Archive for the 'Literary Factions' Category

Breaking down is easy

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on September 19, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Literary Factions, Navel Gazing and Yale
. 1 Comment

One of my new favorite professors, R. Howard Bloch, dropped a few sentences yesterday that overwhelmed me with happiness - suddenly made my ego felt justified in its hyperactivity. We were reading the self-justifying memoir of the great scholastic philosopher Abelard (’im what got ‘is bits chopped off for bonking Heloise) and discussing the spectacular arrogance of a man convinced he was constantly being persecuted by his jealous inferiors. And that’s when Professor Bloch dropped in this:

Paranoia is the purest form of literary criticism. It’s the product of an incessantly interpretive mind. Imposing patterns upon patterns of self reference, it places the self center and everything is filtered through its relationship with the interpreter. And the best thing about is that it’s totally incontrovertible. It’s based purely on a closed system, a set of subjective references set upon each each other.

Apologies if I’ve misworded it in remembrance. It should be obvious why this is great stuff, as a casual extension of work done by 20th century theorists on the ways in which patterns of literary expression manifest the patterns of our psychological processes. For the best examples, see the work of another much beloved professor, Peter Brooks, for whom the Freudian balance between repetition and teleology becomes a model for how narrative prevents a novel’s plot from foreclosing too quickly:

narrative must tend toward its end, seek illumination in its own death. Yet this must be the right death…Deviance, detour…these are characteristics of the narratable…Plot is a kind of arabesque or squiggle toward the end.

But the reason I’m excited about paranoid literary criticism today is that it relates the psychology of the literary critic to the psychology of the blogger. The blogger obsessively creates links upon links, tracing patterns of influence and tracking exactly whence everyone is getting their ideas. A hardcore blogger will find a way to relate every interesting new story back to her own obsessions. Such constantly linkage makes for closed self-referential communities riddled with extensive mutual analysis. Maybe that’s why the sharpest literary critics I’ve known are also the most successful bloggers. It’s all great fun, just like literary criticism and paranoia.

Dreams of my father

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on September 15, 2008
in History, If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Literary Factions, Politics and Social Theory
. 1 Comment

David Frum isn’t usually my favorite pundit but recently he’s been posting too much common sense to ignore. He’s been at the forefront of conservative skepticism about Palin. One key Frum line is that Palin euphoria has moved the McCain platform from the home of straight-talking realism to a confusing land in which personal charisma, endearing backstories and competing aesthetics muddy each other. Thanks to the Palin pick,

it turns out that many conservatives care as little as ever about administrative skill and executive accomplishment. Our party and our movement overwhelmingly respond to symbolic cues.

It’s an argument other commentators have been picking up on all week and it’s got plenty of GOP loyalists worried. Peggy Noonan was embarrassed to be caught claiming that Palin only got the pick because

“I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives. Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and that’s not what they’re good at, they blow it”

The question that keeps coming up is where personal narrative belongs effectively in a McCain campaign. Paul Mirengoff puts it best

We conservatives have had a good time ridiculing the Obama phenomenon, especially its messianic feel — the willingness of its adherents to pour so much hope and belief into such an empty, or at least incomplete, vessel — and its elevation of “narrative” over substance.

It turns out that we were dying to have basically the same experience.

I’d question Noonan’s conviction that “Republicans can’t do narrative” - after all, what was Bush Junior’s 2000 race but the return of the prodigal son? It turned out there was a way to take those alcoholic frat boy stories and make them do good. But Mirengoff is right to point out that they can’t ridicule Obama’s campaign for being narrative-heavy and then turn the same trick themselves. Incidentally, it’s telling that he calls Palin “a vessel” - guess those passive views of femininity just gotta pervade the language mornin’ noon and night.

But there’s a specific literary reason why Palinites shouldn’t try fighting Obama when it comes to narrative in America. Some months ago I heard a truly great literary conservative argue that the truly American narrative is the narrative of the fatherless. As a Brit, I’m often stunned by how preoccupied my American friends are with matters of ethnicity - if a nation won’t provide centuries of history to help one root one’s identity, perhaps neurotically plotting one’s genealogy and racial composition can help fill the void.

Look at the great American novels: Huck Finn, the story of a parentless boy torn between escaping and yearning for a shiftless father; The Scarlett Letter, the plot entirely driven by a child’s fatherlessness; The Catcher in the Rye, told by a boy whose parents are all too absent but who spends his days wishing he could offer children the paternal protection he clearly craves himself; The Great Gatsby, whose dominant character desperately covers up his father’s lowly origins and tries to create a whole new lineage for himself, even though that same rejected father is one of the very few who’ll show up for his funeral…the list goes on and on, the literature of a nation defined by a sense of historical rootlessness, descended from no forbears and entirely self-begotten.

So it’s not a theory I can claim as my own work, but I like it. And when it comes to narratives of fatherlessness, Obama is always going to win hands down. Sorry Sarah, you got the pick because the media strategists hadn’t read enough American novels.

And while we’re at it, check out this older Frum post attributing the cold reception given to Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind on publication to the Old Right’s reluctance to privilege the power of romantic narrative.

Literature ≥ Philosophy

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on June 26, 2008
in Arts, Literary Factions and Philosophy
. 2 Comments

If you want to be more like me — and why wouldn’t you? — you should read the following books.

  1. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson.
  2. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman.
  3. The Vorkosigan series, by Lois McMaster Bujold. (Start with Cordelia’s Honor, then Young Miles.)
  4. The Principia Discordia, by Malaclypse the Younger.
  5. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut.

You may have noticed that all five (well, six) are science fiction or fantasy. This is entirely appropriate, because it’s in the realm of speculative fiction that we can best explore the cultural and philosophical implications of our society.

American Gods explores our spiritual desolation:

“This is a bad land for gods,” said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasn’t Friends, Romans, countrymen, but it would do. “You’ve probably all learned that. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing.”

Cat’s Cradle is a parable on emptiness and the absurdity of love:

Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.

“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.

“Certainly,” said man.

“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.

And He went away.

The Principia Discordia responds with both mysticism and a call to chaos:

“Gentlemen,” he said, “why does Pickering’s Moon go about in reverse orbit? Gentlemen, there are nipples on your chests; do you give milk? And what, pray tell, Gentlemen, is to be done about Heisenberg’s Law?” He paused. “SOMEBODY HAD TO PUT ALL OF THIS CONFUSION HERE!”

Snow Crash offers a stateless dystopia full of metaphysical confusion and low-level heroism:

“Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”

The Vorkosigan books give us whole worlds, with vastly different human cultures, but always return to backwards, neo-feudal Barrayar, a planet the Nisbetcons should love:

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.”

There’s far more to all of them than this, of course, and if you are unconvinced I’d be thrilled to discuss at length.

McCain of Corioles: “The place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.”

Published
by
Dara Lind
on April 18, 2008
in Literary Factions and Politics
. 6 Comments

Some analogies are so perfect that it’s almost a relief to find that someone’s made them before. This afternoon it occurred to me that John McCain is Coriolanus; when I rushed to the oracle Google to validate my claim, the entrails of the search results read “Yes, and?”

Of course, the problem with dramatic analogy in particular is that people look at the plot first, and therefore assume the comparison must have some sort of predictive power. But I could never picture McCain leaving the Romans for the Volsces, whether you take the Volsces to be the Viet Cong, the Democrats or the terrorists (of course, if the last, he wouldn’t even know which camp to get directions to). If the Coriolanus, the work, is the central criterion, the modern-day equivalent wouldn’t be John McCain but rather his buddy Joe Lieberman. In order to figure out why just knowing how the last play ended won’t tell us how this one will pan out, it’s more illuminating to look at Coriolanus, the character — and more particularly, the role he plays in the broader drama of Roman politics versus the role that has been crafted for John McCain over the course of this election and his career.

And by role I mean the label “war hero.”

Both take their war heroism as their heritage: Coriolanus is Marcus Brutus before the battle of Corioles rechristens him in blood, and as Bill Kauffman points out in his excellent essay (which I’ll return to later; h/t Helen) McCain points out that “the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.” But for Coriolanus, it’s the “war” part of “war hero” that is important. His fealty is to blood, and by blood he determines his loyalties to men: both those who spill his blood (such as the Volscian general, Aufidius, whose dialogue with Coriolanus rivals 300 for martial homoeroticism) and those of his blood. His mother, Volumnia, rivals Lady Macbeth for the best role for a mature female actress in Shakespeare, and the scene in which she shames him out of attacking Rome at the head of the Volscian army is downright thrilling. And John McCain has no Volumnia.

It’s because the lesson of John McCain’s battle wounds, more psychological than sanguinary, wasn’t to adopt war as his mantle and armor, but rather the second half of the epithet: “hero.” McCain’s straight-backed honor is born of war, but it’s greater than that, and his loyalty isn’t to blood or battlefields but to honor itself. “Senator McCain’s loyalty is not to any particular American place but rather to a bureaucratic institution (the military) and an abstraction (the American Empire),” Kauffman writes. I’m not so sure that these are the loci of his loyalty, but rather conduits to it — wet nurses or governesses, if you will. The military raised McCain as a ward of Honor, just as Volumnia raised Coriolanus as a ward of Mars.

Believe me, it’s quite tempting to see a man who treats the mortgage crisis as callously as his analogue treated famine, or who genuinely seems uninterested in matters domestic, or who sings “bomb, bomb Iran” in the Senate, as a purely martial being. But the maverick doesn’t seem to have the ties of blood and brotherhood that characterize those who live for war; allegiances and emnities will shift for him, because his guidance is the north star of Honor. It’s not just fighting or even fighting for, it’s fighting through.

Which, of course, might be the other explanation for the Shiite-Sunni mixup — they know which they are, and they can sort it out on their own time. John McCain has other things to do. The brittleness of the man in politics living for something as solitary and antipolitical as war or honor is a parallel that does hold, whether the fight he’s daydreaming about as he sits squashed in the Senate chamber takes place on a real battlefield or a moral one.

To be honest, though, the most fun parts of the parallel are picturing Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter as the tribunes — the self-proclaimed “voices of the people” who are by far the most political animals in the play.