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Category: The b2o Review

The b2o Review is a non-peer reviewed publication, published and edited by the boundary 2 editorial collective and specific topic editors, featuring book reviews, interventions, videos, and collaborative projects.  

  • Turning In to The Sense of Brown

    feeling brown post

    by Ann Cvetkovich, University of Texas at Austin

    ~

    In the wake of José’s death, many people have invoked passages from Cruising Utopia in order to express the significance of his work and what he meant to them. His call to “hear something else” and “feel something else” in the “then and there of queer futurity” has been a form of solace, as though we might be able to feel him while “cruising utopia.” Although I too feel that call, my thoughts have turned more to the book he hadn’t yet published, which was once called Feeling Brown but which morphed over time to become The Sense of Brown. I’ve been waiting for the book at least as far back as the essay called “Feeling Brown,” about Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover, which was published in 2000. It is an article to which I returned again and again to ponder José’s ambitious aim of “describing how race and ethnicity are to be understood as “affective difference.” By affective difference I mean the ways in which different historically coherent groups “feel” differently and navigate the material world on a different emotional register” (70). I found these sentences so thrilling for what they meant about the promise of the affective turn.

    But it took a while before I was able look back to those old publications. When José first died, I just wanted to think about him as a friend not a colleague. It was too heartbreaking to acknowledge how much I will miss the live encounters with his thinking and how much I have come to depend on learning about his ideas in conversations about work in progress—from queer faculty working groups years ago at NYU, to Public Feelings events, to a salon about the good life in my living room last year. When I was finally able to turn to his writing, one of the first things I reached for was the work that I taught most recently—“Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” his essay about Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan and Melanie Klein’s depressive position. I had assigned it for my spring 2013 graduate seminar on “Queer Affect, Queer Archives,” and the students wanted to return to it at the end of the semester because we hadn’t had enough time to cover it the first time around. My files thus contain two sets of notes, which makes it easier to see which points seemed most important. What follows are some of the things that stood out then and that I find myself wanting to remember and pass on now.

    First and foremost is this more recent essay’s articulation of the turn away from identity and towards affect in order to describe brown as a “feeling,” including the brilliant rephrasing of Gayatri Spivak to yield the compelling question, “How does the subaltern feel?” I quote at some length in order to provide the context:

    My endeavor, more descriptively, is intended to enable a project that imagines a position or narrative of being and becoming that can resist the pull of identitarian models of relationality. Affect is not meant to be a simple placeholder for identity in my work. Indeed, it is supposed to be something altogether different; it is, instead, supposed to be descriptive of the receptors we use to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak and are heard or, more importantly, felt. This leaves us to amend Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous quotation, “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988, 1999) to ask How does the subaltern feel? How might subalterns feel each other? (677)

    I love the modification of Spivak’s question because the original has been crucial to my own intellectual formation, and the revised version echoes a question that has driven my research, “How does capitalism feel?” José’s questions not only signal the affective turn but affirm the use of the vernacular word “feel” as a theoretical term. Even as he is gearing up to explain how Kleinian object-relations theory and the depressive position have something to offer, he signals the value of ordinary feelings and lived experience as a foundation for thinking, as in: “Describing the depressive position in relation to what I am calling “brown feeling” chronicles a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right [my emphasis] within the protocols of normative affect and comportment” (676). For those who often “don’t feel quite right,” this is profoundly enabling work.

    Also apparent in the longer passage quoted above is the conceptual challenge of the turn from identity to affect, evident in the rhetorical gestures that underscore this move–the insistence that affect is not a mere “placeholder” and the stated desire that it “be something altogether different.” As a reader, I lean in closely for the next sentence where José mentions the “receptors” and “frequencies” that allow us (or “certain subalterns”) to hear and feel each other. I love this sense of “tuning in” to something that can’t fully be felt, and I want to hear more about the notion of “racialized attentiveness” (680), which constitutes not only a method but a way of living or a structure of feeling. A close reading of this vocabulary of attention helps explain why José might have moved from “feeling” to “sense” as a keyword or critical concept, as he developed a language for tracking the subtle mechanisms by which queers of color or “minoritarian subjects” find and connect with one another.

    José’s distinctive mix of high and low archives, including his range of theoretical sources, constitutes a queer method or, as he puts it, “the stitching I am doing between critical race theories, queer critique, and psychological object-relations theory” in order to produce a “weak” and/or reparative theory. Here as elsewhere, his work is also distinguished by his commitment to a canon of white Marxist and European theory and his ability, often through disidentification, to put what might seem like unlikely sources to service in thinking about queers of color. Through “stitching” together somewhat unlikely companions, and a willingness to let the seams show, he avoids the “cryptouniversalism” (688) of those who are too faithful or narrow in their theoretical allegiances. One of the reasons I am so upset to lose him is because we need “brown feelings” if affect theory, including its queer versions, is not to become too white. His insistence that the affective turn be about race needs to be carried forward.

    José also staged encounters between different bodies of theory by working closely with queer of color artists, who produce theory in a different register. In “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” he turns to Nao Bustamante, one of the fellow travelers with whom he had a long connection and through whose work and friendship his projects were conceived. In his analysis of Nao’s tears and her literal use of stitching in Neapolitan’s crocheted video installation, he offers an account of “the depressive position” as a historically specific form of racialized affect. He invites us to hear the “sound of brown feelings” in the work’s soundtrack and to appreciate the outlandishness of the “sad crow of depression” perched on top of the TV monitor that features Nao’s crying face. And he gently but firmly admonishes those who would mistake this particularity for something either stereotypically Mexican or universally human. It is poignant to read this account now in retrospect and to hope for the reparative potential of tears.

    As I turned reluctantly to the necessity of now meeting with José through writing rather than in person, one of the things my archive yielded was the original book proposal for Feeling Brown. I have one version that we discussed in the NYU Queer Faculty Working Group, likely sometime in 1999-2000, and another version that I read for Duke UP in 2000 so that he could get an advance contract. I was surprised to remember how long ago the proposal had been written; José had just barely published Disidentifications, and he already had a robust second book project. I think it was useful for him to publish Cruising Utopia first; because The Sense of Brown was so ambitious, it benefited from continuing to evolve over time. In the interim, affect theory exploded and morphed in no small part as a result of José’s own work, including the Women and Performance special issue he edited, which stakes out the relations between affect theory and psychoanalysis, the essay on Ana Mendieta in which he more directly addresses sense over feeling, or the talk he had been giving over the last year on Wu Tsang’s documentary film Wildness, in which he was developing his notion of a “brown commons.”

    But even in this early version of the project, the key point that race is experienced as a feeling is already present. In both versions, I circled the sentences (quoted in my initial paragraph) that also appear in the Ricardo Bracho essay. My notes show excited questions that would prove generative for me and so many others — about national affect, about the relation between Marxism and psychoanalysis, and about the use of Williams and DuBois as sources for affect theory. Queer affect theory was still emerging at that point, and although we would come to fuller set of tools, José, who had a head start as Eve Sedgwick’s student, was inventing something very rich in order to make good on his vision of “a radical reconceptualization of ethnicity as affective specificity.” I will continue to tune in to his work to “feel something else” — including “the sense of brown.”1

    _____

    Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

    _____

    Notes
    1. The phrases “hear something else” and “feel something else” are underscored in Kay Turner’s song “Cruising Utopia,” the lyrics for which are taken from José’s book and originally performed at “Otherwise: Queer Scholarship into Song,” Dixon Place, April 4, 2013 and subsequently at memorials for him in New York.
    Back to essay

    Works Cited
    José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and other STDs).” Theatre Journal 52:1 (2000): 67-79.
    —–, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position.” Signs 31:3 (2006): 675-688.

  • When We Grow Up: Lady Di’s Yesterday and José’s Tomorrow

    lady di post

    by Daphne A. Brooks, Princeton University

    ~

    I would like to share a minor tale from yesterday as a way to continue thinking about the world of the what-might-be with which José Muñoz gifted us and which our ensemble of voices are keeping alive today.

    Last March, I showed up at NYU for a panel I had organized on the “musician as urban planner”—inspired by and featuring Fred Moten. It was a session that also included Alexandra Vazquez, Gayle Wald and Greg Tate, and in the audience sat our friend José. The paper that I read that day was hardly even that at the time. I called it “Midnight Fever Dreams for Diana Ross,” or something like that. But what moved me so, what ultimately spurred me on to finish the piece, was that José had said such kind things to me about it. It wasn’t until he moved on last December that I found out that we were a year apart in age—which seemed impossible to me because I had looked up to him for so long as a colleague and friend who had generously created opportunities for me and welcomed me into his vast, roving, electric network of thinkers and artists and rebels and outsiders. Age is important in the case of this short tale I’m telling about yesterday because I can better understand today why my meditation on the Lady Di of our childhood would have perhaps hailed my beloved fellow Gen-Xer José in a particular way.

    If my thoughts about her were shaped so wholly and deeply by José Muñoz, the pioneering, field-altering theorist, world-making mentor, institutional-builder and undercommons cartographer, if my thoughts about her could not have taken flight without his insistence on pointing us towards a then-and-there, they were also, unbeknownst to me at the time, holding the kernel of yet another revolutionary manifesto that José was radically improvising already, one that I would hear about the last time I saw him at the American Studies Association: that of “brown theory,” an embrace of the here and now and the beauty and power of what we already are.

    So humbly and very briefly, then, I share these words and sounds for José as I read them last year.

    When I grow up/will I be pretty/Will you be big and strong?/Will I wear dresses that show off my knees?/Will you wear your trousers long?/Well I don’t care if I’m pretty at all/And I don’t care if you never get tall/I like what I look like, and you’re nice small/We don’t have to change at all…

    Free to be you and me, sang our own groovy Miss Ross, part of the Marlo Thomas ensemble of voices who re-ordered our universe while we sat on shag carpets and swapped Evil Knievel action figures and Ezra Jack Keats urban collages. My own Gen X earliest memory of Miss Ross consists of her re-ordering my playground with those light-as-feather vocals—to me always gender-ambiguous because they, of course, resembled that other voice coming out of my sister’s stereo speakers all day long, the voice of a then-teen Jackson 5 lead singer who, confusingly and yet perfectly and fittingly (because how else could it ever be?) sang “When I Grow Up” with “quiet fire” soul earth mother Roberta Flack on the Free to Be Television special that my friends and I watched, re-played in our heads and re-enacted on the playground for most of that first grade school year.

    The hyper-femme “womanly” and yet “childlike” delicacy of her voice was its own kind of powerful statement of extremes, a queer gateway and an invitation to go with her “Somewhere” else (pace José), just as she and Mary and Cindy sang to us so triumphantly on national TV in the face of unspeakable and yet oh-so-familiar horror and trauma on April 5th, 1968.

    She was always, then, in my childhood, the voice insisting that we were as “normative” as we already were. So that even though, yes, Berry Gordy, my 10-year-old People-Magazine-reading self saw the crass ways in which you re-structured The Wiz, turning Dorothy into a mid-20s school teacher and ousting virtuosic teen ingénue Stephanie Mills so that your “Endless Love” could “ease on down the road,” I was willing “to go to there” with her because she already sounded out fanciful, limitless possibility, safety in playing. She was a songbird often lambasted for her aesthetic “plasticity”, accused of failing the dreaded “A” word, but that putative “IN-authenticity,” that Courtney “fake-it-so-real I’m beyond fake” ethereal register was a reminder that if we did change at all, it could and should be a glorious “act”—one that we could work “fiercely” at Studio 54 or as oddly-as-we-wanna-be as a black New Wave nerd sporting pink hightops in Shallow Alto, California.

    She was the soundtrack for our childhood civic universe, “a land” as the oh-so-crunchy New Seekers sing in the Free to Be theme—where “the children are free… where the rivers run free,” in a land of the “green country… a land bright and clear/the time’s a comin’ near… take my hand and we’ll live…”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_26FOHoaC78

    Today, let’s all hold hands and move towards the place that José saw coming….

    _____

    Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

    _____

    A previous version of these remarks was delivered at the MLA 2014 session entitled “Drama Divisions: Envisioning Tomorrow for Jose Munoz.” Portions of this material appear in Daphne A. Brooks, “Let’s Talk About Diana Ross,” ed. Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste (NY: Bloomsbury, 2014).

  • sonnet

    sonnet post

    by Barbara Browning, New York University

    ~

     

    when push came to shove, you were all talk,
    all action. that’s because you knew to hear
    how portentous a speech act was: the “wow”
    and “gee” of it all, the fun of the yack over coke
    – let’s blow this hamburger stand – better late
    than never – you were always late, but somehow
    way, like way, ahead of the curve. put jelly
    on your shoulder, baby. let us do what
    you fear most. it was you who let us feel
    this world was not enough, that something was
    missing. then you blew the hamburger stand.
    hm. thanks a lot. no really. thanks a lot.
    no, really. i don’t know how to thank you. i think
    i may be trying to do it for the rest of my life.

    ~

    Author’s note:

    After José passed, I wrote a couple of things for memorial or tribute events or publications, reflections that mixed the personal, the professional and the political, each time noting that he really didn’t differentiate between these things, which was the point … Anyway, as I approached this task one more time, with the prompt to consider a particular keyword or concept of significance to him, I began to write about the role that poetry played in his work – especially his later work. But then I just wanted to write a poem for him, and so I did.

    _____

    Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

    _____

  • Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

    Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

    Walt_Whitman_at_36

    Beyond Belief: The Political Whitman

    by Kerry Larson
    ~

    For this volume editor John Seery has commissioned ten essays by political theorists from across the country to assess the politics of that self-professed champion of democracy, Walt Whitman. To establish parameters for the discussion, he has also reprinted essays on the poet by George Kateb, Nancy Rosenblum, and Martha Nussbaum originally published in the 1990s. Seery points out that, as a general rule, political scientists and political philosophers have had little occasion to comment on Whitman. This collection gives them the opportunity to do so.

    The tone for much of what follows is set by Kateb’s essay, which leads off the volume. For Kateb, Whitman is “a great philosopher of democracy” (19) because his writing is everywhere intent on drawing out the full moral and existential significance of a rights-based individualism, cornerstone of liberal democracy. A key assumption of his account is that such an individualism is a “strange idea” whose true implications are in constant danger of being simplified, overlooked, or irreparably distorted. A poem like “Song of Myself” is exemplary for Kateb in getting us to see how democratic individuality is “valuable mostly as a preparation for receptivity or responsiveness” (20). Here, in his best-known poem, the bard sings and celebrates a self that is not a historical person but “a composite democratic personality” which, in “its tolerance, its hospitableness, and its appetite for movement, novelty, mixture, and impurity” affirms the best qualities of a “democratically receptive culture” (37). Personal eccentricity and empathic connectedness go hand in hand. The self, Whitman’s poetry continually shows, is composed of many selves, a discovery that not only accounts for the perennial “strangeness” of identity but is decisive, in Kateb’s account, for creating an enriched appreciation for the strangeness and diversity of other selves.

    Walt_Whitman,_age_28,_1848-crop

    Others, taking stock of what Cristina Beltran calls Whitman’s “amazing mobility of identity,” go along with the substance of Kateb’s analysis while worrying at its possible limitations. For Beltran, “Whitman’s all-encompassing ethic sometimes faltered as the poet associated slaves, blacks, and blackness with that which was repellent and/or corrupt” (68), while Terrell Carver finds that Whitman’s “universalizable concept of democracy” betrays a masculine bias that reduces “female difference [to] domesticity, child care, and sexual availability to men” (236). Similar reservations emerge for Michael J. Shapiro, whose “Whitman and the Ethnopoetics of New York” argues that Whitman’s “side-by-side and monocular and optimistic (often dissensus-denying) point of view” does not always do justice to “the micropolitics of the city” (210). But calling attention to the limits of inclusiveness in Leaves of Grass doesn’t make inclusiveness any less privileged as a critical ideal, and in this sense interpretations of the kind advanced by Kateb (or Martha Nussbaum, who shares many of the same views) are prepared not only to take such demurrals in stride but welcome them. So long as recognition controls one’s sense of what counts as political, expanding the scope of recognition may be viewed as advancing the cause of the political. Thus for example when it comes to considering a topic like equality, it’s “equality of respect” (237) that trumps all other considerations in the majority of these essays. Democracy here is primarily a matter of “feeling right,” to recall Stowe’s exhortation at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By and large, it is less a matter of beliefs one might accept or reject than a collection of dispositions and perceptions that one can either experience or fail to experience.

    Behind this outlook lurks the old suspicion, voiced most memorably by European thinkers like Hegel and Tocqueville, that liberal democracy doesn’t stand for anything in particular, that it is destitute of higher principles—unless doing as one pleases can be called a higher principle. Kateb and others are excited by Whitman’s verse, notwithstanding its occasional blind spots, because it puts flesh on that threadbare skeleton, rights-based individualism. To read through A Political Companion to Walt Whitman is indeed to discover that the conventional terms of social critique have been turned on their head: rather than the interpreter exposing the mystifications and bad faith of hegemonic practices that perpetuate injustice, we have commentators endeavoring to identify the terms of a mythology robust enough to animate core principles that by themselves are “too thinly cognitive . . . [and] too narrowly calculating” (156) to win full allegiance. Strange as it may seem to describe a collection of analytic essays along these lines, this attempt at extrapolating an ideology worth getting excited about does have the advantage of following the poet’s lead, most especially in his long prose tract written after the Civil War, Democratic Vistas, which begins with the author affirming that, while the United States is incontestably a democracy now that it has passed its severest test, the country nevertheless urgently requires bards to instruct a materialistic and myopic people in the true lessons of democracy. It is in this context that Whitman calls upon his successors to produce the “great poems of death” that might model a vision of democratic governance not motivated by fear or simple self-interest. In an inspired move, the editor dedicates the concluding section of the book to the topic of death and citizenship and includes essays by Peter Augustine Lawler, Jack Turner, and Morton Schoolman that, taking Democratic Vistas as a key text, insightfully probe into the relation between these two vital elements in Whitman’s poetry and prose.

    89411380_a58e01572c

    The larger question raised by A Political Companion to Walt Whitman is whether its efforts at ideological retrieval and rehabilitation succeed. Kateb’s account of Whitman’s poetics of empathy is undeniably stirring, but there is a sense in which it is no less abstract or dogmatic than the core beliefs it is meant to enshrine and ennoble. This becomes apparent when Kateb pauses to denounce Whitman’s nationalism on the grounds that its sense of group identity is invidiously restrictive (he says the same about Whitman’s calls for “manly friendship”). But if the objects of the poet’s “receptivity and responsiveness” are in theory boundless, then it would appear that not just nationalism (or homosexuality) is unacceptably restrictive as markers of identity, but virtually any object of the poet’s empathy. The point is not that empathy is stretched thin and thus made superficial by the sheer multiplicity of experiences the world has to offer, as D. H. Lawrence once complained. Rather, the imperative to identify with any and everything necessarily means, as a matter of principle, identifying with nothing in particular. Empathy itself becomes an abstract gesture. Putting receptivity and responsiveness first is a self-defeating policy if it’s really receptivity and responsiveness that we most care about. From this standpoint, I agree with Nancy Rosenblum, who points out in her response to Kateb’s essay that Leaves of Grass invites us to regard democracy as above all an aesthetic spectacle of sublimity and for this reason is more “public than civic” (56). By this Rosenblum means that Whitman’s brand of egalitarianism does not “translate nicely into defense of rights or representative value” since his “attraction to democracy . . . is not to other men and women personally and individually” (56) but rather to a dazzling parade of types such are as put on display in the famous catalogues, where beauty attaches to the abstract idea of a collectivity that for Rosenblum remains expressly independent of any political outcome. (In another essay, Jane Bennett likewise de-couples the poet’s stance from any determinate political result in the course of offering an interesting meditation on the importance of impersonal judgment in Leaves of Grass.)

    ~
    Rather than the interpreter exposing the mystifications and bad faith of hegemonic practices that perpetuate injustice, we have commentators endeavoring to identify the terms of a mythology robust enough to animate core principles that by themselves are “too thinly cognitive . . . [and] too narrowly calculating” (156) to win full allegiance.
    ~

    I conclude with a comment on method. Kateb’s opinion that Whitman’s nationalism is of “secondary importance” (21) and so can be safely excised from our accounts of his work is not necessarily shared by other contributors; Jack Turner, for example, defends this theme on the grounds that it upholds “public identity” in overcoming “privatism” (165). But whether for or against, this pick-and-choose approach blurs the line between trying to understand what Whitman meant and trying to coax various pieces of a poetic puzzle into a picture that will seem compelling to today’s reader. It blurs, in other words, the difference between interpretation and extrapolation. To bracket Whitman’s interest in nationalism because it doesn’t conform to his larger project (or to put it back in because it does) may put us in touch with “the Whitman that matters” (24) for (some) contemporary readers of the poet, but the practice of playing up or playing down various aspects of his writing has nothing to do with interpreting that writing. The blithe disregard of this distinction is all the more striking given the persistent valorizing of openness and the need to accept perspectives at odds with our own beliefs. Martha Nussbaum, to take a further example, is a great believer in “working for a society that treats every [man and woman] as an end, and [not] as a mere tool for others” (100) and applauds Whitman for embracing just this principle. But this doesn’t prevent her from recoiling from his “mystical views of oneness” in certain (unidentified) poems late in his career since in such instances the poet “does not seem to grasp how much at odds these ideas are with his project of teaching America and Americans to accept death” (123). The idea is that poems are instruments—“mere tools,” as it were—for advancing a project and are to be evaluated as such. Actually listening to what the poet is attempting to convey in a particular text drops out as a secondary consideration. The elevation of tolerance and pluralism at the thematic level paradoxically circumscribes the extension of genuine critical interest at the interpretive level.

    Walt_Whitman_by_Mathew_Brady

    Perhaps it will be said that literary critics such as yours truly are bound to have their own ways of dealing with texts while the political theorists are bound to have theirs. But in fact I don’t think this confusion between interpretation and extrapolation—between understanding and relevance—has much to do with disciplinary differences. Perhaps the most surprising lesson of A Political Companion to Walt Whitman is how little is lost in the translation across this divide. The identitarianism alone shared by so many (though not all) of the contributors—the premise, that is, that a vitally important connection exists between the experiences that one goes through and the beliefs one ends up acquiring (as when Kateb or Nussbaum tell us that discovering the strangeness within ourselves will enable us to appreciate the strangeness in others)—is for most (though not all) members of literature departments a truism too obvious to need defending. Further, this privileging of a politics of identity has, in reaching across the humanities, created the conditions for what increasingly seems to be the default model for a great deal of scholarship in this area, where the kind of close reading made standard by the New Criticism decades ago is joined to an attempt to lay claim to political relevance of one kind or another. Not always as helpful as it could be in exploring the sources and shape of Whitman’s actual political beliefs (only Lawler mentions the importance of Thomas Paine, for example; the index mentions Barnburners and Loco-Focos not at all), A Political Companion to Walt Whitman nonetheless provides an interesting occasion to reflect on current attempts to articulate the relationship between politics and art in the writings of a figure frequently preoccupied by the same question.

    __________

    Kerry Larson
    University of Michigan

  • Great American Authors Series: A Political Companion to Saul Bellow

    Great American Authors Series: A Political Companion to Saul Bellow

    Saul_Bellow

    Saul Bellow’s Political Soul

    by Ben Rogerson
    ~

    What connects literature and politics? On first glance, the editors of A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, an eight-essay collection in the series Political Companions to Great American Authors, offer incongruous answers. For the series editor Patrick Deneen, American literature hosts the “teaching of the great authors,” which amount to a “democratic public philosophy” that meditates on issues of perennial political interest (vii)1. Conversely, Lee Trepanier and Gloria L. Cronin, the volume’s editors, initially provide a historicist justification for why Bellow warrants a political companion, explaining that his fiction “captures the general political shift in mainstream America from liberalism to conservatism” (1). But their introduction concludes on a counterintuitive note, in which American literature teaches us about democracy, or politics more generally, to the extent that such literature isn’t political. Any study of Bellow’s fiction inevitably collides with his “genius,” and the realization that “neither his work nor his biography can be reduced to a purely political investigation” (7). After all, he is an “artist,” not an ideologue, and his fiction was ultimately concerned “‘not [with] politics but [with] the soul’” (Gordon qtd. 7). Great American authors may be great teachers, but some mysteries must remain.

    A Political Companion to Saul Bellow does not announce the intellectual positions that it has inherited from Bellow’s era and which clarify aims that are, on one hand, public and pedagogical and, on the other, private and aesthetic. But these positions are familiar to readers of Stephen Schryer’s recent book Fantasies of the New Class, which argues that Bellow’s fiction closely articulates a literary and cultural politics that parallels the changing practice and ideologies of the “new class,” or America’s rapidly-expanding professional middle class2. Following World War II, new-class intellectuals such as Bellow, Lionel Trilling, and Mary McCarthy began to distrust the prevailing practices of “social trustee professionalism,” whose “technocratic pretensions towards social reform” seemed to only further ossify the bureaucratic welfare state (Schryer 6). BellowCompared to “institution building” (4), the response of new-class writers and intellectuals has often been mistaken for a “retreat” into the “purely private aesthetic sensibility” of the autonomous artist (Schryer 5)—what the Companion editors celebrate as Bellow’s “‘soul.’” But Schryer argues that this apparent retreat instead signified a new Arnoldian form of “public service” that “[favored] a different, humanistic model of cultural education oriented toward the educated middle class” (6). In this model, the very “example” of a new-class intellectual—in Bellow’s case, the aesthetic complexity of his literature—presumed a political efficacy capable of correcting the narrow materialism of American society (and capitalism in particular). Even as his politics shifted rightward in the 1960s, Bellow did not abandon the methods of new-class pedagogy. While increasingly suspicious of “intellectuals’ will-to-power,” he still saw the ongoing need “to reconquer the cultural center, using it to reeducate the American public” (Schryer 24).

    Without necessarily embracing the editors’ conservatism, intimations of the new-class pedagogical project seem to suffuse many of the volume’s essays. For instance, Judie Newman argues that Bellow’s neoconservative reputation has concealed the impact of Trotskyism on his early political and fictional writing. That impact is never greater than in short stories such as “The Hell It Can’t” and “Two Morning Monologues,” as well as his first novel The Dangling Man (1944), which question American intervention in World War II and the ongoing viability of capitalism. By 1942, Bellow’s “threshold” short story “The Mexican General”— a fictionalized account of Bellow’s 1940 trip to Mexico to meet Trotsky, who was assassinated beforehand—makes clear that his Trotskyite enthusiasms were waning (20). Thus, a subsequent novel such as The Adventures of Augie March signifies not only an artistic but also a political maturation; its early drafts more explicitly displayed Bellow’s nascent social democratic politics. But the essay concludes by giving the final word to a familiar idea. In “Mosby’s Memoirs,” a 1968 short story that reflects on Bellow’s political past, the writer “satirizes both sides of the political spectrum” in order to teach readers, it would seem, to recognize the naïveté of political ideologies—socialist, conservative, or otherwise (24).

    Newman’s efforts notwithstanding, the neoconservative turn figures prominently in two essays on Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a 1970 novel that uses the Holocaust to frame shifts in Bellow’s political thought. Accepting the series’s moral-pedagogical challenge, Victoria Aarons explores the insights that Sammler and The Victim (1947), Bellow’s second novel, provide into “how to live in a post-Holocaust world” (134). For instance, Sammler, whose protagonist is a survivor, teaches us “that words, uttered irresponsibly, distort essential truths” (147). The novel charges Hannah Arendt with such irresponsibility, as she needlessly theorizes Nazi criminality—her famous conclusion about the banality of evil—“at the expense of clear, straightforward reckoning” (146) and, ultimately, “basic human decency” (149). But at the very least, Aarons’s conclusions are striking for their unreservedness. After all, Sammler is the novel whose only African American character is not only a pickpocket who steals, among other things, Social Security checks from elderly whites, but who maniacally pursues the protagonist so he can expose himself in animalistic fashion.

    By contrast, Andrew Gordon’s essay acknowledges how Sammler deploys the Holocaust as part of a political polemic. In the novel, the pickpocket’s theft and self-exposure bookend Sammler’s visit to Columbia University to deliver a lecture on the British Left in the 1930s, The Adventures of Augie Marchwhich Gordon compares to Bellow’s 1968 lecture at San Francisco State University on the role of writers in the academy. In both cases, New Left radicals rudely heckle the speakers, accusing each one of being an “effete old shit [who] can’t come.”3 (In fact, it was the Mexican-American writer and political activist Floyd Salas who heckled Bellow). More importantly, Gordon argues that Bellow exploits the differences between the two lectures in order to imply that fascistic tendencies within the New Left justify his own conservatism. In the novel, the student radical does not embarrass the self-assured, well-known, and combative Bellow during the Q&A; rather, Gordon points out that he victimizes an unknown and half-blind Holocaust survivor who has innocently mentioned George Orwell, another leftist guilty of breaking ranks.

    Two other essays primarily concern Henderson the Rain King, Bellow’s 1958 novel about an American millionaire whose spiritual search in Africa unexpectedly results in friendship with a tribal king. Carol R. Smith and Daniel K. Muhlestein stake out opposing answers to a single question: does this novel reinforce racist ideologies? Answering in the affirmative, Smith contends that Bellow’s latter-day anti-multiculturalism—his opposition to second-wave feminism and, especially, Black Power movements—realizes political trajectories initiated in his earlier fiction. As its protagonist rambles through deepest Africa, Henderson displaces “the history of the African passage with a history of the Jewish Atlantic” in order to produce what Smith calls an “assimilationist model of white America” (104). Jewishness is crucial to constructing such notions of “Americanness” because it signifies “elective immigration”—that is, Jewishness signifies a flight from European oppression (103). Following Toni Morrison, “Blackness” in turn necessitates the act of displacement because it persists as a troubling reminder of the “potentially disabling material circumstances”—enslavement and forced migration—that subtends American nation building and the transmission of liberal humanist values (106). Smith argues that Henderson ultimately attempts to nullify this racial unconsciousness through its symbolic geography. At the novel’s end, Henderson returns from Africa with a lion cub (itself the reincarnation of a dead African king) to realize renewal in the white snowy landscape of, of all places, Newfoundland.

    ~
    In this model, the very “example” of a new-class intellectual—in Bellow’s case, the aesthetic complexity of his literature—presumed a political efficacy capable of correcting the narrow materialism of American society (and capitalism in particular).
    ~

    Rather than the racialized lion, Muhlestein argues that the novel is preoccupied with a different animal—namely, the carnival bear from Henderson’s youth, and which he also recollects in the novel’s final pages. At first, this symbol seems only to confirm the presence of a carnivalesque aesthetic, in which the novel combines comic and grotesque elements to “torque” the “colonial library,” or those familiar tales of white exploration and evangelism in the heart of Africa (72). Deploying this aesthetic in scenes with King Dahfu and the Wahiri tribe, Henderson debunks the noxious ideology of the black Demonic Other so powerfully explored in Joseph Conrad’s fiction. But Muhlestein ultimately contends that the relationship between the carnivalesque and colonial politics is beside the point. Henderson is “not … a political novel per se,” a point on which Bellow insisted as well (96). Indeed, Muhlstein concludes that the novel’s “reason for existence” is purely vocational—the novel may use elements from the colonial library, but only incidentally, and only in order to “[facilitate] the creation of the carnivalesque” (96).

    Like Muhlestein’s contribution, the cumulative effect of Ben Siegel’s essay on Bellow as a Jew and Jewish writer—an essay about how Bellow rejects the constraints of one “label” after another—is to grant the writer his self-proclaimed status as an artist whose obligations are to his vocation (47). Bristling at the “‘parochial’” description “Jewish writer,” Bellow called it the literary equivalent of “‘ghetto walls’” (qtd. 49). “‘No good literature is parochial,’” Bellow once claimed, because good literature “‘should appeal to anyone.’” Furthermore, Siegel has also described a writer who disavows ethnic labels as obstacles to becoming one of the ““great-public … artists” whose fiction reaches—and teaches—a mass readership (Bellow qtd. 50). As Bellow said in a 1971 interview, “what Americans want to learn from their writers is how to live.” And Richard Ohmann has noted that readers were on the same page, excited to play their part in this pedagogical project.4

    In my opinion, Siegel’s brief sketch of how the writer conceived his relationship to his readership points to new directions for scholarship on Bellow—not for continuing the volume’s political-cum-pedagogical project as such, but for expanding the institutional context in which Bellow’s fiction and ideologies of professionalism circulate. Schryer typically addresses this writer-reader relationship through the university, the institution that educates the growing professional class that will comprise the mass readership for postwar writers. But this relationship is also an effect of another set of institutions, one which has garnered less critical attention—namely, the midcentury publishing industry, whose commercial success partly depended on promoting literary-pedagogical concerns complementary to those of the new class. Evan Brier has recently contributed to this discussion in A Novel Marketplace, his study of “postwar novel production” that suggests how publishers exploited “the genuinely felt alarm over the emergence of mass culture” in order to delineate “a space for the novel within a newly crowded commercial field” (9). To create such space, the industry marketed the novel “to an increasingly educated audience” as a commodity that “transcends commerce” (13). In isolation, this idea is unsurprising. Describing midcentury writers as “producers in a producer-oriented trade,” Brier’s insight is to demonstrate how they also “participated within their novels in the promotion of the novel in general as a cultural and political good, often in terms that echoed the industry’s promotional campaign and the rhetoric of culture critics” (15, emphasis in original).

    images

    Brier’s book concentrates on five novelists, but his method seems capable of wrestling with Bellow, whose work could also be said to “[celebrate] … the writer’s solitariness … against a corrupt, decadent, or totalitarian mass culture” (16).5 To bridge the gap between Bellow’s work and biography, this method could also build on Ohmann’s influential 1983 essay “The Shaping of a Canon: U. S. Fiction, 1960-1975.” In light of Brier’s scholarship, Ohmann’s argument can be read to suggest that “precanonical” American novels—his discussion includes Henderson, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift— satisfy the book trade’s twin mandates of literary value and cultural criticism by striking a particular relationship between style and narrative (208). For Ohmann, the stories are almost uniformly “narratives of illness” in which new-class protagonists endure alienation in confronting the supposed sickness of mass society and culture (217).6 Although their stories may “look very similar,” these novels are actually staking their strongest claims for their literary and political value through the mechanism of authorial style, or “the pursuit of a unique and personal voice” (209). And this idea of an inimitable style, as we have seen, is legible as an example of either Bellow’s new-class public service (Schryer) or his soul (the Companion editors). The more onerous task is connecting such style to Bellow’s relationship with his publishers. On first glance, Bellow does appear to view Viking Press in much the same way that readers regarded novels. More than just a commercial business, his longtime publisher was an Arnoldian collaborator in his supposedly lonely struggle.7 Indeed, Bellow’s letters express “love” for Viking; the press enables his style by recognizing his “pride as a workman” and by refusing to view his fiction through the eyes of a “canning concern,” a phrase evocative of the mass culture industries.8

    Admittedly, the editors of Companion might view this approach with reservations since it implies that Bellow’s vocation motivates political beliefs—formal, cultural, or otherwise—that do not necessarily speak to the so-called perennial concerns of the American political condition. Nevertheless, I think that this approach shows how Bellow’s work can continue to teach us about, as Trepanier and Cronin put it, “the concrete and the complexity of life” (7).

    endnotes:
    1. Deneen complements this claim with a methodological one by promising that the essayists will “approach the classic texts not with a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’”—the ubiquitous, corrosive tool of the left-of-center intellectual—“but with the curiosity of fellow citizens who believe that the great authors have something of value to teach their readers” (vii). But insofar as the phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” describes a methodology, Deneen’s claim is overstated. Essays in this volume uncover the repressed histories of slavery, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and feminism “peek[ing] through the pages,” as one contributor puts it, of Bellow’s fiction (61).
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    2. Schryer, Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 2.
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    3. Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 42.
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    4. Ohmann makes the connection between Bellow’s quotation and studies of reading. See Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: U. S. Fiction, 1960-1975,” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 1 (Sep. 1983): 201.
    Back to the essay

    5. Evan Brier’s A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) has chapters focusing on Paul Bowles, Norman Mailer, Grace Metalious, Sloan Wilson, and Ray Bradbury.
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    6. It should be noted that Ohmann does not use the phrase “new class,” but instead refers to Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s description of a “Professional-Managerial Class,” or PMC (209).
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    7. Founded in 1925 by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheimer, Viking Press incorporated hostility towards mass culture in its premise: to publish “distinguished fiction with some claim to permanent importance rather than ephemeral popular interest.”
    Back to the essay

    8. See Saul Bellow’s letter in James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), 225.
    Back to the essay

    cover art by Zoran Tucić

    __________

    Ben Rogerson is a Ph. D student in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is currently working on a book project that examines critiques of white-collar work in mid-twentieth century American film, fiction, poetry, and photography.

  • Great American Authors Series: A Political Companion to John Steinbeck

    Great American Authors Series: A Political Companion to John Steinbeck

    Steinbeck sketch

    Enduring Ambivalence

    by David Wrobel
    ~

    “Critics do not like to be confounded in their attempts to compartmentalize,” Simon Stow writes in his short introductory essay “The Dangerous Ambivalence of John Steinbeck,” in A Political Companion to John Steinbeck (9). Stow identifies an ambivalence about nation, government, community, and individualism that characterizes Steinbeck’s works, confounds his critics, and helps explain both their consternation and the enduring popularity of his work among readers outside of the academy. It is worth considering that Steinbeck (1902-1968), contrary to the dismissive evaluations of most literary critics, remained a force in American cultural life for three decades after what have been labeled his “years of greatness,” from 1936-1939—a remarkably productive period marked by the publication of In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Long Valley (1938), and his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939)1.

    During the World War II years Steinbeck was subjected to federal background investigations, even as he worked to advance the nation’s cause, writing the much maligned, yet truly impactful novel and play The Moon Is Down (1942) (not explicitly, yet quite obviously about the Nazi invasion of Norway), and Bombs Away (1942) (a thoroughly positive account of a U.S. Air Force bomber team), as well as traveling to England in June 1943, and on to North Africa, Sicily, and the Italian mainland to report on the war for the New York Herald Tribune. He also wrote a pair of works set in Mexico, The Forgotten Village (1941) and The Pearl (1947), which addressed the ethical complications surrounding the intersections of modern medicine and indigenous folk cultures, and the highly successful Cannery Row (1945), which might be considered the first novel of the American counterculture.

    406px-JohnSteinbeckWhile less productive in the fifties, that decade did see the appearance of one of Steinbeck’s most successful and enduring novels, East of Eden (1952), which reflected the generational conflicts that came to mark the post-WWII decades, as well as Sweet Thursday (1954), the critically undervalued sequel to Cannery Row. In addition, the 1950s saw the publication of Steinbeck’s screenplay for Elia Kazan’s acclaimed film Viva Zapata! (1952), and Once There Was a War, his collected World War II dispatches (1958). Steinbeck began the sixties with what would be his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and with his endearing and enduring Travels with Charley (1962), an effort to come to grips with his growing sense of alienation resulting from the pace of post-war change. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in late 1962, over the lamentable protestations of some American critics, and then re-affirmed his deep attachment to the nation a few years later in a collection of essays on aspects of national life and character, America and the Americans (1966). He visited Vietnam from December 1966 to May 1967, where one of his two sons was serving, and wrote a series of dispatches, supportive of LBJ’s policies and critical of anti-war protests, though he would change his position on the war before he died.

    In short, Steinbeck’s writings serve as a remarkable guide through the controversies and complications that marked American politics and culture in the middle third of the twentieth century. If it is legitimate enough to consider the nation in middle third of the nineteenth century under the moniker Walt Whitman’s America (1995), as David Reynolds has, and to label the last third of that century Mark Twain’s America (1932), as author Bernard DeVoto did, then it seems no less reasonable to consider the years from the Depression to the Great Society through the lens of Steinbeck’s writings. Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh and Simon Stow’s collection of essays, A Political Companion to John Steinbeck, is a strong addition to an excellent series of volumes (that also includes Henry Adams, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson). The anthology moves us toward a fuller consideration of Steinbeck’s centrality to at least the first part of this mid-twentieth-century period.

    ~
    Indeed, whether the tensions in Steinbeck’s four decades’ of writing are between the group man and the individual, or traditionalism and liberalism, communism and capitalism, or alienation and affirmation (from the nation), it is these very sets of seeming contradictions and their accompanying ambiguities and consequent ambivalence that characterize Steinbeck’s literary work and political thought and help account for his continuing relevance.
    ~

    Not surprisingly, Steinbeck’s work in the 1930s and 1940s gets most of the contributors’ attention, including co-editor Zirakzadeh’s provocative discussion of Steinbeck as a “revolutionary conservative or a conservative revolutionary,” Donna Kornhaber’s treatment of politics and Steinbeck’s playwriting, Adrienne Akins Warfeld’s examination of Steinbeck’s Mexican works from the 1940s, Charles Williams’ insightful exploration of Steinbeck’s “group man” theory in In Dubious Battle, the volume’s standout essay by James Swensen on Dorothea Lange’s photographs and the work of the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Organization,” Zirakzadeh’s treatment of The Grapes of Wrath as novel, film, and inspiration for Bruce Springsteen, and Mimi R. Gladstein and James H. Meredith’s “Patriotic Ironies,” on Steinbeck’s wartime service. Other essays examine Steinbeck’s legacy in the work of Bruce Springsteen, Travels with Charley and America and Americans (together), and The Winter of Our Discontent.

    John_Steinbeck_1962However, in addition to the absence of any extended treatment of Cannery Row, the second half of Steinbeck’s career in general gets short shrift in the volume. There is no significant coverage of East of Eden, or of Steinbeck’s powerful defense of playwright Arthur Miller in 1957 against the charges of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), or of the political backdrop of the Cold War more generally 2. Party politics are largely absent from the collection, though Steinbeck certainly had his political preferences from the 1930s through the 1960s, as evidenced in his correspondence 3. Steinbeck’s very public responses to the Vietnam War, recently gathered and republished, are also absent from the volume 4. Fuller attention to the 1950s and 1960s would have made this anthology more complete. Also absent, among the essayists themselves, are representatives of an older and still active generation of groundbreaking Steinbeck scholars, including Robert DeMott, and some leading representatives of the current generation, including Susan Shillinglaw and Kevin Hearle, whose perspectives on the politics of race and place would have augmented the volume nicely.

    Nonetheless, for all the anthology’s voids, it does achieve the editors’ and contributors’ goal of illuminating the complexities of Steinbeck’s political thought and underscoring the enduring contributions of his work. It is a nicely edited and integrated set of explorations of the nuances and complications of Steinbeck’s political thought and a quite effective response to the generations of critics who have found Steinbeck’s work too popular, heroic, sentimental, moralistic, and too didactic. Indeed, whether the tensions in Steinbeck’s four decades’ of writing are between the group man and the individual, or traditionalism and liberalism, communism and capitalism, or alienation and affirmation (from the nation), it is these very sets of seeming contradictions and their accompanying ambiguities and consequent ambivalence that characterize Steinbeck’s literary work and political thought and help account for his continuing relevance.

    Grapes-of-wrathSteinbeck may not be read much in the academy, but he remains widely read outside of it. His deep and abiding dedication to the betterment of humanity and the nurturing of human relations through his art is too literally and literarily low brow for most of the arbiters of the cannon. Yet, while extremists on the right and the left attacked his work (from In Dubious Battle to The Grapes of Wrath and beyond) vehemently, a significant segment of the reading public has always felt deeply connected to it. Steinbeck conveyed, probably better than any other writer of his day, the common strivings of Americans during the Depression, War War II, and the post-war decades, and in so doing he continually sparked the appreciation of working class people and the conscience of the middle class, as well as the disdain of many members of the literary class. In placing Steinbeck’s “productive ambivalence” (9) at center stage, this companion to the intersections of Steinbeck’s literary and political journeys wisely nudges us toward a fuller appreciation of the writer and his work.

    endnotes:
    1. See Tetsumaro Hayashi, ed., John Steinbeck: The Years of Greatness, 1936-1939 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993).
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    2. See Esquire magazine, June 1957
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    3. See Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten’s collection John Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, (Viking, 1975; Penguin, 1989) and Jackson Benson’s finely detailed biography, John Steinbeck, Writer (New York: Penguin, 1990, and Viking, 1984).
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    4. Thomas E. Barden, ed., Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).
    Back to the essay

    cover art by Kieran Guckian

    __________

    WrobelDavid Wrobel holds the Merrick Chair in Western American History at the University of Oklahoma. His most recent book is Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire and Exceptionalism, from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013). He is currently working on two book projects: “The West and America: A Regional History, 1900-2000,” for the Cambridge Essential Histories series, and “John Steinbeck’s America: A Cultural History of the Nation, 1930-1968.”

  • "What Can We Learn From Uniqueness?" and "Said's Melville"

    "What Can We Learn From Uniqueness?" and "Said's Melville"

    Another addition to b2‘s Legacies of the Future: Jonathan Arac‘s “What Can We Learn From Uniqueness?” and Don Pease‘s “Said’s Melville.”

    ~

    Cover Photo: “In memoriam Edward Wadie Said, on the Israeli West Bank wall,” taken by Justin McIntosh.

  • Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Walker Percy

    Walker Percy

    A Political Philosophy of Moviegoing?

    by Scott Dill
    ~

    While on a flight back to New Orleans, Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, studies a young man who is reading The Charterhouse of Parma. Binx is curious to learn how he sits, “Immediately graceful and not aware of it or mediately graceful and aware of it?” The apparently innocent matter of posture becomes another sign in what Binx calls his “search.” Soon enough Binx concludes in disappointment that his fellow passenger is “mediately graceful” as well as “a romantic.” Because he is reading Stendhal? No, because his mere comportment is so deeply mediated with melancholy self-awareness. “The poor fellow,” Binx reflects, he “has just begun to suffer from it, this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.” His desire will forever pant, but never be fulfilled. To sum up this desperate relationship to desire Binx comments, “He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to movies.” Moviegoers have enshrined a popularized form of romantic longing, Percy suggests, centuries after the height of Romanticism. Yet movies offer no innocent frolic among the wildflowers of poesy; for Binx, movies are a capitalist culture’s most exhaustive method of mediating the romantic individual’s desire. One need not even go to movies to be a moviegoer, so pervasive are their effects on the cultural imagination. This diagnosis of the moviegoer’s susceptibility, and subsequent unhappiness, captures Percy’s persistent critique of late twentieth-century American individualism—that its short-circuited self-knowledge cannot sustain a thriving culture.

    The Moviegoer

    A new edited collection of essays begins the important work of teasing out the various implications of Percy’s view of the individual for political thought. If the individual is finally unintelligible to himself, what does this imply for the politics of liberal individualism? A Political Companion to Walker Percy, in keeping with the intentions of the Political Companions to Great American Authors series at the University Press of Kentucky, seeks to elucidate Percy’s major contributions to a long, if not august, American tradition of belletristic political writing. For example, the volume’s final essay juxtaposes Percy’s twentieth-century vision of American society alongside of Alexis de Tocqueville’s from the nineteenth. The surprising foil flatters both writers. Yet, even more propitious, A Political Companion to Walker Percy evinces an admirable thematic coherence for a collection of critical essays. Editors Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith’s introduction begins with the question: “Why do two political scientists say that an American Catholic novelist can teach us what nobody else can about our nation’s political life?” Though perhaps overstated, it sets the problem each essay shares, even if their topical concerns vary. Lawler and Smith’s answer is that the various ideologies Percy found plaguing our national political life—racism, the reductions of scientism, radical individualism, the ideal of stoicism—are best elucidated by Percy’s unique “indigenous Thomism.” Percy’s “indigenous Thomism” is, according to Lawler and Smith, a neglected but crucial strain of American political thought.

    The harmonization of what we know through science and what we know through revelation is the rather distinctively Catholic project called Thomism. There’s a neglected American Catholic tradition composed of Orestes Brownson (author of The American Republic, 1865), John Courtney Murray (We Hold These Truths, 1960), and Percy that holds that a Thomistic interpretation of the greatness of our Founder’s accomplishment is the gift American Catholics can offer their country.

    It is the gift of this volume to place Percy in such a tradition. Rather than dealing with Percy exclusively as a Southerner, Lawler and Smith place his thought in a national conversation stretching back to Brownson’s dissenting stand against the rugged individualism of his Transcendentalist contemporaries. This more ambitious, if not more appropriate, placement of Percy’s political thought is due to their view that Thomism offers America “a better foundation for its liberalism than that our nation’s most prominent political philosopher’s have provided us.” A curious claim, but then again, Percy himself loved to provoke.

    The argument that Catholic theology provides the key conceptual grounding for a distinctively American liberalism refrains from any legislative prescriptions in these pages. It is rather an argument about what constitutes the best soil for cultivating genuine human flourishing. The editors are quick to point out that Percy does not intend “to politicize the church” and more than he hopes “to have public policy animated by the personal virtue of charity.” His writing does, however, “show how our political life is limited and sustained by who we are as truthful, social, personal, joyful, and loving beings.” Lacking clear political prescriptions, they see Percy’s work as providing a philosophy of personal relations. For the individual is fundamentally social in Percy’s work. An essay by Nathan P. Carson explains Percy’s writing on semiotic theory in light of his convictions about communal virtue. What is often treated as an abstract theory of signification or a rarified problem in the philosophy of language becomes in Percy’s work the grounds for a virtue ethics—semiotics cum communitarianism. Carson concludes that Percy’s “conjunction of the ontological joys of scientific and philosophical inquiry, on the one hand, and radical dependence, other-regard, and community, on the other, is a refreshing and rare combination.” Several of the essays here collected unfold Percy’s conviction that neither language nor the individual can make any sense outside of the communities in which they are formed.

    Lawler and Smith’s answer is that the various ideologies Percy found plaguing our national political life—racism, the reductions of scientism, radical individualism, the ideal of stoicism—are best elucidated by Percy’s unique “indigenous Thomism.”

    Farrell O’Gorman gets past the isolating idiosyncrasies of Percy’s at times bizarre novels in “Confessing the Horrors of Radical Individualism in Lancelot: Percy, Dostoevsky, Poe.” First, O’Gorman traces the formative influence that reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground had on Percy as he composed Lancelot. Both books “were created by authors who embrace traditional Christianity but utilize obsessive and intentionally offensive post-Christian narrators who simultaneously critique and personify what the authors see as the horrors of the radical individualism engendered by modernity.” If Percy lifted much of the structure of his novel’s critique of individualism from Dostoevsky’s acrimonious narrator, its generic roots stretch down deeper into American soil. In a deft revision of Edgar Allan Poe’s place in gothic fiction, O’Gorman shows how Percy’s time with Allen Tate and Tate’s writing on Poe influenced Percy’s use of gothic tropes, particular its figuration of the female body. O’Gorman argues that the gothic novel emerged from an eighteenth-century moment when a culture “that increasingly valued a self-reliant and essentially disembodied but figuratively masculine rationality sought in effect to exorcise its Catholic past.” He then traces Percy’s reading of Poe to show how the body remains a stubborn stay against the idealized rationality assumed in radical individualism. Rather than celebrate the “American Adam,” the masculine mind free from the gothic past’s figural femininity, Percy represents forms of embodiment that return to and revise the Catholic past so ashamedly disavowed earlier in the gothic tradition.

    The Second Coming

    “Radical individualism,” as here construed, is a threat to the very ideal it commends. Other threats to the liberal individual covered in these essays range from the moviegoer’s “Cartesian theater” to the collective consequences of pursuing happiness to the politics of love and marriage to the reductionist views of scientism. In “Walker Percy’s Alternative to Scientism in The Thanatos Syndrome,” Micah Mattix explicates the relationship between Percy’s semiotics and his view of the novel’s unique cultural work. As opposed to merely descriptive accounts of language, Mattix shows how Percy’s conviction that language is ontologically efficacious—that is, that words are essentially connected to actualities—informs his robust view of the novel. Novels do the moral work of accurately naming the social relations that compose human life. Writing novels, in restoring the moral burden of language, restores the possibility of genuine community.

    Percy’s moral commitments are not left alone to collect dust up on the shelf of theory. Brendan P. Purdy and Janice Daurio contribute an essay on the evolution of Percy’s personal views on race relations in the South. “The Second Coming of Walker Percy: From Segregationalist to Integrationist” documents the three strands of Percy’s thought that developed in the forties and informed his 1956 Commonweal article, “Stoicism and the South” (published four years prior to his debut novel, The Moviegoer). To Percy’s treatment of the stoicism he saw represented in the work and life of his famous uncle, William Alexander Percy, they add his reading of Kierkegaard, C.S. Pierce, and his conversion to the Catholic faith. Connecting Percy’s religion with his ethics and his politics, Purdy and Daurio best capture the spirit animating Percy revealed in this volume, “Being a Christian is not a matter of becoming one more political party; it is being formed as a person of a certain sort who brings the vision of who he is to his decision about what he does.” Percy’s Catholicism does not determine allegiance to a political party, but offers a political philosophy of the person that is also necessarily an ethics. To be formed as a person whose identity governs his or her actions is precisely what Percy’s Thomistic vision finds missing in the American polis.

    His writing does, however, “show how our political life is limited and sustained by who we are as truthful, social, personal, joyful, and loving beings.”

    As unified as these essays are in their exposition of Percy’s thought, a growing silence begins to clamor between the lines of A Political Companion to Walker Percy. While many of its chapters refer to Percy’s view of sacramental mediation, not a single one addresses the kinds of cultural forms that Percy despaired of too thoroughly mediating desire, such as movies or self-help books, and the conventions of the capitalist society in which they thrive. Percy’s indignation that the remnants of an ill-fated Christendom condone the economic structures of solipsistic individualism is largely ignored. This is a shortcoming insofar as it shows the volume’s tendency to pigeonhole Percy as yet another conservative Christian from the South. But Percy’s critique of Christendom is wide-ranging, especially when it comes to what Eugene McCarraher has memorably called “Chrapitalism,” “the lucrative merger of Christianity and capitalism, America’s most enduring covenant theology.” Percy’s work is never without an overwhelming awareness of the crippling effects of baptized consumerism and corporate greed. The flows of capital responsible for enshrining moviegoing as a way of life emerge from real institutions that can and should be fixed. A devout Catholic, Percy was no Chrapitalist.

    Love in the Ruins

    In his study of contemporary fiction, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, John McClure traces the surprisingly frequent coalescence of religious and political economies in late twentieth-century American fiction. In what McClure calls the “age of Pynchon and Morrison,” into which Percy lodges squarely, a swath of novels portray new political formations, communities of “preterite spiritualities and neomonastic politics” that put into practice a “politics of engaged retreat.” Of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo’s novels McClure writes, “Scorning the codes of theological order and exclusivity that characterize ‘high’ religious traditions, they develop modes of thought and practice that are scandalously impure.” Both Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming offer images of precisely such an “impure” community, as does the “engaged retreat” modeled on Dostoevsky’s underground man in Lancelot. Percy’s work certainly fits into McClure’s account of a neo-monastic politics. Like Alastair McIntyre’s call for a figure amalgamating Trotsky with St. Benedict, or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s call for a new St. Francis of loving renunciation, Percy’s work longs for a new economic structure of more fulfilling affective resonances. Lawler and Smith’s collection has managed to wrench Percy free from purely regional concerns, but it is too content with the political limitations of red state/blue state quibbles. This book, which contains an essay by Richard M. Reinsch III that argues, “the South’s evangelicalism might […] demonstrate an alternative to the highly secular model blue states present,” suffers from a limited reading of Percy’s political imagination. Percy’s suspicion of the illusions of a left-right dichotomy, served up as the ridiculous feuds of the Knotheads and LEFTPAPASAN in Love in the Ruins, makes such crass correlations dubious, if not scurrilously narrow-minded. As helpful as this collection is in rethinking Percy’s politics, it has yet to come to terms with the vicious bite of this justly lionized Southern Catholic.

    __________

    Scott Dill is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at UNC Chapel Hill. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on formal representations of the secular in contemporary American novels.

  • Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Henry Adams

    Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Henry Adams

    479px-Henry_Brooks_Adams,_Harvard_graduation_photo

    Being Henry Adams

    by Barry Maine
    ~

    This volume of essays successfully challenges Henry Steele Commager’s assertion in 1937 (reprinted in this volume) that Henry Adams’ “chief significance” is not as a historian or philosopher or teacher or political thinker but as a self-proclaimed symbol of the 20th Century Man educated for the wrong century. It does so by devoting less attention to the author of The Education of Henry Adams than to the other Henry Adams: the editor of the North American Review, the political scientist, the historian, the late convert to the religious scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, and the secret author of two novels. Nevertheless, The Education of Henry Adams, his most enduring literary achievement, functions as the pole star in this volume or, to mix my metaphors, a Rosetta Stone in reverse, its cryptic pronouncements re-interpreted in the light of Adams’ previous work in a variety of genres.

    More than a few authors of these essays point out that Henry Adams’ worries about American democratic government are not that different from our own today. Can a politician beholden to a particular set of interests set those interests aside in the service of the greater, public good? Could such a “statesman” be elected (or re-elected) by popular vote? Have political parties hijacked American democracy? Do our elected officials understand enough about global finance to steer the American economy in rough waters? Adams_Democracy_CoverDo advances in technology threaten human control of government? Adams wasn’t optimistic about our solving any of these problems. As editor of The North American Review, Adams could criticize anything and everything that was wrong with American democracy, but he occupied that position in part because he saw that the political landscape of his country had changed so dramatically from the time his famous ancestors served as presidents and statesmen that it would be impossible for him to seek elected office himself. So rather than seek to join in the procession, he became engrossed in the study of it. He wrote biographies of important statesmen, a history of the United States, two novels (Democracy and Esther, published anonymously), a series of scholarly essays on American economics, finance, and politics, a book about the Middle Ages (Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres), The Education of Henry Adams, mislabeled (and too often misunderstood) as an autobiography, and volumes of letters brilliantly analyzing how a changing world challenged democratic government. Henry Adams on the subject of American democracy is well worth listening to, if we know how to read him.

    Other volumes in this series on the political thought of important American authors combine, like this one, new essays with reprinted ones, which is certainly a valid practice given the wealth of scholarship on the subject. But fewer than half of the essays in the Henry Adams volume are new essays. This may say something about the failure of Henry Adams (yet another one!) to attract a new generation of scholars. The best essays in this collection, with few exceptions, were written decades ago, and it may well be that Adams’ best commentators belonged to an earlier generation of scholars not represented here: Ernest Samuels, Earl N. Harbert, Charles Vandersee, William Jordy, and J.C. Levenson, to name a few. On the other hand, this is not a volume of essays written by literary scholars. The contributors come from other disciplines: history, government, and political science. One feels compelled to ask, then, are these Adams’ best readers? Well, clearly some of them are. Michael Colacurcio reads the two novels as covert explorations of pragmatism, Richard Samuelson contributes a historically nuanced reading of Adams’ 1894 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, and James T. Young brilliantly interprets the evolution of Adams’ complex and evolving political views as they find expression in The Education of Henry Adams.

    “Henry Adams on the subject of American democracy is well worth listening to, if we know how to read him.”

    There is of course considerable value in bringing together in one place essays, new and old, on such a multifaceted topic, but there isn’t much that is “new” here. (Young’s essay, for example, is reprinted from his own book on Henry Adams, and Colacurcio’s essay is well known enough to be cited by many scholars.) One exception is Denise Dutton’s revisionist reading of Democracy in which she argues that we should not assume that Adams endorses his heroine’s political disillusionment, no matter how much it seems to mirror his own, for that would be reading the novel as autobiography (an all too common practice). Mrs. Madeleine Lee, Dutton argues, is a target of Adams’ satire (for her ambition, misguided sense of privilege, self-indulgence, and self-righteous “moral posturing”) as much as Senator Ratcliffe (for his overt political corruption), and therefore her rejection of American democracy should be regarded as “premature.” Dutton demonstrates that the secondary characters in the novel work together toward a common goal, affirming democracy’s promise, and that the “form” of the novel positions the reader as a participant in the process of negotiating disparate and often opposing views in order to arrive at sound and synthesizing conclusions, models for participation in a democracy for both elected officials and the people who vote for them. Dutton’s is the most radical and most positive reading of Adams’ political thinking in the collection, and the one most acutely attentive to narrative “form,” which Adams once admitted was always his primary interest in everything he wrote.

    images

    Any book that shines a light on Henry Adams, one of the most brilliant writers of his or any other generation, is most welcome. The editor of this one, Natalie Fuehrer Taylor, no doubt took on the project with the intention of re-examining the most important aspects and dimensions of Henry Adams’ political thought. Yet that intention is not entirely fulfilled. The volume tends to spin its wheels over the same set of issues (e.g. did Adams believe that history could become a science?) that have been examined before and sometimes to better purpose and effect by J. C. Levenson and company. Other dimensions of Adams’ political thought are missing altogether. There is no essay in this volume that examines Adams’ views on America’s foreign policy, on the uses and abuses of American power abroad, or on his influence upon his close friend John Hay, Secretary of State, in shaping that policy and exercising that power, all of which can be examined in The Letters of Henry Adams. Nor does the volume have much to say about Adams’ views on politically charged domestic issues, such as Westward expansion or Reconstruction in the South. Finally, the approaches to interpreting Adams’ texts are narrower in range than one might have a right to expect. There is nothing wrong, obviously, with “close readings” of the text informed by relevant historical contexts, but one might never know, reading this volume of essays on the political dimensions of literary production, that Fredric Jameson identified something we now recognize as “the political unconscious.” We can look backwards to Hayden White, John Carlos Rowe, and Paul Bové for more theoretically diverse readings of Henry Adams’ political thought, or look forward, hopefully, to a new generation of scholars.

    __________

    Barry Maine is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He is the author of “Portraits and Privacy: Henry Adams and John Singer Sargent,” in Henry Adams and the Need to Know (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 177-205.

    To follow all upcoming reviews (most immediately, from the University Press of Kentucky’s Political Companions to Great American Authors) click here.

  • The b2 Review

    L'anarchie_(1907)

    The print edition of b2 carries only article length reviews. We are starting an initiative to publish shorter reviews and notices of books, new and old, to which we want to draw our readers’ attention.

    We will also publish lists of books. We enthusiastically invite our readers to send us short reviews or notices that might be included on this site as part of the community around b2′s research agenda.

    update: In upcoming weeks, we will have much more posted here, including our review series on GLBT curated by Petra Dierkes-Thrun.

    The b2 Review welcomes recommendations of reviews and reviewers. We decided to develop longer review essays for the copyrighted edition of the journal from the best of the online reviews.