A stretch of river LIX: On the difficulty of conceiving

Thoreau's shaque d'amour? Naah--but he did do some conceiving of Walden here.

I tried talking to Scruffy about all this on our morning walk, but he was more unresponsive than usual. Sometimes, every once in a while, blogs are man's best friend.

On Monday at 9:00 a.m., I'll meet a class of around 15 unsuspecting freshmen in English Comp. I, and my 18th year as a college professor will begin in earnest. Beyond passing out the syllabus and engaging in some sort of let's-get-acquainted activity and, in some cases, make a first assignment, I don't know what my colleagues do on the first day of class. Aside from our deans' insistence that we have a syllabus ready to pass out on the first day, we're not obligated to do anything. Early on in my career at my previous school, though, I got it in my head that it's a good idea to offer up my version of an "Aims of Education" talk, in which I try to convey, in some way that I hope will be accessible and at the same time intellectually challenging, my sense of what we are talking about when we are talking about Education (as opposed to Training, which is, alas, what has become the default setting for thinking about undergraduate education). This talk changes from year to year, but for the past couple of semesters it has begun this way:

Before anyone arrives, I go to the classroom and write the following on the board:

"Let us spend our lives in conceiving then."

The rest is below the fold.

While we're doing the housekeeping stuff of the first day, I don't say anything about that statement; I just let them think they know what it means, along with whatever attendant lascivious thoughts may come to their mind (I'm not accountable (yet) for what or how they're thinking); if anyone asks about it, I tell them that we'll discuss it later. Then, the housekeeping done, I tell them that that statement is from Thoreau's Walden and that he, a life-long bachelor, wasn't talking about making babies. Rather, he was talking about those other, less-familiar meanings of conceive, "to understand" and/or "to imagine." Then I provide them with the following passage from near the end of chapter 2 of Walden, "Where I Lived, What I Lived For," a bit of writing that never fails to move me:

Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

. . . . Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.(source)

(That second paragraph is just amazing, isn't it?)

But now comes the "difficult" part: No matter the meaning of conceive, each has in common the dynamic of two unalike entities combining to make something that had not previously existed. So far, so good. But even under the best of circumstances, there's more than a little luck involved in that dynamic. Estimates vary widely, but scientists say that anywhere from 30% to well over half of all fertilized human eggs will never result in a full-term baby, only a very small percentage of those "failures" being the result of some sort of human intervention. As all of us who have ever dreamed up some idea or theory that literally or figuratively blows up in our face can attest, the success rate with the non-biological kinds of conceiving are probably not very high, either: speaking from experience, most of my ideas don't even make it to the stage where they have a chance to blow up. In retrospect, that's probably for the best.

In the realm of intellectual conceiving, information-storage and -retrieval devices always mediate this dynamic of unalikes meeting and creating something new, especially in terms of the Internet's ability to access vast quantities of data (see Neil Postman's work--in particular his notion of "information") and, as Nicholas Carr provocatively argues, how we assess the quality of all that information--specifically, what the implications of the 'Net are for those subjects, and they are many, which don't translate easily to web-friendly environments.

It's here that the first-day talks will diverge. Comp I students will get to hear the "spell-checks only check spelling!" speech, along with the story of why "defiantly" has become such a common typo for "definitely;" I'll tell them flat out that such errors mean that they are truly not reading their work when such errors occur. I want them to think about the concept that good writing (read: conceiving) occurs when the subject becomes more important than the writer and that requires patience and focus and attention. Comp II students will get the "we need to think not just about the information from the source but also the source itself" speech: we'll look at and talk about the medieval maps you see here (each reflecting the faith of its maker), a 1530 map (part fairly accurate, part complete guesswork) of the Western Hemisphere that I'd link to if I could find it online; and, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, a GPS device. I'll try to say some things about context (or its lack, in the case of the GPS device) that will make sense with regard to understanding, mastering, being able to make observations, and writing well about a subject. All that, too, is part of conceiving.

As I said, Scruffy was unresponsive as I talked with him about all this. Perhaps my students will be a bit more engaged.

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Back to school

Faculty meetings for the new semester began yesterday, and in today's presentation our guest speaker, yet another in a long procession of guest speakers over the years whose job it has been to tell us about Kids These Days, told us about Kids These Days. One of the things about Kids These Days: They have all these gadgets whose chief purpose seems to be to enable their tendencies toward ADD-ness. Moreover, as we know, their most frequent encounters with written language occur not via paper but via electronic screens of various sorts.

I get that, and I am comfortable with that. Or I thought I was until, via The Daily Dish, I ran across this article by Alan Jacobs, in which he announces that he's begun to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on Kindle.

Here's the bit that tripped me up:

So I bought the Kindle version. All the above problems [chiefly, the paperback's bulk] solved . . . but . . . I found that I was missing the visual cues that codexes offer. I don't often miss them, or not all that much anyway, but in this case I miss them. Wallace goes off on these long riffs, but on the Kindle it’s hard to tell how long they are; whereas when holding the codex I could flip ahead to see how long I should be prepared to keep my concentration before I can expect a break.

In case you didn't catch it, Jacobs does not use the word book; he uses the word codex. To see why this pulled me up short, have a look below at the definition I know for codex, along with a picture of one:

co·dex (kdks)
n. pl. co·di·ces (kd-sz, kd-)
A manuscript volume, especially of a classic work or of the Scriptures.
[Latin cdex, cdic-, tree trunk, wooden tablet, book, variant of caudex, trunk.]
Word History: Latin cdex, the source of our word, is a variant of caudex, a wooden stump to which petty criminals were tied in ancient Rome, rather like our stocks. This was also the word for a book made of thin wooden strips coated with wax upon which one wrote. The usual modern sense of codex, "book formed of bound leaves of paper or parchment," is due to Christianity. By the first century b.c. there existed at Rome notebooks made of leaves of parchment, used for rough copy, first drafts, and notes. By the first century a.d. such manuals were used for commercial copies of classical literature. The Christians adopted this parchment manual format for the Scriptures used in their liturgy because a codex is easier to handle than a scroll and because one can write on both sides of a parchment but on only one side of a papyrus scroll. By the early second century all Scripture was reproduced in codex form. In traditional Christian iconography, therefore, the Hebrew prophets are represented holding scrolls and the Evangelists holding codices. (Thanks, Free Dictionary; image found here.

Add to this my recent reading in which Aztec codices get mentioned with some frequency and, well, maybe you can see why seeing a novel published in 1996 referred to as a codex was a bit startling. You can gather that this usage is brand new to me. Is it for you as well?

But more to the point, I found myself wondering about the implications of this term's application to an object that's usually not called a codex. Books are indeed an ancient technology, but are books themselves ancient--which is to say, passé? Is the choice to call them codices meant to honor them or to draw attention to their jalopy-ness? And what might be implied here regarding those of us who still prefer to read off paper rather than off screens? Are we just slightly-hipper versions of these guys?



As you no doubt have determined by this point, I have no conclusions one way or another about this, aside from the usual truisms: Usages change. But it's hard not to be tempted to read this particular one as a kind of commentary on the position printed text now holds in our culture, that now some (many?) consider it to be on some sort of par with hand-written and illuminated manuscripts. That is a strange thing to contemplate as I once again face the necessity of explaining to students why having a book for the class is a good, if quaint, notion.

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My two cents

Randall of Musings from the Hinterland has a short post up re the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" and its attendant controversy. Randall, to summarize, acknowledges and respects the First Amendment and property rights at stake in this issue but disagrees both with the building of the mosque and with the wisdom of President Obama's remarks on this issue last week.

I'll make two quick points here:

1) I think quite frankly that anyone's pretense to arguing that certain structures or businesses should be restricted within an arbitrary (and yet-to-be determined) distance of the site of the World Trade Center and its immediate vicinity should not be permitted, arguing that this space is hallowed ground, lost much if not all its resonance when the Port Authority decided that the WTC site was too valuable commercially to leave "vacant" (read: as a memorial to 9/11). One could argue, in fact, that the only religion that has emerged triumphant here, the first one to slap the face of the victims and survivors of that day, was Capitalism. Yes: I understand the other arguments for rebuilding there, but really: a revenue-generator as a memorial of that day?

2) I have grown weary of those people who in effect are making the argument that the Establishment Free Exercise Clause [thanks, Randall] applies only to those faiths within the Christian tradition (Judeo-Christian, if the arguer is feeling especially inclusive). These people rail against perceived and actual disrespect for their faith but do not feel compelled to respect the faith (let alone the rights) of others to worship (or not) when and where and as they please. Religious fundamentalists have for years advocated in the courts over the right to engage in organized prayer in public schools (churches apparently not offering enough space or opportunity for that activity) and cannot comprehend why on earth anyone might find that even coming close to violating the Establishment Clause; yet, let the adherents of one particular religion seek (and obtain, via unanimous approval of the relevant board) permission to build a building not even entirely devoted to worship, and all Heck breaks loose among some of those very same people--people, by the way, who would have said nothing if a Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu entity had proposed and been approved for the same structure.

It seems to me that that was the substance of President Obama's remarks: to affirm the Free Exercise Clause, even in the face of widespread opposition to this particular instance of its exercise. But the Constitution is not a popularity contest. The slap in the face here is being administered those who want to be protected by the Constitution but refuse to extend those same protections to others.

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The novel-as-package-tour: John Updike's Brazil

The first-edition cover of John Updike's Brazil. Image found here.

At some point during my just-completed rereading of Brazil (1994), I asked myself, Now, why is it that I'm reading this thing? And then I remembered that it was at the very end of my dissertation defense that one of my committee members said something like, "All this you've been talking about sounds just like John Updike's new novel." At some point afterward, I bought a cheap paperback edition and read it and was underwhelmed; this summer, though, I thought I should re-read it in case I'd missed something that might be useful for the book project, a fleck or two of critical gold in the matrix of Updike's quartz-like prose. Alas, no gold but plenty of pyrite that I'll spare my reader(s) the assaying of here (though pyrite can be pretty to look at on its own terms sometimes); in fact, I found myself more irritated than underwhelmed this time around. As the Mrs. and I discussed it this past week (after I finished it, she read it in about a day and a half--she's a fast reader anyway, but it's a quick read, which is a virtue, I suppose), it occurred to me that to my mind it violates a core principle of literary fiction: it tells more than it shows.

Here's the plot: Tristão and Isabel meet on Rio de Janeiro's famed Copacabana Beach in the late-mid '60s and, within a couple of minutes, feel their mutual destiny lies in being together. Divided by both race and class, they could not be more opposite. Tristão makes his living by thievery, lives in the favelas (slums) on the hillsides overlooking Rio's waterfront and might as well be an orphan; he is about as full-blooded an African as it is possible for a native Brazilian to be. Isabel's family, meanwhile, is the embodiment of the leisure class; she herself is white-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed. They go to Isabel's uncle's nearby apartment, where Isabel lives (her mother is dead; her father is in the foreign ministry in the capital, Brasilia), and they make love for the first of what will be numerous, often explicitly-described times (Updike's well-known lush, erotic language is very much on display here). After a couple of months together, they run away to São Paulo to make a life together; Isabel's father sends some gunmen after them to take her to Brasilia; Tristão goes after her and together they head deeper, ever deeper into the sertão (the Brazilian "outback") and, eventually, the jungle. There, something significant and, frankly, perplexing occurs which I won't divulge here (though the Amazon reviews contain spoilers, so be forewarned), and then they retrace their route, hoping to reconcile with Isabel's father, through a Brazil now experiencing the growth and development of the '80s, back to Rio, where, in the end, things essentially come full circle. It is a simple plot, which Updike notes in his Afterword he's adapted from the medieval romance of Tristan and Iseult. And I have nothing against simple plots or, for that matter, simple plots with lots of sex in them. Too often, though, I get the feeling that Updike's chief goal here is to write a book with a simple plot and lots of sex that happens to be set in Brazil, a Brazil, moreover, that feels less like a genuine setting and more like an exotic backdrop--and that, I do have a problem with.

More below the fold.

The aforementioned Afterword is an odd one, and it also, I think, begins to get at Brazil's weaknesses as a novel. In it, by way of acknowledging some of his sources Updike mentions some specific titles of classic works on and about Brazil, some Lonely Planet guidebooks, the names of prominent Brazilian novelists from whose works he "took courage and local color," and some people at Companhia Das Letras, a Brazilian publishing house in São Paulo, who saved him from "many errors and implausibilities." Although the Afterword's contents do not preclude Updike's actually having visited Brazil and drawn additional inspiration from having been there himself, I get the strange feeling from it that he hasn't been there. Not that he has to have been there to have written a great novel about Brazil or, for that matter, any other place, of course. But often what I find most offputting about this book is that it's, well, bookish. Tristão, we're told two pages in, "had spent enough time in school to learn to read street signs and advertisements and no more," yet his diction is often that of the medieval knight upon whom he's modeled. And more than a few times, we get speeches by people like this one, by Tristão's brother Chiquinho, whom Tristão and Isabel have hoped to meet in São Paulo:

"I am no longer making fuscas [Brazilian slang for Volkswagen Beetles]. I am into a new thing, electronics. But my education is too poor for the work, so I am stuck at the lowliest level, cleaning the factory so there is not a fleck of dirt. In the intricate thing we make, which solves all mathematical problems in a little stroke of directed lightning, a fleck of dust is like a rock in the engine of a car. Under the enlightened capitalist policies which have supplanted the dangerous socialist experiments of Quadros and Goulart, I have been privileged to head the team of cleaners, while taking night courses that educate me in the mysteries of the new technology." (64)

One reads passages like this and feels compelled to say, Who is really the audience for this? Surely not someone like, oh, I don't know, a Brazilian, much less a Brazilian who's new in town and wants his slightly-better-educated brother to help him find work. But it's here, nevertheless, along with many other, similar passages, reading more like a novelized combination history and guidebook than a novel. (This, by the way, is my more charitable explanation for such passages; the less-charitable one is a compulsion to use what one has read so that that reading won't have gone to waste, rather than letting it inform one's writing via shaping the background for that writing. The fact that the latter doesn't happen suggests some insecurity on Updike's part with his setting--insecurity being something that, whatever else one might think of his work, Updike isn't usually thought to suffer from.)

Indeed, our lovers, though native Brazilians themselves, are unfamiliar with their own nation beyond Rio; so, while they are not tourists, they encounter these landscapes--or, rather, they are presented as encountering them--much as tourists would: wide-eyed, a bit disoriented, attuned to the unfamiliar. But neither do Tristão and Isabel seem especially responsive to any of the worlds in which they find themselves. Before they met, one gets the feeling that they had existed only for themselves. Now that they are together, they exist only for each other. Meanwhile, Brazil's multitudinous settings end up getting only enough attention as the novel's servicing of the plot will allow. Brazil-as-place is certainly colorful, to be sure, but by the novel's end I don't feel as though I know very much about Brazil, or even very much about its main characters. Not enough to genuinely care about them, at any rate, I'm sorry to say. But we can at least say we've seen some local color.

Maybe the saddest question to ask of a novel is why its author felt compelled to write it. To ask that question reveals that the reader hasn't been moved by its subject(s) either emotionally or intellectually, even to the point that one suspects the writer hasn't been moved by his/her work, either. Yet, even "money" doesn't seem to work as an explanation for Updike's motive here. In terms of his output, it would seem to be a mistake to say that in Brazil Updike is just playing out the string--he would go on to write ten more novels, not to mention short stories, poems and criticism, before his death in 2009, 15 years after Brazil's publication. Perhaps Updike wanted a change of scenery in which to set some familiar themes. Nothing at all wrong with that in the abstract, but it has not resulted in work that advances Updike's reputation. Rather, it makes me want to read some Brazilian novels, to linger in that world for a while rather than breeze through it.

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The Aeolian Harp, rewritten

Don't you hate it when someone says something that it feels like you've been trying to say, off and on, for the better part of your adult life and says it much better than you?

The opening paragraph of a review of Chris Abrahams' album, Play Scar:

You know how when “Strawberry Fields” on Magical Mystery Tour fades out, another song comes passing through, only to disappear moments later? It makes one cock an eyebrow and wonder, “What was that song?” It’s like a brush with an alternate universe in which different Beatles songs exist, and the imagination concludes that an infinite amount of untapped music exists on the other side of the veil. This is why people will always create music, because it seems to exist without us or not. It’s a limitless realm. That one moment where a subliminal song passes our ears is how Play Scar begins, as if the opening chord on a shimmering organ is that moment, but this time we snag the tail of the comet and are led somewhere other.

Romantic neo-Platonism lives! But it is also thus with many things in Real Life, no?

(By the way: lovers of (and those curious about) contemporary instrumental music should make The Silent Ballet a frequent place to visit: skilled and knowledgeable reviewers write about a dizzying range of music, from experimental to classical to movie soundtracks. Even better: the reviewers describe very well what you'll hear. I've rarely felt led astray.)

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Niafunké: An appreciation

The cover for Niafunké.

I haven't posted on music on this blog in some time. However, I recently wrote a review for this album over at Amazon, and I thought I'd share it with my reader(s) here.

Let's be honest: Records that give pleasure to the listener are, relatively speaking, a dime a dozen. We hear them on the oldies stations; our collections are filled with such music. Far rarer is music for which the listener feels genuine, profound gratitude to its maker for having made it and for his/her own great, good fortune for having heard of it before s/he died. Niafunké is most definitely on my list of such music.

I don't believe I had even heard of Ali Farka Touré before a friend played Niafunké for me almost ten years ago. A couple of songs in, and I actually felt something like shame that I had not known about this man and his music long before: it was--and is--that good, that gripping and compelling.

The first four songs give the listener an idea of this album's musical range: "Ali's Here," a rave-up that prepared me, without knowing it, for Tinariwen; "Allah Uya," a song whose melody and rhythm, despite its religious subject matter, can't help but evoke slow movement across the desert and which, I'd learn much later, borrows a little guitar lick from Red & Green's "Timbindy"; "Mali Dje," a slow-tempo plea to Touré's nation's peoples to work together for their common survival (and thus an indirect introduction to Mali's history of inter-ethnic (and sometimes intra-ethnic) violence); and "Saukare," my introduction to the njarka, the Malian violin--a screechy-sounding instrument that is, admittedly, an acquired taste (it has grown on me, but I admit it took a while). These songs also serve as a partial introduction to Malian music more generally; all that's missing is southern Mali's Nigerian- and Senegalese-influenced music (as embodied by Habib Koité and Oumou Sangare), a kora piece (the kora is the Malian harp) by Toumani Diabaté, and something from Sya, Issa Babayogo's masterful melding of traditional instruments and musical forms with Western techno.

But for me the real revelation on Niafunké is "Howkouna," a song whose melody feels, to this Western listener anyway, as though it's beginning in the middle of a line (Savane's "Erdi Yer Bounda" has that same quality); then the njarka's repeated riff kicks in; and then that extraordinary second part of the song where the sung melody line just goes and goes past the point that it feels like it "should" stop, slowly down the scale, occasionally turning back up the scale before heading back down again, like water seeking out a downhill route. You know it's structured because the chorus knows the words and will sing them back, call-response style, but it feels, if not improvised, then certainly organic. Even today, after many subsequent listens, that second part still catches me anticipating its end and being surprised when it keeps going.

There are also the circumstances of this record's being made that enhance its aura for me: Touré had not recorded in five years and was disappointed in his more recent records; he rarely performed; he had devoted himself to improving the lives of his fellow citizens of Niafunké by becoming its mayor and purchasing irrigation equipment for its farmers. The basic tracks were recorded in an abandoned mud building on the outskirts of town, after Touré was done tending his fields for the day. It's clear that Touré wanted to make this record; it's equally clear, though, that there were other things to do while he made it, more pressing than guitar-playing . . . and who would argue that? And yet: Look at what resulted--a record whose subjects are those other, more pressing things, along with the urgency of embracing them. This is political and spiritual music in the most essential senses of those terms--which is to say, it is communal.

Of course, when I first listened to Niafunké, I was just as ignorant of the Malian artists named above; it is because of Niafunké that I know what I do of them, and that is the other reason I am so grateful for this record. I wanted to hear more, so I looked for samplers; the same friend who introduced me to Niafunké also played me Issa Bagayogo's Sya; one thing led to another, as these things do, and now I have some inkling of Mali's (and by extension, western Africa's) musical richness. Before hearing Niafunké, that richness was one of those examples of things that we don't know that we don't know (which, of course, we can recognize only in retrospect); after hearing Niafunké, I had to remind myself that ignorance is not a sin (except when it's willful) but, as I noted above, I couldn't help feeling a bit ashamed for not having head it before.

Can you tell I like this album? I like lots of music, and lots of different kinds of music; there are few records, though, that I will recommend without reservation to anyone with a varied musical palette, or willing to cultivate one . . . or even to the not-so-willing. You've often heard it said that Kind of Blue is that album you recommend to someone who says he hates jazz. For me, Niafunké is the Kind of Blue of Malian music.

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The dark side of literary regionalism

David Edwin Bernard, Threshing Run # 7 (1984). Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Image found here. About a hundred years after the rise of regionalist literature, but it captures well regionalism's usually-rural setting and life therein, and the implicit tension between the old ways and the new.

I've just finished reading around in Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present by Darlene J. Sadlier, billed by its publisher (Univ. of Texas Press) as "the first comprehensive cultural history of Brazil to be written in English." It does indeed seem to be comprehensive (but then again, I don't know a heck of a lot about Brazil relative to the little I know about the rest of Spanish-speaking America, so, "grain of salt" and all that), and it's written in a very approachable manner. At the very least, it's an excellent place to start for those interested in learning a little more about how others have imagined and depicted Brazil and--the reason I'm posting this today--how Brazilians have imagined themselves to themselves.

Though politically Brazil's history in the 19th century does not parallel ours, I was intrigued to learn from Sadlier's chapter on the emergence of Brazilian literature that its literary history does. In both countries in the second half of that century, as cultural and economic power shifted to the cities, the regions of the interior became the subject of writers intent on exploring their topography and cultural and linguistic mores: the essence of literary regionalism (itself an offshoot of literary realism). In the U.S., among the more prominent regionalists and the places they wrote about are Sarah Orne Jewett (Maine), Kate Chopin (New Orleans, and Cajun and Creole country), Joel Chandler Harris (Georgia), Bret Harte (the West), and, later, Willa Cather (the Plains and New Mexico) and Charles W. Chesnutt (North Carolina; intriguingly, Chesnutt was an African-American writer whose first-person narrators often "passed" to their readership as white by not explicitly revealing their race). In the case of Brazilian literature, Sadlier notes the influence of Portuguese writers becoming more interested in the lives of people living in rural Portugal (of course, they would have been reading other European writers doing the same sort of thing, as were the U.S. writers I named above).

An obvious, and relatively benign, cultural function of regionalist writing is that at its best, its depiction of a distinctive place unfamiliar to many readers reveals the people of that place in its distinctiveness and, at the same time, to be in its essence as much a part of the wider nation as any other part. For a relatively new nation seeking to gain a sense of national identity, regionalism thus also performs important political work. Clearly some of this is at work in U.S. regionalist writing, coming as it does in the wake of the Civil War and the beginnings of the settlement of the West along with the rise of urbanization and immigration from both Europe and Asia. But in this writing there's some nostalgia-feeding as well: much regionalist writing appeared in magazines, whose readership was urban and, more often than not, had moved away from the very places that served as settings for the regionalists--and, as well, the stories themselves often recall "the way things used to be" in those now much-changed places (as just one example, Harris's Uncle Remus tales have their origins in antebellum times--though, as near as I can tell, Uncle Remus himself isn't nostalgic about slavery itself). So, then: two levels of nostalgia--the audience's for a place; that place's people for an earlier, now-lost time--are often at work in U.S. regional writing.

These aren't necessarily bad things in and of themselves. But, as per the title of this post, an endnote in Sadlier's book reminded me that they can be, and that led me to wonder a bit about our own contemporary moment.

As I mentioned earlier, though Brazilian and U.S. regionalist literature appeared at about the same time in the 19th century, our corresponding respective political and cultural moments were quite different. Though Brazil won its independence from Portugal in 1820, it was ruled by a monarchy until the 1890s; moreover, Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888. For another, Brazil's landmass is the size of all of Europe's, the result being that, whereas certain regions of the U.S. (with, probably, the exception of Creole society) never appeared exotic but, rather, quaint, for Brazilians enormous expanses of their nation seemed like other nations entirely to the Europeanized coastal areas. The people of these regions--the sertanejos (the Brazilian equivalent of the gauchos) of Brazil's semi-arid deep-northeastern interior, and the by-then-all-but-extinct Indians of the coastal regions--were the romanticized heroes of these narratives, but they were also types that the vast majority of Brazilians reading these narratives would have had no direct experience with . . . and yet, their writers were establishing these types as archetypal Brazilians, as embodiments of the nation's emerging national consciousness.

It's within this context that Sadlier paraphrases literary historian José Maurício Gomes de Almeida's discussion of regionalism (which doesn't differ in its essentials from mine above) and then goes on to speculate:

It is interesting to consider late-nineteenth-century Brazilian regionalism in light of Benedict Anderson's discussions of the nation as an imagined community. Perhaps the concept of a regional literature, which focuses on a specific area and communtiy, was a way for writers to circumvent the vastness and variety that made knowing or representing Brazil as a whole implausible. (315, n. 39)

This is an intriguing idea. I'll just say that I don't know if this is right, but it's certainly not incongruous with anything about regionalism that I've said above. All of us know the risks inherent in insisting on a single place--or, for that matter, some experience in that single place--as being a synecdoche of even that place, let alone an entire nation. Still, perhaps, also at work in the audience for those magazine stories about Home was the comfort that, as confused, confusing and alienating as life in the city could be, there was always a place where life made sense. (Just to be clear: I'm speaking here of U.S. regionalism. My sense of Brazilian regionalist fiction's audience, as I mentioned before, was that they had little if any direct knowledge of the sertão (the "backlands" of the northeast) and the jungle; to them, these places might as well have been entirely different countries.)

The "dark side" reading of this idea, though, is that regionalism can become a means of insisting on a place's distinctiveness, its misunderstood-ness, even its superiority, relative to (and, thus, to the exclusion of) the rest of the nation. In other words, regionalism becomes provincialism. Just off the top of my head, when thinking about this idea as regards U.S. regionalism I think one could make the case that this happened with the "moonlight and magnolias" turn that novels set in the South took after the end of Reconstruction and into the 20th century, culminating in the Southern Agrarian movement as articulated in the essay collection I'll Take My Stand and, much more disturbingly, in the novels of Thomas J. Dixon (whose most famous novel, The Clansman, was made into the film Birth of a Nation). I think we also can hear echoes of provincialism in the recent politics of some via the "real America" trope that seems implicitly to exclude large urban, more cosmopolitan places in favor of an older, more culturally-homogeneous America. That trope, I hasten to add, is not explicitly a racist or a xenophobic one, but it seems inherently suspicious of the Other--it is a trope as old as America itself. It is resistant to difference to the point of being unwilling even to consider that acknowledgement and acceptance of difference under the umbrella of a set of ideas to which we collectively subscribe might also be American.

You might have suspicioned that I don't think that trope is a good thing. To our credit, our literature largely has avoided being too provincial. That which strays too far that way tends not to survive. Sarah Orne Jewett's most famous story, "A White Heron," has survived--and flourished--not because it is about Maine but because it is about a little girl learning the cost of what it means to become a person separate and distinct from other people, something not only Mainers have experiences with. As goes our literature, so goes our nation. We are at our best when we are not insisting on authenticity or reveling in nostalgia. We'll never find the truly authentic; the nostalgic is always prettier than it really was.

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Faulkner, race, and the eye of the beholder

Now with a bit of additional writing.

Faulkner's burial, Oxford Mississippi, July 7, 1962. Image found here.

"[R]acism is in the eye of the beholder." --Andrew Breitbart

(Well, yes, in some sense. And the corollary of that remark is that if the beholder has designated himself to be a hammer, everything looks like a nail.)

The immediate context for Breitbart's quote was his (stated) understanding of what the 2-minute excerpt of the Shirley Sherrod video showed. I've already said my piece about all that. But I've been experiencing all that through another context yesterday and today, that of some reading I've been doing for my book project--in particular, some older (late-'80s and early-'90s) criticism on William Faulkner's novel, Go Down, Moses. As those who, like me, were in graduate literature programs back then may recall, those were the days of the ascendancy of theory and the resulting intra-departmental turf wars among the New Historicists, post-colonialists, feminists, Marxists, etc., etc.; the desire to expand the canon and, for some, seeing theoretical work as a way to do some not-so-incidental political work via inserting the inevitable "oh, by the way" kinds of passages in articles and books that point out the sociocultural blindnesses of the author and/or the characters s/he has created.

Just about the only work those moments accomplish in these pieces is that they inoculate their writers from the potential charge that they, too, must be blind to their subjects' blindnesses for not having pointed them out. They are purely defensive moves that add little to the reader's understanding of the text . . . apart from reminding us of the bleedin' obvious, that human beings, try as they might, can never fully erase from their language or behavior whatever virtues or prejudices their environment have imprinted on them.

As you've probably gathered, I've run into a couple such pieces during my reading yesterday and today. Of course, given that these articles' subject is Faulkner's depictions of African-Americans in Go Down, Moses, it would be naïve not to expect them. Moreover, because this novel is dedicated to Caroline Barr, the hundred-year-old black woman who served the Faulkner family from the time that William was a small boy and who died during the writing of the material that would become the novel, we're provided with a legitimate excuse to examine the novel in comparison with Faulkner's (genuine, heartfelt, but yes, socially and culturally awkward (at best; offensive, some have characterized it) with regard to Barr's family's wishes) public actions and statements about Barr before and at her death. But this post isn't about that, exactly. Rather, it's to ask a question: What would we have Faulkner do about this? It is difficult to speak with him about his attitudes regarding race, seeing as he's inconveniently dead (see the picture at the top of this post); however much we may wish otherwise, he's no longer in a position to revisit and rethink them.

That may sound a bit snarky, but the fact either not well known or forgotten or ignored is that when Faulkner was alive and given the opportunity to do so, he did revisit his public statements on race and, as he felt necessary, revised them. Louis Daniel Brodsky recounts (.pdf) the public response to Faulkner's "Letter to the North," published in Life on March 5, 1956, regarding the Supreme Court-imposed integration of the University of Alabama. The quickie summary: Faulkner gave a couple of interviews during this time while quite drunk and said some things that, had he been sober, he never would have said, not even in jest; in his writing, though, his position on desegregation was that it was just, it was inevitable, and it must happen, but that he wanted it to happen on the South's terms, not imposed from without by the federal government. I don't know if it was he who popularized the phrase "go slow," but those exact words appear in some of his writings on the subject. You can imagine how this played. Some blacks and white Northern liberals accused him of deliberate delay; white Southerners called him a scalawag and sent him threats via the mail. Moreover, you can imagine how some people read all this now: Why advocate moderation (read: delay) when you yourself say desegregation is both just and inevitable?

There are two replies to this. The first is, Faulkner didn't have to say a word on this subject to begin with, and certainly not in fora as public as Life magazine. However, as a result of having won the Nobel Prize for literature, he took on, uncomfortably to be sure, the role of public figure; in the specific case of the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama, he feared that people would be killed and felt obligated to do whatever he could to keep that from happening. Given the time and circumstances, he was pretty damned brave. The other reply also has to do with time and circumstance: My mother, not quite 70, remembers swimming in a whites-only swimming pool in Austin (yes--Austin, that bluer-than-blue island in the very-red state of Texas) when she was a kid. I mention that to make two points: a) How those times are not all that distant from our own; b) how dramatically, how fundamentally our society has changed in that short a time, thus making it exceedingly difficult to remember how, not so long ago, people fought and died both for and against even the smallest incremental changes in the status quo. Sure, Faulkner's moderate course seems mealy-mouthed now--how could it not?--but, as I noted above, extremists on both sides of the desegregation question were driving the debate, and his position, calculated to ensure that as few people were killed as possible, was both brave for him to make as a white Southern man, and sane.

Another way of putting all this: Passing judgment on the racial attitudes of someone living in a time and place very different from our own frankly seems like a cheap way to score rhetorical points, especially if we're not asking an equally-important question: had we been living in the same time and place, would we have done differently? Or better? Or, for that matter, anything at all?

I think it's also true of Faulkner that he was even braver on the issue of race in his fiction and that it's possible to see his thinking evolve over the course of his career, Go Down, Moses being, again, not as direct and affirming of social justice as we in our own relatively-more-enlightened time might wish, but (at least as I read it) powerfully moving--perhaps (I contend) in ways that Faulkner doesn't fully control.

Like all of us, Faulkner was a product of his place and time. He was wise enough to see the South, a place he loved deeply, as terribly flawed by the legacy of slavery, its blacks' and whites' mutual fear and hatred and mistrust, and felt compelled as an artist to explore, as honestly as he knew how, all that very unpleasant heritage. All of which makes quite funny a short "P.S." in a letter he received from a New Yorker in support of Faulkner's "Letter to the North," which Brodsky quotes in his article:

"I was fascinated by the 3 novels of yours that I read. If only you had grown up in N.Y.!"

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Why politics exhausts me these days

The FULL video, in case anyone's interested. There's also this, via Talking Points Memo's story: "Quick note: There is, as you can see, an edit in the middle of the speech. An NAACP spokesman tells me that, according to the local chapter, that's when the tape was switched in the recording. What's missing, he said, is a line about Sherrod being offered tobacco."



Well, okay: not politics per se but how it gets "reported" and discussed in these de-centralized, 24/7 news cycle, pick-the-source-of-information-that-most-often-affirms-your-already-established-belief-system days of ours. It is clear, now, that what happened to Shirley Sherrod yesterday--not Andrew Breitbart's release of an out-of-context two-minute edit of a 43-minute speech whose subject is the exact opposite of what he and others alleged it was about, the subsequent real-time back-and-forth on the news about it, and certainly not her dismissal from her position in the USDA without allowing her (and others) to defend herself--should never have happened, either to her or to any person. When even Glenn Beck, that consummate dot-connector, says an injustice was done to Sherrod, it's pretty clear what will happen today regarding her reinstatement. Well: what should happen.

(Yes: I do support this president and most of his administration's policies. But I hope those who keep reading won't miss the frustration I have been feeling these days toward the Obama administration--not to mention the larger frustration everyone should feel toward the way Congress, because of the deliberate choice of Republicans to not be honest brokers in legislating, is (not) working.)

But it did, and why it did will be the subject of many and various discussions headed in many different directions. Indeed, this story would work well as a case study in the (to my mind) now-vexed relationship between noisy activists whose sole agenda is not policy but ends-justifies-the-means "winning," their surrogates in the media and, increasingly, in the elected branch of government, and this particular version of the executive branch, who, any intellectually-honest person no matter his/her politics would agree, has studiously avoided the appearance of any sort of institutionalized favoritism toward African-Americans.

So much so, in fact, that that is surely what drove Tom Vilsack's decision to force Sherrod out.

That leads me to the first big lesson yesterday's events taught me: that the Obama administration's actions, on the matter of race at least, have in effect been shaped not by policy but by the afore-mentioned folks out there so driven by animus toward this president that they do not hesitate whenever possible to invent a pattern of institutionalized reverse-racism. Preternaturally-optimistic person that I am, it's my fervent hope that this episode will serve to discredit the Andrew Breitbarts of the world and make the markets for his, um, journalism a bit more skeptical in their consumption and propagation of it. But that's beside the point, really. This administration's hamartia has been, almost from the get-go, an overabundance of caution. The legislative manifestations of that are driven by politics--in both the House and the Senate, there are enough skittish lawmakers that Obama has felt it necessary, rightly or wrongly, to scale back proposals to better assure their votes--this started with the stimulus package and continued (especially) with health care and is at present the case with climate legislation. But the result, despite what some would have us believe, has on the whole not been overreach but underreach, to the point that, despite a 9.5% unemployment rate, we won't see a full-blown jobs bill this session because of fear about deficit spending. "Good policy is good politics," Obama has said, and I happen to agree with that. But too many senators and representatives instead act as though good politics is half-assed legislation (if we absolutely must). Meanwhile, in the case of Shirley Sherrod, it was clearly administrative overcaution that caused Vilsack to overreact. Today will be embarrassing, and it should be, as things are a) set aright and b) the dawning realization sets in that because of that overcaution they no longer act out of the courage of their convictions but out of a desire to placate people who have made it abundantly clear that they cannot and will not be placated.

That leads me to the second big realization: that the desire to see the Obama administration fail, no matter the cost to the governance of this nation, has become institutionalized on the right to the point that Republicans and their conservative supporters who argue that such a strategy is, at best, misguided (and at worst, unconscionable within the context of having legitimate and healthy debates about policy) are losing primary elections or are literally shouted down (as here). To be sure, back in the day there were folks on "my side" who held a fair amount of enmity toward the Bush administration, but I would argue that did not result in the spectacle of, say, Democrats serving on bi-partisan committees to write bills, keep insisting that further changes to those bills be made and see those changes made, only to refuse then even to vote the bill out of committee (that, in a nutshell, is the history of the Max Baucus "Gang of Six" committee that wrote the Senate version of the healthcare bill). This sort of thing is not statesmanship or governance but winning the day, a creation of our multi-voiced media, itself divided by partisan alliances or by the desire to not appear partisan.

And that leads me to my third and last big realization. From the days of the 2008 primaries, one of the things I admired most about Obama's campaign was its very clear focus on the long-term, the bigger picture. They seemed to understand that, times being what they have become, what seems significant in the moment would, a few weeks or months down the road seem considerably less so--if, indeed, it was remembered by anyone at all. Given that one of my criticisms of the previous administration was its apparent inability to think through any scenario, foreign or domestic, past the horizon of the next election, I looked forward to an Obama administration that was more interested in genuine governance--something that by its very nature is long term--and to sincere debates with conservatives who also were interested in genuine governance. With some profound caveats, I have to say that at its best the Obama administration has satisfied my expectations on this score--this despite Republican recalcitrance and a loud progressive element disappointed (and sometimes angry) with its half-loaves. But the events of the past two days show that, in the interest of maintaining an optics of colorblindness (obviously a laudatory interest), the administration is susceptible to making snap judgments at the expense of careful assessing of facts (not to mention, of course, the grave human cost to Shirley Sherrod). It is angering to see an administration rightly angry about charges from some that it plays a racialized politics make the decision it did, and as quickly as it did--out of fear--what else to call it?--that hesitancy in acting would be read as its being party to a racialized politics.

I want to be a long-term optimist in all this. This event, coming as it does in the immediate wake of the recent re-litigating (led by FOX News) of the New Black Panther voter-intimidation case (which, just to repeat, the Bush Administration's own Department of Justice had dismissed as being unfounded), the back-and-forth between the Tea Party and the NAACP, and the on-going debate in New York over the building of a Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero, has the potential to lead to several greater goods: in addition to wanting and hoping to see Andrew Breitbart's reputation as Right-Wing Truth-Bringer electronically drawn and quartered--in particular by those who have been invested in that reputation, I hope that the more vocal elements of those who don't approve of the Obama administration be more loyal in their opposition--that they be a bit more thoughtful about what is at the root of their (and others') criticisms of the administration. Debates over economic policy will reveal tensions over what to do (if anything) about the rapidly-widening gap between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy in this country. That's fine, and inevitable. But there are some in this country, some of them quite prominent, willing to more-or-less explicitly frame economic debates in terms of race, as, for example, Rush Limbaugh's arguing that health care reform is a disguised system of reparations. Especially in a very difficult time, such accusations are not just wrong on the merits, they are obscene and unconscionable. I would hope that the Sherrod case causes GOP candidates and officials who, through their words or their silence, have acquiesced in this rhetoric in hopes of getting elected to look past November and acknowledge that this will come to no good end for anyone, no matter his or her politics: MSNBC and FOX and folks out in the blogosphere will just set up competing electronic guillotines and, increasingly, our politics will be reduced to seeing who can best disguise their pandering so as to earn votes and money (and not necessarily in that order) while we all drown in simple-minded rhetoric often based not on facts but unproven assertions and badly disguised as serious discussion about exceedingly complex and important issues--that they will look at all this and say, For our sake as a nation and the ideals we say we stand for, this must change. But I also hope that Democrats and their supporters will also face all this and not be cowed by it but rebut it, to not just label their opposition as racists and call it good. It's precisely that sort of indiscriminate tarring (or, alternately, ignoring it in the belief that people are decent and smart enough to see through it and dismiss it) that has gotten us to this point. It must stop, no matter our politics.

Someone--actually, LOTS of someones--needs to say, simply and directly, that what happened to Shirley Sherrod yesterday was wrong all the way around, that the polite term for anyone of whatever politics who cannot or will not acknowledge that does not exist, and that that person should be kept as far on the fringes of civil society as possible. But I also have to say that having to say that, necessary as it is, exhausts me. And saddens, and angers me.

There is indeed much to be afraid of--no question. But a politics of fear and of fear-mongering, no matter what the object of that fear or who engages in it, is no way to face these dangers. It's a dangerous amalgam of cynicism and fear; as though some want us to keep seeing the Twin Towers fall in some infinite loop in our collective imagination. Well. If it's okay with y'all, I'd prefer not to think that we're behaving as though our entire nation--the people and its elected representatives--are suffering from PTSD. Why, you'll flinch at little things like seeing some trash lying in the street or hearing a car backfiring. You could be hospitalized for that, if the symptoms get bad enough.

You might do something really crazy if you're not careful.

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Casta paintings and the Virgin of Guadalupe: a link

Luis de Mena, casta painting, c. 1750. Museo de América, Madrid. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

(A couple of earlier posts on casta painting are here. A long post on the meaning of the Virgin of Guadalupe in connection with the New World as a miscegenated space is here.)

As part of my research for the book project, the other day I revisited this post's accompanying image, and some further reading--especially in reading the historical record supporting the authenticity of the story and, more directly, here--I was reminded, in a different way this time, of the contested nature of just about everything regarding the story of the Virgin's appearance to Juan Diego, from the very earliest days of that story (she appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in 1531). Some (much?) of that argument, we find between the lines, was driven by rivalries among bishops and their respective orders (which I first speculated on here). Thus, it makes sense that we also have overt written and visual assertions of Juan Diego's worthiness as a way of asserting the truth of the Virgin's appearance to him on the hill of Tepeyac; hence, in the frieze over the east entrance of the old basilica dedicated to the Virgin, Juan Diego's accompanying hat and staff, which mark him iconographically not only as a shepherd but also as someone making a pilgrimage to a shrine, and the beaver in the foreground (a symbol of chastity in medieval bestiaries).

Anyway, that and the fact of the Virgin's appearance as a mestiza to an indigenous person--that is, she appears, in effect, as always already of mixed ethnicity--made me wonder about linkages, whether direct or thematic, between depictions of the Virgin and the genre of casta painting that arose in Mexico and, to a lesser extent, in Peru during the colonial era. Those paintings are not merely secular in content, they are quite literally domestic: often their settings are the interiors of houses, or they show a family out for a promenade; some standardized depictions of castes show physical violence occurring between the spouses, their child attempting to intervene. So, off to Wichita State University's library I went yesterday, and in one of the books I looked at I ran across the Luis de Mena painting you see at the top of this post. As it turns out, this same image also appears in Ilona Katzew's excellent book on the subject; I own this book, but I didn't remember seeing it in there and so didn't bother to look again before last night. (Man: the things I tell you people.)

In a way, it's my forgetting this image that really prompts this post.

Casta paintings that also include images of the Virgin apparently are not very common: this is the only such example in Katzew's book, and I know I've not seen any others like this. At one level, that near-absence of juxtapositions is to be expected: The Virgin is, of course, the embodiment of chastity, while the most direct message of the casta paintings is, ahem, the consequences of the procreative act; moreover, though interracial marriages were officially permitted in Mexico, some, as I discussed in this post, were more approved-of than others were with regard to the social standing of the children of that marriage--more approved-of because of the matter of their racial purity. These were clearly not sacred but secular matters, as regarded the rules governing the painting guilds and their permitted subjects; to directly link the Virgin to such paintings would cross not only legal bounds but also those of propriety. I can be forgiven for not having remembered Mena's painting, then: it's something of an anomaly within this genre.

Katzew herself doesn't spend too much time on Mena's painting, either. She briefly discusses it within the context of a book by Juan Manuel de San Vicente, a book published in 1768 whose purpose was to extol New Spain's virtues and whose language Katzew describes as an example of "creole discourses of pride" (193)--even though San Vicente was a Spaniard. This book

ends majestically with a discussion of the Virgin of Guadalupe, of whom he quotes the famous verse from Psalm 147 (20): "Non fecit taliter omni nationi" (He has not done the like for any other nation), pointing to the honor that God bestowed on Mexico by having the Virgin appear in that country. The Virgin of Guadalupe also features prominently in Mena's casta painting along with the fruits of the land, the city's famous retreats [shown in the upper-right corner], and the Virgin's sanctuary [in the upper-left corner], allowing us to see how the work might have been interpreted by contemporary audiences. (194)

Katzew, as is typical of her book, doesn't go into those interpretations. But, especially when compared to other casta paintings, it becomes pretty clear that Mena wants to insist on a more benign interpretation of these different castas by placing their depiction within a context in which Mexico's other virtues are submitted for our admiration. The castas occupy the middle two registers of the painting; they are framed, below, by a depiction of native fruits and vegetables (it is no accident that the costumes of the figures in the casta paintings are in the same colors as the produce--as if to suggest that these many-hued people are likewise the fruit of the same Mexican soil) and, above, by the Virgin, her basilica and Ixtacalco, a popular place to visit on the southeast of the capital known for its canals. The painting's overall message is that of exuberant variety that is clearly and distinctly Mexican, a variety, moreover, presided over approvingly by the Virgin herself.

But as soon as I saw Mena's painting, I was immediately reminded of the painting below, which I saw for the first time when the Mrs. and I went on our Mexico City trip back in the fall of 2008:

Anon., Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de México, Patrona de la Nueva España. 18th cen. Museo de la Basilica de Guadalupe, Mexico City. Image found here.

(Apologies, by the way, for the poor quality of the image. For details I describe below, I'm working from a picture in a small booklet I bought at the museum.)

The Museum caters to a niche audience, obviously, but if you've read this far and ever find yourself in Mexico City with a few extra hours to spare at the basilica, it's well worth the 30 pesos admission fee to visit. Fortunately for the Mrs. and me, it wasn't too crowded the day we went because when I saw this painting, I couldn't help but stare and stare at it.

In remembering this painting, it suddenly occurred to me that it bears some compositional similarities to the standard casta painting: we have a male and female of different races (here, the female figure on the left symbolizes Europe; the male figure, dressed in indigenous garb, represents the Americas. (The male figure, by the way, is speaking the same verse from Psalm 140 that Katzew reports San Vicente as quoting regarding the Virgin's appearance.) But other images in the painting seem to argue for the Virgin's distinctive Mexican-ness. Directly below the angel who is directly under the Virgin's feet (the angel, by the way, is part of her traditional depiction--it's on the framed cloth with the miraculous image that hangs over the altar in the new basilica), we see two small scenes depicting, on the left, the Virgin's final appearance to Juan Diego and, on the right, Juan Diego showing the bishop his ayate with the Virgin's image on it. But those two scenes rest on the outspread wings of an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus, which itself is emerging from a body of water: the Aztecs' sign from the gods to build their city on that place and, now, the emblem in the center of the Mexican flag.

Clearly, this painting functions as more than an image honoring the Virgin or as one depicting particular scenes from the story of her appearances to Juan Diego. It contains, in the allegorical figures of Europe and the Americas, themselves explicitly female and male, "parents" for the Virgin--whose respective races would account for the Virgin's mestiza appearance, were this a typical casta painting. Moreover, her placement over the eagle on the cactus seems both to locate her in a very specific place and to explicitly associate her appearance with that earlier tradition (pagan though it was) of miraculous signs to the people in the Valle de Anahuac.

But no matter the truth of the Virgin's origins, no religious syncretism is at work here: The Conquest was by now two centuries past for both Mena and the anonymous painter of the painting I have been discussing. San Vicente, whom I quoted above, introduced his work on Mexico by celebrating the Aztec emperors who preceded Cortés' arrival, "because it is one of the circumstances that truly makes this city great, for having as its children (although heathen) eleven so great and illustrious emperors." Katzew goes on to comment, "In other words, Mexico's precolonial past is deployed to legitimize the uniqueness of the country and to set the stage for the remainder of his description [of the country]" (194). The latter half of 18th century was a time among Mexicans of growing pride of place and of culture, and the Virgin was most definitely included in that pride, so much so that in 1746 she would be declared the patroness of New Spain by the archbishop. What is at work in this painting is an allegorizing of the Virgin's cultural parentage, and that her parentage is a miscegenated one. To see a painting of the Virgin from this time borrowing the basic form of the casta paintings is certainly startling from the point of view of religion and of veneration, but from that of culture, specifically Mexican culture, it makes perfect sense. But even more importantly, the Church's official embracing of the Virgin as New Spain's patroness implicitly validated the mixed-race populations who venerated her.

In a later post, I want to address at greater length something I said in this post--in particular, this:

Whatever happened in December of 1531 and the weeks and months following–whether miracle or fraud or some now-irrecoverable combination of the two–the Church lost control over the meaning of the Virgin and the resulting manner of her veneration in the instant that she appeared to an Indian as a mestiza. Which, of course, is tantamount to saying that it thus never had control over her. Such is her power in Mexico and throughout Hispanic America: that everyone knows this; all the Church can do is acknowledge it and appear to grant it official sanction as it is able via such means as papal visits and the move to canonize Juan Diego.

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Some postcards from The Delighted States

Adam Thirlwell, in his native habitat. Image found here.

A while back, I mentioned that I was reading The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes. Also, "Mademoiselle O," a Story by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Adam Thirlwell. and promised that I'd post a little something from/on it as I continued to read. Well, here I am, very nearly at its end, no posts in the meantime . . . and what to say by way of summary about this book that does it justice?

I'm not sure I can. So, what follows isn't even a Fodor's Guide but more like a back-of-the-book-style blurb followed by some passages that I found to be especially compelling observations on novels and, more particularly, Thirlwell's book's elusive prey, that thing called "style." Thirlwell's method is not by any means straightforward; but, as I hope to show below, that is to purpose. He is nothing if not, um, thorough in his writing (some might less-charitably describe it as repetitious). But lovers of reading and literary anecdote, and anyone who has ever wondered about the question of literary influence and/or has ever thought about the art of translation, will find much to reward them in this book.

As I mentioned in that earlier post, The Delighted States' is among the odder literary histories you're ever likely to encounter. Most books of that genre use as their starting point a nation, a language or an intellectual period or movement; Thirlwell's book, in both its arguments and form, deliberately militates against those traditional frames and their chronological and spatial assumptions. It begins with Flaubert, via letters to his mistress, articulating what he is trying to achieve in the book that would become Madame Bovary, but it then jumps ahead to Joyce and then to Polish novelists trying to grasp what Joyce is up to via French translations of Ulysses; it moves back in time to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, then forward to Nabokov; then back to the French, and Joyce . . . oh, and there's Proust and Tolstoy and some other folks I'm forgetting, along with the fact that the Nabokov translation begins at the book's back and is printed upside-down in relation to its front (it's kinda hard to explain) and . . . you get the idea. Imagine Sterne's Tristram writing a literary history of the novel and style and translation, and you'd get something like The Delighted States.

The rest is below the fold to spare the incurious. If you find that description more intriguing than off-putting, then read on--you'll get to learn how the book got its title, along with a few passages I think are worth thinking about.

Here's the origin of the title:

Bohumil Hrabal was a Czech novelist in the twentieth century. One of his last books was a collection of autobiographical letters to an American girl called April Gifford, christened Dubenka by the drinkers in the Golden Tiger pub, since April, in Czech, is duben, the oak month. And April herself came up with her own reciprocal pun in translation, when the drinkers in the Golden Tiger pub asked her where she was from--'Ze "spokojeneých" stáu . . . From the "Delighted" States . . .' Because normally the United of the United States, in Czech, would be spojené--without the extra spike of spokojeny--the Czech word for happy. (31)

A nice story--and, coincidentally, it's reminiscent of how I would explain to Mexicans I met in Mexico how to pronounce my unusual last name. It also introduces a basic fact of translations that we're all aware of: that due to the nature of language (and, for that matter, languages), the completely-transparent translation does not, can never exist. Thirlwell knows this as well, of course, but his book's subject isn't the futility of translation but what is it that survives translation (or, ideally, should survive it) that works its influence on the writers who are reading in translation. Here's his book's central thesis, as near as I can determine it:

[In an essay on Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Samuel Beckett] came up with this catchy conclusion: 'His writing is not about something; it is that something itself [Beckett's italics].

But Beckett's conclusion is not just catchy: it is also impossible.

A sign is not the same thing as the thing it represents. Because this is the case, it is possible to create more and more precise signs--since the gap between the sign and real life is infinite. And this is why there are values in literature--marking the moments when novelists working in the art of the novel invent more precise styles. Often, it is true, the more precise the style, the more form and content are inter-related. But this intertwining of form and content does not entail that a style is so precise in its relation to real life as to be the thing it is describing. All novels, after all, are smaller than real life. They are all miniaturisations. They are never real life itself. Real life is always elsewhere.

And this is why translation is always still possible. The style of a novel, and a novelist, is a set of instructions, a project: it is never able to create an entirely unique, irreplaceable object.

The novel--this art of the precise, the authorial, the deliberate--is also an art of repetition, of reproduction. (14-15)

Style is not merely form + content; in literature it is more accurately described as an author's way of paying attention: thus, Hemingway's reticence, Joyce's accretions of pure data, Kafka's slowing the passage of time down to a crawl in combination with the deliberate withholding of the word "dream" as a descriptor of what's going on in his narratives, etc. This is also why, for example, Nabokov Russian-izes his translation of Alice in Wonderland: whatever else it may be about, Nabokov realized that Carroll's novel is rooted in the sort of Englishness that only the English--not even, necessarily, English-speakers--would grasp. What matters in that novel is the quality of that novel's attention to Alice's (or Anya's) adventures. One doesn't have to be English to attend to the world in that way.

Hence Thirlwell's book's eschewing of the traditional forms that literary histories take. They may be orderly, but authors' readings are not nearly so scripted. It's all a bit like a juggling exercise for the reader--and for him as a writer; toward the end of his book he finds himself questioning some of his former claims, but surely that too is in keeping with The Delighted States' larger claim about the inevitable slippage between language and its subject.

Here are a few more passages worth thinking about. This book is so full of such moments, though, that I'll be saving a few for another set or two of postcards.

[Pastiche] is a way of testing out the limits of a style. It is a form of map-making.

And this becomes more acute in translation. Every question of style can also become a question of translation; every theory of the relation between form and content contains its corresponding theory of how these might be reproduced. And another description of an accurate translation, I think, can be a voluntary pastiche, a reproduction of the style.

But translations are often acts of fragile restoration. Because there is nothing style can do about time, nothing it can do about the possible comic and unpredictable betrayals.

In translation, for instance, a style is often an anachronism. It is in thrall to its ephemeral subject matter. (88-89)

The last two episodes of Ulysses are remarkable for two apparently contradictory things: they are comprehensive, and reticent. On the one hand, these episodes are huge, and full of detail. But these episodes refuse to make any form of selection among detail. And this is why they are also reticent: this mass of detail does not respect any detail's relative importance. Some of the most important things are therefore barely said. (108)

Everything conceals a potential narrative.

In this way, [French novelist Georges] Perec worked on the plan for his last and best novel, La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual), a title which in its vacuous pragmatism flaunts its refusal of the idea that literature should teach, should be a moral or everyday guide. Instead, it was an affirmation of real life, of the multiple novels contained in an apartment block. Which is why, as well as its title, Perec added a subtitle to his novel: Romans.

Not a novel: Novels.

For this was the discovery of James Joyce, with his multiple styles, structured on a network of detail. The everyday was infinite. (114)

More later.

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Strange Fruit: Some comments

Lillian Smith. Image found here; Wikipedia entry here.

I've just finished rereading Lillian Smith's 1944 novel, Strange Fruit, a novel that, though still in print, I suspect not many people read today. That's a shame, really. Given its title's origin (the Billie Holiday song), its setting (early Depression-era rural southern Georgia), its chief subject (an interracial relationship between a white man and a black woman) and the time of its publication--not to mention the fact that it was banned in some places when published--Strange Fruit is brave in ways that better-known Southern novels whose big subject is racism finally aren't (To Kill a Mockingbird, good as it is (and happy 50th anniversary, by the way), comes to mind here). Which, after all, is braver for a Southern novelist in the pre-Civil Rights Act South to do: to show us as we'd like to think of ourselves as being, or to show us as most of us in fact are--and why we are the way we are?

Some lengthy comments below the fold.

The novel's central story is an affair between Tracy Deen, the ne'er-do-well son of a respectable and well-off white family, and Nonnie Anderson, a college-educated black woman working as a maid for another white family. If you know the Billie Holiday song, you already know, more or less, where this story is headed: Nonnie becomes pregnant by Tracy; Tracy, who seems to love Nonnie yet already seems to know that a future with her will remain at best a clandestine one, and already under immense passive-aggressive pressure to marry the nice white girl across the street, breaks off his relationship with Nonnie and seeks to find a black man to marry her so the baby will have a father; that man, named Henry, a black boyhood friend of Tracy's who is now the Deens' house servant, brags on his upcoming marriage in earshot of Nonnie's older brother, Ed; Ed puts two and two together, lies in wait for Tracy along the path he (Tracy) takes that runs from the colored to the white side of town, and shoots Tracy, killing him; his family and a family friend help him leave town; a few hours later, Henry and his girlfriend will come across Tracy's body and attempt to hide it, but other people in Colored Town see this; once Tracy's body is found, word gets out about Henry's having been seen moving the body; despite the strong suspicion among the more-respectable white members of the community that Henry isn't guilty, and their attempts to stop it, Henry is lynched and then burned.

However, though the above is the novel's central narrative, it'd not be inaccurate to say that the novel's main character is Maxwell, Georgia, the town it's set in. We learn about its industries (agriculture and lumber) and their accompanying labor problems (farmers are having troubles finding (black) workers to work the fields because up North are better (and better-paying) opportunities; at the mills, there's rumbling about unionizing the workers); about how religion is regarded by various cross-sections of the town (a revival happens to be in town during the "now" of the novel); and about how blacks who served during the first world war and/or have gone to college are (in the minds of whites) quietly but firmly insisting--through the mere fact of their presence in town--on an opening-up of economic opportunity for blacks.

We also learn that Jim Crow is Maxwell's de facto mayor and, in the wake of Tracy's murder and Henry's lynching, varying degrees of complicity (ranging from participating in the lynching to disapproving but staying out of the way) work to keep that mayor in power. As Tom Harris, the owner of the town's lumber mill and thus one of its most prominent citizens, puts it, "Maxwell's a good town, a quiet town, good place to bring your children up in--and he had brought up nine. Except for Saturday nights, a few razor fights, a dead nigger now and then, nothing violent ever happened in Maxwell. Things still went on in the southwest of the county that had no business going on. Niggers disappeared out on Bill Talley's place too often--dropped plumb out of sight--but you didn't have proof, and there was seldom much talk about it" (300). The part about Bill Talley is especially telling: it's not that black people are disappearing--it's that they're disappearing too often that disturbs Harris. And yet the novel is at pains to show that Harris is among the most sympathetic to the plight of black people in the town: he attempts to hide Henry from the mob searching for him; and when the mob finds Henry, Harris tries to stop the lynching.

Given a novel like this, then, it isn't surprising that Strange Fruit lacks a figure analogous to To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch. Finch stands as our proxy in Harper Lee's novel; we can vicariously stand with him as he defends Tom Robinson, giving voice to what we know is right yet may be too afraid to say out loud.¹ Instead, what we get in Strange Fruit is, for the most part and at best, a resigned acceptance of the status quo. The two lovers at the novel's heart aren't especially sympathetic: much as Tracy Deen resists being defined by the town's definitions of Success and Respectability, he succumbs to them and in so doing rejects Nonnie; and as for Nonnie, her sister Bess characterizes her accurately as not being especially clear-eyed when it comes to seeing that there's no future worthy of her where Tracy is concerned--or Maxwell, either, for that matter. Sam, a black doctor who clearly has the respect of the African-American community there, commands our respect as well, but only up to a point--after all, after Ed shoots Tracy, it's Sam who drives him to Macon to hop a train back to New York and then to Washington, D.C., where Ed lives. Of the novel's white characters, Prentiss Reid, the newspaper editor, widely known to hold radical political and religious views, writes about the lynching but pulls his punches by writing that, yes, lynching is an unpleasant business but the North is not without its own race problems; Harris, as we see above, does not approve of lynching but, because his business employs some of the very men responsible for the lynching, feels he do no more than what he had done to try to stop this particular one. Harris's children, Charlie and Harriett, are much more vocal in their opposition to the town's endemic racism, but Charlie notes that in order to hang on to his ideas about how to fight against Maxwell's mindset, he would have to leave.

But leaving Maxwell, one gets the feeling, is difficult to do. A frequent motif in the novel is the evocations of roads and paths that connect otherwise discrete parts of the town to each other but which, it seems, never lead away from town. Those with the ability and/or inclination to leave are a definite minority; those who remain loathe or resent, with varying degrees of intensity, the members of those whose race they are not . . . in large measure because they recognize that without them, they could not survive--at least, not in the world as they had configured for themselves. It's a miscegenous relationship, but a mandated one: whites are just as trapped in it (though, to be sure, in different ways) as blacks are. So, even as we recognize and applaud Charlie's clear-headedness as he tells first his father and then his sister that he hates how blacks are treated in Maxwell, it's hard not to feel some despair for the town if Charlie either leaves town to preserve his current thinking or stays in town and gradually loses his convictions.

I've already gone on enough. Strange Fruit, I think, is well worth your time, especially when read against To Kill a Mockingbird--and just so no one misunderstands me, I do very much like and respect Mockingbird. But Smith's novel investigates racism's essential irrationality, something which, in the mid-century South, was an important task--especially since the prevailing argument in favor of Jim Crow at that time was that system's insistence on its rationality. More on that, by way of a discussion of Thomas Dixon's novel The Sins of the Father, in a future post.

(An aside on Strange Fruit's style: Smith is enamoured of letting her characters run on a bit in rather mechanical-feeling interior monologues in which her (educated) white and black characters end up sounding the same, despite the novel's otherwise pretty clear distinctions between them. It can grow tedious after a bit. On the other hand, there are a couple of moments when she will have characters interacting in the "now" of the novel and one of them will be simultaneously recollecting two separate past events. Also, there's a powerful scene where Nonnie, her lover now dead, goes through the motions of her duties as a maid and cook while through her mind passes a scrambled collage of bits and pieces of words that Tracy, Bess, Ed, and several other people have said to her over the past few days: Outer calm, inner emotional chaos. Pretty nifty, especially for a first novel.)

__________
¹During yesterday's Talk of the Nation segment devoted to Mockingbird's 50th anniversary, a caller from Georgia said as much.

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