And thus I always resolve now to gaze more closely, more observantly,
to stand before inconspicuous things with more patience, with more
prolonged attention, as if they were dramas or spectacles, and not pass
them by as I had so often done before. The laws move about most guile-
lessly in what is unapparent, since they believe themselves unobserved
there, sequestered in the realm of things.
Rainer Maria Rilke: Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé:
he Correspondence (1903) (2006), 79.

For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one
can never see for oneself.
Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own (1929), 90.

If nature is mere object and in no sense subject, if it is devoid of ‘will,’
then man remains as the sole subject and the sole will. The world, after
first having become the object of man’s knowledge, becomes the object
of his will, and his knowledge is put in the service of his will. And the will,
of course, is a will for power over things. The heavens no longer declare the
glory of God; but the materials of nature are ready for the use of man.
Hans Jonas: “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific
and Technological Revolution” (1971), 71.

All I see
Looks back at me.
Rickie Lee Jones: “A Tree on Allenford” (2003).

Her Diary for 23 November 1926 permits us to overhear Woolf experiencing the genesis of what will become The Waves (1931):

. . . I am now & then haunted by some semi mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; & time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident—say the fall of a flower—might contain it. My theory being that the actual event does not exist—nor time either. But I don’t want to force this. (Diary 3, 118)

British historians, economists, sociologists, and others can convincingly trace the current explosion of globalization back to English imperialism in the nineteenth century. The rise of capitalism opened new waves of communication, technology, and transformation—advertising consequently increased. One of the first historians to contemplate the birth of advertising in Britain, Terence Nevett, illuminated how the rise of advertising was a result of two thematic events: a shift in focus from seller to consumer (with the rise of the bourgeoisie) and a surplus in goods (a result of the ability to mass produce during the industrial revolution). Ironically this surplus of goods also rose during the 1840s, or hungry 40s, when there was a decrease in jobs. Governess jobs were no exception. But a surplus of governesses provided a different sort of anxiety, however real or imagined, for Victorians; the governess represented what it meant to be part of the middle class, and yet her own class was indefinable (Poovey). Middle-class Victorians fretted about the infiltration by the lower classes through the job of the governess while demanding that governesses provide a type of labor trivially associated with lower class work (i.e. needlework). Not only was governess work reminiscent of the lower classes, it also visibly threatened to collapse the separation between the masculine (market) and feminine (domestic) spheres through the exchange of money for service (Poovey, 144). The existence of a marriage market and a surplus of women were evident in an 1851 census; with less middle-class wives, there were fewer jobs for governesses. [1] The men to women population disparity was a product of unstable business, higher life expectancy rates for women, a tendency for men to marry later in life, and the emigration of single men from England to the colonies (Peterson, 6).

Decolonising the Mind sets out to undo or at least lessen the effects colonialism has on the minds of Africans.  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o begins his discourse on the effects of education by labeling it a “bourgeois education system” (Ngũgĩ 56).  The European education system had control and power because of its attitude of exclusivity.  The system consisted of a “process of weakening people, of making them feel they cannot do this or that – oh, it must take such brains!” (Ngũgĩ 56).  Thus, it is not surprising that when certain Africans were selected to study in the missionary schools, they slowly began to view themselves above many of their fellow, “uneducated” Africans.  According to Ngũgĩ, these educated few become “more and more alienated from themselves and from their natural and social environment” (57).  To educate not only meant to familiarize Africans with European literature and arithmetic, but to civilize them, and make them less African and, ideally more European.  Education, in its attempt to civilize the “savage” Africans, also made the people “feel their inadequacies, their weaknesses and the incapacities in the face of reality…” (56).  Ngũgĩ believes that the European education system forces Africans to alienate themselves from their community and even see inadequacies in themselves or in their countrymen.  Through various characters in the texts God’s Bits of Wood and Nervous Conditions, one sees numerous literary examples that support Ngũgĩ’s claim that alienation and inadequacy are often the effects of the colonial education system.

Sembene Ousmane’s novel, God’s Bits of Wood, is set in the hostile timeframe of 1947-48, during the Dakar-Niger strike.  While this fictional story chronicles the real life hardships and struggles that many Africans underwent during the railway strike, the novel also shows the role the French education system plays during this time period.  Within the story of the strike, Ousmane tells a second story of the alienation and the feelings of inadequacy, discussed by Ngũgĩ, which begins to arise within the mindset of the younger, colonially influenced Africans.  The characters of N’Deye Touti and Tiémoko in God’s Bits of Wood both exemplify the negative effects of the European education system in Decolonising the Mind.

Throughout Quicksand, Helga uses fashion in seemingly contradictory ways: she alternates between dressing according to the standards set by her peers and using clothing to set herself apart. The apparent conflict between her two modes of dress, between conformity and iconoclasm, accords with fashionable apparel’s capacity to signal either group identification or individuation. In his 1904 essay “Fashion,” Georg Simmel connects fashion to a dualism that he says operates at both individual and societal levels. There is an ongoing and irresolvable conflict, Simmel argues, between a “tendency towards imitation” that facilitates social cohesion and “individual departure from [society’s] demands” (542). Social life is thus the battleground between the impulse to imitate and the urge to individuate, and fashion satisfies both desires. To Simmel’s analysis I would add that fashionable apparel is a particularly apt medium for the simultaneous satisfaction of these seemingly conflicting desires, because clothing functions as a liminal space between an individual and his/her cultural context (Wilson 2). Apparel is, as Thorstein Veblen notes, “always in evidence” and thus provides observers with information about an individual and how he/she fits into his/her culture “at first glance” (167). Clothing’s public signification and dual modes of individual satisfaction are two key reasons why fashion fascinates Helga and, in turn, why apparel provides such a useful signifying system for Larsen’s portrayal of modern mixed-race identity. Helga desperately craves the group identity offered by fashion. More specifically, Helga seeks inclusion within cohesive racial groups. Yet even as she pursues group unification by imitating the fashion choices of those around her, Helga also longs to be accepted and valued as an individual. Simmel says fashion is ideal for individuals who depend on others’ approval while also craving “a certain amount of prominence, attention, and singularity” (548), and this certainly describes Helga. Although Simmel connects fashion primarily to socio-economic class,[3] his clarification of fashion’s seemingly contradictory conformity and individuation is a useful framework for understanding Helga’s racialized preoccupation with fashion.

What do Super Bowl Sunday, Ford Motor Company, and Kermit the Frog have in common? Environmentalism. It’s true! During the second quarter of Super Bowl XL, a thirty-second commercial aired with Kermit the Frog—a frog, for crying out loud—unable to appreciate nature. A year later, this commercial is most frequently aired after “Nature” specials on PBS, and viewers are forced to bear witness to Kermit the Frog mountain biking, kayaking and rock climbing, all the while lamenting, “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” When he stumbles upon the Ford Escape hybrid, he declares, in utter amazement, “It must be easy being green, after all.” What this indicates about our mainstream culture’s idea of and relationship to nature is sad indeed. For even in an environmental awareness-promoting advertisement, nature is presented as something which exists solely for our pleasure, a place from where we can escape the drudgery of our daily lives, a place which will inevitably let us down. Let’s face it: why else would Kermit the Frog be happy to discover the Ford Escape other than that he has the ability to escape from nature, after having been dissatisfied with his escape to nature?

Still, I have to admit: Kermit the Frog has done us a remarkable favor, has taken one small step for man, one great leap for our environment—regardless of the fact that his foot is solidly planted on a gas pedal. Kermit the Frog has made environmentalism something to be unapologetic for; suddenly, it is not just easy, but it is downright conscientious, to be green. Peruse the April 16, 2007, Newsweek subtitled “Save the Planet—Or Else” or the May 2007 “Green Issue” of Vanity Fair, and you will find green-friendly advertisements for Waste Management, Inc., Microsoft, Intel, the Home Depot, Chevrolet, Lexus, Honda, the Sundance Channel, Dillard’s, Clinique, Aveeno, Simple shoes, Levi’s and, my personal favorite, Diesel’s “Global Warming Ready” campaign that promotes their current line while in each and every background the world as we know it is under water and tropical. Here is ironic labeling at its best, for it seems even our advertisers are ready to reinforce the notion, whether we like it or not, that green is the new black, and the age of eco-consciousness is now.

We seem to agree that we have an environmental crisis on our hands, but rather than beat to death the obvious concerns (climate change, the destruction of our rain forests and exhausting of our natural resources, the polluting and over-fishing of our oceans, etc.) I argue that a new and equally urgent crisis has come into view. I believe that the current trendiness of all things green, if continually promoted, advertised, and sold in these ill-informed ways will soon become a fad. Once it passes, we will have been fooled into believing that either we are global warming ready or that the environmental crisis has been averted; and we will, like Kermit the Frog, be no closer to nature other than that we will be organically attired, hybrid-driving green puppets. This is unacceptable, and so we are faced now with the challenge of rediscovering human nature’s place in nature—a place where, I propose, neither eco-consciousness nor ego-consciousness should be privileged over the other.

Sam Hamod is among the few contemporary poets of Arab American descent. Since the 1960s, he has published poetry about his country of origin, Lebanon, as well as the Middle East in general. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, he has published ten books and has appeared in more than 200 anthologies of literature worldwide (“Window into Palestine”), Unsettling America serving as only one example. He earned his Ph.D. from The Writer’s Workshop of the University of Iowa and has taught at Princeton, Iowa, Howard and Michigan, to name a few. He was the Director of Washington D.C.’s Islamic Center and the founder and editor of Third World News, also in the capital (Hamod “Today’s. . .”).

One aspect of the dual identity in ethnic poetry, such as that written by Sam Hamod, is a strong identification with the country of origin. Interestingly enough, this particular identity seems to be on the rise today. Many scholars consider that multiculturalism and globalization may have lessened the attachment between Americans and the nation. Americans seem to be moving in the direction of a “stronger sense of ethnic, as opposed to national, identity”. Some scholars have pointed to the possibility that ethnic identity provides a source of self esteem for cultural minorities and helps to foster accomplishment of group goals. On the other hand, a number of people maintain that ethnic identity “weakens common bonds and intensifies group conflict” (Citrin 71-2). Either way, this powerful sense of ethnic identity is clearly discernable in Sam Hamod’s poetry. In the words of Marte Broehm, editor of Hamod’s Just Love Poems for You collection, Hamod in his poetry and in person expresses “his groundbreaking ethnic honesty and directness, never flinching from his Lebanese/Muslim heritage—mixing it with his rough-house and youthful gang life in Gary, Indiana” (Hamod).

Hamod’s “Leaves,” anthologized in Unsettling America, uses concrete specifics to show dual identity in an American family. As the poem opens, Sam and “Sally” are cooking a traditional Mediterranean dish: stuffed grapeleaves. The leaves are depicted as icons of heritage; cultural emblems, which must be cherished:

		. . . we get out a package, it’s
		drying out, I’ve been saving it in the freezer, it’s
		one of the last things my father ever picked in this life . . .
		we just kept finding packages of them in the
		freezer, as if he were still picking them (lines 2-8)

Hamod is drawing a parallel between ethnicity and the grapeleaves. Just as heritage goes on and on, so do the grapeleaves; they are symbolic. His father, defender of the “faith,” takes extra precautions for their preservation, “packing them / carefully,” so they don’t “break into pieces” (9-11).

In addition to the grapeleaves, Hamod’s father himself emerges as a kind of cultural icon. Very little about him is American. He speaks and writes broken English in a heavy accent: “To my Dar Garnchildn / Davd and Lura / From Thr Jido” (12-14). In contrast, his Arabic letters are strewn everywhere in the upstairs storage.

But the marks of Americanization are still found in him. Hamod says the above composition of his father’s, “English lettering / hard for him to even print,” is “one of the few pieces of American / my father ever wrote” (lines 17-21). The language is significantly described as “American” rather than English. It is actually culture, the dual identity, that is being described here, though the family patriarch’s “American” qualities are rather inadequate, compared to his ethnic Lebanese.

Yet American advertising and mercantilism have still made their impact, having been found among the scraps of nostalgia in the upstairs storage. Hamod includes a somewhat humorous illustration, a letter dated 1932 from Charles Atlas to his father, telling him, “‘Of course, Mr. Hamod, you too can build / your muscles like mine . . .’” (26-27). The gadgets, gizmos, and gimmicks offered to him from American vendors are parts of his history; the partial legacy of the capitalist West.

Hamod’s father and all that he represents, culturally and otherwise, has deeply impacted his son, and is the reason why Hamod chose to write. The songs he sang in the car “were poems” (31). Hamod ends “Leaves” with a strong sense of ethnic identity: “Even now, at night, I sometimes / get out the Arabic grammar book / Though it seems so late” (32-34). “Leaves” becomes in actuality, a story about human language, communication, poesy; figurative “leaves,” and the importance of language to culture.

Hamod’s “After the Funeral of Assam Hamady,” also anthologized in Unsettling America, depicts this dual identity as well. The poem begins like a screenplay:

		Cast:

		Hajj Abbass Habhad:  My grandfather
		Sine Hussin:  an old friend of my father
		Hussein Hamod Subh:  my father
		me

		6 p.m.
		middle of South Dakota  (lines 1-7)

This opening suggests the impact that coming to America has had upon the “cast.” America is famous for its films. Therefore, being part of a film suggests Americanization has taken place. However, it also signifies something unnatural, unreal, or fake about the roles that the cast plays. To not be, By having a dual identity, one is not a “true” American and merely an actor. The idea of being part of a movie is enhanced throughout the poem, with short stanzas that emphasize the quickness and scene-like quality of the scenario, like a fast-paced movie that slips from one piece of action to another.

The narrator of the poem, “me,” Sam Hamod, is driving a 1950 Lincoln, an American-made car. Significantly, the model is named after, arguably, the most famous and well-favored president in American history. Moreover, he carries with him in the vehicle a “Navajo blanket.” Although Navajos may not typically seem “middle American” to most readers, they are a part of the broader category that represents the oldest residents of the land, and they certainly have nothing to do with Hamod’s country of origin, Lebanon; he has adopted foreign emblems.

But a difference exists between Hamod and the older generation. They are not as Americanized as he is; their ties to the Middle East remain stronger. As they drive back from the funeral, they demand that Hamod pull over along the side of the road so that they can get out and pray, which is the primary action of the poem:

		“STOP THIS CAR RIGHT NOW!”—Hajj Abbass
		                                             Grabbing my arm from the back seat
		“Hysht Iyat?  (What’re you yelling about?)”—my Father
		“Shu Bikkee?  (What’s happening?)—Sine Hussin

		I stop

		“It’s time to pray”—the Hajj (17-21)

But while the older generation begins their devotionals, Hamod does not join them, and instead remains “sitting behind the wheel” while “car lights scream by” (29-31). He is too Americanized to endure the nuisance of maintaining the inconvenient traditions from his homeland. They urge him to join them, but he refuses: “‘Hamod! Get over here, to pray!’ / No, Ill watch / and stand guard” (41-43). In this stanza, punctuation disappears, building suspense and quickening the pace of the action.

The whole scenario reels with irony and humor. Hamod writes:

		Three old men
		chanting the Qur’an in the middle
		of a South Dakota night

		        Allahu Ahkbar
	                    Allahu Ahkbar . . .
		in high strained voices they chant
		more cars flash by . . .
		I’m embarrassed to be with them (58-73)

Hamod’s confession is full of portent. He has become so much a part of America that he feels emotionally discomforted now by displays of his prior culture, literally embarrassed by them. Yet maintaining the old ways seems to be difficult, even to the family patriarchs. Their voices are “strained.” Continuing old practices are not easy for them. This word choice could also suggest the idea of belligerence in their unwillingness to compromise for the sake of convenience.

Yet this same word recurs a bit further into the poem, but this time is applied to an American: “people stream by, an old woman strains a gawk at them” (76). It is significant that she too is of an older generation. Hamod is suggesting that elderly people get “set in their ways” and lose the freedom to look at the world and at each other objectively, to try new things and posit fresh ideas. In an ironic way, despite their cultural differences, she and Hamod’s older companions are very much alike in this respect.

The word “Ameen,” pronounced with a thick accent reminiscent of the Middle East, signals a transition from the past to the present. Here, Hamod re-evaluates the past and concludes that he’s missed something cultural. Some parts of his roots are gone, and it fills him with longing and a desire for some degree of restoration:

		I hear them still singing
		as I travel half-way across
		America
		to another job
		burying my dead
		I always liked trips, traveling at high speed
		but they have surely passed me
		as I am standing here now
		trying so hard to join them
		on that old prayer blanket—
		as if the pain behind my eyes
		could be absolution (95-106)

Hamod is now juxtaposing his previous conclusion, making a complete reversal. Whereas before he was siding with Americanization, now he is siding with loyalty to an ethnic identity. He feels that his ancestors have outdone him, “passed” him along life’s road. He regrets missed opportunities to partake in the cultural practices of the wizened of his people, and now those opportunities are lost. He will never have the chance be a part of them again. Hamod desires to recapture some of what he has lost, but now that he is older, he too has gotten stuck in his ways, and he cannot detach himself from his Americanization. He has a dual identity.

Hamod’s “Dying with the Wrong Name,” another selection from Unsettling America, continues the theme of dual identity. “Dedicated to all the immigrants who lost their names at Ellis Island,” this poem centers on the name-changing or abbreviation that takes place as people are displaced from their homelands to America. Hamod writes:

		These men died with the wrong names,
		Na’aim Jazeeny, from the beautiful valley
		of Jezzine, died as Nephew Sam,
		Sine Hussin died without relatives and
		because they cut away his last name
		at Ellis Island, there was no way to trace
		him back even to Lebanon . . . (Lines 1-7)

Careful word choices convey the difficulty, even the injustice, of having your name forcibly altered upon entering America. Your name, the grand title to your personal identity, is “cut” out of you. But it is not just your name that is knifed away: “the loss of your name / cuts away some other part, / something unspeakable is lost” (21-23). A loss occurs as a result of this transaction: “There is something lost in the blood, / something lost down to the bone / in these small changes” (11-13). Forced re-naming is depicted as a dirty deed: “suddenly—as cleanly / as the air, you’ve lost / your name” (15-17). Considering the air quality of New York City, the reader must conclude that this practice is quite unclean.

As the immigrant continues carrying on his or her life in America, the process of Americanization takes place and a dual identity develops. Hamod uses second person to put you in the place of such individuals: “you move / about as an American” (19-20). Your activities may be similar to the “average” American. You drive your Ford. You run your business, “a cigar store in Michigan City, and / in the back room a poker game with chips and / bills . . .” (27-29). You may procure employment at a factory, one of the “packinghouses in Sioux Falls / and Sioux City,” before ending up in Gary, Indiana (32-33). You work hard, conform to America’s protestant work ethic, and maybe even develop a degree of prosperity, “from / nothing to houses and apartments worth more than / a million—in each sweaty day in Sioux City” (33-35). You listen to the same kinds of music as other Americans, “B. B. King and T-Bone Walker” (39). You “buy time”: “each dollar another day mixing names and money” (40). And then you die to be buried “under / a stone carved in English” (47-48). But the language isn’t right, and neither are the names:

		. . . the Arabic of Hussein Hamod Subh,
		Na’aim Jazeeny, Sine Hussin
		lost
		each one sealed away
		with the wrong name (48-52)

But this conflict does receive some degree of resolution—the “world comes together,” Hamod writes. America and Lebanon fuse within the immigrant’s dual identity:

		Sine Hussin is still sitting in that
		old chair, upholstered in brushed maroon wool . . .
		you know the smell of this room, meat and fried onions,
		fresh garlic on the salad, tartness of lemon
		twists into the air, and an ease toward evening
		as you walk in
		all the silence splits into hellos and hugs
		while the world comes together
		in the small room (56-72)

A sense of family is retained. You find that English words (i.e. “Hello”) are friendly too. You discover recreant pleasures in the new land, good food to enjoy, and the rift is healed; dual identity is achieved.

But just when you have begun to forget about your country of origin, its reality re-manifests itself. You remember eating fatiyah with your forebears who came to America in 1914. Two realities exist; one is America, the other Lebanon, “that other reality, where his name, that / language, Hussein, Sine Hussin, Im’a Brahim, Asalamu Aleikum / all of these sounds were part of his name, this was that other /edge of Lebanon he carried with him, that home” (86-89). Even the sounds in names, each individual phoneme, are important. These linguistic aspects are a significant component to one’s cultural identity. Hamod shows that the Lebanese identity and culture remains in the lives of the immigrants, in the moments of “good food of the rich smells” (90), in the places where they dwell, “in this house, in these people, in this moment” (93). Hamod emphasizes that the Lebanese identity has not been lost despite a name change, rather, two identities have merged.

Williams and Clifton point out in “The 10 Lenses,” that one vital part of one’s identity is the legacies with which one associates. Legacies are historical situations or important events for members of diverse cultures, races, genders, ethnic, religious, and political groups, etc. Significant events that have impacted one’s ancestors, community, and family comprise legacies. Immigration or migration to a new country is one example of a legacy (8). The act of immigration becomes a powerful moment of extreme significance; the genesis of the dual identity.

Hamod’s “from Moving” in the Unsettling America anthology, depicts this genesis and its aftermath. Once one loses one citizenship and gains another, the dual identity forces one into a sort of limbo where one never stops moving. Torn between two places, two cultures, one wavers back and forth, seeking to stabilize one’s identity.

The poem uses the extended metaphor of being lost at sea to describe the experience of emigrating from one nation to another. Through figurative language, a feeling of displacement is re-created for the reader.

The poem’s title, “from Moving,” is almost like an explanation for the phenomenon that it portrays: the aftermath of moving, of immigration, as if to say, “I got messed up like this from moving.” It is as if one never stops moving after that point. Perpetual confusion results, and a feeling of separation, as members of an extended and nuclear family float in the sea, out of reach of each other. This sense of separation is furthered through the technique of adding extra spaces between select words:

		so we move now
		my new wife and I, my children
		move further away          like lost
		shipmates crying to me for help (Lines 1-4)

Hamod conveys a desperate yearning to understand, with double entendre. He speaks of his children, “trying to grasp at these new patterns in the early morning darkness,” (8) as if they are both reaching out for some flotsam and striving to comprehend their new world. The idea of incomprehension is encouraged with repetition of the words “wondering” and “wonder.”

But despite the separation and confusion, the reader does have a glimpse of some degree, of American identity. Hamod writes, “. . . I sometimes think about a life / I’ve never known except for a little while / in some old country of time that I remember my father and / grandfather / talking about, when I kept wanting to go out and play baseball” (17-20). He wants to play sports with the rest of the American boys. He feels distanced now from the traditions, ways, and thought processes of his ancestors.

But the “reality” of his country of origin won’t abate. This reality relates to a “time” when the family seemed connected: “where at least the whole tribe moved together / it was that way in my “old country” of / stories of truth” (23-25). Whether or not “reality” is a time or a place remains ambiguous, but this confusion is just more of the aftermath of moving.

Hamod uses italics and quotation marks to emphasize key terms. Togetherness, something that has been compromised, is emphasized with italics, as is the term “old country”, with quotation marks, conveying the idea that this is a phrase Hamod has heard over and over but does not relate to as strongly as those who keep nostalgically repeating it. The idea that the older generation’s dual identity is not nearly 50/50, but leaning more towards the country of origin, is a reiterated theme in Hamod’s poems dealing with this subject.

The poem ends with extra spaces between words that continue to play up the idea of separation:

		before them
		everyone          everything stuck together          things stayed
		and when they moved
		grandfathers          grandmothers          fathers (26-29)

Here the poem trails off and ends rather abruptly, as if the family members have lost contact for good now. They have floated away in the currents, out of sight of each other. This conveys the idea that when one immigrates to a new country, there are always family members that one leaves behind that one may never see again. In addition, a parent may have always imagined raising a child within the standards of their home country, only to find that they’ve lost that child and are now raising an American.

Sam Hamod agrees that he has a dual identity, but to him it goes beyond this. In an email to the author, he relays:

i am even more than those two identities, as u read about my life in the back of Just Love Poems…i see myself as more of the “the world” than just limited to that because of my background in travel and work in what is called “the third world.” s u read more the poems, u’ll see what i mean. look closely at the poems in Unsettling America and u’ll see what i mean, and then the books will open up even more for u. (“Identity . . .”)

Such poems as “Leaves,” “After the Funeral of Assam Hamady,” “Dying with the Wrong Name,” and “from Moving,” all portray the dual identity of Sam Hamod, an American with Lebanese roots. In an email to the author, he affirms that his poems “. . . are autobiographical and all true, not fictive” (“Re: . . .”). His experience, as depicted in the content of these poems, parallels that of many other ethnic poets. His portrayal of dual identity supports the researched conclusions of those scholars who see less of a sense of solo American nationalism within the U.S. populace, and more of a hybrid self-conception, perhaps even a greater sense of ethnic identity than in years past. As Hamod conveys in his poem, “At Fakhani, The Shoe: Lebanon, After the Bombing,” from his The Arab Poems, The Muslim Poems collection:

		. . . what am I
		to say, a stranger now
		to my parent’s land, in the
		Bright Washington afternoon . . .
		. . . feeling grief in
		Arabic saying it in English . . . (Lines 53-60)

In the final analysis, Hamod shows that we are all Americans, but we come from many different lands.

Works Cited

Citrin, Jack., Cara Wong, and Brian Duff. “The Meaning of American National Identity: Patterns of Conflict and Consensus.” Rutgers Series on Self and Social Identity 3 (2001): 71-100. 7 June 2008 .

Gioia, Dana and X. J. Kennedy. An Introduction to Poetry. New York: Pearson, 2007.

Hamod, Sam. “After the Funeral of Assam Hamady.” Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry. Ed. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan. New York: Penguin Group, 1994. 288-292.

Hamod, Sam. The Arab Poems The Muslim Poems: New and Selected Poems. San Marcos: Cedar Creek Press, 1999.

Hamod, Sam. “Dying with the Wrong Name.” Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry. Ed. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan. New York: Penguin Group, 1994. 130-132.

Hamod, Sam. “from Moving.” Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry. Ed. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan. New York: Penguin Group, 1994. 19-20.

Hamod, Sam. Just Love Poems for You. Ed. Marte Broehm. San Marcos: Contemporary Poetry Press, 2006.

Hamod, Sam. “Identity . . .” E-mail to the author. 9 June 2008.

Hamod, Sam. “Re: Questions 4 Professor Hamod.” Email to the author. 17 June 2008.

Hamod, Sam. “Leaves.” Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry. Ed. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan. New York: Penguin Group, 1994. 132-133.

Hamod, Sam. “Today’s Alternative News.” Requested Article. 26 Apr.-May 2006. Today’s Alternative News. 8 June 2008 .

Said, Edward. “Crisis [in orientalism].” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. New York: Longman, 1988. 294-309.

Williams, Mark A. The 10 Lenses: Your Guide to Living & Working in a Multicultural World. Sterling: Capital Books, 2001. 7 June 2008 .

“Window Into Palestine.” Sabra/ Shatilla: in Sorrow Poem by Sam Hamod. 2007. 8 June 2008.

Orhan Pamuk’s novel The White Castle has provoked mixed responses ranging from extreme revulsion to excessive adulation. Some have debunked it as extremely boring, dull, flat, and an infelicitous drudgery, while others have praised it sky-high, comparing its author with Calvino, Borges, Eco, and Marquez. Detraction and deification of this kind help only to obscure the pith and core of the novel’s humanistic import. In spite of such criticism, Pamuk’s literary greatness remains unquestionable—the Nobel Literature Award of 2006 proves it. The ground swell of such reaction symptomizes, if anything, an a priori assumption, caused not so much by his writings, but by his being a Turk caught in the cross-fire of a political battle of wits between Europe and Turkey.

Pamuk’s statement to a Swiss periodical about the Armenian genocide of 1915 (when a million Armenians were killed in Turkey) and the more recent Kurdish genocide in his country (in which thirty-thousand Kurds were massacred), for which Turkey has not officially regretted, stirred vehement protests both from Turkey’s religious conservative camp and the secular establishment. Pamuk had to face a criminal trial in 2005 under the controversial Article 301 for belittling his country and “insulting Turkishness.”

Though the case was eventually dropped by the Turkish government to show that they respected the individual’s freedom of speech in a secular democracy, it nonetheless made him a controversial figure. Europe watched these developments in Turkey with bemused interest. In fact, the events that took place in Germany and France between Pamuk’s prosecution and his receiving the Noble Prize lend interesting insight into the uneasy political equation between Europe and Turkey. Shortly after Pamuk’s trial in 2005, he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. About a month later, in November, he was awarded the Prix Médicis étranger in France for his explicitly political novel, Snow. Then in September 2006, France honored him again with the Prix Méditerranée étranger. At this juncture, the Swedish Academy’s Nobel announcement in Stockholm in favor of Pamuk made Europe ecstatic. European leaders praised him in profusion.

French President Jacques Chirac called his views on society “intelligent, strong, and liberal.” Olli Rehn, the European Union Enlargement Commissioner, hailed the decision as “good news” for all those “who want to speak, search, and learn the truth.” He went on to add that artists “need freedom of expression as desperately as life needs water and air. Orhan knows more than others how precious and fragile such freedom is” (Pourgouris).

This seems a very carefully worded and heavily loaded statement with serious political implications. Rehn’s addressing Pamuk by his first name, Orhan, suggests the sense of comfort that the Europeans feel with what Pamuk represents. And the strategic positioning of the two words “precious” and “fragile” in the sentence make a devious hint at the very foundation of the precarious Turkish democracy.

One begins to suspect that secularism and freedom are perhaps at the mercy of Islamic Law. If one stretches the implication a little further from the Turkish point of view, it could mean that Pamuk is hand in glove with the Europeans and is only giving lip service to his country—a suspicion reinforced by what Professor Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, has observed in the context of Pamuk’s novel The White Castle: “he has stolen the novel, we can say, from us Westerners and transformed it into some thing else”(Pourgouris).

Whatever may have been the real intention behind these statements, Pamuk became a suspect in the eyes of the Turkish people, and they thought that the Europeans were using their own man against them. It touched the Turkish susceptibilities to the quick. It all happened at a time when Turkey was aspiring to join the European Union. This naturally gave rise to a tremendous nationalist backlash. Pamuk’s own countrymen saw him as a Westerner writing in Turkish. Turkish critics maintained that Pamuk was given the Nobel Prize not for his novels but for his politics. The leader of the Ultra-Nationalist Lawyers Kemal Kerincsiz said, “as a Turkish citizen I am ashamed . . . I don’t believe this prize was given for his books or for his literary identity. It was given because he belittled our national values for his recognition of the [Armenian] genocide” (Traynor).

It is a pity that Pamuk, whom Turkey should be proud of, was received with so much derision and hostility at home. No author in recent times has been so patently misunderstood by his countrymen as Pamuk. His love for secular democratic values and his attempt to bridge the gap between the East and West artistically were misconstrued as anti-Turkish. Such imputation, however, seems unjustified, for he has always maintained that tradition does not mean stasis—it is forward looking. In his view, tradition and liberalism are not contrary values. His main contention is that “upholding one’s history and tradition is not incompatible in a modern secular state that seeks to join the European Union.”

Jim Gee discusses this friction between home and school discourses in his essay “What is Literacy?” According to Gee, “discourses are intimately related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structure in society,” (53). Because I was raised in a working-class home, I was already relatively removed from the public sphere of authority and success. In order to gain access to this realm of power I had to acquire a secondary discourse—that of the academy. While all students have a primary discourse acquired through their family or guardians, “it is of course a great advantage when the secondary discourse is compatible with your primary one,” (56). Privilege discourse favors the privileged, so middle- and upper-class students are instantly more prepared for higher education.

For the most part, my family exists in an insular world dominated by the familial and domestic spheres. Their (our) primary discourse is one of oral tradition and social joviality, accompanied by a charming Boston accent. However, I have had far greater opportunities to acquire secondary discourses. For example, while my older sister was homeschooled, I attended a predominantly white, middle-class high school. I had part-time jobs throughout my teenage years, participated in civic and art groups, and eventually went on to Emerson College, a prestigious communications and performing arts private college. It was in this environment of assumed homogeneity that I quickly shed my Boston accent and assimilated into the communication styles of the upper-middle-class students around me.

At Emerson, uniqueness and creativity are highly valued—that is, if your self-expression reaffirmed middle-class values and expectations. We could all be as artsy, irreverent, talkative, and creative as we wanted, so long as we maintained the illusion that we were all the same by having parents who expected us to go to college, who paid our rent, who taught us how to be confident, cultured, communicative, and above all marketable. Being a quick learner, I easily figured out how to pass as middle class. I, too, complained of being “poor” (college student poor, not perpetually poor), molded my speech to reflect and accommodate those around me, and easily made friends with students and professors. It was a matter of academic and social survival. What I didn’t know then was that my experience was common, textbook even, among students from non-dominant discourses.

Basil Bernstein coined the terms “restricted” and “elaborated” to differentiate the discourses of working-class and middle-class people. According to Bernstein, restricted code is that which is context bound—language that expresses something in a precise time and at a certain place. Elaborated language, the mode of the middle class, is that which can be parlayed by generalities (Kutz & Roskelly). Graceful handling of generalities is, of course, perfectly suited for tackling academic dilemmas. If you have to write a paper on health care policy, are you going to write about how your aunt lost her benefits at her job or about how Canada and the U.S. differ in their social policies? Most professors would prefer you choose the latter approach in order to show your synthesis of ideas, reading, and research. What seems obvious to the professor may not be obvious to the student. Despite the flaws of Bernstein’s model (for one thing, the terminology clearly devalues working class discourse), there is some merit to his ideas. Bernstein’s model is helpful in that it shows how educational institutions inherently favor middle-class discourse. Therefore middle- and upper-class students already come to school with a privileged stance. According to Kutz and Roskelly, Bernstein’s approach is valuable in that “schools provided, in Bernstein’s terms, an elaboration or extension of social identity for the middle-class child, while they forced a change in social identity for the working-class child,” (60). That is, it’s not simply that poor students have a more difficult time in mainstream schools, but that they are made to feel shame for their self-expression, values, and lifestyles. The perpetuation and internalization of this shame leads many students to drop out or become reticent.

If this is the case—if this is what the masses are consuming—what hope is there for experimental literature’s survival?  In a Harper’s Magazine article, Ben Marcus rages against the judges of 2004’s National Book Award in fiction, saying their quick dismissal of low-selling works was “a clear announcement that the value system for literature [is] tweaked to favor not people who actually read a lot of books but a borderline reader…who might read only one or two books in a year.”[2] Marcus’ argument is based on a premise that American readers are not interested in being mentally challenged and that the publishing elite cater to this by marginalizing economically any writer “interested in the possibilities of language…[who] appreciate artistic achievements of others but still dream for [them]selves …[and believe] that new arrangements are possible…new connections of language that might set off a series of delicious mental explosions.”[3] Though the publishing house numbers would support this assertion, what Marcus fails to account for is the fact that experimental writing, from avant-garde to postmodern, has never held the dominant interest. In fact, this is specifically a condition of its existence. As long as mass-produced and formulaic literature exists, there will be marginal groups addressing the crises and conflicts internal to literature itself. And that is okay.

I recognize that the term “experimental” is problematic, and has been found frustrating by many writers. Among the more vocal was Kathy Acker, who openly complained that it invalidates the finished work and creates an illegitimacy that more traditional forms do not have to deal with.[4] She saw the label as “another way of sticking people in the corner,” focussing solely on texts that would be more aptly named transgressive. In contemporary society, it is easy to blur boundaries and get confused. While the experimental and transgressive can overlap, just as the experimental and postmodern can, they are not necessarily the same animal. Experimental writing, for the purposes of this discussion, includes the transgressive, postmodern, and avant-garde. It acts as an umbrella term; a foil to traditional, formulaic, formalist writing.

Experimental writing provides a means of expression that is different from traditional narrative by shifting focus from empathy to sympathy—from “I feel what you feel” to “I feel a supporting emotion about your feelings”—a distancing that creates objectivity.[5] It not only allows the writer to access areas that may have been blocked off by traditional, formalist approaches, but creates an opportunity for the reader to shift consciousness and become aware of the present. And while experimental writing, like other forms, will always exist, it can never become dominant due to its nature to demand shifts in cognition: “Whenever the present achieves expression, those living in it will find it annoying, irritating, unnatural, ugly. Consequently, art can’t be made present by accommodating it to popular styles or dominant ideas” because it will lose its present-ness as a result.[6] Experimental writing will need to reconcile itself to the fringe of publishing society and accept that what it is creating now will most likely not be appreciated for many years to come, when its innovative approaches have become integrated into popular culture and are no longer threatening.

Since the 1960s, an experimental fire has been brewing in France. At first only a slow smolder, the kindling has in the last fifteen years begun to take and spread its embers about the globe. This fire, to end the metaphor here, is the literary form of Oulipo. Now, I must be careful because maybe form is not quite the right word. Genre? No, even that’s debatable. For now, I’ll leave the categorization up to you.

Oulipo—otherwise known as Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, OU.LI.PO, and OuLiPo—is experimental, provocative, and transgressive. Oulipo is political and subversive, superficial and multifaceted, weighted and impartial. Oulipo is poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction, mystery, romance, comedy, and tragedy. In short, Oulipo is everything.

The question, of course, begs to be asked: if Oulipo is everything, how can it be something? In order to answer that, some backtracking is in order. In the early 1930s, a group of French mathematicians gathered together secretly to begin writing a series of books under the collective name of Nicolas Bourbaki. The group’s mission was to rewrite all of mathematics using Set Theory and rigor to create a unifying foundation. Operating as an underground group, Bourbaki managed to publish extensively, subverting conventional mathematics worldwide, particularly at the advanced level. The originators of Oulipo (François Lionnais, Raymond Queneau, et al.) considered their group an homage, parody, and extension of Bourbaki—their intention being to invent and reinvent restrictions by which literature is composed. Oulipo translates the rewriting of mathematics as a whole into the realm of language arts.Unlike formalist approaches, Oulipien literature begins by setting up rules for itself; rules that do not coincide with the conventions of tradition or with which readers have understood to constitute a proper work of art. These rules can be as simple as Christine Brooke-Rose’s decision not to use the verb “to be” in her novel Between, or as complex as Georges Perec’s choice to follow complicated mathematical equations and chess moves in Life A User’s Manual. The rule, once set, then becomes the only initial constant—it is the sole framework within which the author will create.

Many of the constraints that have already seeped their way into popular literature include the anagram, acrostic, and lipogram. The anagram, for those unfamiliar, rearranges the letters of one word to create another (angel into glean, for example); acrostic poems use the vertical succession of a word to form the first letters of each line of the poem (John Cage did this quite a bit); and lipograms exclude one or more letters from the text (Perec’s A Void manages to exclude the letter “e” from the entire novel). Other less familiar constraints conform strictly to mathematical formulas, like W ± n. This relation was originally devised by Jean Lescure and is also known as S +7 and N + 7. Here W stands in for a word, and n stands in for a variable number. The formula is simply to replace each noun in a passage with the seventh that follows in the dictionary. The original texts can be taken from traditional sources or created originally for the project. If we take the quote “Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief” (Act v, Sc.2) from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost and try the formula, we get: “Honest plain workshops best pierce the Earhart of grieschoch.”The amendment, in and of itself, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So what’s the point? Simply, this is one of the easiest ways of breaking down the pre-programmed language structures that condition our experience and expression and subsequently one of the easiest ways of creating something new. By their very nature, these strategies require a lack of intention on the part of the author—the method becomes the focus, rather than the result. This lack of intention within the constraint, though, is only the initial approach to creating a text. It is a compositional approach, just like freewriting or Madlibs. The author does the work of accumulation under constraint and arrives at a point where all of the elements are ready to put into a composition. Oulipien writing, unlike trangressive or avant-garde, is not about rebellion or political agendas. It is about finding new combinations of things, new ways of expressing and seeing, and nothing more.

Where formalist approaches make structure invisible so as to allow for full immersion in the subject-plot, Oulipien approaches draw attention to form and make structure part of the reading experience. Formalism’s structure “conceals certain assumptions about that pre-existing order and its role in creating the possibility for human action and critical theory” and can easily reinforce the framework of society so that readers do not consider re-evaluation.[7] Oulipien, and other experimental forms, subvert this framework.

So what can American writers learn from the French? That we can be more proactive in thinking outside the box with regards to our compositional structures. If mathematics and literature can be combined, why not try other non-literary areas? Why not physics, or ecology, or plumbing (yes, you read that right). It’s an exciting world, this realm of the experimental. Aristotle burst many a bubble with his everything already exists idea—why not find out what connections are lying hidden? Who knows what can happen as a result.

Some notable Oulipien texts worth reading:

Life A User’s Manual and A Void (La Disparation) by Georges Perec

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Cosmicomics, and The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino

My Life in the CIA by Harry Mathews

Zazie in the Metro (Zazie dans le Metro) by Raymond Queneau

Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie

Notes

[1] BookWire. 9 March 2006. Bowker, Inc.  http://www.bookwire.com/BookIndustryNews.asp

[2] Ben Marcus, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It,” Harper’s Magazine (October 2005): 41

[3] Ibid 40

[4] Kathy Acker interview. http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_acker.html The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Fall 1989, Volume 9.3

[5] Suzanne Keen, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” NARRATIVE 14.3 (October 2006): 207-236

[6] See R.M. Berry, “Avante-garde and the Question of Literature,” Electronic Book Review, ed. Joseph Tabbi 27 Apr 2003 http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/AVAnt

[7] See Jim Hansen, “Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and de Man on the Function of Allegory,” New Literary History 35.4 (Autumn 2004): 663-684

Elvis’ expression of freedom was heterosexual, for the most part, and gained a wider attention for that reason. He also was introducing African American culture to the white middle class. Through “Howl” Ginsberg introduced homosexuality to those classes in denial, but did so as a Jew while the Western world continued to negotiate the guilt of the Holocaust. In other words, he may as well have stood in front of American culture and announced his homosexuality as Whitman had done, but unlike in Whitman’s case, the moment in history was right. Jesse Monteagudo in his October 27th, 1997, article “The Death of the Beat Generation” assures us that, “More than any other work, it was Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ that made homosexuality, both overt and sublimated, the hallmark of the Beat Generation” (Gay Today).  Freudian psychology had infiltrated the suburbs, and the sexual revolution had begun.

One can’t separate the sexuality from the poem. Ginsberg’s being a Jew and declaring sexual liberation ten years after the Holocaust of WWII complicated efforts by the government or anyone else to quiet him. Though in 1957 Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti were sued for obscenities, in his book Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Merrill tells us, “If nothing else, the legal proceedings brought against ‘Howl’ for obscenity served to make it easily one of the bestselling volumes of poetry of the twentieth century.”  Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti won the law suit, and in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked that the trial rendered the book famous and aided in the sale of 10,000 copies (Merrill 51).

The historical situation he found himself in was not lost on him. In John Raskin’s book AmericanScream, he tells us that in his youth Ginsberg “was astounded to learn that in Germany and in Italy political parties advocated ‘killing all the Jews’” (34). Raskin goes on to say that “given the geopolitical and personal backdrop of Allen’s early development, it’s understandable that he grew up to write the poetry of personal crack-up and political catastrophe” (34).  Conscious or not about the self-proclamation that thrust him into the world of American poetry, he could be understood as having been reacting to the pressures of his day, a new voice emerging with force before American culture.  The voice is one of pain, but also one of celebration that made Ginsberg a hero.

Ginsberg’s confessional style three years prior to Robert Lowell’s confession of his father’s and his culture’s failure in his “groundbreaking” Life Studies was instrumental in establishing his heroism. Ginsberg’s Whitmanesque, metrically free loose verse with its long line also mocked the tight academic poetry that ruled the small, elite poetry audience of the day. The powerful affect of Ginsberg being a Jew after WWII confessing his beat fate and that of friends in a poem can’t be overstated. Ginsberg was unapologetic, irreverent of power structures, and reminded readers of Whitman’s dream of a more open America. In his essay “The Jew as an American Poet” Allen Grossman sums up Ginsberg’s situation:

Ginsberg’s poetry belongs to that strange and almost posthumous poetic literature which began to be produced in America after World War II, and in which the greatest figure is the spoiled Calvinist (Catholic), Robert Lowell. The characteristic literary posture of the postwar poet in America is that of the survivor—a man who is not quite certain that he is not in fact dead. It is here that the Jew as a symbolic figure takes on his true centrality. The position can be stated hypothetically from the point of view of a European survivor who has made the Stygian crossing to America: ‘Since so many like died, and since my survival is an unaccountable accident, how can I be certain that I did not myself die and that America is not in fact Hell, as indeed all the social critics say it is?’ Ginsberg’s poetry is the poetry of a terminal cultural situation. It is a Jewish poetry because the Jew is the prime symbolic representative of a man overthrown by history. (103)

In the opening line of “Howl” the persona celebrates himself as a survivor of the death and madness of kindred spirits at the same time the poem screams an animal pain. But more, the persona claims to have been subjected to and witness of “The atrocities that have allegedly been endured by Ginsberg and his friends” (Merrill 55). The reader generalizes the confessional critique to one of civilization which gives the poem its power. Each “atrocity” in the poem’s list pivots on the repetition of the word “who” that introduces another representative in the catalog that makes up section one of the poem. Part one of the poem is steeped in sexuality and in the threat of insanity. Again, Grossman explains that Ginsberg’s “protagonist is the apotheosis of the young radical Jewish intellectual” who has “exhausted all the stratagems of personal identity, sexual and ethnic, he is nonetheless determined to celebrate his state of being and his moment in history” (104). The ability of serious reviewers to find Ginsberg’s psychological autobiography in the poem makes it “confessional” and so narrows the place of persona. The last lines of Part one call up Carl Solomon of the poem’s dedication and draw parallels with Christian religious figures of martyrs and of Christ.

Part two of the poem uses the repetition of “Moloch” to center it. The mythological Middle Eastern god of the sun for which believers sacrificed their first born is used to blame for the evil represented in the first section of the poem. The contemporary Moloch of the poem is one for which people break their backs lifting it to Heaven, a “Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!” (Howl 22). Ginsberg’s Heaven is right out of Blake’s mythology. His Moloch is cement and aluminum, industrial, whose soul is made up of electricity and banks. In this section, Ginsberg turns the “mad generation” on the “rocks of time” into heroes who broke through and with “real holy laughter . . . saw it all” (23).

Part three of the poem declares solidarity with the persona with Carl Solomon, his mother, and other victims of the madness of Moloch. He does this by insisting that the persona is with Solomon et al. in Rockland, the place of “rocks in time.” Here again he suggests the mythological Christianity of William Blake. It is important to note that in this section the solidarity of the mad people in the poem secretly hug and kiss the United States under their bed sheets. These bed sheets remind the reader of Whitman’s. However, the bed sheets of Whitman are more eloquently, less boldly portrayed than Ginsberg’s graphic portrayal.

The “Footnote to Howl” updates Blake’s New Jerusalem for the twentieth century by declaring everything is holy. The section seems a second thought and a swipe at earlier twentieth century poems that provided footnotes for their readers, e.g. “The Wasteland.” This section also seems to attempt to justify the poem’s victims’ place in the world by listing the victims and suggests apologies for the accusations of the other parts of the poem by declaring everything holy, including the middle class, pavements, and skyscrapers which are the “incomprehensible prison” of the United States and the Moloch of sections three and two (27).

The triumph of the poem is the call for liberation of the mad defined broadly from the forces that provoke madness and imprison. In 1956, homosexuality was seen as a psychological disorder if not insanity. The poem’s triumphant call is both that of content and its freedom of form and structure. It also brings freedom of subject matter in bringing the self as a legitimate subject for poetry in an age of psychology. Voila confessional poetry is born. Ginsberg’s triumph would be repeated by others throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

The poem’s limitation is remarkable in that Ginsberg prided himself in writing what he called visionary poetry, and yet, the poem dates itself shortly after its publication. What connects the last three sections of the poem to the first section is the villain of the poem, the evil that is Moloch and the United States and the “incomprehensible prison.” The driving force behind the evil is the women of the first section of the poem and no amount of accumulated build up of organic structure or speech patterns can hide the finger being pointed at the “three old shrews” (14). Moloch, the middle class, the United States, the prison are merely symbols or cover for the blame the poem places on women. Indeed a close reading of lines 128-153 reveal the poem’s limitations. Its limitations of perception, discernment, and tolerance are misogynistic. As a Jewish poet affected by the treatment of Jews in the twentieth century, Ginsberg seems to attempt to seek shelter, to tie his fortunes to the patriarchy that distains women, a patriarchy that has no love of homosexuals either.

The introduction to “Howl” by William Carlos Williams hints at the limitations of the poem’s empathy, the poem’s inability to recognize other oppressed peoples of America. Williams’ last sentence, “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell” reveals the limitations of Williams to understand the patriarchy’s power dynamic (8). His misogyny will be echoed by Ginsberg, who at the time was open regarding his hatred of women. What is surprising is that Williams was a champion of the idea of ethics over aesthetics, thus his falling out with Eliot over the poem “Wasteland.” However, Raskin tells us that Denise Levertov wrote to William Carlos Williams about the poems stating that “There’s something I can accept unconditionally” (Raskin175). So it seems even some women poets lacked insight into the poem’s misogyny or simply accepted it.

“Howl’s” audience is witness to Ginsberg blaming capitalism and all of America’s problems on women. Women become the victims of his diatribe and become villains in his narrative. He states that the “best minds” of his generation, “lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate / the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar / the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb / and the one eyed shrews that does nothing but / sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden / threads of the craftsman’s loom” (Ginsberg 14). One can easily read these lines as a complaint that good homosexual loveboys have been lost to women who are either desirous for money, or desirous of the conventional life of biological family, or desirous of destroying the intellectual gifts of her male lover while destroying her own.

The passage goes on to suggest that the loveboys have been distracted by the “vision of ultimate cunt and come” and have eluded “the last gyzym of consciousness” (Ginsberg 14). Lines 144 to 153 are very ambiguous. One may read the lines as “whoring” love-boys who possess cynical memories of “innumerable lays of girls” in a variety of empty situations while secretly rendezvousing in “stolen night-cars” with “cocksmen” and “Adonis” (14). One may also read them where the persona is projecting girls onto a variety of other love-boys. Either understanding suggests that the persona mocks women while lacking any integrity of its own. It seems to me that the poem’s sections two, three, and footnote are attempts to correct section one, or to bury it in the authority of Blakean religious imagery, or to distract the reader from the weakness of the poem’s accusatorial beginning. In section one, the persona perceived that women were the cause of madness, evil, and the ruination of intelligent males of a generation. The poem as a whole seems to suggest that if women didn’t screw men up there would be no capitalism, no middle class, no United States of Moloch. Allen Grossman has it right when he tells us that “The enemy in Ginsberg is Moloch” and he defines its creator as “the economic culture” (107). which has as its manifestation the “three old shrews of fate” (Ginsberg 14).

This is where the poem fails by not discerning capitalism’s manifestations as patriarchal and therefore that there may be other victims of patriarchal capitalism. That perception would have required that the persona recognize his part in the problem. The persona is male. Madmen and homosexuals are not alone in their victim-hood. Women have long suffered the double bind of men’s thinking so that blame falls to them for everything male and female. Ginsberg was not up to the task of recognizing kindred spirits and discerning the root of his poem’s anger. In fact he is quite apologetic about the poem later in his life. His reading of the poem in 1981 was described by a sympathetic audience member as Ginsberg “‘mocking the past – mocking the angry radicals, mocking the dreamers, mocking the quest for visions’” (Merrill 53-54). Ginsberg described the poem years later as “a tragic custard-pie comedy of wild phrasing, meaningless images for the beauty of abstract poetry of mind running along making awkward combinations like Charlie Chaplin’s walk  . . .” (54).

So while Allen Ginsberg remains a folk hero or pop star to many young male writers and alternative culture youths, his later work may have a more lasting impact. If a reader is coming to poetry for insight into the possibilities of their time, “Howl” is not the poem to read. Had Ginsberg taken a more sincere, discerning look at the argument of the poem, he might have seen the obvious scapegoats women had been. It is amazing that he accepted the conditions of his fame on moral grounds. It is also telling, even on promotional grounds. We know that Ginsberg was a trailblazing self-promoter who was successful at it. Half his potential audience would come to cross the poem off their reading lists. A reader who is one generation removed wonders at Ginsberg’s lack of insight.

Works Cited

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 1956.

Grossman, Allen. “The Jew as an American Poet.” On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ed.

Hyde, Lewis. UnderDiscussion. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984.

Merrill, Thomas F. Allen Ginsberg. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

Monteagudo, Jesse.Gay Today. (Oct. 27, 1997). 8 Sept. 2006

http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/viewpoint/102797vi.htm

Raskin, Jonah. American Scream. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

At different points in history the prostitute body, and by extension the act of prostitution itself, have been variously coded and understood in culture.  The prostitute body is a site on, and through which, discourses make claims about the appropriate nature of subjectivity and appropriate types of bodily activity. It follows that the image of the prostitute subject which emerges will be as varied and polymorphous as the discourses which attempt to define it.  The prostitute is an identity defined through legal, political, medical, familial and economic discourses among others.  And dependant on the discourse, the prostitute is alternately defined and coded as a criminal, an outlaw, a diseased body, a healthy body, a drug addict, a worker, an abused body, an empowered body, a pleasured body and a victim.[1] The prostitute body is required to be “simultaneously closed, open and empty” so that while having a basis in material reality, it can also be filled up with desired cultural  imaginings which are constructed to signify differently depending on the particular discourse.[2] This polymorphous and contradictory aspect ensures that the prostitute can both take in these projected images and also put out. Despite attempts to define exactly what a prostitute is, the term, the concept, the act, the subject and the identity along with all of its political ramifications, seem to fit uncomfortably within these definitions even while the discourses themselves seem to give it “an analytical, visible and permanent reality.”[3] If as Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality, “an intensification of the intervention of power links to a multiplication of discourse,” what is signified by feminist discourse on prostitution and what kind of intervention is it?[4]

In a general sense feminism is polarized and divided on issues of sexuality, such that sex is understood as either the primary source of women’s oppression or the primary source of women’s liberation. By extension this dichotomy is manifested in feminist constructions of the prostitute body as either empowered or victimized, as well as indifferent prostitutes’ statements about their own experiences. But much like Foucault’s understanding of the homosexual, nothing goes into the prostitute’s definition (in discourse) that is unaffected by her sexuality: “it was everywhere present in [her], at the root of all [her] actions.”[5] This suggests that feminist discourses on prostitution have also “traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” or sometimes, in the case of prostitution, disempowerment and abuse.[6] But the prostitute, as a sexed body, resists such either/or definition and this leads to a proliferation of the discourses on prostitution. It seems, therefore, that the prostitute body questions the feminist project to determine the nature of women’s liberation or oppression through answering questions of sexuality as it has often tried to do in the past. More simply, the prostitute may subvert the very potential of finding definitive answers to these questions through explorations of sexual morality. The prostitute body further questions a feminism that was divided through issues of sexuality and this resistance acts, retroactively, to interrogate the importance of sex and sexuality to frameworks of subjectivity and identity politics in feminist discourse generally. At the same time, however, prostitution necessarily foregrounds sexuality and the body.

As Diane Elam argues in Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. En Abyme “feminism cannot afford to lose sight of the body,” but how the body is seen and described within feminist discourse determines not only the body which is seen, but also the subject that it supposedly represents.[7] For radical feminists of the 1980s like Catherine MacKinnon, “woman is…a being who identifies and is identified as one whose sexuality exists for someone else…what is termed women’s sexuality is the capacity to arouse desire in that someone else.”[8] Woman therefore becomes the passive recipient of masculine desire, and the prostitute becomes the perfect symbol of female oppression. Within this framework the prostitute is necessarily outside of not only the project of women’s liberation but is also barred from that liberation itself.  Interestingly, MacKinnon’s notion of liberation excludes the subjectivity of “disenfranchised” prostitutes whose very existence seems to justify MacKinnon’s claims even while the prostitute subject (as MacKinnon represents her) undermines the validity of any such claims.  In this context it is useful to consider Elam’s notion that any feminism which thinks “it has all the answers about women, [which] never questions its own composition and exclusionary practices, is destined to practice some of the worst forms of social injustice in the name of liberation.”[9]

While much of the rhetoric of the body has been denaturalized and de-essentialized, the rhetoric of the prostitute body has remained intact and has even been confirmed by MacKinnon-style feminist representations, which, it should be mentioned, overlook the possibly liberating effects of sexuality.  Within feminist discourse, the very language that is used to describe the prostitute is “so bound up in the body, so mimetic in its expression, that it collapses the semiotic distance between sign and referent,” that is, between feminisms ideological and representational needs and some idea of the ‘real’ of prostitution.[10]

The tacit assumption of these constructions of prostitution is that progress would be marked by the disappearance of the prostitute from culture. Thus as Margo St-James—a representative from COYOTE, a sex trade worker’s rights organization—states: “when [feminists] slide into their ‘Oh, they’re all victims, we must save them!’ trip, it supports the continued stigmatization [of prostitutes].”[11] Furthermore these feminist constructions are in fact negations of the prostitute subject as she is defined through the very use of her body which these feminist discourses—seeing sex as oppressive—seek to oppose. In this respect the prostitute is caught in a representational bind. She is relegated to the space between previous notions of femininity as sexualized for the purposes of masculine desire and current feminist notions of “women” that seek to eradicate all such forms of femininity. From this perspective it becomes possible to consider the idea that feminists are, or at least have been, engaged in a common-sense perception and representation of prostitution. In this sense prostitution shows the ways in which the “common ground of sisterhood, long held as white feminism’s ideal, was always more utopian than representative.  Worse, it was coercive in its unacknowledged universalism, its unrecognized exclusions.”[12] Feminisms’ “common ground” has operated historically to foreclose various categories of difference within the category “woman,” such that abject bodies (based on race, class and sexual orientation) are not only excluded from feminist discourse, but are also negated through the production of discourse itself.  Perhaps though, prostitutes have suffered most from these exclusions because their very livelihood is what is at stake in these types of feminism.

The “difference feminist” struggle is not only “to assert an identity but to assert difference” within gender categories.[13] Rather than a reduction to essential characteristics of woman, difference feminism asserts the poly-vocal notion of women. However just as “woman” marks a “point of dispute where language itself becomes a problem, where one person’s injustice cannot be registered in the language of the other” so too does the category of the prostitute within feminist discourse.[14] In the 1985 conference Challenging Our Images: The Politics of Pornography and Prostitution, Penny Miller articulates this “blind spot” in communication between feminists and prostitutes:

“But it’s different when it comes to sex” I ask you “Well, why is it different?” You believe only in “Let’s find a way for prostitutes to escape.”…What is so terrible about fucking for a living?…Who am I, and who am I to you?…Who am I to you if I enjoy my job? Are we without dignity? Have we got a problem? Are we sick?[15]

This quote reveals the extent to which the prostitution feminist debate engages in questions of legitimate speech and who is authorized to speak.  It also reveals a direct confrontation as to where prostitutes (“who am I?”) can be located in the feminist project, and, conversely, where feminism is situated within prostitution debates. In any case the “common ground of sisterhood” emerges as anything but common and a gap in language can here be detected between feminists and prostitutes. This gap functions to turn feminist claims around, such that the feminists are put in their place, as it were, and reminded of the extent to which they too occupy a particular subject position with feminism’s own political agenda and ideological aims.

When it is not arguing for “the common ground of sisterhood,” most of the feminist discourse on prostitution hinges around the notion of experience. However as Diana Fuss has argued, “bodily experiences may seem self-evident and immediate but they are always socially mediated…experience is not merely constructed but also is itself constructing.”[16] While feminist discussions often focus on the causal aspects of the prostitute subject—the hows and whys that create prostitution in society—there is very little engagement with the constructing aspects of the prostitute subject in culture. Therefore in much the same way that the gay and lesbian movements questioned heteronormativity, one of the significantly constructive questions raised by the developing prostitute’s rights movement is that it questions compulsory monogamy. It is telling that while much of feminist discourse has questioned the institution of marriage and its oppressive potential for women, monogamy remains as a dominant hegemonic value. With marriage under scrutiny, why has monogamy sustained its self-evident position in culture and likewise feminist discourse?  It seems that the prostitute subject questions the privileging of “sexual exchange, which takes place in the context of love, commitment, and some form of responsibility through time [as] necessarily more ethical than sexual exchange that is anonymous and perhaps limited to a single encounter.”[17] It should be mentioned that the HIV/AIDS pandemic reinstated (not through coercion but consensus) compulsory monogamy as the end point to the free-love of the sexual revolution.  But the prostitutes’ rights discourse has generated new meanings of prostitution. According to this discourse, the prostitute is constructed as “healer rather than disease producer, as educator rather than degenerate, as sex expert rather than deviant, as business woman rather than commercial object.”[18] In this respect the discourse negotiates the identity of prostitution, thus expanding the politics to include new subjectivities through their reconstitution in culture, representation and language.

Identity politics marks the “tendency to base one’s politics on a sense of personal identity…a working theoretical base upon which to build a cohesive and visible community.”[19] Although the formation of such coalitions has mobilized many rights movements, Diana Fuss questions the notion that “identity necessarily determines a particular kind of politics.”[20] Fuss argues for a more nuanced understanding of both identity and politics within contemporary critical discourses.  Furthermore she suggests that identity cannot be framed as “unitary, stable and coherent” as is often the assumption of essentialist understandings of identity and those based on experience. By contrast a deconstruction of identity asserts identity as difference rather than self-presence.  Although a deconstructive reading of identity seems to obliterate the importance of identity altogether, Fuss argues for the maintenance of the “fiction of identity” that is made possible in a deconstructive framework.  Furthermore, a psychoanalytic notion of identity posits the “subject as always divided and identity is purchased at the price of the exclusion of the Other.”[21] As such the identity categories that are created through identity politics are themselves discursive formations that always operate to produce certain types of knowledge and power.  Importantly then, Fuss argues that “the determining factor in deciding essentialism’s political or strategic value is dependent upon who practices it.”[22] By extension it seems that identity politics ensures the proliferation of multiple representation of identity and as such it appears as an inclusive practice. With each new representation subjectivity seems to become more accurately and equally represented and, with this accuracy, culture in general seems to move towards some notion of progress.  However, I would argue that any projection of identity that is rooted in a notion of unity is necessarily exclusive. The notion of exclusivity that I am using stems from Derrida’s construction of the binary: “the indefinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already inscribed there the space of repetition and the splitting of the self.”[23] From this perspective any identity category forecloses its own inadequacy as “substitution fills and marks a determined lack.”[24] It seems then that identity politics always become (and are continually becoming) a sort of micro-politics which raises the question whether there will be any common ground left after everyone has been given a voice, though perhaps it is the illusion of this common ground that is necessary for political activism.  The danger is in the creation and recreation of a cacophony of private, and therefore non-communicative and incomprehensible, languages and discourses, as I think this fragmentation is in fact a symptom of the metadiscourses of capitalism.  Furthermore Fuss argues that “it is telling…that anti-essentialists are willing to displace ‘identity,’ ‘self,’ ‘experience,’ and virtually every other self-evident category except politics.  To the extent that it is difficult to imagine a non-political feminism, politics emerges as feminism’s essence.”[25] In this sense the fact that much feminist debate surrounding prostitution relies alternately on a notion of essence, experience and politics to naturalize and justify its action within this sphere speaks to the extent to which the prostitute body challenges both essentialist and anti-essentialist feminism.

Essentialist definitions of “woman” place the distinctive characteristics of femininity in the body and the experience of the body such that women may gain control and freedom through it. However the prostitute in many respects defies this notion of bodily authority. By contrast if anti-essentialist claims necessarily deny the primacy of all self-evident categories in favor of politics, then the visceral and embodied aspect of prostitution is negated, thus undermining the significance of prostitution as it necessarily foregrounds sexuality as an experience of the body and subjectivity. In this respect the prostitute body both occupies a boundary between conflicting feminist notions of sexuality, the body, and “woman”, while these feminisms founder on the kind of sexuality that prostitution is predicated on. This critical blindness within feminist discourses implies the extent to which sexuality persists as a source of discomfort even within the discourses that supposedly liberate it. Prostitution is thereby foreclosed from the realm of the thinkable and speakable within feminist discourses that seem to reconstruct sexuality as the meaningful union of a legitimate couple, rather than attempt to figure a divided and multiple definition of sex from within.

Notes

[1] Bell, Shannon. Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p 99.

[2] Segal, Naomi. “The Common Touch.” In After Diana: Irreverent Elegies. Eds. Mandy Merk. London: Verso, 1998, p 142.

[3] Foucault, Michel.  “The History of Sexuality, Volume 1.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001 pp 1648-1666.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Elam, Diane. Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. En Abyme. London: Routledge, 1994, p.60.

[8] MacKinnon quoted in Shannon Bell, Ibid. p. 80.

[9] Elam, Diane. Ibid. p. 32.

[10] Felleman, Susan.  “Fluid Fantasies: Splash and Children of a Lesser God.” In Camera Obscura, 19 (January 1989): 119.

[11] Good Girls/Bad Girls: Sex Trade Workers & Feminists Face to Face. Ed. Laurie Bell. Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1987, 86.

[12] Elam, Diane. Ibid..46.

[13] Ibid. p 33

[14] Ibid.

[15] Good Girls/ Bad Girls.Ibid. p. 49.

[16] Fuss, Diana. “Reading Like a Feminist.” In Difference, 2:1 (summer 1989): 89.

[17] Bell, Shannon. Ibid. p. 95.

[18] Ibid. p. 100.

[19] Fuss, Diana. “Lesbian and Gay Theory: The Question of Identity Politics.” In Essentially Speaking. New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 99.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid. p. 102.

[22] Fuss, Diana. “Reading Like  A Feminist.” Ibid. p.86.

[23] Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 163.

[24] Ibid. p. 157.

[25] Fuss, Diana. Ibid. p. 90.

Affect is controlled in literature by structure and language; postmodern literature by pastiche and saturation, respectively.  Though Jameson has gone into great detail to separate the various elements of the postmodern condition, there is an interrelationship—a hierarchy, almost—that seems to be ignored: mainly, that the use of pastiche and manipulation of language leads to, but are not separate elements from, depthlessness and then to disorientation.  To suggest that they operate independently or in both directions is misleading; the elements function in one direction only.  On the highest plane, it can be seen how pastiche and language are capable of functioning independently, but that psychological elements such as disorientation, depthlessness, dissolution of linearity in time and space, and euphoria are all dependent on the former.  These conditions of existence are fabricated in literature by the manipulation of words on the page, by their visual presentation and tone.

Pastiche is more than just “the imitation of a peculiar mask” (Jameson 65).  In postmodern literary terms, it is a plurality of mimicry; a placement of forms, not necessarily complimentary, next to one another so as to comment on one another in a new way.  By utilizing a plurality of existing forms, an author creates layers that do not necessarily relate in a way that is interactive—one level does not lead to another.  They simply coexist.  Poetry interwoven with prose may be one way to see this technique in use, but it is likewise effective by interweaving multiple perspectives or tenses.  The key, here, is to create a Fifty-Two-Pick-Up effect, throwing all of your cards into the air and seeing what new pattern is formed.  This fragmentation creates “flatness,” removing any immediate “interpretive depth” in which the reader might construe some hidden meaning (Stephanson 4). Immediate is the operative word in that last sentence, though, because as Jameson suggests, “This new mode of relationship through difference may…be an achieved new and original way of thinking and perceiving” (75).  By placing familiar forms in an unfamiliar way, the author allows a commentary to take place that provides the reader new exposure “to alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and evaluating the world” (Mitchell 47).  It is not that the fragmentation removes meaning, but “that any meaning that exists is of our own [individual] creation” (Hutcheon 43).  The gap between author and reader becomes subjective; whatever meaning is derived comes directly from the patterns the reader finds, not one prescriptive representation the author projects.

Though pastiche may appear random on the surface, it does not negate intention on the part of the author.  The specific placement of forms allows the author an opportunity to place multiple layers of meaning that are independent of one another into a work—something traditional forms do not necessarily allow.  Finding some order in the chaos, though, is required if the reader is able to locate themselves in the work, to find some referent with which to contextualize the piece.  If they are unable to “complete the hermeneutic gesture,” discerning meaning becomes impossible (Jameson 60).  Though Jameson claims that this inability to complete the “hermeneutic gesture” is a characteristic of postmodernism, I argue that by mimicking existing forms, it is an impossibility for the reader not to be able to find some referent.  The derivation of meaning may not be immediate, but it is not impossible.  The only way this could be achieved would be in the use of a language and form never before seen.

In The Public Burning, Coover utilizes pastiche to its fullest.  His re-visioning of the Rosenberg trial of the 1950s is presented in almost every form possible; poetry interweaves with narrative prose, screenplays and scripts butt up against sermons and news reports.  This organization, at first, is utterly chaotic and seemingly arbitrary.  It takes on a Red-Rover-cum-Simon-Says feeling: Coover is in charge of where we go, when we go, and at what pace we go through the story.  The poetic moments, by their very minimalist nature, require a slow, thoughtful reading; the prose, on the other hand, is presented much in the way we naturally converse, and is able to be read and understood at a faster rate.  The screenplays and scripts are not literary forms that most readers have extensive experience with, and so these then require not only an orientation with the form, but often a re-reading so as to garner the content as well.  This is incredibly frustrating if one is expecting a more traditional linear narrative.  Once understanding that this is the way the novel is going to go, though, the reader is forced to make a decision: trust that Coover has an ulterior motive for creating this disorientation and to just go with it, or believe that there is no ulterior motive, that the novel is completely an experiment in randomness.  Neither is a comfortable state to be in.  Because the very nature of the human mind is to create order out of chaos, to find meaning where there is none, this means that the mental effort required to process the story is more than that of a traditional work.  It requires a holistic approach.  The reader must be willing to allow for the disorientation to take hold, so that their brain can, in time, make connections in the whole and find a pattern.

In addition to creating disorientation, an almost frenetic feeling reminiscent of the time period itself, the pastiche approach allows Coover to force the reader to pay attention to particular moments in the text more than others, simply by the nature of the form in which he presents them.  As a reader, one quickly becomes aware that their premonitory abilities no longer work in this context; they are kept in the moment, anticipating what Coover will present next.  Chapter Two of the book is an excellent example of where one can see this happening.  After a long first person narration by a re-contextualized Richard Nixon, Chapter Two: “A Rash of Evil Doings,” begins with a newspaper-like form, resembling a series of headlines: “Two ore tankers go around in the mud of St. Clair, Canada. A coffee plot is uncovered in Brazil. Russian tanks tool up, roll toward Berlin” (Coover 36).  The reader is presented with a series of facts and statements they must piece together to find some thread.  These statements then segue into more comprehensive reports, providing information of what is happening globally at the time.  Each report is situated beside another that does not seemingly relate—the political state of King Sihanouk of Cambodia is placed directly before a fruit distribution issue in Guatemala, which comes directly before an assault on clergy members in Italy (37).  Interspersed with these reports are updates on the manipulation of the sign that hangs above the Rosenberg stage in Times Square—another fragment that seemingly does not relate.  “America the Hope of the World” becomes “America the Rope of the World;” then “Rape,” “Rake,” “Fake,” “Fate,” and “Hate” (36-37).  Though outwardly arbitrary in placement, a closer examination allows the reader to find connections between these fragments.  In a larger context, we can see that these manipulated slogans comment directly on the information presented before it; “Rape of the World,” for example, is rather poignant in relation to GIs in North Korea and plots surrounding coffee plantations (36).  Interestingly, the fragments that correlate—the sign interruptions, for example—when taken together, do not have any particular flow or meaning; it is only in the context of the different forms that they make any sense.  Just as we begin to see Coover’s pattern here, however, he switches it up once more.  These reports become an omniscient third person narrative on the state of the battle between Uncle Sam and the Phantom; less in newspaper form, and more in literary prose.  These prose sections are broken up by the verse of Poet Laureate Time magazine:

americans could not forget
korea and it spoiled
some of their pleasure in
tv sets and cadillacs (Coover 38).

Reading this verse alone certainly provides some context on the self-absorbed nature of American life, but placed in the middle of prose describing the brutality of the war in Korea, and the battle between Uncle Sam and the Phantom, it takes on more meaning.  Certainly, this new meaning depends in large part on the ideology of the reader, but it can be assumed that many will feel the shame linked with our dissociation from the rest of the world.  While American government is tinkering in foreign countries, and sending young men to battle for something not necessarily concrete, Americans as a whole live their entitled lifestyles oblivious to the rest of the world’s happenings.  Upset from seeing this “reality” on television, or from being made aware of the conditions of existence in these foreign lands, is fleeting and inconvenient.

This interweaving of forms continues throughout the entire novel, often more explicitly than examined above.  But it is not only in genre form that Coover utilizes pastiche.  It can, in fact, be seen in a multitude of ways throughout if one looks hard enough.  Perspective switches, for example, or the heavy use of pronouns confuse the reader as to who exactly is speaking.  The use of multiple plots and their presentation also follows the pastiche approach.  Coover initially presents the novel as an exploration of the Rosenberg trial, but quickly the reader finds that equal time and treatment is dedicated to the battle between Uncle Sam and the Phantom, Christianity and Communism, and the political and emotional evolution of Richard Nixon.  While each of these plots are playing out, they are presented in a soap-opera-like way; a staged drama that can be dropped into or out of at any given time, without the loss of orientation.  At the end of Chapter Two, for example, in a span of three pages, we move from the narration of a letter from Ethel Rosenberg to her children into the “National Maritime Union’s strike” and U.S. Postal Office stamp rate hike, to the Korean peace talks, and into the attempted kidnapping of “Czech refugee Jaroslav Lukas” (Coover 41-44).  Unlike the fragments of forms, each of these events (when placed together) are cohesive; though  periodic, they will continue to be addressed in a more or less chorological flow throughout the novel,  frequently switching at the height of any possible emotional resolution.  The very nature of this media replication in both form and order of presentation supports the claim that Coover is making a political statement about the media in the United States, to be addressed shortly.  Before discussing political messages, though, it is important to address the second element that controls affect in postmodern literature: the saturation of language in the text.

A theoretical exploration of language tells us that words are signs; they are nothing more than aural associations for particular objects or states of being; a tool simply to be used for communicating efficiently within a given linguistic form (Saussure 10).  But words carry more than literal meaning; they possess emotion and positive or negative associations.  According to Barthes, it is through language that the “ideological and the imaginary come flowing in” (98).  Since “there is no practice except by and in an ideology,” the language cannot be separated from the author—choice in diction and syntax are automatic reflections of the author’s belief system (Althusser 53).  Here the political re-emerges in the text.  In an interview with Anders Stephanson, Jameson uses the analogy of homeopathy to describe how postmodernism can dissolve the very elements of postmodernism itself; to deconstruct, not politicize (17).  The underlying principle of homeopathy is that the substance introduced to treat a dis-ease is the same substance that, in a healthy body, creates the dis-ease.  By saturating the system with too much of one substance, the system responds by overcompensating in its production of a substance that reverses the effect.  The treatment pushes the body to its limit, forcing it to respond.  In postmodern literature, this homeopathic response can take place in many ways.  The hyper-stimulation caused by a pastiche of forms, as explored previously, can cause the reader to begin to create patterns where there theoretically are none.  Overuse and repetition of other literary elements, likewise, creates a similar condition.  However, even more direct in its influence is the deliberate use of language.  An author who infuses every sentence with sentimentality, melodrama, apathy or violence will cause desensitization in the reader—similar to the desensitization that occurs with violent or sexual material in the media.  When consciously done, an author subconsciously directs the reader’s emotions—in postmodern texts, this is typically to a point of saturation in one particular feeling.

Coover’s use of language in The Public Burning is skillfully employed to manipulate the reader’s emotion.  When narration is given in the voice of Nixon, the tone invokes the underdog, the guy who just can’t catch a break.  “I knew that Uncle Sam would do what was right and necessary,” Nixon tells us early on:

do your own job well, get your rhetoric ready, and don’t ask too
many irrelevant questions: that seemed the best policy.  But maybe
it was not.  Maybe I had not done enough.  I fussed about, choosing
a ball for teeing up, worried about this.  Everything was remarkably
green, the sky was deep blue, the balls a blinding white: my senses
were still on edge from the transmutation. (85)

The tone invoked here rings true with the character of Nixon, constantly unsure of himself, relying on others to give him direction and confirmation.  The selection in and of itself does not give too much of an overwhelming feeling of insecurity, but Coover sticks to this tone, and after pages and pages of the constant questioning and deferring to others, it is inevitable that we grow tired and bored with the victim attitude.

Coover takes this same approach with each of his narrators.  The omniscient third person narration, though presenting an overview of events, does so through a particular ideological thinking.  The sarcastic tone can be seen throughout:

And indeed, now, tonight, as evening marks the close of day and
skies of blue begin to gray, the “good people” emerge, as though
on cue, to protest the executions, attack Uncle Sam and his Legion
of Superheroes on the frontiers and harass him within, violate
human decency, threaten the Free World with terror and disruption,
and strike ruthlessly at the very faith that binds it together. (102)

The use of negative words like “protest,” “attack,” “harass,” “violate,” and “threaten” invoke feelings of anxiety and combativeness.  Though it initially may seem to support Uncle Sam et al., in the larger context of the section it comes across as deeply sarcastic toward Uncle Sam and the US.  Combined with the use of long, rambling sentences, the heavily descriptive language becomes monotonous.  As a reader one stops trying to pay attention to every descriptor, and stops assuming the information is going anywhere.  But it isn’t solely negative, pathetic language Coover offers.  The positive is included throughout, as well, often in the voice of politicians and clergymen.  The first Intermezzo, a “Vision of Dwight David Eisenhower,” is full of positive language:

How far have we come in man’s long pilgrimage
from darkness toward the light?
Are we nearing the light—
a day of freedom and peace for all mankind?
Or are the shadows of another night
closing in upon us? (original italics, Coover 149)

This overlaying of positive, negative and emotional language is clever in its execution.  While the pastiche approach does allow for the switching of emotion and tone, the switch is always into another emotion or tone of equal saturation.  Ethel Rosenberg’s sections ring a bit on the melodramatic side; conversely, Uncle Sam’s come across as ironic and Carnivalesque (Hassan 506).  There is no reprieve from the onslaught of stimuli.  More than simply creating a lack of affect, however, this bombardment simultaneously comments on society as well.  Not only do we receive information from every direction imaginable; these relays are also deeply infused with different ideologies—we are constantly being told what to believe.

Though it seems clear that over-stimulation in form and language can push a reader to the point where the emotion no longer exists, it is my contention that the consciousness of this push draws the reader to some larger point, some commentary on the condition of this emotion in society.  The text that

exceeds demand, transcends prattle, and…attempts
to overflow, to break through the constraint of adjectives….
the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts
(perhaps to the state of certain boredom), unsettles the
reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions,
the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a
crisis” not only his relationship with language, but his
relationship with the world. (Barthes 98)

“Irony, perspectivism, reflexiveness,” Hassan reminds us, “express the ineluctable recreations of mind in search of a truth that continually eludes it, leaving it with only an ironic access or excess of self-consciousness” (506).  Recognizing the lack of affect in a piece because of a particular form and/or language allows the reader to perceive the discrepancy between what they have always “known” and what the new perspective reveals.  “Consciousness duplication,” whether in form (the frenetic feeling mentioned earlier, for example) or character, allows the author to replicate conditions of existence on multiple planes and becomes “a matter of considering the possible truths or aptness of alternative ‘senses of life’” (Mitchell 49).  In Coover’s text, it is not in any one section that we find meaning; in fact, it is not in the text proper at all.  Meaning comes from piecing the different elements of pastiche and language saturation together, on our own, after the reading.  Attention can, in fact, be drawn to more than one message, messages that hang out there independent of one another.  Richard Walsh, in his essay “Narrative Inscription, History, and the Reader in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning,” found the underlying message to be one of “scape-goating” in the American system, a reflection of the fickleness of the culture as a whole.  Frank L. Cioffi, however, decided that “Coover uses his novel to theorize about the world-making and reading processes of fiction” (27).  While both of these arguments have merit, Coover’s text also offers another interpretation: that the pastiche and manipulation of language are commentaries on the state of information dissemination in the US.  By overloading the reader with a variety of forms, Coover allows the whole to draw attention to itself.  As readers, we cannot help but notice the constant switching and variety in play.  The form mimics the multitude of ways information is communicated to us on a daily basis—a constant bombardment of information on the subway, on television, in newspapers and on the radio.  It is a steady influx of information, too much for the brain to process at once.  Combining this mixing of form with the soap-opera feel mentioned earlier, and the deliberate manipulation of language, the message is “mechanically fitted into the plot”—something distinctly political (Brecht 75).  If content is included here, we can see that the plot supports the message; more than once in the text we are privy to the propagandistic messages given by the government.  Coover controls our experience as a reader and the means through which we receive information—he gives us multiple specific “realities” in which to receive and interpret “facts,” which all add up to a “little morality play” (119).

In creating a lack of affect through form and language, the political praxis is returned to The Public Burning.  It is distinctly postmodern in this “and/both,” rather than “either/or,” approach, and as Hutcheon contends, “teaches us about those [who fight the ‘one-dimensionality’ of mass culture], if we are willing to listen” (41).  By giving us so many perspectives, each in a different extreme, Coover forces us to realize what we, by sheer coping mechanisms, ignore each day: the truth is relative, and every bit of information conveyed is done so through a particular lens.  It is our job, as educated members of society, to find the grains of truth hidden in each perspective.  This deeply political message is timeless—it is as relevant today (the lies surrounding Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib still unfold), as it was ten years ago in the Clinton administration (Monica Lewinski) and thirty years ago during the Reagan era.  The Public Burning serves as a reminder to take each “truth” with a grain of salt, and to forever be wary of those who claim they know best.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis.  “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’ (1970).”  From Critical and
Cultural Theory Reader. Eds. Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan.  Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2002.  50-58.

Barthes, Roland.  “The Pleasure of the Text.”  From Critical and Cultural Theory Reader.
Eds. Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
96-100.

Brecht, Bertolt.  “Against Georg Lukács.”  Aesthetics and Politics. Trans. Ed. Ronald Taylor.
New York: Verso, 1977.  68-85.

Cioffi, Frank L.  “Coover’s (Im)Possible Worlds in The Public Burning.”  Critique 42.1 (Fall
2000): 26-37.

Coover, Robert.  The Public Burning.  New York: Grove Press, 1976.

Hassan, Ihab.  “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective.”  Critical Inquiry.  12.3 (Spring 1986):
503-520.

Hutcheon, Linda.  A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988

Jameson, Fredric.  Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991.

Mitchell, Allison.  “Consciousness Duplication and Our Capacity to Learn From Literary
Fictions.” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 1.2 (August 2004): 42-50.

de Saussure, Ferdinand.  “Course in General Linguistics (1916).”  From Critical and Cultural
Theory Reader. Eds. Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan.  Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2002.  7-13.

Walsh, Richard.  “Narrative Inscription, History, and the Reader in Robert Coover’s The
Public Burning.”  Studies in the Novel 25.3 (Fall 1993): 332-46.

In The Feminine in Fairy Tales (Boston, Shambhala, 1993), Marie-Louise von Franz[1] makes a comprehensive study of “The Handless Maiden” also called “The Girl Without Hands,” as recounted by the Brothers Grimm, as well as several other versions, including a Russian one. In all of them, a young woman is rendered helpless by the father, representing patriarchal culture, who “cuts off her hands,” thereby refusing to recognize the feminine and value it in the daughter as a part of himself. Beneath the Christian overlay of the eighteenth century Grimm version, the tale explains how the young woman must go deeply into her own unconscious in order to take care of herself and, in Jungian terms, become individuated.

“The Handles Maiden” appears to have inspired two recent Australian-directed films. The first is The Piano, directed by Jane Campion, 1993, which won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and starred Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, and Anna Paquin. The second is Niki Caro’s North Country, 2005, starring Charlize Theron (nominated for Best Actress, Academy Awards) and Frances McDormand (nominated for Best Supporting Actress, Academy Awards), with Sissy Spacek, Woody Harrelson,andSean Bean.

Before getting into the films and what they offer contemporary cinema-goers, it is useful to have the text of ‘The Handless Maiden.”[2] For a comprehensive Jungian analysis, space limitations require that I recommend the von Franz and Robert A. Johnson (see note 1, above) discussions.[3] I will, however, after quoting the tale itself, offer a brief cognitive interpretation central to my analysis of the films.

“Why do Albanian border patrols consist of three men?

“Well, there’s the one who can read, and then there’s the one who can write.  The third is a political commissar to keep an eye on those two intellectuals.”

While not terribly witty (or encouraging), the joke does reflect a certain assumption some have about this small Mediterranean country—that Albania’s long history of occupation by both the Turkish and Russian empires has created a community of illiterate and politically shell-shocked individuals.  Although neither is terribly accurate, the stereotypes do have some historical basis.  Centuries of Big Brother watching and economic disparity have made being an intellectual in Albania both dangerous and difficult.  But as the country nears fifteen years of independence from communist rule, survivors of Enver Hoxha’s communist regime are finding their voices—and those of us in the West would do well to listen very closely.

Historically, literature has functioned not only as a form of entertainment, but as a reflection of life and society at a given time: a barometer by which we can gauge the world’s humanity.  By reading Jane Austen or George Elliott, we get a clear sense of the propriety and place of women in 19th Century Britain; Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright will forever testify to the struggles of African Americans during the early-to-mid 20th Century; Elvira Dones, Ylljet Aliçka and others like them now continue in that tradition, bearing witness to the history and current culture of Albania.

For six-hundred years, Albania survived under the occupation of the Ottoman Empire.  This rule began to collapse during the First Balkan War in 1912, and by 1913 Albania was recognized as a separate country (minus Kosovo) from the rest of the region.  Its sovereignty was forgotten (ignored?) by all leaders during World Wars I and II, enduring repeated invasions by neighboring Italy, Greece and Germany.  In the years following, Communism established a stronghold and the country’s intellectuals found their safety in spouting government propaganda.  As Dr. Robert Elsie (a Canadian born author, translator, and interpreter) notes in his essay “Albanian Literature, an Overview of Its History and Development,”1 the 1930s saw a change in literature: “an influx of new ideas from abroad and a higher level of formal education among intellectuals flung open the gates to cultural advancement.”  But that advancement would come to a shocking halt in the 1940s when Enver Hoxha assumed control.  Hoxha and his entourage saw the country’s intellectuals as threats, and “the immediate post-war period [became] an Apocalypse for Albanian writers and intellectuals.”  Those suspected of dissention were arrested, and often put to death—the list of the talent lost during this time is disturbing.  But in 1991, Albania’s communist system finally disintegrated, opening it up to the rest of the world.  What was discovered when that finally happened was that Albania’s culture, which can trace its roots back to the Illyrians (pre-dating both the Greek and Roman) has managed to maintain an integrity and uniqueness throughout it all.  It has now become a culture that, without the constraints of communism, is finally free to express itself.

We know that artists create from what they know; from their experience in the world.  Their work bears witness to the lives they have lived and to the histories that have shaped them.  And that witnessing, in turn, gives the work praxis—serving to not only act as a mirror of a culture, but to suggest action as well.  Jane C. Sugarman, in her article “Imagining the Homeland: Poetry, Songs, and the Discourses of Albanian Nationalism,”2 nicely documents the interplay between Albanian poetry and action.  Sugarman states, “it is clear that in most cases the intelligentsia’s linguistic and folkloric pursuits led directly to the development of nationalist aspirations, and that their literary activities became inseparable from the formulation of political strategies.”  The praxis came about “in part when nationalist poems…were transformed into men’s narrative songs,” thereby making the work available not only to the bourgeoisie, but to the lower classes as well. Since it is true that the educational system in Albania is not good (over 90 percent of Albanian girls, for instance, never receive a high school education),3 the transformation of poetry into melody functioned much like the call-and-response songs of African slaves in the US; it allowed the masses to access the radical political messages of the poetry, politically activating them without alarming those who kept a tight reign.  As we embark on the 21st Century, the need for this type of poetry/song in Albania has begun to evaporate, being replaced with poetry and prose that suggests possible futures and documents an atrocious past.

Because of the oppressive constraints Albanians have had to survive in, most of the literature created in the country proper has taken on the form of poetry—the predominant prose coming from Ismail Kadare, self-exiled in France.  But that is beginning to change.  Dr. Elsie (one of the few Albanian-literature translators in the world) and Northwestern University Press are about to release the first collection of modern Albanian short stories translated into English, entitled Balkan Beauty, Balkan Blood.  The compilation features writers from all over the country, embracing themes of war, love, death and oppression.

From the opening piece, a selection from Elvira Dones’ Stars Don’t Dress Up Like That, Elsie manages not only to capture the rhythm of speech and diction of the country, but the tone as well.  “If I were not so depressed,” Dones’ character Leila begins, “I might even be happy.”  As readers, we are sucked into the first person narration immediately, wanting to know why Leila is in “insidious pain” and unable to see what is happening around her.  She shares bits of her story, giving only enough to keep us engaged.  It isn’t until two pages later, when the perspective in narration switches, that we find out she is lying in a coffin, stab wounds riddling her body, on her way back home to Albania.  Elsie’s translation of Dones keeps intact the chilling and disturbing conveyance of reality for so many young women in the region—a lack of education and employment opportunity sends them abroad, often unwittingly into the hands of slave traffickers, and eventually to their death.  It is a cautionary tale, one whose message begs for attention—particularly “when there may be as many as 30,000 young Albanian women working as prostitutes in Western Europe” (unwillingly), and undoubtedly a good number, as well, here in the States.4

Likewise, Ylljet Aliçka’s “The Slogans in Stone,” takes on an Orwellian tone that for readers in the States might seem speculative, but rings true to the Balkans’ experience.  Andrea, a new schoolteacher “in an isolated mountain village in the North,” finds himself at the discretion of a regimented town bearing striking resemblance to communist society.  Andrea soon finds that, in addition to his teaching duties, he is to maintain a “slogan” out in the nearby pasture.  “If you want to be respected by the Party and the authorities,” another teacher cautions, “roll up your sleeves and take good care of your slogans.”  Aliçka’s slogans are poingnant: “The Most Dangerous Foe Is A Foe Forgotten;” “Long Live The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat;” “Yankees, Hands Off Vietnam;” and “Let Us Think, Let Us Work, Let Us Live Like Revolutionaries”—the last a slogan, the principal declares, that “Comrade Enver Hoxha used himself during the Seventh Party Congress.”  The slogans create the axis around which all else must function—the propaganda to live by, upon pain of death.  It is both a reminder of the recent past, and a warning to those who may be living in societies where the control of language by the government is increasing, and public dissention frowned upon.  Aliçka’s message prompts us to remember that when we get caught up in maintaining propaganda, we lose ourselves.

Each of the stories Elsie translates in this compilation offers something worth remembering, whether it addresses politics, social condition, or simply cultural practice.  They are well-needed documents of life—not just life in this small country, but life around the globe.  It calls to our humanity, draws attention to flaws in our own systems of government, and begs us to do something.  As is so often the case, we overlook what we can’t see.  As soon as the newspaper is shut, or the television station changed, we forgeth the genocide in Kosova.  We feel sympathy for a bit, then our daily lives pull our thoughts away.  But those who are living—just trying to survive—in those challenging environments don’t have that luxury.  And their stories require telling: if not to warn, then to testify.

Those of us that have grown up in the West often take for granted our relative safety.  We don’t think twice about walking down the street alone or speaking out against the President’s latest choices.  We don’t live in fear of soldiers showing up on our doorstep one morning and hauling our loved ones away, or the neighbor down the street initiating a blood feud because of an accidental insult.  But some of these tales remind us that those actions are not a far hop, skip or jump away from Guantanamo Bay, Gulf War censorship, or even the assault on a woman’s right to choose.  “There is still much to be learned behind the headlines of war and destruction,” Elsie recently said in an email.  Lessons those who cherish freedom and humanity should heed carefully.

Balkan Blood, Balkan Beauty should be available through Northwestern University Press during Summer 2006.

Works Cited

1. Elsie, Robert, PhD.  “Albanian Literature, an Overview of Its History and Development”  Österreichische Osthefte, Vienna, 45.1-2 (2003)

2. Sugarman, Jane C.  “Imagining the Homeland: Poetry, Songs, and the Discourses of Albanian Nationalism.” Ethnomusicology.  43.3 (1999).  The Society for Ethnomusicology.

3. Vullaimy, Ed.  “Streets of Despair.”  Amnesty International Magazine.  4 February 2006. http://www.amnestyusa.org/magazine/streets_of_despair.html

4. Ramet (Trondheim), Sabrina P.  “SLIDING BACKWARDS: The Fate of Women in Post-1989 East-Central Europe.”  Presentation at the 7th International Seminar Democracy and Human Rights in Multiethnic Societies, Introductory Lecture.  6 January 2005.  http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/fallstudie/SRamet1.pdf

The writer must accurately choose, combine, superimpose upon, blot out, shake up, alter the outside world for one absolute purpose, the good of the story. To do this, he is always seeing double, two pictures at once in his frame, his and the world’s, a fact that he constantly comprehends; and he works best at a state of constant and subtle and unfooled reference between the two. It is his clear intention – his passion, I should say – to make the reader see only one of the pictures – the author’s – under the pleasing illusion that it is the world’s; this enormity is the accomplishment of a good story.[2]

A writer must be able to clearly distinguish between reality and fantasy, between the story and real life if she is going to manipulate real world conditions to achieve her vision. Welty’s concept of double vision mirrors the DuBoisian one – just as black people must view themselves through the eyes of their racist white oppressors, so too must writers view their stories with the eye of a reader.a href=”#anchor3″>[3] Unlike DuBoisian double consciousness, Welty’s double vision, the writer’s double vision, may be voluntarily acquired.

In Welty’s A Curtain of Green, and McPherson’s Elbow Room, both writers project their double vision into their fiction by highlighting the difference between social ideology and practice in American society, using humor to call attention to this gap. Both employ the same comedic tactics – garrulous narrators, isolated individuals who experience reversal, and satirical dialectics where a character must choose between two undesirable outcomes, to pleasurably expose this distance to the audience. Welty and McPherson criticize social norms through comedy, which implies that their writing is an impetus to social change. Here, their vision diverges. As Merill Skaggs has argued, Welty frames some of her stories so that, “the detached position of the reader, […] actually enhances the comic perspective as it permits the reader to feel exempt from the censure of, yet included in the observation of, the satirical exploration of human frailty and absurdity.”[4] Welty’s primary purpose is the amusement of the reader, amusement in which social critique plays an important and instructive role. In contrast, McPherson uses comedy to compel the reader to reconsider pre-conceived notions, by inviting readers to enter into and complete his stories. Welty calls attention to social problems, and McPherson builds upon the techniques of his predecessor, calling for revolution.

The loquacious characters of Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” and McPherson’s “The Story of a Dead Man,” provide a good overview of where their comic visions converge. In “Why I Live at the P.O.,” Sister’s humorous exaggeration undercuts the very serious business of leaving her family to live at the Post Office. As critic Diana Pingatore states, “The autonomy Sister claims for herself as mistress of her own fate is juxtaposed against the isolation to which she has subjected herself in order to assert her hard-won independence.”[5] Ironically, Sister demonstrates her independence by leaving her family but fails to recognize her profound connection to them. Without her family, Sister has no story to tell – she may have left her family, but she can’t stop talking about them. Her unreliable narration reveals her isolation to the reader, even though she is not explicitly aware of it herself.

In “The Story of a Dead Man,” the narrator’s illusions about himself are similarly hidden. Also framed as a defense of action, an account of what “really” happened, William, an upwardly mobile black young man, feels he must compete with the colorful narration of his ne’er do well cousin, Billy Renfro. Billy clothes himself in the illusion of myth – he tells tall tales about his lost eye and his gunshot wounds. As a consequence, his identity is protean and adapts to the situation and listener at hand. William, on the other hand, wants to live the American dream, and feels he must hide the poor, southern part of his heritage that Billy represents – he dresses Billy up in a nice suit for dinner with his in-laws. When Billy pulls off the suit and tells a shady anecdote, William must choose between Billy and his in-laws. William’s identity is not adaptive – he cannot expand his sense of self enough to contain his poor southern roots and his yuppie pretensions at the same time. As McPherson critic Herman Beavers puts it, “The story’s reversal […] centers, then, on the ways upward mobility leads to the collapse of identity rather than to the discovery and assertion of self-awareness.”[6] William and Billy are doubles – William’s intellectualism is as much a show as Billy’s colorful anecdotes.

Welty and McPherson use isolated individuals – Welty’s might be called “southern grotesques,” while McPherson’s are upwardly mobile, disenfranchised black men – to criticize the society which has isolated them through comic reversal. For example, Welty’s “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden,” and McPherson’s “Problems of Art” present disenfranchised black people that must confront inaccurate representations of themselves. The joke of “Keela,” is that Keela is neither outcast, Indian, nor maiden, but a club-footed black midget, Little Lee Roy, whom the circus entrapped and forced to eat live chickens. Welty frames the story as a journey of discovery for Steve, a young white man who took tickets for the Keela sideshow, unaware that the circus had entrapped Little Lee Roy, and who has now sought him out to make amends. Steve did not begin feeling bad about the exhibit until a local man proved that Little Lee Roy was a sentient human being, actions that reveal the barbarity of a racist establishment that is willing to chain up anyone who is “other” to make money. Furthermore, Steve must live with his complicity in the enslavement of another person. Critic Alfred Appel writes that in “Keela,” “conventional patterns are reversed and seemingly defenseless characters become superior to the tangibly superior characters, who are not revealed to be truly unfortunate, due to a more basic failure or deficiency in themselves.”[7] Little Lee Roy may not be smart, rich, or normative, but at least he’s morally pure.

Appel’s comment also applies to Mary Farragot and Corliss Milford in McPherson’s story “Problems of Art.” Mary Farragot, accused of drunk driving, is convinced she needs a white attorney, Corliss Milford, to represent her in court and translate her black experience to one that the white court system can understand. The story opens with Corliss waiting in Mrs. Farragot’s apartment, and McPherson uses this setting to highlight his preconceptions about Mary. McPherson writes, “the neatness [of Mrs. Farragot’s living room] did no damage to the image of Mrs. Farragot he [Corliss] had assembled, even before visiting her home.”[8] Corliss identifies the room with Mrs. Farragot. The portrait of Jesus seems “cheap” (95) and conveys “the poverty of the artist’s imagination,” so too does Corliss view Mary as a poor pious teetotaler. The end of the story produces an ironic twist – Corliss discovers that Mary “don’t drink nothin’ but Maker’s Mark” (116). This information disrupts Corliss’ stereotypical picture of Mary as an upright black church woman, and in doing so reveals that although Corliss thought he was in charge of her trial, that in fact Mary has manipulated him through his racist ideology. Corliss’ basic deficiency is his racist naiveté, just as Steve’s is his complicity with racism (perhaps also racist naiveté). Little Lee Roy has the moral high ground while Mary Farragot has the upper hand.

The visions of “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden,” and “Problems of Art,” diverge with their ending twists. Both endings add depth and complexity to the stories. In the ending to “Keela,” Little Lee Roy tells his children that two white men came to the house and talked to him “about de ole times when I use to be wid de circus.”[9] Little Lee Roy’s speech rounds out his character by informing the reader that he is a family man and that the circus is part of his life but not its totality. This assertion contrasts with Steve’s equation of Little Lee Roy and exploitation, thus forcing the reader past the rather two dimensional realization that “exploitation is wrong” into “exploitation is not the most important fact about Little Lee Roy.” Critic Carol Manning interprets Little Lee Roy’s words as a mechanism for coping with racism. She writes, “Little Lee Roy does not simply glamorize or exaggerate the past […] he, in fact, remolds the past, blocking out its horror.”[10] Little Lee Roy may revise his history, but within the story this is his only power – ultimately, he, Keela, depends upon the humanity of white men to live. In contrast, Mary Farragot adapts to racism – she figures out how to manipulate people through their own racism, through careful control of her own image. Little Lee Roy, as Keela, is an art object for the white establishment, an object of gaze, but Mary Farragot manages to be an artist.

In “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies,” Welty uses satire to expose and undermine Christian propriety. The three ladies care for Lily Daw, a mentally deficient young woman in small town Mississippi – Aimee Slocum, the spinster postmistress, Mrs. Watts, a fat widow, and Mrs. Carson, the preacher’s wife, who rescued Lily from a father who “tried to cut her head off with the butcher knife” (7), and have cared for her ever since. The inherent violence of the patriarchal rule, suggested by Lily’s father, is symbolically balanced and mediated by the multiplicity of women, who care for Lily physically (they give her food, clothing, and shelter) and spiritually (they take her to church and baptize her).

However, if the patriarchal rule is one of violence, then in Welty’s view the women’s rule is one of meaningless propriety – neither is in Lily’s best interest. At the beginning of the story, the three women receive news that the Ellisville institution has accepted Lily, but their plan goes awry when they learn that Lily has become engaged to a circus xylophone player. At first they believe Lily is making it up, but their alarm becomes palpable as soon as they learn Lily’s virginity is at stake:

“Did he – did he do anything to you?” In the long run, it was still only Mrs. Watts who could take charge.

“Oh, yes’m,” said Lily. […]

“What?” demanded Aimee Slocum, rising up and tottering before her scream. “What she called out in the hall.”

“Don’t ask her what,” said Mrs. Carson, coming up behind. “Tell me, Lily – just yes or no – are you the same as you were?”

“He had a red coat,” said Lily graciously (11).

The ladies urgently want to know if the xylophone player took advantage of Lily, but instead of asking her about it in simple terms that she is capable of understanding, they use the euphemisms of propriety. To the reader, the potential miscommunication amuses – the ladies assume the worst, but they don’t recognize that Lily may not understand what they are asking – their extreme worry is potentially a needless worry. Later, Mrs. Carson states that the xylophone player “was after Lily’s body alone and he wouldn’t ever in this world make the poor little thing happy, even if we went out and forced him to marry her like he ought – at the point of a gun” (12). Mrs. Carson’s speech presents a bleak view of marriage for a preacher’s wife – she envisions Lily’s marriage, and perhaps all marriages, not as ones of affection and happiness, but as shotgun weddings. As Appel writes, “they [the trio] not only patronize Lily and fail to understand her real needs, but manipulate her in a way that denies her humanity. She has become the vessel into which all their sexual repressions are channeled.”[11] Mrs. Carson is out to preserve propriety, not to ensure Lily’s happiness.

Lily’s ultimate options – institutionalization or marriage, also suggest a critique of male power on Welty’s view. Women who are not useful to the patriarchal order, women who are not marriageable, may be safely marginalized, stashed out of sight at an institution, are treated as insane by the dominant power structure. Lily’s three ladies may not represent women’s rule at all, but rather women’s accommodation of the male patriarchy – after all, they force Lily to become currency within the patriarchy when they push her into a hasty marriage with a man who does not know her well, and who does not seem to realize she is feeble minded. Whether “Lily Daw” presents a woman’s world gone wrong, or patriarchal accommodation, Lily’s choices of mental institution or the institution of marriage are unsatisfactory ones. Lily may cheerfully accept either option, but Welty’s satirical tone suggests that she is neither feeble minded, nor convinced that the choice is a necessary one.

Similarly, in “A Sense of Story,” McPherson uses dichotomy to lay bare the racism inherent in the legal system. The prosecution and defense rely on competing racial stereotypes during Robert Charles’ trail for the murder of his white employer, Frank Johnson, a murder Robert has confessed to. The prosecution’s picture of Robert Charles states that he was “a loner” (235), “an employee whose talent does not match his ambition” (240), who acted “like he thought they thought they was something better than black and white, and he already had it” (245). This view of Charles as a shiftless, uppity black man is a stereotype. In addition, the prosecution valorizes Frank Johnson, Charles’ deceased boss. Johnson had “love in his heart for everyone in the world” (237) and suggested that the repair shop owner “add a black or two to the crew” (237). Beavers nicely summarizes the prosecution’s view: “the prosecution’s narrative agenda rests on the illusion of white paternalism and Robert Charles’ ungrateful response.”[12] The defense’s case is hardly less racist. The defense lawyer, Mr. Grant, paints the defendant as “an illiterate Southern black, socialized in an environment of violence, who possesses a single skill” (239). This is the dark joke of the story, that within the courtroom where he is supposed to receive “blind justice,” Robert Charles can only be a stereotype. Charles attempts to disrupt this dichotomy when he interrupts his own attorney during the summation to reiterate his confession. Beavers insightfully writes, “what Charles’s ‘outburst’ is intended to stave off, is the reconfiguration of the black working body into a fragmented object.”[13] In speaking out of turn, Charles refuses to participate in the legal farce that offers the judge and jury either an ungrateful beneficiary of white paternalism, or an ignorant black man, socialized to kill.

McPherson’s framing of “A Sense of Story” invites the reader into the narration to pass judgment on Charles and on the legal system. McPherson frames the story with a judge, who selects and reviews portions of the transcript in search of the “sense of story” that will help him to pass judgment. The judge is a reader who wades through the narrative to get a complete chain of events. Any reader of this story must do the same thing, must become the judge of the events as they unfold. The story cobbled together from the two accounts of Charles is one of Frank Johnson exploiting Robert Charles’ labor, denying him personal dignity, and stealing his idea for a new engine lubricant. The reader judges the story, may disagree with the judge in the story, and in doing so is forced to judge the legal system, is forced, perhaps, to concede that there are some crimes not appropriate to be tried in a courtroom, is forced to conclude that judges are subjective individuals and that, sometimes, the court system is not just. In this respect McPherson’s writing radically departs from Welty’s. Where Welty is content to reveal unsavory truths about the social structure, McPherson invites the audience into the story, asks participation as a means to instigating the social change he desires. Welty’s writing reflects moral disapproval of a strong-willed, but privileged middle class white woman, where McPherson’s invitation to the audience reflects a man deeply and personally affected by racism

*********

[1] Derives from W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk. DuBois writes, “the Negro is […] born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.”

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (1903) Bartleby Online, <http://www.bartleby.com/114/1.html> 10 December, 2005.

[2] Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” qtd. in Suzanne Marrs, One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2002) 16.

[3] It might be argued that Welty also has female double vision, that Welty writes from the position of “other” within a white patriarchy, just as McPherson is also “othered” by his blackness.

[4] Merrill Skaggs’ position, as described by Diana R. Pingatore, A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) 7.

[5] Pingatore 73.

[6] Herman Beavers, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1995) 60.

[7] Alfred Appel, Jr., A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1965) 38.

[8] James Alan McPherson, Elbow Room (New York: Fawcett, 1975) 94. Future references to this book will be made in text, by page number only.

[9] Eudora Welty, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968) 88. Future references to this book will be made in text, by page number only.

[10] Carol S. Manning, With Ears Opening Like Morning Glories: Eudora Welty and the Love of Storytelling (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1985) 72.

[11] Appel 45.

[12] Beavers 219.

[13] Beavers 220.

Works Cited

Appel, Alfred. Jr. A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1965) 38.

Beavers, Herman. Wrestling Angels Into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1995.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Bartleby Online. <http://www.bartleby.com/114/1.html> 10 December, 2005.

Manning, Carol S. With Ears Opening Like Morning Glories: Eudora Welty and the Love of Storytelling. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1985.

Marrs, Suzanne. One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2002.

McPherson, James Alan. Elbow Room. New York: Fawcett, 1975.

Pingatore, Diana R. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Eudora Welty. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Welty, Eudora. A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. Orlando: Harcourt, 1968.