Camping in Nature with Grizzly Men: “Ecocriticim” through a Camp Sensibility – ENG 449

Treadwell reads as we read Treadwell

John Water’s camp classic Pink Flamingos ends with Divine eating a pile of dog feces. The story goes that Divine followed the dog around for hours, waiting for it poop, setting a stage for a performance and scene that would cement her title as “the filthiest person alive.” And similarly, in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell glorifies bears, their scat and filth, puts himself “at risk,” performs excessively to gain credibility as a naturalist. He is performing an identity that he himself may or may not understand but it is nonetheless—to borrow from Judith Butler—both deeply embodied and artificial. A character like Treadwell, who sincerely and bodily performed loving the bears unto his death, forces uneasiness within an audience that holds tremendous preconceived notions of nature and the natural and what constitutes an appropriate relationship towards them. Nature, the universe, the environment—the what we consider to be natural, wilderness, or interconnected—these very foundations of ecological language, are made more readily visible as constructed notions and artificial through Treadwell’s performance. Grizzly Man illustrates for its audience that these concepts rely upon their conceptualization through the human mind and are constantly molded by human stewardship and touch. And so, in terms of conservation, Grizzly Man questions our naturalized unreality by examining the more porous aspects of ecology and stewardship.

Grizzly Man, through Herzog’s and Treadwell’s mediated and contemporaneous performance and direction, take serious Treadwell’s actions but exhibit a serious failure of tone through the extravagant tension these competing narrators produce. And Grizzly Man becomes sensible, through the extravagant failure it performs, as “pure Camp,” which according to Susan Sontag requires an “essential element…a seriousness that fails…that has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve” (23). Treadwell takes himself seriously as an activist and lover of bears but still exhibits his actions and stewardship playfully and as a performance—his camera is present, to drink in and represent his enactments of friendship and protection. And Herzog appropriates these performances, interprets the composite of his footage, and inserts his direction and his own performance to inscribe a different language of consequence onto Treadwell’s actions, forcing a tense competition between the two subjects.

The narrative tension bred from this competition manifests throughout the film but is exemplified in an intense moment of tonal juxtaposition as Treadwell crouches over a half-eaten fox, quietly crying “I love you…I love you and I…don’t understand; it’s a painful world” (Herzog). In this passionate performance of tenderness, Treadwell mourns the loss of one of his “friends,” treating a “natural” creature as he would a deceased pet or relative.  But in a narrative move that is best described as predatory, Herzog seizes an opportunity to interrupt, “Here I differ with Treadwell, I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility, and murder.” Herzog claims control of his audience’s perception with a rhetorical either-or dichotomy—harmony with or antagonism against the natural. As this is Herzog’s representation of Treadwell, the audience is meant to sympathize with the cold, Teutonic appraisal of the state of nature: something that cannot, will not, and is unable to reciprocate Treadwell’s and humanity’s wishes, desires, and devotions.

But Herzog’s performed dichotomy is false and predicated on terminology that he insists upon and provides which erodes his ability to control his dominance over the narrative through its overbearingness. Treadwell believes the world is painful but he doesn’t seek to explain it, and instead consoles himself by appealing his own lack of understanding to embrace of the melancholy his performance produces in this encounter with death. Herzog believes the world is painful and interprets Treadwell’s sorrow as a failure to react rationally to the irrational “reality” of nature; Herzog seeks to reify his narrative authority in this moment, forcing his moral upon the audience. In this flourish, Herzog handles Treadwell in a manner that parallels Susan Sontag’s relationship to Camp as she says she “is strongly drawn to [it], and almost strongly as offended by it” (1). Herzog’s unsympathetic evaluation attempts to produce a pleasurable and satisfying affect in its audience because it wantonly appeals to the audience’s fear and repulsion towards bears and the natural world while still attempting a concerned honesty towards Treadwell’s “naiveté.”

However, this stark tonal juxtaposition illustrates a moment of narrative fissure, opening up and magnifying the effervescent, extravagant artifice of Treadwell’s and Herzog’s posturing within Grizzly Man. These performed postures are so overwrought and excessive that they become sensible as Camp, which contains “a large element of artifice” (Sontag 7). Through their increasingly artificial performances, Treadwell and Herzog represent “instant characters” who embody “a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing” (33). Treadwell’s affected mannerisms and childlike behavior are a “triumph of the epicene style,” since his subject performance is always a mix of maternal tenderness and an aggressively paternal protection which make his gender unconventional and puzzling (11). Both men are “the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater” (10). And so, these men exhibit many of the “notes” that Sontag uses to describe a Camp sensibility. Camp is a “mode of seduction – one which employs” but also latches onto “flamboyant mannerisms susceptible to double interpretation, [and] gestures full of duplicity” (17).

One of Herzog’s closing remarks insists that he sees no harmony, discovers “no kinship, no understanding, no mercy” in the eyes of a bear Treadwell films and sees “only the overwhelming indifference of nature” but this statement appears duplicitous since he admits that it is a difference of perception between him and Treadwell. He invites the audience to reflect on the bear’s eyes in this gesture—and how the audience reflects is a projection of their own postures and sensibilities towards bears onto the “bear.” Camp provides an opportunity to interrupt Herzog’s machinations in this scene and seek meaning through alternative sensibilities.

Sontag’s portrayal of Camp is meant to be opaque and so it often appears that a work of Camp is performing the seduction of Camp as the reader is perceiving the duplicity of its performance and recognizing the Camp within it. It is described as a sensibility and its ability to be sensed, through a refinement of a taste or a capacity for sensation, help to inform the complex interaction between a thing performing Camp and audience perceiving Camp in a performance—which are often collapsible categories, further complicating what it means to be Campy. At some point, the complications become so immense that the argument for Camp must be simplified to “I know it when I see it” or put another way, “it simply is.” And Grizzly Man, through its excessive narrative performances and opulent theatricality simply is Camp to this audience member. Sensing Grizzly Man’s Campiness provides an opportunity to reevaluate its didacticism since Camp is “a solvent of morality” that “neutralizes moral indignation, [and] sponsors playfulness” (52). This allows the audience of Grizzly Man analytical distance and provides the ability to articulate the ways in which Treadwell embodies the exaggeratedly theatrical and excessive performance that Camp senses, values, and celebrates; Camp sees “artifice as an ideal, theatricality” and allows this theatricality to invest their thought in new ways of “being” in “nature” (43).

There is a lingering spectral presence that interrupts an elegantly Camp interpretation of death in Grizzly man: it is not Treadwell’s specter—or society’s—but Amie Huguenard’s. She is the only character who shirks the excess of performance in Grizzly man: liminal in appearance and representation, she remains a nonentity. And therefore, she the only failure that Camp cannot locate success within. She cautions the playfulness of Camp to not entrench itself so deeply into irreverence that it becomes cruel; Camp considers nothing sacred but cannot celebrate something that is not extravagant and is simply lamentable. Instead, Camp latches onto characters, like Treadwell and Herzog and “relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character”…identifies with what it is enjoying…Camp is a tender feeling” (56).

Treadwell, through many triumphs and awkward intensities of exaggerated performance, illustrates the ability to reimagine the “natural” into his own set of rules and regulations of appropriate touch, reverence, and stewardship. Camp is a sensibility and aesthetic, values performances, like Treadwell’s, that defamiliarize and make exaggerated, the constructions society assumes to be natural. In a moment of exaggerated unfamiliarity, Treadwell stoops over a pile of fresh scat, rejoicing in its warmth and excrement as a product of life, something produced by one of his bear friends, and it provides a moment of slippage for his audience where we are able to glimpse into the construction and constructedness of the natural. He whispers that he “can feel it,” that it was “just inside of her, my girl…it’s Wendy’s poop” (Herzog). He returns the camera to his face, addressing the audience and anticipating their disgust as he relays, “I know it may seem weird that I touched her poop but it was inside of her…it’s her life…it’s her…she’s so precious to me, she gave me Downy” (Herzog). This is one of his least dangerous interaction with the bears but it is also the most confusing and unsettling, as he infuses qualities of vitality and importance onto the waste product of these omnivorous alpha predator.

Through his touch and tender reverence, he remarkably defamiliarizes the audience’s relationship to poop and bears by his active redefinition of meaning and boundaries. There is a proliferation of new meaning in this interaction, bear becomes “my girl,” “my girl” becomes Wendy, her poop becomes an extension of Wendy, Wendy’s poop becomes Downy—her cub, an organism that gestated inside of her and was released into the world, full of vitality. It is a series of performative speech acts, producing new definitions of reality as he builds his utterance towards the conclusive, “everything about them is perfect” (Herzog). His appraisal of the scat descriptively not wrong and it is infused with appropriations of existing facts: it is indeed warm, fertile, and full of life—fecund for literal bacteria and figurative meaningfulness.

In “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag argues that Camp is “at least apolitical” but the redefinitions and newly produced meanings that Treadwell performs are inherently political since they bear consequences for Grizzly Man’s subjects, for the bears and their ecosystem, and for a society that actively asserts and produces definitional meaning as a means of controlling its subjects through discourse (2). Performative redefinitions happen throughout society, often contemporaneously; the societal reaction to the AIDS crisis mutated the rectum into a grave incubator of disease and death, and through this redefinition, mediated and informed a deepening societal revulsion to the anal and fecal (Bersani). But Treadwell interrupts this societal distaste to redefine the scatological as he shrewdly performs for his audience—as a trained actor does—balancing his performance and the audiences’ repellant perception of poop to negotiate his new understandings. Through his performance, he produces a new reality where touching poop becomes a gesture that touches bear, transforms poop into natal, and re-describes digestion as a celebratory, bountiful production of fresh life instead of a repulsive symbol of death, waste, and terminated consumption.

In a beautiful, off-screen turn of unintentional Camp, Treadwell is eaten and can finally become bear, through digestion, by becoming the poop he gleefully touched. Poop is the means through which Treadwell can transform into “bear,” if we follow his produced framework of definitional meaning.  However, he is denied this (through a bitter reversal of his wish to never harm a bear) as he and his lover, Amy are exhumed from the bear’s stomach. Through this denial, he remains human and his composite parts are collected into a trash bag. What the coroner call “a trash bag of human parts” (Herzog). But he has been human trash for a while: a dejected, depressive ex-junkie and failed actor—he is already discarded and devalued by society. Camp allows the audience to sense that Treadwell was always already failing to become “bear” and his failed transformation into poop further exemplifies the inability to break free from human constructions and the power of discursively enforced relationships and boundaries. Camp can also sense the performance of societal power—as a display that reifies humanity’s status as the “alpha predator”—and in this moment, the audience can “sniff the stink and pride ourselves on our strong nerves” since this naked performance of power exhibits how deeply new definitions of relationality are resisted by society when they do not conform to a produced appropriateness or normality (Sontag 48).

Treadwell’s failure to become bear can be understood, through a Camp sensibility, to reveal the perpetual production of artificial meaning within the societal constructions of nature, the natural, and humanity’s enforced relationship to them. Grizzly Man presents Treadwell as naïve and strange since his desires are projected onto creatures—predators—associated with carnal needs, aggression, and death. Yet Herzog is didactic and extreme, so unabashedly predatory and hyperbolic in his direction, that when compared to Treadwell’s tender earnestness, both men seem comical and frivolous. The moral murkiness is buttressed by the profusion of discourse Herzog provides through interviews that work to moralize Treadwell’s passing; each new subject seeks to make meaning from his corpse, to turn Treadwell into a heroic figure, a parable, or cautionary tale. The absolute unnaturalness of these postures, and their naked desire to enforce narrative, force the audience to work through the ambiguities that become manifest in their performances. A Camp sensibility resists the compulsion to moralize and seeks to “find the success in certain passionate failures” (55). And in terms of Camp, Treadwell’s death was a glorious success since it is an imperfect triumph of his aesthetic; he became “bear” in a very momentary victory against the power of entrenched definitions and produced a new form of “being” through digestive transmutation. His success as “bear” is artificial and ultimately fails but is equal in its artificiality and failure to the language that seeks to enforce his status as “human”; as Sontag says “Camp sees everything in quotation marks” and those quotation marks denaturalize naturalized categories of being. And so “bear” never was Bear just as “human” never was Human; the categories were always already constructed and Grizzly Man makes them perform their artificiality by exaggerating them to their logical extremes.

This effervescent proliferation of artificiality allows the audience to feel the “sympathy modified by revulsion” in Grizzly Man which is an ambivalence that returns them to Camp as a “solvent of morality” and a sensibility that” neutralizes moral indignation” and “sponsors playfulness” (1, 52). A solvent dissolves substances into solutions and the solvency Camp provides is its ability to dissolve the solute of naturalized categories of being and identity. Equally intriguing is its ability to transform these categories into solutions through their dissolution. Grizzly Man’s proposed solution is illusory, imparted through Herzog’s objectivity as a documentary filmmaker but he inserts his narration into the film and—whether intentional or not—exposes the role he plays. Through his unabashed mediation, he reveals the artificiality of a “documentary” that proposes to “document” the life of another. Treadwell’s solution is less duplicitous through its naiveté. While both men are playful with artifice, Treadwell works to deconstruct the appropriate boundaries of identity, touch, and the natural to broaden possibility; whereas Herzog plays with artifice to foreclose the possibilities opened by Treadwell. The Camp solution celebrates the successes each man achieved through their failed experiments, understanding each to be inadequate and radiant, beautiful and repulsive. Sontag concludes, “The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful…Of course, one can’t always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I’ve tried to sketch in these notes” (58).

Certainly, we can say Grizzly Man is good because it’s awful; its subject matter is “grizzly” and the playful pun does not go unnoticed and informs the shades of grey between the extremes of the film that inspire awe within its audience. And so, if everything remains awfully grey and that greyness remains constructed, we are encouraged to play in the constructed greyness and to interrupt entrenched definitions of “natural” relationships. We see a sign that commands us “Do Not Wander from the Path” at Walden Pond and we can sense that this is antithetical to what Walden Pond represents and draws people to it. But we can also celebrate the contradiction while respecting its purpose. These boundaries and restrictions are artificial, readily subverted by Camp—playfully—with an irreverent respect towards what limits seek to protect. A Camp reading of Grizzly Man knows better than to suggest that people should touch the bears. But a Camp sensibility can joyfully respect and celebrate the desire and attempt to redefine what it means to touch, love, and protect through understanding that these artificial redefinitions are exactly where meaning is always already located.

Works Cited

Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” The MIT Press (1987): 197-222. Print.

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” Inside/Out: Lesbain Theories, Gay Theories (1991): 13-31. Print.

Gammil, Cassia. “A Queer Ecological Presentation on Bear and Grizzly Man.” Eng. Department Colloquium. 27 May 2015.

Grizzly Man. Dir. Werner Herzog. Lionsgate, 2005. Film.

Pink Flamingos. Dir. John Waters. Dreamland, 1979. Film.

Sontag, Susuan. “Notes on Camp.”1964. Georgetown.edu. Web. 4 April 2015.

“Beyond Terrestrial Futurity” – ENG 449: Sex, Gender, and Ecology

I made a short zine for my scrapbook project that investigates the imagined futures within the PC game Civilization: BeyondEarth.

Presentation Proposal – Camping in Nature with Grizzly Men: Ecocriticism through a Camp Sensibility

Burger Girl – “Kiss Lamour” on youtube

**Submitted proposal for a paper presentation–more to come if accepted!**

John Water’s camp classic Pink Flamingos ends with Divine eating a pile of dog feces. The story goes that Divine followed the dog around for hours, waiting for it poop, setting a stage for a performance and scene that would cement her title as “the filthiest person alive.” And similarly, in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell glorifies bears, their scat and filth, puts himself “at risk,” performs and camps-it-up to gain credibility as a naturalist. A character like Treadwell, who sincerely and bodily performed loving the bears unto his death, force uneasiness within an audience that holds tremendous preconceived notions of nature and the natural and what constitutes an appropriate relationship towards them.

Nature, the universe, the environment—the what we consider to be natural, wilderness, or interconnected—the very foundations of ecological language, are constructed notions and artificial. And it’s deceptively simple to admit that without consequence. However, it is another to consider this unreal reality in terms of conservation, in terms of ecology, and in terms of sustainability. What are we seeking harmony with? What antagonizes us? What is nature? How do we contextualize our own purpose within it?

Treadwell is presented as naive and strange; his desires are projected onto creatures—predators—associated with carnal needs, aggression, and death. Herzog defamiliarizes both his own and Treadwell’s views of naturalism by putting them into conversation with one another. Herzog is didactic and extreme, so unabashedly predatory and hyperbolic in his direction, that when compared to Treadwell’s tender earnestness, it seems comical—campy even.

If camp, as a sensibility and aesthetic, seeks to defamiliarize, and make exaggerated, the constructions society assumes to be natural, what can be gleaned from camp performances as ecocriticism. And equally important, can camp—which is descriptively apolitical—offer meaning beyond aesthetics? Is camp and camping a virtue and mindset towards which society should aspire?

Nancy’s Conclusions? The Myriad Complications of Historical, Subjective, and Narrative Identity in Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl – ENG 464

Willa Cather at her least Willa Cather

-For ENG 464: Willa Cather and Reading Queerly

Sapphira and the Slave Girl constantly attempts and tries to achieve a static ideal only to interrupt itself, to retract and redact, pulling its language or plot back into itself. Nancy, who may very well be The Slave Girl in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is a driver of plot, as a locus of desire, hope, and faith, and as mentioned, and stands out as a textual device of interruption. Nancy is a character who “didn’t tell falsehoods deliberately, to get something she wanted; it was always to escape from something;” Nancy’s escape through lying is interrupting less for its dishonesty and more for its desire to flee and escape from consequences—even if only for a moment (44). The inability to be honest makes the asymmetrical power dynamic of master and slave explicit—a conflict that is central to Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Nancy “caught at any pretext to keep off blame or punishment for an hour, a minute,” which interrupts a relationship predicated on the ability of Sapphira, the master, to control punishment and control the terms of the punishable for Nancy (44). Through lies, Nancy illustrates her desire to escape the power-dynamic for fleeting moments “before she had time to think or to tell herself that she would be found out” (44). Exposure is framed through the language of the inevitable within the text, something that can be deferred but that will ultimately be found out. But oddly enough, despite the language of exposure, lying, and deceit, the text makes no mention of truth or honesty, belying the text’s investment in leaving matters of truth and honesty largely unspoken for. The text seems to insinuate that the confusion bred from lies and half-truths may paint a more honest picture of the novel’s setting than attempting to relay the “truth” through the verisimilar. It hints at the inability to find truth in a system that places value in wildly disproportionate power structures where all participants lie to one another in order to maintain whatever aspects of control they are able.

The end of Book III, “Old Jezebel,” exemplifies the text’s use of lies and half-truths as an escape by fleeing, darting off as a means of gesturing towards the intersection of conflicting narratives. In chapter one of “Old Jezebel,” Sapphira reminisces that their time together, gardening “were good times” but then laments, “I’ve been house-bound for a long while now, like you” (87). Relayed through vague snapshots, and mediated exclusively by Sapphira with nodding affirmation from Jezebel, their past together truly does appear good; we are given very little information about their history but both women seem to agree that they worked together pleasantly. Simultaneously, Sapphira extends sympathy, blithely comparing their ailments, apparently unconcerned with the asymmetry of the comparison. It is clear that aspects of the sentiment are genuinely considerate of Jezebel but Sapphira’s sympathy serves a dual purpose since it forces Jezebel to accept the comparison and return the sympathy.

During Jezebel’s consideration of Sapphira’s condition, she begins to wheeze, signaling a moment of gasping interruption that is trying to burst forth, out of Jezebel’s mouth; the moment underscores that she spends her dying energy towards ensuring Sapphira’s well-being and peace-of-mind through sympathetic words. Even as Sapphira implores that Jezebel “musn’t talk” since “it “catches [her] breath” she continues, “We must take what comes to us and be resigned” reducing Jezebel’s words to a whisper and allowing herself to remain in control of the conversation (87). Jezebel’s coughing is only threatening to Sapphira in its ability to detract from her own sense of victimhood and proximity to death. Sapphira’s dropsy is crippling but she still exerts considerable control and ability through her power over others; one of her methods to maintain that power is to ensure that she is always perceived to be weak and in need of sympathy and care. None of this is to say that she isn’t weak or in need of sympathy and care; however, she certainly uses her dropsy as leverage to bolster her supremacy.

In chapter III of “Old Jezebel,” Sapphira’s perception of her own impotence explodes into a manic frenzy, illustrating how fragile her sense of power and ability appear to herself—helping to explain why she so desperately leverages, and clutches onto, what power she has. Sapphira glimpses Nancy and Henry “in deep conversation” after Jezebel’s funeral (103). She is incensed by the momentary intimacy they share with one another and the sight of it causes Sapphira to “put her handkerchief to her eyes, afraid that her face might show indignation” claiming she had never before “seen him expose himself like that” (103). Exposure returns as both an anxiety and inevitability with Nancy as its catalyst but Sapphira must maintain the appearance of composure and control—literally saving her face from exposure, lying to escape from, and mask the reality of, her embarrassment. Sapphira claims that Henry “had forgotten himself,” his forgetting to lie or veil his feelings and intimacies is an exposure of genuine emotion, not intentionally on display for others but observed nonetheless, and Sapphira considers this authenticity to be deeply embarrassing to her (103-4).

Sapphira remains committed to the stasis and equilibrium of her own, carefully constructed reality, something that this indiscretion interrupts; she is not as in control of her husband as she likes to outwardly have herself and others perceive, which leads to her sudden, frantic outburst at the end of the chapter. Sapphira obsesses over the details of Henry’s exposure, feeling “wretched and lonely and injured” relenting, “The thought of being befooled, hoodwinked in any way, was unendurable;” these sentiments quickly morph into a suspicion that every person she knows is complicit in a conspiracy against her and she frets, “unable to lie still any longer” and rises out of bed (105). Lying takes on a dual meaning within this sentence. Sapphira feels inactive, inside of her own head, fearing the exposure, the “shattered and treacherous” disclosures that gossip, hearsay, and misconceptions produce when she is not the one maintaining perception (107). She has to rise, no longer comfortable in bed; she is agitated. And she is unable to defer the lies and lying any longer; she cannot maintain her deceptions when she herself is deceived.

This energy and mania builds until she nearly faints from overstimulation, ringing the bell to usher Nancy into her room (105). Nancy is summoned to either interrupt or confirm the worries Sapphira has; Nancy enters as evidence that Sapphira’s anxiety is unfounded, that her worst suspicions remain unrealized, and that Nancy remains under her control—available for her to call upon when needed. Sapphira relies upon the perception and words of others for information but “her house [stands] safe around her,” as long as it is in her control (107). And while Nancy does not lie to escape explicitly or verbally, she allows the lies to continue by entering the room, the careful fantasies of the house remain in-tact since she stands as evidence that everything is still under control. It’s a near catastrophe, but one that can be deferred and pushed away by Nancy’s interrupting presence.

This extended conflict, from the moment of exposure to its deferred resolution underscores Nancy’s interrupting presence and illustrates how it both serves as a driving force of progress and as a suspension and cessation. She has the ability to interrupt Sapphira’s notion of control through simple, innocuous, and deeply personal gestures, signaling an intimacy, affection, and authentic emotion that is indecent between master and slave. But she has the ability to postpone and suspend any further implications by entering the room as evidence and an exposure of innocence. And yet, Nancy is described as the character who lies despite how innocent, honest, and authentically she behaves throughout the entire novel. Oddly, it appears Nancy lies because she characteristically will not lie in a system predicated upon lies; and that is precisely what an interrupting force is. In the same manner that both Sapphira and Henry “were talking about Bluebell” but were actually “thinking all the while about Nancy” the narration displaces lying onto Nancy, calling Nancy a liar when in fact the narration is thinking about everyone else in the novel and specifically, Sapphira (53). The narration and Sapphira recognize Nancy as an earnest force that indiscreetly and recklessly breaks the veneer of untruth through innocence and authenticity; she is someone who does not fully understand that she is a pawn, whose purpose is to be manipulated by Sapphira. And yet still serves Sapphira to maintain aspects of balance through her innocence and well-meaning.

Martin Colbert’s enters into the narrative as a pawn of corruption by Sapphira and Nancy’s innocence becomes fragile at the very least, broken at worst, all the while still remaining virginal. Martin’s attempts to rape Nancy are never explicitly named as such; Sapphira describes it as “going wrong” or “demeaning himself,” Henry calls it “demoralizing,” and Sampson calls it “foolin round” but the threat is clear and it’s sexual (199, 190). The threat forces Nancy to flee, no longer in the mental or figurative sense, from Sapphira’s house. Henry feels that “something disturbing had come between” him and Nancy once he is alerted to Martin’s advances by Sampson (192). He no longer views her as “an influence,” instead seeing her as “a person”; if she can be perceived to be sexual and desirable then her presence as a force of interruption is made explicit and exposed to Henry, who now feels repulsed by her (192-3).

Nancy interrupts Henry’s self-control as much as she does Sapphira’s; Sapphira’s self-control manifests in her ability to control Henry and others and Henry’s self-control manifests in his ability to regulate himself. Even as Martin’s rape attempts play directly into Sapphira’s machinations, Henry now feels manipulated by his own desire and susceptible to Nancy. And since Henry cannot force Martin to leave, he passively helps Nancy escape—unwilling to embarrass Sapphira through his actions—he enables Rachel to steal the money she needs to get Nancy to Montreal (226-9).

Nancy’s shattered innocence within the text is made clear when the text re-acknowledges that she “had come into the world by accident,” acknowledging her very existence as something that is outside of the Sapphira’s plans (219). Nancy, simply by being a product of slave rape, is ultimately a symbol for the mixture of black and white, a never-ending interruption to “the order of the household” (219).

Nancy’s absence provides a narrative gap of almost twenty five years, offering details that inform how little has changed without her there; however, the narration surveys the lack of change in tandem with those details and aspects that have changed. Together, they illustrate a world that is very little altered while still having endured the onslaught of the Civil War and the passage of time, pointing to a portrait of the South that suggests an odd static dynamism. The civil war enters the concluding book immediately, the narration reports that it “came on so soon after Nancy ran away” which implicitly connects the two into a relation of cause-and-effect (273). Nancy’s absence, as is her presence, interrupting—while Nancy’s departure may prevent interrupting conflicts within Sapphira’s home, her escape and her very identity is still placed into relation with conflict through comparison to the Civil War. While this could otherwise be considered a simple connection bred from proximity, the text’s heavy use of insinuation and diffusion of untruth informs a more dubious reading.

The text continues on the Civil War, suggesting that despite the many deaths and loss of livestock, “Defeat was not new to [the men of Back Creek]. Almost every season brought defeat of some kind” (275-6). And so, the text portrays the Virginia backwoods folk as inoculated against change, able to return to the way it was through their perseverance. But it also acknowledges that “though the outward scene was little changed, [Nancy] came back to a different world” (277). The narration cannot quite decide what has changed and what hasn’t—at once, very little and very much. It makes note that appearances haven’t changed but that something akin to the atmosphere has changed, noting that the new generation is “gayer and more carefree,” taken to “picnics and camp-meetings…and dancing parties” (277).

The first-person narrator that interjects into the final book is the offspring of this generation, and seems to relate to the new energy dynamism, while still showing investment in the more static, inherited histories of the older generations. Within the first paragraph of the new narrative voice, the “I,” comments upon “the limp cordage of the great willow trees in the yard” getting “whipped and tossed furiously by the wind” but concludes, “It was the last day I would have chosen to stay indoors” (279). Quickly, it is worth noting that this storm ushers Nancy’s entrance, another implicitly insinuated connection between Nancy and conflict. The narrative voices desires to be out in the storm, they are drawn to the squall and feel shut in against their will.

At the same time, the narrative “I” believes, “The actual scene of the meeting had been arranged for [their] benefit” suggesting that there is a layer of mediation from the adults, and an attempt to make an auspicious setting for the reunion—all the while the narrator would rather be playing in the storm. This mediation is odd, since we are given few hints about who this narrator is: they’re a five year-old child, their parents are friends with the cast of characters that the narrative has followed. But we don’t know the purpose of the stage set before the narrator, why it is so meticulously controlled? We know it is informing the narrator and therefore, the reader and we know, following the logic of the text, that the adults are a product of a generation that desires to promote artifice and untruth; to lie to escape and defer until later.

As Nancy returns, these familiar characters seem to want to broadcast that all is well to the narrator—and the reader, by proxy—and insist that Nancy can return and reconcile with the novel and the setting. And for a while, the idyllic mediation, the stagecraft, the artifice holds up as they reminisce of the time passed; the narrator is “allowed to sit with [the adults] and sew the patchwork” (287). But Nancy’s power of interruption creeps into the narrative shortly after, our narrative “I” reflects “I soon learned that it was best never to interrupt with questions—it seemed to break the spell. Nancy wanted to know what happened…and so did I” (288). The narrator’s curiosity and Nancy’s are joined, as is their ability to question and interrupt. The narrator feels solidarity with Nancy, who has earned the ability to question through her growth and absence—the adults see her as one of them and trust her to be complicit in their act. However, Nancy disturbs the stunt “with a smile” as she asks Rachel “what had become of Martin Colbert;” this reintroduction puzzles the narrative “I” who has “never heard of him” but instills a curiosity and disallows the Martin’s violence to be erased from the narrative. The narrative “I” knew Nancy was returning but never express that they know why she left. The reintroduction of Martin into the narrative complicates the narrator’s perspective, forces questions to linger and ultimately, interrupts any neat or tidy conclusions the text may attempt to make.

And then Sapphira and the Slave Girl ends in a stupefying manner, continuing after the annotated “The End,” with a reflection upon Fredrick County surnames and finally finished with a flourish of the name “Willa Cather” (295). With the introduction of the author’s name as the end note, the reader is left to question whether they should bridge the potentially autobiographical implications of this sign-off and the introduction of the narrative “I”. The narrative complications of auto-biography verses the narrative “I” work in-tandem to complicate the already complicated majority of the novel, written from the third-person perspective. Quickly—all in the course of twenty pages these narrative moves build towards a crescendo that questions the previous narrations in hindsight.

Temporally, this conclusion compounds the layers of narrative mediation the reader must unpack in order to interpret the story as it is presented to them. The novel, seemingly about a discrete timeline in 1856, is refracted through a lens of the recent past, then twenty-five years removed, and then to Cahter’s Era, an additional sixty years later. These complications and their continuation, the transferal of narrative mediation from third person, to first person, to a signed Willa Cather provides an explicit, textual attempt to confuse the reader’s sense of narration, truth, and time as if it were throwing its hands into the readers face in a manic flurry. This mystifying, stupefying gesturing both distracts and obfuscates but ultimately seeks to inform a readerly conception of inability and failure to unify or concretize within its parameters.

Temporality and narrative voice has always already been complicated just a few pages back throughout Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Within the final book, the newly-introduced first person narrator admits that Nancy “had been gone now for twenty-five years” which confirms the subtitle of Book IX “Nancy’s Return,” “(Epilogue—Twenty-five years later)” (281, 271). The confirmation of the passage of time suggests that this first-person may in-fact be the previous third-person that has mediated the majority of the novel thus far, and establishes and complicates these now-multiple narrators as a potential, unified author/narrator. Within a few pages, the potential, comfortable unity is once again made insecure by the interjection of Willa Cather herself, which advocates that the narrator-as-author suggestion is true—and even autobiographical—while also making these conclusions problematic by investigating the troubles with hearsay and naming that Cather has encountered through recalling past memories of stories told about others.

These allusions to acquaintances of Cather’s parents, “often talked about” from afar are gossip, the names and people are both “unknown” and “a lively fascination” for Cather; a fascination bred from ambiguity, making the names “especially delightful” in how unusual and distant they sound (295). As Judith Butler points out in “Dangerous Crossings,” there’s a lot of psychic energy latent within names in Cather’s work, a “dynamic of identification” that acts as “an occasion for the retheorizing of cross-identification” and crossings that themselves seem “at work in every identificatory practice” (Butler 143). The dynamism that Butler asserts is not entirely self-evident in Sapphira’s concluding paragraphs; however, the novel’s autobiographical reflections upon a fascination with naming seems to winkingly re-separate Willa Cather from the narrative voice by creating a sense of distance through time and langauge—all the while still insisting that they are not entirely different by sheer matter of discombobulated context.

The narrator both is and isn’t author due to the complications that Cather details and Butler enriches—we’ll essentially never see the person who bore the name Willa Cather and to this day we don’t know how to spell it out (295). We don’t know how to introduce the name as a unity of an autobiographical author and narrator, which is just the way Willa Cather may have liked it and/or understood herself to be a site of such complication (but we’ll never actually know the truth in its entirety). Butler is pointing towards a suggestion that, yes, Cather sees the name as an occasion for necessary confusion and something that is always already an unstable foundation. Thus, Cather exposes the narrator’s and narration’s zig-zagging identity to variance and multitude, enriching its possibilities and muddling its certainty.

These complications underscore and illuminate how the text has always already been obfuscating its multiplicity of identities throughout its timespan and narration: in parentheticals, in asides, the by-gone histories of people, and in references to futures not yet realized with in the established time-frame, all among other pricking temporal inconsistencies. And in fact, the novel begins, “The Breakfast Table, 1856 [period],” establishing an incredibly distinct, specific—maddeningly vague—punctuated setting, both in time and place; however, despite this localization, the text continues in past-tense, “Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted….beyond that he appeared irregularly” already acknowledging that it is discussing something that has already happened and simultaneously referencing a pattern of past and future behavior (3).

All of these cursory textual details are banal to the point of being unremarkable in the introductory pages of a novel—the reader very much understands that there is a past, present, and future and that a rich novel exists in a multitude of these temporalities. However, once re-read with Sapphira’s conclusion in-mind, temporal details mark a very different narrative device within the novel, that of compartmentalization: the text suggests, from the beginning, that it should be read as a punctuated, specific snap-shot moment of place and time—“The Breakfast Table, 1856.”—without the influence of a past or future but it cannot escape the descriptive language of alternative tenses. Compellingly, the profound amount of lingering questions that the text provides—at its end and throughout—forces a methodology of interpretive hindsight, layering previous readings with compounding, frustrating, interrupting and contradicting information—all of which suggests that this novel embodies the project of history and identity as Willa Cather understands it.

The Interplay of Custom, Knowledge, and Commodity in Bacon’s “The New Atlantis” – ENG 440 SciFi Before Modernity

“The New Atlantis” provides a glimpse into a new world whose customs and knowledge would appear both culturally familiar and foreign to Bacon’s readers. Early on, Christian custom plays a pivotal role into how the narrator’s crew is treated and approached by these foreigners. But despite this respect bred from faith in religious morals and customs, the knowledge that the New Atlanteans are willing to share is limited. The narrator’s outsiderdom is made explicit in this mediated treatment by the foreign culture and unveils the text’s Montaignian ambivalence towards customs. While customs lay a common foundation and allow an exchange of familiarity and humanity, they are still relative and fluid—customs are a convenience and medium through which the flow of power and knowledge can be retarded. Like Hariot, the New Atlanteans understand that knowledge is a commodity; it is cultural capital, something of value that should be stockpiled and exploited—deployed when necessary but as much withheld to maintain control and security.

These intersections of Custom, Knowledge, and Commodity are investigated in “The New Atlantis” through the first interactions between the narrator and the New Atlanteans’ cultural emissaries. Despite similar and shared customs with Bacon’s narrator, the New Atlanteans shrewdly and unabashedly reserve their collected knowledge of the world to protect their culture’s integrity; the New Atlanteans’ perspective on knowledge enriches an understanding of colonial expansion and questions how information within Bacon’s era can be and should be traded with other cultures.

Bacon’s narrator is met with sympathy and compassion by the New Atlanteans after an exchange of Christian vows; their shared customs of hospitality and gratitude work in the favor of the Atlanteans who appeal to the narrator’s sense of respect while setting the rules of their status as guests. As the narrator’s crew recovers from their sickness, a Priest greets them and says that he comes to them, “to offer [them] [his] service, both as Strangers, and chiefly as Christians” (271). Already, the priest acknowledges a dual status among the narrator’s men; while they are Strangers, they are hierarchically Christians and will be treated accordingly. But the caveat that they are also Strangers—and will be treated as such—calls into question whether the customary treatment of fellow Christians will be as familiar to the narrator as he may hope. And both Christian and Stranger are capitalized in this passage, enforcing a sense that they are—perhaps—equal categories. This moment is enriched by Montaigne’s observation that “habit stupefies our senses” with a suggestion that this priest is making a shrewd appeal to their commonality and blinding them to—or at the very least, making them unable to address—the fact that he is highlighting their difference in almost equal measure (78).

The narrator’s status hierarchies are made more opaque when he and his crew are further addressed by the priest, who details the lawful limits of the guests’ sojourn—emphasizing the foreign government’s rules but allowing space for Christian exception. The priest elaborates upon their initial status as Strangers by stating that, “The State hath given you License to stay on Land, for the space of six weeks…I doe not doubt, but my selfe shall be able, to obtaine for you, such further time, as may be convenient” (Bacon 271). There is a careful friendliness in the tone of the priest, first establishing the limits of the state’s hospitality but ensuring that he could do his guests the Christian favor of extending their stay. The appeal to New Atlantean law is another appeal to mutual custom, since both the Priest and the narrator are members of lawful societies.  The Priest delivers a calculated request for respect of the established, foreign government’s law but also expertly deploys the promise of potential religious generosity towards fellow Christians. And again, the nuance of the narrator’s status is called into question, asking whether Christian customs can override the necessary customs of the state.

The priest concludes by establishing limits upon the guests’ movement throughout the city. After the Priest elaborates upon the wealth of services his society can provide to the narrator, he ends with a warning: “Only this I must tell you, that none of you must goe above a Karan…from the walls of the Citie, without especiall leave,” and the narrator claims to “[admire] this gracious and parent-like usage” (272). Through his reflection upon the Priest’s tone, the narrator suggests that these limits are placed for his protection which further displays the sort of stupefaction that Montaigne cautions his readers against. The priest exerts a great deal of kind effort to ensure that these guests are put at-ease—working to ensure that his guests feel protected.

However, it becomes clear through the narrator’s conversations with the Governor of New Atlantis, that the kindness and hospitality (with legal restrictions) is protecting the order and customs of his society’s secluded culture by limiting the guests’ exposure to the New Atlanteans’ foreign knowledge. The Governor gladly elaborates upon the custom of helping strangers in need but says that they place restraint upon their hospitality for the sake of Salomons House, which he describes as “The Noblest Foundation…dedicated to the Study of the Works, and Creatures of God” (280). This Order amounts to a University of sorts, a stockpile of knowledge, a cadre of scientists who travel the world and collect other societies’ technology, language, customs and science (280-281). The Governor describes these men as a sort of intellectual-merchant class, claiming that they

“maintaine a Trade, not for Gold, Silver, or Jewels; Nor for Silkes; Nor for Spices; Nor any other Commoditie of Matter; But onely for Gods first Creature, which was Light: To have Light (I say) of the Growth of all Parts of the World” (281).

While Bacon’s narrative is written pre-enlightenment, knowledge, light, and illumination are one-in-the-same, an idea buttressed by the fact that this merchant class is collecting intellectual artifacts: books, instruments, and inventions from all over the world (281).

This passage provides insight into the commodification of knowledge; the New Atlanteans value knowledge as treasure, collect it from across the globe, and horde it. This turns the mirror onto Bacon’s readers by suggesting that the colonial treasures of the burgeoning global market are not mineral—but intellectual—wealth. And back within Bacon’s piece, it begins to illustrate why the New Atlantean culture is so cautious around its foreign guests—they are seeking to protect the wealth of their nation which they labor extensively to stockpile. Their understanding of—and participation in—foreign customs and habits allows them to have enough clout to control their interactions with outsiders. The New Atlantean culture has superior knowledge and therefore, exhibits superior control; they can appeal to the rule of law and Christian kindness simultaneously—among other intended manipulations—to exert power over those who believe in the importance of those customs.

The New Atlantean commodification of knowledge and custom exhibits a new understanding of how power functions; there is an implicit acknowledgement that it can be traded, exported and imported throughout the globe. There is an explicit acknowledgement that it can be shared in manners that serve to benefit or protect those who have more knowledge than others. It is a very subtle, clever commentary from Bacon, who clearly valued intellectual innovation and achievement, but shows that such things become the capital of a new intellectual merchant class—and therefore should be shared with caution, reserve, and deliberate calculation.

“You’ve got a Friend in Me, Bartleby: Thoreau’s Preference for the Nonhuman and Possibly Undead” – ENG 467: Staying Single

Thoreau begins his examination of friendship poetically, relying heavily upon metaphor, to make claim to the seeming impossibility of establishing a definition for the concept of “Friendship”. The language used in these first paragraphs speaks of tempestuousness, bounty and lack; “Friendship” is described as “Evanescent” and “Remembered like heat lightning,” “A summer cloud,” vapor during drought and “April showers” (Thoreau 1). This rich metaphorical language establishes a complex foundation that Thoreau relies upon throughout his essay; he uses this complexity to show that there is no simple answer. He acknowledges that “There is no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims” (4). So while Thoreau is making this essay into a concretized gospel of “Friendship”—a roadmap to intrapersonal relationships—he is also insisting upon a disavowal of any existing institutions. These complexities and complications and the back-and-forth anxiety of creating a new language of “Friendship” within Thoreau’s piece are experienced viscerally by the narrator within Bartleby; he struggles with his stoic companion in ways that illuminate and inform the challenges and impossibilities that Thoreau lays out.

Thoreau uses a framework of metaphor to proselytize “Friendship,” throughout the treatise. Early on, through nautical language of exploration and a new world, the piece insists upon a pioneering spirit. To Thoreau, “The Friend is some fair floating isle of palm eluding the mariner in Pacific seas” (1). He quips, “There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore” (4). Within this extended metaphor, “Friendship” is an untouched desert island, sought after but never yet found. It exists within a world full of established rules, regulations, and institutions but it is an oasis that is found—within the metaphor—through shipwreck and accident by those who are exploring the unreached corners of the world and experience.

Bartleby is one such unreached corner of experience and intelligibility; he is “unaccountable” and yet, the narrator is so perplexed by him that he must account for him (Melville 26). The narrator believes that, “No materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man” (3). There is no church of Bartleby, no previous, established institution that can give words or meanings to the narrator’s account; Bartleby is, “One of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable except from original sources” (3). The narrator expresses a sense that he has experienced something that is at the edge of understanding; something that is original and belongs solely to him and Bartleby. Bartleby and the relationship and experiences that he and the narrator share, are an untouched oasis—inescapably curious and difficult to recount.

Similarly, to speak of that which is challenging to speak of, Thoreau speaks of “Friendship” mostly through the use of these metaphors to create a sense of daily, lived poetics, something both within—and beyond—language. These layers encourage interpretation and new forms of literacy. There is a sense of drama within Thoreau’s metaphors, the sensation and expectation that a new, untold story will be narrated; in the same way that the narrator assures that he will tell you, “All [he knows]of [Bartleby]” with what his, “Own astonished eyes saw of [him]” (3). And indeed, both Thoreau’s early metaphors and The Narrator’s account coalesce anew into a drama within their pieces.

Thoreau asserts that, “All men are dreaming of [Friendship] and its drama which is always tragedy, is enacted daily” (5). Further elaborating upon this thought, he concludes that “We are continually acting a part in a more interesting drama than any written” (6). “Friendship” has the trappings of drama and tragedy but the piece argues that it is a drama that should not be experienced in the playhouse or upon the stage. The slipperiness of this drama is expressed through the language of dreaming and the piece suggests that the dream of “Friendship” is lucidly and imperfectly “enacted” every day.  And so, within these layers of metaphor is an allusion to the power that institution plays within society and that maybe “Friendship” should be a drama that is experienced beyond the stage and written word. Latent within these ruminations is the anxiety that anything written makes an experience or idea into an institution, something which the piece explicitly wants to avoid. This sense of caution informs any potential readings of Bartleby as well, the power of the institutional and the importance of silence or alternative languages when faced with it is an important facet of any account of “Friendship”.

Thoreau both lauds the pleasure that society and people derive from the institutions of the written word—the dramatization of human experience—but also asserts that, “We are poets and fabler and dramatists and novelists ourselves” (6). The use of “we” throughout this construction is important because it implicates the reader, forcing them to consider themselves and their “Friendships,” and forces them into the assumed role of playwright. And through this implication, Thoreau asserts a sense that individuals can discover their own narratives and sensations of “Friendship”; the reader is shown that a lived experience, never made institutionally concrete or uttered into written word, is “more interesting” and upheld as his ideal. The piece meanders back to the language of drama, stating that, “It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act” (12). There is no script to follow for “Friendship” but it is still somehow enacted every day; it is an ideal for everyone and yet an oasis is stormy seas.

There is an inescapable complexity within the piece’s construction of an ideal “Friendship”; it is an ideal that is rife with complications, added stipulations, and still pregnant with ambiguities. “Friendship” and “Friend” are capitalized, throughout the piece, which protects and elevates these words as a sort of Truth—with a capital “T”—something divine, a platonic form of sort and not vulgar or common. Yet, there is an insistence upon lived-experience and the power of the individual to narrate and construct “Friendship” as their own. This near-contradiction or seeming-paradox is acknowledged throughout the piece since—as already shown—Thoreau also treats the ideal “Friendship” as a privileged space, found by wayward sojourners and not by everyone. The piece insists upon “Friendship’s” ability to be experienced by anyone but then also limits its accessibility—to those who both seek and do not seek—to those who experience the sublime and uncanny, and to those who experience the lightning flash of heat that defies the ability to be uttered.

These defiant moments stand out throughout Bartleby as well; the narrator is always struggling to comprehend these flashes of comfort, the silent seconds of sympathy and understanding. After one-of-many moments of refusal from Bartleby, the narrator concedes that, “There was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but, in a wonderful manner, touched and disconcerted me” (11). It is never clear how brief or fleeting these moments are but they are brief and fleeting, since immediately following this moment of lucidity, the narrator begins, “To reason with [Bartleby]” (11). The narrator is never quite content with the touching, disconcerting feelings that Bartleby gives—the narrator only rests in them quickly—he is too caught up in his quest to get Bartleby to produce, work, and coerce responses and utterance out of Bartleby beyond a preference not to. The narrator reaches this precipice of understanding—of the unestablished and self-written ideal of “Friendship”—over and over again, only to flee from it immediately, back to the comfort of the already established rules and mores of the institutional, societal, and earthly.

The narrator experiences the pulsation of intense, intimate, and momentary understandings and the pull to retreat from the evanescence back to the concrete illustrating his failure of “Friendship” with Bartleby to ever be understood steadfastly. In another moment, the narrator expresses that he never feels so private as when he knows that Bartleby is in his office with him and concludes that he is “content” (26). He wants, “To furnish [Bartleby] with office room for such period as [he] may see fit to remain,” reflecting that it is the “predestinated purpose of [the narrator’s] life” (26). It is an incredibly pious acceptance of his odd relationship with Bartleby, exemplifying Thoreau’s axiom that, “The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him” (13-14). For a lightning flash of a moment, the narrator is willing to cohabitate with—and accept—Bartleby for an indefinite amount of time; to make something beyond institution and arrange a status of living and relationality which is not fully able to be understood.

Bartleby accepts his role as someone whom the narrator must bounce his neuroses off of and remains always what he already is; he is a static being, inhumanely temperate and a true Friend. Thoreau believes that “Friendship is not so kind as is imagined, it has not human blood”; the earlier marriage of disgrace and apotheosis are key in his understanding and illustrates that Bartleby is a true Friend since he cannot disgrace the narrator by, “Having anything ordinarily human about him” (Thoreau 22) (Melville 10). Bartleby would, “Prefer not to quit [the narrator]” and, “Would prefer not to make any change at all,” he is in a very tangible stasis within time and space and gains a sense of apotheosis and divinity through it (24, 30). Bartleby’s odd living arrangements, the fact that he was always there, “As harmless and noiseless” as any old chair, bring the narrator the feeling of comfort and eternality that Thoreau seems to exalt (Melville 26).

Still, somewhat frustratingly, Thoreau’s ideal form of “Friendship” is always already being made complicated and enriched throughout with its liberal use of almost-contradiction and near-paradox; “Friendship” is always at the edge of understanding and forces the reader to pause and rethink earlier positions. These complications are exemplified when utterance—as an institutional force—is both made problematic by the earlier metaphorical axioms and then exalted through an additional metaphor of musical harmony and melody. This complicating metaphor is constructed within the reflection that, “Even the utmost good-will and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody” (8). Seemingly rife with potential paradoxes, this sentence insists upon a musicality to the ideal form of friendship; and this form is the same ideal which was argued should not be made into written word. While written words and music are not the same and therefore not entirely contradictory, it shows that the role of utterance is not entirely dismissed; utterance is, in fact, an integral aspect of the ideal. “Friendship” is an utterance beyond the written language of drama and beyond an oversimplified idea of harmony; instead, “Friendship” can be something that is expressed lyrically, a form of utterance that is—perhaps—less acute or laden with the baggage of society.

The baggage of society is something that the narrator unfortunately cannot escape; he allows societal, social pressure to influence and pervert the uplifted divinity of his relationship with Bartleby. Immediately after his reflection upon his predestined purpose to allow Bartleby to exist peacefully within his office, he laments that, “This wise and blessed frame of mind would have continued with me had it not been for the unsolicited and uncharitable remarks obtruded upon me by my professional friends” (26). The fragility of the divine within the earthly is a problem that Thoreau obsesses over and spends his entire essay trying to compensate for and Bartleby’s narrator cannot escape this fragility. The transcendent form of “Friendship” that Thoreau espouses—and that the narrator briefly experiences—is beyond language, a crescendo that can only interpreted and never fully understood or made concrete by those who listening-to and experiencing it.

And so, in the end, ostracized and left exposed by the narrator’s inability to accept and embrace his friendship, Bartleby dies. He receives immortality through words and memory, always with the narrator as a specter; but no longer subject to the whim or influence of societal pressures that undermine the divinity that he embodied. It is a complex message and provides a question that Thoreau’s essay left silent: when exactly does “Friendship” happen? The axioms and foundations that Thoreau provides are something that transcend the earthly; there’s an unavoidable, dreadful sense of ephemerality to his reflection that Bartleby unmasks. The beautiful, true sense of friendship may only be eternal as a living death; given that, “It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak, and another to hear” leaves open a consideration that the person who hears may no longer be an embodied, living being (9). And in fact, they may be a dead-lettered man. The intangibility of Thoreau’s true “Friendship” leaves open myriad possibilities and Bartleby convincingly offers its conclusion as an answer. But, as established throughout “Friendship,” answers are simply additional institutions and gospels; and truly, “To the highest communications we can only lend a silent ear” and leave that which is unspeakable unsaid (Thoreau 26). To come full-circle, to return-to and insist-upon the power of metaphor: Bartleby is but one Shipwreck of many in a vast ocean of potential and possibility that is “Friendship” or perhaps only a single footprint on a now trodden-upon isle of palm.

Works Cited

Melville, Herman. Batleby and Benito Cereno. New York: Dover, 1990. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. Friendship. Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1907. Print.

The Singular Multitude in Song of Myself – ENG 451: Staying Single

Walt Whitman, the wanton, permeable being.

[27]

To be in any form, what is that?

If nothing lay more developed the quahaug and its callous shell were enough.

Mine is no callous shell,

I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch my person to someone else’s is about as much as I can stand. (Whitman 25).

Song of Myself strives to be a passive medium, through which things are pulled into, filtered, projected into itself and then back onto that which is outside; it endeavors to be penetrated and used. Its passivity is active in its insistence upon permeability. The narrator frames him(/sometimes her)self as the subject and object of the poem and through it, the narrator becomes the poem—among all of the many other things. The narrator in Song of Myself is singular as a person but has a multiplicity of desire. The desire for everything and everyone—and the determination with which he pursues it—lends to the narrator’s and poem’s singularity of desire. The desire for many becomes the desire for all and the desire for all is the desire can be a singular thing. Being, to be single, and what it is “to be” comes into question throughout Song of Myself; the status of embodiment is never static. These questions are asked throughout the piece and the multiplicity and richness of examples is overwhelming at times. But through a single passage, being is interpreted to be pregnant with possibility and exemplifies the contradiction and potential within the expansion of what it means to be and to be single. And so, ideas about single, singularity, and singleness operate in myriad ways; to be permeable and still single, the narrator inhabits a place that is never still or fixed—physically or temporally—yet, the narrator is always available to be willingly used. The passage uses a singleness of being and purpose to insist upon a multiplicity of use and partnership; through this paradoxical logic, what it means to be single is made complicated—it is something that is simultaneously profound and superficial.

In passage [27] the narrator builds upon the reflection of that which is called “being” by qualifying it as something that is not callous, rigid or encapsulating; instead of being limited or protracted, “to be” and being are something else. The passage begins by asking, “To be in any form, what is that?” (Whitman 25). Although simple and brief, this question asks a lot through its use of “any form” which makes its purpose almost absolutely purposeless. The end that the question seeks is “to be in any form”—so, the question’s purpose is concrete. However, the question seeks what it is, “To be in any form” (emphasis added) and, “Any” enforces a sense of potentiality and a multiplicity of outcomes (25). Nonetheless, it is still a question that has outcomes limited by the confines of the possible form that being can take; and therefore, it isn’t entirely open-ended. “Form” is used—not forms—and so the possibility of what it is “to be” is still sought after as a single outcome, not a throng of outcomes.

With this question, the reader is given a sense of paradox with through protracted nebula of restricted outcome. Although the outcome sought is singular, it is still insistently not rigid as the next line maintains that, “If nothing lay more developed the quahaug[sic] and its callous shell were enough” (25). This line is complex in its intentions; the two verbs that the sentence uses are in contrasting tenses: “lay” in present-tense and “were” in past-tense. This mix of tense confuses the subject that the sentence is addressing and provides a chaotic richness of potential interpretation. The statement, “If nothing lay more developed” could be addressing an answer to “To be in any form, what is that?”which suggests that if any answer is not further developed, then it is enclosed and rigid (25). It may be questioning the earlier mentioned confines and limiting rigidity of the question, itself. This reading is supported by contrasting the question of being from the first line with the subject of “nothing” in the second line since nothing is an assumed absence of potential and “to be” (and being) provide a wealth of potential.

Synthesizing these multiple readings of the second line provides an interpretation that any answer to the question of what it is “to be” has limitations but offers the conclusion that these limitations are something as opposed to “nothing”. “Nothing” cannot be developed further but something can be. Hence, any outcomes of these questions of what it is “to be”—as a rigid, unfeeling quahog’s shell—are dismissed as inadequate. This dismissal is further buttressed through the use of the past tense. If the shell, “Were enough” than this may have been a satisfactory form through which “to be” at one point; however, the poem insists that it needs to be, “More developed” and not left unquestioned (25).

The narrator further repudiates callousness—both as a state of being and in definitions—in the next stanza by framing himself as a conduit. The narrator espouses a sense of what it is to be by saying that, “Mine is no callous shell” (25). By continuing the metaphor of the quahog’s shell, he acknowledges the limits that any answers to the question of being have. He has a shell; shells are spaces in which being happens and takes place but his shell —his borders, confines and limits—are not callous. Callous, as a word used to describe a defense by-and-from overuse, is important because throughout the piece, the narrator expresses himself through imagery of overuse and exposure. In an earlier passage, he says that he is “exposed…cut by bitter and poisoned hail” (25). If callousness is the hardening of skin from overuse or pressure, then the narrator refuses the hardening effects of exposure and keeps himself pervious (OED).

Rejecting callousness and rigidity, the narrator develops his concept of being—and elaborates upon the question of what it is “to be in any form”—through language of attraction and permeability. The narrator cultivates these ideas by proclaiming that he has “instant conductors all over [him]” that “seize every object and lead it harmlessly through [him]” (Whitman 25). Instead of a defensive shell with limits and borders, his being invites and seizes things outside of it and makes them pass through. It is a difficult state to imagine; the narrator claims ownership of his shelled state of being by using “me” and the earlier “mine”. This also illustrates that the narrator is still a singularly identified being in this stanza.

The narrator’s singleness is complex; his word choice suggests that—although single—he is never alone. The language of conductors and permeability lend an absorbent lens to view how identity operates and is formed by the narrator. His shell is his own, and within that is an acknowledgement that he is a single person. But he has conductors all over him, “Whether [he] pass[es] or stop[s]” (25). The narrator is in a constant state of flux, sometimes mobile and sometimes fixed. His conductors are outside of him, both a part of him but separate from him. They bring things trough him, this pulsation suggests that the conductors are always present and the things that the conductors pass through him—though always different and potentially new—are also always present. He is always accessible and his state of being enforces this accessibility; this allows the narrator’s singleness to be promiscuous and indiscriminate.

The final stanza adds further complications to the narrator’s idea of what it is “to be in any form” through the idea of being indiscriminate; the lack of callousness lends a sense of openness but also frailty and sensitivity. What passes through the narrator is described as brief and shallow,

“I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch my person to someone else’s is about as much as I can stand” (25).

To return to an earlier thought, callouses provide protection through their rigid, hard layers and the narrator insists that his being’s shell is without them—he is therefore without protection. And the final stanza displays that although he is constantly interacting and cannot help but be penetrated by a multitude of things, he has limits to how deep those interactions go. A sense of touching is the dominant imagery used in this stanza; to feel and to touch, in very superficial ways, are what makes the narrator, “Stir” and be, “Happy”—gives the narrator pleasure. After all, it’s his person that’s being touched to another’s person and what his constitutes his and another’s “person” is still very ambiguous. The narrator’s person, his being, is a porous shell, capable of pulling objects through itself and the poem’s logic suggests that other’s persons are some of the objects that he leads through. But touching and leading through are not the same thing; this incongruency muddles how intimate these interactions are, penetration is deeply intimate, as is touch—but touch is still a much more superficial sensation. And yet, touch is, “About as much as [the narrator] can stand” (25).

This selected passage begins with a question and when given a question, the reader assumes that an answer will be provided; however, it quickly becomes apparent that the answer given is merely a discussion—an opening up of possibility instead of a closing-off of possibility through something concrete. The narrator plays with the idea of what it means to be single and singular in intent and purpose and muddles any conclusions by insisting that single is not a pure designation. The passage and the poem are constantly interacting within themselves and outside of themselves to inform the reader and enrich perception. It is single because it is one thing, a being, a shell, a poem, and/or a stanza but it is multiple because it seizes, contains and fluctuates so much within—and without—its boundaries. This builds the poem into an incredible intercourse that invites myriad persons, things, and experiences into it for fleeting moments. But the poem has a sense of superficiality that’s bred from how fleeting and encompassing it all is; it’s orgasmic in its pace and sincerity but lacks a deeper intimacy with its subjects because of its promiscuity. The poem is whimsical and moves from thought to thought on a whim, flitting and in-flux. This superlatively indiscriminate, all-encompassing singleness reinforces the poem’s singularity through its ability to mean so much about everything while still only being Walt Whitman’s Song of [Him]self.

Works Cited

OED, Online. callous, adj. March 2013. WEB. 13 May 2013.

Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself. Mineloa: Dover, 2001. Print.

A “Backseat Anthem” for the Unspoken Deviant Sexual Space – ENG 494: Queer Theory

A new Subaru car commercial began circulation a few weeks ago on Logo television, the Viacom subsidiary channel whose programming targets the LGBTQ community—with shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, 5 gays 1 Girl and Golden Girls re-runs. This is, at least, where I came across it and I’m sure it’s circulating on plenty of other TV stations as well. The ad is titled “Backseat Anthem” and focuses its attention onto the backseat; the message broadcast suggests that the backseat is a precious place, where families grow, treasurable things are kept, and invaluable experiences happen. Of the myriad things that happen in the backseat, the ad leaves sex unspoken. However, the backseat can be a sexual space, a safe place for paradoxical privately public sex, a place that allows for a freedom of activity for those who cannot engage in specific sexual acts or behaviors at home or elsewhere. The teenager, the closeted queer, the prostitute—unacknowledged, hidden and/or deviant sexualities, among others—engage in the sexual community of vehicles and their backseat. This ad acknowledges sex by not acknowledging it, it re-“brands” the backseat as a space for familial growth and community. But by talking so much about the backseat, by using language of designing, enlarging, and making more accommodating, the ad invites speculation into the unspoken sexual realm it is discussing so much through not discussing.

“Backseat Anthem” immediately asserts the realm of the domestic and familial to frame the car and backseat as a space that is part of the publically private sphere of the nuclear family. The advertisement begins by philosophizing, “The humble backseat, it’s the first place most of us ever sat, the place we trust to hold our most precious cargo” as it flashes between clips of various families climbing into the back seat (SubaruSouth). The backseat is “humble;” it is meek and modest, not ostentatious or prideful; it simply exists. It’s an innocuous thing, perfectly dull. But within the subsequent language of the ad, the backseat becomes a character; it is something familiar, safe and trustworthy. This is buttressed with images of children in car seats—devices of childhood protection, safety nestled and secured (SubaruSouth). The value of the backseat to the family is asserted when the narrator declares that “we believe it can be the most valuable real-estate on earth” (SubaruSouth). Within this statement is an equation that brings the home into the fold of the car: the car is a domestic space, the backseat is family property and part of the “estate”.

The ad is always intercutting images of the backseat that frames it as a place of controlled intra-generational exchange; the parents are in the front seats, their most precious cargo—kids, grandparents and dogs—are accessible, watchable and protected in the backseat. The ad acknowledges that the new Subaru was designed “from the backseat forward and [built] to take care of a driver’s entire world” (SubaruSouth). The nuclear model of family is further reinforced by the father’s eyes watching his kids sitting in the backseat as the narrator’s voice speaks the words “driver’s entire world” (SubaruSouth). The driver is the patriarch, concerned with the wellbeing and safety of his family and the car is another space which he can extend domestic control and ensure that the social order is instilled and reinforced.

The ad never divulges the additional role that the backseat plays within family, as a place where families are made through sexual exchange and intercourse; this “backseat”, transgressive form of intercourse has the potential to disrupt the idea of a planned, nuclear family. Returning to the idea that “it can be the most valuable real estate” acknowledges that important things happen in the backseat; it is a space that is pregnant with potential; its value extends beyond something that you can sit safely in. Many families have been started in the backseat; countless children were conceived in the confines of the backseat of a car that’s parked somewhere inconspicuous while two people engage in sex. However, families born from the backseat are not ideal or the norm necessarily. Sex and reproduction are not always tied together and this is also a key in understanding why the backseat is a place of unspoken sex; the sex is often reproductive only by accident. And thus, the family bred from the backseat is often deviant; the backseat is a space that heterosexual teenagers employ to escape the watching eyes of parents and the public, not to plan families. Cars and the backseat have the potential to be a private space through offering a mobile sphere that those with hidden, disallowed or denied sexualities—like teenagers and queers—would otherwise not have.

The ad fights this notion of a hidden, private sphere or space by employing imagery of constant surveillance. The ad attempts to instill imagery of control and vigilance with the shots of the driver’s eyes looking into rearview mirror and the mother looking through the window into the backseat and looking gleefully at her newborn child (SubaruSouth). The backseat is a complicated space, despite its mobility, it is still a place of exposure; it is never truly hidden or private. All it takes for a hidden sexual encounter to be unmasked is to have someone walk up to the window. The rearview mirror reasserts that there is always a gaze into the backseat, even when the driver—the father—is not present; the patriarch’s gaze is always considering the backseat and what happens there. The threat of being found out and discovered is as omnipresent as the parental gaze is in the ad.

The obsession with the backseat is telling; “Backseat Anthem’s” language of importance and potential dovetails with language of design and safety to reify the controlling aspects of the backseat. The car is being “redesigned from the backseat forward” and thus, the backseat is at the forefront of thought (SubaruSouth). The audience is implored to consider the backseat and its purpose through guided imagery of the family, surveillance and interconnectivity. Its message enforces the power that the backseat holds to bring people together but also makes obvious who it should bring together. The backseat joins babies and families, mothers and fathers, grandchildren and grandparents, people that illustrate the continuity of reproduction; but the backseat is not a place for the “sometimes accidently reproductive” acts themselves.

The title “Backseat Anthem” itself is rich for interpretation itself; as it allows an interrogation of the euphemistic underpinnings of the word “backseat”. “Backseat” can be read in many ways, one of which reads as a euphemism for the anus; therefore, the title “Backseat Anthem” can be read as an anthem for anal sex. This further complicates the notions of the deviant sex that this advertisement leaves unspoken but implied. It is a type of sex that is constantly interrogated for confession and a type of sex that is often forcefully attempted to be controlled by parental figures. It is closeted until exposed, assumed to not exist until otherwise unveiled. So too, is the sex that happens in the literal backseat; it is a sex that tries to hide for fear of being found out. Backseat sex (with the myriad interpretations of the word) is deviant and non-normative, it happens at the peripherals of knowledge and society to protect itself from disclosure.

The obsession with what happens in a backseat is not new and this ad is neither a surprising nor inventive consideration of the backseat. However, it is fascinating because it is so earnest in its convictions, so wholesome and unaware; it invites skepticism through its willing refusal of irony. It does not allude, in any way, to the full potential that the backseat carries. The ad says a lot about the parental, societal anxiety that surrounds the backseat through its blithe “Backseat Anthem.” It’s a refusal to acknowledge the hidden sexual world of the backseat but an unspoken acknowledgement of its latent potential through imagery of surveillance and language of family and safety.

Works Cited

SubaruSouth. “2014 Subaru Forester Commercial – Backseat Anthem.” YouTube. 10 April 2013.

Hyperreality and The Constructive Project of Neo-liberalism in Pastoralia – ENG 494: Debt and Culture

Hyperreality earns apotheosis in Saunders’ theme park cave.

Pastoralia navigates a multitude of absurd familiars and bleak banalities that permeate the everyday. It is an exaggeration and near-dystopia but rests comfortably within a fluency of language and behavior that is not unlike the now. As a story set within a theme park, its connection to Baudrillard and his lens of hyperreality and simulacra are inescapable; Sarah Pogell ties these two works together in her piece “’The Verisimilitude Inspector’: George Saunders as the New Baudrillard”. Hyperreality, the problems of representation in an age of mechanical reproduction—identities that rest on copies of copies for which there are no original—are what neo-liberalism thrive on. Tying together, Saunders, Pogell and Wendy Brown’s piece on neo-liberalism cast the actors within Pastoralia as subjects who navigate their world and their own humanity clumsily and confusedly, revealing a reality that is constructed to control them into docility and administer a type of humanity stripped of nuance and reinforced by controlled unreality.

In Pastoralia, two theme park employees—dressed as Cro-Magnons—enact a performed, pre-historical rendition of cave life for the entertainment of park guests. And yet, these two workers are not cave people, they are employees of the theme park. Their reality is an accepted exaggeration for educational and entertainment value and the two employees engage in a subjection to performance, unable to break character or behave as human beings within their cave. However, once their act is interrupted by the narrator’s distraught co-worker, Janet, she is given a poor review by both a park guest and her co-worker and subsequently fired.

Her firing represents a capitulation by the narrator to the management’s power and way-of-thinking by no longer making excuses for her inadequate performance, one that he, as a free agent, bears no responsibility for. He must separate himself from her anxieties, her foibles and her poor performance because he sees himself as a good employee being given a bad name through no fault of his own. Janet exists as a character with a mismanaged life which Wendy Brown characterizes as “a new mode of depoliticizing social and economic powers” (14). The narrator who defended Janet as “a friend with a dying mom on the day she finds out that her screwed-up son is even more screwed up than she originally thought” no longer considers this nuance, seeing her actions as having “totally blew it” (Saunders 34, 58). Her meltdown about her son towards the guests and calling them a “suckass” illustrates her failure, as a failure of personal judgment as “a ‘free’ subject who rationally deliberates about alternative courses of action, make choices, and bears responsibility for the consequences of those choices” (Saunders 59) (Brown 16). Janet’s failure is now a failure of her to be stronger than her problems—it is a denial of why those problems are there in the first place and a denial that there is any lack of infrastructure to support her through her problems so she doesn’t have outbursts. She is expected to behave as a professional caveperson—keeping her composure and sticking to her inhuman script, even in times of deep emotional distress.

Janet’s firing is a triumph of neo-liberalism because it extinguishes a human inefficiency without questioning at-length or in-depth why an inefficiency occurred or why her behavior was considered inefficient—it simply was. Janet represents an identity and role where “the very idea of looking and acting human is a liability” (Pogell 472). Janet’s dismissal and subsequent replacement broadcast a social anxiety, an “admonition to potential job seekers, who in trying to survive in corporate America, might be tempted to forfeit their humanity” (472). The neo-liberal and corporate America are inseparable and the loss of humanity is palpable within their necessary cost-benefit-analyses. By reducing human morality to economics and competition, it “entails the erosion of oppositional political, moral or subjective claims located outside capitalist rationality but inside liberal democratic society” (Brown 20). The reason that there is no resistance to the system in Pastoralia—besides Janet’s speaking in English and a few, bitter notes left by fired employees—is that  the theme park exists within an absurd but familiar near-future where control has been so thoroughly entrenched that resistance isn’t even considered a possibility. As Pogell observes in Pastoralia, “language that expresses emotion and individual truth has been relegated to mere idiolect” through Janet, who in her letter to the narrator after her firing reveals “the complexity of her emotions, beliefs and values” through a diatribe rife of misspellings and vulgarity but full of emotion and sincerity (471).

Within a corporate memo given to the narrator after Janet’s dismissal, he is assured that “[him and Janet] are not the same entity. [They] are distinct” and yet, the same memo suggests that the narrator should consider to “think of [himself] and Janet as branches on a tree…sometimes one branch must die so that others may live” and finally asserts that he, “should be thinking in terms of the lens of what is the maximum good for the overall organism” (Saunders 59-60). This memo acts as both an appeal to the narrator’s individuality and to his part to play within a collective; this absurd, paradoxical identity that attempts to unify the collective and separate the individual through language of health and cost is an exemplar of neo-liberal logic. This contradictory metaphor shows how neo-liberalism can control subjects “through their freedom…because of [its] moralization of the consequences of this freedom” (Brown 16). As the narrator’s boss gleefully exclaims at the end of his note, “this is the way organizations grow and thrive, via small courageous contributions by cooperative selfless helpers” (Saunders 60). The moralizing language of sacrifice and individual achievement act as a corporate pat-on-the-back for the narrator who just allowed his friend and co-worker to be fired through his own condemnation—acting as a distraction from what just happened.

None of this is to say that Janet was, in fact a “good” co-worker, she was hardly doing her job at all; but the narrator’s attitude shifts from one understanding of her behavior to another—from compassionate understanding to that of truth. He explains early on that he covers for her, hoping that like his father, who helped his coworker in times of need, that he’ll be repaid someday (46). But his boss slowly works against this compassion and sense of debt by explaining that he needs to tell the truth on his partner evaluations (21).  And so, as the narrator concludes after writing his partner performance evaluation, “it’s all true” (59).The power of truth within Pastoralia is that there isn’t anything that is true but plenty that masquerades as such. Neoliberalism is able to foist itself and fact and truth because, structurally, it rests upon things that appear to be so—numbers, costs, its subjects own free will. This power appears to be, and has trappings of, an ontological claim—it attempts to be simply put as the way things are.

However, Wendy Brown asserts that Neo-Liberalism “involves a normative rather than ontological claim about the pervasiveness of economic rationality and advocates the institution building, policies, and discourse development appropriate to such a claim” (Brown 8). Since neo-liberalism cannot—and therefore, does not—claim ontology, Brown asserts that it “is a constructivist project” and “does not presume the…givenness of a thoroughgoing economic rationality for all domains of society but rather takes as its task, the development, dissemination and institutionalization of such a rationality” (8). This constant reaffirmation of the belief manifests in the narrator’s gradual shift from one perception to simply “telling the truth” about her. Truth then, becomes a tool of the management; truth is something that they control.

One small but integral form through which this manipulation of being and rationality takes is exemplified by the corporate memos within Pastoralia. Laden with corporate double-speak, an acknowledged unreality of reality and the need to buttress its own truth through a constructive project of truth, the memos show the danger and potential death of a free-willed, human subject. The last corporate memo in the piece best exemplifies how Saunders provides a parody of the familiar—to make extreme and explicit—the constitutive acts that neo-liberal hegemony enacts upon the burgeoning underclass of subordinates to its logic.

The concluding memo within Pastoralia begins with a discussion of rumors of corporate “reorganization”—essentially, mass firings. The memo begins “Regarding the rumors you may have lately been hearing…please be advised that they are false” (62). What makes this memo peculiar is that it initially denies the substance of the rumors, attacking the rumors as an idea in-and-of-themselves. Rumors—whatever they are about, within the memo are bad—except when they aren’t; when the rumors present the management, “us up here, in a positive light, and our mission, and our accomplishments, in that case, and in that case only, we will have to admit that the rumor you’ve been hearing is right on target” (62). The management’s prose is purposefully confusing and dense, both stream-of-consciousness and exacting in its meaning. It’s loaded with double-speak that obfuscates its motives through abstractions. But simultaneously, its meaning is clear: only good rumors are true and only bad rumors are false—and that those value judgments of good and bad directly correlate to how they portray the company. It exemplifies neo-liberal logic because it immediately acknowledges the possibility of a counter-narrative and its own structural nature; rumors serve to destabilize the logic and identity and may interrupt the “constructivist project”.

As a “constructivist project,” neo-liberalism allows for an acknowledgement of its own unreality and creates an identity of crisis—an identity that must always be reaffirmed and buttressed by those who seek to maintain the identity. This identity’s power is its ability to control its appearance of ontology through its misuse of language and ontological claims, as the memo continues it questions, “because what is truth? Truth is that thing which makes what we want to happen happen” (63). Truth, its definition, its essence, becomes explicitly a tool for those who hold power to maintain it. The memo continues, “so when a rumor makes you doubt us, us up here, it is therefore not true, since we have already defined truth as that thing which helps us win” (63). It best exemplifies the type of truth and reality that the management in Pastoralia tries to instill as Truth, with a capital “T” for its subordinates—Truth is that which is controlled by those in power and left unquestioned by those who aren’t. This is the neo-liberal apotheosis within Pastoralia—neo-liberalism may not be able to wrest claim to ontology but through reinforcement and pretense it can still attempt the claim.

All of this paints a very bleak picture; Pastoralia’s corporate near dystopia is a world in which the signifiers and language of meaning are controlled and mutated to reinforce a concrete power regime. In this way, it is not unlike the now. However, the power of the now rests within the ability to reject regimes claim to ontology or absolution. Counter-narratives, rumors, outbursts of sincerity, and active resistance to the status-quo still permeate contemporary society. Recognition of—and demystification of—cofounding language and reinforced power regimes is seminal to a resistance towards them. Saunders takes the logics of neo-liberalism and hyperreality, as they exist now, to their extreme in order to broadcast their absurdity, their inhumanity and their danger—if the logic is left unchecked.

Works Cited

Brown, Wendy. “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Project Muse: Theory and Event 7.1 (2003). Web.

Butler, Judith. “”Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.”.” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-531. Print.

OED, Online. “Ontology n.”. September 2012. Web. 3 December 2012.

Pogell, Sarah. “”The Verisimilitude Inspector”: George Saunders as the New Baudrillard?” Critique: Sudies in Contemporary Fiction 52.4 (2011): 460-478. Web.

Saunders, George. Pastoralia. New York: Penguin, 2000. Print.

ENG 467: Race Punishment and Biopolitics – Foucault, the Biopolitical and “Making Live and Letting Die”

H.R. Giger: Birth Machine

 

 

Within Society Must be Defended, Foucault critiques society and its subjects by developing and interrogating what he describes as “biopower”. If power is a capacity within individuals and society, biopower is an exercise of capacity by making live and letting die. Using the lens of biopower, who is made to live and who is left to die exposes the power pulsating throughout society.

Holt’s “Problem of Freedom in an Age of Revolution” re-focuses and complicates an interpretation of biopower by injecting an analysis of the logic of capitalism. The work suggests that the two concepts necessitate one-another and aid in each other’s production. The work buttresses Foucault’s concept of biopower by interrupting narratives of capitalism, liberal democracy, freedom and progress. These paragons of modernity and liberty become monumental oversimplifications when illuminated through the intersecting critiques of capitalism and biopower.

Power—and by proxy, biopower—is a capacity, one that exists in myriad forms within modern subjects and institutions. Biopower adopts mechanisms of discipline but it no longer “train[s] individuals by working on the level of the body itself” and instead “take[s] control of life and the biological processes of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are…regularized” (246-7). Foucault is not arguing that bodies cease to function entirely as subjects to disciplinary power, but points to a shift in the approach through which they are subjected; a shift towards regularization (246-7). Regularization allows the establishment of a shifting ideal, a simulacra of the norm so that societal narratives maintain an identity that is always in a state of reformation and crisis. Subjects are both the producer of knowledge and a subordinate of knowledge formations and regularity is the modality of the modern subject. Foucault’s biopolitical society, through regulatory mechanisms “must establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within its general population and its aleatory field” (246). Deviance is expected and implicit within a regulatory society; regulation is betrothed to a norm that is illusive and always in a state of coming-to-be. Regulation accepts—but then attempts control over—deviance; that which deviates isn’t protected within this logical framework.

And hence, within this umbrella of regularity, the necessity to discuss capitalism becomes foundational due to the language and formation of regularities. What constitutes regularity in modernity cannot divorce itself from the hegemony of capitalistic ideology.  Foucault never denies the intrinsic connections between biopower and capitalism; both are formations and systems of production. However, biopower is the production of life, capitalism is the production of capital. Nonetheless, biopower can also be read as a production of capital since a healthy, productive population will best produce capital.

The cooperation between capitalism and the exercise of biopower can be extrapolated from Holt’s explanation of Jamacia’s slave revolution in 1873; biopower and the regulatory society promotes a very specific type of life within his piece. The abolitionist argument adopted by England’s Parliament “rejected racist interpretation of slave behavior and insisted that blacks shared the basic, innate traits of other human beings” that they were “motivated by self-interest and the desire for self-improvement” (50). This is telling because it explicitly points to a conception of humanity that is regulatory in nature; a desire for self-improvement isn’t a corporeal trait and yet it forms the basis of the logic that provides humans with rights—within their logic. These slaves were viewed as human because they were viewed as beings that sought to better themselves; freedom had to be earned through “their own industry” (46). The language of self-improvement exposes the regulatory regime within the language of the so-called free subject.

Holt expertly explains that the Jamaicans “would be free, but only after being resocialized to accept the internal discipline that ensured the survival of the existing social order” (53). It is evident that the mechanisms of regularization were fully exercised, masquerading as freedom—which is not to discount the liberty and self-determination that Jamaica achieved through their revolution—however, these trappings of freedom are peculiar because they are particular and remain largely unquestioned. Freedom is subordination to a regime of regularization within modern liberal democracy, to this day.

The multitude of modern, productive, capitalist societies are at odds with themselves, because they—as Thomas Holt points out—require for their “justification a postulate of equal and natural rights and rationality” (6). The central locus of the modern identity is the belief that people are rational, free-willed, productive—and most importantly: equally human—beings.  But as Holt elaborates, “freedom as defined by capitalist market relations inevitably produces unequal class relations, which undermine the substantive freedom of most members of society” (6). This struggle between the implicit protective language of equality and the reality of regulatory society’s approach towards deviance exposes a paradox.  Structurally, society produces deviance through its promotion of individuality, liberty and free will; yet it simultaneously employs biopower as a mechanism towards control and promotion of regularity.

Adopting the lens that Holt provides, had Jamaica rejected the modality of “earned freedom” and “self improvement” they would have rejected their humanity along with it. To put it another way: a rejection of the system is a rejection of the rights provided by the system. Promotion of life demands participation in the system; the life promoted is enveloped within larger folds of equality, capitalism and liberal democracy. So, a non-participant, the deviant—or deviations within and without the system—expose biopower‘s capacity to “let die.” Through a decided or undecided deviation, non-participation or confrontation of the system, people can be thrust to the peripherals of society—left out there to die. This sequestering need not be physical but it remains a violence against the idea of equality and humanity through its rejection of the right to life. Arguably, the most powerful aspect of biopower is its ability to justify its weeding out of deviance through the language of the individual and their choices, even when that individual was guided by the conceptions of free will and human equality espoused by the system upon which biopower relies.

Through these critiques, it is apparent that society participates in banalities permeated with countless judgments of character and value. The biopolitical is able to discount facets of society and entire groups of people through their non-participation and deviance from the intangible and ever-changing norm. This framework, taken further, accounts for the embedded racist formations—both vestigial and newly mutated—that are presumed anachronistic within societal narratives within liberal democratic society.