Orals

I completed my reading year, and finished my oral comps this morning. I will begin the written exam on Monday.

My chair gave me a few minutes of feedback afterwards in preparation for the written exam, and at some point in the conversation she asked me if I liked being a student. "YES!!!!" I said, looking up into a giant pine with a leap in my heart. I have always loved being a student, from the first moment I picked up a crayon and asked my mum to show me how to write my name. I crave data.

"Well," she said, "all that's over. That's what the exam means. This is the point when your life as a student stops, and you become an [academic]."

*I pause and think about the implications*

"If you don't like this part - sustaining an original argument - , or you don't think you can do it, then don't waste the next three years. Because this is what academics do. But I think you can."

I wonder if I haven't been infantilizing myself in the way that I inhabit this model of information absorption. It's rather misleading, and entirely pejorative. I'm so, so old to be suddenly trying to change into an adult. In one week. Can I change how I see myself from a fat, wrinkled graduate student to something astute, something stately, as some kind of authority?

Short answer? No.

Long answer: Probably not, but don't give up until you've tried.

Longer answer: How much of your success really depends on your self-image? I mean, besides the "all of it" that pop psych would ascribe. Freud and the post-Freudians would probably say that your imago, your ego-image is the mediation between the subject and object, and therefore "all of it." You have two days to fix yourself.

Longest answer: 

I have options. If I want to retrench into a safer space, or remain in a passive reader model, I absolutely can. I can sustain it indefinitely. But in order to achieve a PhD I need to be adaptable to other models as well: scholarly models of entering the conversation as some kind of authority. What I find most frustrating about that adaptability is that it is not taught: it's another one of those things that is somehow invisibly embedded in the discourse of academia. It's a fluency issue, and it's that fluency that is at the heart of all of my academic nightmares. I'm not talking about words - that's another issue. I mean the behaviors and value systems. I mean the pattern of reader response that creates a "unique" perspective. It means that graduate papers are hit-or-miss guesses, and until you hit on a formula that yields favorable results, you're screwed. Like all Discourse, this cannot be taught. It can only be learned through patterns of observation and imitation, and will only be successful through an apprenticeship. Ultimately, my committee are asking by this examination whether I am ready for a journeyman phase.

See the above "longest" answer.

All Art is Self-Portrait

I steal this idea from Lillian Jackson Braun, who wrote "The Cat Who"* mystery series. In one of them, the reporter Jim Qwilleran interviews members of an artists community, and especially a man who fills his paintings with little rosy-cheeked children who all somehow seem similar. They all look like the artist.

I'm finishing the last dozen or so books on my PhD reading list, and in a meeting with my committee chair today I forgot myself and expressed this idea aloud. It's a philosophical claim, not a textual one, and does not belong in exams. But like James Gee explains, PhD exams are a Discourse, and I am only an apprentice. My committee are gatekeepers, asking me to prove my fluency in their dialect. Their dialect does NOT include philosophical musings. Fortunately, I blog.

Anyhow, my response in that meeting was inane to the point of mortification (aren't they all?). But it's an idea I wanted to tie to the texts I've been studying.

The question which evoked so vapid a response (quoting paperback mysteries from the seventies? Really?) was "how are your vestigial autobiographies interconnecting to the other readings [fairy tale cultural analyses] you're doing?" My mistake was to be speaking the wrong dialect. I was in "casual conversation with fellow academic" mode, not "pop quiz from mentor" mode.

Truthfully, I find mimesis such a universally applicable signifier that all literature appears autobiography, especially literature about children. Childhood is totally inaccessible, and the nearest thing seems to be memory. Even fairy tale writers write about children, but not for them. Few Romantic or Victorian writers turn instead to a nearby child - a fact I find nearly inexplicable. Even writers who seem to be interacting with "real" children (Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddel, for instance) are instead only and necessarily expressing themselves, and more specifically a lost self that can only be reclaimed by narrative.

What is more natural than that when faced with the unknowable, we writers, like Henry James, extrapolate from the known?

Where this idea of Self-Portrait becomes more complicated is when we examine the text as metaphor for the child. If it's easier, imagine a textual child - born of pure words - like Sarah Crewe, or Huckleberry Finn, or Oliver Twist. According to James Kincaid, the 19th Century consumed and perpetuated ad nauseum the belief that a child was empty, appropriate to be filled with culture/civilization/character by a supervising adult. They could be shaped, molded, raised up to suit the parent or nanny.

Wordsworth, who believed the child a kind of priest or avatar of nature, still shared with Coleridge this conviction that the naive poet's connection to the "natural" could be perpetuated into adulthood, creating an ideal poet restricted only by meter, and not the entirety of culture. When raising Hartley Coleridge, they tried the experiment and whatever success they may have had failed out of Oxford and died with him. Their texts, though, live a rather different life.

A physical child is a kind of biological mimesis. If you believe Jung, it also inherits cultural memory. A child in this sense is a kind of self-portrait (moreso if you don't study genetics and live in the Renaissance), but it is not Art. Treating a child like a work of art, to be carefully sculpted or painted, is a protracted and unprosecutable act of violence (see Bourdieu: Pedagogical Violence). 

A child is not a text, but a text is also not a child (sorry, Anne Bradstreet). A text is a magical image that removes wrinkles from memory, or deepens them. A textual child is pure obedience, even when you surrender your authorial control to the demands of realism, expectation, or history. Maggie might neglect Tom's rabbits despite his admonitions, but she only does so because Marian made her.

I return now to this idea that all art is self-portrait. When we read a novel, a poem, or look at a landscape painting, or examine a bust, no matter how mimetic the work, the artist cannot help but recreate only himself. Every character, every portrait, every pun. All sight is comprehended by the eye, all sound by the ear. So somewhere in Greece, a potter makes an urn. He expresses what exists in his own mind, and reproduces it by his hand for his eye. He sees himself, perhaps only in pieces, reproduced and sold. The quality of the work and the market value are his silhouette. In England, the poet Keats sees the thing, and writes a poem. He is inspired by the urn, but what he produces does not resemble the urn. Nothing about its commodification or its reception indicate "urn" or "type of urn." But those things are instead the silhouette of Keats. Even were Keats to reproduce precisely what he had seen, it would only be a signifier marked by the singular repetition of the decision to imitate. Like Pierre Menard. A body of work is a collage of selfies.

*Pause* are forgers the only original artists?

We read the poem, but the subjective nature of readership allows us only to see ourselves. It's worse if you're an undergrad. All art is your portrait. All art is a mirror.

 

 

 

*Please tell me y'all remember The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern. EVERYBODY was reading it by the public pool in 1993.

Foucault's Sexuality of Children

In his discussion of power-relations and sexuality, Foucault repeatedly mentions children's "natural" sexuality, or this assumption that children are all sexual which spurs the 19th-century investigation and policing of this sexuality.

Historical Narrative & Family History

I'm reading Paul Ricoeur. I'm not supposed to read it straight through. I'm totally reading it straight through. I keep finding too many pieces missing when I skip around.

I'm not very interested in History, except as it relates to autobiography (which must be memory, or a different kind of emplotted history), but I am also doing some personal, genealogical research. I get a lot of my information from my mother's cousin Gerry, but when I ask him for his sources and documentation, his answer is "well, I talked to so-and-so, and that's the story they tell." It's information from memory - gossip. My scholarly brain just screams. It's the documentation that's lacking, and that's where I come in. It's my job to find the paperwork to back up the family gossip.

There's a subtle difference between this Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) emplotment and Ricoeur's account of historical emplotment. He describes it as a focus on events, on a way of stringing events into a causal chain (I am not at all sure that he means to imply a post hoc fallacy, though clearly narrative tends that direction. If he doesn't, I'm certain he'll point it out soon). While LDS Family History research is always interested in the stories of our forebears, we link our stories generationally. Firmly anchored in measured time, we focus on births, deaths, and marriages; mostly because these are the documented events, but also because these are the events that create a "generational" model of time, which is largely temporally illusive. We "emplot" our generations into a family tree, or neat fan graph, but time shifts underneath it. A "generation" is closer to Ricoeur's Augustinian experienced time than Mrs. Dalloway's bells.

In a way, it's more like parallax in Ulysses, or like two asynchronous sine waves; one organic (generational) and one mechanical (measured). And I'm mixing metaphors again.

Also:

Literature is not furniture. The End.

Temporary Rhetoric and Speculative Fiction

I am never 100% sure I understand any of these theorists. I have colleagues who are patiently and weekly tutored through everything they read by three different faculty members, and of my five-person committee, my chair is in the middle of three major projects, one is on maternity leave, one is on sabbatical, one isn't even in my department (it's a requirement) and the fifth is being loaned out this semester for a chair somewhere in the midwest. I'm reading these totally alone.

So. . . De Man. I did need to supplement this essay with another lecture or two, but if I had to dangerously reduce the idea into a summary I would say that he's comparing allegory (in a general sense, after conflating or redefining other forms of symbolic narrative into it) to irony around the function of linear time. In the case of allegory, I would say that it is irreconcilable through time. It is inevitably separated the story from its antecedent. In the case of irony, De Man argues that the subjectivity is irreconcilable (a mystified subject is being viewed by the same subject from some aware, but still mystified distance), but the chronology is conflated - both subjectivities must exist simultaneously, while never reconciling. They are simultaneous and perpetual.

So, fascinated by this description of irony. . . I had already decided that "allegory" was the perfect category for speculative fiction, although De Man seems to think the novel the perfect form of irony - fiction aware that it is fiction, in the way that history is mystified, and unaware of its fictiveness. In this way, Spec Fic seems to be another layer of mystification on top of the irony: Fiction aware that it is fiction, but also simultaneously fully and irreconcilably convinced that fiction is the only reality.

Lacan and Spec Fic

After reading Lacan's "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud," watching this lecture, and reading three or four summaries, I have come to several conclusions, not all of which are co-extant.

Firstly, I conclude that it is rhetorically impossible for a summarist to make Lacan comprehensible for the simple reasons that to do so would both betray Lacan's original style, and lose the rhetor credibility (capital). It is my experience that summaries and discussions of Lacan are no more helpful than Lacan himself, who is undeniably not. They are (I believe ironically AND metaphorically) a deferral of desire by acting as signifier for the unachievable signified. And not in a good way. It's like Kafka's bloody apparatus (the association being inescapable after my undergraduate theory course).

If, as Lacan proposes in "The Mirror Stage," we continually build our self-image by seeing ourselves reflected from other people, and perpetually striving for the no-longer-available ideal-I, I have allowed Lacan to show me myself as a victim of his obtuseness, obfuscation, and general antagonism for any agency external to his collective and indistinct self. I might need counseling from someone a little more practical to recover.

Despite this, I think Lacan (via Jakobsen) might be essential for an understanding of how speculative fiction functions in culture. What if culture functions exactly like the unconscious, either metaphorically or consequently (okay, maybe not)? It is not unified or guided by a central consciousness, but is divided and sub-divided into factions continually in conflict. Tumblr is pure signification, nothing material. What if speculative fiction is that metaphor/metonymy that Lacan found a connecting point that can be so valuable in indicating desire, and demonstrating the mechanism of deferral? If speculative fiction provides metaphors for race relations, gender relations, etc. then they must be, on some level, available to analysis, though whether as symptomatic of culture, or of an individual pathology, can we ever decide?

This is becoming an individual/culture, chicken/egg problem, although Lacan seems to have weighed in on one of those pretty one-sidedly, which might have at least, again, metaphorical significance. Stupid weighted words. Lacan has stolen my ice cream.

Honestly - what more essentially rejoices in the unattainable than the fantastic? And who is more baffled by the success of Twilight?

I'm almost definitely oversimplifying, but I think there's something. . .

Lukacs and Spec Fic

It is one of the most frustrating experiences in my academic life to stumble upon a colleague or superior who refuses to accept the value of speculative fiction, and the first time it happened I was absolutely stunned. It had never occurred to me that anyone would simply reject an entire genre which had already produced some of the twentieth century's most breathtaking prose. I did not, and still do not entirely understand why the presence of the unreal in a modern/late-modern text should very thoroughly disqualify a novel from serious study. 

Then I read "Realism in the Balance," Georg Lukacs's argument against various aesthetic movements in modern culture. Academics are still highly influenced by the Frankfurt School. 

That's a profound understatement. 

Academia and Marxism are professors' OTP. They will go down with this ship, avataring the whole way. 

The Frankfurt School were influenced by (among others) Lukacs, and Lukacs proponed realism as the only way to achieve true revolution. Even Magic Realism can't claim to be any kind of realism of which Lukacs would approve, although I'm totally willing to make that argument on its behalf. Magic is not exactly expressionism, but it is likely seen by Marxists as having a similar effect - and there are two paths here to the same dreaded end.

Lukacs speaks well of popular novels, but only as they are realistic. Elements of distortion or subjectivity offer an individualistic view of the world which is unhelpful in constructing a useful image of holistic, objective reality. We can't change the world because we have glimpsed inside one person's head. Only their perspective on a deeper, naturalistic reality could offer us that grip on the actual which would lead to necessary revolution.

The other path to complacency is the idea that popular culture in any form is essentially a political soporific. I don't know who says so, but I'm sure I'll run across him soon. That argument is/was inevitable.

So when my professor who is personally and professionally interested in racism screws up her face at me when I suggest that I want to write a paper on race in speculative fiction, I understand that it's because she has been ideologically programmed to reject the imaginative as relevant to social change. And yet she has no problem urging us to boycott racially unequal science fiction films. It's very inconsistent.

And yet here is my defense: many of us, steeped in capitalistic popular culture, experience speculative fiction as an actuality. I do not mean that we "live" our novels the way Pinterest would suggest, but rather that the relationships we observe between characters, while not necessarily derived from actual relationships, still constitute a level of experience which inevitably colors our daily interactions in the same way that anything fictional would. Just because the embedded racism is between dwarves and elves, it does not mean that every reader will not understand the metaphor, and the reason for using it. Other magical functions can become metaphors, or indicate areas of interest for other actual social concerns. Race is just the most obvious, and most written on by those who brave censure to analyze genre fiction.

Yes, the metaphors are implicated in such an analysis for "softening" the language of a harsh reality. We're not morons. We just like magic and space battles.

The OTHER argument which professors politically avoid is much more relevant to my area of study: the accusation that the imaginative is immature. THAT's a horse of a different color, and one that hasn't yet been stabled.

Intellectual Geneology

It disturbs me to see myself reading book after book of sociology, psychology, structuralism, and other theory and reaching conclusions only to find that they have been reached before me, and that I have spontaneously discovered only the most basic of intellectual strides. I think I've finally defied gravity only to find that I'm learning to WALK.

I have never pretended to be an original mind. I don't think divergently. I have a very common mind that always finds the obvious and is vividly aware that what it finds is always the obvious. I'm very suggestible with a rapacious memory, but I don't enjoy it. It mortifies me every time. I always tell the obvious joke. I do nothing unpredictable. I suppose I should be proud that my brain can move in directions that smarter brains have found and paved before me, but instead I mourn the loss of creativity.

These texts are training me to think in specific ways, and in important ways that my field requires and rewards (think Bourdieu), but somewhere in my psyche I have an emotional memory of being different, and the social and fiscal rejection that real creativity brings. In High School (relevance?) I was voted "Most Unique," and I suppose part of me thought it was real. I falsely assumed that my status as an outcast was because I was just a little more different than other people whose difference is celebrated.

I am very different because I am only a little different in very unusual ways. My mode of difference is just slightly off normal. Bourdieu says this is bad for my capital. I don't doubt it.

A smarter person broke down problems of fostering creativity institutionally. I didn't realize I'd have to choose between creativity and success. Or maybe I did; I just stuck my head in the sand. Either way, at this point it is no longer a choice.

Northrop Frye and Pregnant Language

Frye, in a Fables of Identity introductory chapter called, "The Archetypes of Literature" observes: "The poet's task is to deliver the poem in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associations, his desire for self expression, and all the other navel-strings and feeding tubs of his ego." If in the metaphor the poet is the mother, then Frye (in the fifties) implies that the mother's job is. . .

I'm totally focusing on the wrong thing, here. I should be analyzing his use of logic to create a literary/critical T.O.E., but I'm not. I'm hung up on this damned sexist metaphor, and only because I've turned it inside out. I'm not really interested in what he thinks it says about the agency of a poem, but what he can possibly imagine is the mother's role in giving birth.

I've never given birth. I've never been a first-hand observer of someone giving birth. But I am female, and I live in a female-dominant, mommy-centric cultural sub-group. No, I'm not explaining what that means. You'll just have to take my word that the end result is that I'm often around a lot of women while they talk about their first-hand experiences making and delivering babies. We are frightened of our own bodies (humans generally, but possibly women moreso), so I would guess that we talk about them for comfort: for normativity.

 

I don't care what Frye means. I don't even care if he's really right. I'm just really pissed that he thinks he's allowed to say shit like that. I can just imagine his head on some infant's body, gnawing frantically at the umbilical cord and congratulating his bleeding and sobbing mother for not forgetting any of his ten toes. What a prick!

Just for the hell of it, and because it's slightly nearer my diss. topic, let's talk about that characterization of an infant's agency. Frye suggests, for the sake of his ill-chosen metaphor, that an infant wants to be free of its mother. I don't remember my early infancy, but in my experience a pre/newborn is pretty content as long as it is warm, fed, and clean. In or out of the uterus. The struggle to be free of placenta, umbilicae, etc. sounds like pure pseudo-psychological speculation, or else a reference to the lifelong process of growing independence from parental social upbringing. The mother's body rejects the child, not vice-versa. Her hormones begin muscular contractions that shift bones, turn the baby, and finally expel it. (I say "finally" - HA)

So, okay, compare writing a poem to creating something with agency. Babies are the only example of that I can think of either, but in this metaphor the poet is not the mother. The poet is, at best, a father, and at worst, a sperm donor. He contributes at least genetic data (words?), and a good father will also provide some measure of care as well, and then send it off to college in a twenty-year-old Volkswagen.

Frye seems to mean only that the poet is no longer relevant to the poem; can no longer feed it or change it. While the poem does change the poet and his reception, the poem is no longer growing (which isn't, strictly speaking in a market context, true).

Actually, doesn't that make a poem more like an excised tumor?

No, I'm pretty sure Frye considers poems entirely as complex as a human, though constructed slowly from centuries of criticism. And I'm pretty sure if poetry is the product of copulation, the poet is the father, and culture/language is the mother.

Pretty sure.

Henry James Points at Me

In his "Art of Fiction," Henry James accuses critics of the novel (as an artistic form) of condemning fiction as "priggish and paradoxical and superfluous."

I suspect strongly that I am one of those critics. Novels have always been to me one of those three things. I find its pornographic manifestations sunstantially superfluous to the art, as dependent on it as the market might be. Didactic novels are nauseatingly priggish, especially when it infringes on my idea of a proper romance. The third assertion, that novels are paradoxical in their relationship in the balance between truth and falsehood, I have blogged about extensively on my more personal site, which makes ME priggish, and of which status I am certain Henry James would disapprove, though D.H. Lawrence he is not.

And lo: I succumb to his syntax.

He continues to explain that for many (he means me), the ending of a novel (I feel the same way about film, television series, and all other narrative media) is the dessert course, and novelists who insist that fiction be "artistic" are the doctors who have diagnosed diabetes. (That last bit was a deplorably unacademic liberty, but more personally relevant). I am the sort of person who will absolutely refuse to consume media if I A) do not know or cannot predict the ending, or B) disapprove of the known ending. I also order dessert in restaurants, and keep a stash of chocolate in my desk drawer. Don't think that this means I approve of every nauseating bit of saccharine that blows in from Disney studios: quite the opposite. I wish to feel satisfied. I want the ending to be earned, and given. I do not wish it to be either given undeservedly, nor earned and then withheld. And what does James say about that? "There will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say." He says "value" (which he defines as "interest") depends on freedom, and I think to some degree variation. We value reward because of the existence of alternatives, and without the literal existence of those alternatives, reward would be imaginary. I like chocolate, because not everything I eat is chocolate.

But that interpretation simplifies and I think partially misinterprets what he's trying to say. It also privileges my preference for literature that comes with a dessert. I think what James means is not subversion to lend piquancy to conformity, but rather the variation itself, the freedom and honesty are what makes literature delicious.