever-proliferating spread of the grass across the uplands replaces an agricultural containment of instrumentalized and “consumable” land. Acknowledging, in Butler’s words, that “something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan or project, larger than one’s own knowing” (18), Thoreau gives himself over to a systemic, complexly related framework. The recompense is not direct or normative, but it is there. As a result of this circuitous bodily relation to natural objects, the loss can exist side by side with the restitution.

Branka Arsic describes, “in moving into what has decayed, as if remaining faithful to it, not letting it go, grieving as natural life produces thus its own regeneration” (Arsic). Decaying becomes a process of never-ending remembrance, a scar without palliation, even as it fertilizes new life. The word “still” in “it would still be good for the grass in the uplands”—as opposed to 72

a connector that would mitigate or elide the decay of the beans—registers a sense of these persistent, perpetual, and simultaneous processes of decline and regeneration. Neither is canceled by the other. Both, as part of the larger natural cycle, still carry on. By reimagining what is “good for” the body in ways that complicate a simple, direct digestion of food into a singular “I” figure, Thoreau suggests that humans can find new ways of “feeding” the disappointed, racked body—ways that do not terminate a personal loss but allow new possibilities to co-appear.

Throughout “Solitude,” then, Thoreau rewrites our usual modes of interacting with and consuming “external” materialities. Rejecting the vision of “active human subjects who confront passive objects and their law-governed mechanisms” (Bennett xiv), he positions us as vital assemblages of matter that mingle with the agentive energies of other bodies, human, animal, and object. The processes through which we engage the outside world are not mastered and predictable (as digestion is often perceived, for instance), but are prone to complex fluctuations and non-linear, “stranger, more wonderful” compensations (Breitwiesser 159). But how does this type of bodily reorientation affect Thoreau’s ideas on mourning? As it happens, Thoreau is the first to conceive of grieving as fundamentally related to literal consumption. Freud himself figured the difference between healthy mourning and pathological melancholia as a question of appropriate digestion.

According to his theory, normal mourning is integrative and assimilative, incorporating the lost other into the self’s consciousness, while melancholia occurs when the subject fails to fully process the loss into an integrated ego (Craps 62). If we take this to be a normative paradigm, then a person’s stance as a consumer, a body acting in and with the world, comes to bear importantly on her stance as a mourner. In other words, a basic, ontological conditioning around eating would become a nexus of what Jane Bennett calls “micropolitics”: a field where “bodily disciplines [are sites] through which ethical sensibilities and social relations are formed and reformed” (Bennett 39). This, in fact, is exactly what Thoreau implies, as the corporeal logic he has articulated through scenes of consumption work to illuminate and clarify his brief sections about mourning.

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In Thoreau’s first, longer discussion of grief, he gives a puzzling account of human and natural sorrow: “all Nature would be affected,” he claims, “and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds would rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve” (Thoreau 17). His tone here is characteristically opaque, making it difficult to decipher. But based on our study of his attitudes about consumption, I would argue that this passage has a satirical, almost comical undertone. Playing on the Romantic trope of the pathetic fallacy—Keats’ “sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud” (“Ode to Melancholy”) comes to mind—he conjures a fantasy world in which nature sympathizes with humans by performing their grieving rituals alongside them. Thoreau’s disdain for this model, though veiled, is detectable. The ostentatious showiness of the scene, in which each of the elements rushes to exhibit their own performance of grief, culminates in the ridiculous image of a tree wearing mourning clothes. Nature here has been domesticated, donning “civilization’s trivial beauty” instead of “the sublime’s destructive power” (Breitwiesser 147), a more subtle and mysterious attitude. Consequently, unlike the rotting beans that continue and comingle with the possibility of new birth and new “goods,” these processes of mourning are focused on an “I,” a self that will eventually cease to grieve. Even within the logic of the fantasy, the sun must someday return to brightness; the rain cannot perpetually fall; the tree must discard its mourning clothes. In other words, this is a scene of what Thoreau derisively calls “spent grief,” which Branka Arsic describes as “guided by the interest of the mourner’s self—its sorrow, its recovery—human grief doesn’t infinitely abide with the loss, but instead figures a way to self-recuperation” (Arsic). In Thoreau’s figure, natural elements take on the habits of the appetitive, digesting subject, one who pursues the societal comforts of a straightforward type of incorporation. Her weeping, her “humane” cry, and her mourning clothes are part of a process that she controls and masters. The rituals complete, the loss will be assimilated, and she will once again become whole.

Instead of holding this scene as the model of Thoreau’s ideal mourning, then, I would instead direct us to a passage about yet another tree— 74

though very different from his comrade clothed in mourning—that has experienced a loss. Thoreau writes: In one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a large pitch pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. (3) The type of “grieving” that this tree undergoes is akin to the way that Thoreau envisions meaningful interactions in the world, and especially interactions involving bereavement. Unlike the earlier picture of sympathetic nature, in which the mourners represented their grief through symbolic demonstrations (weeping, dimming, dressing), this tree directly enacts its loss even as it articulates it. While the other modes allowed for a distanced, controlled use of gloomy signifiers, here we are “out where human devices—maps, metaphors, books, adjectives, sentiments—are wrecks, where the thing is before any subsequent description, before its singularity weakens into analogy” (Breitwiesser 152). The tree’s grief is marked on its very being, not in any legible or cultural form, but as a mark that simply exists, and that existing, witnesses the tree’s undoing. Through the model of the scored tree, as with the vital relics that collected on Thoreau’s front steps, Thoreau asks us to really see things (including our traumas) in light of their sublime, unblinking singularity, instead of through an abstracted or habitual lens of teleology. This is a mourning that demands that its subject approach loss not as something separate from itself—something to be processed through the machinery of recuperation and coping—but as a vital part of being, unnamable except as its own unique and embodied expression. It is beyond description: “like a passion,” to quote Butler, “[it] must be undergone” (39).

Another striking aspect of this model of “natural” grief, relating directly to Thoreau’s conception of vital bodily relationality, and standing in opposition to the earlier vision of natural sympathy, is the way the lightning affects the “integrity” of the tree. As Thoreau describes, the scar forms “a perfectly 75

regular spiral groove,” cut “as you would groove a walking stick” (Thoreau 3). In this sense, the bereavement is not figured as a process of assimilating the hurt into the subject (Freud’s “mourning”), nor is it a fundamental, unincorporable disfigurement of the subject (Freud’s “melancholia”). The cut does not disappear—it is “now more distinct than ever,” even eight years later—but the “craftmanship” undertones of the walking stick imply that the change is not purely destructive. Rather, the interaction between lightening and tree, and the resulting loss of a part of the tree’s constitution, in some way becomes oddly additive and productive—without canceling the loss that has clearly occurred. That is, the meeting has not simply radically altered the tree, but, like a craftsman’s working of a walking stick, creates something new. .The tree is now not purely tree, not purely scar, but a conglomerate of trauma and self, coexisting and commingling in strange ways. As Thoreau’s vision of imbibing conditions the reader to see here, mourning, like “the eating encounter,” shows “all bodies…to be but temporary congealments of a materiality that is a process of becoming, [a] hustle and flow punctuated by sedimentation and substance” (Bennett 49). If the self is too preoccupied with maintaining a unified, coherent subject status, she will miss the ways that these unpredictable transactions become fundamentally metamorphic.

Butler, like Thoreau and his tree, reminds us of this bereavement’s unmasterable and “undoing” energy: “One mourns when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one that changes you, changes you possibly forever, and that mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which you cannot know in advance” (18). The process is indeed “terrific and resistless” (3).

Ultimately, Thoreau offers a radically new conception of mourning, one that is conditioned by his vision of fluid, charged, and self-altering processes of consumption and bodily interaction. Where normative grief is teleological and oriented toward recuperation, Thoreau’s grief is open to unpredictable compensations; where normative grief privileges an agentive subject, Thoreau’s grief accepts the ruptures and fluid minglings that constitute selfhood; where normative grief is deeply personal and specific, Thoreau’s grief is incorporated into an overarching, cyclical, and natural 76

process. But why does this new approach to bereavement matter, beyond the scope of an eccentric thought experiment? The end of “Solitude” offers a profound answer to this question in the form of its juxtaposition of two ancient goddesses, Hygeia and Hebe. Thoreau claims that he is “no worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor Æsculapius” (Thoreau 18). Hygeia, as the goddess of health and sanitation and the daughter of the god of medicine, becomes an embodiment of the urge to “fix” the broken human body, to mend the aspects that “go awry.” She thus represents a vision of matter as pharmaceutical, sublimated to personal desire—in other words, “a conquest model of human eating, according to which the ingested bodies of animals, plants, [and] bacteria…are figured as inactive, plastic materials for human use” (Bennett 48). As in Freud’s version of “healthy” mourning, the emphasis here is on regaining power and wholeness by incorporating the necessary substances, figured as themselves inert, in a dominating, controlled way. But, as her name—the origin of the word “hygiene”—suggests, this will to power and mastery inherently contains a violent desire for purity and sanitization. Working against bodily vulnerability and the effects of other organisms upon the self, Hygeia’s model is one of virulent resistance to mixture, uncharted processes, and ultimately, to an acceptance of rhythms far larger and more sublime than our individual designs. In selecting Hebe as the goddess to worship, herself the product of a capricious union between lettuce head and god, Thoreau chooses to viscerally acknowledge the idea “that ontological mixtures of different substances are in fact not illicit but common” (Arsic). Turning away from a fierce and often brutal investment in healing, restoring the “complete,” sanitized person, Thoreau opens himself to a fecund partiality and fusion.

As we linger in the throes of mourning, he suggests, allowing the wounded self to become a point of communion between body and other, we open ourselves to new and spectacular forms of charged connectedness—forms both agonizing and ecstatic.

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Works Cited Arsic, Branka. Memorial Life: Thoreau and Benjamin on Nature in Mourning.

London: 2012. MP3.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke

UP, 2010. Digital file.

Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert. “Henry David Thoreau and the Wrecks on

Cape Code.” National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic

American Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Print.

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. PDF file.

“Congenial, Adj.” OED Online. Oxford English Dictionary. Web. 27

Apr. 2014.

Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Palgrave

Macmillan, 2012. Google Books. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.

“Imbibe, v.” OED Online. Oxford English Dictionary. Web. 27 Apr. 2014.

Thoreau, Henry David. “Solitude.” Walden. Ed. Richard Lenat.

Thoreau Reader, 2009. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.

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A Parish Boy’s Stasis, Society’s Progress: Morality and the Inverted Bildungsroman in Oliver Twist

By Fin Le Maitre

L

ate in Oliver Twist (1838), Mr. Bumble and his wife find themselves

staring through a trapdoor in the floor onto the current of a river “rushing rapidly on below” (255). It is a moment perhaps evocative of the anxiety that the Victorian middle class felt as it confronted the transformations of the Industrial Revolution “rushing ,” as it were, “rapidly on below.”

In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens grapples with one of these middle class anxieties in particular: a sense of moral instability. Dickens’ diegetic society embodies this anxiety, presenting the world that confronts his hero as a labyrinth of false morality and evil influences. One might expect to extrapolate from this premise a criminal Bildungsroman that ends for young Oliver at the gallows.1 Yet it is not Oliver who develops, but society. Modernity, for all its apparent evil, has a saving grace in Dickens’ portrayal: its fluidity, its ability to change courses. With Oliver Twist, therefore, Charles Dickens inverts the traditional structure of the Bildungsroman so that the morally destitute yet dynamic society moves into compromise with the virtuous, static individual. The deterministic form of the Bildungsroman makes the narrative a teleological model for historical progress, wherein social reform is a matter of historical necessity.

The period of early industrial modernity that Dickens depicts was a time of immense social change and fluidity, such that Marx referred to it as 1. Before bringing Oliver to see Mr. Fang, the cell warden addresses him as “young gallows” (61).

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a “permanent revolution” (Moretti 553). Industrialization brought with it a new class system and a new consumer culture; and out of industrialization came a large-scale displacement of agrarian society to the city—a shift that helped mold the new industrial culture. In “Shaping the New Society,” historian John Osborne argues that a destabilization of English conceptions of morality accompanied the broader loss of social stability. The Church of England, traditional guardian of morality, suffered an “erosion of…power and influence” (196). Already by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had lost its hold on the working class, partly by failing to the new industrial cities (193). Meanwhile, the seemingly devout middle class made material wealth “its real object of worship” (194). Anglicanism’s declining hold on morality may have led to an emerging (though more likely intensifying) anxiety about morality among the middle class. As many clergymen no longer seemed interested in helping the poor, for example, members of the middle class tried to take on some of the burden of charity; the proliferation of charitable organizations suggests attempts to stabilize “virtue” by separating it from the declining Church.

As a characteristically bourgeois genre, the novel reflected the concerns of the middle class (Baldridge 82); accordingly, moral anxiety pervades social-problem novels like Oliver Twist. The social-problem novel’s very existence as a subgenre testifies to the anxiety of its readers and writers.

In Dickens’ novel, young, innocent Oliver confronts a society that continually threatens to corrupt his morals, indeed, that seems bent on doing so—Fagin’s express intent is to turn children into criminals. And although Oliver never changes, the corrupting potential of the world around him looms specter-like over the events of the novel. The continual confrontation of virtue and evil expresses middle class anxiety over morality. Of course, the social-problem novel also attempted to resolve the anxiety it dramatized.

As the rise of secular charitable organizations suggests, the Industrial Revolution had given the middle class not only more power and wealth, but a sense, too, of its responsibility to act for the good of society. According to Rosemarie Bodenheimer, social-problem novels “display conflict about the nature and diversity of a newly empowered and fragmented middle class as 81

they attempt to reimagine the roles that [they][the middle class] it should play in the maintenance of social order” (5). Dickens’ preface to the third edition of Oliver Twist seems to give the novel an explicit social purpose. The preface comprises a response to morally anxious readers who see the novel as a corrupting influence, and an argument for why it is not (lxi). “I wished to shew, in little Oliver, the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance and triumphing at last,” explains Dickens (lxii).

The solution to moral instability, naturally, is stability—fixity—and this is the ideal that Dickens works toward in Oliver Twist. Literature is well suited to representing this ideal, because text provides the illusion of fixed and stable meaning. Alongside the social-problem novel, philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill also used their writing to stabilize morality. But Dickens’ novel is far less a codification of morality in itself than a dramatic representation of how a society attains such a codification by negotiating with a stable ideal. Oliver embodies this fixed moral ideal as he is a “flat character” who starts out virtuous and maintains his virtue through the course of the narrative.2 The hero therefore begins his life as though he has naturally inherited a bourgeois sense of right and wrong; similarly, he maintains this morality despite frequent exposure to the supposedly corruptive criminal underworld (79). As Cates Baldridge notes, it is unlikely that this quality is accidental. Dickens, in fact, removed the subtitle “The Parish Boy’s Progress” in 1846, presumably to discourage readers from expecting character development (80). In his flatness or, “inert nobility” (80), rather, Oliver represents an ideal of fixed and stable morality that addresses middle class anxiety. This moral ideal is incorruptible, even in the face of modernity’s most destabilizing influences.

It is perhaps the non-contradictory wholeness of Oliver’s virtue that gives it stability. He pursues ends that he sees as just, and, as he is innately “good”—the inheritor of middle-class virtue—his view of justice invariably aligns with bourgeois morality. He often puts the interests of the commu2. I am using E. M. Forster’s distinction between “flat characters,” who are simple and do not develop, and “round characters,” who contain contradictions and complexities, and do develop.

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nity before his own, as when he says that he would prefer dying to stealing (143). Similarly, his desire to see Brownlow as soon as he is free of Fagin likewise suggests a bourgeois moral concern; he fears seeming “ungrateful,” dishonoring the tacit contract between them to exchange charity for gratitude. There are, nevertheless, moments when Oliver seems to abandon his deferential attitude. He asks for more food at the workhouse and beats up Noah when he insults his mother (11, 37). Yet even in the few scenes when Oliver seems to contain internal contradictions or a hint of “roundness,” it is an illusion. He is standing up for himself, which, given his established embodiment of virtue, constitutes another moral act. This absence of contradiction in Oliver’s character creates a kind of stability that allows for him to represent a fixed, normative ideal.

Oliver is by and large a symbolic embodiment of certain values. It follows, perhaps, that his antagonist is non-human and abstract—the cold, rationalistic ethos that pervades society. One sees the faceless force that Oliver fights when a crowd chases him through the streets for a crime he has not committed (59). Dickens individualizes Oliver by using detailed description—“large drops of perspiration streaming down his face; strains on every nerve to make head upon his pursuers”—while at the same time neglecting to distinguish between “pursuers,” even when they speak as individuals (59).

The scene exemplifies the novel’s central conflict between the virtuous individual (Oliver) and the ideology that oppresses him.

Though few consider Oliver Twist to be a novel of ideas, K.J. Fielding argues that the novel engages directly with the utilitarian ideology underlying the 1834 Poor Law (50). He contends that Oliver Twist complicates the idea of a society in which individuals are capable of working in pursuit of their own interests. Central to Dickens’ critique of this ethos, writes Fielding, is the idea that utilitarian “rationality” is in fact irrational, and that individuals often suffer for their “rational” selfishness in the long run (59).

Speaking to Morris Bolter (Noah Claypole), for example, Fagin explains the spirit of his group in a way that satirizes utilitarianism: “‘In a little community like ours, my dear,’ said the Jew… ‘we have a general number one; that is, you can’t consider yourself as number one, without considering me too 83

as the same, and all the other young people’” (Dickens 293). The logic of Fagin’s statement is of course paradoxical, Dickens’ implication being that selfishness and rationality are mutually exclusive. The author thus undermines the idea of utilitarianism as a viable moral framework for society on the basis of its instability. Cruel, contradictory and unstable, it is the antithesis of Oliver’s static bourgeois morality.

In Dickens’ portrayal, the institutions that once helped to regulate morality have embraced the contradictions and instability of the modern era. Both Church and family exist as perversions of the ideals that they are traditionally supposed to uphold. Drawing on Anglican clergymen’s unsympathetic view of the poor, and on the Poor Law’s abolition of parish-based relief, Dickens’ satirizes the figure of the parish beadle as an inversion of the ideal clergyman. “You have the same eye to your own interest, that you always had, I doubt not?” Monks asks him with ironic understatement (245).

Mr. Bumble agrees to sell Monks information for his own gain, but does so at Oliver’s expense. In effect, the beadle represents a moral institution so unstable that it has inverted its traditional ideal of charity into greed.

A similar process seems to be at work in several portrayals of the “family.” The workhouse is Oliver’s first “family,” and Dickens frames Mrs. Mann as that family’s mother figure: “You feel as a mother, Mrs. Mann,” says Bumble (6). But contrary to the natural order wherein the mother is the child’s first provider of nutrition, Mrs. Mann often starves the children in her care to death (4). If Mrs. Mann represents a fundamental corruption of the bourgeois moral motherhood ideal, Fagin extends this idea so that the family is the site of immorality’s reproduction. Though Fagin’s gang is initially the closest thing Oliver knows to a family, Dickens emphasizes the distortedness of this image. Fagin calls the children in his care “my dear,” for instance (53)—a phrase whose gendered-ness creates a kind of dissonance when it comes from a man’s mouth. The true inversion, however, is Fagin’s initial purpose in recruiting Oliver: he plans to corrupt the hero’s morals by turning him into a thief. In this depiction, the family becomes a place for the reproduction of immorality rather than morality. Dickens once again destabilizes and inverts another institution whose traditional social role in84

volved the preservation of bourgeois morality.

Of course, even when confronted with a corrupted Church and family, Oliver never changes. Several critics have connected Oliver’s non-development and incorruptibility to his inheritance of virtue. Among these is Cates Baldridge who argues in “Bildungsromans that Aren’t” that Oliver’s inheritance of virtue is “a kind of genial [sic] determinism” (82). Baldridge reasons convincingly that this constitutes a problem for the critic, since the idea of inherited virtue stands at odds with the otherwise middle class values of the novel (80, 82). Yet he makes a somewhat tenuous case that Dickens risked this contradiction because of his own experience in a workhouse—a time when Dickens might have fantasized about ‘“blood’ proving stronger than circumstances” (84). I would argue, rather, that Oliver’s inheritance of virtue represents a concession of thematic consistency to formal cohesiveness.

Oliver Twist’s form as an inverted Bildungsroman requires him not to develop as a character, just as a classical Bildungsroman requires its protagonist to develop; it requires Oliver to take his nature seemingly from outside the confines of the novel.

In The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, Franco Moretti theorizes that the form of the Bildungsroman embodies an essential contradiction that emerged at the dawn of the modern industrial era: that between the construction of individuality and the necessity of socialization (558, 562). The typical Bildingsroman, Moretti argues, internalizes the warring impulses of the young era in its youthful hero, suggesting the individual’s progress toward social compromise as the solution to external social contradictions (561). An inverted Bildungsroman reverses these features, so that society itself plays out its contradictions and the individual is the ideal toward which it moves. In this sense, Oliver’s internal stability and virtue constitute an inversion of the instability and amorality of the society around him—an inversion of the Bildungsroman’s tendency to set internal contradiction against the backdrop of historical stability and harmony (Moretti 561).

Oliver’s stability allows society to develop into compromise with a fixed moral ideal.

As Moretti writes, the defining focus of the Bildungsroman is youth.

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The youthful protagonist becomes a stand-in for the “young modern era,” which allows him to play out its contradictions. In Dickens’ novel, the reverse is true. Though Oliver does seem to represent “youthful” modernity, he does so as a stable ideal for its future—not as an embodiment of moral instability or “permanent revolution” (Moretti 553). Beyond his age, Oliver’s innocence and naïveté make him almost symbolize childhood as a state of being. Oliver’s orphanhood, moreover, symbolically disconnects him from the previous generation or era. One might see him, therefore, as an embodiment of the idea of a new, modern age. But according to the novel’s logic of inversion, the contradictions and instabilities of youthful modernity play out in society itself as opposed to Oliver. Society begins on its path rife with internal contradictions, while Oliver’s “inert nobility” is apparent from the novel’s beginning (Baldridge 80). As Moretti writes, the central opposition of the Bildungsroman is the “conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization” (562). These contradictory values of modernity collide most forcefully at the workhouse, where Dickens satirizes the cruelty of his society’s ethos. The workhouse’s purpose is largely to socialize, which demands the suppression of individuality.

When Oliver asks for more gruel, asserting himself as an individual, he is accordingly “consigned by the wisdom and mercy of the board” to solitary confinement (Dickens 11-12). Oliver’s individualism, it seems, is a threat to the process of socialization, just as socialization works against his individualism. Of course, the reconciliation of contradictory values and the attainment of stability is the ambition of Oliver Twist. Society, young and unstable, must reach compromise with the fixed, moral ideals that Oliver represents.

Dynamic modernity thus begins as immoral and moves toward morality, toward compromise with Dickens’ hero. As the social institution whose role is most explicitly geared toward upholding morality, the justice system provides a telling representation of society’s moral transformation. When Oliver first confronts the criminal justice system, the reader witnesses its mutability. Police magistrate Mr. Fang intentionally confuses a crime’s victim, Mr. Brownlow, with its perpetrator: “Officer!” he says, “what’s this fellow charged with?” (63); Fang then proceeds to threaten Brownlow with a 86

bogus charge of “disrespect to the bench” (63). Blurring the line between accuser and defendant draws attention to the moral instability of the justice system. In such a state, bourgeois moral individuals like Oliver naturally must seek justice outside of the law. Oliver beats up Noah Claypole for this reason, and similarly, as the justice system has failed to provide him a just situation, he finds a home among Fagin’s gang of criminals.

Yet increasingly through the novel, Oliver encounters stable, moral, middle class situations—first in his short stay with Mr. Brownlow, then in his longer stay with Mrs. Maylie. These constitute glimpses of a society that is moving toward Oliver’s ideal, suggesting that Oliver might one day find a just and stable situation for himself. Eventually, of course, society reaches full development. This occurs when law serves morality as it is supposed to: the deaths of Fagin and Sikes signify the completion of justice’s maturation process. Sikes accidentally hangs himself in his attempt to escape from an angry mob, while Fagin is sentenced to go to the gallows (347, 359). In both cases, it is a kind of socially sanctioned law that upholds justice—even if it is the law of gravity. The faceless crowds that gather in condemnation of the hanged criminals are a mirror image of the crowd that once chased Oliver through the streets (344, 364). They represent a version of justice that is finally in line with bourgeois morality.

In one sense, the death of these criminals completes the structure of the inverse Bildungsroman, death being an inversion of procreative marriage.

But Oliver Twist also concludes with a real marriage that signals total reconciliation of society’s warring impulses. Rose’s decision to decline Harry Maylie’s marriage proposal on the grounds that she would hinder him, and Harry’s subsequent decision to repudiate his wealth for Rose’s sake, leads to a happy marriage (234, 357, 365). It is a marriage based on mutual self-sacrifice for the good of the group, and it reconciles, as such, the apparently contradictory needs of the individual and society. A union such as this makes the family a place of moral stability, and of moral stability’s reproduction.

Oliver does not marry, of course, but one might say that he symbolically “marries” society by finding a stable living situation with Brownlow. By taking Oliver in, says the narrator, Brownlow “gratified the only remaining 87

wish of Oliver’s warm and earnest heart, and thus linked together a little society, whose condition approached as nearly to one of perfect happiness as can ever be known in this changing world” (Dickens 365). The new “society” into which Oliver moves represents fixity in the face of a “changing world” (365). It is moral, stable, and mature.

The form of a novel has political implications, of course, and Oliver Twist is no exception. As Rosemarie Bodenheimer writes, “it is in the shape and movement of narrative rather than its proclaimed social ideology that we may find the ‘politics’ of a novel in its deepest, most interesting, most problematical expression” (3). The political meaning of Oliver Twist’s inversion of the Bildungsroman lies mainly in its tacit advocacy of a teleological view of history. Useful in seeing this, perhaps, is Franco Moretti’s distinction between classification- and transformation-oriented Bildungsroman (557). Oliver Twist falls in the classification category, as Dickens’ ending is definitive as opposed to open-ended, and it serves partially to give the preceding narrative meaning. Because Dickens reverses the classical Bildungsroman’s tendency to transpose the dynamism and contradictions of history onto the individual, the classifying principle gives meaning to the narrative that precedes it. In its inverse image, the Bildungsroman’s narrative of individual progress effectively becomes a narrative of historical progress. Dickens’ formal inversion implies the inevitability of social change, or alternatively, the need for it.

Oliver Twist’s narrative moves forward with the logic of the inevitable.

Dickens’ use of foreshadowing suggests a predetermined outcome for Oliver, while a seemingly endless series of coincidences advances him through the plot as though by the will of some higher power. It is indeed possible to see the same inevitability of movement in society’s transition to greater morality. The symbolic death of corruption and instability in Fagin and the reproduction of bourgeois moral stability in the marriage of Harry and Rose suggest two potential courses for society: one in which members remain self-interested, and society succumbs to its own fatal contradictions; or one wherein society adapts to become moral and stable, a model that allows for its reproduction.3 Dickens’ deterministic narrative implies that society’s ad3. Adaptation to each other’s needs is the necessary precondition for Harry and Rose’s marriage.

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aptation toward a morally stable ideal is necessary for its survival.

For some in the middle class, the Industrial Revolution might have seemed to sweep morality into its current, undermining the moral solidity of the pre-modern era. Dickens presents, with Oliver Twist, a narrative in which society regains its moral stability by moving toward the static ideal that Oliver personifies. This inversion of the traditional Bildungsroman form suggests a teleological view of history, in which society has no choice but to adapt. By looking at this picture as a whole, perhaps it is possible to see Dickens drawing attention to a necessary precondition for the survival of the modern nation state: the system required legitimacy as much as it did morality. As Moretti writes, the liberal-democratic, capitalist system needed individuals to perceive the values of society as their own (562). In writing a social-problem novel like Oliver Twist, then, Dickens may have been acting out the dramatic struggle of the inverse Bildungsroman. Failing to see society adequately reflecting the values he cherished, the mature and self-consciously moral Dickens was attempting to pull society into compromise with his own positive example.

Works Cited Baldridge, Cates. “Bildungsromans That Aren’t: Agnes Grey and Oliver Twist.” Dialogics of Dissent in the English Novel. Hanover, NH: U of

New England, 1994. 63-90. Print.

Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988. Print.

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966. Print. Fielding,

K.J. “Oliver Twist and Benthamite Utilitarianism.” Dickens Quarterly

4.2 (1987): 49-62. ProQuest. Web. 7 Dec. 2014.

Moretti, Franco. “The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European 89

Culture.” Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael

McKeon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 554-65. Print.

Osborne, John W. “Shaping the New Society: The Transformation of Education.” The Silent Revolution. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,

1970. 191-209. Print.

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“You Actually Have to Take a Position.

You Have to Believe in Something” An Interview with Ramzi Fawaz

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amzi Fawaz is an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin Madison whose research and writing explores the relationship between popular culture and radical social movements in the modern United States.

He is especially interested in the ways that movements for women’s and gay liberation, black power, AIDS activism, and the Third World left have used literature, film, and visual media as vehicles for giving voice to commonly marginalized groups like people of color, women, sexual and gender outlaws, and the disabled. He is drawn to the question of how cultural production—the making and telling of stories in various mediums and genres—has been used by these groups to participate in American political life when other avenues of civic engagement have been denied them. In other words, his work asks how reading and writing books, making and watching movies, drawing and interacting with comics and visual art among countless other cultural activities become ways for people to participate in democracy and envision the kind of social and political world they desire, and perhaps might one day bring into being.

His work is heavily influenced by queer theory—the study of the political and social dimensions of sexuality and desire—and often focuses on the cultural production of LGBT writers and artists. In his courses, he works to reconstruct the lived experience of producing and consuming literature and popular culture intended to transform the political commitments of par92

ticular audiences; in turn, he encourages students to inhabit the identities and worldviews of creators and audiences whose experiences (which might include being a closeted government worker in the 1950s, a gay member of the New Left in the 1960s, a radical feminist in the 1970’s, or an AIDS activist in the 1980s) might seem vastly different than their own. He wants students to see how queer literature and popular culture offers ways of understanding people who might appear radically different from the status quo, develops a variety of critiques of that status quo, and articulates the desire for a different world. What that “different world” might be is usually the topic of his courses.

His first book, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, examines how the American superhero became a cultural embodiment of the political aspirations of sexual, gendered, and racial minorities in the post-WWII period. Specifically, he argues that the transformation of the superhero from an icon of white masculinity in the 1940’s and 1950s to a social and species outcast, or “mutant,” in the early 1960s, enabled comic book writers and artists to articulate the figure to a variety of left wing political ideals that celebrated the lives and worldviews of those most excluded from the American social order. In an early review of the book, Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Díaz has written that The New Mutants is “A powerhouse one-of-a-kind book! By charting the radical transformations of the comic book superhero in the post-war period, Fawaz brings to light the extraordinary secret history of American Otherness. Truly fantastic.” The New Mutants will be published by NYU Press in December 2015 as part of their new series Postmillennial Pop. MJLC: Your new book, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, is due out soon. When can we purchase it?

Ramzi Fawaz: The official release date is January 22nd, 2016. It will launch at the Modern Language Association conference in early January (which is in Austin, Texas this year) and I’ll be spending a month or so traveling to New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to promote the book during my sabbatical semester. I’m looking forward to 93

getting the word out there and reaching both academic and non-academic audiences.

This is your first book, correct? Are you excited?

I can’t wait. I’ve been working on it for eight years, which kind of boggles my mind to consider. In a weird way, I’ve been working on it almost my whole life, since I was thirteen, when I first starting reading comic books.

It’s been in my mind ever since. I’m thrilled—it looks beautiful, it has a ton of pictures, and NYU Press generously gave me a lot of space to write. It’s a chunky book, because I had a lot to say about this topic, and I felt that the story I was unfolding had not been completely told in any other venue, at least not to my satisfaction. My biggest concern is that I really wanted to write a book that would be a crossover hit. I wanted a book that would be extremely substantive to academics at every level—for undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty—and that was an important contribution to literary and cultural studies and to queer studies; but I also wanted to write a book that could be read by ordinary people. That’s something my friend Nirvana Tanoukhi [assistant professor at UW-Madison] and I really value.

We are both invested in public intellectual life. We were talking before I did my revisions about the logistical things I had to do to make it a crossover hit, and one necessary revision was to keep it both really theoretically sophisticated but also streamline the language and make it super accessible without losing its sophistication. So that was what I did last year as part of my revision process.

It’s been great to get blurbs for the book from very high-profile literary and cultural icons, like Junot Díaz and Greil Marcus. Greil Marcus is sometimes lesser known by a younger generation, but he’s probably one of the most important music critics in the history of the U.S. He was Rolling Stone Magazine’s first music review editor in 1964 when they started publication, and one of his books, Mystery Train (1975), was listed as one of the hundred most influential non-fiction books written in the twentieth century by Time magazine. It’s about images of America in Rock’n’Roll music. He was a very important mentor of mine and to have him blurb the book and to have Junot Díaz join him is a great honor.

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What were the challenges of writing the book in an accessible way? Why did you try for that, and why do you think other people don’t go down that path? What are the difficulties of streamlining that language and making the book able to crossover?

The difficulties are multiple. One of them is that as a scholar you are required to be in dialogue with the language of your field. You’re beholden, in a sense, to a lot of the concepts, the ideas, the worldviews that are circulating currently and in the past in your area of study. And of course a lot of that language is not known to the public. You’re trying to make that language available to a public audience, while also advancing the specific conversations unfolding among academics in your field—these are two very important, though not always overlapping tasks to juggle. The question, for me, was not in any way about dumbing down or simplifying ideas. Rather it was about showing non-academic audiences: “Listen, here are a bunch of ideas we use in our field to explain certain phenomena, and here’s why it might make sense to your life, and why this language is not simply jargon.

It’s actually meaningful, substantive vocabulary that we invent or innovate to describe complicated realities that lots of people live, including you.” It’s a way of saying that academic language is not always esoteric. It’s actually deeply grounded in everyday life, but it abstracts from everyday life in order to create concepts that might be broadly useful.

One of the things I do in the book is invent words in the vein of queer studies that I think can also be accessible to the public. For example, the key concept of my entire project is something I call “comic book cosmopolitics.”

This concept describes a set of artistic and narrative innovations in comic book storytelling that took place specifically in superhero comic books in the 1960s and after. In this period, comic books visually scaled upward from the everyday struggles of superheroes who traditionally fought urban crime to stories about cosmic, intergalactic conflicts that became less about crime fighting and more about expansive egalitarian projects to save the universe from fascism and explore questions of democratic belonging amongst aliens, humans, and other kinds of life-forms. I use the word cosmopolitics to link superhero comic books and their world-making projects to egalitar95

ian democratic visions in the postwar period, and that includes everything from postwar internationalism to the New Left to women’s and gay liberation, and Third World movements.

Part of the reason I invent that vocabulary is because it describes something that has never been pinned down in previous scholarship. The other reason I do it is because I want to link artistic and narrative practices to political realities, and this is what people like Nirvana Tanoukhi call “scale” or “scale-making.” I’m interested in how it was that a young teenage reader of any major demographic could pick up a comic book like The X-Men in the 1970s and immediately recognize that characters like Storm, Colossus, or Wolverine embodied complex political investments in internationalism, in Third World politics, in women’s and gay liberation. How could you scale upward from the individual fictional lives of these characters to these larger political fantasies about another kind of world? What was it that enabled that kind of imaginative leap? I think that comic books provided conceptual, visual, and narrative tools for doing just that; at the same time, the content of comic books elicited a really rich, ongoing conversation between fans, creators, and cultural critics about the meaning and possibilities of that content. It’s astonishing really. Comic book cosmopolitics describes that entire network of creative and social relationships, and I unpack its various parts in the introduction and throughout the book…so that’s one example of a term that I invent.

Another term I invent to be engaged with the thinking in my fields of study is the idea of a “queer mutanity” against the idea of a “universal humanity.” I use this phrase to describe something The X-Men comic books innovated in the 1960s and 1970s, namely forms of collective life that do not depend on the assumed universal humanity of all people to bind strangers together, something that human rights discourse presumes. While the concept of universal humanity is a very egalitarian, open-ended idea—“everyone is human, and that is what confers dignity on all”—we know that in practice there are always people who are left out of what counts as “human,” because of a variety of preexisting inequalities and biases. So a “queer mutanity” (as opposed to a universal humanity) takes up the idea that everyone might 96

be a mutant, everyone might not legibly be human, and that is what binds us together, the fact that maybe none of us ever fully embody an idealized notion of what it means to be human, and this reality might create the most desirable form of collectivity.

I’m just giving you a couple of terms I innovate that are very much in keeping with the scholarly creativity that queer studies and cultural studies have been invested in; the reason we invent terms is not just because they’re cute or clever or difficult to grasp, but because they pinpoint or describe things that have not been described by current theoretical language. If current theoretical language could describe this “something” I’m exploring, then I would just use that language, and in fact, in many cases I do turn to classical theoretical language, including terms like “queerness,” “disidentification,” “normativity,” and “flexibility,” all of which circulate widely in queer and cultural studies and do help me illuminate many aspects of the visual culture of comics. But in instances where these terms and others like them don’t describe something that I think is happening, I invent something. So that’s a long way to go back to the question of reaching a wide audience beyond academia—I use those terms to make things more accessible to a public, and I explain them very, very clearly: what they mean, what they do. So that’s one way of meeting a broader audience halfway, saying, “Listen, I’m gonna elaborate exactly what I mean by these terms and I’m gonna give examples, but I’m also not gonna abandon the use of rich, complex conceptual language just because it’s hard to work through the ideas they represent. You’ve gotta do some of the work too folks, haha!”

You said you’ve been thinking about this book since you were thirteen.

What drew you to comic books then, and what sustained your interest in these comic books and those that led to The New Mutants in particular?

The New Mutants comic book, you mean? Have you read it?

No, I was referring to the title of your book.

Oh, the title of the book. So the title of the book is partly a reference to The New Mutants comic book series of the 1980s, and partly a reference to 97

the famous speech that literary critic Leslie Fielder gave called “The New Mutants” in 1964.

I’ve told this story many times and I mention it briefly in the acknowledgments of my book, but I’ll tell you the more elaborate version here.

When I was thirteen, I was going through the worst period of my entire life. I was in between seventh and eighth grade, I was bullied every day.

Not a day went by at school where I wasn’t called a faggot, yelled at, policed around my gender expression. I just wanted to be gay, and smart, and loud, and people kept trying to shout me down. Intellectual life was my one safe haven, and also I read fantasy novels. I loved fantasy, I read and consumed as much of it as I could. And I had seen comic books, but I’d never really plugged into them. I remember it was the summer between seventh and eighth grade that I was extremely depressed and hated myself and hated life and felt very alienated and had no friends, and I remember opening a magazine and seeing an advertisement for the 35th Anniversary of The X-Men. It was in this popular culture magazine, I don’t remember the title. At the time that was a very rare thing that only happened in the 1990s, when comic books were advertised in magazines, which they no longer do. And I remember turning to my mom, and I asked, “Can you take me to the local comic book store? I really want to pick up this thing, it just looks so cool.”

It was the era of the craze for holographic covers and specialty toys and novelty items, and I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I thought, “Oh wow, it’s a holographic cover, it looks so cool, there’s this weird team on the front,” and I didn’t recognize this team. I knew who the X-Men were, but I didn’t recognize any of these characters on the cover of the first of the two parts of this anniversary issue.

My mom took me to the comic book store and I lost my mind there— this is another academic book that someone needs to write, about the cultural geography of comic book stores. It’s a magical place, over-packed from top to bottom with comics, books, posters, t-shirts, toys, games. It was just so overwhelming, I felt, “This place is so amazing!” And I pinpointed this issue, and I realized that it was two parts, and the second part had the actual X-Men on the cover that I recognized. So I bought these two and I started 98

reading them, and what I realized is that the 35th Anniversary tells this fascinating story about how an imposter team of X-Men start going around the world engaging in terrorist acts and claiming that they are the X-Men. That’s the group of characters that you see on the first cover. What happens is that the X-Men are forced to have to reclaim their name, and I remember this powerful scene in the comic book where one of the younger X-Men (this is a conceit in the history of The X-Men series, that at any given time there’s always one young member who’s new to the team), she says something like, “Why don’t we just give up? Why don’t we just go our separate ways and let people hate mutants? Whatever.” And there’s this amazing moment where the famous character Storm responds (and I’m paraphrasing here— I’m sure it wasn’t nearly this full of meaning, but this is how I absorbed it): “If that’s what you believe then you’ve misunderstood fundamentally what the X-Men is all about. Because the thing that distinguishes us from these people who are imposters is that we are a chosen family. We chose to bind together not because we’re just mutants, but because we have a shared vision of what the future could look like, a better future, and these people want to destroy relationships between humans and mutants, and they don’t care about their own kind. They don’t care if all mutants are killed as long as they get their piece of the pie.”

I remember being so incredibly moved—I identified immediately with this. I had never engaged with a cultural text that I identified with so easily—you know how we professors often encourage you as students to broaden your horizons and not just read literature that you identify with? Well, you know, growing up as a young gay guy in suburban Orange County, I never identified with anything I read or watched. I never saw or read about anyone like me. I remember identifying in my adult life with maybe three figures in popular culture: like I remember watching Glee for the first time (the show fell out of popularity but it was such a big deal when it first hit). I saw the pilot episode and thought, “Oh my God, Chris Colfer is me in high school!”

You know what I mean? I just thought, “Wow, a character who is just like me, I’ve never seen that.” But I always loved popular culture because I didn’t identify, because I loved engaging characters that were nothing like 99

me and learning from them. But The X-Men was the first time I ever read something in popular culture and thought, “I identify completely.” It was so immediate to me and that was shocking and wonderful.

For years, I read comic books, learned about characters with whom I didn’t identify but loved. Then when I was an American studies major at UC Berkeley, I was at the top of my class, and when I was a junior my great mentor Kathleen Moran (one of the four people I dedicate my book to) said, “I want you to be a TA for my class on Consumer Society.” So I was an undergraduate teaching assistant, graded all the papers, joined her in the class discussions and sometimes helped facilitate. One day she said, “I want you to give a lecture on comics and consumerism.” I was all ready to give this historical lecture on collecting and consumer society, and she said, “No, no, no, I want you to do a close reading of a text.” I was obsessed with the X-Men, so I decided to give a lecture on the “Dark Phoenix Saga.” The Dark Phoenix is a very famous storyline in the history of the X-Men in which one of the founding members of the team becomes possessed by the evil half of a cosmic force called the Phoenix; she then goes on to consume an entire star and obliterates another galaxy. I did a whole reading about this as a fantasy about over-consumption in the 1980s and I explored the ways it was mapped onto gendered bodies. It was of course about a woman losing her mind!

Lots of gender politics going on. And Kathleen came up to me afterwards and said, “That’s your project, you need to do this. Why haven’t you studied comic books before through the lens of American cultural studies?” And I said, “I don’t know, I just love comics. I didn’t think about it.”

And so that summer, I was very lucky, I won this prestigious summer research fellowship at Yale University (it still exists and I encourage students to apply—SURF: Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at Yale) and it was the first experience I ever had of an institution paying me to spend eight weeks in the Yale libraries doing a project about alternative queer families and superhero comic books. And I met extraordinary people there, I studied with Jonathan Katz at Yale and that was what convinced me that I needed to go to graduate school.

So the project developed little by little since then. In many ways my in100

tellectual life and my personal engagement with comics intersected at some point. The question I really became interested in at Berkeley was my identification with these characters. It seems naïve now to ask this question, but at the time I thought, “Was it just me? Did I just read these stories and think, ‘I’m a gay boy and I love these comics!’ Or was there something in the comic book that was encouraging that identification?” And when I tracked that question back historically (using The X-Men initially), I discovered that there was a major transformation in the cultural history of comics in the 1960s. In this period, every major mainstream superhero comic book began to elicit a readership that was no longer traditionally white masculine-normative. It began to elicit identification from the most diverse demographic imaginable and it specifically identified people who felt like outcasts, alienated from American society. It engaged the counterculture. And I was fascinated why this had happened, what possibilities it enabled, what it visually looked like to make this change, and also why this change was so beautiful! Comics of this period were so visually exuberant and fabulous and fun. As I argue in my article in American Literature, when you read The X-Men in the 1970s, the radical politics of that comic book were visually tied to the cultures of gay of women’s liberation. It is psychedelic, every page looks like a disco dance floor. When women in the comic book use mutant powers, like telekinesis, telepathy, the control of the weather, the control over magnetic forces, it looks like an explosion of color and fluid form...like their bodies turn into a lava lamp and time and space bends and melts around them. These women owned it, you know?! It’s just this incredible efflorescence of embodied feminist power and I remember wanting to explain what this was all about and why this had happened. And that, of course, lead me to tons of other comics and the project took shape from that point on.

Well, I can keep asking, why did it happen? Why did they start listening, these kinds of audiences?

Yeah! I think it happened for a number of reasons. I’ll say briefly: historically at the heyday of comics, when comic books were selling their most, like in 1941 Superman is selling 900,000 issues a month. It’s unbelievable, you 101

know? By the post-war period comics, at their height, even at their most popular in the 1960s and 1970s, are selling 300,000, 400,000 issues. And I’ll explain briefly why that happens. But right at their height in 1939 and during World War II, comic book readership was fifty-fifty split between girls and boys. Mainly pre-adolescent, young kids. You know, this image we have of the nerdy, white, teenage boy—a presumably straight boy—reading comics is very distinct to the early 1980s and 1990s. It’s a historical development. But what does happen in the 1940s and 1950s is that after this explosive popularity of superhero comic books during World War II, after the war people become bored with superheroes and we have the atomic bomb by then, so in a way, the question become why do you need Superman? Whatever, we can split the fabric of reality! So superhero comic books go out of vogue and then what happens is that comic books begin to diversify in terms of the genres they take up: we get war stories, romance tale, you know, funny animal stories, and then the most popular is crime and horror comic books.

And that is when you get the stratification by gender, where more men tend to read crime and horror, although women read them too but in lesser numbers. And you also get a more adolescent audience.

And then, at the height of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, comic books start to be identified by Catholic decency groups, psychologists, and educators as the source of juvenile delinquency. Because they see so many young people reading comics and they begin to associate it with degeneracy, anti-authoritarianism, the rebellious teenager. And so famously, when the House Un-American Activities Committee had its highly publicized Senate committee hearing on juvenile delinquency in 1954, even though they were talking about juvenile delinquency at large, they focused on comic books specifically. And they defamed comic books in the public arena. Legally, you could not censor comics because under the first amendment comic books were free expression. You could however defame the comic book industry so much publicly that if they did not reform their own content, nobody would buy their materials. So instead of legal censorship, the government coerced the comics industry to create the Comics Code Authority, an oversight institution that determined appropriate content for comics. And then all of the 102

comic book companies had to reform. As a result, crime and horror comic books basically got side-lined.

So what were comic books to do? The major comic book companies were like, “Why don’t we go back to the one character that was the most popular of all time, that was associated with baseball and apple pie and all American values? Let’s go back to superheroes.” But by the time they did that in the mid-to-late 1950s, their audience had grown older, it included more teenagers, and those teens were about to enter the counterculture.

The figure needed to be something new, it needed to respond to the needs and desires of a new generation of alienated rebellious teenagers. And the way creators did that is by reinventing the character as a mutant and a species outcast who modeled or could embody the various forms of what it meant to be a social and cultural outcast, or oppressed group, in U.S. society. Being a racial minority, being a woman, being queer (not to mention being an alienated teenager). And so that is part of the reason why comic books began this shift their form and content.

Now comic books creators thought initially that they were just creating cool, mutant-like rebellious characters, and then readers found these characters so compelling and exciting that they began to demand extraordinary complexity in the world-making around these characters. So what you see is this thing I call comic book cosmopolitics. It was a negotiation that happened between a patently-liberal creatorship—creators tended to be second generation Jewish immigrants who were anti-racists, anti-fascist, nominally anti-sexist (they knew nothing about women, if we’re being honest, but they were like, yeah we’re anti-sexist!). And they began to empower a more radicalized youth readership. These readers didn’t make up a huge number of the audience for comics, but it was a significant enough portion of the readership that creators’ liberal politics had to contend with the radical politics of this young readership. And what you get out of that negotiation of ideas is this thing I call comic book cosmopolitics. This innovative visual and narrative imaginary that tries to invent new kinds of social and political collectivity in response to left-wing movements.

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Okay, this is amazing. I want to read your book now, you’re selling it. You also answered a bunch of the questions I wrote out.

Oh good!

Which is good, so we’re on the same page. Okay, so you’re the first one to look at the link between radical politics and comic books. What was it like being on the edge and what did you turn to to make that link?

That’s actually a great question. There’s a huge body of literature about comic books, about comic book history, about fan communities, about comic book form. And comic book studies is an odd-ball field because even though it’s growing and developing—I mean we even have a Mellon seminar on comics that’s been extremely successful on our own campus, that has showed the wide, diverse array of approaches to comics—it has historically remained extremely niche and focused primarily on the formal study of comics. And because of that it has lacked a historical, cultural, and theoretical richness around the object itself, of comic books. So what you’ve tended to get is scholarship that is specifically about comic book form, divorced from history and culture, or you get historical studies of comics that don’t care about form, that say: “This happened in history, World War II happened, and then comic books reflected World War II. The 1960s happened, comic books reflected the 1960s”…and so on.

Why do you think that happened, that people chose formal studies or really dry historical ones?

I think that happened because the people who really take comic books seriously felt that in order to make it legitimate as an art form, they needed to treat it like you would treat a classical art form like painting. So they had to develop formalist analysis the way art historians do. And then I think that people who treated comics historically never really actually thought comic books are meaningful as actual literary or cultural texts, but merely as documents that reflected larger historical trends. They simply acknowledged that people have had an interest in comics, but not that comics are worthwhile in their own right. These historians take an approach that can be summed 104

up as, “Yeah, people love comics. Comic books are still trash, but people love them so we should study them.” And so because of that, they don’t do depth analysis of the texts themselves, and historically literary scholars just didn’t view comics as something even near the realm of actual literature.

I found the division between these modes really distressing and frustrating but I quickly discovered American Studies—which is an innately interdisciplinary field—to be the most powerful methodological approach to thinking about comics as complex, multi-dimensional, cultural objects that were always producing new ways of viewing the world at the same time as they were reflecting what was happening in that world. Like any other form of popular culture comics reflect what is happening in a moment. But I wanted to show that they also gather up and crystallize developing, or not yet fully formed, ways of viewing the world that are transforming current historical conditions. So when I did my work I actually very assiduously avoided comics studies. I didn’t like what was coming out of that field.

What I turned to instead was three fields. I turned to visual studies, queer studies, and political theory. And this was all couched in American cultural history, more broadly. Because I really wanted to think of comic books in such a way that would allow me to actually access what was productive about them rather than merely reflective. What was it about comic books that produced new ways of viewing the world rather than just reflecting what already exists? I needed to turn to political theory because it’s a field that thinks about what it means to actually innovate novel forms of public life and collective governance. So I began to see that in many ways the visual components of comic books actually produced new forms of imagination about what collective life could look like. And in that sense I began to conceive of comic books after the 1960s as a form of popular political theorizing. You didn’t need to be a political theorist to re-think democracy: You could read The Fantastic Four and you could see the unfolding kinship between these four mutated superheroes who choose to be aligned because of their shared egalitarian values. You could see them enact democracy in new ways directly in their collective actions. Or if not democracy proper, then the values that attached to a radical version of it: egalitarianism, ethical 105

relations to others, you know, new forms of kinship and collectivity. You could see it performed in the comic book, but then as a fan, you could also respond to those performances and say, “Well, listen, I believe in something else,” or “I believe this thing that you did is not true to the egalitarianism that you reflected in earlier adventures.” For instance in The Fantastic Four, the comic book sold this radical form of egalitarian collective action that was open to a variety of ways of life and worldviews in the universe. But in its early issues it was deeply anticommunist. And readers started writing in to say, “This negative attitude towards Communism completely contradicts the values of this comic book. Why would you say that all forms of political thought are valuable to think through even if you disagree with them, and then say Communism is evil? That’s just bias.” That’s amazing when you think about it! That comic books elicited political responses from readers at the same time that they were theorizing new kinds of political values.

And you know near the end of the project I found myself turning towards, very briefly, world literature and reading the work of Nirvana Tanoukhi, because she helped me explain that cognitive process by which readers were able to scale upward from the details of a comic book to the larger realities of their political lives. And that’s a form of scale-making, and so I turned to Nirvana’s work on scale to describe that mechanism when I rewrote my introduction.

If you’re working in formal studies of comics, say, you could talk to all the other comic studies people. But what was it like trying to talk about what you were doing to people in these fields where the study of comics was relatively alien, for example in political theory?

One of the ways I did this was to speak the language of those fields to a certain degree, and the other thing is I bent the language of those fields toward other intellectual purposes. I said, “Listen, I’m not a political theorist, so I’m not gonna argue like a political theorist. I am rather going to show you why the tools of political theory illuminate something about the function of superhero comic books that you would not see otherwise if you didn’t use this model or this language.”

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To be honest, one of the other ways I speak to people across disciplines is just by making a clear, strong, and compelling argument for the political efficacy of the texts I’m writing about—I think my close readings put the argument forward in and of themselves. When I was a candidate for this job at UW-Madison, I was asked at some point in the interview process: “How do you convince traditional literary scholars that comic books matter as a form of literature?” First, I had a glib answer to this question, and then I had a serious one. The glib answer was, “I don’t care. If you don’t want to be convinced that comic books matter, then don’t worry about it.” In other words, you do you. At some level, I’m not invested in convincing people who don’t believe that comics are literature that, actually, comics are literature; just as I don’t think any colleague of mine who writes about surrealist poetry, or John Milton, or environmental literature needs to legitimize or explain to me the literary value of their object for me to take them seriously.

I always assume that the arguments people make based on those objects stand for themselves. But the real, genuine answer is this: “It doesn’t really matter if you think comics are literature or not, because fans, mainstream readers, creators, and cultural critics from the 1960s onward understood them as literature and talked about them in that way all the time. They compared the content of comic books to Russian novels, to anti-apartheid literature, to the epics of Homer, to Shakespearean tragedy and comedy.

There was a critical public understanding that comic books were engaging in intertextual relationships with literature.” So comics are literature as a simple historical fact of how people approached them, whether or not you want to think of them as such. Now, on the other hand, you can take a different tack, which is what more classical comics studies people say: that comics are part of the history of the book. They are literally bound objects made of paper stapled together, and so they are actually book material and they compose one part of the history of book-making and print culture.

But what I find so ridiculous about this whole debate is that we don’t argue any longer whether, you know, Blake’s woodcuts matter to his poetry.

Of course they matter, and of course when we read his poems we also look at the visual culture he produced. What it really comes down to—and I hate 107

to say it—it really comes down to intellectual bias. It boils down to some people saying, “I think your object is more degraded, or less legitimate, or less aesthetically sophisticated and important than mine because it’s mass culture, it has pictures, it’s for kids, it isn’t classically ‘literary’”…the list goes on. When people don’t want to think of comics seriously, I say, “You know what? You can study what you want to study and I will study what I want to study, and the world will be better for lots of smart people creating knowledge about many different objects. Millions of people read comics and that seems enough of a reason for them to matter.” That, to me, is the benchmark of why it matters. Millions of people, it means something, they’re doing something with it—why? We should bother to find out. That is certainly not the only reason to study something. I also find incredible value in things that don’t reach mass audiences. But I think to disqualify an object on the basis of its mass circulation, its popularity, its audience, its genre, its aesthetic “level,” is just plain bias.

I was going to ask you about just cultural studies in general, but you answered that in talking about comics. Recently, the big trend in films is all these superhero movies. I don’t know enough—is this a new trend, or is it people just seeing it as a trend?

I think it is a new trend, yes.

Where do you think that’s coming from?

I think it’s a convergence of forces. First, we have reached a level of sophistication with the production of special effects that allows us to actually visualize the kinds of fantasies that are depicted in comic books. So I think the very ability to do that alone and the fact that by presenting it visually you get mass audiences to watch it is big part of it. Second, I think especially in the post-9/11 period, superhero movies reinstate a kind of fantasy of bodily invulnerability and power that makes people feel strong in the face of global war, environmental collapse, economic and political insecurity, which is why I believe the movies tend to be extraordinarily conservative, why they’re baldly nationalist, hyper-masculine and militaristic in their fo108

cus. They tend to be about reconstituting the power and force of the nation-state. The one movie that I think is a little bit different from this, weirdly enough—it’s kind of an outlier among the popular ones—is Captain America: Winter Soldier. It’s a fascinating movie because it’s about the idea that maybe the American government is infiltrated by Nazis and that all of its politics are really totalitarian in nature. Yet by and large these movies are so much about the exceptionalism of superheroes and the fact that they are the only people who could ever save the world—the heroes in these movies are never allied with ordinary people nor are they ever seriously in dialogue with the masses they purport to be saving whereas in superhero comic books past, superheroes have large networks of human friends, lovers, and allies. I think that that’s what happening with the movies, and I think that movies are a different form altogether than the comics. Superhero comic books, or comic books in general, have this unfolding serial format that allows for an endless proliferation of stories so that even if you tell a story that’s deeply conservative, you always have the potential of unraveling it in the next one, and that goes on kind of indefinitely.

Sometimes literally making another universe.

Exactly. And that’s part of what I call comic books cosmopolitics. I do a lot with the idea that serialization itself can model egalitarian democratic possibilities. No matter how many film sequels you have, film can never be serialized to the level, magnitude, or volume of comics. We’re talking about thousands of films to get near the number of comics in any given genre. I think there’s a level of complexity—of narrative expansion, character development, dialogue—that can unfold in the thousands of pages and issues of comic books that you can never fully capture in the movies, so I tend to think of the movies as extremely conservative politically and formally, but I think that they comfort people in times of crisis by implying that there are figures that will gather up power and be able to restore order in a chaotic world. I don’t think that’s the only interpretation that’s possible. I think the movies can be far more complex than that, as scholars like Matt Yockey have shown. But I think that that’s a powerful element of their appeal. I 109

think they also just look cool and so we like watching them. I go to see all of the superhero movies even though most of them bore me in terms of storyline, but whatever, they’re fun to look at. They also introduce popular characters to people who never read comics in a palatable, easy way. So people can access those same long-running characters and think, “Oh, I didn’t have to read 500 issues of this comic to know this character.”

Say, even in particular, what do you see the change being between the X-Men comics and the X-Men movies?

In The X-Men comics, historically, mutation not only stands in for a variety of identities at different moments (race, gender, sexuality etc.), but it also exists alongside a multiplicity of different forms of identification and actually explodes identity politics. So mutation is often presented in the comics as a malleable, open category that has to be constructed over and over rather than a ready-made identity to inhabit. I think the movies basically collapse mutation into “gayness” in a one-to-one relationship, then are like, “You people are accepted!” The movies imagine the assimilation of LGBT people, allegorized as mutants, into the mainstream imagination. I don’t think the movies do much complex intersectional work around identity. They make mutation very obviously an allegory for one or two specific forms of identity, and they sell on the basis of that idea. Again, it’s possible to interpret the movies in a more complicated way, but that is on the surface what they’re doing. It’s very basic.

I was going to ask you a question about how this ties into your teaching, but you said that this whole project came out of your teaching, right?

Which one?

The book, you said it came out of the presentation you gave.

Oh yes! I wasn’t thinking of it that way. Yes, you’re right.

So do you have any other comments on that? What do you think being a teacher adds to your research or vice-versa?

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I mean, without a doubt. There’s no way it can’t be. Teaching is about being in dialogue with numerous other minds at once, especially the seminar format, but lectures can be the same way. And a lecture may not always be directly in dialogue with audience members, but what you’re doing in a lecture, as my former mentor Kathleen Moran always says, when you’re lecturing you are having to figure out a way to get a huge variety of people to understand what you are saying even if they come from a vast array of positions, while also being yourself. So you’re playing this incredible intellectual performance where you are creating a set of ideas that you’ve come up with but that you’re trying to express to a large group of people and then they respond and you engage in a dialogue. For me the word that describes this is having an interlocutor. The way you come up with ideas is you have an interlocutor who responds or communicates with you substantively. You have someone who asks you questions and is in dialogue with you, and they expand your thinking, and that is exactly what teaching is to me. Teaching is about going into a room and having thirty or more interlocutors. You might be leading and facilitating and you might have a knowledge base that the others in the class don’t, but you are creating the conditions where everyone can be an interlocutor for everyone else.

That’s why teaching is so crucial to research. I never teach in a topic-based way. What I mean by that is that even though my classes have topics—like, “America in the 1990s”—I didn’t initially conceive of the class as only being about the 1990s. The class is an outcome of a set of questions that I am interested in that lead me to a subject that can be the focus of course content. So every one of my classes is organized by a set of critical questions that fascinate me. I always borrow from a former mentor, Richard Hudson, the idea that what I want to share with students when I teach are “the things that keep me up at night.” There are these certain texts, certain events, certain people, certain phenomena, certain modes of thinking that capture my imagination and keep my mind abuzz with ideas. I’m so deeply fascinated and drawn to the cultures of radicalism of the 1970s, the sexual cultures of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the political and cultural production of the Great Depression Era, classical Hollywood cinema (the list goes 111

on) and I ask questions about what the popular culture of these moments did for people, about how popular culture was created and circulated, about the meanings people made of it. And then I construct classes around those questions. For instance, when I teach my course “Cultural Citizenship in the New Deal and After,” that class asks the question, “How have Americans used popular culture, art, and cultural production to engage in radical politics since the 1930s?” In other words, why is it that when we tend to think of politics as involving things like direct action activism, voting, and government institutions, why would art, literature, cinema, and performance be part of doing politics, and how did it come to be that way starting in the 1930s?

I’m really of the mindset that all great research starts with good questions that we ask of the world. Topics aren’t that exciting. “I’m going to write a book about X,” is less exciting than, “Why is this happening? How is this happening? Why are people engaging with this mode of literature?

What are they doing with it?” To give an example, after all those years of doing small little research projects around this book that began to lead into my dissertation, I ultimately came to the large question of my project, which was: “What was the relationship between liberal and radical politics and fantasy in post-WWII America?” That’s the big question of my book. The object of the study—superhero comic books—happens to be for me the most effective site for studying the link between these two things. But somebody might do a similar project and focus on Walt Disney, or space-age imagery, or psychedelia and the drug counterculture (there are books about all of these things), and that kind of fantasy might operate differently. But I argue that superhero comics were the most effective and powerful site of radical fantasy in post-WWII American popular culture. It took me a long time to arrive at that question through my teaching, through teaching about popular culture, film, visual culture, this is a question that began to formulate in my mind, because it was a question I kept coming back to in my conversations with students.

So absolutely, I learn so much from my students. I love being able to be in that dialogue, and the classroom is like a stage where you enact a set 112

of ideas. The funny thing is that I almost never teach directly about my research. I rarely approach a class thinking, “I’m gonna teach a class about superhero comic books because that’s what I’m writing about.” I teach classes that are about the questions I’m interested in, and those lead me to much more interesting ideas than focusing exclusively on what I am researching.

Next semester I’ll be teaching a grad seminar called “Queer Ethics” that is about the relationship of queer studies to political theory, and that is very much a set of questions that are about my second book but without being all about the texts I’m discussing in that book. I want to be in dialogue in the early stages with graduate students about it and learn from them new possibilities for how to approach the project.

So you say-Were you going to ask me about cultural studies, by the way?

I was, but I think you answered that when talking about comics. The answer extends pretty easily. Shifting away from comic books, UW-Madison is facing large budget cuts, and there’s a lot of rhetoric criticizing the university and tenured professors especially both in Wisconsin and nationally. How do you respond to this? What do you think is an effective defense of public higher education?

I have been deeply moved by the multiple responses that members of the English faculty have had to the ongoing budget crisis and to the attacks on higher education more broadly; our faculty have written op-eds, engaged with the Madison community, and dialogued with one another on this issue from a variety of angles and we’ve modeled truly democratic debate. My own perspective, however, is that those of us in the humanities here at UW-Madison have perhaps stressed too heavily the need to defend our work through economic arguments, that is, arguments about how well we train undergraduates for the job market, how much money we bring in to the school through grants, and how well we bolster the state economy. I’m really furious that we have reached a place in higher education where the public knows so little about who professors are, what we do, what we think, what our scholarly mission and project 113

is about, that we are forced to defend even the most fundamental aspects of our profession, like tenure, shared governance, and the basic pursuit of knowledge, in economic terms. I recently had an exciting conversation with a Madison native who works for Charter Communications when he came to pick up my cable box; we got into a debate about tenure and he expressed frustration that professors receive what he thought of as an “unfair” form of job security that he couldn’t claim as a private sector worker. First, I pointed out that unlike most private sector workers, professors are tasked with training entire generations of youth how to interact with the world—for similar, if not lesser pay in some cases, to private sector workers, we teach classes of anywhere between 15 and 500 or more students, do one-on-one mentoring, participate in the life of a department, train graduate students how to go off and do what we do, manage the emotions of our students, and then somehow carve time to do our own research. It’s easy to forget that our job is two-fold: to teach student and to produce knowledge! Those are huge tasks. There’s a reason we need summers free (which are unpaid by the way unless you win a fellowship)…it’s to do that second part and do it well. I dare say, most people in professions outside of teaching do not have to manage the minds of thousands of students over the course of a career. This is a massive, emotionally draining and often underpaid task for the vast majority of people working in higher education regardless of their professorial rank. Moreover, I asked whether or not it would make sense for me to begrudge him his raises, or bonuses, or promotions which are simply benchmarks of success in his field just like tenure is a hard-earned benchmark of accomplishment in the professoriate. I wondered if he thought it was unfair that most public university faculty in the UW system had not received regular raises for nearly seven years despite the continued rise in the cost of living (there’s reason I was canceling cable…the bill goes up every year and our salaries don’t always keep pace!). And finally, I wondered aloud why, rather than align himself with us to fight for greater expanded job security for folks just like him, he felt that some of us should lose our job security even if we’d done the necessary work to achieve it. I asked him: Why don’t we struggle together for greater job security for everyone, rather than begrudge the few who are public servants of what little benefits 114

they receive for their work? No one had ever asked him these questions nor had he ever had the opportunity to talk to a professor about what they do or what tenure is. He was a thoughtful, intelligent guy but he had very strong and negative opinions about tenure when he didn’t even know how to define it or what its purpose is! I am baffled that so many people have such strong opinions about professors when they don’t know what we do. People are not going after those who work at corporations for getting promotions, or telling them their bonuses are unfair or unearned; or if they are, it’s not with the same kind of venom that is being spewed at professors and members of higher education. Why are we singled out as the one class of workers whose very minor form of job security is somehow “unfair,” when in fact that job security is really all about freedom of speech and academic expression rather than some imagined permanent positioning? That’s all tenure is. The entire purpose of getting tenure is so that you can say what you want intellectually and not be fired for your political beliefs. It was invented after McCarthyism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It’s a distinctly historical response to the fact that under the conditions of McCarthyism people could get fired on the basis of having even the slightest dissenting views from anticommunism. So it’s just absurd to me that we have to make arguments about the economic viability of tenure, which is like buying into a model of thought that says, “Everything that is worthwhile about higher education is directly related to its ability to accrue financial value, and if it doesn’t, it should be eliminated.” That’s what I can’t stand. I’m so tired of making this argument about how economically productive we are—parents are so stressed out about the economic viability of their kids after college (to the point of encouraging them to study things they hate, which is often a waste of a good education), but instead of questioning the system that demands their children to be useful laborers in an ever-shrinking job market, they want us to guarantee that we’ll solve the problem by training skilled laborers. We are not a robot factory. Guess what? Every time we win that argument about our economic viability in the short run, we lose in the long run. When we make the case effectively, state officials say, “Oh, you know what, you’re right, you are pretty efficient at making money for the state and training good workers. So now we’re gonna fire everyone whose 115

courses don’t enroll high enough or train students in marketable skills, downsize whenever you don’t make as much money as you predicted, and evaluate your performance on quantity of research output rather than the quality of your work.” It makes institutions of higher education into corporations, not places of learning. That’s not what we should be arguing for.

We should be arguing that what we offer is exactly the opposite of that value system, that we offer a compelling, democratic alternative to the view of higher education as a money making machine, or the value of life itself as being about profit alone. There are indeed other values than making money, and these are the values that the humanities teach, celebrate, and offer to all people—far from being elitist or distanced from everyday life as our work is often made out to be, the humanities has been the most powerful and consistent area of the modern university where we debate and take seriously the needs of everyday people, where access to historical and cultural knowledge is made available to all, and where a commitment to rethinking what counts as “the good life” is made manifest. I am fascinated by the perception of the humanities as “elitist,” especially since nearly every major humanistic field including English, History, Women’s and Gender Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, American Studies, Ethnic Studies and many others have increasingly committed themselves to studying, writing about, valuing, and supporting the lives of ordinary people, the working classes, and all kinds of marginalized communities. This is not uniformly true, nor does it let scholars off the hook for the many ways in which they can, and sometimes do, distance themselves from public life; but those who are doing research that is aware of the lived conditions of ordinary Americans, and global communities, are everywhere teaching, writing, and publishing.

Among the many things we offer students who come to us in the humanities include: the capacity to discern between ideas that allow one to make significant social and political decisions in the world; the ability to develop substantive and meaningful responses to heterogeneity and difference; the knowledge of one’s history that allows for a clear-eyed appraisal of the present; the ability, and even the motivation, to develop ethical orientations towards others; to be able to rethink the meaning and value of “the good life”; the skill 116

of interpreting the world and its various facets with generosity and precision; in other words, to imagine human flourishing in all its forms. One effect of all these skills, is of course, intelligent young people who will succeed in a complex and evolving work force; but frankly, beyond my own desire to see my students live comfortable lives free from economic hardship, I don’t really care about this outcome. I am interested in the more important and immediate outcome of this work we do, which is the production of acute, thoughtful, powerful minds that may actually be able to respond to the problems of our society with generosity, egalitarianism, and humanity. I don’t know about you but I’d like to see less suffering in the world, more collaborative practices engaged across differences, more health for a greater portion of the world, and actual, substantive freedom for more people globally—we’re supposed to be training students to potentially make these things possible. So yeah, I don’t think tenure is a lot to ask.

These are all extraordinary outcomes of a liberal education that have nothing to do with extractive value or the profit motive. That is what we offer, and we need to start reminding people of the value of this bundle of human-centered (rather than profit-centered) skills. We, like so many Americans before us, are losing job security, losing our social and intellectual standing, losing our sense of what our mission is, losing our ability to take genuine pleasure in the production of knowledge. Why don’t we just give up on making the economic argument and say, “Actually what we offer is the complete opposite. That’s what we do, and that’s what we do best, and that is what makes for a democratic world. We teach people to be prepared for democracy, which is no more and no less than the capacity of people to govern themselves rather than to be governed by others.” What people do with that is up to them, as Wendy Brown points out in her new book, Undoing the Demos.

She reminds us that you can participate in a democracy that is completely racist or committed to imperialism. People can vote a dictator into power if they so wish; or create a different, more egalitarian world altogether. But at the end of the day that ability to collectively choose our fate is better than being governed by others.

What we’re doing when we make economic arguments for our survival 117

is essentially allowing markets to govern our decision-making and determine what we teach and how we teach it. As someone who commonly teaches what are thought of as “sexy,” “fun,” nontraditional courses on sexuality and popular culture, sometimes I want to throw my hands up and say, “How many times can I put the word ‘sex’ in a class title to get a hundred students to sign up for it?” I mean, you either want it or you don’t. As an undergraduate student, you either want to explore the world and expand your mind and be exposed to ideas that make you uncomfortable, or you don’t. I don’t know what to tell you if your biggest goal in coming to an internationally renowned research institution is to spend four years being taught what you think you already know about the world. Sometimes I want to say to my students, “Aren’t you bored already with hearing the same thing over and over? Don’t you want to find out what you haven’t heard about? Don’t you want to know what you’re missing?” I’m tired of this model where we have to sell ourselves at every turn to convince students that ideas of all kinds matter—of course there is a certain degree to which I want to influence and transform hearts and minds.

I’m not going to assume the value of what I teach is obvious or known in advance and I’m more than willing to provide compelling arguments for why the study of sexuality, literature, and popular culture matters. But at some level, I think: You’re the ones that are coming to school! You know what I mean? So if you don’t want to take our classes, that’s your decision. I’m not a salesman by trade, I’m an educator—I don’t offer a product, I offer an experience and a possibility to reexamine everything you know or think you know…some think this experience can be packaged as a product, but it simply isn’t that. It’s something we create or invent together and every instance of it is totally original, can’t be reproduced exactly, and will have unpredictable results. Think about it, when you miss one class session of a course you’re taking, you can never recreate that experience you missed. It was one of a kind. I want to say to students: “Take advantage of your education, take some risks, study something you don’t understand or that scares you or that just seems exciting and different. Don’t expect someone to sell or advertise an education to you—take charge of your learning and curate the education you want to have.”

The ability to critically think, to be able to work with others, to discern 118

between ideas, to innovate: these things all help you be successful economically, but that is not the point of a liberal education, and I am really no longer that invested in selling people on that idea. I’m invested to the degree that I want my students to be successful, to live rich—I don’t mean rich in terms of money—I mean substantive, flourishing lives, and if that means also making a good salary and living well, then great, but that’s not my goal in life, to make sure that my students can all extract economic value from their own intellect to the maximal level. That’s not what the world needs right now.

The world is literally coming apart. All of my colleagues and friends who study and write about environmentalism tell me the world is going to die because of this model of intensive, extractive economic value in everything, from resources to people to bodies and relationships. It’s a horrific way to relate to the world, and it obliterates the capacity to live democratically. My students in every class tell me, when we study 1960s and 1970s social movements like women’s and gay liberation, black power, the New Left, and Third World movements, they say: “I can’t even wrap my head around this stuff because I don’t know how to think collectively. I never imagined that there could exist a group of people who set aside their individual desires for money and success in order to collaborate and collectively transform the world for their own flourishing.” And I think: “Oh my gosh, what are they gonna do if we can’t imagine a ‘we’ that is not merely an aggregate of individual, independent, financially extracting entrepreneurs who are running around trying to accrue as much profit as they can? How are we ever going to transform the conditions of our society?” It’s devastating. I think that if we lose that capacity to imagine ourselves acting in concert for the betterment of our world, we will no longer be able to have democracy. Wendy Brown, in her book Undoing the Demos, says something to the effect that, “By the way, democracy can go away. It can disappear and that will happen. It has already happened in many ways.” And I think that’s really terrifying.

You said that your students didn’t even have an idea of how to think of a collectively, the idea of being anything more than just an aggregate of individuals. How do you deal with these sorts of—not necessarily political 119

divisions—but their inability to understand radical politics, or their differing exposures to it? How do you deal with that in the classroom?

One way of describing what you’re saying right now is the idea of, “How do you deal with people not being plugged into different kinds of political imaginaries? How do you deal with the fact that somebody does not even have an imagination about something?” One great example: one of my favorite students, a brilliant young woman in my cultural citizenship course, she was really blown away by the readings we did around women’s liberation and then gay liberation in the 70’s. In one of the classes, she said, “I think what is so moving about this work that we’ve read, these manifestoes, this literature, is that as a woman I had never ever been told that it matters for me to imagine myself in collectivity with other women, that other women and their lives should matter to me in a direct way, that maybe my own survival and success is contingent on the success of other women.” She said, “I’ve just been raised in a very individualistic mode, where it’s all about, ‘As long as I’m fine, and I’m not being harassed, and I’m not being stopped by a glass ceiling from getting where I need to, it’s fine.’ I’m so moved by the idea that we have to do it together.” That really blew my mind. I was like, “Wow. What does it mean to have no access to that imaginary of collective life?” That means that we cannot live democratically if we don’t have that imagination. We cannot know how to govern together ourselves. We only know to govern our individual actions, which are then controlled by outside forces, which is the opposite of democracy.

So one of the ways I deal with that is very basic, and this is why students complain all the time that I assign too much reading, and I respond, “You have been exposed to nothing in the world.” My students are like 18, 19, 20, they’ve read nothing, watched nothing, know nothing, and I say, “I’m going to bombard you with so much content that you are going to be flooded, you’re going to be overwhelmed, with other modes of thinking that are unfamiliar, that are alien, that will make you uncomfortable.” And so I make students watch movies almost every single week, I make them read literature, I make them read political documents, primary source documents, and then I make them read secondary literature about them, the 120

entire gamut of forms of reading. One thing I do then is I try to create with the content of a class a hyper-immersive environment in which we can, in obviously a very limited way, reconstruct the affective experience of what it might have been like to live a different life. To give an example, I do this diptych in my sexual politics course where we do gay San Francisco and gay New York in the 70’s. I’ve actually wanted to teach a class called “Gay San Francisco, Gay New York” that’s just a class on those two cities over the twentieth century. But in this class, we do a week on gay San Francisco, and here’s what we do. We read Tales of the City, which was the most popular serialized gay fiction of the 70’s--if you haven’t read it, go read it tomorrow, it’s amazing, it will change your life--and then we watch The Times of Harvey Milk, the documentary, which is an extraordinary document of gay political activism in the 70’s, and then we read a whole set of documents from gay liberation. So it’s a lot! We only meet once a week, and I’m asking them to watch a movie, read a novel, and read secondary literature, or read primary source documents that are non-fiction. That’s a lot. When my students come to class an extraordinary thing happens: what we experience by bring all these texts together is this incredibly immersive lived feeling of like, oh, the same person who opened the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday morning to read the next installment of Tales of the City was also turning the page to read about Harvey Milk’s political campaign and may have left their house later that day after work to go join the rally that Harvey Milk was organizing and may have also picked up these set of manifestoes that were mimeographed and circulated at all these gay bookstores in San Francisco. They begin to realize that all these things are linked together and nobody was reading Tales of the City in isolation. They were reading Tales of the City while they were having sex, coming out of the closet, visiting new restaurants and bars, getting a new job, moving from the Midwest to San Francisco, joining new political movements, becoming a feminist--they were doing all these things at the same time, and this work of literature was not divorced from that world. It was completely the way they interpreted it, engaged it. Here’s an example of research coming out of teaching: a chapter of my next book is on serialized gay fiction, and it’s a case study of Tales of the 121

City, and I was so moved by the conversation I had with my students that I decided instead of simply analyzing the first two novels (they were serialized and then collected into six novels), I want to analyze the first two which are the most famous and they’re squarely in the 70’s, I’m actually going to go to San Francisco and interview people who read it in its original serialized form in the San Francisco Chronicle, people who’ve survived the AIDS epidemic, because I want to know what readers were actually doing with it, how they reading it, how they were living. So that’s one way in which I do that.

Another way is to engage students in elaborate debates about issues of common concern that they may not think about or they may take for granted and to show them the limits of their thinking. To give an example, when I taught third-wave feminism in my 90’s class, I never expected to have such an explosive debate in that class. It was so controversial. There were boys in that class who said, “I don’t believe that women are oppressed, blah blah blah blah.” It was old school. Here were all these people in the class who had sat in the first ten minutes, saying, “I generally believe in what feminism is all about, I believe in equality for women etc., but I don’t think of myself as a feminist, blah blah blah”--classic. But as soon as some of the people in the class started to say deeply anti-feminist things, like “I think men and women are equal, I don’t know why women are complaining, I think women are more emotional than rational”--people said these things! This is like an antiquated idea: women are more emotional than rational. This goes back to ancient Greece. That’s--it blew my mind. This is what ended up happening. I thought it was an extraordinary moment. People in the class who had disclaimed feminism found themselves trapped because the only way they could refute or counter those claims was by using feminism and feminist language, but five minutes before they had said, “I’m not a feminist.” I put them in a position where they were required to rethink what their politics are, and what their investments are, and I really pushed them to be held accountable for what they believed, because so many people that I teach now of the generation that includes you, they just are obsessed with being like, “Well, I love everybody and everybody can be free and I don’t 122

really care. Everyone can do whatever they want.” And I say, “That’s not a political position! That is license. Just because you feel in your heart that people are free and they can do whatever they want, that doesn’t mean that people are actually free. It doesn’t mean that queer people and trans people and black people are not being murdered on the street.”

In order to stop those forms of violence, in order to stop oppression, in order to create a more democratic world, you actually have to take a position. You have to believe in something. You may change your mind, many times. You may elaborate and fine-tune your thinking and your politics, but you actually have to believe in something. What I found my students doing in all those discussions in my 90’s class is realizing that they believe in nothing, and that they had to take a stand at some point. This, I think, really was meaningful to them. This was the practice we took in the class over and over again. For instance, I often had students say, “I’m not an anti-feminist, but I don’t believe women are oppressed,” and I told them, “That is an anti-feminist thing to say. It is a cornerstone of feminist thought that gender is a powerful, hierarchical form of power in our society, and that you can see this in everyday interaction.” So I said, “If you don’t want to believe women are oppressed, you’re allowed to do that, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t say, ‘I’m not racist, but I don’t believe black people are oppressed.’ You can’t say that! You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” What my students want is to be thought of as good liberal people who also don’t believe that anyone has any trouble in the world. They want to believe that there is no structural inequality and that everything is fine. I say, “You can’t have it both ways. It is an anti-feminist thing to believe that gender does not oppress people in any way. If you don’t believe that, that is perfectly fine, but that is a position, and you need to learn to take that position.” That’s another way in which I deal with that disconnect. I produce the conditions where we actually have to work through arguments. That is very exciting and generative. Many of the comments that my students said in their evaluations were amazing this year in the 90’s class. They wrote, “This class taught how to take a position in the world, how to believe in something, how to deal with heterogeneity.” When I saw this in an eval, my 123

heart exploded. Someone wrote, “This class taught me to be accountable for what I believe.” And I thought, “Yes.” Wow. Okay.

And that hurts by the way. This is what I told my students: Being accountable for history is painful, because as Fredric Jameson famously says, history hurts. History reminds you of the amount of atrocity that is inflicted upon people in the name of progress, and to be accountable for what you believe and your own history, both as a subject of the United States and as a member of different communities, demands that you look at the world in all of its horror, and wonder, and joy, and violence, and say, “I have to believe in something and I have to respond to what is happening around me.” That is what liberal humanist education teaches people to do. That is its purpose.

Its purpose is not to make you more economically viable. It is to make you able to be accountable for what you believe and to move in the world with conviction and discernment and the capacity to make decisions in concert with others. That’s it! That’s all, folks.

Thank you so much. The last question: what do you enjoy doing outside of writing, teaching, and reading comic books?

Oh, you know what I do? I spend so much time with all my friends. I have an amazing network of friends around this country, around the world, who are the best, the brightest, the most loving interlocutors, and they sustain me, and they make me feel like a full human being. That’s why I travel so much. I love engaging with the people that I’ve met in my different travels, and I go back, and I see them again and again and again. They are, to me, what life is about. They remind of why I’m invested in the political things I’m invested in, because I believe in their flourishing, just as much as they believe in mine. I love having that community.

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Doron Darnov is a Junior at Rutgers University, where he plans on majoring in English and Comparative Literature. His main research interests include critical theory and “the crisis of modernity� as it is presented through scholarly discourse as well as popular media representations, particularly focusing on novels, film, and art. More specifically, Doron is concerned with evaluating modernity as a space of constant cultural rupture situated as an intersectional nexus between broader social concerns, including capitalism, science, nature, technology, and individuality.

Sydney Jones received her BA in English Literature from Haverford College in May of 2015. Her academic interests include affect theory, queer studies, and materialism, and she completed a senior thesis on the architectural politics of Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman. As an undergraduate, she also enjoyed studying computer science and will begin work at a medical software company in the fall.

Fin Le Maitre is entering his fourth year at McGill University, where he studies history and English. His academic interests include the theory of the novel and the politics of historical representation. Outside of school, he likes to read, cook, and ride his bike.

Alexandra Pollak graduated from Yale University in May 2015, where she majored in English with a focus on feminist literature. Her areas of study include modernism, African-American literature, science fiction, and queer theory, particularly as they intersect with philosophies of language.

She plans to teach next year and apply for doctoral programs in English.

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Grace Schwartzenberger studied English Literature and Theatre at Northwestern University (2015), concentrating in British Literature and Theatre for Young Audiences. A Virginia Woolf enthusiast, she recently completed an honors thesis that combined her two areas of study, exploring the theatricality of Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts. After graduation, Grace plans to continue her work in the theatre as a performer, teaching artist, and lighting designer, creating meaningful art for young people of all abilities.

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