This One's for John; or, Persons, Characters and Authors, Oh My!

            In his article “ ‘Lay Aside My Character’: The Personate Novel and Beyond,” Jonathan Lamb desperately communicates the superiority of person over the categories of character and author; while characters’ “part in the history of fiction is scant,” and authors have an “enigmatic genealogy and an uncertain posterity” leading to “a symmetry of pure enquiry that has little to do with knowledge,” persons are where it’s at: “Persons have a much greater investment both in representation and conjecture, which is their way of transfiguring what is imagined into what is real.  Really they rule the world” (284-5).  Clearly, for Lamb, there is an investment in the process of creating reality through imagining, rather than relying upon empirical facts and histories that so neatly differentiate characters and authors from persons.  Though he preludes this postulate with (an entire article’s worth of) an impressive review of the critical work concerning persons and characters in the eighteenth century novel, I am left baffled by his damning of these other categories, as though persons that are not characters or authors always already exist.  Not that they have no origin—he makes the “making of person” (by that same person) very clear; rather, he seems to suggest these three categories of existence are mutually exclusive—one may only be either a character, a person or an author. 

If we use his definitions of these different ontological manifestations to consider Lavinia (I will leave her unlabeled, as yet), I wonder if such distinctions will hold, or, since Shakespeare always trumps everyone, if we will find these definitions a bit too limiting.  If characters are “settled and well known,” then Lavinia should fit the bill marvelously.  As a type of stock character (the virgin “good girl”), one who is literally a character in other narratives (The Metamorphoses, The Rape of Lucrece) and one who spends the entire time complicit in a revenge plot which simply looks back on what has happened, both to her and her literary predecessors, rather than casting ideas forward, she would seem to fit the part.   And yet, according to critic Mary Fawcett, Lavinia is exactly the type of author Kristeva defines in Desire in Language: “he [she] is neither nothingness nor anybody” (Fawcett 262).  As Fawcett sees it, the act of carrying her father’s detached hand in her mouth (since she has no hands of her own with which to carry it) replaces her tongue; subsequently, that same orifice takes in her uncle’s staff to carve the crimes of her rapists into the sand.  She is transformed from “speaker to witness, and from character to writer” (ibid).  Granted, Fawcett has not Lamb’s specific definition of character and writer/author in mind; yet, it seems possible, in light of Lamb’s description of author—that which is “unattached…to the cycles of exchange that define a character, or to the fictions of representation that define a person” (Lamb 274), to argue for Lavinia’s existence as both an author AND a person.  Though she seems attached to “the fictions of representation” (i.e. Ovid’s account of the history of world from creation to Julius Caesar) she explicitly distinguishes herself from this representation, by physically distancing herself from it—she points to the book, itself.  She is the person who has created a person, by writing about (i.e. authoring) a character of herself to create herself (as the avenging Lavinia of Titus Andronicus).  

Lamb’s methodology seems handy in distinguishing this tripartite model of Lavinia, but to pin her down to one or another seems to undermine the whole point of personhood.  Lavinia’s use of the imagined (her literary predecessors), through authorship, to manifest her revenge seems a quite lovely Shakespearean contradiction to Lamb’s reductive model.  

Fawcett, M. L. “Arms/Words/Tears: Language and the Body in Titus Andronicus.” ELH (1983): 261–277. Print.

Spinoza, Poetics, and the Trans-Corporeal

Humans, according to Stacy Alaimo, are “always already part of an active, often unpredictable, material world” (17). That the transcendental subject, as grounding the conditions for possibility as such, no longer holds any theoretical currency is evident when one realizes the necessary outside to thought that trans-corporeality entails.  The autonomous outside means that the world does not begin and end with subjectivity.  Given micro and macroscopic exchanges of flesh, politics, toxins, weather, and culture, ethical considerations must emerge from “a more uncomfortable and perplexing place” (17).  This imperative marks a refusal to peal culture away from matter.
           A physicalist perspective is needed; but one that operates within an “epistemological space that allows for both the unpredictable becomings of other creatures and the limits of human knowledge.”  Moira Gatens draws from Spinoza's philosophy to describe "human bodies that open out into the more-than-human world" (13).  Following Gatens' lead and engaging with Alaimo’s attempt to “trace how trans-corporeality often ruptures ordinary knowledge practices" (17), I want to introduce Spinoza's theory of matter in order to look for ways in which Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path thematizes the embodied interface that always exists between manuscript and reader.

             For Spinoza, thought and extension are attributes of one irreducible substance.  Pierre Macherey articulates this position with precision.  He states, “Spinoza is not content to resolve the question posed by Cartesian dualism: he reverses the problematic completely" (105).  Attributes are identified as two ways of expressing substance, and as such, “are unified at the same time as they remain really distinct.  This unity is expressed in a well-known proposition: 'the order and connections of ideas are the same as the order and connections of things'" (106).    Thought and world mutually condition one another.  This relationship manifests in Alaimo's observation that the, "the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial" (20).  Ben Lerner's Mean Free Path explicates this kind of embodiment.

They are passing quickly, those
               houses I wanted to
speak in.  Empty sets
Among my friends, there is a fight about
The important questions
cannot arise, so those must be hills
             where the famous
winter.  I am familiar with the dream 
                Windmills enlarge

experience, killing birds
              but I have already used
dream too often in my book
of relevance.  Nothing can be predicated
Along the vanishing coast
tonight. You'll have to wait until
             remnants of small fires
the eye can pull new features from
            The stars
             
             Consistently, Lerner's text offers authorial agency to the reader.  It evokes play, the feeling of being free to rearrange lines.  If we ask from where can "the eye", or the reader's eye, "pull new features from," then the very lines of the manuscript become reasonable sources.  Consider, "The important questions /cannot arise, so those must be hills/ where the famous/ Windmills enlarge/ remnants of small fires."  Or, "Among my friends, there is a fight about/The important questions/ of relevance/  Nothing can be predicated/ tonight.  You'll have to wait until/ the eye can pull new features from/ The stars".  Through play, two sides of the same coin, matter and thought, mesh, collide, and disrupt one another.  Trans-Corporeality is thus thematized as one redistributes signification across the material space of the page. 
              The body must literally change its orientation, as downward reading is replaced with a playful down-up-and-around style of exploration.  We can see how this mediates a relation between Spinoza's theory of matter and Alaimo's interactionist ontology when we observe how Mean Free Path flattens the distinction between the discursive and the physical.  Thought and matter are explicitly obverse relations.   If we begin to read downward, "Among my friends, there is a fight about/ The important questions" slams into "cannot arise, so those must be hills." The eye might move back up the page and connect "Empty sets" with "cannot arise" when one realizes that, in set theory, the empty set cannot "arise," but always exists in every set.  
              Operations such as these implicate the reader's body as being both textual and physical when subjective and objective space become two ways of saying the same thing.  In the reader/page network, material distances are crossed through assemblage.  Consequently, Mean Free Path reminds us that reading functions, not according to the chimerical structure of transcendental subjectivity, but within the strange space of matter.   
__________________________

1.  Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Print.
2.  Macherey, Pierre. Hegel or Spinoza. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print.

Transcorporeal subjects in Titus Andronicus

In consideration of the transcorporeal ethics Stacey Alaimo discusses in Bodily Natures, I am curious to see how early modern drama, in which the concept of subjectivity has recently developed (though not without misgivings) into the idea of resting within a consolidated, autonomous individual, serves as either a breeding ground for more transcorporeal readings or as a site of resistance to the “material transit across bodies and environments [that] may render it more difficult to seek refuge within fantasies of transcendence or imperviousness” (16). 

Alaimo’s postulate requires a rejection of the anthrocentric models of corporeality, and suggests that through “[denying] the human subject the sovereign, central position” in environmental ethics we can understand how “trans-corporeal subjects must also relinquish mastery as they find themselves inextricably part of the flux and flow of the world that others would presume to master” (16, 17).   Must we assume, though, that such a participation in the ethics of transcorporeality requires the denial of human sovereignty?  Beyond the fascinating interactions between human characters and “non-human nature” in Titus Andronicus, the politics of representation on the early modern stage seem to call this opposition into question. 

In Titus, we see how the characters who participate in a type of “viscous porosity” fall prey to other characters who, though shaped by and shaping their surrounding environment, manage to retain a sense of sovereignty and Renaissance subjectivity.  If this viscous porosity is dominated by the idea of “mediating membranes, which may be biological, social, and political,” (15) then Lavinia’s mouth becomes particularly interesting.  As a site that mediates between inside and outside it is an organ that serves biological, social and political functions.  Prior to her rape, Lavinia proceeds to “mouth off” to Tamora, cementing Tamora’s disdain for the girl and provoking the empress to let her sons “satisfy their lust” with her body (2.3.180).   During her rape, Lavinia’s tongue is cut off (along with her hands), in essence neutering its political function (I’m going to assume that the rhetorical function of the mouth leads it to political efficacy, and since I don’t have time to flesh out this idea, you will just have to go along with it), biological function (she can no longer eat) and social function (voice marks a significant gender differentiation—it is one of the most important factors in transgender patients gaining acceptance in their new gender[1]).  Through the loss of this important “membrane,” however, Lavinia develops a new possibility for agency, through the manipulation of two bodies—her own (in developing a handless method of writing) and the body of literature upon which her own existence relies (i.e. Ovid).  Yet Lavinia’s new agency is not derived from (secondary to) the original, hands-and-tongue-intact body and Ovid’s original rendering of the Philomela tale; rather, she recreates and rewrites these bodies and ultimately secures the death of her perpetrators.  So, through the loss of this special site for viscous porosity, Lavinia displays sovereignty and subjectivity not reliant upon these dictated biological, social and political roles.

 Approaching the question of transcorporeality on the Elizabethan stage leads to another set of interesting observations.  The performance of gender and race on the stage was largely facilitated through makeup; in the case of “the Moor,” a white male actor donned blackface, a technique that consisted of smearing onto the face a paste made from soot or burnt corks and oil; in the case of a woman, the white male actor donned “whiteface,” a paste of white lead with mercury and ground orris, in addition to rouged lips and cheeks[2].  Both of these concoctions were highly toxic, and often lethal.  The Elizabethan audience was highly aware of the fact that male actors played the roles of female characters, and that white actors played the roles of black characters, and so the representation of femininity and blackness became synonymous with the painting of faces—painting with “natural” (i.e. non-human), yet toxic materials.  It is interesting to note, too, that the painting of faces was preferable to the wearing of masks and gloves, since the paint was “closer to the body of the actor” (Callaghan 195), in essence blurring the line between person and costume, a non-human element.  If we also consider the fact that women and racialized bodies have long been associated with the “natural,” then I wonder if we can draw the conclusion that femininity, blackness and nature are considered toxic?  (Femininity as toxicity is not a new idea; early modern medical theories considered pregnancy, a key factor in femininity, an ailment.)  

This would explain why the feminists that Alaimo mentions have fought so stringently against associations with nature, but what happens when nature returns?  Alaimo suggests that “only by directly engaging with matter itself can feminism do as Tuana advocates: render biological determinism ‘nonsense.’ For instance, rather than bracketing the biological body, Birke insists upon the need to understand it as ‘changing and changeable, as transformable’” (Alaimo 5).  Indeed, the white, male bodies on Shakespeare’s stage embraced this transformational ability; but by transcending genetic makeup through stage makeup, they also maimed those potentially subversive bodies.  Can we really agree that transcorporeality trumps an anthrocentric view of environmental ethics; that “interconnected material agencies” really helps “erode even our most sophisticated modes of understanding” (17)?

---

[1] McNeill, E. J. M. "Management of the transgender voice." The Journal of Laryngology & Otology 120.07 (2006): 521-523.

[2] Callaghan, Dympna. "Shakespeare's stage. "Alternative Shakespeares 2 (1996): 192.

Never, Never Again to Close

In Bodily Natures, Stacy Alaimo stresses that “ecocriticism must develop modes of analysis that do not continue to emphasize the ‘disjunction between text and world,’ but instead reveal the environmental traces within all texts” (8). Here “environmental traces” can be read as “material traces,” as she notes that “‘the environment’ is not located somewhere out there, but is always the very substance of ourselves” (4). Later she praises post-structuralism for its refusal “to delineate the human, the cultural, or the linguistic against a background of mute matter,” and emphasizes that “Nature, culture, bodies, [and] texts all unravel into a limitless ‘force field of differentiation’” (14). In this last post, I would like to use trans-corporeality (and all of its related concepts) to bring together a few of the different arguments I’ve made about Watt this quarter. Indeed, I would like to think that all of my posts have centered on a core set of concepts, and that trans-corporeality provides a way of thinking about Watt in all its de-familiarizing strangeness.

            From the outset of Watt, Beckett constantly reminds you that you are not only reading a novel, but are quite literally holding a book. Early in the narrative we get dialogue from Mr. Hackett: “Tired of waiting for the tram, said¹ Mr. Hackett, they strike up an acquaintance."

Henry James' Queer Folk

Mel Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections” highlights the queerness -- vis a vis the cultural and the material -- that we absorb by simply going through the world, unaware of our level of contact with other people and the environment, including its inanimate objects. This ongoing exchange is not sanctioned by whoever is invaded by the foreign element or by society: it is an interruption that is radically outside of heteronormative human body exchanges; the perceived queerness of the exchange gives way to an assumption of toxicity. Chen's bodily exchanges with the environment are unwilling and inevitable, yet sociable. Narrating her oblique yet intimate experience of strangers on the street -- dangerous because of their effusions of smoke, fragrance, or very nearness --, Chen writes, “There is a potency and intensity to two animate or inanimate bodies passing one another, bodies that have an exchange — a potentially queer exchange, I suggest — that effectively risks the implantation of injury. The quality of the exchange may ... or may not have violent bodily effects, or the exchange may be visual, where the meeting of eyes unleashes a series of pleasurable or unpleasurable bodily reactions such as chill, pulse rush, adrenaline, heat, fear, tingling skin.” It’s an ambivalent exchange, calling into question the boundaries of the sexual and social, whose desires and effects are mixed.

There are similar encounters throughout The Portrait of a Lady wherein Isabel is confronted by the toxicity of animate and inanimate stuff: Gilbert’s collections and bibelots are a metaphor for his conception of humanity; he collects that which confirms and displays his tastes. Isabel is disgusted. In contact without touching, Isabel, Gilbert and his things are exchanging psychically and physically, perhaps queerly. And, as Isabel is unable to comprehend and re-form to these conditions that run counter to the fulfillment she expected in marriage, they begin to feel toxic: “Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life.  It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation.” Her body cannot function and this attestation to the porousness of human bodies primes Isabel (ironically because thus far toxically) for the sexual exchange that will seal her fate, which has been in thrall to Gilbert.

Like Chen, Isabel is penetrated by her environment in an exchange that occurs at the end of The Portrait of a Lady. Caspar Goodwood confronts Isabel for the last time before her return to Rome. Isabel sees Caspar as a toxic force as he once again declares his love for her, yet, simultaneous with a verbal denial, Isabel responds to him physically, even orgiastically. We read in the scene familiar tropes of orgiastic experience (it is like an ocean, it is like dying) where there is only a kiss: the language of borders being transgressed comes prior to any physical nearness:

“Isabel scented his idea in all her being. ‘But it doesn’t matter!’ he exclaimed, pressing her close, though now without touching a hem of her garment. [...]  Isabel gave a long murmur, like a creature in pain; it was as if he were pressing something that hurt her.  [...] The world, in truth, had never seemed so large; it seemed to open out all round her, to take the form of a mighty sea, where she floated in fathomless waters.  She had wanted help, and here was help; it had come in a rushing torrent.  I know not whether she believed everything that he said; but she believed that to let him take her in his arms would be the next best thing to dying. [...]and the next instant she felt his arms about her, and his lips on her own lips.  His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free.”  

Isabel’s physical experience of Caspar, though heterosexual, is yet queer in that the locus of exchange isn’t bodies but the environment. Much like Chen’s unwilling exchange with those whom she passes by, who intoxicate her, we see the same sort of reluctant intoxication on the part of Isabel. The exchange that exists between Isabel and Caspar expresses new possibilities tied to a new danger. The book closes with the open question of whether Isabel will leave Gilbert for Caspar.

Interestingly (but as a bit of a side note), this book is also about transnational borders and state bodies, which we may consider with the same set of concerns as the human body; both are porous and open to unwanted influence. Caspar, a persistent if often unseen force in Isabel’s life is, like her, transnational. They are Americans abroad, subject to multiple influences and, as missives crossing and re-crossing national boundaries, carriers of heterogeneity in their common search for identity. Like the human body, the functional state body thinks itself immune to interpellation (this is inherent in conceiving of itself as having cultural and physical borders) but the passing between states of human bodies, ideas, etc. undermines this idea of immunity and of the body keeping itself alive by keeping foreign bodies out. Thus, Isabel’s and Caspar’s particular form of relatedness is one with international implications.

Exploding the Individual

Looking back over my posts for this blog, I find a few themes emerging in my treatment of Shaw’s Heartbreak House. I have been interested in images of illusions and façades, in role-playing and theatricality, in the pervasive stasis and sleepiness of the characters, and in violence and corruption as a possible foundation for everything in the play. In the end, I think my various readings of the play all agree that it is concerned with the possibility of a false, agency-less, purposeless, and violent social system. This is not to say that the play is consistently dire—it is in fact both comedic and haphazard. But it is playing with and proposing the possibility of such a society.

I’d like to think for a bit about this idea in relation to the idea of “trans-corporeality.” In the introductory chapter of Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures, she proposes “trans-corporeality” as the name for what she argues is an emerging and potentially transformative theoretical conception of bodies and environments. She writes, “by emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures. But by underscoring that trans indicates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality also opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors ” (Alaimo 2). I don’t know that Heartbreak House is all that interested in bodies as such. Where Alaimo emphasizes the materiality of bodies, Heartbreak House is all about the costumes and illusions that cloak them. I think the play’s basic concerns are related to Alaimo’s, however, in that both the play and the article explore the diffusion of selves.

In these posts, I have argued that Heartbreak House is interested in socially performed and/or imposed roles, which change with the characters’ surroundings, and with the re-writing of texts that accompanies their social enactment. Both of these concerns lead the play to critique the notion of a coherent or intentional self with predictable “inputs” and “outputs.” I have also argued that Heartbreak House “mock[s] the very idea of holding on to singularity in meaning” and “expresses the fear that destruction, without simultaneously introducing new modes of being, is empty” while simultaneously “remind[ing] us of just how much courage it will take to move away from those places in which we are comfortable.” And in my most recent post, I found that the characters “behave as though they are in a constant state of spiritual siege, but this siege has no location. If it stems from anywhere, it stems from each of the other characters in turn: it is diffuse.” My point with all of these quotations is that I can see myself returning again and again to the same image: a diffuse, trans conception of individuals.

The metaphors of the play may even speak to Alaimo’s interest in the material world. [I would argue that the theatre always speaks to the idea of trans-corporeality a bit, simply by being a process of enactment, but that’s a generic idea about the medium…] As I have mentioned, the characters are always falling asleep. And, in part, I think this is an image of stasis and the characters’ deep reliance upon various social networks in order to function. It is an enactment, in other words, of Alaimo’s ideas. But, as I discovered in a recent post, sleep always occurs for them at a particular moment. I wrote, “as soon as these figures are no longer playing—indeed, as soon as their present roles begin to erode? They fall sleep. They have nothing else.” That is, as soon as the characters are no longer explicitly participating in a network, they lose control over and presence (of a sort) in their bodies. Metaphorically, they realize Alaimo’s central claim: without networks, they do not have bodies.

In the end, then, I think that the first chapter of Bodily Natures is connected to Heartbreak House by the ways in which both imagine individuals. And both are presenting a potential image of the society in which they are set. And yet the final act of the play is one of violence--the explosion of individual bodies. Metaphorically, it may stand for the very act in which Alaimo is engaged. But it is also a disturbing act of power. It reminds us that what remains unanswered in both Alaimo's chapter and Shaw's play is the extent to which power informs these structures and the extent to which agency is possible within them.

The Imagination in Measure for Measure

For this final post, I would like to return to some of the same ground I covered in my first, in which I looked at the "temptation scenes" (2.2 and 2.4) of Measure for Measure in terms of Patterson's discussion of the autonomous self in Chaucer. Since we have now read another essay dealing with medieval self-consciousness, Nicholas Watson's "The Phantasmal Past: Time, History, and the Recombinative Imagination," let's see if we can find evidence for or against the hypothesis that something like the medieval "imagination" is depicted in these scenes.
     To be a bit more precise, I am interested in Watson's description of the cellula imaginativa as a troubled mediator between external reality and the faculties of "judgment and memory" (9); "troubled" because the rational part of the mind seems to require images produced by the imagination in order to function at all, yet there is no way to be sure these images will adequately represent reality and the imagination may further muddy the waters by combining images haphazardly (as in dreams). Watson uses the example of John of Morigny's Liber florum to demonstrate the severity of this anxiety, as well as one ingenious scheme for managing it in the context of divination: "the Virgin's appearance in dreams must be carefully vetted for diabolical deception. [... E]ven true visions may contain a whiff of the diabolic, a mingling of truth and error" (28). That this kind of thinking was still possible in Measure for Measure's day may perhaps be established by the prominent place in Descartes' philosophy, a generation later, of the famous "evil genius" hypothesis (e.g., Meditations 22).
     And the scenes of the play leading up to Angelo's temptation do indeeed introduce the notion of the shaky relationship between image and truth. Vincentio's appointment of Angelo as his deputy begins with the ironic (in retrospect) claim that "There is a character in thy life / That to th'observer doth thy history / Fully unfold" (1.1.28-30). The metaphor is of an open book, the sight of which produces reliably intelligible images in the mind of the "observer"; but Angelo answers with a less confident figuration: "Let there be some more test made of my mettle / Before so noble and so great a figure / Be stamped upon it" (1.1.49-51), introducing a coining motif that will recur several times in 2.4.
     Angelo first retools it as a metaphor for Claudio's crime in begetting a bastard:
                                                            It were as good
          To pardon him                 [. . .]
                            [. . .]                               as to remit
          Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's image
          In stamps that are forbid. (2.4.42-6)
But the appearance of the coining image that most clearly associates it with the imaginative faculty occurs in Isabella's response to Angelo's claim that "women are frail too" (2.4.125): "Ay, as the glasses where they view themselves, / Which are as easy broke as they make forms. / [...] / [...W]e are soft as our complexions are, / And credulous to false prints" (2.4.126-7, 130-1). The imagination here is figured both as a fragile mirror of the soul and as a faculty for imprinting images on the woman's "soft" judgment. It was this latter formulation that would prove so enduring among British empiricist philosophers, beginning with Hobbes: "There be also other imaginations that arise in men [...] from the great impression made in sense" (Leviathan 1.2.4).
     The argument thus far I hope has established that the crucial "temptation scenes" of Measure for Measure are, in fact, concerned with a mental faculty akin to the medieval "imagination," which stamps images or forms onto the mind in a way that can be misleading and problematic. But the question remains, given the ease with which Measure for Measure's characters--and indeed those of early modern drama in general--are taken in by the imagination's false coinings: how is one to go about "vetting" its distressing productions?


Works Cited

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. 3rd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. 46-105. Print.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. J. C. A. Gaskin. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. Eds. Ivo Kamps and Karen Raber. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. Print.

Theorizing the 18th C Imagination: Novelty in Roxana

Nicholas Watson’s “The Phantasmal Past” presents Chaucer’s House of Rumour as representative of the recombinative medieval imagination, an “engine of images” driven by “a constant stream of sensory impressions that it instantly manufactures into phantasms…” (14). Viewing the House of Rumour as a virtual machine churning out “tidinges” is partly what enables Watson to recover “the very feature of the past most successfully suppressed and assimilated by modernity: the novelty of the past…” (7). Such a comparison could be extended to the growth of literacy in England in the 17th and 18th centuries, and particularly to the news cycle (and indeed, J. Paul Hunter makes a similar claim linking novelty, imagination, and the 18th c. newspaper in Before Novels).The “engine of images” referenced in Watson would seem to have a real-life counterpart in the printing press, churning out a mixture of fictional forms and social commentary that recall the past as phantasm. Roxana intersects with both Watson’s argument and the celebrations of novelty found in eighteenth-century newspapers, demonstrating a way in which to theorize the 18th c. imagination.

Roxana’s development is deeply informed by Defoe’s preoccupation with novelties and newspaper publishing. Indeed, Defoe’s long-standing fascination with the imagination is evidenced in his Journal of the Plague Year and The Storm, two pseudo-journalistic pieces that document public reactions to disasters. A tidbit of news made equally of “fals” and “soth” elements plays prominently in Roxana’s narrative: the role of Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II and famed actress who formed the basis for Roxana’s character. Watson describes how, in medieval imaginative theory, “our perception of all reality, past, present, and future” “is constantly staged as “a negotiation between the false and the true” (18). Extending this theory to the 18th c. requires viewing Roxana as the site where this negotiation takes place, as the reader synthesizes the ambiguous image of Nell Gwynn with Roxana’s own indeterminate traits. Although the Preface insists that the story is “laid in Truth of Fact; and so the work is not a Story, but a History,” this assertion is continually called into question by Roxana’s revisions (2). One might read Roxana’s undermining of the “Truth of Fact” as reminiscent of Dante’s musings on the Geryon, the “nightmare product of the recombinative imagination…the lie with the face of a truth” (19). Watson shows how the unraveling of Geryon’s image reveals the poem as a “comedia” for the first time and highlights its fictionality. Roxana’s truth similarly conjures up an “epistemological uncertainty” that Watson is unable to resist comparing to “that essential, fraudulent modern genre, the ‘novel.’”(22).

Imaginative understanding “first conceives of the object of inquiry in corporeal terms,” Watson notes (5). If the image of the past can be read as a body, Roxana stands in for the imaginary archive, with its many fragmented editions and complicated relationship with truth-telling. Reading Roxana requires a piecing together of the many versions of Roxana, assembling a more-or-less coherent whole. Yet Watson also suggests that the “circulation, the process of question , answer, and exchange….is vital to the mode of imaginative thought” (36). This brings me back to the idea of how the 18th c. newspaper, Roxana’s chosen profession as a prostitute, and Watson’s imaginative theory remain linked: each depend on circulation of textual and literal bodies. Defoe’s fascination with imaginative thought led him to construct Roxana as a “phantasmic presence,” a novelty constantly kept in circulation as she is rewritten and revised (36).

Watson suggests that “the medieval imagination indeed forms an essential part of the history of novelty, which is also part of the history of the modern” (18). I'm curious about whether reading “across the divide between present and past” can help me understand 18th c. novelties, or whether I'm simply succumbing to the teleological reading Watson warns against (7). Is there a place for modernity in Watson's medieval analysis?

The "Hand that wrote mortality": Toxicity and animate objects in "The Birthmark"

Toxicity is undoubtedly present in “The Birthmark.” Aylmer produces potions and supplements that he administers to his wife Georgiana both directly and indirectly, by filtering vapors through the air and secretly adding his concoctions to her food. The presence of these toxins (we know they are toxins by the end, when Georgina is killed by them) differs somewhat from Chen’s analysis of lead paint in Chinese-made toys and her own disease of MCS in that Aylmer knowingly and purposefully produces and administers the story’s toxins. The intentionality here is mirrored to some extent in Chen’s description of the Thomas the Tank Engine toys as they were interpreted by white Americans, in that the American consumers generated a mentality of sexualized and racialized threat from China, as if the Chinese workers intended to intoxicate white boys with a homosexual desire. The difference is, of course, that the threat to Georgiana is one of exaggerated heterosexuality or patriarchy, in that Aylmer attempts to form her into the perfect wife by removing the birthmark. By this logic, toxicity in the story would be an agent of normative order, rather than of queer productivity, as Chen argues.

            However, such a reversal of Chen’s argument about toxicity cannot take place so simply in the story. Just as the Chinese workers also experienced the toxicity of lead, in fact to a greater degree than did the white American child, so too does Aylmer experience a different type of toxin: the birthmark itself. To both Aylmer, who cannot stand the sight of the birthmark, and Georgiana, who consequently suffers under her husband’s horror, the birthmark is the most powerful toxin of all in the story.  Chen describes of a toxin: “It is not necessarily alive, yet it enlivens morbidity and fear of death” (265). Georgiana’s birthmark similarly is equated inevitably with death; it is the “spectral Hand that wrote mortality” (1322). Its influence on Aylmer’s mind and body is severe; he cannot look at his wife without “a strong convulsive shudder” (1324), and soon the birthmark’s toxicity transfers to Georgiana who “learn[s] to shudder at his gaze” (1322). We learn that the birthmark “‘has clutched its grasp, into your [Georgiana’s] being, with a strength of which I [Aylmer] had no previous conception’” (1329). In addition, like Chen’s description of her altered, slightly delusional state after the deluge of toxins she experiences walking down the street, Aylmer’s intoxication by the birthmark begins affecting his mental state: he has nightmares about surgically removing the mark, he isolates himself more and more in his laboratory, and Georgiana warns that he must remove the birthmark “or we shall both go mad!” (1329).

            Certainly there are strong differences between the birthmark as toxin and the toxins in Chen’s article; namely, the birthmark is not toxic in and of itself. Rather, it becomes toxic through Aylmer’s need for perfection in his wife (his patriarchal impulse). In this way, the birthmark gains meaning not only as a toxin but as the animated (queer) object that Chen argues is produced by toxicity. I put “queer” in parentheses because it may be too great of a move to posit the queerness of Georgiana/the birthmark’s subversion of patriarchy. In any case, the birthmark certainly reflects Chen’s “animacy:”  “[animacy] is described alternately as a quality of agency, sentience, or liveness…These many meanings must be sustained together, for they all circulate biopolitically, running through conditionally sentient and nonsentient, live and dead, agentive and passive bodies” (280). The birthmark, with its ability to “write mortality,” appear under Aylmer’s gaze as if knowing his disgust, and change color and shape with Georgiana’s emotions, betrays all three qualities of animacy: agency, sentience, and liveness, respectively. Where the birthmark’s position as an animate object gets muddied is the fact that is not an object external from Georgiana’s body. It is in fact not really an object at all. This, however, I would argue reveals not that the birthmark is not an animate (queer) object, but that together Georgiana and the birthmark form one animate (queer) object (see my post about Bernstein’s dolls article for evidence of Georgiana as a sentient doll). This conclusion is quite different from Chen’s. For Chen, toxicity produces “queer bonds” between subjects and animate objects; in “The Birthmark,” toxicity exists in and is queerly bonded to an animate object within one subject. Does the story’s version therefore demonstrate an internal, harmful rupture of the relationships and “queer loves” Chen argues are propelled by toxicity (281)? Or does Georgiana and her birthmark present a new internally productive plurality of toxicity, queer bonds, and animate objects? Clearly this is complicated by the fact that Georgiana is killed in the end by the birthmark’s toxicity, specifically its intoxication of Aylmer. Perhaps without the threat to the male heteronormative self, the productive plurality argument could have emerged as successful in the story.

Your Body is a Wonder-land: Transcending Alaimo’s Trans-Corporeality in Lady Audley’s Secret

The opening paragraphs of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret describe the natural space and idyllic environs that surround Audley court. Man-made edifices insinuate themselves into the landscape as the description progresses bearing not only the handprint of man but insidious foreboding. A religious vision of harmonious nuns that once prayed and worked in the court, using the very well that is now “stagnant,” “idle” and “rotten” adds to the scene (44). Tracing a connection that has been well understood in Christianity for centuries, these introductory descriptions depict the interdependent trinity of earth, body and spirit. In the Christian bible humans are essentially built from earth and will return in death to the dust of which they are formed. This linkage is stabilized and unchanging, so that this cultural belief (religion) predetermines both biology and humanity. Thus trans-corporeality is always already present and acknowledged in the inescapable religious genealogy of each birth and in the ritual actions that are couched in the natural world, such as baptism and burial in the earth. The replacement of questionable science with the certainty of spirit in this construction allows for the extension of trans-corporeality into a space of immateriality and transcendence. To ignore that crucial connective tissue is to try to build a body out of clay without the power of animating it.

            In the first chapter of Bodily Natures: Science Environment and the Material Self, Stacy Alaimo points out that “the sense of selfhood is transformed by the recognition that the very substance of the self is interconnected with vast biological, economic and industrial systems that can never be entirely mapped or understood” (23). Though apt, this assertion focuses on the necessity of connecting these fields without acknowledging the significance of how these connections are formed.  Without the groundwork of significance, the result is “confusion and contestation that occur when individuals and collectives must contend not only with the materiality of their very selves but with the often invisibly hazardous landscapes of risk society” (Alaimo 17). Braddon’s narrative is alert to show “all that scary stuff, supposedly out there, is already within” the toxic body of Lady Audley, which is the site of inherited madness (Alaimo 18). This gendered and toxic nature is passed down matrilineally and the catalyst that sparks the necessary intra-actions that cause this latent toxicity to surface are those of environment. But rather than a contested space of unstable networks, Lady Audley’s narrative takes place across a complex network of biologies that are made material, corporealities that are imbedded in landscape, animation of meaning through language.

In Braddon’s Christian depiction of the body, flesh and environment are porous, reflecting and exchanging and absorbing into each other in significant ways as in Alaimo, but consistently Braddon insists on grounding this relationship with religion. As Alaimo points out, science “offers no steady ground, as the information may be biased, incomplete, or opaque and the ostensible object of scientific enquiry” and “the material world—is extremely complex, overwrought with agencies, and ever emergent” (20); however, the Christian text posits that the antidote to these shortcomings are the stable groundworks of Christianity. Braddon’s biblical scaffolding anchors the complexity of nature and self in religion and calls attention to the diffuse animating energy that flows between and makes apparent this interconnectedness on a scale unbounded by time and space. John 1:1 explains that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” and in John 1:14 that this word “became flesh” and dwelled on earth as Jesus. The revelation of the Word (Logos) that is present before creation being manifested in the flesh so that it can be understood by human minds parallels the textual manifestations of meaning in and between the body and the environment that makes trans-corporeality significant.

Without the connective understanding of the significance of Peace having “taken up her abode” and the “handiwork of that good old builder—Time” that makes the relevance of Braddon’s landscape clear and creates an alarming contrast with the “secret chambers” and dark passage of the lime tree walk, the narrative linkages between these descriptions hazes over (Braddon 44-5). The cohesiveness of Braddon’s narrative is bounded by biblical illusions that insist on the inevitability of the network of the text. The last line of the novel quotes Psalms 37:25 as a rationale for the shape of the text because evil must be punished and the good must be rewarded since God never shows “the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread.” Thus Alaimo’s trans-corporeal subject finds himself not only “inextricably part of the flux and flow of the world” (17) but also in possession of the transcendent revelation and the ability to express it that make this inextricable connectivity meaningful.

Queer texts, queer history, and a prosthesis problem

In thinking about my post for this week I felt the temptation to use Chen’s article on toxicity to help me formulate a proper queer reading of The Member of the Wedding, a reading that the text, with its agonies over the incomprehensibility of heterosexual marriage, seems to beg for and that I never really tried this quarter. But strangely, though I was so sure a queer analysis would be a cinch, I encountered some trouble in my attempts to use my text to say something about toxicity as a way of understanding queerness. Certainly queerness is here in Member, and ties to Chen are evident. The family formation of Berenice, Frankie, and John Henry in the kitchen can be described as a model of queer domesticity à la Chen, as the kitchen is a non-reproductive space and the state of relationships within it bear an uncanny resemblance to the toxic domesticity that Chen and her lover share: “Distance in the home becomes the condition of these humans living together, in this moment, humans who are geared not toward continuity or productivity or reproductivity but to stasis, to waiting, until it passes” (Chen 277).

            And yet there seems to be something historically specific about theorizing with toxicity that puts a wrench in the notion of putting it in dialogue with McCullers’ mid-20^th century work. The panic about Chinese lead in toys and considerations of immunity and multiple chemical sensitivity are specific contemporary examples that seem to say that thinking with toxicity is made necessary by a particular historical and geopolitical condition. For Chen, toxicity matters because we theorize in the West in the 21^st century. So how can the present’s toxicity matter to McCullers in 1946, and (or?) how can 1946 speak to the present?

            When queer texts seem to want to speak to each other across decades but history gets in the way, perhaps the question becomes how to formulate a queer conception of history. Because I know how to use the internets and I took a queer theory course once, I am well aware that there has been plenty of thought about what it might mean to queer history, but as I only have 600 words I’ll content myself with arguing that I think Nicholas Watson has something to say about it. Watson argues that historians should “work with, as well as on, the models of thought and feeling they study, adapting these models for historiographic use” (1) and through the use of this strategy he proves that the past exists in the present through the collective imagination, as a phantasm. An argument that the past doesn’t just haunt the present but is actually present within it can be understood as a queer move because it destabilizes the notion that history has a linear reproductive thrust, instead suggesting a model where the past and present are bound together by imagination.

Guy who lost his hands in WWII says: "Prostheses,
like seminal historical events, are hard to ignore!"

            I think it’s easy to argue that this queer conception of the past is a solution that allows me to use McCullers to talk about toxicity and vice versa. After all, Watson writes that the “living spirit” of the past survives “among other places, in the branch of the cultural imaginary called scholarship” (6), and the fact that he uses medieval modes of thought to make an argument about historiography in 2010 suggests that Watson, at least, wouldn’t mind a visionary strategy that invokes 1946 for my present use. But here I can’t help but remember Chen’s discussion of her mask as prosthesis: the prosthesis allows her to function in the toxic world but also marks her disability. In using Watson as a tool that would allow me to connect McCullers and Chen, have I created some sort of textual prosthesis or at least suggested one is necessary? What are the implications of suggesting that texts whose central concern is queerness can/should/must develop queer ways of talking to each other (as I’ve just done), and then using a third text to prosthetically connect the two—does a move like this, in the context of queer theory, mark queer texts as deficient?

Power/Knowledge in Measure for Measure

I want to look at inclusionary and exclusionary power in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, as Foucault uses those terms in his "15 January 1975" lecture. At first it seemed to me that Angelo, acting as the Duke's deputy, utilizes exclusionary, and the Duke (something more like) inclusionary power; but the situation now seems a bit more complicated than that.
     Duke Vincentio has "let slip" for "nineteen years" the enforcement of Vienna's strict laws against fornication (1.3.311), and puts Angelo in charge knowing he will be a severe enforcer-figure, thus drawing criticism from Vincentio himself while also reining in the town's "liberties" (in multiple senses). Angelo's strategy for enforcement seems stolidly exclusionary. He orders the executions of Claudio ("guilty" of impregnating his betrothed, Juliet) and Barnardine (who had escaped execution under the Duke because "his friends still wrought reprieves for him: and, indeed, his fact [...] came not to an undoubtful proof" (4.2.241-3)). Angelo's instructions to the Provost include the order that Claudio's head be brought to him after his decapitation, an interesting hint of attempted oversight. The head's status as a guarantor of justice properly executed (Shakespeare's London Bridge featured a display of severed heads to remind passersby of the penalty for treason) is problematized when, at Vincentio's urging, the head of the recently deceased pirate Ragozine is substituted for Claudio's, with Angelo none the wiser. Clearly, Angelo needs to learn a thing or two about effective surveillance before graduating to the use of Foucauldian inclusionary power.
     Duke Vincentio, on the other hand, paradoxically uses his abdication in the play's first scene to cement both his government's rule over the populace and his own position at the top of that "pyramid of uninterrupted power" (Foucault 45). By taking on a friar's habit, Vincentio puts not only his ordinary subjects (Claudio, Isabella, the Provost) but even the acting Duke, Angelo, in the position of inmates of the Panopticon. While Angelo exercises exclusionary power to "pluck down" the brothels and harshly punish fornicators, the Duke goes about collecting information about his subjects in the manner of the plague town "overseers" in Foucault's account. If anything, Vincentio's program is more efficient in that he is able to delegate parts of his task (as he does not only with Angelo, but also when he enlists Mariana, Isabella, and the Provost to carry out his schemes before they know he is the Duke) without sharing knowledge and thus control of the process with them. One might also see his plot to reconcile Mariana, who resides in a "moated grange" outside the city, with Angelo as a move toward greater inclusion: Mariana moves from a space beyond the easy surveillance of city authorities into the city proper.
     On the other hand, Angelo's exclusionary practices have a seemingly unintended inclusionary result. When Pompey first announces that "All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down" (1.2.186), he also notes that those brothels within the city limits will be allowed to "stand for seed: they had gone down too, but that a wise burgher put in for them" (1.2.188-9). In this instance, Angelo's full exercise of (exclusionary) power seems to have been thwarted by the "wise burgher"'s buying up of the condemned properties. As implied when Pompey assures Mistress Overdone "though you change your place, you need not change your trade: I'll be your tapster still" (1.2.196-7), these "houses" will be converted into legitimate places of business only to serve as fronts for their continued operation as whorehouses. The result of this play of opposing forces (Angelo's brute force and the burgher's clever subversion of the law), interestingly enough, is the possibility for heightened surveillance as the brothels are quarantined within the city's jurisdiction. Pompey, Overdone, and their customers are drawn closer to the center of Vienna's administrative apparatus, and Pompey even becomes an agent of State justice as assistant to the executioner while serving time in prison.
     Perhaps more interesting than the contrast between Angelo's straightforward, exclusionary way of bringing order to Vienna and the surveillance characteristic of Duke Vincentio is the way that the attempt to exlude criminals from one space produces the unintended consequence of their inclusion in another, closer to the center of power and thus more accessible to strategies of "quadrillage," surveillance and analysis which allow for the more efficient extension of state power.

Celebrating self-destruction

The ending of Heartbreak House—in which the characters not killed by bombers celebrate the recent destruction and ecstatically hope that it will come again—continues to trouble me, and I have been wondering this week if Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” might have something to say to it. Certainly, Heartbreak House was explicitly written by Shaw in order to explore the condition of the British state at the beginning of the twentieth century, while Mbembe’s article is set at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and argues that “contemporary forms of subjection of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror” (39; emphasis added). And yet there are some startling parallels between Mbembe’s descriptions and various moments of Shaw’s play. He goes on to say that “what connects terror, death, and freedom is an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics” (39).

If the house in Heartbreak House is the ship of state (see earlier posts for textual analysis!), it is also a physical space with “boundaries and internal frontiers” that resonate with the “spatialization of colonial occupation” in Mbembe (26). This is not to say that it stands for a colonized space, but rather that the state described by Heartbreak House is a place of spatial regulations with specific and enforced borders, as is the occupied colonial territory used as an example of the “state of exception” in “Necropolitics.” This suggestion goes against Mbembe’s claim that there is a move in colonial politics to create “a distinction between, on the one hand, those parts of the globe available for colonial appropriation and, on the other, Europe itself” which is “crucial in terms of assessing the efficacy of the colony as a terror formation” (23-4). Heartbreak House erases that distinction by describing the state in the same terms as the colonized territory—both operate as a “state of exception.” And both are populated by people “alive but in a state of injury” (Mbembe 21).

I want to be careful about this comparison of people “alive but in a state of injury.” In Mbembe, this means real people suffering from real violence. In Shaw this means characters reduced so much by their surroundings that they are figuratively incapacitated: they sleepwalk; they are trapped by the bounds of the house. Only as a metaphorical claim about the condition of the state could the stakes of Heartbreak House be taken as comparable, and perhaps not even then, because the kind of violence that Mbembe describes is absent from the play. Nevertheless, I think this very difference between the two descriptions might be the key to the ending of the play.

In Mbembe’s article, there is a clear source of oppression—a place from which violence is enacted. In Shaw’s play, on the other hand, there is no source for the oppression of the characters. They behave as though they are in a constant state of spiritual siege, but this siege has no location. If it stems from anywhere, it stems from each of the other characters in turn: it is diffuse. Thus I wonder if what we see in the final moments of Shaw’s play is the characters’ attempt at the resistance and transcendence that Mbembe portrays at the end of his article. And I wonder if, further, this moment is ultimately the same kind of false hope that Mbembe and Bataille describe in the death of a “suicide bomber.” Mbembe explains Bataille’s argument about the “suicide bomber,” as someone who “ ‘dies seeing himself die, and even, in some sense, through his own will, at one with the weapons of sacrifice. But this is play!’ And for Bataille, play is more or less the means by which the human subject ‘voluntarily tricks himself’ ” (38).