The God of the Gaps

Ellipsis as the Unnamable in Thi Bui and Carmen Maria Machado

In “Memory and Narrative of Traumatic Events,” María Crespo and Violeta Fernández-Lansac explain the way trauma creates two discrete systems of memory that operate independently of and in parallel to one another. The first “comprises voluntary memories that are integrated with other autobiographical memories,” while the second contains “nonverbal information without a temporal context, whose access is automatic” (149). One system employs language and the other—received, involuntary, immediate—is silent. So how do memoir authors express aspects of trauma that are beyond speech? Thi Bui and Carmen Maria Machado, two unconventional memoirists who chronicle deeply scarring and politically-charged traumas, intentionally combine semiotic systems to give voice to memory’s silences. By weaving gaps and non-verbal expressions into their prose, they experientially represent the silence of second-tier traumatic memory. Bui combines textual and visual rhetoric in her graphic memoir The Best We Could Do, with spreads that let the gaps between the two semiotic systems express the hopes, fears, and uncertainties of immediate and involuntarily-experienced pain. Similarly, Machado’s In the Dream House layers its rhetorical structures: While the cracks in her text are marginally visual—in the form of experimentation with typography and form—her rhetorical breaks are primarily expressed in vertiginous genre shifts that recreate the instability of an abusive relationship. Both authors use narrative fracture, redoubling, and omission in the service of communicating the unnamable, and through these ellipses, they experientially render the unnamable disquiet of trauma.

Bui’s graphic memoir chronicles her family’s traumatic journey from war-torn Viêt Nam to the United States, and the consequent hauntings of postmemory that affect two generations of Vietnamese immigrants. She blends words with panels of black and white line drawings, unified by a single-color wash in brick-red that places readers within the inexact, sepia-tones of memory. The words can be understood as Crespo and Fernández-Lansac’s first-order processed memories, while the images become the fragmentary memories of the second order. The red wash flows freely between words, images, and panels in a way that unifies disparate aspects of the same psyche. For example, in one spread Bui draws herself at a writing desk, beginning the project, enclosed in a panel. Behind her are ocean waves in the red-wash of memory, flowing into the page below. Beneath the panel is a young girl, her back turned to us, her hair blowing in the wind. She disappears off the bottom of the page in a full bleed, without a bounding box. On her back, a black tattoo of Viêt Nam, echoed by a mirror image of Viêt Nam in the wash in front of her. The words, in boxes, say “if I could see Viêt Nam as a real place, and not a symbol of something lost… I would see my parents as real people… and learn to love them better” (Bui 36). Through apposition, ellipses, and visual metaphor, the book places readers in the swell of traumatic memory: In the literal swell of memory, as the swells of the sea that transported her family on a tiny boat out of war-torn Viêt Nam are a recurring motif that expresses vulnerability, migration, and the tidal forces of women’s bodies.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud provides valuable insights about the multiple semiotic overlays that activate graphic literature. The gaps between panels, for instance, are known in comics scholarship as “the gutter”—the space where the action and events of the story are implied or suggested, but not fully shown or explained, and where readers are forced to commit “closure” (McCloud 63). Closure refers to the brain’s tendency to craft conceptual links between elements in apposition, even in instances where such links are not explicated by authors. As such, closure is necessarily experiential, asking the reader to, in a sense, co-author the story. It is the space where readers’ imaginations are activated, and where the significance and implications of the story are constructed. In the spread mentioned above, readers apprehend the images instantaneously: We see a writing woman bounded in a panel, which is linked, through closure and the red background unifying them, to a young girl with her home country written, in the form of a map, on her body. These images—which aren’t connected through reason but through emotion—slowly combine with words that explicitly link the pain of the country with the ongoing pain of the family until emotion, for the reader, squares with logic. The gutter plays a crucial role in mediating between sign systems in Bui’s text. McCloud discusses the way images are instantaneously “received” while words are “perceived,” a process that takes time, specialized knowledge, and the ability to de- and recode signs (49). The lag between reception and perception causes emotion and logic to harmonize at different registers. As such, the combination of word and image is perfect for rendering both first- and second-tier traumatic memories—the verbal and the scotomized or unnamable. By leaving space for the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps, Bui harnesses closure, the gutter, and the lag between reception and perception to weave a rich and complex narrative that is both conceptually coherent and emotionally wrenching.

Machado’s In the Dream House, too, forces readers to commit closure, though her methods are more conceptual than visual, including dizzying shifts in genre that occur each chapter. Her memoir chronicles same-sex intimate partner abuse, which readers co-experience in the narrative’s constant destabilizations, diversions, and repetitions. Machado writes sudden queasy shifts, violent mood swings, and pregnant ellipses into the text, subversions of narrative expectations that mirror the gaslighting, unpredictability, and cruelty of the relationship in question. While she does not exploit the split between received images and perceived text, she does manipulate our expectations of genre: Our anticipation of generic tropes, after all, precede cognition of the complex plot. Machado names her past abusive relationship “The Dream House,” and the unnamed girlfriend as “the Woman in the Dream House.” The narrative literally takes place in a small home in Bloomington Indiana in which the two lived during the author’s early twenties; but it figuratively takes place in an increasingly isolated and atemporal dreamscape that rollercoasters from erotic heights to horror-movie lows. We can read these different narrative layers as parallel to Bui’s overlay of words and images; and both authors use these unconventional techniques to layer Crespo and Fernández-Lansac’s first- and second-order memories. Machado employs second-person narration throughout. Readers come to understand that the author is the “I” at the time of writing, apostrophizing her former self, the one trapped in time, repeatedly and eternally undergoing abuse. Each chapter resituates the Dream House in a new genre, almost like switching the channels on a television, and the chapter titles, like “Dream House as Bildungsroman”; “Dream House as Haunted Mansion”; “Dream House as Cosmic Horror,” remain the only formal constant. Many of the chapters are short and impressionistic, sometimes as short as a single sentence, with connections to the narrative that are often oblique, tenuous, associative. Thus, much of the text is blank space. The interstices between Machado’s vignettes thereby function as “gutters” of sorts, that force readers to supply the connective tissue, like they must between the panels of Bui’s graphic memoir.

In “Exploring Same-Sex Female Intimate Partner Abuse Through Literary Tropes,” Sinéad Spelman notes that Machado endeavors to “bring to light invisible, and often taboo, areas of experience through stylistic experimentation,” in which the “the autobiographical first-person interrupt[s] dynamics of erasure and silencing” (45). Like Bui, Machado paradoxically uses silence to restore her own authority over a narrative that has been hijacked. Machado must walk a fine line to tell a story that has been commandeered both by the Woman in the Dream House on the one hand and by forces that are hostile to or essentializing of LGBTQ+ experiences on the other. The textual pauses between vignettes do a lot of work, forcing readers to participate in the text by committing closure where she leaves blank spaces. Take, for instance, the gap between “Dream House as Idiom” and “Dream House as Warning”: The final lines of the former contend that “Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, [‘safe as houses’] means that the person in charge is secure; everyone else should be afraid,” which yields immediately to “A few months before your girlfriend became the Woman in the Dream House, a young… undergrad went missing in Bloomington” (Machado 78-9). While the observation about the idiom “safe as houses” and the young missing girl are literally unrelated, they are figuratively tied together, and readers cannot help but link them through closure. Thus, as happens in the ellipses between all of the vignettes—indeed one could almost take any two contiguous vignettes to make the same point—the two ideas grow together, such that even the joy of moving in with a lover becomes tinged with threat. The author is not “safe as houses” in the Dream House, since she is implicitly not the one in charge, and then she becomes the missing girl, who, it is implied, has been disappeared by a perpetrator. This perpetrator, our brains tell us, illogically, is the Woman in the Dream House.

Both authors aestheticize eloquent silences. Jacques Derrida offers insights about the deep resonances of silence. In “Ellipsis,” he notes that what is left out of texts, the absences or “ellipses,” “redouble and consecrate” the words that remain (296). Pauses pepper Bui’s and Machado’s texts, stylistically and rhetorically, and Derrida’s conception of the ellipsis helps to ground their semiotically unstable methods. Textual blind spots, he argues, contain a “fabric of traces” for readers to decode, for “all meaning is altered by this lack” (Derrida 296). By “pronouncing non-closure,” Derrida maintains, the gaps are both “infinitely open and infinitely reflecting on [themselves]” in a Möbius strip that “redoubles” meaning. Redoubling, to Derrida, disrupts the traditional hierarchy of language, highlighting its inherent instability and ambiguity (Derrida 298). Bui and Machado use negative space as a kind of redoubling, creating the outlines of trauma such that the shape of its impact is clear, even if it cannot be looked at directly. Since they are both women whose identities are already marginalized by factors other than their trauma, they use gaps to forestall the external suppression of the traumatic experiences that further marginalize them. In an interview with Aaron Burkhalter, Bui discusses cultural silence: “my people speak in pregnant silences and don't argue. So I had to figure out how to do that in comics. It turns out that comics are actually good at showing silences.” McCloud discusses the emotional impact of silence in comics; the way silences push content into eternal and unchanging spaces, remarking,

the content of a silent panel… can produce a sense of timelessness. Because of its unresolved nature, such a panel may linger in the readers’ mind… When ‘bleeds’ are used, time is no longer contained, but instead hemorrhages and escapes into timeless space. (102)

We might look once more at Bui’s older version of herself sitting inside the panel, imagining the full-bleed image of her younger self below. The self below is trapped in timeless space, even as the author ages. This, according to Crespo and Fernández-Lansac, is how second-tier trauma memories work: “Triggered by perceptual cues,” they are “dominated by vivid sensorial details” that fragment and arrest time (149). These involuntary memories return the afflicted person against and again back to the site and conditions of the trauma. In an interview with Madi Haslam, Machado, too, discusses her aesthetic choice to use second person as a negotiation between her older self and the younger self who is doomed, when triggered by external stimuli, to repeat the traumatic memory:

I talk about this first-person Carmen—that's me—and the second-person Carmen—that's like this past version of myself that can't access any of the knowledge that I have… she is constantly turning on this hamster wheel of pain, trapped in the past… She’s stuck there forever and there's nothing I can do about it, so [using second person is] sort of honoring that wall.

Thi Bui

By taking control, visiting the scenes of trauma on their own terms, these authors perform a kind of healing scriptotherapy, which Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in Reading Autobiography, refer to as “the process of speaking or writing about trauma in order to find words to give voice to previously repressed memories” (29). Both Bui and Machado create, gaze at, and empathize with these remembered selves who cannot speak, who are immobile within the amber of their distress. Both authors use silence to sanctify their timeless, full-bleed suffering.

Derrida conceives of the ellipsis as a tool to draw readers’ attention to what is missing in a text, suggesting there is always more to be said or thought in these textual gaps. Ellipses, being circular and recursive in nature, as well as pregnant with potential energy, challenge a linear philosophical telos. They open new, more rhizomatic structures of thought around familiar ideas as a part of Derrida’s broader project of deconstruction, which seeks to expose the hidden assumptions and biases that buttress Western epistemology. Both Bui and Machado are women of color with a specific positionality within mainstream culture, and thus their narratives are triply adulterated by the strains of dominant discourse: They are women on one hand; they are women of color on another; and finally, Bui is an immigrant and Machado is from the LGBTQ+ community. While everyone suffering unnamable trauma works within some form of narrative mediation that they must navigate and, if necessary, dismantle, immigrants and queer women of color must kick against tremendous undercurrents to be heard at all. Moreover, they are burdened with representing not only themselves but an entire category of people, balancing personal truth with the need to protect their group from harmful stereotypes. Ellipses can help, strategic silences that speak a language that is different from but complementary to the narrative. Through the differences between word and image for Bui and between a first-person narrator and a second-person self in Machado, these two women navigate memories that do not square with, or that fit uncomfortably among, existing narratives about immigrants and queer people.

The Viêt Nam war, for instance, has deeply entrenched narratives in the United States, and part of Bui’s project is redressing the “stereotypes and terrible cliches about Vietnamese people from bad Vietnam War movies” (Burkhalter). And so she must fight against calcified history in writing her historically-specific trauma. As Stella Oh observes in “Birthing a Graphic Archive of Memory: Re-Viewing the Refugee Experience in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do,”

Rather than dehistoricizing trauma, Bui positions trauma and the material conditions of war firmly and literally on the back of the character and engages in a political project of recuperative narrativization. The graphic novel serves as a form of cartography, mapping our ways of perceiving Vietnam and the Vietnamese War in spatial and recursive modes that intervene in dominant tropes of Vietnam and representations of the war. (81)

Carmen Maria Machado

Like Bui, Machado expresses frustration that the legal and social narratives about queer people make her leery of representing the Woman in the Dream House as “the specter of the lunatic lesbian” (126), but she is compelled to write her experience because “the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history” (138). Being in the double-bind of trauma on the one hand and cultural invisibility on the other compels both women to aestheticize silence, if only to keep their narratives out of the greedy grasp of pre-existing and limiting white Western heteronormative thought. God, as the old saying goes, can be glimpsed right there in the gaps.

In sum, ellipses run like electrical currents through both authors’ prose, and their texts use ellipses to explore trauma by mixing semiotic systems, in ways that correspond to Crespo and Fernández-Lansac’s two tiers of traumatic memory. Machado and Bui employ writerly techniques that, through silence, become powerful archives of traumatic memory and postmemory. Kelly Hurley’s “Trauma and Horror” argues that traditional modes of narration such as realism are inadequate for the abreaction of trauma, because it isn’t possible to render

a “true” representation of traumatic events, given that the very experience of trauma involves the derangement, even the shattering, of the subjective apparatus designed to process it. Traumatic events can only be understood belatedly and imperfectly; they give rise to repetitive dreams and uncontrollable flashbacks and generate this-is-what-happened stories characterized by disjunction and distortion. (2)

Bui and Machado’s grapplings thereby provide models of healing that acknowledge and honor breakages and fractures, sanctifying the gap between what can be spoken and what exists beyond words. Their fractured narratives, rather than smoothing over the jagged edges of trauma, choose to aestheticize the breakages as a way to honor their experiences and experientially convey them to readers. Both of them are doing something that becomes a source of empowerment for those who find their experiences outside of accepted reality: They queer the pitch, semiotically, a tactic that strikes me as a kind of écriture féminine, since women, when it comes to trauma, often have to fight tooth and claw to wrest their stories back from a dehumanizing hegemony that would prefer to smooth out, simplify, or simply erase their story from the archive.

Works Cited

Burkhalter, Aaron. “Thi Bui Brings Her Graphic Novel Memoir to Seattle for Four Days of Appearances.” The South Seattle Emerald, 8 April 2019.

Crespo, María and Violeta Fernández-Lansac. “Memory and Narrative of Traumatic Events: A Literature Review.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 2016, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 149–156.

Derrida, Jacques. “Ellipsis.” Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass, U. of Chicago P., 1978, pp. 294-300.

Haslam, Madi. “The House is a Space of Living Metaphor: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado.” MaisonNeuve, 20 Dec. 2019, Accessed 10 Dec 2022.

Hurley, Kelly. “Trauma and Horror: Anguish and Transfiguration.” English language Notes, Vol. 59, No. 2, Oct. 2021, pp. 2-8.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins Publishing, 1993.

Oh, Stella. “Birthing a Graphic Archive of Memory: Re-Viewing the Refugee Experience in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do.” Melus, Vol 25, No. 4, Winter 2020, pp. 72-90.

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Second Edition. U. of Minnesota P., 2010.

Spelman, Sinéad. “Carmen Maria Machado's Memoir In The Dream House: Exploring Same-Sex Female Intimate Partner Abuse Through Literary Tropes.” Journal of Gender, Globalisation and Rights, No. 3, 2022.

Of Carpets and Shrouds

The Family and the Polis in Aeschylus’ Oresteia

In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, marriage is war. In a literal rather than a metaphorical sense: The perversion of the marriages of Atreus, Menelaus, and Agamemnon form a chain of iniquity that leads directly to the Trojan War and its tragical aftermath, and the text links the failure of blood ties to the failure of the state. But the sacrifice of young unmarried women in the play—whom the text renders as especially tragic—is what delays and complicates the carrying out of justice. Or, rather, it sets one paradigm of divine justice against another, equally important one. Cassandra is one such Parthenos, and her fruitless prophesizing transforms her into a crucial audience surrogate: Like us, she is armed with foreknowledge about how the play’s action will transpire but (like us) she is unable to use her knowledge to change events and is doomed to watch them unfold with the same combination of pity and terror that the audience experiences. A figure of impossible duality, she is at once nubile and doubly-wed; at once princess and slave; and, most crucially, at once herself and an echo of another Parthenos, the unjustly sacrificed Iphigenia. She cannot be suffered to survive this duality, but without such recursion in Cassandra’s body, the story cannot be suffered to survive. In her, the plays’ warring energies collide: Cold, rational Apollo, overseer of masculine order, and the hot, feminine temper of the Furies. It takes a divine arbiter in the form of Athena to settle the dispute between the justice of the Polis and the justice of the home, and to restore equilibrium to the chaos created by the drama’s many perversions of marriage.

Cassandra personifies the state that has captured her. Like the ruling family of Argos, her life is defined—and defiled—by a curse. The curse on the house of Atreus, Aeschylus makes clear, was initiated when Atreus’ brother Thyestes seduced his wife in a prior generation. In revenge, Atreus fed Thyestes his own children. Cassandra, the play’s truth-teller, renders this curse legible for the audience when she characterizes her new home as “A house that hates the gods, a houses in  / on the wicked murder of its own, of itself, a house full of nooses” and she gets more explicit when she references “the babies wailing over the sacrifice, / and the roasted meat on which their father was fed” (Ag. 1090-1, 1096-7). This initial horror—the first mutilation of marriage and child-rearing bonds—has, by the time of the action, rippled out to subsequent generations such that the curse dooms the entire culture to violent instability. Menelaus drags his allies into the protracted Trojan war because of the abduction of his wife by her lover, Paris; Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in exchange for favorable sailing winds. In “The Marriage of Cassandra and the Oresteia,” Robin Mitchell-Boyask notes that “the color of Iphigenia's robes, ‘saffron-dyed’… suggests the appearance of the Greek bridal veil,” and thus we see that she, thinking she would be wed, was sacrificed instead (283). In turn, Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, takes ferocious revenge for Iphigenia’s murder upon her husband’s return from the Trojan War, killing him in the bath. From there, their son, Orestes, must obey Apollo by murdering his own mother in retribution for the regicide. Though that is the last human death, Orestes is so hounded by the Furies—the fierce, ancient deities who preside over kinship bonds—that he is driven mad, unable to ascend to his father’s throne. No human recourse can interrupt the endless cycle of bloodshed and suffering ensured by the curse.

In parallel to the curse on the house of Atreus, Cassandra suffers under her own curse. Apollo, at some point in the past, gave her the wooing gift of foresight, but when she spurned him, he cursed her by ensuring her prophecies would never be believed. When we meet her, she is a war prize bequeathed to Agamemnon by his army, a former princess of the conquered Troy, now a slave. A Parthenos, Cassandra must follow Agamemnon into his home in a caricature of Greek marriage rites, which, as Mitchell-Boyask notes, “cast the bride’s departure from her house as an abduction and then death” (276). By tradition, a bride is delivered by chariot from her mother’s to her mother-in-law’s household, an act that is “strongly associated with the Persephone myth that this drama evokes” (Mitchell-Boyask 276). So marriage—a girl’s forced obeisance to a new lord—is framed as a kind of death. When Cassandra arrives in Argos as war booty, the play’s staging casts her as his bride, alighting from a chariot while he marches on foot, and his wife, Clytemnestra, becomes a stand-in for her mother-in-law, greeting her at the door. The bride imagery, however, is redoubled by her entreaties to Apollo, whose bride, we learn, she should also be. The saffron of Iphigenia’s robes is reiterated in the text by the chorus, who liken the chill her words have on their blood as “the color of men who have fallen / in battle and lie in the rays of their life as it sets” (Ag. 1121-3). Though Mary Lefkowitz’ translation alludes to Apollo in evoking the color of sunbeams—he is after all the god of sunlight and patron of young ephebes in the military—Mitchell-Boyask translates the line as “saffron-dyed blood” (283). This textual echo strikes me as critical in generating a resonance between the plays’ two Parthenoi. Doubly a bride, Cassandra is no bride at all. She laments, “No father’s altar waits there, but a block— / scarlet and warm when I’m the sacrifice,” strengthening her link to Iphigenia (Ag. 1277-8). Death is her last resort, and the only way to consummate the aborted wedding to Apollo. Mitchell-Boyask notes the way Cassandra’s lot becomes metonymy for the state:

By presenting Cassandra as Apollo's bride the dramatist looks forward and prepares his audience for important aspects of the next two parts of the trilogy, including the role of Orestes as a maturing ephebe claiming his patrimony under Apollo's guidance and Apollo's extremely problematic… conduct during Orestes's trial. (271)

Through Cassandra, the play intimates that intuition cannot comfortably mate with rationality: There is no perfect union possible between rational and intuitive justice. A balance must be struck between the ancient Furies and the younger gods of the Polis if there is to be any dramatic resolution. Once inside the home, Cassandra removes her veil with the words “I’ll prophesy no longer like a new bride / timidly peering out beneath her veil” (Ag. 1178-9). Mitchell-Boyask asserts that “Her progress into clarity here, lifting the veil, stands for her as the consummation of her marriage as it accompanies her accession to death as a Bride of Apollo” (278). Cassandra can fulfill her obligation to Apollo only through death, and thus serves as a recursion of the fatal conflict between sign systems that the culture suffers: It takes a balance of the feminine and masculine principles, embodied by Athena, to provide a resolution, albeit an imperfect one.

When Apollo tells Orestes to travel to Athens to be tried by the courts, he informs us that the city’s patron goddess, Athena, will adjudicate the proceedings. This represents a yielding of ancient custom—clan justice with its cycles of never-ending carnage—to the urbane laws of the Polis. No human character in the trilogy is wise to condemn of defy Apollo, but Aeschylus does not present him as just or trustworthy either. His system of marshal justice, too, is proven insufficient, and the play demonstrates that Athens’ civic legal code is equipped to recognize and contend with such insufficiencies. Apollo serves, in the trial, as the god for the defense, and he begins inauspiciously by insulting the Furies, who are serving as the jury. He arrogantly demands that they leave the Areopagus, saying: “You should share a cave / with a blood-guzzling lion, and not wipe / your dirt on others at this oracle. / You strays, you feral goats, move off!” (Eu. 193-6). Athena, though she rules in favor of Apollo and Orestes, serves as diplomat, calming, negotiating with, and expressing reverence for the Furies so that all sides are more or less satisfied with the outcome. As a goddess begotten of Zeus’ forehead, she represents both male and female principles, announcing herself as mediator between their interests with these words:

There is no mother who gave birth to me.
With all my heart, I hold with what is male—
except through marriage. I am all my father’s,
no partisan of any woman killed
for murdering her husband, her home’s watchman. (Eu. 736-40)

The Furies are angered by Apollo, but Athena turns to them with the words “let me persuade you” (Eu. 793). She promotes them, promising them the privilege and worship due to goddesses, for “No household here could thrive apart from you” (Eu. 896). It takes a woman (Athena) to reconcile the fierceness of a lioness protecting a cub (Clytemnestra) with the impartial justice of the state (Apollo). Thus, the trilogy’s conclusion makes plain the theme of incompatible systems of justice, models a resolution to the incompatibility, and delivers Cassandra and Iphigenia vengeance, paltry but satisfactory.

Cassandra and her antecedent are keystones that communicate the trilogy’s gendered orientation to justice. The drama subtly suggests that an all-male justice schema will catch too many innocents in its crossfire. Feminine interests in the drama are represented by fabrics, as exemplified by Iphigenia’s saffron robe; Cassandra’s bridal/prophetic veil; and, as yet unmentioned, the tapestries spread out by Clytemnestra upon Agamemnon’s return. Clytemnestra welcomes him home by spreading sumptuous textiles beneath his feet. They are dyed with precious murex, too fine to be walked on, and she does it as a kind of test. Agamemnon at first demurs, saying only gods should trample such fabrics, but his ego eventually cannot hold up to the temptation, and he treads on them. This act of male hubris signals that Agamemnon has failed his wife’s test. But he also fails ours: Even after sacrificing countless soldiers in a long and bloody war, he is still willing to tread on something fine to serve himself, the way he tread on his daughter by sacrificing her to his own glory. Apollo oversees and adjudges young ephebes, and as such he is a god with a connection to the justice of war—a god whose sister demanded Iphigenia’s blood sacrifice. But he is also himself without a consort, and is thus a threat to young parthenoi, as much as human ephebes are, which we learn from his menacing of Cassandra; and from the Furies, toward whom his behavior is unforgivable. The justice of women, however, based on rage and instinct, while understandable, is also insufficient to run the state, as we see in the curse that the Furies have unleashed on the house of Atreus. Setting aside the gendered aspect of the systems of justice, the metaphor of Cassandra is as useful today as it presumably was in the time of Aeschylus. We still do not have a perfect system of justice; and we still struggle for grace and balance under the law. These plays go deeply and psychomachically into the psychology of ethics, wherein one aspect of human experience doesn’t “play nice” with other aspects. Many if not all, at times, experience the pride and hubris of Agamemnon; the rage and vengeance of Clytemnestra; the impossible choices and hounding conscience of Orestes. Many of us struggle, at the personal, familial, and state levels, to restore order and equilibrium to a kingdom that is perpetually torn asunder.

Works Cited

Aeschylus. “The Oresteia.” The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Translated by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, Modern Library, 2017, pp. 51-177.

Mitchell-Boyask, Robin. “The Marriage of Cassandra and the ‘Oresteia’: Text, Image, Performance.” The American Philological Association, Vol. 136, No. 2, Autumn 2006, pp. 269-97.

Losing Control

A Dialogic Game Derived from the Crowdsourced Imaginary

“The buildings of capitalism, hives of killer bees, honey for the few.
He served there. But in a dark tunnel, when no one watched,
he unfolded his wings and flew. He had to live his life”

— Tomas Tranströmer, “Epigram”

Fan fiction traditionally follows a radial trajectory: Beginning with a locus—an author or text—it projects outward to a loose confederacy of fans who create and compile work that orbits and extends the original. But the videogame Control reverses this trajectory, taking its inspiration from a fanbase dedicated to collective storytelling—a Creative Commons fictional universe called the “SCP Foundation” to which anyone is welcome to contribute. Both properties are haunted houses of a sort, conceived as shadowy government agencies charged with “Securing, Containing, Protecting” (SCP) paranormal phenomena. The Federal Bureau of Control, Control’s in-game analog to the SCP’s “Foundation,” is literally haunted by the phenomena contained therein, but group storytelling and universal ownership queer our expectations of the haunted house paradigm: While traditional, single-author hauntings are often centered around one idea that the author controls and which the fanbase then complicates, the hauntings in Control are networked, variegated, and compounding. The narrative, in consequence, often feels tonally chaotic, but each element is a recognizable fragment in a shared imaginary, severed from its context. Control is, compellingly, a junk drawer of free ranging, psychologically-charged symbols which deliberately shift from definitive to ambiguated authorship: The game’s diffuse provenance, centerless networks, and hauntings from the collective unconscious offer players a quixotic power fantasy of literally cleansing the specters of late-capitalist alienation from a modern workspace.

Control’s set is a chilling workplace dystopia, where players are charged with containing various phenomena, usually consumer products that have come to life due to a quorum of the population imbuing them with longing or terror. They range from mischievous to neutral—haunted jukeboxes, arcade games, and lawn flamingos—but the game’s true villain is a malignant entity called only “The Hiss,” which infects people and spaces. The player avatar is Jesse Faden, a drifter who spent her life working low-wage subsistence jobs, a fact that is relevant to the project. The game begins with Jesse, in search of her brother, inside a brutalist government building in Manhattan, a building that is seemingly empty save for the electrical hum of fluorescent lights, the whisper of shuffling paper somewhere nearby, and the clanking of distant machinery. Jesse eventually finds herself in the office of the Bureau Director where he is lying dead on the floor. Upon picking up his sidearm she becomes the new Director of the FBC. All the photographs of the former Director on the walls, the player notices with alarm, have been replaced with her face, and the few office workers that remain alive greet her as the Director without surprise when they encounter her. Jesse finds she must fight The Hiss through the various departments of the Bureau, learning on the job to cleanse nodes of its influence, and shepherd uncorrupted office workers to safety. From beginning to end we aren’t sure if she is sane or hallucinating; if she is struggling underclass or apex predator; if the mysterious janitor haunting the corridors is man, god, monster, or ghost; or if the mysterious Board, a group of enigmatic entities who advise Jesse from out of a huge, inverted pyramid, are her pawns or her Svengali.

These inversions contribute to the game’s uncanny power and offer a searing critique of capitalist priorities. In “The Precession of Simulacra,” Jean Baudrillard calls our attention to “the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality” (463). Control literalizes such mise en scènes by imagining the workspace as haunted by cruel and incomprehensible manifestations of corporate greed and expressions of power. The Hiss infection warps the building—the walls and corridors and furniture—in disturbing, unpredictable ways, mixing senseless architectural recursion with what feel like severed body parts. The game is a visual metaphor of Baudrillard’s “hyperreality,” which he conceives as “the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface” into a kind of Möbius strip (465). In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler maintains that the “alienation of the individual” is expressed in the scale differences between skyscrapers—expressions of capitalist domination—and the anonymous workers who are automatons within and around them. This difference would not be so acute without “the real economic and social estrangements experienced by the majority of [a city’s] inhabitants” (Vidler 4). In Control, where there is Hiss infection, hapless office workers hang suspended in midair. These suspended figures murmur a steady chant in unison as the player gets close to Hiss-infected areas. The words of the chant occasionally come into focus with bizarrely juxtaposed Dadaist non-sequiturs like “A copy of a copy of a copy / Leave your insides by the door / The picture is you holding the picture.” They wear office attire—the uniforms of executives, scientists, secretaries, custodians, and security guards, all rendered equal in thralldom. They are liable at any moment to drop from the ceiling and attack Jesse, for the Hiss is a malevolent hive-mind that takes over bodies and spaces for some unspecified purpose that Jesse, without understanding how or why, must stop.

The gameplay involves fighting through rooms representing “the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface.” Different Bureau divisions have their own character and commentary on the class implications of corporate structure: In “Research” the player faces the experiments-gone-wrong unleashed by scientists playing god; “Maintenance” requires players to clear toxic waste and sentient fungal infestations; and in “Executive,” players discover increasingly unhinged recordings, evidence of upper management’s insanity, in their luxurious office suites. We are Quixotic flâneurs in a crowdsourced space, and the hauntings we find here are multiform and interconnected in what Neal Kirk calls “Networked Spectrality,” a particular kind of contemporary, high-tech haunted house that is collective and rhizomatic in structure, and through which our emergent fears and longings hunt and terrorize us, the more frightening because they are “unseen technological protocols” that can “structure and use human behavior” (Kirk 64). Rather than Freud’s psychological unheimlich, we find ourselves in a site of sociological unheimlich, a contemporary workspace that is also a prison, as the mysterious Board lets slip during a weapon tutorial, saying, “The Service Weapon has many Forms, like the House/Prison you occupy.” Like its real-world analogs, the Board inhabits a space wholly separate from the Bureau, and its inscrutable language—often a hodgepodge of cosmic horror and corporate buzzwords—obfuscates and bullies. Toward game’s end, Jesse teams up with another entity, which angers the Board. It says to her, “We Apologize/Deny All Knowledge. [The Former] builds a Competition/Not Us… If you [side with it] you will be Sorry/Dead. And you will never work/exist in this Torn/Cosmic Reality again.” There is no escape from Jesse’s fate—or ours, as Baudrillard would have it—but cleansing the nodes of each sector of Hiss influence comes close. Mastering these spaces of terror—watching the walls retract into smooth, gray, innocent symmetry; watching the eerie red give way to regular fluorescent lighting, hearing the blessed cessation of the chanting—is accompanied by a heady feeling of power and release.

Because no game about hyperreality would be complete without an instance of life imitating art, I’ll leave off with a real-life story: In 2015, Russian oligarch Andrey Duskin joined the SCP Foundation as a writer and began selling art based on its logo and stories, a project that was warmly encouraged by SCP—at first. But then, after copyrighting his work, he tried to wrest control of the IP away from them, using a loophole in the Creative Commons licensing. The lawsuit failed outside of Russia—for now—but it is ongoing, and he now owns all the rights to the property, including the work he did not create, inside Russia. As I was doing research for this project, Duskin became the Hiss for me, a corrupting force that consumes everything of cultural emergence only to package it back up and sell it to its creators. For this is one of the insatiable hungers of capitalism: The endless appropriation of the communicative arts, the packaging of it into bite-sized consumables, so that even our own creations are no longer ours, but part of the Möbius strip of capital, folding back on its own surface. But playing Control, on my couch in front of my PS5, at the threshold between real world and game world I felt myself momentarily free of that. For a moment, embodying a working-class hero who fell into a position of authority, I could ask myself “Who has Control?” and think, just maybe, it could be me.

Works Cited

Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation, Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U. of Michigan P., 1994, pp. 453–81.

Control. PS5 Edition, Remedy Entertainment, Distributed by 505 Games, 2019.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, Translated by Brian Massumi, U. of Minnesota P., 1987.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Art and Literature, Translated by James Strachey, Penguin, 1990, pp. 336-75.

Joy, Reagan. “The Tragedy of the Creative Commons: An Analysis of How Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights Undermine the Use of Permissive Licensing.” Case Western Law Review, Vol. 72, Is. 4, 2022, pp. 977-1012.

Kirk, Neal. “Networked Spectrality: In Memorium, Pulse, and Beyond.” Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic, and the Found Footage Phenomenon, Edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, I.B. Tauris and Company, 2015.

Tranströmer, Tomas. “Epigram.” Inspired Notes: The Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by John F. Deane, 2011.

Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. MIT Press, 1999.

Parsing a Secret History

Ann Cvetkovich’s “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”

Ann Cvetkovich situates Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home among extant criticism of other graphic memoirs—namely Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—in the way they all concern the relationship between historical and personal trauma. Like Spiegelman, Bechdel’s text concerns a kind of family archeology, in her case undertaken by a queer child attempting to trace her queerness back to her closeted father; like Satrapi, Bechdel was an actual witness to events, and is not merely responding to the “postmemory” experienced by the next generation (Cvetkovich 113). But Cvetkovich distinguishes Bechdel’s memoir from the others for its intimate scope and emphasis on queer concerns and problematics. Where Spiegelman and Satrapi pursue precision, Bechdel generates ambiguity; where Spiegelman and Satrapi situate their stories in moments of violent political rupture, Bechdel’s family drama feels deceptively small—one might even call it claustrophobic. All three texts dramatize the difference in scale between the individual caught within the machine of vast global events and the cultural memory that occludes the personal in such events. Bechdel’s cultural rupture is an invisible one, the very violence of which is in its suppression and secrecy. She seeks to be “the sympathetic witness who can make available the rich and contradictory story of [her father’s] life so that he is something more than a pedophile, suicide, or tragic homosexual” (Cvetkovich 113). Bechdel undertakes this task for the good of the queer community, excavating the violence to self and others that comes from living a closeted life: Such suppression, the text argues, is as silently dangerous as louder, more visible cataclysms.

Cvetkovich grounds her observations in a queer theoretical frame, linking queer theory to scholars of historical trauma like Marianne Hirsch, who coined the term “postmemory” to refer to the aftereffects that haunt the children of parents who have lived through trauma. Much of Cvetkovich’s evidence is built on the interplay between image and text: She observes that the combination of words and images in all three graphic novels demonstrate “the effects of growing up in the vicinity of powerful combinations of violence and secrecy, including forms of secrecy that in the interest of protecting children’s innocence seem only to harm them” (Cvetkovich 113). For Bechdel’s text especially, the images create a “visual archive” of what only existed in secret or as symptom—the way her father’s obsession with restoration is a symptom; or his fastidiousness about appearance that he projects onto his daughter in a way that violates her autonomy. Through recreating documents and photographs in a more detailed, photorealistic sketch style than the rest of the illustrations, Bechdel “draws the evidence” in a way that both concedes a subjective read of events—the drawings are not photographs or digital reproductions of documents like they are in Spiegelman—and rhetorically separates them from the rest of the art. Bechdel uses the art to “both enhance and trouble acts of witness” (Cvetkovich 114).

Cvetkovich takes as her prime exemplar the memoir’s “centerfold,” an image of the family babysitter taken during a trip the children took with their father. Bechdel painstakingly reproduces the photograph in detailed crosshatching, but also includes her cartoony style in the form of the narrator Alison’s hands holding the photograph. This produces overlays of reality that complicate rather than simplifying. The more realistic sketch gives the artifact a greater tie to the “real world” than the personal story of Alison’s interiority, while also nodding to her father’s more baroque artistic tastes in contrast to her simple line-art. But, as Cvetkovich notes, the fact that it is hand-drawn concedes that we are not seeing an “unmediated form of vision” (114). She bathes the photograph—which may have been innocent—in an erotic glow, trying to visually imagine her father’s desire when he took the photograph of the almost naked teen lying on the bed, in the hotel room next to his children. The drawn photograph’s “visual elements—its style, composition, layout, and sequencing—underscore its emotional significance” rather than its historical veracity (Cvetkovich 115). Indeed, Cvetkovich contends that the original photograph and the hand-drawn replica tell different stories, each critical to our understanding of a complex and secret history: “Despite their differences—the photograph instantaneous, the drawing laborious; the photograph apparently truthful, the drawing achieving other kinds of verisimilitude—both serve as technologies of memory” (118). This overlay of semantic systems is central to Bechdel’s project of cultural memory’s intersection with personal experience.

Bechdel’s archive interrupts the narrative of queerness in the United States. Her combination of images and text refuses to succumb to dominant trends in “queer witnessing” that idealize and simplify. The trauma of Bechdel’s illustrated world is repressed and compacted, cramped within her father’s need to sublimate and deny, and Bechdel “airs out” the family trauma by outing a parent for whom concealment was a way of life. The graphic form is appropriate to this project, comprising an “insurgent genre” that documents events in ways that hew closer to emotional than historical truth (Cvetkovich 112).  As Cvetkovich notes:

Fun Home's queer witnessing deserves to be part of its highly successful and well-deserved reception, since it provides such a compelling challenge to celebratory queer histories that threaten to erase more disturbing and unassimilable inheritances. (126)

Cvetkovich calls this challenge to the status quo a bold move. She notes that the current state of LGBTQ  rhetoric, at least in the mainstream, is “quite willing to disavow stigmatized identities that might disrupt the clean wholesome image of gay people who just want to get married and have families” (125). Queer theory itself pushes back on this recourse to normativity.

Cvetkovich draws interesting parallels and makes compelling points about Bechdel’s archive of memory and its relationship to the inherited trauma of the closet. Having read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, however, I can’t help but think she might have deepened her argument through an engagement with semiotics: Bechdel deliberately activates different sign systems in her visual and conceptual overlays. McCloud notes how variance along the continuum of realism/abstraction in comics affects reader’s experience of meaning in predictable ways:

By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts. Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without… and through the cartoon the world within. (41)

This insight deepens Cvetkovich’s observations about the Bechdel’s assorted “technologies of memory,” and could be fruitfully applied to her “centerfold,” which shows Alison’s hands (the world within) holding a photorealistic drawing of a photograph (the world without). McCloud notes that comics offer what other media can’t, in that the reader becomes, in a sense, a collaborator. He introduces the concept of the “gutter”—the space between the panels of a cartoon—as a space at once empty and pregnant with meaning. The gutter is the interstice where readers commit “closure”: “Comics panels fracture both time and space,” he says, “offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (McCloud 67). Bechdel’s medium of choice forces readers to collaborate with its author, closing the gaps in memory, both cultural and personal, that have no closure in the real world.

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. First Mariner Books, 2007.

Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly. Vol. 36, No. ½, Spring/Summer 2008, pp. 111-128.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Postmemory.” https://postmemory.net/, N.D., Accessed 20 Oct 2022.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.

The Bent Arrow

Heteronormativity, Negative Space, and the Color of Selfhood in Giovanni’s Room

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

— James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"

“So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.”

— Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B”

What is particularly instructive about James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room is what is left out: Baldwin is a queer black American adopting (persuasively) the voice and stance of David, a white, queer, self-hating ex-pat suffering—and making others suffer—under the conflicting pressures to live an authentic life and to hide under the mask of his privileged position within white American masculinity. The effect of the novel is therefore essentially metatextual, signifying what a black man notices about white behavior and motives, and therefore expressing what a white subject has difficulty seeing in himself and his lived experience. In this way, the novel might actually be about a black queer experience through its use of negative space: The specter of black identity haunts its pages like a film negative, springing up in David at his most vulnerable, at times a sort of shadow-self. Baldwin’s novel thereby renders, with excruciating intimacy, a reversal of the white gaze. For he has a perceptional superpower: He is a black subject who, unlike white subjects, has access to both the rhetoric of white, postwar, heterosexual normativity—since the culture is saturated with it—and black double-consciousness, inflected by the coequal marginality of mid-century queer identity.

In Baldwin’s novel, blackness is conflated with queerness, and through it we are invited into the crisis of American postwar anxiety, where the borders of race and other signifiers of alterity—poverty, foreignness, gender, etc.—are vigilantly policed. This novel is evidence for the imbrication of blackness and queerness, as Baldwin states plainly in “Go the Way Your Heart Beats”: “The sexual question and the racial question,” he avers, “have always been entwined” (178). In my argument I will amend Loredana Bercuci’s contentions that by leveraging the “troubled psyche” of a white character to call out “the post-war consensus on ideals of white masculinity,” Baldwin is actually expressing a black experience (191). He accomplishes this through metaphors: By peopling the text with shadows that “darken” the metanarrative David depends on for his identity, we see how reified blackness and whiteness operate and are dependent on one another. As such, the text is involved in “undoing whiteness,” an argument proposed by Aliyyah Abur-Rahman in “Simply a Menaced Boy.” Moreover, the text literalizes Edward Said’s theory that the West’s black and brown “Others” are really shadow-selves of its own desires and terrors. When David endeavors to project his fears and desires “outside” so he, a white man, can occupy the rarified status of “inside,” it costs him his happiness—and, in many ways, his soul. Blackness is expressed in shadows that frighten David, but the blackness, by the end, gestures the way to his liberation as well, as Emilio Amedeo suggested in Queer Tidalectics: He argues that the text’s shadows become paired with water imagery, emblematic of movement and authentic self-expression, antidotes to joyless and brittle American manhood. This metaphorical qualities of blackness—shadows and tides—corroborate Josep M. Armengol’s contention that the novel “smuggles” blackness into places we “least expect them” (674). It foregrounds white characters, but the text wears, in Mae Henderson words, a kind of “racial drag”—a costume assumed deliberately to launch a critique of the machinations of power in postwar America (298). Indeed, I argue that far from making the text a “white life” novel, this racial drag is central to the text’s project of dismantling whiteness, a sine qua non that draws an outline of black queerness in crisper lines than it can draw white heteronormativity, the boundaries of which the novel blurs beyond recognition.

Racial Drag: Contamination Fears, Cramped Spaces, and Surrogate Selves

The beginning of the novel is its end, after the lines have already been blurred. Giovanni’s Room opens on David, standing before a window inside a house as the day dies. We watch him watching himself. His white reflection is framed in increasing blackness as the sun slowly sets on the eve of a terrible day of reckoning for the actions that are about to be chronicled in flashback. Thus a metaphor of darkness and lightness—specifically the way the category “white” requires “black” to reify it in the same way light requires dark for its definition—sets the stage for the novel’s complication of racial and sexual identity. Baldwin embeds the metaphor in a moment of narcissistic contemplation. There is no ambiguity as to David’s race: The author foregrounds both the visuals that mark him as white and the complicated history of white colonialism that whiteness is dependent on for its signification:

I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as the night falls… I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the windowpane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past (Baldwin 3).

Thus we understand, however obliquely, that the story will be concerned with race and its relationship to circumscribed boundaries. Indeed, the novel goes on to explore the boundaries between many things: the genders, youth and age, heterosexual and homosexual, American and European, and predator and prey. These boundaries are being constantly, anxiously, drawn and redrawn, even as they are transgressed. The narrator seeks constantly to reassert them, but his own desires—his very personhood—keeps asserting itself, causing boundaries to bleed into one another. David sees himself everywhere, in everything. The “darkening gleam” is distinct from the gleam of his blond hair—but the same word describes both in successive sentences, conceptually linking the two. He is “darkening” metaphorically. He says he is “rather like an arrow” (as in “straight as an arrow,” perhaps) because the qualifier “rather” suggests that he isn’t. His face is a face “you have seen many times”—the historical White Man, not an individual with what Eve Sedgwick, in Epistemology of the Closet, calls a “nonce taxonomy” (23), a set of one with a uniqueness all his own. The blackness of his “darker past” dogs him so that he can’t see his reflection without the intrusion of its ghostly remains. It is difficult to read this passage and assume that the book is merely a “white life” novel: The ghosts of blackness curtail the white character’s movements, relationships, and selfhood from the book’s first image; they paralyze him and turn love and pleasure into ashes in his mouth. David is, in many ways, a slave to blackness, reliant on blackness to prop him up, give his life meaning, shape his identity. David asserts his dominance over the queer characters around him, the novel’s proxies for black characters. Without queerness/blackness as a point of contrast with his own normativity—once he can’t separate himself from the rest of le Milieu—he is left starting into the face of his own inner darkness. Such a confrontation with inner darkness, Baldwin suggests, is a component of growing up, of maturity—a way out of American innocence.

In Bercuci’s “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a Transgressive White-Life Novel,” we get the definition of a genre that has fallen out of favor: White-life novels “refer to works written by African-American writers which primarily center upon white characters,” a genre later denounced for “pandering to a white readership” (192). She notes, however, that “While most white-life novels slid into oblivion… this is not true in the case of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room” (193). We do not need to delve deep to discover why: The novel tells a white story, but it reveals more about the operations of reified “whiteness” on whites and non-whites alike than it panders to it. It exposes the corrosive power of that meaningless dividing line, shored up by fantasy and prior conquest and literary and cultural dominance. Whiteness comes at a price that is far too high for David, and by extension for all of the white Western world. It is not just the soul of the antihero at the gallows, it is his sense of joy and meaning and love, not to mention the life of his non-white Other who literally pays, in the text, for David’s sins.

 Black and queer: These describe the author, but the author’s creation, David, uses these categories to set himself against his “Others.” In Orientalism, Edward Said frames how, where there exists an asymmetry of power, the powerful group shapes and manipulates a definition of an “Other” against which to define itself. He traces how European colonial powers created a stereotyped “Other” deliberately “as a sort of surrogate and even underground self,” depending for its strategy on the “flexible positional superiority” of the colonizer but embedding its fears and desires and fetishes into the flesh and soul of the Other (7). He notes how “The nexus of knowledge and power” (a tool of white supremacy) creates sciences that establish white and black in diametric opposition to one another (Said 27). Baldwin does this with metaphor. Bercuci calls the novel’s play of light and dark a “narrative chiaroscuro effect, wherein light is associated with the status quo and darkness with marginality and otherness, but also liberation” (198). The light/dark dichotomy establishes a hierarchy of power that is conveniently visual, but we watch these binaries leach the humanity from both sides. Liberation exists only in the spaces where they bleed together. As Sedgwick notes, “A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: Gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions” (22). These categories are too cramped for comfort, and as tools they are ill-equipped for successful navigation of a complex world. While whiteness affords David a kind of shelter-in-the-open, allowing him to sneer at his fellow man from the vantage of privilege, his soul is cramped within its confines; queerness/darkness free his soul, but the sanctuary they offer is the cramped shelter of the closet. As soon as David is tempted with liberation, he grows uncomfortable in its cramped space—literalized here in the dark, dirty room in which he lives with Giovanni—and retreats back to the safety of normativity. But the power to trade these spaces for one another (a power that David has but Baldwin, being black, does not) comes at a terrible price. This is certainly the case for David in the story, but it is also the case in Baldwin’s America, and the price of normativity is what Baldwin endeavors to explicate. The novel explores the violence done to self and Others in the performance of white heteronormativity, written at a point in U.S. history where the template for the American man was at a crisis point.

The Bible, the Post-War Identity Crisis, and the Threat of Alterity

In midcentury America, Otherness of all stripes was condemned, and the fear of reprisal caused many white people to scuttle to the refuge of white heteronormativity, because alterity became associated, in the McCarthy era, with communism. The white, Christian, American family, whose structure and behavior was defined and reinforced as communism’s opposite by political rhetoric, media, and the education system, not only bought white Americans a good amount of belonging and safety—if they could but conform—but was also considered an unshirkable patriotic duty. Bercuci notes that by the midcentury, “Homosexuality became entwined with the threat of communist infiltration during the Cold War” (197), and Mae G. Henderson discusses the oppressive normativity of the Cold War era in “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: Expatriation, ‘Racial Drag,’ and Homosexual Panic”—how tinged it was with paranoia. She notes how difference was seen as infiltration, creeping in to contaminate American purity and innocence. Any flirtation with difference increased Americans’ collective vulnerability to the Red Menace:

sexual deviance or “perversion” was linked to “subversion,” and the job of the government was, in the words of the Reverend Billy Graham, to expose “the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle.” In other words, to be a “good American” meant to be “a real man”… Baldwin’s literary performance of racial passing provides for the author a position that allowed him both to explore his own sexual variance or “difference” and to critique the dominant national construction of masculinity (299-300).

And according to Stephan Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War, the era “prescribed that men were men and women were housewives” and “the overriding fear of the American parent… was that a son would become a ‘sissy’” (qtd. in Henderson 299). In Bercuci’s words, it was a time when “sociological theories were being developed that attempted to uphold the heteronormative ideal of the white American family” (195). We feel David grappling with the monolith of American normativity throughout the novel. I seek to extend Henderson’s claim that this novel is an act of “racial passing.” Indeed, I argue that Baldwin embeds American blackness within his white character—blackness in general as both a sort of creeping menace and promise of salvation, and American queer blackness as the outer edges of alterity and the moment of ultimate freedom and selfhood—against which David’s white body can only hold out for so long—though he does not reach it within the pages of the book, there is an implication that Giovanni’s death might have caused enough internal change for him to eventually get to a space where he can give up black/white and live in full color.

The frame story is concerned with reflection. At the opening and closing of the novel, David sees himself reflected in windows and mirrors, and he reflections metaphorically as well. His reflection complicates the lie of his whiteness again and again. Before finally going to bed at the narrative’s close, he stands “watching, in the windowpane, my reflection, which steadily becomes more faint. I seem to be fading away before my eyes” (Baldwin 166). Whiteness has become ghostly, a lie, increasingly replaced by a more bespoke palimpsest of selves. His final reflections (physical and mental) are linked to increased maturity. He flees the window to sleep but the bedroom mirror once again accosts him, where his disembodied whiteness rears again, this time shot through with something else:

The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation (Baldwin 168).

Giovanni has hitherto been a proxy for the text’s black body, sacrificed to white American masculinity, but we see in this passage that it is David, as well as Giovanni, who is “under sentence of death.” He now perceives the conflict between “white” and another thing that “moves” through him, as water moves. He has been resisting “revelation” but here we see it will haunt his life until he is ready to accept it. The word is no accident, revelation: David looks to a surprising source to make sense of his human complexity (the thing that “moves” in the body despite his desire to keep it “lean, hard, and cold”). The Bible, the text Americans like Billy Graham hide behind when they define normativity, becomes for David a lens through which to see his potential maturity and liberation. He quotes Corinthians 1 to himself, and the Biblical allusion becomes a subtle dig at the lie of American innocence: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: But when I became a man, I put away childish things” (KJB 1Cor. 13:11). In this, he frames a desire to grow up—to leave American “innocence” behind. “I long to make this prophecy come true,” David opines. “I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed… the key to my salvation… is hidden in my flesh” (David 168). Revelation, salvation—Biblical concepts made crucial here as a way out of the trap of American manhood.

The Bible is likewise invoked in the names of the two protagonists, David and Giovanni (King David adored his friend Jonathan, the Italian form of which is “Giovanni”). In Samuel 1, “Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul… Then said Jonathan unto David, Whatsoever thy soul desireth, I will even do it for thee” (18:3, 20:4) and in Samuel 2, after Jonathan’s death, King David laments, “very pleasant hast thou been unto me: Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (1:26). Thus Baldwin weaponizes the Bible, the text that is most often deployed to bludgeon those who threaten, by their very existence, American normativity. Similarly, he weaponizes David’s whiteness to show not only the damage its reification does on the non-normative characters in the book, but on white men themselves. Baldwin showcases what Bercuci refers to as

the notion of American manhood in the 1950s and its damaging role when it comes to me achieving full humanity as it places [white men] in an impossible relation both to women and to other men… American culture clung to a notion of innocence, which would recognize the complexity of human beings—a complexity which would include homosexuality” (196).

So in this respect, Henderson is correct in her assertion that the author’s project “necessitates a male protagonist… defined in terms of racialized whiteness” (298). But the necessity of a white protagonist does not, as Henderson argues, mean the text is “passing.” I argue that Baldwin embeds blackness everywhere as David’s shadow—as the alterity in queer desire, as literal darkness and dirt—that both generates the whiteness that is his birthright and also contaminates it and renders it unsafe.

Seeing Double: Blackness as the Long Shadow of American Identity

The shadow hounds David with threats of contamination and peril as powerfully as it lures him with the freshness of selfhood and joy. We see the first indication of this threat early in the novel, when he watches the sleeping body of the “quick and dark” Joey—Giovanni’s antecedent—after their sexual encounter (Baldwin 6). He wakes and looks at his new lover: “I awoke while Joey was still sleeping, curled like a baby on his side, toward me… Joey’s body was brown, was sweaty, the most beautiful creation I had ever seen till then” (Baldwin 8). But the intrusion of white masculine performativity sours the joy: “my own body suddenly seemed gross and crushing,” David says, “and the desire which was rising in me seemed monstrous” (Baldwin 9). It is whiteness that is monstrous here. Joey’s brown body is still beautiful. But that changes when Joey’s body

suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood… A cavern opened in my mind, black, full of rumor, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words. I thought I saw my future in the cavern. I was afraid (9).

A cavern is a black opening, the inverted shadow-self in which he had just experienced “great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst” and from which “came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love” (Baldwin 8). The depth of his passion is not allowed by his American alter ego, which endeavors to keep him cold, rational, unemotional. The white alter ego prompts men to adhere to the duty of wife and procreation, but not to seek, even there, the “thirsty heat” which, for the narrator, is the purview of queer love. The settings for queer love link, in Henderson’s words, “homosexuality with the alien, exotic, or outlandish,” but these spaces are also the spaces of greatest happiness and authenticity (299). After David abandons the heat he shares with Giovanni, leaving his Italian lover to the guillotine, he describes himself thus: “my body is dull and white and dry” (168). How anathema to the authentic passions that moved through him like water, animating him and pointing the way to his salvation.

David resists Giovanni at first. We are unsurprised: He has spoken with sneering heteronormativity about the queer Parisians with whom he spends his time: He remarks that the denizens of le Milieu, the gay bar in which Giovanni works, “looked like a peacock garden and sounded like a barnyard… a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them” (Baldwin 27). He is a mouthpiece for normativity here. He compares marginalized people to beasts the way American racism deploys animal imagery to describe black people. He depicts a transgender blond in the bar (using the male pronoun and the masculine form of one of the only adjectives in English that declines by gender, “blond/blonde”): “his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not—so grotesquely—resemble human beings” (Baldwin 27). Such judgments make him feel superior, but we understand he is merely externalizing his own self-disgust. He is among them, after all. His dehumanizing metaphors are expressions of the same monstrousness he felt with Joey, not accurate portrayals of the vulnerable inhabitants of the bar. Later, David describes Guillaume and Jacques in terms that evoke both blackness and contamination, as “dirty old men” whose “filthy” thoughts “bubbled upward out of them like fountain of black water”—though his assessment might, in this case, be apt (Baldwin 45). And while walking along the quay, David describes the mist as “clinging like a curse to the men who slept beneath the bridges—one of whom flashed by beneath us, very black and lone” (Baldwin 45). The curse is within: He is “very black and lone.” In “In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room,” Josep M. Armengol  notes that “David tried to affirm his heterosexuality by projecting his own repressed homosexuality onto the homosexual demimonde of Paris, which he sees as dirty and dark” (682). The novel dramatizes how the performance of whiteness sterilizes heat and passion, winnowing David down into something “dull and white and dry.” Blackness defines him, haunts him, and tempts him..

In “‘Simply a Menaced Boy’: Analogizing Color, Undoing Dominance in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room,” Aliyyah I. Abur-Rahman decries that the “label ‘homosexual novel’ and the critical obsession with the novel’s white characters have obscured many of the novel’s underlying critiques of the machinations of power” (Abur-Rahman 478), noting that in the novel’s “superficially all-white context,” Baldwin embeds the same racial signifiers that can be found elsewhere in his writing:

It was Baldwin who gave African Americans the word “unlivable” and “unspeakable” and “unanswerable” as the terms that most approximate … the experience of being a black person in the U.S. at any point in history… [because] the African American, the woman, and the (so called) sexual deviant are doomed symbols of the U. S. cultural imagination, where the fears, fetishes, and fantasies of the straight, white bourgeois mainstream are deposited (477).

She goes on to remark that Giovanni, until the end, is a stand-in black character: “In the text, Giovanni, David’s darker, poorer, abused, and finally executed Italian lover, undergoes the classic experiences of the degraded figure of both the African American and the homosexual” (Abur-Rahman 482). The door to Giovanni’s execution, after all, is described as “the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body” (Baldwin 168). The revelation David seeks never quite comes, but at the novel’s close, we see he is getting closer to it. In describing the older man, Jacques, he remarks in passing, “I understand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt,” a moment of rare self-awareness (Baldwin 23); and another time he notes that everyone “goes down the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright” (25). Blackness haunts David in the story—as shadows, impulses, tricks of light, and in the novel’s tragic denouement. By the end Giovanni is a kind of Christ figure here, dying so that David can understand his nonce taxonomy. In this final Biblical allusion, David has to potential to be a sort of Longinus, implicated in Giovanni’s death—but, if strong enough, able to learn from it.

Conclusion: Crushing Whiteness, Fluid Blackness, Full Color Life

Though there are no black characters, Giovanni’s Room is not a “white-life” novel. Instead, it shines an unflatteringly harsh light on the dominant—though ultimately suicidal—project that is midcentury white American whiteness. Normativity functions as a kind of straitjacket that keeps David suspended, unable to mature. The few character strokes he is allowed (“manly,” “Teutonic,” “cold”) must be meticulously performed and maintained with a singular vigilance that is close to self-harm. Baldwin demonstrates how the project of whiteness is a parasite that kills its host as well as its “Others.” The narrative shows him beating back each dark, errant desire that rises in him in an exhausting game of whack-a-mole, until not one but three lives lie in tatters. His love can’t survive the parasite of white masculinity. In seeking the safety of normativity, David spreads the parasite to everyone he touches. The narrator’s disavowal of alterity costs him his happiness, humanity, and lover and, by the end of the story, has paid few perceivable dividends. Blackness is smuggled into the text in the form of darkness and filth, but all along there are other metaphors for alterity, in water and cleanses and flows, signifying the potential for metamorphosis, adaptation, mature love, and liberation. David’s humanity and capacity to love are here part of the project of blackness.

Whiteness and all it represents (intensified by a Cold War “Us/Them” mentality) is the novel’s villain. The specter of blackness that haunts the book’s pages signifies, in its blank outlines, the way white Americans create and maintain the binary of white/black, throwing all kinds of other alterity on top of blackness (including queerness), such that the room for individual personhood shrinks and finally disappears. Paris is neither represented as the utopia for black and gay Americans that many of Baldwin’s contemporaries regarded it to be, nor is expatriation sufficient to cure him of the disease of normativity reinforced by family and country. His character is weak and cruel, but Baldwin evinces empathy for him, drawing a parallel between a white man’s experience of being queer and a black man’s experience of being American. The white man must occupy an impossible space—rational, asexual, strong, masculine, superior—and he needs blackness as a point of contrast; but at the same time he must continuously annihilate the blackness within as a dangerous contaminant. We get the sense, reading Giovanni’s Room, that black men like Baldwin, who have no possibility of achieving American normativity due to a physically obvious marker of alterity, are both free of the crushing pressure to conform and also menaced by that same conformity, as impoverished, foreign-born Giovanni is. Giovanni’s Room is a black book. A book without black characters can still instruct white readers about the experiences of their Others: David, in brief, “dark” moments, learns what blackness feels like—and what it could feel like—if he (if we) could only mature into it.

Works Cited

Abur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. “‘Simply a Menaced Boy’: Analogizing Color, Undoing Dominance in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.” African American Review, Vol. 41, No. 3, Fall 2007, pp. 477-86.

Amideo, Emilio. “The Sub(merged) Text in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.” Queer Tidalectics, Northwestern U. P. 2021.

Armengal, Josep M. “In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.” Signs, Vol. 37, No. 3 Spring 2012, pp. 671-93.

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. First Vintage International, 2013.

——————. Giovanni’s Room. First Vintage International, 2013.

——————. “Go the Way Your Heart Beats.” Interview by Richard Goldstein, in James Baldwin: The Legacy, Simon & Schuster, 1989, pp. 173-85.

Bercuci, Loredana. “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a Transgressive White-Life Novel.” Philologia, Vol. 66, No. 1, 2021, pp. 191-204.

Henderson, Mae G. “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: Expatriation, ‘Racial Drag,’ and Homosexual Panic.” Black Queer Studies, Duke U.P., 2005, pp. 298-322.

Hughes, Langston. “Theme for English B.” Poetry Foundation, Accessed May 14 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47880/theme-for-english-b.

King James Bible. “1 Samuel.” University of Michigan Online, Accessed 16 May 2022.

——————. “1 Corinthians.” University of Michigan Online, Accessed 16 May 2022.

Said, Edward. “Introduction.” Orientalism, Pantheon, 1978, pp. 1-28.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 2008.

Circles of Sorrow

Considering Claude Pruitt’s “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Sula”

Claude Pruitt’s “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Sula” argues that the author organizes her novel as a concentric series of physical, temporal, and narrative circles, which radiate out from the book’s emotional core like the ripples that float out from Chicken Little’s disappeared body. These circles mirror (or are palimpsests that contain traces of) first a psychoanalytic concept advanced by Jacque Lacan in which he envisions the unconscious as three interlocking circles comprised of the “symbolic,” the “imaginary,” and the “real;’” next, the philosophical essay “Circles” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which imagines time as rippling circles representing a universe in flux, with individuals buffeted at their center; and finally, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, which engages directly with Emerson’s “Circles,” thrusting his narrator into the downward spiral of the midcentury black American experience. Sula is intertextual with these, but in placing black American women at the novel’s heart, she repositions the focus to a group that has been routinely scrubbed from both linear accounts of history and from earlier African American literature that, while likewise circular, have been written primarily by and about men.

The friendship between Nel and Sula is the beating heart of the novel, spatially, temporally, and conceptually. But the account of their friendship is embedded within and inextricable from other narrative circles. Physically, the story takes place in the “Bottom,” a high ground that surrounds the fecund farmland below (at least until white people covet the Bottom’s views). The friendship takes place in the central 100 pages of the book, “1922” through “1940,” and it occurs within the circular narratives of the town’s other inhabitants (Pruitt 117). Shadrack circumnavigates the text, the town, and the seasons as a kind of modern-day prophet or shaman, a symbol of both chaos and order, as exemplified by his disorganized mind and hyper-organized home. The men in town are trapped within the circles of their despair, all “grotesque embodiments of masculinity… distracted by the only group for whom they are not completely emasculated… the women of the Bottom” (Pruitt 118). The center of the girls’ story is their sexual awakening while digging and filling holes by the river, followed immediately by what becomes an unspeakable secret: Their complicity in the death of Chicken Little. The awakening and the death, tangled together, cause a rift in narrative and psyche, seeming to split the girls’ souls. Nel’s adult identity is characterized by lack: She affects a “motherly martyrdom,” and her misery is “righteous but empty” (Pruitt 115-6). Sula, meanwhile, creates a life of sensual overabundance, and she is described on more than one occasion alongside an attendant image of “overripe green things” (Morrison 108, 174). The final image of the book—Nel finally mourning Sula—reinforces the theme of circularity: Her cry “had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow” (Morrison 174). To Pruitt, this ending is the beginning of Nel’s self-actualization, suggesting that she is ready to face her own unspeakable center, to heal her split soul (121).

Pruitt contends that the circles surrounding an “unspeakable center” in the novel are explorations of Lacan’s tripartite unconscious. He explains Lacan’s “theory of mind,” where

the symbolic is the area in which language functions, the imaginary is the realm of images, and the real is that which cannot be symbolized or imagined at a particular time, the impossible or unspeakable… Healing can occur when trauma is spoken about, even indirectly: Trauma is made more clearly “symbol” and less “real” as its symptoms are explored in language (120).

The memory of Chicken Little’s death, then, is the novel’s “real,” the unutterable trauma that unites them. Nel’s healing begins only when she can acknowledge it, albeit obliquely. Part of the tragedy is that Sula tries to discuss it on her deathbed, but Nel forestalls the catharsis until many years after Nel’s death. Before their acknowledgement of the “real,” the secret takes the form, in Lacan’s words, of symptom, “for Sula as promiscuity, for Nel as first subservient wifehood and then repressed sexuality” (Pruitt 120-1). In keeping with the novel’s other circles, the end of the book is the beginning of Nel’s life.

Concentric to this Lacanian referent are the multiple evocations of Emerson’s “Circles” and Ellison’s grappling with and dramatization of Emersonian philosophy. Ellison places his unnamed narrator into the path of the “boomerang of history,” each interaction with which “moves him lower in his descent (‘and under every deep, another deep opens,’ Emerson writes in ‘Circles.’)” (Pruitt 125). Both men, however, write a world without women, and especially black women, who are already omitted from so much history and literature. Ellison is reconciled to Emerson, Pruitt contends,

through a dialectical engagement that begins with displacement, leads to confinement in a womb of historical significance for black men, minimizes the role and historical importance of black women, and replaces their generative function with a faith in modernity and technology” (125).

Emerson urges us to abandon the past for progress: “History,” he says, “the past from which we as individuals and cultures move, [are] worthless… rags and relics” (qt. in Pruitt 126) and Pruitt remarks that Emerson “takes as axiomatic the idea of self-determination” (Pruitt 126). Morrison gives Emerson and Ellison respect through references and symbols but pushes back against progress and individualism. The “joke” of the Bottom—a white man’s joke about it being the “bottom of heaven”—evokes the grandfather’s joke in Ellison; her “plague of robins” is a reference to Ellison’s folk tune, “O well they picked poor Robin clean” (qt. in Pruitt 124); her “circles and circles of sorrow” evoke Emerson’s insistence that “under every deep, another deep opens.” But her entire endeavor highlights women, community, and the unearthing of the past’s “rags and relics,” not the burying of them. Morrison wants to resurrect and mourn a vanished community. After all, “In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood” (3). The land itself is a palimpsest of untold stories: She wants to speak the unutterable.

I appreciate Pruitt’s read of Morrison’s warm, difficult, perplexing novel. If I find his views difficult to summarize, it is because he structures his essay in a circular mimesis of Morrison’s project, which reads like an act of grace and admiration. While I value his read of Sula, he did skip over an alternative read that I wish he had synthesized within his own frame instead. He mentions and then discards the argument of Vashti Crutcher Lewis, who sees trickster characters from African mythology in Sula and Shadrack. In this folkloric interpretation, Sula is a water spirit, and Nel’s eventual acceptance of their bond is a reconnection with the gods of her ancestors. Pruitt dismisses Lewis because Morrison is embedded “firmly in the European psychoanalytic tradition” (119), but is there a reason it cannot be both? Most of Pruitt’s observations see the text, like the former neighborhood, as a palimpsest, and he credits Morrison for layering semiotic systems so that they resonate together. Along with folklore, it might be beneficial to note that a circular narrative can be considered counter-hegemonic: It offers an alternative to the linear structures preferred by the West.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Sula. Vintage International, 2004.

Pruitt, Claude. “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Sula.” African American Review. Vol. 44, No. ½, Spring/Summer 2011, pp. 115-129.

A Literary Conflagration

Inquisition as Critique in Don Quixote 

Chapter VI of Don Quixote involves a priest and a barber in the protagonist’s library, assessing his collection of books, and deciding which must be burned for the hero’s health. Miguel de Cervantes could have summarized the chapter thus: “The two men burned the books according to those they thought had infected the hero with delusions of chivalry,” but instead it goes on for five pages of careful critical assessment of several volumes. What might we make of this prolix chapter? The two ersatz literary critics, Dr. Pero Perez, a priest, and the local barber, Master Nicholas, spend the chapter delightedly condemning and pardoning various books from the collection. The chapter dramatizes the novel's relationship with both texts themselves and with the mania for chivalry that is nearly universal in its world. Chivalric romance is a genre at once lionized and reviled in the text, often at the same time. This profound ambivalence threads through the story, popping up now and again when Don Quixote’s fantasies clash too forcefully with “reality” (whatever that is). But since what befalls Don Quixote is alternately humorous, violent, and transcendent, ambivalence about the effects of literature itself forms a sort of gordian knot at the novel’s center. Far from condemning chivalric fantasy as heretical, like the priest and barber try (and perhaps fail) to do, Cervantes renders the real world as absurd and unstable—the ideal, the realist, and the “real” compete for viability in Don Quixote.

The book trial is an early example of this struggle for viability. It is staged as an inquisitional hearing, wherein the books are potential heretics, with Don Quixote’s housekeeper and niece the loudest voices for the prosecution, preferring to burn all the books as equal offenders. The niece, in fact, brings holy water and hyssop—a plant used in cleansing rituals in the Old Testament—to defang the books before destroying them, but the priest and barber insist on going through the motions of trial. Over the course of the chapter it becomes clear that their judgements are less religious than literary—for it turns out that they are as vulnerable to the lure of chivalric romance as the other characters. When the priest wants to burn the Four Books of Amadìs for being the original chivalric romance in Spanish, the barber protests that “‘it is the best of all the books of this kind ever written, and as a unique example of the art, it should be pardoned’” (Cervantes 46). Books of lesser fame and quality are criminalized. The priest sentences Felixmarte of Hyrcania to the fire not for its heretical qualities but because of “‘the harshness and dryness of his style,’” and later remarks that The Knight of the Cross should be condemned: “‘Because of the holy name this book bears,” says the priest, “one might pardon its stupidity, but as the saying goes, “The devil can hide behind the cross.” Into the fire’” (Cervantes 47). The final book saved by the priest is one whose author “had great success translating some fables by Ovid” (Cervantes 52). Far from presiding over a Christian inquisition, this priest saves and condemns books on their literary merits alone. These texts are real texts, not literary inventions. Readers are invited to laugh as Cervantes, through these men, engages in a droll send-up of others in his literary milieu, since many of these authors were contemporary to his time.  In “Don Quixote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction,” Norman Holland defines metatextuality as when “the physical medium of the story becomes part of the story” (73). Metafiction lulls us into passive reading only to jolt us aware by slipping from the hypothetical to the real. In this scene we are trapped (pleasantly, I would argue) between text and metatext—just as the novel’s characters are trapped between romance and reality.

Toward the end, Cervantes intrudes indisputably into the scene, destabilizing our suspended disbelief: One of the books they hesitantly save (though they banish it, pending further assessment) is La Galatea, Cervantes’ first work, a pastoral romance. Moreover, Cervantes is apparently friends with Dr. Pero Perez. The priest thinks little of his writing but argues for quarantine rather than immolation because its author has suffered, and “‘is better versed in misfortune than verses’” (51). The layers of artifice keep building and stripping away, leaving us, the readers (bastions of the final “real”) on unstable ground. The book’s “reality” (which is really just literary realism) competes with the chivalric fantasy that infects all the characters to a greater or lesser degree. But flourishes like Cervantes being both author and a character in the book forces artistic realism to compete with our reality. Readers are caught in the cross-fire of these competing sign systems. Book-lust infects everyone in the equation: Goatherds, innkeepers, prostitutes, the priest, Cervantes, we the readers, all are presumably enchanted by the tropes of romance, and many seem to be heroes in their own chivalric tales, especially when in proximity to Don Quixote, who lends gravitas to their fancies. When he isn’t being beaten for his mania, he becomes a kind of spiritual mediator for the force of romantic idealism. The collective fantasy (on our part as well as the characters’), is a source of both tension and humor. As Steven Jaeger notes in “Book Burning at Don Quixote’s,” a narrative trick of the book’s many layers of art, idealism, realism, and the real comprise “a consistent narrative dynamic in which the highest flights of fantasy are answered by the most humiliating and physically damaging of events, not because the latter are real, but because they thwart the ideal to comic effect” (Jaeger 213). The text is often hilarious, it’s true. But humor is far from its end goal.

Holland calls Don Quixote “perhaps the greatest of metafictions, because it not only uses, but ultimately transcends, the very brain mechanisms of metafiction” (86). Don Quixote does not just create a magical sphere around himself with the power to transform innkeepers into kings, prostitutes into chaste ladies, and windmills into giants—through metafiction, he rewires the very neural networks in his readers’ brains. Jaeger notes that though Don Quixote “is not really a chivalric knight, he is the epitome of the enchanted reader, transformed by the higher world of fiction and able in particular cases to transmit its force to the world of experience” (215). Don Quixote’s magic ushers us courteously into his world; at the same time he crosses the boundary, provisionally, into ours.

His enchantment is contagious.

Works Cited

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated by Edith Grossman, Ecco Harper Collins, 2003.

Holland, Norman. “Don Quixote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction.” Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions, U. of Texas P., 2012, pp. 73-88.

Jaeger, C. Stephen. “Book Burning at Don Quixote’s.” Enchantment, U. of Pennsylvania P., 2012, pp. 204–24, https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812206524.204.

War of the Roses

Artifice, Naturalism, and Symbolism in the Flowers of North and South

Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South is garlanded with flora, literal and figurative, gaudy and sublime, scientific and aesthetic. The prose itself contains clauses that grow, vegetally, like an English garden—a space created to dramatize the struggle between nature’s wildness and the human desire to impose order. In this fecund cosmology, women grow naturally and the products of their labor evince instinct, accident, artisanry, and emergence. The text casts men, on the other hand, as purveyors of order, and the growth that emanates from their industry is mechanical, characterized by repeated patterns and artificial reduplication. The novel’s title suggests that it is preoccupied with binaries, and to be sure the binary of nature and man—and of man and woman—threads through the text. But we might look to its various floral metaphors to illuminate the text’s complication of the simple thesis/antithesis of Southern agrarian beauty and Northern industrial blight; of women’s domestic sphere and men’s industrial one; and of the modern world’s ambivalent new relationship with science and nature. Gaskell’s potent floral metaphors are rarely coded “female” or “romantic,” as readers of Victorian literature might expect. Rather, they explore the imbrication of the feminine and the masculine; the industrial and the natural; the scientific and the aesthetic. Flowers, in North and South, speak a language more nuanced than romance, exerting their own logic on the text, and appearing to call for the synthesis of binaries—the marriage of metaphorical North and South.

Flowers introduce us to a central tension early in the novel when Margaret Hale and her father tour the Northern town of Milton—where they are forced to move after a decline in their circumstances—to look at potential homes. The house that interests them has a drawback: The floral wallpaper offends their delicate sensibilities: More than that, Margaret makes the claim that its pattern is in fact dangerous, expected to contribute to the ill-health of Margaret’s mother, like the bad air of the factory town, should she be forced to reside within its influence (the reader might note the analogue to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s madness-inducing wallpaper from a few decades later, which draws a similar parallel between a woman’s environment and her health; or, for that matter, the reputed final words of Oscar Wilde). An entire chapter is gravitationally centered on the pattern: Margaret predicates their acceptance of the home upon the removal of the wallpaper, with its “‘atrocious blue and pink’” roses (Gaskell 56). She steels her mother against its effects: “‘you must prepare yourself for our drawing-room paper. Pink and blue roses, with yellow leaves!’” (Gaskell 60). She approves of the home’s other attributes, to say nothing of the fact that it is the only fitting one the Hales can afford. Her father laments that the landlord is unlikely to remove the wallpaper, and when he seeks the man out, he shares Margaret’s concern about it enough to remark, “I hope I shall be able to get new papers” (Gaskell 57). The text assumes the reader’s agreement about this objective fact: That color combination, those awful flowers, constitute a hazardous vulgarity that is in some way unhealthy.

The view from the room with the wallpaper, on the other hand, is a selling-point of the home, and establishes a core binary in the novel concerning taste. The window in the room with the wallpaper frames a “‘pretty view over the plain’” (Gaskell 56). Margaret’s use of the word “plain” is interesting here, for the same word comes to mean—and thus link—three discrete concepts over the course of the chapter. The first is literal and geographical, referring to the flat topography of Northern England in the view out the window. It contrasts with the wallpaper’s baroque design. But “plain” also prefigures the assertion, a few paragraphs later, that Margaret “had never come fairly in contact with the taste that loves ornament, however bad, more than the plainness and simplicity which are of themselves the framework of elegance,” which is meant to indicate Margaret’s comparably high-class upbringing and her consequent ability to identify elegance (Gaskell 57). Her class status is contrasted, in the same chapter, to that of her future love interest, Mr. Thornton. He is the factory-owning industrialist, a self-made man who is uneducated in the “framework of elegance.” At first he seems a human extension of the wallpaper. But Margaret does note that the paper’s “vulgarity and commonness’” are not to be found in his face, which she describes as “neither plain, nor yet handsome” (not yet). Here “plain” is an antonym of “handsome.” Margaret observes that with Mr. Thornton’s “expression of resolution, no face, however plain, could be either vulgar or common” (Gaskell 60). Gaskel’s use of the slippery word, “plain,” threads an interesting needle within the narrative: it is an emblem of nature (in contrast to the wallpaper); an emblem of moral character; and can signify both elegance and unattractiveness, but not vulgarity. In the world of the novel, plainness signals honesty, good breeding, and good taste. The jury is out on Mr. Thornton’s morality at this point (he is neither plain nor handsome), but readers see in Margaret’s careful assessment of his looks which way the plot is headed. Indeed, Mr. Thornton’s character is established in the final lines of the chapter when readers realize that he has influenced the landlord to remove the offending wallpaper.

We might see Margaret’s décor-proviso as an act of agency on the part of a female protagonist. Women, after all, are meant to have their power limited to the domestic sphere. But we see in this chapter how critical that sphere is, how thoroughly it ripples out into the world of men from within, and how it influences life and death (indeed Margaret’s mother does not survive their relocation). We see through contrast that the flowers skulking up the walls of the sitting room are not real or honest or plain. They, like the goods produced in Mr. Thornton’s textile mill, are the products of industry, part of the generative male world that defines the North: They exist without nature’s stochasticity, forcing inhabitants to live inside their repeat. “Living inside their repeat” also describes the repetitive motions of the town’s working-class factory employees, who are forced to repeat the same actions all day, like machines, in order to produce patterns like the vulgar wallpaper—patterns that might be simulacra of nature but are without nature’s “plain” and healthful properties. The actions of workers in the agrarian South, on the other hand, involve nature directly, or involve direct and artisanal manipulation of natural elements on the part of individuals, as in, for instance, traditional modes of spinning, weaving, and decorating fabric (or paper). Both locations involve man’s intervention in nature, but the North utterly decouples the natural (read: female) from the lives of its inhabitants, factory owners and factory workers alike: It is located squarely and exclusively in the masculinist ethos of the industrial. This is the unbalanced world into which the Hales move, a world of smoking chimneys and “the ceaseless roar and mighty beat and dizzying whirl of machinery… Senseless and purposeless [the] wood and iron and steam in their endless labours” (Gaskell 379). Gaskell presents this world as one in sore need of synthesis with the natural—and, via the transitive property, with the female. Good thing Margaret and her keen eye for the healthful and plain are about to change the town’s wallpaper, so to speak, and the heart of one of its pivotal industrialists.

Roses feature once again in the novel’s final pages, this time as evidence of the change that Margaret has wrought, representing the synthesis of so many of the novel’s binaries. Mr. Thornton and Margaret have changed one another. He is softened—she wiser. Both have learned humility. Margaret has just saved his factory from financial ruin and they both apprehend for the first time the mutual love that has been maturing, as slowly and steadily as vegetation, over the course of the plot. In the book’s final action, Mr. Thornton shows Margaret the roses he picked in her Southern hometown, and dried to keep. She recognizes their unique patterns: “‘They are from Helstone, are they not?’” she says. “‘I know the deep indentation round the leaves,’” To which he replies, “‘I wanted to see the place where Margaret grew to what she is” (Gaskell 395). The flowers are symbolic, but of much more than romance: Mr. Thornton is acknowledging Margaret’s uniqueness, her “growth” in Helstone mirroring the growth of the flowers. The blossoms, deciduous to Helstone, are likewise unique, having their own rivets and corrugations.

The admission of the roses’ distinctiveness demonstrates Mr. Thornton’s moral conversion: In the early days of the text, Mr. Thornton saw his male and female employees as those blue and pink roses in the ugly wallpaper: Identical, featureless, utterly fungible. Now he sees them as individual human beings. His appreciation has become both naturalistic and aesthetic. He finally deserves Margaret, and their union satisfies a narrative arc that argues for synthesis. The novel is bookended with roses, conceptually at war with each other. The English garden is a metaphor for the its thesis and an apotheosis and extension of its logic: Nature’s wildness is anarchy without man’s intervention; but man’s rationality without nature’s/women’s emergence, individuality, and chance is dehumanizing. Women and men are only “plain” and healthy when they collaborate—when they find the middle way. The pressed flowers at the end have been pressed by human hands, and that weds industry and nature with another preoccupation of the Victorian era: That of scientific naturalism, a curiosity about the world of nature and nature’s relationship to man.

Works Cited

Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. W. W. Norton and Company, 2005.

Goat-Leaf/Goat-Song

In my colleague’s immensely intimate and exciting “Beowulf to Milton” class of early literature in English, I found myself reading the first written English definitively authored by a woman (that we know of anyway—most previous authors wrote anonymously). After the hyper-masculine ethos of Beowulf, I read Marie de France’s lay “Chevrefoil” with delight. I was perhaps most enchanted with what I see as a particularly feminine art: The imbrication of concepts, objects, locales, and stanzas, in a “woven” pattern, the apotheosis of which is the plants that twine around one another. The honeysuckle and the hazel enmesh in a fatal embrace, as the lovers Tristram and The Queen are enmeshed in a fatal love. Feeling such femininity throughout was a balm after the hard edges of the previous text—with its strict adherence to community values and abstract concepts and heroes who must sacrifice all for the good of the community. In an almost cinematic flourish, the lay zooms in on two forbidden lovers without judgement about the love affair’s effect on the body politic. I enjoyed rollicking in this far softer and more personalized worldview, as I can imagine myself inhabiting this world (much as I love it, Beowulf feels foreign and at times overly grim). Again and again, de France’s poem connects the lovers across physical, temporal, and social barriers, representing it as a force of nature in which the lovers have no choice but to love. Nature weaves the “goat-leaf” with the hazel in the same way she weaves the lovers together: Love here is not a force that can (or should) be resisted, but one that, as any natural event, must be endured, though it can also be aesthetically enjoyed and celebrated in song.

The poem also seems to stylistically echo the organizing metaphor of plants snaking around each other: Each grouping of six- or eight-line clusters changes character, location, topic, or narrative style, as R. N. Illingworth notes in “Structural Interlace in the ‘Lai’ of ‘Chevrefoil:’” The poem “is composed in two discrete, interwoven strata, each with its own distinctive rhythm, style, and subject matter” (248), and that moreover, these sizains and huitains toggle between an archaic and a contemporary diction, suggesting that the author is engaging with earlier source material in an intertextual way (Illingworth 255). Thus, the theme of weaving pervades every aspect of the poem, its themes, style, narrative, and organizing metaphor all include imbrication that, to this reader, is even more suggestive of the interconnectedness of culture than a text like Beowulf that is so evidently anxious about maintaining social interconnection. I am wondering if Marie de France achieves this woven world through the poem’s insistence that nature calls the shots:

The two of them were similar
to honeysuckle, which must find
a hazel, and around it bind;
when it enlaces it all round,
both in each other are all wound.
Together they will surely thrive,
But split asunder, they’ll not live.
Quick is the hazel tree’s demise;
quickly the honeysuckle dies.

Where Beowulf needs to continuously guard against contaminating “Otherness” in the form of monsters, “Chevrefoil” allows the world to grow freely and greedily, even if that growth is deadly. The former is an Eden in which Adam has total dominion, and the latter is an Eden in which Eve assumes non-judgmental equality between living things. Love, like vegetation, grows where it will, and we can write about it, but we cannot (and should not) endeavor to control it: Only live with its consequences.

I am struck by the title’s translation, “goat-leaf,” and its evocation of Greek tragedy, a word that means “goat-song.” There is something delightfully absurd in linking darkness, tragedy, and fatal love with goats. Goats are sublimely ridiculous. Even the word in English is absurd, lacking the gravity of the Greek “tragos” and the French “chevre.” The poem, while tragic in its content, is nevertheless playful and joyous in its delivery, a “goat song” in every aspect of its Anglo-Saxon etymology (descended from Dutch geet and Old Saxon gēt), a romp through the ecstatic infidelity of an ancient Queen and her lover, whose threat to the social fabric is never the lay’s focus. No: The honeysuckle must find a holly, in this world. To deny it would be unnatural.

Works Cited

De France, Marie. “Chevrefoil.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1: Tenth Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, pp. 131-4.

Illingworth, R. N. “Structural Interlace in the ‘Lai’ of ‘Chevrefoil.’” Medium Ævum, Vol. 54, No. 2, 1985, pp. 248-58.

Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

The Monomyth as Interior Quest and External Reckoning in Toni Morrison’s Home 

“We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.”

— Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not a Luxury"

“Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

— William Butler Yeats, “The Circus Animal’s Desertion”

In multiform ways, Toni Morrison’s Home parallels The Odyssey. After a pointless, protracted Trojan war, the battle-weary Odysseus ranges across the Aegean on his way home. He is beset by enemies and evils and, as in most quest tales, the hero must use his wiles to negotiate perils, overcome trials, and fight monsters to return home, a changed man. Home’s Frank Money quests through a segregated country after his own psychic fracturing as a black soldier in the “forgotten” war with Korea. Like Odysseus, he longs for hearth and home and his quest involves the rescue of a woman, in Frank’s case his fragile sister Cee, and the reintegration of his damaged heart and mind. The novel is structured, like many of Morrison’s novels (and like Joseph Campbell’s monomyth itself), as a circular hero’s journey. But Morrison’s story is shaped more like a spiral or gyre than a circle, for the physical journey across a hostile American landscape is accompanied by an inward journey from an “outside” characterized by the jagged, broken fragments of the hero’s life to the painful center of his psyche—the space where he can finally incorporate outer and inner.

The home Frank seeks is less a physical space than a psychological one. Morrison employs and complicates the structure of the ancient epic in order to challenge the linear storytelling, linear history, linear ideas of progress, and other discourses of linearity so prevalent in the white Western world (and so suppressive of other epistemological modes)—forms it has used to commit atrocities against its cultural “others.” Living black in a racist country that obfuscates its racism with fraudulent national narratives, she implies, prevents healing for the black American. In this spiralized hero’s journey, “home” is a space of self-definition, a reconnection with earlier modes of healing (such as ritual) and a space where witnesses help reclaim a hijacked personal narrative. In a sense, Morrison’s novel is metafictional in that it models how stories themselves are a form of healing, especially when they act as crosscurrents to damaging dominant narratives that contribute to ongoing trauma.

Home as a Hero’s Journey

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell explores the archetype of the “hero’s Journey,” and the way epics such as The Odyssey engage similar themes of transformation and arrival all over the world. He envisions this monomyth as a shared human patrimony, a vast subterranean river of human experience, from which all creativity is drawn, and “through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation.” Indeed, he believes that all mythology is “the same, beneath its variety of costume.” The first stage of Campbell’s circular hero’s journey is the “call to adventure” (Campbell 1-2, 28). Home begins with Frank Money, rambling at loose ends a year after his discharge from the army where he fought the United States’ war with Korea. He suffers PTSD. He is tortured by flashbacks and hallucinations and is consequently prone to alcohol abuse, to quiet the noise of the war, and his blackouts get him into trouble. One such event has landed him in hospital, drugged and chained to a bed, and that is how we find him at the opening of the novel’s events. A savvy reader might note that Odysseus, too, is imprisoned and in thrall on Kalypso’s island at the commencement of The Odyssey. Morrison has deliberately placed Frank in a mythopoetic space. The narrative reveals that he has just received what could be thought of as “the call to adventure:” A letter from a stranger, simply saying, “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry” (Morrison 8). We don’t know who “she” could be nor whom the note is from, but it spurs our hero to action, urging him to escape the hospital, as a visit from a messenger god might do in an ancient epic.

Nor do the resonances between Home and Homer’s epic stop there. The Odyssey’s capricious gods are in Morrison’s novel represented by the “tyrant-monsters” of American racism and capitalism: Frank must journey across a hostile land full of random police violence, murderous racists, the ever-present need for money to travel and keep oneself alive, and the demons in his own soul. The second thread to Homer’s epic is Penelope, the woman who has been left behind to keep the household, and she has an analogue in Morrison’s tale too. Ycidra (“Cee”) is still rather close to their hometown of Lotus, Georgia (a town Frank joined the army to escape, for the “fifty or so houses and two churches” do not feel like home for him), where she waits. When we first meet her, she is bemoaning her abandonment on multiple fronts, by a faithless husband, a villainous grandmother, and a brother too damaged to return. Cee is naïve and fragile in her own estimation, and we see that even she knows that Frank’s rescue might not be in her own interests, for she tells herself that “where her brother had been, she had no defense. That’s the other side, she thought, of having a smart, tough brother close at hand to take care of and protect you—you are slow to develop your own brain muscle” (Morrison 48). Her life is marked by waiting, just as Frank’s is marked by his inward/outward journey. Like it does with Odysseus and Penelope, the narrative nudges them toward one another. But it is not until Cee undergoes a harrowing trauma at the hands of a doctor whose evil smacks of Josef Mengele that the hero is finally jolted out of his self-involved stupor to initiate the quest. This, we discover, is the letter that calls him to action.  

In “Flying Home: A Mode of Conversion in the African American Context,” Jay-Paul Hinds discusses the introduction of African folklore to a literature rife with Eurocentric epic traditions, and its specific emphasis on African and African-American journeys being necessarily roundtrip. Joseph Campbell writes of universal themes, and these are not contradicted but rather refined or made more specific by Hinds. He writes of the “canon of latent folktales that modern writers are attempting to bring back to African American consciousness,” in which the hero escapes his suffering by flying away, and then, struck by conscience, returns home armed with supernatural aid to help those still suffering. Home is full of this kind of circle, albeit metaphorical rather than supernatural—a desire to escape, followed by a wrestling with virtue and a final resolve to return to help those still in need. As Hinds notes, “flying is a mode of religious conversion… that has enabled African Americans to come in touch with supernatural resources during times of sociopolitical, communal, and personal sorrow” (383). Morrison engages the European epic but inflects it strongly with African folkloric modes in order to model a hybrid form of healing that black Americans can use to repair themselves and one another after centuries of systemic sociopolitical damage. Frank has been to war, and war is traumatic, but his return to a racist country after serving in an integrated army means he is cut off from the healing resources available to other veterans; Cee is traumatized by an act of purposeless violence to her body, but the fact the violence is perpetrated by an authority figure whose job it is to care for the vulnerable renders her voiceless. It is no wonder that the European hero’s journey is here leavened with African storytelling tropes: Dominant narratives do not provide language enough for these heroes to give voice to their sorrows.

Maxine L. Montgomery discusses the trauma caused to black soldiers in the “forgotten war” between the United States and Korea in “Re-Membering the Forgotten War: Memory, History, and the Body in Toni Morrison’s Home.” She focuses in particular on the way it was compounded for black soldiers when they were forced to reintegrate into a hostile, racist America after the war—a different America from the one encountered by white soldiers. At the outset of the novel, Frank is grappling with his PTSD alone. He, and other black soldiers, are doubly traumatized by the hostility of a country that is happy to use them to fight abroad but leaves them alone to suffer appalling racism at home, often at the hands of those in power. According to Montgomery, their experiences with racism after the war made recovery from the trauma of it well-nigh impossible. Further, she argues that Home endeavors to expose the fraudulent narratives of the whole decade: “Morrison's comments about the need to ‘rip the scab off’ of the 1950s,” says Montgomery, “suggest the authorial effort to excavate obscure moments in our national history, reconstructing them from the vantage point of the marginalized subjects who witnessed those events firsthand” (322). Frank suffers alone; Cee, protected her whole life by her brother, does not know how to resist the white doctor who acts as though he has her best interests at heart, and then secretly sterilizes her while she is under his employ. Morrison’s heroes do not really have a home in America to return to: Their job, we learn, is to create one in their hearts and for each other.

So, Morrison complicates her European epic by chronicling experiences that are largely erased by a Western literary canon—a canon that rejects texts that don’t support its metanarratives. Her hero’s journey demonstrates the horror of being an American “Other,” having at every turn to negotiate with an American superstructure whose foundations have racism holding its masonry together (if I’m not overtaxing the metaphor). Campbell conceives of the traditional hero’s journey as circular in shape. Morrison uses this template but subverts a Eurocentric schema with characteristic narrative virtuosity: By making the journey a spiral that leads inward at the same time it moves across/around, she demonstrates how to access and speak the “unspeakable.”

The Hero’s Journey of the Heart: Healing as Inward Spiral

Morrison’s “excavations” (to borrow Montgomery’s word), especially as regards speaking the unspeakable, correspond to Judith Herman’s thesis in Trauma and Recovery; the tripartite model of the subconscious as conceptualized by Jacque Lacan; and, at the macro-level, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theories of postmodernism, in particular his “incredulity toward metanarratives” and the concept of greater truth embodied in petit récits. Herman’s work on trauma elucidates the project of Morrison’s novel, and perhaps informs it (if only by osmosis). One of its foci is the behavior of the world surrounding the victim. Herman argues that bystanders faced with another’s trauma do whatever they can to avoid identifying with it, especially if they suspect their own complicity in its cause. The America in Morrison’s novel violently rejects the harm it has caused black people. “When the traumatic events are of human design…” writes Herman, it becomes “very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator” (7). Frank must overcome American narratives with as much vigor as he must overcome American violence. And the narrative Frank encounters most often is that despite America’s conception of itself as being a bastion of human rights—for such was its pretext for war in the 20th century—he is unwelcome and homeless in the land of his birth and nationality, despite his sacrifice overseas.  These narrative inconsistencies are compounded, moreover, by the fact that his role in the army was a reversal of his role as a citizen: In Korea he was a powerful aggressor, even a colonizer, while stateside he is an abject victim. Montgomery notes that the novel’s structure—a structure that includes a framing metaphor, resolved at the end; an inward journey that parallels the outward one; and testimonials from multiple interested parties, including two from different aspects of Frank’s psyche—is “designed to correct the troubling omissions in extant historical record” (326). Before the book’s events, there is the sketchy, impressionistic account of white men burying a black man alive, witnessed by Frank and Cee. We do not discover its significance until the end of the book, when the two are finally ready to confront and, literally, exhume the past. During his journey to find Cee after his discharge, Frank encounters black trauma and black coping strategies wherever he travels, and his psyche accumulates these strategies over time. Unlike Odysseus, Frank is not the exemplar of his culture but a stranger in his own land, accepting help from a kind of underground railroad of other marginalized Americans, and taking healing where he can get it, but persecuted at every turn and prone to violent fits of rage. Cee, too, has to negotiate a hostile world. When she is hired to clean the kindly Dr. Beauregard Scott’s office, she laments that she cannot understand the books on his bookshelf, but Morrison makes sure the reader can: “How small, how useless was her schooling, she thought, and promised herself she would find time to read about and understand ‘eugenics.’ This was a good, safe place” (65). We feel the horror of Cee’s innocence and we know before she does that the kindly doctor has evil designs. But there is no national narrative that informs about the forced sterilizations and other horrendous medical experiments of the era conducted on the bodies of black Americans without their knowledge or consent. Herman notes the difference in available narratives between the trauma of those with cultural capital as compared with those without:

Soldiers in every war, even those who have been regarded as heroes, complain bitterly that no one wants to know the real truth about war. When the victim is already devalued (a woman, a child), she may find that the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of socially validated reality. Her experiences become unspeakable (8).

The white American narrative renders Frank and Cee’s experiences and trauma unspeakable, and this compounds the damage, forcing them to create their own spaces for healing through community, ritual, and the ritual reframing of their own stories. That they find a way to heal themselves in a hostile world of murderous and dehumanizing racism offers a corrective to older epic modes: This, contemporary readers note, is the definition of true heroism.

In “Symbol and Language,” Lacan’s theories of the unconscious provide a helpful visual frame for Herman’s concept of trauma. He imagines the unconscious as composed of three interlocking circles, representing the “symbolic,” the realm of language, the “imaginary,” the world of dreams and images, and the “real,” which is the unspeakable heart of us, where interior pain without a narrative can be expressed only as symptom (Lacan 171-2). Herman asserts that the biggest obstacle to healing is the refusal of others to bear witness to an individual’s trauma, for it’s so scary to be confronted with a chaotic world and/or to be implicated in another’s pain that it is often easier to identify with the perpetrator than the victim, which is anathema to the victim’s healing. This builds off Lacan’s contention that healing is the transfer of the “real” (the unspeakable) to the “imaginary” and the “symbolic.” In an early episode in Home, Frank is speaking to the Reverend John Locke, who is the first in the novel to put words to an unspeakable reality: “‘You go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better’” (Morrison 18). This is the novel’s first transference of the real to the symbolic. In a later episode in the book, Frank stops in a jazz club and witnesses a kind of “speaking the unspeakable” through music: “After Hiroshima, the musicians understood as early as anyone that Truman’s bomb changed everything and only scat and bebop could say how” (Morrison 108). This encounter can be seen as a transfer of the unspeakable into the imaginary space of music. Frank’s drinking and violence and nightmares, meanwhile, are the symptoms that do not heal him. He survives on the scraps of healing he encounters until he has enough inner resources to face himself. Cee’s naivete and credulousness are symptoms, while her friendship with the Scott’s maid, Sarah—who, it is later revealed, sends the note to Frank that is the novel’s precipitating event—is her first inkling of her own value, a first step in the process of self-reclamation through the imaginary that must continue later in the book. Sarah’s willingness to stand up to the doctor so that Frank can carry a critically damaged Cee out of his office demonstrates the indispensability of allies who see and recognize unspeakable trauma. Morrison’s novel forces Frank and Cee face-to-face with their pain so they can move their unspeakable “real” into the realm of the symbolic through language and a narrative (as in Frank’s case); and into the realm of the imaginary through ritual and self-reliance (as in Cee’s case).

Lyotard is notoriously difficult to parse, but instructive in revealing the larger superstructural conditions that give rise to the trauma of marginalized citizens. Morrison engages some of his theories of postmodernism, which, in The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard defines as a studied “incredulity toward metanarratives” (8). Where Herman and Lacan form the basis of an individual’s healing, Lyotard is concerned with the relationship between power and reality, and he examines these phenomena on the national and cultural scale. He argues that metanarratives or “grand narratives” always, by definition, serve the interests of the powerful at the expense of the marginalized. Herman discusses the consequences of this, for “The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments will prevail,” and so, in her estimation,

The systematic study of psychological trauma… depends on the support of a political movement… The study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war. The study of trauma in sexual and domestic life becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordination of women and children (8-9).

To promote the dismantling of grand narratives, Lyotard proposes the aggregation of “petit récits,” or “little narratives,” in which all stakeholders in history add their story, even (or especially) if it contradicts the grand- or metanarrative of the nation or culture, or if it emanates from those with limited power within the system. The more limited the subject’s power, Lyotard argues, the more we should aim to amplify her story. He proposes wresting the story from the “authorities” in order to refine “our sensitivity to differences and [reinforce] our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy.” (Lyotard 37-8). I argue that Morrison’s project is exactly this kind of petit récit: She is an inventor extraordinaire, modeling a paralogical method of healing in the face of a rigid, self-perpetuating “reality-logic” crafted, maintained, and jealously guarded by the dominant culture.

Donald E. Pease explicates the specific paradoxes of the 1950s American narrative in his article “The Uncanny Return of Settler-Colonial Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Home,” in which the contradictory messaging of postwar rhetoric is made doubly unheimlich for the black returning soldiers who are forced to occupy the no-man’s-land between rhetoric and reality. Pease discusses Morrison’s omissions of Cold War philosophy, and the way her omission highlights the contrast between propaganda and fact:

Morrison confronts readers with a comparably uncanny experience when she deletes from the narrative any trace of the Cold War ideology whose structures of feeling, epistemologies, and military architecture the Korean War was putatively fought to establish… After the newly formed Department of Defense described the United States as an anti-racist state charged with safeguarding liberal humanity from “Communist slavery,” racial desegregation emerged as an essential component of the U.S. effort to win the hearts and minds of populations in Korea and across the decolonizing world (Pease 50).

But of course the reality of American racism in the 1950s belies this propaganda in uncanny ways, and black veterans must navigate the wide gap between them as yet another obstacle to overcome. Morrison’s decision to elide the “polarizing dichotomies sedimented within the Cold War frame” shines paradoxical light on them while also “disintersecting race from other articulations of power” and shuttering “the white supremacist gaze that would have employed these perspectives to place Frank under the control of the carceral state” (Pease 53). Morrison’s choices are self-conscious, as she makes plain in an interview for Interview magazine:

Was that what [the 1950s] was really like?… it tends to be seen in this Doris Day or Mad Men-type of haze… Somebody was hiding something—and by somebody, I mean the narrative of the country, which was so aggressively happy… And I kept thinking, This kind of insistence, there’s something fake about it (qtd. in Pease 50).

So, contending with national lies and interior disquiet, Frank’s journey leads him from Seattle to Georgia on a rescue mission, but it also leads him closer and closer to a truth that is central to him and his unspeakable “real.” For Frank, too, is “hiding something.” It is the voiceless lacuna at the center of the spiral into his psyche, and it drives his rescue mission, his drunk blackouts, the fights he gets into, and everything else, until he can finally admits it to himself.

The narrative takes its time zeroing into this central truth. Morrison structures his narrative in two strata: A third-person omniscient narrator tells the story of Frank that the world sees, but a parallel first-person, present tense, stream-of-consciousness monologue occasionally intrudes on the third person narrative, sometimes chastising or contradicting it:

Korea.
You can’t imagine it because you weren’t there. You can’t describe the bleak landscape because you never saw it. First let me tell you about the cold. I mean cold. More than freezing, Korea cold hurts, clings like a kind of glue you can’t peel off (93).

Slowly this narrative corrects the other, more rehearsed one, in the psychomachic manner of a man debating himself. In this space, Frank tells us of the little Korean girl who foraged for garbage to eat left behind by the soldiers. As she forages one day and Frank observes a soldier confronting her as she holds a rotten orange. She “reaches for the soldier’s crotch, touches it. It surprises him. Yum-yum? As soon as I look away from her hand to her face, see the two missing teeth, the fall of black hair above eager eyes, he blows her away” (Morrison 95). This revelation comes three quarters of the way through the novel and coincides with a lessening of nightmares and hallucinations for Frank: His ability to put words to the trauma begin to move his experiences and guilt from the realm of the real to the realm of the symbolic.

The Round-Trip Flight: Metafictional Collectivity

Frank and Cee go to Lotus, the final stop in their odyssey. What happens there comprises the “home” of the novel’s title, but it is also operating on a metafictional level, modeling a way to approach trauma and recovery for marginalized people whose stories might be outside of officially-sanctioned reality. When they arrive it is not yet clear whether Cee will survive the experimental surgery performed on her by Dr. Scott. But the town closes around brother and sister in ways they were not expecting and comes to represent the community that traumatized people need to heal. Cee is whisked away to recover while Frank does odd jobs here and there to keep himself busy. Contrary to his memories of it, the town has grown benevolent in his estimation:

It was so bright, brighter than he remembered. The sun, having sucked away the blue from the sky, loitered there in a white heaven, menacing Lotus, torturing its landscape, but failing, failing, constantly failing to silence it: children still laughed, ran, shouted their games; women sang in their backyards while pinning wet sheets on clotheslines; occasionally a soprano was joined by a neighboring alto or tenor just passing by (Morrison 117).

We see contemporary trauma therapy at work in Frank’s recounting of trauma throughout the novel, the apotheosis of which occurs in Lotus. And we see it in the healing rituals practiced by the women who aid in Cee’s recovery, for a group of local women take immediate, unsentimental control of Cee’s healing, and every woman in the neighborhood bands together to prevent Frank from seeing his sister for two months. When they allow him entry, “Two months surrounded by country women who loved mean had changed her. The women handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping” (Morrison 121). They express scorn toward the patient and handle her ungently. They force her to engage in “sun-smacking,” which meant “spending at least one hour a day with her legs spread open to the blazing sun. Each woman agreed that that embrace would rid her of any remaining womb sickness” (125). She is skeptical of the ritual, but she recovers, and after she recovers, the women grow gentle. One of them tells her, “‘Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you… Don’t let… no devil doctor decide who you are. That’s slavery. Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world” to which Cee replies, “I ain’t going nowhere… this is where I belong” (Morrison 126). According to Herman, a community willing to bear witness but also to allow the survivor to wend her own way toward recovery is key to healing trauma. Since “the core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others,” then the survivor needs to establish new connections, and then needs to find her own story: Indeed, “The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery” (Herman 133). Frank wants to save her like he always has, so the women drive him away and teach her self-reliance. Ultimately, it is Cee, with the scales of naivete fallen from her eyes and a new, fledgling sense of herself as the agent of her own saving, who rescues him, though she never knows it.

For Cee has come to understand something about her relationship with Frank: “While his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her… she wanted to be the one who rescued her own self.” When she openly weeps in front of him, she then refuses the “don’t cry” he always gives her when she is suffering, answering, “I can be miserable if I want to… I’m not going to hide from what’s true just because it hurts” (Morrison 129-131). Her resolve, and her grief, and her bravery in facing the child she can never have who haunts her dreams, inspire him to finally face the black hole within him. For he, too, is haunted by a child. He confesses to himself, or to his chronicler, in the italics reserved for his interstitial corrections:

I have to say something to you right now… I lied to you and I lied to me…
I shot the Korean girl in the face.
I am the one she touched.
I am the one who saw her smile.
I am the one she said “Yum-yum” to.
I am the one she aroused (Morrison 133).

Frank has been experiencing a dissociation from events common to combat veterans. Herman notes that in combat it is

not merely the exposure to death but rather the participation in meaningless acts of malicious destruction that rendered men most vulnerable to lasting psychological damage… [many soldiers] admit to committing atrocities that haunt them, with which they bludgeon themselves, and which prevent their recovery, since recovery requires forgiveness. These soldiers often do not want to forgive themselves (54).

After admitting the unspeakable to himself, Frank and Cee can begin to live. They are home, physically and spiritually, despite a country that endeavors to dispossess black Americans at every turn. In the final pages of the book the siblings disinter the black man they saw being buried, and they uncover the mystery of what happened to him: It was a kidnapped black father and son, forced to fight to the death, wherein the father sacrificed himself so the son could survive. He wasn’t dead yet when the white men who arranged the battle royale buried him. Morrison dramatizes the personal search for modes of healing, but the final revelation places the story in a larger context of racialized violence, and she clearly intends her novel to be read metatextually as well. Irene Vissar observes how Home is structured as a metatextual argument in “Entanglements of Trauma: Relationality and Toni Morrison’s Home.” Specifically, she notes that the theme of psychologically confronting trauma “is foregrounded in the novel by the structural device of the frame narrative: Frank, the traumatized war veteran, relates his personal story to a listener, who is the (nameless and faceless) author of his written text” (8). But when he takes back the story, he reclaims his own narrative as though it has been kidnapped (which indeed it has). The testimonial, according to Vissar and Herman, is what is used now to reconstruct and address collective trauma, like the trauma suffered by black Americans from many hundreds of years of oppression and metanarrative obfuscation. Morrison demonstrates the need for community and solidarity in recovery as well as a silent witness, and she emphasizes the crucial role of stories in the rebuilding of damaged psyches. Frank’s interstitial first-person accounts that correct for the omniscient narrator’s incorrect assumptions read like oral reclamation of written untruths, and, according to Visser, “orality and rituals function as catalysts in processes of mourning and grieving in the aftermath of traumatic events” (3). When we leave Frank and Cee, they are facing the world as agents of change themselves, committed to correcting ancient wrongs and fully responsible for themselves and those around them. They have made a roundtrip journey back to Lotus, and unlike the denizens of the land of lotus-eaters in The Odyssey, Lotus is the town where they doff their enforced forgetting and embrace their warts-and-all truths.

In “Dystopia, Utopia, and ‘Home’ in Toni Morrison’s Home,” Mark A. Tabone, like Pease, is concerned with how Morrison exposes the 1950s American utopia (still popular among American conservatives) as a dystopia: Her novel presents a “demythologizing dystopian portrayal of 1950s America,” and in her rendering “she rejects nostalgia and escap­ism to posit utopia not as an ideal or blueprint, or primarily as a space, but instead as concrete, and ‘endless,’ ethical practice” (Tabone 292). He connects the testimony of Frank and Cee—a process that contributes to their personal healing—with the demythologizing force of such testimony,

in which mutually exclusive versions of history are implicitly placed in confrontation in order to stress the fact that the past is not a set of established truths in which all further developments originate, but rather a contested site of cultural codes, each designed to preserve (or efface) a particular version of cultural and national identity (Tabone 297).

In other words, their petit récits fly in the face of America’s national narrative about its own history and purity. The novel is a potential model for other Americans similarly damaged by racism, marginality, violence, and trauma to help themselves and one another. Herman and Lacan are psychologists, but their theories of recovery engage aspects of narratology: Trauma therapy integrates aspects of storytelling—or rather of story reclamation. Morrison is a storyteller, but her novel integrates many aspects of psychology, so much so that the book itself becomes a kind of survival manual for dealing with systemic problems and a political and economic landscape that has virtually no interest in personal psychological health. By setting her story at once in a specific place and time in American history but also engaging aspects of Campbell’s monomyth, she universalizes a method of building identity and course-correcting an off-the-rails life in a world beset by angry, capricious, and unjust gods, even if those gods are your own country’s government, citizens, propaganda, and its greedy, ravenous capitalism. 

Flying (and Sailing) Home

When I read Toni Morrison, I often find myself haunted by the opening lines of William Butler Yeats’ “Second Coming,” a poem written early in his career: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” and the final lines from a poem he wrote at the end of his career, “The Circus Animal’s Desertion:” “Now that my ladder’s gone, / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” Even European poets have long evoked the gyre in mystical ways that fly (so to speak) in the face of rational history and linear time. Writing this, I find my mind again and again touch the lines from these European antecedents. But I’m also breathless about Morrison’s deployment of these rich symbols through their fusion with non-European forms, such as the African legend of “flying home.” Perhaps it is the rich ringed veins of poetry that travel around and unite the world, correcting for the dark grand narratives of history. Or maybe Audre Lorde put it best in “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” when she avers that

within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as [women] were meant to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets… we have hidden [our pain and] our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak (37).

In my mind, Morrison’s novels are birds, circling in disquieted loops around the imperfect, ecstatic, guilty, loving, damaged human heart. They reject cant. They orbit a problem, a moment of rupture, and their circles avoid and then finally confront that rupture. Rather than a widening gyre, her gyres lead inward toward an exhumation of buried tragedy so that tragedy can be sun-smacked. Odysseus had Ithaka to which he could sail home and lay claim. Frank and Cee, denied that kind of homecoming, create their own internal home. Morrison pairs trauma theory with the traditional hero’s journey—and African mythologies as explored by Hinds specifically within Campbell’s template—to model a hybrid form of healing that runs against the grain of the American metanarrative. The Korean war backdrop dramatizes the double-trauma experienced by black soldiers in an integrated army who must return to a segregated America. And the structure of the novel is, in many ways, its primary argument: In using the frame of the testimonial, Morrison models a theory of trauma and recovery for all black Americans who live in a country that has mechanized the systematic erasure of their stories. 

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph. “The Monomyth” & “The Adventure of the Hero.” The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd Edition, New World Library, 2008, pp. 1-74.

Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Perseus Books Group, 1997.

Hinds, Jay-Paul. “Flying Home: A Mode of Conversion in the African American Context.” Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 69, Issue 4, Aug 2020, pp. 383-404.

Lacan, Jacques. “Symbol and Language.” The Language of the Self. The Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1956.

Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” Sister Outsider, The Crossing Press, 1993, pp. 36-9.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. U. of Minnesota Press, 1979.

Montgomery, Maxine L. “Re-Membering the Forgotten War: Memory, History, and the Body in Toni Morrison’s Home.” CLA Journal, Vol. 55, No. 4, Jun 2012, pp. 320-334.

Morrison, Toni. Home. Vintage International, 2012.

Pease, Donald E. “The Uncanny Return of Settler-Colonial Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Home.” Boundary 2, Vol 47, No. 2, 2020, pp. 49-70.

Tabone, Mark A. “Dystopia, Utopia, and ‘Home’ in Toni Morrison’s Home.” Utopian Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2018, pp. 291-308.

Vissar, Irene. “Entanglements of Trauma: Relationality and Toni Morrison’s Home.” Postcolonial Text, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2014, pp. 1-21.

Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming” and “The Circus Animal’s Desertion.” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, pp. 187, 346.

The Great Equivocator

View fullsize

Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, I am singularly intimate with Macbeth. It is strange to academically study a play that I’ve acted in. The two forms of intimacy with the characters and language—close-reading and performing—are so different. There was something personally transformative about inhabiting Lady Macbeth at the age at which I inhabited her. Her power, drive, and determination were intoxicating, her greed and agency strangely admirable, at least for a woman of the time (Shakespeare’s time and my own). I remember looking forward to stepping into her skin at each rehearsal, because where I was an insecure teenager who frequently felt powerless, unsure what I wanted from life or what kind of respect the world owed me, she knew exactly what she wanted and had no compunctions in pursuing it. I really felt that power flowing through me when I hooked the metal clasp of the scarlet robe I wore, stood taller than I ever would, and allowed her words to come out of my mouth.

But now I’m a middle-aged reader. Lady Macbeth’s agency, ambition, and stop-at-nothing greed are more familiar, and certainly less aspirational, as both literary trope and real-life mindset. I will always love her, but she is less personally compelling to me because I have been her at times, in many small ways (short of murder of course). I am more struck by the equivocator himself, Macbeth, and the way the play sets up contrasts and then inverts them, as in the play’s famous refrain, “Fair is foul” (I.i.10), in order to trip him up. I read Macbeth now struck by an uneasy tension: Shakespeare forces us to feel for Macbeth at almost every step of the plot (until the final act, Lady Macbeth can take care of herself). Even if we disapprove of his decisions, we see the chain of circumstances that lead him to the inevitable de casibus conclusion. This empathy makes us complicit. A psychologically rich strategy on Shakespeare’s part, to show a descent into evil as something to which we could all fall prey, given the right external stimuli. Though he deliberately chooses evil, Macbeth is acutely aware of—and able to articulate—the evil he at first rejects. In the introduction to The Arden Shakespeare, Kenneth Muir notes the intimacy we feel with Macbeth and his decisions: “Shakespeare wished to get under the skin of a murderer, and to show that the Poet for the Defense, through extenuating nothing, can make us feel our kinship with his client, can make us recognize that if we had been so tempted, we too might have fallen” (xliii).

View fullsize

Because for my birthday I bought myself a subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary, I thought I’d cash in on the purchase and comb the language of Macbeth’s pivotal dagger scene for interpretable, equivocating language, because the “correct” interpretation of signs is a central preoccupation of the play. A phantom dagger appears to Macbeth, and we watch him struggle to interpret it. It could be a warning (“fair”) or a temptation (“foul”). The Oxford English Dictionary defines “equivocation” as “the expression of a virtual falsehood in the form of a proposition which (in order to satisfy the speaker's conscience) is verbally true.” Macbeth’s conscience is never hidden from us: We feel it acutely:

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? (II.i.34-39).

Macbeth’s words betray his hesitance about the moral validity of the dagger. Created either by an external, malignant force, it could as easily originate from his own already-guilty mind. Macbeth refers to the vision as “fatal,” which can mean either “allotted or decreed by fate” or “producing or resulting in death” (OED). On the one hand, the dagger might be a prophetic device showing him the way to glory; on the other, a warning from his own soul against future action (indeed, the subsequent murder seals Macbeth’s fate as much as the king’s). Such equivocation is manifest in subsequent lines as well: “Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going / And such an instrument I was to use” (II.i.42-43). The verb “to marshal” has two meanings: “to place in proper rank” or “to conceal a defect” (OED). Thus, the dagger might be “marshaling” Macbeth to his proper place as king or obfuscating the immorality of becoming king. The noun “instrument” is a morally neutral word. He uses “Instrument” instead of “weapon,” “knife,” or even “implement” (which would retain the meter), ethically distancing himself from the deed. Macbeth continues:

I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing.
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes (2.1.44-49).

“Business,” another morally neutral word, corresponds to “instrument.” The dagger was the equivocator. Now Macbeth is, with his careful choice of morally neutral language. At the line “There’s no such thing,” Macbeth ceases to speak to the dagger and begins to speak to himself.  These terse words represent a turning point in the soliloquy: he begins to take responsibility for a crime he hasn’t yet committed. 

Lady Macbeth will always be my girl, but at my age, from my vantage, watching Macbeth struggle and eventually choose evil is more frightening—a more potent warning about the confusing complexities of evil, and of good.

Works Cited

“Equivocation.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2019, oed.com/view/Entry/70179?redirectedFrom=equivocation#eid. Accessed 3 Feb 2021.

“Fatal.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2019, oed.com/view/Entry/70179?redirectedFrom=fatal#eid. Accessed 4 Feb 2021.

“Marshall.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2019, oed.com/view/Entry/70179?redirectedFrom=marshall#eid. Accessed 4 Feb 2021.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth.  Kenneth Muir, Editor, Penguin Group, 1963.

In Exemplo Est

The Treachery of Art in the Story of Byblis

“Byblis in exemplo est, ut ament concessa puellae,”

— Ovid, Metamorphoses

View fullsize

“Byblis is a warning,” Ovid asserts in the opening lines of his tale of Byblis “in order that young girls might love lawfully.”[1] Or, as Horace Gregory translates (losing a great deal of the meaning), “That is a story of how girls should not fall in love at all” (Gregory, Myers, 244).

However we translate it, the opening lines lead readers to anticipate a cautionary tale about forbidden love. But Byblis is in Book Nine of Metamorphoses, so by now we’re well acquainted with Ovid’s sly humor, and we know he doesn’t suffer laws or taboos gladly. We trust that he’ll ultimately undermine that Byblis is in exemplo, at least about unlawful love. Indeed, he does make Byblis—desperately in love with her twin brother—a cautionary tale. But the warning concerns art, not the sin of incest. Like the author, Byblis is an artist. Words are her currency. Through his brilliant narration, Ovid works a considerable amount of dramatic irony into the framework of the story, distancing us from his subject. But some of the most powerful scenes are the scenes when we feel closest to Byblis, when Ovid throws his ventriloquist’s voice into her mouth. She becomes a sort of doppelganger for Ovid, and she, like Ovid later in his life, takes the hit for being too artful, too rhetorically slick. Ovid’s Byblis, when she speaks, is a rich, relatable heroine whose very self-doubt wins reader’s hearts and minds, even though her argument is unsupportable. Like Macbeth (who can credit Byblis as an antecedent), she is a master equivocator, talking herself—and sometimes her readers—into some pretty shady seduction plans. The story is not without meta-irony: Ovid himself was banished on account of his own excessive rhetorical artistry some time after the publication of his Metamorphoses, when his writing was considered subversive enough to be treasonous.

Byblis knows that her desires are transgressive. But she is such a skilled wordsmith that she talks herself into a disastrous course of action. She builds and keeps the sympathy of her readers with a surfeit of skill, even as we understand that her venture is doomed. We can’t condone the incest, but by the end of the myth, by the time the repeatedly spurned Byblis is metamorphosed into a fountain, we feel almost wholesale sympathy for her. Her most indignant detractors must confess that by the end that they admire and pity her. Indeed, such is the power of her rhetoric and the beauty of her words, that her brother Caunus is the only character unmoved by her suffering. Byblis is indeed in exemplo. Her tale cautions against self-delusion: beware, young girl, of your creative artistry! Morality, for the artist, is a semi-permeable boundary, across which she can venture, but at her own peril.

When we meet Byblis, she is an innocent. She doesn’t at first identify her feelings for Caunus as love. She doesn’t question the kisses and embraces that she gives her brother, a little too frequently and lingeringly:

Illa quidem primo nullos intellegit ignes,
Nec peccare putat, quod saepius oscula iungat,
Quod sua fraterno circumdet brachia collo:
Mendacique diu pietatis fallitur umbra. (9.457-60) 

At first she did not think such heat was love.
Although her greatest pleasure was to play
A game at kissing him, her arms around his neck.
She thought these gestures sisterly affection (Gregory, Myers, 244).

Soon she comes to understand her blossoming sexuality. Ovid makes use of a familiar puberty trope to do this. But while such desire for Apollonian young men befits girls Byblis’ age, her lust transgresses: neither contemporary readers nor Roman ones could condone sex between twins. And her sexual fantasies are all the more forbidden because they lurk under the guise of familial piety. But little by little, “declinat Amor” (9.461), “love goes astray,” and Byblis has troubling and prurient dreams: “…visa est quoque iungere fratri / corpus et erubuit, quamvis sopita iacebat” (9.470-1): “Often she saw her body joined to her brother.” Even in innocent sleep she blushes because she understands the fundamental taboo. No translation I’ve encountered makes proper use of the past participle “sopita,” which connotes being knocked out by a blow, indicating the strength of Byblis’ passion. When she wakes, she charms her readers by examining her feelings carefully, and balancing them against the social reality. In “Ovid Through Shakespeare: The Divided Self,” Edward Milowicki and Rawdon Wilson discuss the social construct surrounding transgression myths, and assert that “…characters reflect, or otherwise mirror, a public reality accessible on its own terms outside of the text and… the most valid analysis [of it] would follow an empirical-descriptive method…” (Milowicki, Rawdon, 218). Byblis has too much integrity to ignore a personal truth, and sets about weighing her desires against the empiricism of her social reality. But she has too little integrity to hide her feelings when they are balanced and found lacking. Such is the conundrum of the poet! She indulges an impulse that will destroy her: her skill at manipulating truth to justify her actions. She draws upon her treasury of words to explore the limits of her desire and the ramifications of crossing them. Then, through a series of recursive arguments, she slowly inoculates herself against doubt.

Her argument follows a cyclical, rather than linear, trajectory. Concentric circles of logic ripple from the center. The outermost line of reasoning concerns the appropriateness of the match. She dismisses the matter of blood:

O ego, si liceat mutato nomine iungi,
Quam bene, Caune, tuo poteram nurus esse parenti
Quam bene, Caune, meo poteras gener esse parenti (9.487-9).

 If, by changing my name, I were permitted to marry you
What a perfect daughter-in-law I might make for your parent, Caunus
Caunus, what a perfect son-in-law you might make for mine.

The subjunctive mood captures her agony: on balance, their shared blood is the only obstacle standing in the way of their union. Instead of making one another’s fathers happy by the match, they must share a father.

Next, Byblis finds a precedent for incest. The Gods frequently marry their sisters, including Saturnus and Jupiter. She acknowledges that humans are bound to different laws than gods, but leaves the question open-ended as to why: “…Quid ad caelestia ritus / exigere humanos diversaque foedera tempto?” (9.500-1): “The gods / Have other laws than ours: how can I balance / Human mores against them?” (Gregory, Myers, 245). In asking “quid”, she highlights their hypocrisy. Why, she asks, may the gods do as they like? Is there any compelling reason for humans not to follow their example?

After such equivocation, she worries that Caunus might share her feelings, but perhaps they’re both too ashamed to admit to them. She reasons that were the roles reversed, and he came wooing her, she wouldn’t dream of turning him away, incest notwithstanding. Thus, she cannot imagine the worst—his utter rejection of her. To fail to speak, she thinks, would injure her more than the consequences of a confession:

Sit tamen ipse mei captus prior esset amore,
Forsitan illius possem indulgere furori
Ergo ego, Quae fueram non reiectura petentem,
Ipsa petam…! (9.511-12)

If he were already captured by love of me,
Maybe I would be able to indulge this madness
Therefore, since I would never reject him if he came wooing
I myself must woo…!

Here we realize her error in judgment. She’ll never win with these arguments. But we can’t help but admire her passion and skill as a rhetorician, even if she is motivated by self-deception.

Finally, she decides that while shame might hold her tongue, she can still rely on the persuasive powers of her writing. She commits her feelings, in all their circularity, to a letter for her brother. The letter, we sense, is the agent of her ruin.

View fullsize

Here Ovid showcases his own writing chops with a verbal portrait that could be called “Woman in Doubt.” In the word-picture he paints, we warm to Byblis, albeit with extreme ambivalence. Ovid portrays an artist’s exquisite agony over crafting the perfect prose. Almost every word is a verb of doubting and hesitating, proviso, negotiation, translation. She pours in concentration over her artful letter. Byblis starts, stops, condemns and approves of her words:

Incipit et dubitat, scribit damnatque tabellas,
Et notat et delet, mutat culpatque probatque
Inque vicem sumptas ponit positasque resumit (9.523-5).

She began, and then doubted what she’d written
She wrote, and then cursed the words.
She inscribed and erased, and changed, condemned, approved.
As soon as she picked the tablets up, she put them back down.
Putting them down, she picked them back up.

By switching to the point of view of omniscient narrator, Ovid allows for dramatic irony. We see Byblis is in pain. Her hesitation makes her human. She is clever and well-spoken. Nevertheless, we see what she can’t: that her gamble will fail. Not because it is immoral (for love in this story is amoral), but because she has credited the world—and her brother—with greater sensitivity than they deserve. We watch her agonize over the letter, knowing it will be poorly received. We know this not even having met Caunus. The reader watches her scribble in the wax in horror, praying for her to change her mind.

The logic of the letter follows a circular course, mirroring her private thoughts. In the letter she touches upon a new key point: She assumes that Caunus will care more about saving her from suffering than about rules. He could have read her feelings, she says, had he been attentive to her pallor and her thinness and her perpetually-wet eyes, and all those un-sisterly kisses. Moreover, she assures him that,

…Non hoc inimica precatur
Sed quae, cum tibi sit iunctissima, iunctior esse
Expetit et venclo tecum prepriore ligari” (9.548-50)

…It’s not an enemy imploring you
But the girl who is now the most joined to you,
Seeking to be joined by an even tighter chain.

She concludes the letter with a plea that he not reject her and be the cause of the inscription on her tomb. A manipulative move, and one that further complicates our feelings about her. She hands the tablets over to a trembling slave, saying, “…Fer has, fidissime, nostro” / Dixit , et adiecit longo post tempore “fratri.” (“’Most faithful servant, carry these to my—‘ and she waited a long time before adding, ‘—brother.’”) As she hands the tablets over, they clatter to the ground. This is a sure omen. Her endeavor will fail. Byblis’ failure in logic is that she, an artist, anticipates an artist’s response: she can’t imagine Caunus’ hardheartedness. She typifies the trope of the artist, misunderstood in an artless world.

For all the text’s circularity, the letter stands in as the central element. It’s the story’s concretization of the character’s desire and struggle. The tale is organized around the letter as an object. It is, in fact, the only real cause of harm for her. Her fantasies (as all fantasies) are morally neutral, and the text goes so far as to suggest that unspoken desire is natural: to “put it in writing” is where it gets sticky. In “The Writing in (and of) Ovid’s Byblis Episode”, Thomas E. Jenkins creates the below schema to illustrate the organizing power of the letter in a text otherwise circular and cyclical:

455-473: Introduction: Byblis’ dream and desire for her brother
            474-516: Internal monologue of Byblis and the conception of the letter
                      517-563: The composition of the letter                     
530-584: The secret letter of Byblis
                        564-584: The delivery and rejection of the letter
            585-629: Internal monologue of Byblis and regret over the letter
630-665: Conclusion: rejection of Byblis’ desire and metamorphosis (Jenkins, 440).

We have seen the verse take a circular form that mimics the inner workings of the human mind, recursively (somewhat monomaniacally) hashing and rehashing the same evidence to construct an airtight argument that is impervious to reality. But, as noted above, the structure of the story as a whole is highly organized. The moment Byblis releases the letter into the world, she truly dooms herself and her endeavor. It is like her desires have tremendous potential energy. As long as they remain in her fevered brain, they can do no harm. But the moment she releases the tablets into the hands of her trembling slave, they fall, giving a sure omen that they have become harmful kinetic energy. Next, we leave Byblis for the first (and last) time and follow the slave. We finally meet Caunus. We aren’t impressed. We realize the scope of Byblis’ mistake. Caunus is not a poet, and shows himself to be pitiless and obsessed with decorum:

Vixque manus retinens trepidantis ab ore ministri,
'Dum licet, o vetitae scelerate libidinis auctor,
Effuge!' ait 'qui, si nostrum tua fata pudorem
Non traherent secum, poenas mihi morte dedisses.' (9.574-9)

Scarcely restraining his hand from the trembling slave’s face
He says “Flee while you can, Pimp: I would kill you now
If your death wouldn’t drag my good name down with it.”

View fullsize

Caunus is an ambassador from a world without art. His icy—even violent—response to Byblis, although he has the moral high ground, causes readers to side even more dramatically and compassionately with infelix Byblis. Her brother loses our sympathy most when mere etiquette keeps him from killing the messenger. He stays his hand only because it would drag his shame down with him (note his use of the word “shame” in line 9.579 as compared with Byblis’ gentle concern that shame was holding her mouth. The two verbs, “tenabit” and “traherent” illustrate the differences in the roles of shame in their twin lives, and the use and purpose of words for them both).

The last portion of the poem involves Byblis’ struggle with her passion in the face of violent rejection. Caunus is in a rage. Byblis pales and briefly regrets the letter and the feelings, but slowly they creep back into her mind. She allows them to enter, and soon indulges them again:

…neque enim est de tigride natus
Nec rigidas silices solidumve in pectore ferrum
Aut adamanta gerit, nec lac bibit ille leaenae.
Vincetur! (9.613-17)

                                    …Dear Caunus

Is not a tiger’s cub, nor is his heart steel-bound
Or cut from rock, nor did a lioness
Give him her breast to suck. He will be won! (Gregory, Myers, 249).

Once again, she makes the argument that Caunus cannot possibly be as cruel as the evidence has proven he is. Perhaps, she suggests, it was the fault of the slave, who approached him at an inopportune time, or perhaps she chose the wrong day (these poor, poor slaves!) “Byblis,” says Jenkins, “blames not the unpalatable message, but the medium of writing itself” (Jenkins, 447).

View fullsize

Perhaps, she laments, were she to have seen him in person, he would have been won over by her. If she used more ambiguous words, equivocated better, he would have been convinced. If her stratagem were sounder, he would be her lover. We know her cause is hopeless, but we watch her commit herself to further humiliations. She is so good with words that she can still talk herself into actions that work against her own self-interest. Ovid is not telling a cautionary tale about loving appropriately, but about the misappropriation of art. One suspects that Byblis might have left herself less vulnerable if she spoke less well, and didn’t have the skill to convince herself of anything.

Ovid’s Byblis transgresses. The reader must agree with the odious Caunus on this. Byblis has an irrepressible desire for something society can’t allow her to have. Ovid, in his fashion, sets us up to expect a cautionary tale about loving unlawfully. But while “Byblis in exemplo est,” his thesis doesn’t concern lawful loving. Ovid is neutral about incest and doesn’t explore the ethics of incest taboos. He merely exploits them to create tension in the story. He endows his doppelganger-poet with so sympathetic a voice that we root for her. After being spurned, Byblis wanders the wilderness, tearing the clothes from her breast and wailing. We feel her tragedy acutely. The story does not focus on the sin. It focuses on the triumphs—and the pitfalls—of rhetorical dexterity. Byblis uses her talent to inoculate herself against the doubt she should feel. Her creativity parallels—unwittingly perhaps—her creator’s talent. Ovid uses the tools of omniscient narrator, combined with his signature ventriloquism, to persuade title character and reader alike into thinking that what she desires is above morality. Our desires, Ovid warns, if artfully enough expressed, can override ethics. He warns the artist, therefore, about what happens if they fail to anticipate a world hostile to art. Given his imminent banishment, he might have learned better from his own cautionary tale!

Cited Sources 

Jenkins, Thomas E., “The Writing in (and of) Ovid’s Byblis episode”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 100, (2000), 440

Milowicki, Edward J., Wilson, R. Rawdon, “Ovid Through Shakespeare: The Divided Self”. Poetics Today, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1995). 218

Ovid. Metamorphoses: Book 6-10. Anderson, William Scovil, ed. University of Oklahoma Press: Norman.  1972. 119

Ovid, The Metamorphoses. Horace Gregory, and Sara Myers, trans. Signet Classics. New York: New American Library. 2009. 244

[1] Unattributed translations are the author’s own

Shored Against Our Ruins

View fullsize

One of the cleverest attributes of T. S. Eliot’s iconic poem The Waste Land is the tension between the chaos of its textural surface and the order of its underlying structure. This tension perches the poem precariously between the World Wars, as on the one hand it frets over the loss of unity that art and mythology provide—focusing on the ruin of society, and the “modern” ascendency of meaninglessness—and, on the other, anticipates (some might argue overmuch) the “aestheticization of politics” tendered by fascism and the second World War. Perhaps this is the reason there is so much critical ambivalence toward the poem. The period between the wars, in Eliot’s estimation, resembles the blighted earth after trench warfare, psychologically barren and devoid of pleasure, for the poem’s characters certainly, but also, maybe, for its readers. But look closer: What appears at first to be a trash heap of the useless shards of Western Civilization—used in the deployment of a meaningless irony so in step with interbellum fashions—becomes, under scrutiny, the attempt to resurrect our old coordinating myths and belief systems. These fragments, “shored against [our] ruins” (Eliot 42), become a radical innovation: A Modernist clockwork that serves to reinstate a more organic cultural grand narrative—that advocates for a synthesis of tradition and modernity.

View fullsize

Many readers don’t—or can’t—get past the poem’s surface. In “The Waste Land Reconsidered,” Lewis Turco describes his first reaction to the poem: it “seemed obscure, confusing, pretentious, pompous, artsy-craftsy” (289). This perfectly describes my own initial reaction to it, and the reaction of students and critics everywhere. Why jumble all this high and low art into such a senseless mess? Why create this modern-day Babel of monuments, images, and languages unless to showcase one’s own erudition and critical (rather than poetic) sensibility? The young Turco describes his reaction to Eliot’s endnotes: “What kind of poem needed all these notes to explain it? If Eliot were a poet, not a scholar, wouldn’t he have put the information of the notes into the poem?” (289). Indeed. In similar vein, in “Withered Stumps of Time: The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion,” R. V. Young writes that the poem strikes “most readers as a defiant, outré assault by a modish cynic on all the decencies of English literature and society” (24). But, like me, Turco and Young reappraise the poem from the vantage of greater age. Turco concludes that the poem’s power lies in its symphonic sweep, in the music of its syntax, a collaboration between Eliot and Pound that credits il meglior fabbro for the poem’s artistic success. My reassessment lies closer to Young’s. What coordinates this poem beneath its fractured surface is its almost Romantic longing for spiritual fulfillment and religious salvation. “Despite its ‘modernist’ techniques,” says Young, “the poem implies a prophetic denunciation of the secularism, rationalism, and materialism of the modern era” (25). Though Eliot’s own conversion to Christianity was years off, we can see his thirst for it here, exemplified literally by the emotionally sere, secular desert of post-war Europe, for “Here is no water but only rock… / There is not even silence in the mountains / but dry sterile thunder without rain” (40).

Yes, The Waste Land is barren and joyless. But Eliot encrypts the solution to this barrenness interstitially within the text. In virtually every passage, every image of the emotionless clinging to “winter,” deserts, and interior deadness is set against its antidote. The abovementioned quotation, for instance, though it comes later in the text, is reversed by this:

There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising before you (Eliot 31-2).

View fullsize

A familiarity with the bible is needed to fully decode this passage. There is the Messianic prophesy of Isaiah as explained in the endnotes, but one might also know that “Adam,” in Hebrew, means “red earth/dust” and that Jesus Christ is known as the “second Adam,” and also as a “rock or stone.” Someone hidden is pointing the way out of our morass. Salvation is possible, but unavailable—indeed invisible—says Young, “to those who prefer winter to April” (27). Similarly, Madame Sosostris, “the wisest woman in Europe,” wields a “wicked pack of cards,” (Eliot 32) and her Tarot cards clearly contain wisdom. Her cards presage some events in the poem (such as the drowned sailor with pearls for eyes). But, slick and superstitious, she lacks the sight to read them, and her customers aren’t looking for truth anyway. She is ultimately blocked from finding “The Hanged Man,” the point of access to sight—and to grace. In Acts 5:30 of the King James Bible, Jesus is referred to as “Hanged on a Tree.” Unable to see beneath the surface of her cards to their emotional Truth, the cynical Modernist Madame Sosotris can nevertheless see the suffering around her: she sees people “walking round in a ring,” evoking the antechamber of Dante’s Inferno, where, in Young’s words, “those who were neither good nor evil spend eternity going around in a futile circle” (27). The characters that people this poem lack true sight, but the key to their salvation is all around them—all around us. Eliot himself backs up this claim in a later work, “Notes Toward a Christian Society,” in which he claims that industrialization creates men and women who are “detached from tradition, alienated from religion and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob” (17), similar to the mob crossing London bridge in fog, or Sosostris’ shuffling circle (Eliot 32). Salvation is non-rational, bearing more in common with myth than fact. Modernism is concerned merely with fact and empiricism. If we blind ourselves to our non-rational traditions, we can see the world, but we can't feel it. We might gain some insight about how to read this poem if we harness some of Joseph Campbell’s observations about myth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: “The symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source” (4). Eliot makes observations about the dire, Godless state of postwar Europe, but he also alludes to the “germs” (or perhaps the “tubers”) that might save us, so long as we aren’t ruled solely by Modernist individualism and rationality.

View fullsize

For clarification about how the poem’s tension between structure and chaos works upon our psyches, we might look to Frederic Jameson’s genre theory. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Jameson proposes two approaches to genre: a semantic read of genre concerns the essence, or core, of that genre, the production of a set of feelings and sensations each genre sets out to create (tragedy makes us feel pity, terror, and catharsis; comedy makes us laugh; etc.) A syntactic read of genre concerns the surface trappings, the bells and whistles that signal to us, the readers and audiences, what kind of story we are reading or watching, conventions to which we are highly, if unconsciously, attuned (104). What distresses us is a discordance between these two generic categories. The Waste Land can be understood as intentionally throwing semantic and syntactic genre into the blender. The poem is semantically cohesive, syntactically fragmented. Built upon a bedrock of tradition, it employs Modernist tropes—not in order to advocate for Modernism but to combat it. Eliot’s realism does not serve to advance the cause of realism, as we have come to expect Modernist poetry to do. Rather, his opus harkens back to the lost and largely denigrated genre of romance. Where Modernism is cynical, romance is idealistic. As Jameson notes,

Romance is a wish-fulfillment or Utopian fantasy which aims at the transfiguration of the world of everyday life in such a way as to restore the condition of some lost Eden, or to anticipate a future realm from which the old morality and imperfections will have been effaced (110).

Why would Eliot blend categories like this, hiding a romance within Modernist trappings? Why might he create a text full of “The ruins of a monument, still noble and radiating significance” (Young 25) without explicating that significance? Eliot uses the idiom of his day to escape the trap of his day: his lost Eden is still out there, but we can't get back to the ignorance of the garden, and nor should we. But we also can't forget the garden. The waste land is real, but realism—mere observation—is not cutting it, spiritually: The City of Man, which worships human self-sufficiency, still cannot erase the old coordinating myths that allow us to see past our own shadows, that bubble up among the dry rocks if we do not blind ourselves to them. For, says Young, “To escape the waste land means learning to live in it without being its subject or citizen” (35). We live in Modernism, but we have the romantic tools all around us to forge a new way. Jameson, too, remarks on the insufficiency of realism as a Modernist tool:

The ideal of realism is a narrative discourse which in one form or another unites the experience of daily life with a properly cognitive, mapping, or well-nigh scientific perspective. Yet in the context of late capitalism, realism loses much of its ability to come to grips with various differential layers of the real. That is, it has undergone a gradual reification in late capitalism. It is in this context that romance, as often opposed to the realist ethos that has turned restrictive and repressive, comes to be felt as the place of narrative heterogeneity and of freedom from the reality principle (104).

Modernism is excellent at observing misery and deconstructing the human condition. But it has no power to reconstruct. The Waste Land argues that we should not abandon our old tools while integrating the honesty and brutality of Modernism into our way of thinking about our world. The syntactic and the semantic genres of the poem do not agree, but maybe they should. Maybe a synthesis of Modernist and traditional modes is what is required.

View fullsize

Modernism is a great observer. Emerging from advances in science, the rise of Darwin and Freud, it provides us to the tools to see the world as it is. But it doesn’t quite offer us a way to change our lot, and that, Eliot suggests, is what is hurting us. Perhaps this is why, as a product of my age, I have come to appreciate the tension between form and content in Eliot’s poem. While I still feel alienated at times by the obscurity of his references, by the vertigo-inducing non-sequiturs and mish-mash of high and low art, by his pretentions and digressions, I still see this poem as a largely idealistic and hopeful work of prescience and yearning. I, too, share Eliot’s longing for a coordinated world in which we can see past the shadow that rises out of men to the architecture of an older, more ordered universe. We can use those old fragments, it’s true, paired with Modernism’s keen observation and adherence to truth, to shore against our ruins.

Works Cited

The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford UP, 1998.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen Series XVII, Princeton UP, 1973.

Eliot, T. S. Christianity and Culture.  Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1949.

Eliot, T. S. The Wasteland, Prufrock, and Other Poems. Dover Publications, 1998, pp. 31-42.

Jamison, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP, 1981.

Turco, Lewis. “The Waste Land Reconsidered.” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 87, No. 2, Spring, 1979, pp. 289-95.

Young, R. V. “The Withered Stumps of Time: The Waste Land and Mythic Disillusion.” Intercollegiate Review, Vol. 38, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2002, pp. 24-36.

Outcast from Life’s Feast

Epiphanies False and True in James Joyce’s “A Painful Case”

View fullsize

James Joyce peoples the universe of Dubliners with tattered lives, rendering the moment when the characters realize they are irreparably broken. These moments are epiphanic, but the epiphany, rather than showing the characters their potential, shows them their limitations, and the delusions under which they are doomed to live. Epiphany does not free these characters from the bleak paralysis in their souls. The stories in this slim book move from childhood through the sexual initiations of adolescence to meditations on aging and dying, but each concerns a character confronting himself and finding himself and his belief system lacking, even injurious. A strong exemplar of this pattern is “A Painful Case,” a story about a middle-aged bank clerk, Mr. Duffy, whose staid, “adventureless” life, in his own estimation, suits him (Joyce 71), until the possibility of love comes his way. When he repulses it, the ensuing tragedy sets him face to face with his botched life. The tragedy of his epiphany is threefold: first, the realization comes at the cost of his love interest’s life, and his only opportunity for potential escape; second, Mr. Duffy’s dawning awareness of his faults makes him also aware of his culpability; and finally, his epiphany stops short of where traditional literary epiphanies lead us—for Mr. Duffy, there will be no redemption. His paralysis allows access to knowledge and voice, but not to change.

View fullsize

Most of Joyce’s stories give us some dramatic irony, and this one is no exception. Mr. Duffy has so little self-awareness, that we must understand him through his environment. Unlike Mr. Duffy himself, we see the paucity of his life as exemplified by where he lives: he occupies “an old somber house and from his windows he could look into [a] disused distillery” (Joyce 70). In Dubliners, the buildings are often more eloquent about the souls of their occupants and neighbors than the people are, who, until their grim moment of realization, are as blind and mute as the empty building’s windows. Mr. Duffy’s soul is like that unused distillery, full of the intellectual potential for generation and fruitful production, but shut down for reasons of self-protection, a victim of Dublin’s “paralysis.” As Michael West and William Hendricks note in “The Genesis and Significance of Joyce’s Irony in ‘A Painful Case,’” “The austerity of [Mr. Duffy’s] room is not merely economical but satisfies his aesthetic soul” (707), and, further, the arrangement of his books, which are “arranged from below upwards according to bulk” (Joyce 70) suggests an intellectual poser rather than a true intellectual, proposing that “Duffy is more interested in [the books'] appearance than their contents” (West and Hendricks 707). Moreover, Joyce says of his anti-hero, Mr. Duffy “had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed” (70-71). Mr. Duffy’s “saturnine” exterior does all the talking for him, and though he fancies himself a writer and intellectual, the rotten apples on his desk tell us that he rarely sits at it (Joyce 70).

View fullsize

Image courtesy of enotes.com

Mr. Duffy finds a voice eventually. When he meets Mrs. Emily Sinico at the opera, a woman whose husband “had dismissed [her] so sincerely from the gallery of his pleasures that he did not suspect anyone else would take an interest in her” (Joyce 72), he begins to emerge from layers of insulating armor. The two talk, and “He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all” (Joyce 72). In a Romantic tale, this—or perhaps a relationship less narcissistic and one-sided than this—would be the recipe for love. But this is a starkly Modernist tale, and the love must contend with Mr. Duffy’s repression, moral rectitude, and obsession with appearances, defense mechanisms he comes to loathe by the end of the story, after it is all too late. Such defense mechanisms, he comes to see, are results of cowardice, not goodness. In “Isolation as Motif in ‘A Painful Case,’” J. Mitchell Morse remarks that Mr. Duffy “dooms himself to sterility and a woman to death through presumption and pusillanimity” (186), and this fight between sterility—which surrounds Mr. Duffy’s life and neighborhood like a miasma—and fertility, as exemplified by plant imagery once he meets Mrs. Sinico, becomes a fight to the death. Death, of course, wins, for both characters, and this—the fact that both have suffered as a result of this cowardice—is the story’s true “painful case.”

View fullsize

The relationship between Mr. Duffy and Mrs. Sinico begins auspiciously enough. They take walks, meet frequently in her parlor with the permission of her absent husband, and the language Joyce employs undergoes incremental changes. “Little by little” says Joyce, Duffy “entangled his thoughts with hers” (72). The images of empty, angular, man-made sterility as exemplified by the disused distillery give way to images of natural growth, “entanglement,” eventually even lushness. Mr. Duffy comes to regard his friendship with Mrs. Sinico as “like a warm soil about an exotic,” and it “emotionalized his mental life” (Joyce 73). As their talks move from the intellectual to the personal, following a familiar trajectory of a burgeoning, scholarly, middle-aged love, we feel hope for the healthy growth of this “exotic,” narcissistic as he might be, for even Mr. Duffy is a preferable companion for Mrs. Sinico than a husband who has no interest in her. But when Mrs. Sinico violates the terms of the friendship by making it physical, pressing Mr. Duffy’s hand against her cheek (a gesture that merely borders on sexual passion), his reaction is cold—and terrified. He spurns her, and Joyce’s language once again takes a turn, this time with religious overtones: he calls their union a “ruined confessional” (73). Mr. Duffy cuts off all contact with her. It takes four years—and Emily Sinico’s death—for him to realize his mistake. She is hit by a streetcar as she crosses the street, drunk, for after their break-up she developed a habit. In keeping with the religious overtones, Mr. Duffy is primed to receive his epiphany.

For the first time, he begins to question his beliefs and behavior. This is new to a man such as Mr. Duffy, who lives, out of fear, a life free of self-examination. Sitting in the bar, Mr. Duffy’s thoughts undergo an almost religious transformation from judgement to empathy. The reader cannot help but note their significance. For one, these are his thoughts. He doesn’t need buildings and rooms to speak for him any longer. He first thinks of Mrs. Sinico as “unfit to live… one of the wrecks upon which civilization is reared” (Joyce 76). He is embarrassed of her and ashamed of himself for spending any time with her.  But after a few drinks in a bar he experiences an increasing disquiet with his own fictions, and begins to feel “ill at ease.” Finally, he thinks, “Now that she was gone, he understood how lonely her life must have been” (Joyce 76). The apotheosis of his epiphany occurs as Mr. Duffy is walking home through the park:

He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast (Joyce 77).

Life’s feast: his lost opportunity with Mrs. Sinico. This is an epiphany about his human weaknesses—about how the strengths he had always been proud of (though never out loud) were actually based on timidity and failure—not strengths at all. In a final bout of dramatic irony, we come to see that even Mr. Duffy’s epiphany is tainted, as it does not include a path to self-recovery. As West and Hendricks contend:

Enmeshed in a web of authorial irony, the automaton Duffy scarcely becomes human, even in his final anguish and remorse. For these feelings Joyce resolutely limits our sympathy by making them deluded, exaggerated, and temporary. The ending thus completes a pattern of ironic disjunctures with which Joyce bedevils this unfortunate character from the beginning of the story (706).

View fullsize

Mr. Duffy takes full responsibility for Mrs. Sinico’s alcoholism and death, but even this concession rings false and narcissistic. Mrs. Sinico developed her habit two years after their break-up, and Mr. Duffy forgets that she has been living with a husband who ignores her. His epiphany is useless because it is only a part of the picture: it, too, lies.

The true irony in Joyce’s epiphanies is this: they are true—but only to a point. They are not—the reader wants to shout at the characters—deterministic, and they could be leveraged as a point of access to grace. But the characters do not read them that way, and herein lies the true tragedy of paralysis—knowledge about ourselves does not make us better or happier. It offers no relief, because it offers no future. As Seamus Perry notes in “City, Paralysis, Epiphany: An Introduction to Dubliners,” “The stories are studies in incapacity and self-replicating unhappiness.” In this, the author says more about the effects of the city in which these hapless occupants live and less about the occupants themselves. Perry goes on to note that Joyce “liked to present himself heroically as a kind of stiff cathartic medicine, purging the Irish imagination of its toxins, surrounded by lesser talents peddling an obsolete kind of romanticism.” Romantic tale of religious conversion this story is not. Indeed, none of the stories in Dubliners are. The false epiphanies that plague the characters in its pages are not true epiphanies.

The epiphanies in Dubliners belong not to the lost eccentrics populating the book, but to the reader, who might yet find grace—with a little purging of the toxins of modernity.

Works Cited

Hendricks, William. “The Genesis and Significance of Joyce’s Irony in ‘A Painful Case.’” ELH, Vol. 44, No. 4, Winter 1977. 701-727.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Dover Thrift Editions, 1991. 70-77.

Morse, J. Mitchell. “Isolation as Motif in ‘A Painful Case.’” James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 3, 1966. 186.

Perry, Seamus. “City, Paralysis, Epiphany: An Introduction to Dubliners.” Discovering Literature: 20th Century. British Library Publications Online, 25 May 2016.

Art and the Void

View fullsize

As a student I wondered at it. As an English instructor I find it an indispensable font; a reminder I can dip into again and again that the goal is to practice empathy, not dogma. Empathy is a lesson one has to learn again and again, especially at a college with over half of its students from disadvantaged or marginalized backgrounds. "It" is “Sonny’s Blues,” in my opinion James Baldwin's opus. My students nod their heads—the lessons contained here are familiar to them. But I wonder anew with every rereading.

Baldwin's short story (publication date, 1957) is a tapestry, tightly woven of complementary motifs and themes, rich and dense. Not a word out of place. How to land on a single topic to discuss? Here is one obvious motif: on it’s surface, it’s a story of the prodigal’s return. A comfortable trope, certainly rife with cultural resonance, and still worthy of exploration. The unnamed narrator—the straight brother—has escaped his circumstances through stalwart moral rectitude: he fights for country, marries well, educates himself, and teaches at-risk boys in his old, ailing neighborhood of Harlem a few decades after its Renaissance and before the Civil Rights movement. He is circumspect in all things. Emotional distance is the cost of his prudence. He grapples with ungenerous feelings toward his dreamier, more inward-looking and self-destructive brother, Sonny. Even though his mother has entrusted our narrator to look after the wayward boy, he can’t bring himself to reach out. Sonny confounds him. The narrator commits the sin of silence, which, the story suggests, is complicity with the void. He doesn’t even write when Sonny, a heroin addict, goes to prison. Sonny, to the narrator, is merely a ghetto stereotype, is an affront to him, the escapee, and all the work he's done to elevate his people. But ultimately it is the narrator’s moral righteousness that the story questions, not Sonny’s transgressions, just as the bible story stacks our prejudices against the resentful brother, angered not to have been granted primacy in the family hierarchy as payment for his piety.

View fullsize

Baldwin carefully crafts a world of sinister, inhuman evils. In Harlem, unnamable malignancies bare their teeth from every tenement building. They poison the very air. They drag the inhabitants into darkness, even the ones that have escaped (through drugs or through education or through music). Against this evil, Baldwin’s people have only communication—art, music, stories—to fight with. It is Sonny, the narrator realizes, who has all along been battling these ominous forces. The narrator apprehends this while Sonny is playing his blues, and his moment of epiphany is heartbreaking. Over the course of the song he experiences a sudden dilation of perception. The chasm between himself and his brother is bridged a little, for a little while. It is, the story suggests, the best we can hope for: a rickety, temporary bridge between people.

“Sonny’s Blues” remains above cynicism, even though it suggests that life—not just life in economically depressed areas, but everywhere—is unbearable. This gives the story its power. As we face the abyss, we develop coping strategies. We escape however we can. The narrator escapes through what he deems proper channels. Sonny escapes with drugs and music. The narrator is surprised to find that his own strategies are not qualitatively better. His erudition is not superior to the strategies he condemns. Sonny, with music, talks back to the void. He tries to explain it. “There’s no way not to suffer,” Sonny tells the narrator. “But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it."

View fullsize

Image courtesy of enotes.com

The first relief from drowning in it occurs when the narrator hears, between the derisive cursing and laughing of adolescent boys, one boy whistling. He likens it to birdsong, barely holding its own through all the evil talk. The paragraph serves as a miniature of the structure of the story itself, in which a thin, futile good threads through all the reduplicated evil. Empathy breaks open in the narrator’s heart, if only for a moment, a break of sunlight through a crack in the blinds. This boy’s whistle initiates a metaphor carried through the story with remarkable consistency (because in Baldwin, not a single word is missing or extraneous). The whistle is a rebellion, and a refuge. Later, the narrator listens to the singing of a barmaid whose life is otherwise doomed. Another refuge. Sonny sends a condolence letter from prison, conferring sympathy for the death of the narrator’s daughter (both events precipitate a change in the narrator’s worldview: create the conditions for deepening empathy). Finally, in the ultimate scene, music provides temporary sanctuary from the darkness outside. These coping strategies are communiqués in both directions. They speak to the chaos that exists beyond our control, darkness beyond words, saying you will not have me yet. And of course, they talk to the living. The narrator’s tale, the reader realizes by the final paragraph, is the last of these communiqués, shared with us, and we are duly honored by it.

“Sonny’s Blues”, notably, has no human cruelty in it. The void, discrete from human agency, does have a metonymy within the story: it is silence. It is a formless, motiveless entity that does harm, but makes the communion between souls all the more precious for its inevitability. Death takes us; terror and loathing win in the end. The transcendence of the story is not mastery over the inevitable. There is, however, transcendence in the temporary staving off. The antidote to cruelty is not its eradication. Rather it is the creation of spheres of intimacy, patterns of survival. Silence is the story’s villain. Silence is redeemed through art, a sanctuary. A sanctity.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues." The Jazz Fiction Anthology. Edited by Sascha Feinstein and David Rife. Indiana UP, 2009. 17-48.

More Truth Than Fact

Finding Truth in an Allegorical Read of the Bible

“God is… an amalgam of several personalities in one character. Tension among these personalities makes God difficult, but it also makes Him compelling, even addictive.”

— Jack Miles, God: A Biography

“Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Human beings, in our meaning-making toolbox, have truth and we have fact. But are “Truth” (in the Platonic sense) and “fact” synonyms? Nothing makes the distinction between these words greater than when we apply them to the bible, a work that is almost impossible to categorize as “fact.” When we endeavor to literally interpret the bible, we get into some trouble. Quite a few wars have been fought (and continue to be fought) over literal interpretations of the bible. There is a reason fiction and mythology are more suited to the exploration of ethics and the building of cohesive cultural memories than historical, scientific, or “divinely-authored” texts. When reading metaphorical or allegorical texts, readers don’t need to get bogged down by accuracy: They feel the moral repercussions more immediately, their place in the world more tangibly. Fiction creates a safe space for readers to explore, without the need to refute or prove, cultural history, cultural taboos, the law, and human beings’ place in this confusing cosmos. Certain sects of Christianity, of course, argue that the bible is the literal word of God—the Logos—meaning that God is not merely the story’s protagonist; He is also its author. But one need only glance at the bible’s first book to see overwhelming evidence that it was written over a long period of time by multiple (human) authors. Were it truly the word of God, we would expect to see greater internal consistency in style and content. We might expect God’s character to remain constant for the duration of the story. But the bible means much more for being a work that harnesses the power of fiction and myth—a work that is living, growing, accretive, rather than static; interpretive rather than absolute—to impart a sense of faith and awe, even if, for non-believers, that awe is more literary than spiritual.

The first piece of evidence that the bible is neither Logos nor history is the lack of internal consistency in its narratives. In Understanding the Bible, Steven Harris points out many of them. Rather than being the work of a single author, like the Quran, the bible is, according to Harris, “the product of a long process of composition, revision, and repeated editing by different writers and redactors,” which account for the multiple “duplications, contradictions, and other discrepancies” that litter the text (Harris 62). Similarly, in the introduction to the New Oxford Annotated Bible, editor Michael Coogan notes that “modern scholarship has persuasively argued that each [book of the Pentateuch] is composite, consisting of many sources from different periods of Israel’s history” (3). Take the first story of the creation of the world. First, God creates the world and then creates human beings in His image: “In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1.27). But a few lines later he creates woman from Adam’s rib: “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man” (Gen. 2.22), suggesting that only man was created in God’s image. Coogan, in his annotation of this section, calls this shift unfortunate: “The man’s rule over the woman… is a tragic reflection of the disintegration of original connectedness between them” (15). Why would an infallible divine author create two discreet origin stories that fail to cohere? As Harris contends, the “documentary hypothesis” of biblical authorship—largely undisputed among scholars—assumes that the old testament has at least four authors, each with a slightly different goal that correlates with the political and spiritual issues that were contemporary to the writing (67).

This multiple-author hypothesis is borne out by the bible’s syntactical and grammatical style shifts that clearly divide the prose into distinct categories. As Harris points out, most scholars assume that the Old Testament is a mash-up of four authors’ words and he credits the varying styles in grammar and syntax as evidence to support this theory: J, or the “Yahwist” author (because that is what he calls God, God's actual name), is likely the oldest and in it God is anthropomorphic, quasi-human, interacting freely with His creations (67-9); E, or the “Elohist” source (“Elohim” is what he calls God—the plural for the generic term for "god"), creates a more standoffish deity, who nevertheless finds ways to communicate, directly and indirectly, with humans, though he doesn’t walk-and-talk with them (69-70); D is the Deuteronomist source, and is concerned with an inculcation of Jewish law (70); and P, or the “Priestly” source is the most recent of the biblical authors, and retroactively sanctifies the tradition and authority of priests, while simultaneously solidifying the structure and purpose of the Pentateuch after the Babylonian exile (70-71). Indeed, “When sources are separated,” says Harris, “they not only reveal internal consistencies in style and vocabulary… each of the Torah’s different literary strands consistently exhibits grammatical and other traits characteristic of a particular stage of Hebrew language development” (67). The earlier sources likely come from the oral tradition, and bear more relationship to creation myths of older cultures than do the more recent redactions, which are far more concerned with establishing laws and practices, justifying the rule of specific bloodlines, and post facto justifications of wars, murders, and—in some cases—genocides.

The duality and placement of the stories, moreover, suggest that what these authors meant to communicate is something other than factual. One early anachronism in Genesis contends that Cain, after killing his brother (and reducing the number of human beings on earth—if one parses out the etiology—to three), the Lord “put a mark on Cain so that none who came upon him would kill him” (Gen. 4.16). It’s just possible to imagine that this mark protects Cain from his own parents until section 17: “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city” (Gen 4.17). Unless his wife is also his mother, we see here that the story of Cain and Abel belongs in another part of the bible, after the world has been populated. But it is more likely that the bible’s redactors gave the story pride of place because it has a special resonance or importance. As in Medieval artwork, where the more important figures are larger than the lesser figures, the bible is arranged more symbolically than realistically. It’s a text that creates a literary hierarchy among the players and events that emphasize their relative importance in the ordering of events. Straight chronology can’t do this. The placement of the Cain and Abel story by one of the biblical authors, in other words, has a significance that makes the anachronism worth it.  Presumably, something can be read into God’s unexplained preference for Abel’s sacrifice of animal flesh over Cain’s in other senses equal sacrifice of harvested grain. Perhaps, as some scholars suggest, the text is showing God’s preference for a nomadic people over a settled people. In Traditions of the Bible, Talmudic scholar James Kugel suggests that this could correlate to when this story was composed: God approves of the nomadic sacrifice, right when the Israelites were expelled from the land of Canaan, and forced into nomadic exile (54). One cannot argue that this is a factual telling: But that does not mean it is barren of some form of Truth.

God, too, changes as much as the styles change. In fact, even He doesn’t seem sure what he is or what he wants from biblical book to biblical book. In God: A Biography, Jack Miles treats the Abrahamic creator as a fictional character, and goes so far as to suggest that “much that the bible says about [God] is rarely preached from the pulpit, because, examined too closely, it becomes a scandal” (6). God makes mankind in his own image, but then expects mankind to behave according to His laws, even before the laws are written or expressed. That becomes difficult for creations who are only privy to God’s character as man’s creator. God provides no account of his own adventures that don’t relate directly to man, and God seems preoccupied only with the doings of mankind. Such is the lot of the solitary Creator: for a pantheon of other gods might provide some company, sure, but also some context: what is this deity like? If the purpose of the bible is to instruct human beings on how to build themselves in God’s image, created and creator both seem to learn by trial and error what God’s image actually looks like. In Miles’ words:

That quest [of man becoming God-like], arising from the protagonist’s sole stated motive, drives the only real plot that the Bible can be said to have. But that plot, God’s attempt to shape mankind in his image, would be far more comprehensible if God had a richer subjective life, one more clearly separate from, more clearly prior to, the human object of his shaping (87).

Despite this, Miles says, or maybe because of this, the West trusts a flawed, inconsistent character more than a complete, comprehensible one. Whether God created us in His image, or we created Him in ours, the relationship is fraught, but not without love, understanding, and the ability to learn and grow on both sides, somewhat like a new parent with his (His?) children.

Along with inconsistency in the story, grammar, and character, the bible’s lessons feel more concerned with creating an ongoing sense of cultural cohesion and united purpose than casting God and humanity as stable and unchanging. That goal is more in line with today’s philosophical valence than the stable eschatology and worldview espoused by Medieval and Renaissance theologians. We’ve seen, in the 20th century, a movement from the search for capital-T “Truth,” in the Platonic sense, to the ascendancy of the “micronarrative,” which, Deconstructionists like Jean-Francois Lyotard contend, can, in aggregate, get us closer to Truth than a single history-by-consensus. After all, he says in The Postmodern Condition, a unified history almost always serves the powerful, not the truth, and “facts” and “stats” are the worst offenders (Lyotard 504). If we want truth, the deconstructionists say, we need contradictions, paradoxical as that might sound. What is the bible, if not a series of loosely connected micronarratives, rife with comforting contradiction?

In an environment that rich in fiction, that is where we might find some Truth.

Works Cited

Harris, Steven L. Understanding the Bible, 8th Edition. New York: The McGraw Hill Publishing Group, Inc., 2011.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.” Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Cahoone. Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996. 481-513.

Kugel, James L. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard UP, 1998. Pp. 54-7.

Miles, Jack. God: I Biography. Kindle Ed. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1996.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Edited by Michael T. Coogan et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1929.

The Abyss Gazes Back

Madness, Blindness, and Armageddon in King Lear

“…nothing himself, [he] beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

— Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

View fullsize

The 20th century finally invited King Lear in off the heath. Its post-industrial bleakness found him apt company, bid him come out of long exile to rest his weary bones next to his spiritual brethren: “The Snow Man,” Endgame, Beyond Good and Evil, and all the other nihilistic works of existentialism, deconstruction, and Eastern ideas of “nothing” as a desirable state—much of the work to spring from the late Victorian era to the present. It took long enough. Early modern audiences found the play’s godless rejection of Christian eschatology unbearable; Nahum Tate produced a grotesque comedy out of it (which was what people read and produced for centuries); Samuel Johnson could stand to read it only once, after which he quickly edited it; even A. C. Bradley, who admired the play, called it “Shakespeare’s greatest work, but not… the best of his plays” (248). In “King Lear or Endgame,” Jan Kott remarks of Lear that “All that remains at the end of this gigantic pantomime is the earth—empty and bleeding” (112), and that, like the listener in “The Snow Man,” fits just fine in the 20th century. We can take it. God is dead, after, all; the world is brutal and uncaring and ruled by competition for survival; and we all know that, in Beckett’s words, “We give birth astride the grave.” The very fact that the word “nothing” appears 34 times in the play makes it a great fit within the worldview of late-stage capitalist meaning-making, where we watch the procession of simulacra with horror, but without recourse. In King Lear, Shakespeare presents an abyss that, when we gaze into it, truly gazes back into us.

One of the most powerful scenes in the play, for its raw, crazed energy, is Lear in his initial stages of madness on the heath, provoking the storm to do its worst:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned our cocks.
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Crack Nature’s molds, all germains spill at once
That makes ingrateful man. (III.ii.1-9).

Lear’s rage at the storm is pointless… and admirable. Lear, abandoned by his children, fallen, in less than a month, from king to pauper, makes believe that he is controlling the weather, in a heartbreaking negotiation with the pathetic fallacy. He is at once child-like and god-like. On the one hand, he exercises a child’s omnipotence fantasy, imagining he has control of forces out of his control; on the other, the audience wonders if he is indeed controlling the weather—if the tempest in his own mind has actually been expressed outside himself. It is an act that inspired awe in the Romantic poets. This is a roiling I suspect we all feel at times: faced with the void, what are we to do but imagine we can control it? In King Lear in Our Own Time, Maynard Mack comments on the universal appeal, to 20th century man, of Lear: the “…abysses of the play,” he says, “are in fact wrapped in the enigma of our own ignorance of the meaning of existence, its peals echo with cries of triumph and despair so equivocal that we are never sure they are not ours” (84). One can see why the suggested meaninglessness in the cosmology of the play would have distressed early modern audiences (and Restoration audiences even more), leading to its exile. After all, the Medieval and Renaissance worldview was one of an ordered universe with a just and comprehensible God. Lear offers no such comfort. Mack goes on to opine that the play has no true hero in the traditional tragic sense. Moreover, the lack of a hero, he says, sits “…more easily with our present sensibility (which is pathologically mistrustful of heroism) than the heroic resonances of the usual Shakespearean close” (Mack 84). We don’t believe in heroes, and, as in Waiting for Godot, the play gives us none, just the all-too-human struggle of a man stripped bare and forced to confront the often-malign indifference of the universe.

Blindness, too, like frenzied madness, is a current that runs through the play, this time exemplified literally by the story’s secondary plotline. Blindness and madness seem to be the only clear paths to a rarified kind of sight: self-knowledge, true love of others, and freedom from the fear of death. They, metaphorically or literally (the play does not make it entirely clear), prepare the old for a peaceful—at least a resigned—death. Lear’s ally Gloucester, blinded and, like Lear, abandoned by his child, somehow finds the mad Lear on the heath, and there begins a journey of the blind truly leading the blind. The culmination of Gloucester’s plot is his “suicide” off the cliffs of Dover. Gloucester is with his disguised son, Edgar, but does not recognize him. Edgar describes the terror of the void below them:

Come on, sir; here’s the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
…The murmuring surge
That on the unnumb’red idle pebble chafes
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more,
Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong (IV.vi.11-24).

The problem? He is lying. They are not at the cliffs of Dover, but on a small rise near the cliffs, and he is not describing what is actually below them: he is describing a seascape to a blind man, in order that he might jump, and survive, and be metaphorically reborn. Gloucester does jump, and does survive, and is reborn in what Edgar (now pretending to be a fisherman down on the beach) labels a marvel: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again,” he says (IV.vi.55). This prepares Gloucester for a loving reunion with the former king, and finally, his own actual death. A cold comfort, perhaps, but the only one afforded the old man, even though the audience feels more ambivalent about his ordeal. In our contemporary world, within the Weltanschauung of existentialism/deconstruction, we can hope for little more than a brief access to grace before we die. The play understands us—clearly more than it understood our antecedents.

Along with human disaster—blindness and madness—the entire world of the play seems to be careening toward eminent catastrophe, and the ending does not correct that trajectory. Everywhere are allusions to Armageddon. As Mack says, “Intimations of World’s End run through [the play] like a yeast. In the scenes on the heath, elements are at war as if it were indeed Armageddon” (85). Armageddon has agency and energy, unlike the passive depression of, say Hamlet, which presents a foul, stilted world in need of resurrection. The characters in Lear, in contrast to Hamlet, (and at times the weather and the environment are characters), all seem to be heading toward a precipice of non-being, but it is a place of creative action, not stasis. Says Mack:

Under [the play] run tides of doomsday passion that seem to use up and wear away people, codes, expectations, all stable points of reference, till only a profound sense remains that an epoch, in fact a whole dispensation, has forever closed… To this kind of situation, we of the mid-twentieth century are… sensitively attuned (86).

This apocalyptic rhetoric also includes, in Mack’s words, a “strong undertow of victory” (87). In Gloucester’s case this victory arrives with his rebirth on the false cliffs; for Lear in his erroneous belief that his daughter, after their heartrending reunion, has been resurrected. For both, the victory is illusory, but no less poignant—and no less real a triumph—for not being true. When he is reunited with Cordelia, Lear finally abandons his power and releases himself into the care of family, and to true grace:

…Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies (V.iii.8-13).

When Cordelia perishes, and Lear holds her in his arms, he says, “Do you see this? Look, her lips, / Look there, look there” (V.iii.312-13). He then expires. In all the “nothings,” this small hint of a “something” must suffice… a hint at redemption, or resurrection (though perhaps not in a Christian sense). Lear dies, perhaps, thinking that his child lives, and as such he dies happy. The world, at the end of Lear, is not restored to rights by a tragic death (for Mack is right: there is no hero here to sacrifice himself for the restoration of equilibrium). Rather, we are in a world still heading we know not where—a world of teleological uncertainty—that eerily resembles the world that we now know ourselves to inhabit. After revolutions in science, after World Wars and cosmological upheaval, after the invention of massive weapons of destruction, and the knowledge that we are the tiniest speck in an immense universe, after the knowledge that the universe will likely end with a whimper and we will not even be a footnote—in this world, the barren heath of Lear finally makes sense to us.

King Lear confronts the abyss, is chewed up by it, and finds a way to make meaning anyway. It finds a way to live with it. Finding a way to live with it is something we are all of us trying to do: existence is, by definition, uncertainty. We have left the garden of blissful ignorance, and no system of beliefs feels complete any longer: religion, once comprehensive and far-reaching, has been sufficiently contradicted by science for reasonable doubt to creep in (except in our most stalwart adherents to faith—and maybe even in them). If we need to deceive ourselves into surviving in all this uncertainty—whether through the pathetic fallacy, through intentional blindness, through madness, through (ideally) love and kindness, or through self-delusion—so be it. Welcome home, Lear.

Cited Sources

Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.
2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1905.

Kott, Jan. “King Lear or Endgame.” Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Methuan, 1963, pp. 100-33.

Mack, Maynard. King Lear in Our Time. Routledge, 2005.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Tr. Helen Zimmern. Millennium Publications, 2014. 41.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Signet Classic, Published by New American Library, Penguin Group, 1972.

Our Small Forever

Code Confusion as Female Trope in Louise Erdrich's The Round House

“Gynocide… is known by the colonized peoples of yesterday… the nations… off whose backs the history of men has made its gold.”
           — Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

Our guide through Louise Erdrich’s novel The Round House is a young man. But Joe Coutts—real, tangible, effervescent teenager that he is—is birthed, definitively, from a female mind. Erdrich, in a move of great virtuosity, creates a tale that exists in both cyclo-mythical time and in linear time; in which the language and alternative reality of the spirit world coexist and intermingle with the language of the law; through which Christian crosscurrents traverse and mingle with shamanistic codes; and in which characters are both their corporeal, temporal selves, and universal archetypes who must repeat ancient patterns. Cultural stories radiate from the main narrative like ripples in a pond. And at its center—the round house. It’s no coincidence that the pivotal object is circular in shape: it is the novel’s many-chambered heart, and the story, in a sense, “orbits” around this richly symbolic monument to good and evil.

 We might call Erdrich’s inclusive, circular narratives characteristic of “feminine” writing, a genre Hélène Cixous defines in her essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa.” The feminine writer’s speech, she asserts, “…even when ‘theoretical’ or political, is never simple or linear or ‘objectified,’ generalized: she draws her story into history” (Cixous 881). In Erdrich’s world, we aren’t allowed to make phallocentric hierarchies of information or codes: varying systems coexist and compete, resisting synthesis. Neither Erdrich nor her characters are subordinate to western/patriarchal history’s “truth,” but by collaborating with it they manage to achieve a deeper truth. Years after his mother is brutally raped on a reservation and he enacts lethal revenge, Joe retells the story in complex layers, weaving folklore and supernatural intervention into a text also brimming with legal realities that we—Erdrich and her readers—must objectively measure and judge in our “real” world. According to Sarah Deer’s article, “Sovereignty of the Soul: Exploring the Intersection of Rape Law Reform and Federal Indian Law,” the Justice Department has in fact under-reported the statistic that one in three native women will be raped in her lifetime (almost always by non-native men): “…the rates of sexual assault” she says, “…are actually much higher… [and] elders in Indian country [say]… that they do not know any women in their community who have not experienced sexual violence [emphasis mine]” (456). The matter is real. The matter is urgent. But Erdrich makes us feel this “gynocide” all the more acutely for not letting it fall merely into the “simple or linear… history” of legal or journalistic language. We feel it, as Cixous might say, in the body.

How does Erdrich accomplish this distinctly female corporeality in her writing? In “Reading Between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich,” Catherine Rainwater explores Erdrich’s ability to create an almost physical sense of “temporary marginality” in her readers. Erdrich’s texts, she says, contain structural features that “frustrate narrativity,” and that, “This frustration amounts to a textually induced or encoded experience of marginality as the foremost component of the reader’s response." Erdrich achieves this effect, Rainwater contends, chiefly through her use of “code confusion” (Rainwater 406). For instance, in the novel time works both cyclically, in what Rainwater refers to as “ceremonial time,” and linearly, in what readers understand as chronological time. Joe’s story begins with him uprooting the saplings “attacking” the foundation of his parent’s house, and ends with him, innocence lost, family shattered, driving out of town after the time-stopping rape and murder, and into a paradox: “…in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever” (Erdrich 317). In between, we hear an account of events in the order in which they occurred. But bits of family lore, dream sequences, tribal memories and ghosts—vestiges of “ceremonial time”—festoon the narrative, enriching it, complicating it, radiating from its center, or floating above it, in ghostly parallel. Early in the novel, when Joe and his father realize that his mother is missing, Joe remarks that, “…her absence stopped time” (Erdrich 3). In a sense, from the moment her absence is registered to the moment the family drives off the reservation, time is both suspended and sequential: the narrative alerts us early to time’s malleability. We are told at the outset that Mooshum, Joe’s eccentric grandfather and teller of a parallel legend of filial love and revenge, lives “…in a timeless fog” (Erdrich, 4), and that is the vantage from which he dispenses his crucial wisdom. Rainwater notes that Erdrich’s temporal idiosyncrasies hint at the narrative limitations of chronological time: “…linearity,” she says, “is often disrupted by many flashbacks, lateral narrational pursuits, flights of free association, and other indications of the failure of chronology to contain the story” (414). This kind of time confusion—combined with these pyrotechnics of craft—reminds us of Cixous’s theory about feminine writing: “Woman,” she says, “un-thinks the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield” (882). Ceremonial time set against linear time may disorient readers, but it’s this temporal vertigo that makes us feel these events—these conflicts—in our very bones.

Through marginality we come to understand the intersection of tribal, spiritual and legal justice. Each of these legal systems is incomplete: none alone manages to achieve perfect justice, but by forcing us to examine them all together, Erdrich creates a patchwork that approaches justice, however asymptotically. In a seminal scene, Joe’s father spends a few pages educating Joe, and the readers, on the history of Native American jurisprudence since European settlement, the slow, unsatisfying climb to tribal sovereignty. He informs us of Oliphant v. Suquamish, which “Took from us the right to prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on our land” (Erdrich 229). In “Sovereignty of the Soul,” Deer remarks that since Columbus landed, rape has been used as a “tool of colonization and a tool of war against Native peoples and… as a weapon of conquest” (458). Fighting back against what Deer refers to as “…attack[s] on the human soul” is no easy task for Joe and his father, or for real indigenous peoples armed with limited legal tools. But the book proposes an alternative route to justice for Joe: what his grandfather refers to as “wiindigoo justice.” Wiindigoog, explains Mooshum, are “people who lost all human compunctions in hungry times and craved the flesh of others” (Erdrich 213-14). A wiindigoo must be killed by tribal consensus, and when Joe kills his mother’s rapist, his father, the judge, argues that there is a “traditional,” rather than a legal, precedent for the murder: “It could be argued,” says Joe’s father, “That [the rapist] met the definition of a wiindigoo, and that with no other recourse, his killing fulfilled the requirements of a very old law” (Erdrich 306). We have here another example of Rainwater’s “code confusion.” The simultaneous presence of cultural codes—legal and traditional—that are “…epistemologically, experientially and teleologically different,” contends Rainwater, “…vexes the reader’s effort to decide upon an unambiguous, epistemologically consistent interpretive framework. Encoded ‘undecidability’ leads to the marginalization of the reader by the text” (407). Erdrich unsettles her readers by refusing to place tribal justice on a higher moral plane than legal justice (or vice versa). Even Mooshum warns that wiindigoo justice is often undertaken rashly or unjustly when tribal elders aren’t consulted, and in a queasy scene toward the end of the book, Joe realizes that with a bit more investigation the rapist would have been caught, and that western law might have garnered Joe’s family sufficient justice without recourse to murder. In this way, Erdrich’s narrative resists code hierarchy. “Narrativity usually includes an impulse to resolve… textual tensions through privileging of one code or through synthesis,” says Rainwater, “but Erdrich’s texts preclude both options for dealing with these conflicting… paradigms” (409). This resistance to pat resolution falls in line with Cixous’ analysis of the “woman militant”, who splits struggle open, “…so as to prevent… struggle for the liberation of a class or people from operating as a form of repression” (882). Arguably, the privileging of one system of justice over the other would operate as a form of phallocentric repression in that it reduces the importance of one code, implying the necessity of creating code hierarchy. Here neither traditional nor western law takes primacy. But nor do they synthesize: they remain discrete, incompatible codes, and the refusal to choose one over the other causes discomfort in characters and readers both. It causes, in Rainwater’s words, a “…permanent state of irresolution” (409).

Another set of conflicting codes Erdrich explores is the intersection between Christianity and indigenous shamanism. “Competing with the syntagmatic chain of references to Christianity,” says Rainwater, “is another chain of references to Native American beliefs about material and spiritual life, which… are not as distinctly separate as they are according to Christianity” (408). Nowhere is this juxtaposition of faiths felt more strongly than in the round house itself, a space devoted to native worship which, pre-1978, when traditional religions were outlawed on the reservation, could be hastily converted into an ersatz church. The space is a liminal crossroads between creeds, between good and evil, and between legal jurisdictions. Mooshum, talking in his sleep, explains its origins: a raffish figure of legend, Nanapush (a figure the reader is often urged to compare to Joe himself), was communing with a female spirit of the disappeared buffalo, who sacrificed herself that Nanapush might have meat to eat and the shelter of her body in a storm. “Your people were brought together by us buffalo once…” she says. “Now we are gone, but as you have once sheltered in my body, so now you understand. The round house will be my body, the poles my ribs, the fire my heart” (Erdrich 214). The round house is a sacred cadaver: loss and memory inspired its creation. Ceremonies conducted at the round house still heal Joe and his Ojibwe people. But in this novel, what heals also harms, and what kills also saves, and we the readers must live with these contradictions. The rapist selects the round house as the scene of his crime because by doing so he will almost surely avoid prosecution: the land on which it sits is a tangled boundary of state, federal and tribal jurisdiction. When Joe visits the scene of the crime, we hear the round house “speak:” “There was a moment of intense quiet,” Joe remarks, “Then a low moan of air passed through the cracks in the silvery logs of the round house. I started with emotion. The grieving cry seemed emitted by the structure itself” (Erdrich 59). The house, a living character in its own right, speaks to the novel’s protagonist from a tortured Native American past, both ancient and recent, spiritual and legal. Later, Joe gets direction from Father Travis, the reservation’s Catholic priest, about “Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance” (Erdrich 250). Both traditional and Christian codes cry out with voices that are almost human, pulling our hero in different directions, neither one louder or more persuasive than the other. Joe makes his fatal decision within the clamor of this chorus of voices. Rainwater notes that, “With several avenues of meaning remaining open, the text does not overdetermine one avenue of interpretation and thus endorse one theological view over the other” (410). Not even the novel’s characters definitively favor a single dogma: many reservation inhabitants, in response to Christian pressures to convert, “…decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe." (Erdrich 250).

Time, religion, the law, exist on multiple planes, dipping, circling, weaving, intermingling with alternative codes in what Cixous considers a distinctly feminine manner. The woman writer, she contends, discovers a new history through the “…process of becoming in which several histories intersect with one another… woman always occurs simultaneously in several places” (882). Paula Gunn Allen, author of The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, comments on the inherent femaleness of Native American life and storytelling: “Traditional tribal lifestyles [and literature],” she argues, “are more often gynocratic than not, and they are never patriarchal… American Indians [base] their social systems, however diverse, on ritual, spirit-centered, woman-focused worldviews” (2). This is a good thing, because the specter of male-dominated colonial tyranny and coercion hangs ominously over the world of Erdrich’s novel—over the round house, over Joe and his mother, over the Ojibwe people, over Erdrich herself—and Erdrich, as a warrior in Cixous’ feminine army, refuses to fight this enemy with the enemy’s weapons alone. In “American Histories, Native American Narratives,” ethnographer Arnold Krupat outlines the difficulty of squaring Native American history—which includes magic, circular narratives and ceremonial time—with western ideas of “legitimate” history:

Is it possible, then, to write history ethnocritically, somehow reconciling competing narratives and values? The question is of acute importance both to native people and to postcolonial historians who do not wish their work to be part of an ongoing record of might establishing right. For there is little doubt that the rationalist-secularist paradigm for writing history in the West has unfailingly trivialized native, indigenous, and traditional ways of doing and living knowledge, presenting to Native people the impossible choice, “be yourself or choose knowledge”(Kraput 168-9).

Erdrich proves that it is possible to write an ethnocritical novel. To tell Joe’s story in linear time alone, to subordinate traditional justice to American law, to give up native religious tropes for the tropes of Christianity, or to privilege any code over another in an effort to avoid code confusion—all of these would be examples of might establishing right: of subordination to the phallocentrism of the male western narrative. It is Joe who negotiates this razor’s edge of history, carves a semblance of justice into his “small forever.” but it is Erdrich herself who wears Cixous’ righteous armor, fighting her good fight, placing at the center of her novel—at the center of all these great, rippling narrative ellipses—an object that beats with a female heart: the round house, container and creator of stories, time and history.

Cited Sources

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Beacon Press. Boston. 1986. Print.

Cixous, Hélène. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen. Signs. Vol. 1, No. 4. Summer 1976. Print.

Deer, Sarah. “Sovereignty of the Soul: Exploring the Intersection of Rape Law Reform and Federal Indian Law.” Suffolk County Law Review. Vol 38. 2005. Print.

Erdrich, Louise. The Round House. Harper Collins. New York. 2012. Print.

Krupat, Arnold. “American Histories, Native American Narratives.” Early American Literature. Vol. 30, No. 2. 1995. Print.

Rainwater, Catherine. “Reading Between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich.” American Literature. Sep 90, Vol. 62 Issue 3. Print.

Trickster in the Modern City

In Science Fiction Studies’ “Symposium on Slipstream,” authors and critics spill a fair amount of vitriolic ink raging against the codification of the slipstream genre (when not raging against the genre itself). Neil Easterbrook quips that the impulse to create a stable and static definition of it is the point at which “taxonomy becomes taxidermy” (13), and Jonathan Lethem urges us to reject “…brand new nomenclatures, apparently expressing the yearning for brand new self-referential politics of exclusion, defiance, caste-shame, and resentment” (15). So censorious is the polemic against slipstream that these authors do more to prove its dastardly hold over the psyche of the millennium than to reject it. It’s a genre that has, apparently, hit a nerve. Perhaps, like jazz, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know. We know—and many of us are affected by—slipstream when we see it. And boy do we see it in Michael Swanwick’s Dragons of Babel. Dragons is a novel that, through its fusion of realism and mythology, suggests slipstream might be an emergent phenomenon, rising organically from the ashes of modernity in order to synthesize the two halves of our fragmented modern souls.

Joseph Campbell can be seen everywhere in Dragons. His hero-orphan thwarts the dragon, discovers his noble parentage, and is apotheosized when he assumes the mantle of king. In parallel to this template of the monomyth, in almost every paragraph, our protagonist Will navigates our world: the dismal hyper-realism of late capitalism, full of urban blight; democratic principles stagnating in a swill of bureaucracy; institutionalized bigotry; and relentless, brutal, and meaningless war. We know this latter world—we recognize it as our own—even as we yearn for the former, the mythic. We have gritty, indifferent New York City. We long for its magical analogue, Babel. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell warns us that in current progressive societies around the world, “…every last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality, and art is in full decay,” and that, within such a structure, “the timeless universe of symbols has collapsed” (Hero 334). He talks about the deterioration of social cohesion: that which served as the ethical, religious and mythological memory-keeper has been replaced by individualism and the secular state, engaged in “…hard and unremitting competition for material supremacy and resources” (Hero 334). Where is the magic—where are the heroes—in this world of “rationalized avarice” (Hero 337)?

Most fantasy novels (The Lord of the Rings is a prime exemplar) provide respite from the “real.” Readers, nostalgic for something they sense but haven’t experienced, seek refuge in fantasy in order to luxuriate for a time in a world alive with “grand narrative”—Campbell’s “human heritage of ritual, morality, and art.” Such novels replace the modern with a world unified and organized by myth. What Swanwick gives us—what perhaps the best of slipstream fiction gives—goes beyond pleasurable escape. He asks us to imagine our contemporary world with our old coordinating mythologies intact, by superimposing one upon the other. We know dragons don’t exist in this world of science and rationality, but we still have what dragons are a metaphor for—violence, greed, the seductively dangerous will to power. Swanwick literalizes the metaphor, making the dragon at once a sentient animal, capable of malice, persuasive discourse, and abuses of power, and a war machine, running on jet fuel and requiring a pilot: he is both the potential evil in the human mind and the machines of war such a mind creates. John Kessel, co-editor of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, notes that one of the hallmarks of slipstream fiction is the literalizing of metaphor (“Symposium” 15), and Swanwick literalizes everywhere, from the crusty old drunk who has fused bodily with her seedy downtown bar to the solipsistic power-monger who creates a whole army out of thin air so he can watch his soldiers die. With such literalization, Swanwick strives to resurrect Campbell’s “universe of symbols,” but his signifiers aren’t mere backward-pointing diversions. Rather, he endeavors to make these hieroglyphs legible in today’s world. It’s no surprise that when Will slays the dragon he merely internalizes the evil—he doesn’t vanquish it—a particularly modern trope of psychology’s “control and mastery” theory. Through narrative maneuvers like this, Swanwick shows us that our metaphors still have juice, still have the power to unify and organize our experience into coherent, interpretable shape. He invents a hero who, in Campbell’s words, attempts to “bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul” (334). Our souls may be different now, but they can still be understood—co-ordinated—through metaphor; through pointing to the signified (which is modernity-proof) with the rich signifiers of our heritage.

In addition to literalizing the god-and-monster metaphors, Swanwick literalizes the holistic nature of Campbell’s monomyth. His characters are self-consciously drawn from mythologies the world over. Classical Centaurs, Germanic elves, Japanese onis and Southern American haints coexist—often imperfectly—in the melting pot that is the novel, and the city Babel (like the languages in its biblical namesake). Such democracy evokes Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” which transcends any particular tradition, touching on the universality of human experience. This is our story, all of us, this negotiation between our heritage, in the form of myth, and the bleak here-and-now, in the form of progress and modernity. There isn’t a single place on earth—no remote forest tribe, no Himalayan village—safe from the encroachment of industrialization, a reality to which we have no choice but to adapt. Now that our world has globalized, and we all face many of the same enemies, our belief structures must negotiate not just with industrialization but with each other. Rationality has freed us all from what Campbell ironically calls the “bondage of tradition” (334): it strives to jettison myth—all that is “untrue”—from our lives. But, Dragons suggests, we might just need our myths, our resplendent metaphors, to guide us through the rites of passage in a world where individualism has replaced the group. In “Symposium on Slipstream,” Lance Olsen suggests that the art that connects us to earlier forms of reality-representation offers antidotes to the “hypermediatized, late-stage capitalist ‘reality’ that is no longer perceived as real” (16). Though we know they aren’t strictly “true,” our myths can lend a foundational reality the “real” no longer has; and by not privileging one mythological pantheon over another, Swanwick suggests that it hardly matters which symbolic framework we choose to organize our experience: we just need one of Campbell’s myths, those “spontaneous productions of the psyche” (Hero 2), or many of them—or all of them.

Campbell describes an emergent phenomenon when he says myths emanate spontaneously from the psyche, because the psyche, in this case, stands in for both the individual’s psyche and the collective one (2). In Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Steven Johnson explains that emergent phenomena are decentralized processes whereby millions of units of individual input make, collectively, decisions for the good of the whole, without benefit of leaders, or “pacemakers” (17). Myths, like cities, grow of their own accord out of the needs of the many. Intelligent decisions appear like magic, but “who,” asks Johnson, “is doing the conjuring?” (33). Once again, Swanwick literalizes the metaphor, here in the form of the emergent city. An urban denizen informs Will that Babel was built not as a city, but “…the framework of one—a double-helix of interlocking gyres…” where “Buildings are thrown up and torn down as needed, but the city goes on” (Swanwick 122). The city, in essence, is a character with a will (Will?) and a genotype, and at the same time it isn’t—it’s a swarm of self-interested individuals doing what they do to get ahead. Like the dragon, it exists as two things at once, its scientific taxonomy and the living idea for which it’s a metaphor. Johnson reminds us that even in science this “couple-coloredness” can exist, for a city is literally the sum of its residents, and also “…more than the sum of its residents—closer to a living organism, capable of adaptive change” (52). The process of myth-making, like the living city, arises out of the collective unconscious, and it’s just possible to see slipstream as a manifestation of a very specific human gene: our myth-making gene, our need for an organized social cohesion, sired not by our “pacemakers” but by our hearts.

To this end, Swanwick conflates two hero archetypes in the novel: the king and the trickster. While traditionally the king is a “pacemaker” who restores order and inculcates the law, the trickster’s job is to queer the pitch, or, as Campbell notes in the short film “Mythology of the Trickster,” he serves as the “Disruptor of Programs.” The trickster is the best man for the job of synthesizing the modern and mythological, because, by operating “bottom up” rather than “top down,” he endeavors to integrate a new way of thinking, not replace the old one. He is a catalyst for emergence. In “Trickster: Shaman of the Liminal,” Larry Ellis calls the trickster, “a creature of low purpose who establishes precedent, [and] dabbles in the creation of the world that will be” (55). Moreover, he notes the invaluable place of the trickster in myth:

The world of myth is a place of creation in which things and events, from the seemingly insignificant to the momentous, are altered in preparation for the world to come. Trickster is a figure of myth, and in singular fashion sets out to change the mythic landscape in every area imaginable (Ellis 57).

Nat, Will’s father and the novel’s absent king, primes his son to be this catalyst, ready to reach “every area imaginable.” He explains the role of the trickster this way: “We keep things stirred up. Without us, the world would grow stale and stagnant. Every life we’ve touched today has been made richer and stranger” (Swanwick 234). What Will learns about kingship is that its main function is not to embody justice and power, as his advisors counsel; nor to destroy the evil Babylon, as the dragon within him urges; nor to impose order over a chaotic city, as the citizens of Babel expect. No. Nat puts the king’s role best when he contends that, “It isn’t for me to increase or decrease the total amount of virtue or vice in the world—just to keep things stirred up. To keep us all from dying of predictability” (Swanwick 234). Swanwick could be teaching us to negotiate a world whose prime directive is to slaughter magic and erect the static “real” in its place. Or, correspondingly, he could be writing a treatise on slipstream itself.

Whatever we call slipstream—magical realism, metafiction, experimental fiction, counter-realism—it is, like the trickster himself, our agent provocateur, the “Disruptor of Programs,” the creature “of low purpose” who changes the world. Many signifiers, the rational and the irrational, can point to the same signified, and no single definition is sufficient—is even possible. No wonder the folks of the slipstream symposium are enraged with the necessity of pinpointing, of defining a category genetically blueprinted to resist stasis. How do you create a taxonomy when the basis is manifold, when the genre emerges out of spiritus mundi to fulfill whatever collective need produced it? Pinning it down changes it—makes it taxidermy rather than taxonomy. Will realizes that after he changes the world he must disappear, because the world needs a disruptor, not a pacemaker. So he does, only to resurface later, as legends do, when they’re needed, to start the cycle over again. He, and slipstream itself, are Campbell’s modern heroes, “…rendering the modern world spiritually significant” (Hero 334) by allowing the myth-making half of our soul to sooth the restless, rational, post-modern half, the one hungry for co-ordination, for our lost “universe of symbols.”

Cited Sources

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato, California: New World Library. 2008. Print.

Campbell, Joseph. “Mythology of the Trickster.” Magic, Myth and Folklore Videos. BOAS Network. Feb 17 2014. Web. Dec 6 2015.

Easterbrook, Neil. “Symposium on Slipstream.” Science Fiction Studies. Vol. 38, No.1. March 2011. Print.

Ellis, Larry. “Trickster: Shaman of the Liminal.” Studies in American Indian Literatures. Ser. 2, Vol. 5, No. 4. Winter 1993. Print.

Johnson, Steven. “The Myth of the Ant Queen.” Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. New York: Scribner. 2001. Print.

Kessel, John. “Symposium on Slipstream.” Science Fiction Studies. Vol. 38, No.1. March 2011. Print.

Lethem, Jonathan. “Symposium on Slipstream.” Science Fiction Studies. Vol. 38, No.1. March 2011. Print.

Olsen, Lance. “Symposium on Slipstream.” Science Fiction Studies. Vol. 38, No.1. March 2011. Print.

Swanwick, Michael. The Dragons of Babel. New York: Tor Books. 2007. Print.

Entirely in Your Hands

The Search for Authority in Moore and Gibbon’s Watchmen

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who guards the guardians themselves? [1]”

— Decimus Junis Juvenal, Satura VI

View fullsize

The question Just who are the watchmen? sounds facile when asked of Dave Gibbons’ and Alan Moore’s graphic masterpiece Watchmen. The superheroes, of course: this is, after all, a comic book. But a closer examination of the title, like so much else in the book, reveals its complexity. The reader sees the Juvenal quote scrawled on walls and storefronts in virtually every chapter of the novel, diegetically referring to the masked vigilantes. But then it finally appears in epigraph (epitaph?) alone on the final page, after the world has been “saved” by its masked heroes. Neither generational cadre of superheroes calls itself “The Watchmen” (the older generation dub themselves “The Minutemen;” the younger group, ridiculously, “The Crimebusters”). The book’s epigraph, taken from the Tower Commission Report (post facto even from the standpoint of the book’s publication), places the question unsettlingly into our world. The characters, too, seem alarmed at the intrusion of the “real” world into their comic book universe, where morality is meant to be a simple choice; where good prevails, evil is thwarted, due to the drive, determination, and cooperation of the heroes. The moral framework of the protagonists is as unwavering as it should be in the superhero genre. The problem is they don’t share the same moral framework, and thus find themselves embroiled in a battle royale of warring philosophies—not the dialectic of good and evil we all expect from comics, but in the messy and godless way it plays out in the world around us—between and among the “good guys.” Ozymandias embodies utilitarian principles; Rorschach is a deontologist, exercising the categorical imperative; and Dr. Manhattan becomes a kind of reductio ad absurdum Übermensch—but at the novel’s heart lies the unsettled and, by all measures unsettlable, question of authority: who gives authority to the watchmen, who polices them, and, more unsettlingly still, who, at the end of the day, at the end of the story, are the watchmen?

View fullsize

Ozymandias

Extra-diegetically, the watchmen are almost certainly not the superheroes. The novel’s “winner,” “savior,” “villain,” as you like, is Ozymandias, the superhero moniker of Adrian Veidt, a man of almost superhuman intelligence and physical prowess, possessed of an ego to match. The only thing distinguishing him from a supervillain is that instead of seeking world domination when he destroys New York City via a lab-manufactured monster, he is seeking (no, really) world peace. Veidt successfully staves off nuclear war between terrestrial enemies by forcing warring nations to unite against a common alien enemy. He doesn’t even want credit in the traditional sense; he’s satisfied to quietly pull the strings from the sidelines. His actions are utilitarian in the extreme, in that they enact, perfectly, “the greatest good for the greatest number:” he kills a few million to save billions. His maniacal self-aggrandizement, however, complicates beyond repair our sympathies. He delivers a protracted, two-chapter speech about his plot, first to his dead servants and then to other masked comrades (his servants he kills, along with the others who know his machinations; his comrades he spares only because he has stalemated them into silence). This speech, too, compromises his heroism, for the simple reason that, per the comics trope, prideful oration is commonly (and hubristically) delivered by villains. Instead of a comeuppance at the close of the speech, as the trope would have it, Ozymandias reveals that his plan already happened: “I’m not a republic serial villain,” he says in response to the threat of being stopped, “Do you seriously think I’d explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting the outcome?” (Moore & Gibbons 375). Some readers might be sympathetic to the ends-justify-the-means philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, but the comics conventions curtail the sympathy of such readers for Veidt.

View fullsize

Rorschach

Rorschach, the “true” identity of one Walter Kovacs, has a worldview that stands in direct opposition to Veidt’s. He is beholden to a rigid, unflinching moral code, and feels obsessively duty-bound to carry it out. He outlines it in his journal: “There is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise in this” (Moore & Gibbons 32). In the carrying out of this code, he reasons, he must break a few eggs. Most of the eggs are the fingers of criminals, but he doesn’t balk at taking their lives either. He, like the traditional superhero, is a true Kantian, in that the moral imperative by which he lives is entirely without compromise (Kant 21). But his heroism, like Veidt’s, is compromised— by reality: for who gives any one of us the right to decide what deserves punishment? The social contract forbids such vigilantism, and for good reason: we must make such decisions collectively or risk the arbitrary judgment of others, however mentally unsound (Hector Godfrey, the gruff, right-wing editor of the New Frontiersman quips, significantly, when his assistant Seymour reads him the first few lines of Rorschach’s journal, “Jesus, who’s it from? Son of Sam?” [Moore & Gibbons 338]). When, at the end of the book, Rorschach is asked to go along with Veidt’s plan, he repeats his mantra, though he knows, this time, it is literal: “Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise” (Moore & Gibbons 402). He will reveal the plot even at the cost of his own life and the lives of the billions saved from nuclear apocalypse, because for a Kantian, no one man (let alone millions) can ever be a means—humans, in Kant’s moral universe, are all ends in themselves (Kant 21). Rorschach’s stalwart adherence to a code, however perverted, makes him far more of a tragic antihero than Veidt, and the reader pities him when Dr. Manhattan implodes him outside Veidt’s artic lair, Karnak.

View fullsize

Dr. Manhattan

View fullsize

Friedrich Nietzsche

In Dr. Manhattan, Moore and Gibbons give us a true superman. Nietzsche might not recognize his Übermensch. But Dr. Manhattan behaves in ways the theoretical Übermensch, taken to its logical conclusion, likely would behave: he is depicted throughout the book as a man locked in a losing battle with his own indifference to human morality, agency, politics, and allegiances. If humanity did evolve, as Nietzsche speculated, into something mentally and physically superior, with the attributes of a god, he might, instead of becoming a ruler of men, become another species entirely, losing interest in men and their small preoccupations. And indeed, after Jon Osterman’s nuclear accident transforms him into Dr. Manhattan, giving him actual superpowers, he acts first as a political tool, aligned, by default, with American interests: he wins the Vietnam war and allows himself to be used to intimidate the rest of the world into submission to America’s will (allowing for a fourth term for Richard Nixon). But, as he can see and understand matter on an atomic level, isn’t beholden to time’s linearity, and is functionally immortal, he loses interest in the petty, violent, short-sighted dramas of human politics and emotions. When asked about Dr. Manhattan’s political allegiance in an interview, Veidt quips: “Which do you prefer, red ants or black ants?” (380). Russians, we assume, are the red ants in his metaphor. Lest we fail to see that this Übermensch is by all measures a god, we see him, in his final moments before leaving earth forever, walking on water, after one of his only smiles—at the sleeping bodies of his former lover in the arms of another (this is the book’s subtle suggestion that human love, frailty, and sympathy are the only causes worth fighting for, putting to shame the lofty abstractions of philosophy). After walking on water, Dr. Manhattan then engages in the following exchange with Veidt:

DR. MANHATTAN: Human affairs cannot be my concern. I’m leaving this galaxy for one less complicated.
VEIDT: But you’d regained interest in human life.
DR. MANHATTAN: Yes, I have. I think perhaps I’ll create some (Moore & Gibbons 409).

After this comes one of the most profound exchanges in the book, when Veidt’s confidence falters, and we see the shortsightedness of his plan (the shortsightedness that curses all mortal beings):

VEIDT: I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.
DR. MANHATTAN: “In the end?” Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends (Moore & Gibbons 409).

That the two are standing in front of an orrery is surely no accident, for earlier in the novel Dr. Manhattan opines that the universe is a “makerless mechanism,” a clockwork that runs without end, bereft of a creator (Moore & Gibbons 138). And here, in front of this clockwork solar system, he decides to become, at last, a watchmaker.

View fullsize

The book's final panel

The haunting strains of “Nothing ever ends,” and the imagery that unites the book’s closing with its opening, prompt the reader to reread the book. Rereading Watchmen is crucial to understanding it, so on a fundamental level, Dr. Manhattan is right: even the book, in a sense, doesn’t end. It’s an ouroboros swallowing its own tail. The cyclical impulse causes some of the clockwork pieces, on a second and third read, to fall into place. The book opens with an image of a smiley face, its bilateral symmetry violated by a bloodstain: the pin worn by The Comedian, whose murder sets the book’s events in motion. In text boxes above the images we get Rorschach’s rambling journal. The final scene shows Seymour of The New Frontiersman, reaching toward the “crank pile,” where Rorschach’s journal lies (a journal exposing Veidt’s plan), waiting to be burned. Seymour wears a smiley face shirt, and we watch ketchup spill over the smiley face’s eye in the exact pattern of the book’s opening. We can’t help but wonder whether the book’s events have been told in retrospect by the furthest thing from a hero: Seymour, the chubby, right-wing slob with buck teeth and very little demonstrated agency. Godfrey’s words accompany Seymour’s reaching hand, prompting him to choose from the crank file whatever he wants to run in the magazine: “I leave it entirely in your hands” (Moore & Gibbons 414). Has Seymour been the orchestrator of the book’s omniscient narration? The idea seems implausible, but it’s there in his name—a homophone for “see more” —and yes, if he sees the contents of the journal, he “sees more” than any other living being in the book, whose view of events are partial, contingent, or compromised (even Dr. Manhattan cannot see futures beyond his own, and thus does not anticipate Veidt’s potential failure). His name might also be prompting us, the readers, to “see more” through another read. So, is Seymour, as potential omniscient narrator, a possible Watchman (the “watch-man” or watchmaker who turns the gears of the plot)? Has he already orchestrated the destruction of the world by exposing Veidt’s plan? Or is he one of many cogs?

View fullsize

Clockwork

The superheroes, no Watchmen, are clearly cogs in this clockwork universe. Countries, with their petty policies, are cogs of even less significance (in our world as well as the novel’s world). Even Dr. Manhattan apprehends himself as a cog (though one with the power to uncog himself, should he choose): he tells his ex-girlfriend, “We’re all puppets… I’m just a puppet who can see the strings” (Moore & Gibbons 285). The characters themselves, though they may believe in their own omniscience, are held captive by that most tyrannical of despots: the omniscient narrator. Though each superhero is a storyteller, through journals, monologue, or dialogue, though many narrative frames are layered together, diegetically and meta-diegetically, providing a patchwork of possible truths, the truths are all at the mercy of some mysterious, remarkably literate narrative voice, who titles chapters, chooses epigraphs, and obtains the rights to various copyrighted materials to compile information for us (this narrator is beholden to copyright law, apparently, suggesting that he or she is a diegetic member of the cast). At the novel’s close, Godfrey’s voice says the future is “entirely in your hands.” “Godfrey,” of course, is a homophone for “god” and “free,” no less significant than “Seymour” considering the book’s questions about theology and free will. The final panel before the Juvenal epigraph is the moment at which readers become aware, as they always do on a final page, that they are holding a book, that a book is literally in their hands, and that straightening out the ouroboros of events, untangling the multiple narrative layers, determining which philosophical standpoint is right, or at least the least evil, falls to them. Moreover, the books epigraph reminds us that we live in a world far more nuanced, violent, and ideologically fractious than the book’s tapestry (as referenced by the real-world Iran-Contra allusion). We, then, the readers—the “Seymours,” not the “great men,” in our big, complicated clockworks—are Watchmen, witnessing all our human philosophies fail us on the page (just as they do in real life), and wondering, as we’ve all wondered since Juvenal: who, if not us, is authorized to appoint, watch, or be, the watchmen?

Cited Sources

Juvenal, Decimus Junis. Satura VI. The Latin Library, 27 Nov. 2016. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/6.shtml

Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals with On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns. 3rd Ed. Tr. James W. Ellington. Hackett, 1981.

Mautner, Thomas. The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy. Penguin Books, 1998.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1993.

Moore, Alan, and David Gibbons. Watchmen. DC Comics, 2004.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Tr. Walter Kaufman. Penguin, 1954.

[1] Translation Mine