8:43 p.m. - 2007-02-10
Better Living Through Critical Theory: Vicki Mahaffey's Modernist Literature
On the Zaprudy diary, I began to do some of the orals studying, in a way. In a way that sucked, actually. I go back and I think that 1) I was not really sure what I was doing and 2) I was trying too hard to not be too smart about things. I am only now starting to realize just how big a problem that second one's been.
Since this entry is really about her, I'll go back to the third and final class I took with Dr. Vicki Mahaffey, a class team-taught with a classics professor where Homer's Odyssey was read alongside Joyce's Ulysses. After two classes with Vicki that I had absolutely loved, this one I learned to hate. It was not her fault. This was an Honors course, taught by two honored faculty members, so there was a line out the door on the first day to get in. It was the cream of the crop from multiple departments, and after people starting coming in with presentations on Deleuze and Wittgenstein I started getting antsy, something not helped by the fact that I was in this class with my friends Leah, Janis, and St. Caroline of the Nickel Slots, three people from whom snark flows like wine in Tuscany. When other people talked about Aristotle, I brought up Duck Tales (there was this episode based on the Odyssey, okay, and people were wondering how the Wandering Rocks worked, so I explained how they did them on the cartoon because that's always what I thought of, thank you very much). After presentation after presentation that I found difficult to understand, and therefore boring, I decided, for my presentation, to stage a conversation between myself and the chapter of Ulysses in question (Sirens, since you ask). I became something of a brat, and for the first time, Vicki Mahaffey didn't give me an A. An A-, but considering how much of a favorite of hers I was, this was something of a slap in the face, at least for an English nerd like myself.
The second slap in the face I got from her came from a class I almost took with her, one on Modernism and the Holocaust. We were reading Dubliners, and as always my busy semester had meant I had to do a lot of skimming (I had an Honors thesis that semester, dudes, and I was trying to put a show together without a theatre group, gimme a break, yo). Vicki asked the class what we thought of the first story, "The Sisters." No one was speaking, and so I started extemporizing about the story, how the priest was trying to educate the boy about Catholicism, make him savvy to its complexities, and how the sisters seemed rather inane, almost taking pleasure in the death of the priest. This was NOT the answer she was looking for, and she let me have it, even telling me after class that she was disappointed that I didn't see what she could: that the title of the story was a signpost, urging the reader to think about the two women who had devoted their lives to a man who had done little for them, about how they experience a spirituality unmediated by religious hierarchy, and how that very hierarchy, unculcated into the narrator, is what keeps both boy and priest from being able to get in touch with something transcendant. The spiritual becomes meaningless, and so does interpersonal connection.
At the time, I defended myself. I said that I found the way that sisters spoke of their brother somewhat ghoulish. Mostly, though, I was just upset that I might have got something wrong. I hate to say that I am someone who would rather be right than happy, but I am beginning to suspect that, at the very least, a large part of me would rather be right than happy. This is a problem, a problem for a scholar, and a problem for a modernist.
It certainly became a problem at Berkeley. When I first arrived, some of my fellow first years and I started making analogies to the Olympics, that each one of us had been far and away one of the best in our own circles, but here we were not simply on par with a couple of other people in our class, but with everyone in our class, which made us realize, I think, on some level, that one of us had to be on the bottom. One of us was going to be the worst. And considering that half of us at best were going to go on to tenure track positions at major universities, or universities AT ALL, being on the bottom was not an option.
I tried to meet this competition head on. I tried to defuse it, saying we should all just admit our ignorances and focus on learning from one another, but at some point I stopped practicing what I preached. My initial response was to do what I had done in the Homer and Joyce seminar, bringing up Scooby Doo in my 14th Century poetry class (people were not amused) and trying as hard as I could to be funny, to add levity, to lighten the mood, to make myself the clown in the hopes that people would stop being o serious all the time. Then, eventually, I just shut down. I didn't feel like people were listening to one another, like people were actually interested in one another's opinions or reactions, and so class followed class without me saying a word.
This was not the worst moment, though. The worst moment was in the class where there was this girl who drove me crazy, who constantly admitted to not having finished the reading but who nevertheless made assertion after assertion about it. Her opinions drove me nuts, and then the day came when she got something wrong, just flat out WRONG, and my hand shot up and I had the quote ready and I SHUT. HER. DOWN. I took great relish in doing so, in proving her wrong, in front of everyone. In other words, I had become everything I had been trying so hard not to become, one whose self-esteem rests on his intellect, one who needs to prove how smart he is by proving how stupid someone else is. I felt like shit, afterwards, and I really, really wanted to leave graduate school.
So, more than a year after that, I did leave, and a few weeks ago I was in Book People, the best bookstore in the universe, and I wandered over to the literary theory section, to see if there was anything I could use. Then I saw a name: Mahaffey. Her new book, the one she was working on as I was leaving, the one on Modernism and the Holocaust. I picked it up, and flipped it open, and by chance or by destiny I landed on her discussion of Dubliners, of The Sisters, to be precise, and how nearly everyone gets it wrong on the first read. I felt the sting a little, after almost six years. I bought the book.
The book has been a series of slaps in the face, but this time I take those slaps as some much needed tough love. Vicki--who, if you're wondering, looks eerily like Catherine Keener in Capote--is telling me to shape up, and with her help I am remembering why I fell in love with literature in the first place, and discovering that, sometimes, when you're wrong, you can look around and find yourself in pretty good company.
Or to put it in more literary terms, I have long though that literary critics live in terror of the line from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which a woman says to the speaker: "That is not it at all. That is not what I meant at all." Literary theorists have even thoroughly killed off the author in an attempt, I think, to guarantee that they will never hear that phrase. The problem is that in no universe should J. Alfred Prufrock be considered a model for living: someone who says, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling on the floor of silent seas" is someone in need of therapy. He's also, and I want to say this before I go on, a liar, because anyone who says, "I have heard the mermaids singing each to each/ I do not think that they will sing for me" has, by that statement's own terms, imagined the possibility that they will do so. I have been far too Prufrock-y for my tastes for the past two years. There's gotta be a better way.
Enter Vicki Mahaffey, with whom I will kick it old school in this, my first REAL orals study entry, in the upcoming, ongoing series, Better Living Through Critical Theory.
Vicki begins with the idea that modernism is pedagogic, designed to provide a new way of teaching and learning. She includes a fantastic quote from Woolf's Three Guineas, in which Woolf observes that education is designed to encourage people to use force in order to keep possessions, to support war when it means the continuation of consumption. Consumption of literature was on the rise, and with it a desire for easily consumable books. The modernists tried to provide fare not so easy to swallow, ones that prevented an ease of comprehension and challenged a readers ideas. If fiction can become real, if fiction's representation of reality makes us readers of reality who are only able to recognize the well-known tales--boy meets girl, good fights evil--then we are unable to recognize that which is destroyed by these stories (maybe there'd still BE dragons if people weren't so all in favor of knights killing them all the time). Modernists implicated readers in the fictions by forcing them to read carefully, to understand the confusing, polyvalent reality facing their characters, many of whom were deeply flawed and compromised as readers themselves. I disagree with her idea that dominance and submission doesn't promote conversation (I think sadomasochism is profoundly conversational, but I'll save that for Deleuze), but I love the way she talks about the book as a figure of the author (both on preface page X), and how the book-burning of the Third Reich prefigured the burning of people (to this day, no matter how much I LOATHE a book--Jennifer Weiner, I am looking at you--I cannot bring myself to destroy it). After talking about 1) a German man's bitter reaction to her family's presence in post-war Germany and 2) the negative reactions to her decision to perform a monologue written for an African-American actress based on the experience of the first African-American students in a desegregated school (both to examine the tragedy, albeit occassional necessity, of asserting unrelatable difference), she quotes Angelika Bammer, who claims "For while detachment and identification can be problematic in just these ways, resulting in difference or sentimentality, they are, at the same time, indispensable elements in our relationship to troubling pasts, as detachment is necessary for critical thought and identification is necessary for empathy. The search for a proper balance between the two thus has ethical, psychological, and political urgency."
Word. I intend to use that to attack certain theorists whose criticism of empathy seems, to me at least, so far, to be throwing out the baby of compassion with the bathwater of appropriation. Of course, throwing out babies with bathwater is, perhaps, one of the constitutive problems of much of academia, but THAT'S coming with Kosofsky Sedgwick.
The modernists, admittedly, are challenging certain modes of identification, like Wilde reminding the reader that whether they see themselves or not, they are still Caliban. Henry James called the conventional narrator the watcher in the house of fiction, which she compares to Foucault's Panoptic watcher. This identification with the watcher leads to a comfort with BEING watched, with understanding that one is always being evaluated, and with evaluating others. For Vicki, modernism challenges this mode of reading and asks--and I nearly wept with joy when I read this, because it is SO my dissertation--that the reader perform rather than read, that they assume the positions of mutliple characters so that the consequences and motivations of actions can be seen from multiple perspectives, to make choices as we read so that we can learn to make better choices in life. She turns particularly to Bernard in Woolf's The Waves, who emerges as a single voice after others have fallen away, who recognizes the tremendous loss as one narrator tries to express that he is part of a universe of people; he longs for lovers language, something almost nonsensical in its conversationality. This uneven, broken, mysterious narrative becomes particularly important at the edge of human experience, in the face of monumental horrors like the Holocaust (she turns to Agamben, I would include Laub). Bernard, however, does acknowledge that telling the story to another and allowing the presence of another to effect the story, to bring the narrator back to a consciousness of what he didn't know, of the complexity that he cannot capture, which is a PERFECT connection to Judith Butler's latest work.
Speaking of perfect, Vicki moves toward a model that favors a perfection of comprehensiveness over a perfection of purity; both are impossible, but the second sanctions the destruction of whatever is seen as impure (Jews, Roma, queers, the disabled, etc in the Holocaust), while the first demands that even what might be negative be retained and held in tension (a reparative model, to connect to Kosofsky Sedgwick).
The Holocaust enters the book in large part through Stanley Milgram. Milgram conducted psychological experiment where he asked subjects to administer electrical shocks to another person. The shocks were fake, the tester and fake subject actors, but the people didn't know that. The actors claimed that the shocks were getting more and more painful, but in most cases it took very little for the scientists to convince the people to keep administering them, and when asked about the experiment later many were more concerned about how well they did what they were told rather than whether the shock victim was alright. These people accepted the context of the situation, and were thus unable to take action. Society becomes more efficient, people are rewarded, and becomes agents for the wishes of another. We become Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, two among billions who have "kept their appointment" even if Godot is never going to fucking show. We abdicate responsibility in our feeling of responsibility to context. Wilde argues that we must advocate disobedience as a response, thus gaining joy as we discover new modes of responsibility.
One of the disobedient subjects in Milgram's experiments grew up in Hitler's Germany, and said, of her refusal to administer the shocks, "Perhaps we have seen too much pain." Vicki turns to Browning's Ordinary Men, which describes a police reserve in Poland and their participation in the Shoah, how many of them went along with the killing, even when they were given the option of recusing themselves, because everyone else was doing it, identifying themselves so completely with one another that they were unable to identify with the Jews that they slaughtered. She counters this with Primo Levi, an Italian in Auschwitz who attempts to communicate with a francophone named Jean, teaching his portions of Dante's Inferno. This careful communication was not simply and easy storytelling, one that can deaden the reader and make them accept anything the narrator says. The story's strength comes from interruption, from the moments that break the spell and force interaction. It is the only way to guard against Levi's greatest fear: that he will not be listened to, that just as every Nazi ignored the pleas of the people they were torturing and killing, so would people ignore the stories of the survivors. In The Drowned and the Saved, which Vicki doesn't turn to, Levi talks about how the Nazis taunted their victims by saying that the actions of the Third Reich were SO cruel, SO monstrous, SO horrific that, even if anyone survived the Shoah, they would never be believed. In the world after Auschwitz, after a century full of mass-murder, in a new century that promises more of the same, the community created through storytelling must be challenging, must demand that other people listen, must retain the contradictions and conflicts that defy meaning in order to move toward any meaning at all.
Modernism provides that challenge, making the reader confront the impure (Yeats's Crazy Jane and Circus Animals' Desertion, Joyce's various crapping and menstruating and masturbating heroes, the refuse laden landscapes of Beckett) and recognize their own impurity, to understand that it is death that makes life sweet, just as ice cream's tendency to melt makes eating it so wonderful (the only emperor, as Wallace Stevens says, is the emperor of ice cream), to sacrifice the idea of mastery, to be read by the work they thought they would read. They spoke of an interconnectedness that defied borders, an "international individuality" that fascism and other forms of totalitarianism was working to destroy. That which crossed the border was filthy to the fascist, like the plague-bearing rat, which was equated with Jews by the Nazis (the Nazis, funnily enough, HATED Mickey Mouse for this very reason; Disney may not be perfect, but if Nazis hate it, it can't be all bad). And before I go on, let me just say that Vicki is fully cognizant, as were many of the modernists, that the lynching of African Americans and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--another holocaust, make no mistake--were the result of the same sicknesses of mind and society that produced Nazism: the idea that We are Right and They are Wrong, We are Good and They are Evil, We must Survive and They must Die.
With all this seriousness, it becomes easy to believe that one should only read modernist literature while eating steamed vegetables and drinking rainwater, that one should never do so without first meditating for an hour. This ignores two things. First is that no one loved dick and fart jokes quite like Joyce, except maybe Beckett or Faulkner, and that Wilde and Woolf and any other modernist worth their salt (and here I do not include Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot only sometimes) had a great love of humor. A lot of modernism, in addition to being deeply moving, is fucking hilarious (read Faulkner's The Hamlet if you don't believe me; there's stuff in there that's downright slapstick). Second is that deferral of meaning is like the deferral of pleasure; in other words, sometimes deliciously erotic. And coming to know a book slowly can be like coming to know a person slowly, discovering more about them each time, growing accustomed to their mysteries and flaws, laughing as you discover new things about yourself in the process. In other words, you can learn to love without loving easy answers. I call that a pretty sweet deal.
And all that was just the first chapter.
She begins her official Readings with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who offer a model of reading that is both analytical and empathic, that offers multiple perspectives that, together, create the narrative of the case. One must, like Holmes, work backwards, seeing what evidence is available and eliminating the impossible rather than trying to imagine what narrative might best fit; in other words, read the story, don't write it. On a side note, this should be a lesson to those, like me, who couldn't help but think that Howard K. Stern TOTALLY KILLED Anna Nicole Smith and her son; it's an obvious story, but that doesn't mean it's true, and it leaves out the possibility that Anna and her son killed themselves because DANNIELLYNN IS THEIR INCESTUOUS LOVE CHILD, OMG!!!!!! This model of analytic reading is mirrored in Dubliners, where an overdose of identification can lead someone down the wrong path, which makes them put down the book in frustration and boredom, if by "them" I mean "me," which I do. She goes right to The Sisters, as well as a number of other stories, showing how, in each, seeing only from the narrator's perspective, coming to believe that this was the only way things could come to be, is to fall into the same traps. For example, we become unable to see that the great crime the priest commits against the boy in The Sisters is to convince him that his readings are incorrect, that his interpretations are wrong, that his experiences are nothing compared to the dogma of the Catholic Church. In other words, to convince him, as I became convinced, that it is only natural to feel wrong about being wrong. Dubliners sure read me, alright. I admit it, Vicki. I was wrong. And I am so grateful to be proven so. I am hoping to learn a means of learning that does not demand validation for rightness, that embraces the failure and the mistake with laughter. It provides a promising model for education and, as Vicki's writing on marriage indicates, for love. If we look for someone to give us our answers, we will learn to hate one another for what we don't know. If we see the answers as provisional, as the conversation more important than the conclusion, then a more equal partnership is possible.
First, we must no longer distance ourselves from the unknown. We must be willing to confront the unknowability of the other, and put ourselves at risk, rather than try to narrate a story for them. In other words, we must--no, let me do this another way. No commands. The worst thing that I did to Chris Jensen was to write his story for him, to assume I knew what he felt, to imagine it, to guess at it, to try to turn him into a character in my story, to be a voyeur on my own fucking life rather than tell him that I wanted him. I may not have gotten the answer I wanted, but for the first time, he and I were together, by which I mean, I was there in the moment with him. That is a Joycean epiphany, that is Woolf's moment of being. I felt more alive than I had felt in years when I just said that I wanted him, that I was willing to risk something for him. And I even got a kiss out of it. It . . . well, I shouldn't kiss and tell. It was not passionate. But it was compassionate, and that's nothing to shake a stick at.
This is getting huge. Vicki talks about the multiple narratives of The Waste Land, a series of scenes connected by motifs that prevent narration, and The Ambassadors, where the transformation of people into artworks reveals blindness. She turns to Nausicaa in Ulysses, and the act of mutual, conflicted, complicated voyeurism that I once compared to Bridget Jones's Diary. Vicki really reads me, though, when she gets to To the Lighthouse. When I read the book, I was quite annoyed by Lily and her artistic project, finding it ludicrous that she would spend so much time on a painting and then hide it. Vicki would have slapped me harder than she ever did for Dubliners if I had said that in her class. She reads Lily's attempt to see a different Mrs. Ramsay, one that doesn't NEED to be displayed, as one that demonstrates her independence, her desire to live life on her own terms rather than be ruled by a husband or praised by an audience. The art represents deep communion. I need to keep this book handy when I reread To the Lighthouse. I had forgotten that Lily's painting does survive, and that its hidden nature reminds the reader that there are some things he-she-I cannot know. There are moments of artistic communion that are private. I still detect a note of sarcasm towards Lily, though. When I reread To the Lighthouse and Dubliners, I'm going to keep this book handy, but I am not going to throw out all my criticisms. Vicki would no doubt insist that our beliefs be held together in tension, and so would I.
The last chapter deals with darkness, so often condemned as the place of fear and evil and the unknown, as embraced by the modernists, who acknowledge that night and day will always follow one another and to deny one is to leave oneself blind in the other. She shows how African-American authors like Jean Toomer embraced the metaphor of darkness that had once been used to condemn them, and that many strove to show a balance of dark and light (particularly Toomer, who was of mixed race and who didn't like identifying as black or white). The darkness not only represented war (as in To the Lighthouse), but a confrontation with the subconscious, with sexuality (particularly in Nightwood), with the erasure of difference (we all look the same in the dark), and with the knowledge that all consolation is only that. Night will come, as will the day, and the only purity from one or the other can come in death.
This brings me to a poem by Countee Cullen, a new favorite courtesy this beautiful work, in which the author writes against the white perfection of heaven: And how would I thrive in a perfect place/ Where dancing would be sin,/ With not a man to love my face,/ Nor an arm to hold me in?/ The wistful angels down in hell/ Will smile to see my face,/ And understand, because they fell/ From that all-perfect place." LOVE THAT POEM. Emma Goldman, certainly, would love that poem. Anne Sexton, who writes of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, would love that poem. My friend Theresa, who loves Sexton's Twelve Princesses, would love that poem. Tori Amos, who wrote "And is your place in heaven worth giving up these kisses?" would love that poem. I love it so friggin' much. I am memorizing it.
I've often wanted to be perfect, never wrong, always right, always confident. I am terrified of wrong moves. However, I would like to imagine dancing as a series of wrong moves, of moves out of control, because I love dancing. I love dancing more than I can say, and just as Emma Goldman never actually said, but likely believed, that if she couldn't dance, she wouldn't want to be part of the revolution, I want no heaven where I can't dance.
I wrote to Vicki to tell her I loved her book, and she was grateful. She was worried no one would hear. She was worried that she was speaking into emptiness. Well, I was listening, and I needed to hear it. I need to be willing to listen to another person's perspective, to imagine it and challenge myself as I go, in order to be an artist and scholar and human. I need to remember that just because I can never fully know the mind or heart or life of another, it doesn't mean I shouldn't try.
I've been paid a number of compliments in the past few days. That might be the next entry. But I will say that I have learned something today (this is turning into a South Park episode). I have been reluctant to be seen through the eyes of others, and have wanted to appear to them in such a way that I would always be right, strong, kind, and beautiful. The problem is that because I was unwilling to see what I was doing wrong, I was also missing out on a lot of the things I was doing right. I think I am getting closer to figuring out what I was doing wrong, which opens up a huge array of possibilities. You will never believe what you an accomplish when you stop being afraid of your infinite capacity to get shit wrong.
I'm still scared, of course. I won't lie. But I'm getting better, slowly. And now I have the memory of someone else's lips on mine, someone who, I am starting to understand, saw pieces of me that I have never seen. I owe Vicki so much for that. I owe her my ability to find the beauty in a kiss.
