Strategic Formalism and the Reader in TItus Andronicus

Better late than never...right?  Here goes...

Caroline Levine present “strategic formalism” as an intervention in cultural studies, a method that harnesses the power of popularly scorned formalist techniques in order to reveal the political efficacy of highly contestatory social and political forms.  She hopes to accomplish this without resorting to deconstructive practices that pit binaristic elements against one another, but rather by understanding how they “rub up against one another, operating simultaneously but not in concert” (633).  Such interaction among differing forms affords a social impact “not so much from active and intentional agency as from the openings that materialize in the collisions among social and cultural forms” (ibid).  Her argument shapes itself around a reading of a Victorian poem, in which she finds and traces competing iterations of the metaphor of family and suggests that “the potential for revolutionary new social formations may come less from organized resistance and conscious radicalism than from the unexpected encounter between forms” (651). 

Interestingly, while Levine’s essay effectively displays the “radical alterity” that results from the meeting of these competing forms, she focuses on ostensibly political loci such as gender, class and colonial imperialism, and neglects to consider another powerfully shaping (but often invisible) entity—the reader.  Though she discusses the implications of a political body in her discussion of hypocrisy, she divorces that body from the body reading the words on the page, and relegates the hypocritical figure to the realm of literary subject.  I would argue that this shortcuts a very important critical move; not only can we see how contested forms play out in the poem and the environment surrounding the poem, we can analyze how these same forms come in conflict with the reader-form.

The reader is anything but uncontested ground; as Ellen Rooney describes in her essay “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form,” form and the reader are not so easily separated: “Form as a productive consequence of reading disrupts the distinction between description and analysis, reading and writing, inside and outside, surface and depth; it generates a disorienting doubleness of meaning on a single plane” (132).  I’d like to think not only of form as a consequence of reading, but reading as a consequence of form; after all, if every reading is also itself an act of writing (112), then it seems necessary to consider the forms that shape the reading as much as the reading shapes the form.  In other words, what we have here is a symbiotic relationship between reader and text, and this is precisely where Titus Andronicus steps in to teach us a lesson about reading.

In Shakespeare’s play, reading consistently presents itself as a problem.  Whether literal—the emperor’s reading of a letter that wrongly condemn Bassianus to death, Lavinia’s reading of Ovid that provides form for the revenge plot—or more broadly applied—Titus’s “reading” of his daughter’s body language—or considered as a metacritical approach—the audience’s/reader’s “reading” of the play shapes whether Titus’s murder of Lavinia is merciful or cruel—this play is determined to shake up the idea of a unidirectional shaping force between text and reader.  Each of these instances provides an opportunity for the work to shape us, while also insisting that it is our “thoughts that now must deck our kings,” as the prologue of Henry V reminds us. The play’s presentation of contesting forms such as national allegiance, the family, gender and imperialism all also mingle in the reader, and, as Rooney puts it, we ought to be aware of how “we can only ever hope to coax them into revelations by being as explicit as possible about what we are looking for…and keeping track of how that transaction plays out, that is, by saying what reading we are guilty of” (124).  The purpose of Rooney’s article is to highlight the politics of reading; Levine seeks to champion the political efficacy of contestatory forms; Titus, then, enacts the combat of contesting readerly forms, both within the play and its characters, and without (by forcing reader/audience to interpret events).  Ultimately, the play seems to side with Rooney (at least in the debate about surface/symptomatic reading); the consequences of reading are what drive the events of the narrative, for good and for ill, and it is in intersections with this form—the reader—that other social and political forms begin to collide in meaningful and surprising ways.  

Mutating Axes: Unsettling Form

If the becoming of a revolution and the subsequent christening of its aftermath set limits on what can be thought, then what can be thought about time seems to have gone through at least two important transformations—Kant’s Copernican Revolution and the birth of industrial capitalism.  Each event appears to work in tandem with the other to mark a shift in the fundamental categories of modern subjectivity.

The Copernican Revolution reversed the idea that thought and sensation conform to the external world. The external world conforms to the subject, insofar as space and time are the forms of human intuition—Kant’s fundamental insight.  Capitalism converted value into socially necessary labor time.  Surplus value, capitalism’s supreme invention according to Marx, is what you get when labor time exceeds what is socially necessary. 

Consider then, the following maxim: “Thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind.” If conceptual sight depends on time as a form of intuition, then what can be more invasive than capitalism’s conversion of time into surplus value?  The very intuition that structures thought gets wrenched from the subject and put to work for the capitalist.

 As Joshua Clover notices, in the autumn of capitalism’s history, time appears to have gone through another transformation.  Clover considers how to read Marx’s general formula of capital—M-C-M’ ( the movement of money to commodity to more money)—within the context of financial capitalism.  Clover’s argument starts with financial capital’s impact on the organic composition of capital—constant capital (capital put in machines, technology etc.) rises while variable capital (capital put in labor) decreases.  When this occurs, says Clover, something crucial happens to time when C in the M-C-M’ formula changes.  He  states, the “mutation M-M’…turns out to be monogram of Autumn, of finance capital as such...[I]t can be seen easily  that the removal of C is always the subtraction of time, when one recalls that the commodity par excellence is that of labor power, the value of which is measured in time.” (42)  According to Clover, the “social logic of Autumn” becomes the transmutational process of the temporal converting to the spatial.  (43) This social logic manifests in literature. 

Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path, insofar as it radicalizes form into seemingly null category, provides choice material for us to explore Clover’s concept at its limit. The “ceaseless internalization of labor time as world space…cannot be grasped even symptomatically as narrative…poetry [is] better situated to grasp the transformations of the era.”(49)  Perhaps, then, when Mean Free Path appears to explode form as such, what is in fact occurring is an incessant transformation of the temporal and the spatial. Where the breaking of logical succession permeates the text, the larger canvass of a  dreamscape operates to thematize individual breaks in thought.  Here we have poetry moving in two opposing directions—toward formalization and deformalization.   But when one considers these poles dialectically, spatiality  (the actual separation or interruption of lines on the page) becomes the middle term which mediates formalization and its opposite.  

The dialectic becomes clear when we read, “I decided I would come right out and say it/ Into a hollow enclosure producing/ The aural illusion that we are in a canyon/ They call this an experience of structure/ Or a cave.  If it weren’t for Ari/ In the literature./ It has to do with predicates/ But it is…” (45)  The spatial organization of the lines permits multiple readings that bend particular temporal trajectories of successive ideas.  Succession is mutated by spatial arrangement.  For example, we can read “I decided I would come right out and say it into a hollow enclosure producing the aural illusion that we are in a canyon.  They call this the experience of structure.”  We can also read "I decided I would come right out and say it into a hollow enclosure producing the aural illusion that we are in a canyon or a cave.  If it weren’t for Ari, but it is.”  However we read the passage, space becomes the arbiter of understanding.   Perhaps this double movement reveals the very symptom of late capitalism noticed by Clover—“time is colonized as if it were space.”  (45)

Warring Forms in Measure for Measure

In "Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies," Carole Levine makes a case for a more complex and systematic analysis of the relationship between "social" and "literary forms."  Her claim is that older attempts to make sense of past cultural practices got tied up because they failed to take into account the haphazard nature of the social "order," in which forms interact and collide in unpredictable ways. As a Victorianist, her prime example is the discourse of the separate spheres, which had become a contentious topic in Victorian studies with some scholars going so far as to advocate discarding the term altogether. This was because they realized that what in theory was a reactionary and antifeminist mode of thought sometimes behaved in practice very differently. Levine's use of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Cry of the Children" to demonstrate how traditional imagery relating to the "separate spheres" ideology could be conflated with other prevailing social and literary forms to undermine not only those forms but perhaps, in the final analysis, Barrett Browning's argument itself, provides a rubric for further scholarship. In this post, I propose to bring her insights to bear on the social forms which find expression in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.
     The hilarity of this play perhaps results in part from the wide array of such forms which jostle each other on its pages: discourses of authority, marriage, piety, and sexual purity often reach absurd compromises with each other in Shakespeare's Vienna. There is, to begin with, the strange case of Barnardine, the convicted murderer who cannot be executed because he does not repent his crime. Barnardine has unwittingly become the site of a clash between a mode of thinking punishment as a process of spiritual reform or purgation of sin (represented by the Friar/Duke's constant presence in the prison) and a secular discourse of enforced obedience through managed anxiety (discussed in last week's post). Paradoxically, by behaving in such a way as to merit the most extreme punishment, he has consistently escaped his death sentence and is pardoned at the conclusion of the play. The tactics employed by the civil authorities to arouse his anxiety fail due to his utter moral depravity: "We have very oft waked him, as if to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming warrant for it; it hath not moved him at all" (4.2.127-9). This leaves only the actual execution of the sentence as an option to secure his (bodily) obedience; but at this point Barnardine's similarly intransigent resistance to spiritual discipline comes to his aid: as the Duke (in his role of friar) recognizes, he is "A creature unprepared, unmeet for death; / And to transport him in the mind he is / Were damnable" (4.3.54-6). These two "social forms," then, which in theory promise a well-ordered society in which civil punishment regulates subjects' bodies while religious discipline regulates their subjectivities, in practice step on each others' toes in this instance, allowing a convicted murderer to walk away scot free.
     In a less farcical register, Measure for Measure plays the early modern obsession with purity (racial, sexual, religious) against its valorization of marriage. These two cultural imperatives had always had an uneasy relationship. John Stubbs, for instance, in his polemic against Elizabeth's proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou, rejects the notion that the contact with impurity involved in an unequal marriage could ever be construed positively as the improvement of the faulty partner: "And here note this, that everywhere it is set down how the wicked perverted the good, but nowhere that the better part converted the wicked" (11). But in the spate of marriages demanded by the comic plot of the play, Measure for Measure needs this fear of corruption to give place to reconciliation and union. It does, but the dissonance between the two is perhaps more pronounced than in any other Shakespearian comedy. Isabella (a novitiate nun) famously does not respond in any way to the Duke's offer of marriage; while Lucio is forced to marry a prostitute he has impregnated, a fate he claims is equivalent to "pressing to death, whipping, and hanging" (5.1.520-1). Most interesting of all is Mariana's plea for Angelo's life, which actually inverts the normal judgment against impurity: "They say best men are molded out of faults, / And, for the most, become much more the better / For being a little bad. So may my husband" (5.1.435-7). The comedic form thus shunts aside cultural demands for purity in favor of marriage, in the process calling into question the desirability of either.

Works Cited
Stubbs, John. John Stubbs's Gaping Gulf with Letters and Other Relevant Documents. Ed. Lloyd E. Berry. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1968. Print.

No Symbols Where None Intended

             In “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus call for a reading practice that will attend to the surface, that which “insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” (9). In doing so, they argue, we will “[accept] texts, deferring to them instead of mastering them or using them as objects, and [refuse] the depth model of truth, which dismisses surfaces as inessential and deceptive” (10). This new reading practice is set in opposition to “symptomatic reading,” a practice that seeks “a latent meaning behind a manifest one,” in which “the interpreter ‘rewrite[s] the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code’ and reveals truths that ‘remain unrealized in the surface of the text’” (3). Such reading practices are epitomized in Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, in which Jameson argues “that only weak, descriptive, empirical, [and] ideologically complicit readers attend to the surface of the text” (5). This opposition between surface (or descriptive) reading and symptomatic reading depends on the political potential of a text—a potential that is either more or less manifest in what the text “insists” or is “repressed” by the text altogether. What, we may ask, happens when a text refuses to be political? What if a text presents symptoms if only to disqualify them altogether?

            Enter Samuel Beckett’s Watt. The critical history on Beckett has long established him as a vehemently apolitical writer—indeed, Peter Boxall, in “Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading,” claims that

Beckett’s work has come to mark the far limits of apolitical writing. His perceived longing for silence, for voicelessness and placelessness, his indeterminate nationality, his relentless, ascetic refusal of all forms of belonging, his paring down of reference to the point that his writing seems barely to refer to the world at all, have all led critics to suggest that his writing constitutes an abdication from, a denial of, or an indifference to the political. (159)

We may ask, then, what work the opposition between surface and symptomatic reading does in relation to Beckett’s work—how useful is a supposedly symptomatic reading of Watt, for instance, a text whose last (and most infamous) claim is that there are “no symbols where none intended” (214)? This refusal to engage with depth models seemingly undercuts any critical attempt to identify latent material in the narrative (a term I use loosely).

            In my last three posts, I would like to think I have attended to the “surface” of Watt to the extent that such a practice seems possible. Indeed, I would argue that attention to the surface of Watt highlights the significatory preoccupations of the narrative, and brings to light (a depth model image) the text’s obsession with language and the seeming nothingness behind it. Perhaps the strongest case against symptomatic reading of Watt is the “Addenda” which follow the main narrative, which provide a seeming key to understanding the baffling narrative but, in reality, offer only more questions. I will include three instances of this “precious and illuminating material” to convey my point:

das fruchtbare Bathos der Erfahrung

faede hunc mundum intravi, anxius vixi, perturbatus egredior, causa causarum miserere mei

parole non ci appulero (213)

On the surface, these references seem (in the context of an English-language novel) to be literally quite meaningless. However, the dutiful reader (and Googler) soon finds that these references are attributable to Kant, Aristotle, and Dante respectively. Each of them provides more thematic reinforcement for the preceding narrative (“the fruitful Bathos of experience,” “In filth I entered this world, anxious I lived, troubled I go out of it, cause of causes have mercy on me,” and “I will add no words to embellish it”), though ultimately they refer to more traditional understandings of a world that are centered around the logos that Beckett has long abandoned. A surface reading, on the other hand, takes Beckett at his word—“no symbols where none intended.” Watt’s struggle to understand his objective reality (and ultimately Mr. Knott) proves fruitless, and Watt’s ability to appreciate meaning deteriorates into madness. (Our nagging symptomatic reading practices cannot help but read into the names—Watt is really an articulation of “what?” and Mr. Knott is little more than negation (“Not” or “Naught”) personified). Is that the whole joke? Did Beckett really write a 200-page novel about our always already fruitless attempts at making meaning, which in the course of the narrative provides countless red herrings for our desperately symptomatic reading tendencies? That’s what the surface seems to insist.

Extrapolating from “Autumn of the System”

Extrapolating from “Autumn of the System”

Joshua Clover’s article “Autumn of the System” reads our contemporary (2006-2011) economy as an end of the “reign of finance” because capital has ceased to move; it is mere money. At the same time, global capital is spatial, leaving us with a scattered narrative of economy and, thus, of reality. He writes, “The goal here is to peer a bit further into the confrontation of space and time in the era of late capitalism, and perhaps finally to post a brief on behalf of poetry (or, at least, non-narrative) as the signal literary form of the period, despite its dismal reputation.” In other words, the literature of the moment has evolved to reflect our experience of economic and political realities in its narrative arc or lack thereof -- and that language is poetry.

According to Clover, poetry is the language of the waning of accumulation capital within post modernism because poetry resists narrative and is a fragmented way of communicating, because it inscribes debt or interruption into the logic of itself.  Does this imply that each era has such a complementary language? That is, if we were to read the political economies of the civil war or of the civil rights movement, would they, conversely, offer themselves as complete narratives that suggested an unstuttering logic? Is there ever a language of a self-present politics? Do we ever find the present to be sufficiently understood that we could narrate it smoothly? Or, does poetry seem proper only because we cannot historicize as we go, such as would be true for any age? It seems so: “That the book cannot finally provide a cognitive map of the present, of capital’s material, is of course the point” (Clover 40).

According to Clover’s criteria, poetry might seem to be the appropriate language to any age, since it is impossible for any present to be cognitively mapped. And, by the logic justifying poetry, I could argue that any genre is appropriate to the present, because even a well-constructed narrative fails to grasp a total reality. A narrative in prose is insufficient and opportunistic, choosing only what forwards the narrative and disenfranchising the rest.

The Portrait of a Lady was published serially in 1880-1881. Let us consider: in the 1880s (and the Gilded Age in general), speculation and finance were new forms of capital, based not on the generation of commodities, but in infrastructural investment based on a hunch (oil barons came into being at this time, betting on the importance of the commodity in the future); thus we could say that the present was a time of collapse into the future; finance was generated on the basis of a hope, so that narrative was concentrated on one point in time and then a thin thread let out as the capital developed. What would its literary representation look like? Might it look like a novel whose first several hundred pages yield little action over the course of a few months, followed by five pages that include a marriage, a miscarriage, the dissolution of the same marriage, and then two hundred more that narrate a few more inactive months? Such is The Portrait of a Lady,  accomplishing its action in fits and starts, bursting with action and then holding its breath.

The railroad acquired also new importance at that time (between 1870 and 1880, railroad mileage in the US nearly doubled) especially in light of new technologies that expanded its use (sturdier cars and tracks, which carried more people and goods more efficiently and the refrigerator car, to transport food). I would argue that this new ability to cover distance would have been felt as a spatial condensation on the scale of current globalization. A language that encapsulated this spread might have been composed serially and/or across continents, which was James’ mode; he expatriated himself to England and published Portrait via monthly installments in The Atlantic. Or this language might accumulate a diversity of perspectives and schizophrenically offer differing accounts of the protagonist via sentences that luxuriate and meander: “She was not in love with him and therefore might criticise his small defects as well as his great -- which latter consisted in the collective reproach of his being too serious, or, rather not of his being so, since one could never be, but certainly of his seeming so.”

If either mapping of  The Portrait of a Lady onto the Gilded Age seems plausible, then the bildungsroman may be the narrative mode appropriate to the Gilded Age...but, were we to test them, so might poetry or drama.

"Shooting yourself, in a manner of speaking!"

(In which I do an unabashedly symptomatic reading of Heartbreak House in order to make it talk to Ellen Rooney about surface reading.)

The distinction that Ellen Rooney attempts to make clear between symptomatic reading and surface reading (in “Live Free or Describe”) might be summed up as follows: “symptomatic reading implies a kind of unfreedom, an imposition, the trace of a force never entirely in the control of either reader or writer, [while] description as the problematic of surface reading celebrates obviousness, that which (allegedly) lies in plain view”(Rooney 116). Heartbreak House is also concerned with the notion of “that which (allegedly) lies in plain view.

Many of the characters are immediately recognizable—both to each other and as recurring fictional types. Their characteristics are the characteristics of their category. They are, in other words, readable solely on the basis of what is obvious about them. Shaw encourages a kind of allegorical reading of the play in both his introduction to it, where he writes of English society as a collection of easily defined categories of existence, and in his stage directions, which often describe the characters in terms of their social station and type. He defines them by their place, and simultaneously claims that they may stand for that place in society. Rooney might object to the claim that allegory (which asks us to create an allusion between text and social structures) could ever qualify as surface reading. And yet, as each character arrives before the audience, those things that are obvious about her are those things which refer easily within a set of social significations. If a description of surface reading refuses any meaning which relies upon a sign system, then of course Rooney is right to claim that it is impossible. I can imagine an account, however, (though Rooney would believe that I am deceived about the extent of ideology) which acknowledges the necessity of sign systems in the creation of meaning, but which asks the reader to rigorously deny all but the most superficial claims of a text. A character in a military uniform, for example, could not be read as a symbol of war, but could be understood to be in the military until further information is provided. Thus allegory may be ruled out insofar as each character is asked to stand for an idea, but a reading of characters based on their social markers would remain acceptably on the surface.

The characters in the play certainly believe that each of the others is an identifiable type who may be treated as such. They are surface readers of each other. And some of them have no depth. They are always an extension of their surface; they mean as they appear. And yet they play is also aware of the problems of an easy assignation of meaning. Captain Shotover, from the beginning, mistakes Ellie’s father (Mazzini Dunn) for an old acquaintance (Billy Dunn), and he refuses to believe that he might be incorrect . . . until the arrival of someone else whom he believes to be Billy Dunn. And this new Billy Dunn’s identity is also in doubt—he is always playing a part. He plays the part of a burglar, and then the part of a poor beggar, and then accepts the Captain’s claim that he is Billy Dunn, and plays that too. It is at this point that he accuses Mazzini, crying, “have you been giving yourself out to be me? You, that nigh blew my head off! Shooting yourself, in a manner of speaking!” (87). Thus the possibilities for a given identity double (at least!), while Mazzini (and perhaps the Captain too) stands accused of an attempt to destroy the other possible version of himself. He is imagined as a defender of a singular meaning, foolishly seeking to destroy all other options. Various other cases of characters appearing to be singular and simple appear and are complicated through the play. Even the fact that this is a play makes the most superficial characters potentially complex, as each is realized by an unruly body and appears in a performance that inevitably changes with each enactment. Thus the play presents a set of superficial characters, whom the playwright defines as types, and then proceeds to mock the very idea of holding on to singularity in meaning.

Winter is Coming (Again): Or, a Capitalist Horror Story for Halloween

Joshua Clover’s “Autumn of the System” charts the narrative of late capitalism through the “organizing trope of Autumnal literature," a clash between time and space that has a parallel relationship with the narrative of financialization (43). And yet “the conversion of the temporal to the spatial” is not a singular experience, limited to literature written about the twilight of the global economy collapse in 2007-2008. Clover gestures toward another “imperial cycle” in Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” in which the poet “arrived not elsewhere but elsewhen, having made his way across a temporal ocean” (44). The implication is that the transmutation of time and space is a repetitive motion, occurring each time the discourse of capitalism reaches a point of rupture.

In this post, I aim to trace this trope back even further to an eighteenth-century Autumn epitomized by Roxana. Rather than using the term “Autumn” to identify the beginnings of an economic collapse, I hope to analyze how capitalism is both tentatively engaged with and feared as a potentially destructive force in the book. While Clover reads Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day as a “dizzying kaleidoscope refracting the now distant beginnings of the twentieth century—that is, the rise of industrial capital and U.S. world power,” I find that Roxana provides a snippet of a capitalist horror novel, depicting an era of material expansion swelling to monstrous extremes.

After being abandoned by her money-squandering husband, Roxana first seeks only to pawn goods for money: “I began to make away one Thing after another, until those few Things of Value which I had, began to lessen apace…” (Defoe 14). Roxana’s use of the C-M-C form (exchanging necessary commodities to acquire more necessary commodities) transitions rapidly to the “most basic of Marxian formulations," or “money which seeks to become more money” (Clover 36). As a successful businesswoman reaping investments, Roxana wholeheartedly embraces the capitalist lifestyle and becomes “as expert in [business], as any She-Merchant of them all (Defoe 170).

The temptation to read this moment as triumphant is complicated by Roxana’s journey by sea to claim a 1,200 crown-credit. The contrived nature of this scene is difficult to neglect: Roxana fears she will be accused of accumulating her wealth by illegal means, and thus entrusts her jewels and money to a Dutchman and flees France for Holland, carrying only the credit the Dutchman has given her. Reading the Autumn trope into this scene, we might interpret Roxana’s crossing to France over a “temporal ocean” as she confronts “the identical action of financialization itself, restlessly passing off time as space” (Clover 44). The limit of credit looms large in this scene, as Roxana worries that “if the Bills should be refus’d, I was cheated…” (122). Even more tellingly, a massive storm that occurs along the way results in a confrontation of space and time. Narrative movement slows to a stop as Roxana views an alternate future for herself, in which she will “spend a great deal of what I had thus wickedly got, in Acts of Charity, and doing Good” (Defoe 126). In a parallel to Yeat’s Byzantium, Roxana arrives “not elsewhere but elsewhen,” surveying a land that seems entirely to be made out of clouds.

My interpretation diverges from Clover’s in that Roxana’s credit cannot be read as “the making present of future labor…” since Roxana is, after all, the rightful owner of 1,200 crowns (44). There is a more sinister angle that I would like to take up in regards to this, and it hinges on the fact that Roxana, as a woman, represents “a natural economy of reproduction that is the antithesis of the perverse generation of capital…” (Kibbie 1025). Roxana will always be forced to labor under uncertainty that her rightfully earned money will be confiscated, as it nearly is after an unfounded accusation in France. This, perhaps, may explain the book’s uneasiness towards capitalism, as Roxana is portrayed as an all-consuming monster entirely manipulated by the system (it has been made much of that she cannot read her own accounts and relies entirely on male advisors to manage her investments). Roxana is punished throughout the novel for representing the mother figure and the greedy capitalist, used as a puppet to generate capital for her male counterparts, and finally condemned to an early grave while her husband and step-son (presumably) inherit her wealth. It would seem that her extended line of credit has run out.

Kibbie, Ann Louise. “Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana.” PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 5, (Oct. 1995): 1023-1034.

Spring of the System: Temporal Fixation in "The Birthmark"

If Clover claims in “Autumn of the System” that our current economy is the onset of a capitalist Winter, when was Spring? He explains that the Autumn of the system is the decline of a “cycle of accumulation;” hence the beginning of that cycle must be its Spring. When discussing late capitalism in the United States, I believe it fair to argue then that one “Spring” took place during the American Industrial Revolution and the rapid national and colonial expansion that followed. The American Empire, as it were, saw significant westward and overseas growth during the early to mid-nineteenth century as well as a continuance of financial development as industry and agriculture grew together. Andrew Jackson’s dissolution of the National Bank in 1832 prompted a financial system of credit and loans from smaller banks that came to define the American economy at that time. In contrast with what Clover posits as the inability in Autumn for the “hegemon” to “forward its accumulation via real expansion” (48), this “Spring” for capitalism saw endless possibilities for expansion. There was no “phantom space” (48), only real space.

            If, then, the literature of Autumn is poetry that converts the temporal to the spatial in reflection of late capitalism’s projected view of “labor time as world space” (48), it would follow that the vast spatial possibilities in the nineteenth century Spring might manifest literature that reverses Clover's axial transmutation and converts the spatial to the temporal. Indeed, the American nineteenth century saw a predominance of narrative fiction over poetry, and the poetry that did exist was generally narrative (excepting that of Emily Dickinson). Not only does Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” (1843) fit the bill with its straightforwardly narrative structure as a contrast with Clover’s formal analysis of Autumnal poets, Hawthorne also specifically contemplates the importance of time over space through his character Aylmer’s scientific pursuits, again in opposition to Clover’s reading of subject matter in the twenty-first-century poems. We find out that before the story begins, Aylmer has extensively pursued scientific problems of space in the physical world: “the pale philosopher had investigated the secrets of the highest cloud-region, and of the profoundest mines; he had satisfied himself of the causes that kindled and kept alive the fires of the volcano; and had explained the mystery of fountains, and how it is that they gush forth… from the dark bosom of the earth” (1324). The vast array of geographical understanding that Aylmer purportedly has indicates a dissatisfaction with scientific pursuits that are grounded in the space of the earth itself. Whereas space for Autumnal poets is “phantom,” a mystery, and something to search for, Aylmer sees no further mystery in the spatial questions of the world. Now, he begins to look forward to an understanding of time through his preoccupation with mortality.

            After Georgiana faints in his laboratory, Aylmer attempts to soothe her with some “light and playful secrets” of science, or optical illusions (1325). Georgiana is amused with the “procession of external existence” that “flitted across a screen;” this procession “perfectly represent[s]” reality, or what we could dub the spatial realities of physical existence (1325). However, Aylmer soon wearies of this and reveals an illusion more sacred to him: “Aylmer bade her cast her eyes upon a vessel, containing a quantity of earth. She did so, with little interest at first, but was soon startled to perceive the germ of a plant, shooting upward from the soil… and amid [the leaves] was a perfect and lovely flower” (1325). Clearly Aylmer plays with time here. He manipulates temporal laws in a way that is more magical than any previous “spatial” illusion. This magical flower remains bound to the cycle of time, however, when Aylmer indicates that “the flower will wither in a few moments, and leave nothing save its brown seed-vessels– but thence may be perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself” (1325). The cycle is proportionate in the speed of the flower’s birth and the speed of its demise.

            Aylmer is therefore dissatisfied with his flower trick; his ultimate goal is to subvert the laws of time completely and concoct the Elixir Vitae that will prolong life indefinitely. In this way it could be argued that Aylmer distorts the temporal in a way similar to the late capitalist system and the Autumnal poets. Clover explains that through the use of credit, the financial system “pass[es] off time as space” (44), which could similarly explain Aylmer’s attempt to understand and manipulate time as he has understood and manipulated space. However, Aylmer’s ultimate failure in removing Georgiana’s birthmark nullifies a possible conversion of time to space that Hawthorne sees as an abomination. He reasserts the translation of the spatial to the temporal in the last sentence of the story and reinstates the important narrative continuity of time: “The momentary circumstance was too strong for [Aylmer]; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of Time, and living once for all in Eternity, to find the perfect Future in the present” (1332). Hawthorne indicates that Aylmer “failed to looked beyond the shadowy scope of Time” because that shadowy scope is endless, impossible to be subverted. Further, his failure rests on his denunciation of the present in favor of the future, while Hawthorne tells us that “a perfect Future” can be found in the present. Such a claim opposes Clover’s description of “late capitalism’s drive to plunder and hollow out the future” (45).

            Whether Hawthorne was directly influenced in “The Birthmark” by the economic “Spring” of industrialization and expansion is open to interpretation. While the most readily available context for his conversion of the spatial to the temporal may be his religious belief in the immortality of the afterlife, one could argue that the emphasis on vocation in the story grounds it in an economic context. In either case, “The Birthmark” demonstrates a formal and thematic counterpoint to the loss of time to space in the Autumnal literature of our system. If our system’s Spring valued time, and its Autumn space, what is to follow in the literature of the next cycle’s Spring?

Entitled: Inevitable Titular Guilt

The political implications of the title of Ellen Rooney’s essay “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form” run deep, insisting on being “symptomatically read, disclosed by an interpreter as not being fully in control of our text, of our languages, or even of what we know we meant to say” (134). Published in 2010, her explanation of her title pun as an East-coast regionalism ignores the Tea Party Movement’s current national absorption of this phrase from the American Revolution. In this context this phrase suggests a freedom from governmental oversight, a limitation of centralized government power that is not complicated by electing politicians who build repressive structures of government even as they claim to tear them down. The tea party is a call for regionalism that asks voters to think in general terms, a movement towards surface reading that claims the “dream of freedom” (Rooney 116). A party whose platform is non-interference with the self-evident truths that define Americans— a new formalist approach to government. The (unintended?) connotations of Rooney’s title demonstrate how titles prime the reader to read guiltily and disallow an approach to a text that is truly neutral.

            Written over a century earlier and the product of an age of imperialist government and breakneck social change, Lady Audley’s Secret tests the limits of the unembellished formalist approach against the titular suggestion of subversion. The result is an oppositional tension that attempts the Tea Party’s formalist approach but implicitly asks the participant to read surface symptomatically, to distrust meaning while participating in it. The sensational novel is a work of surfaces and generalizations—its structure relies on the reader’s belief in the essential correctness of universal ethical and legal structures. These structures insist on their objectivity—they are absolutes. Detailed descriptions of ornate objects suggest their concreteness and weight, and places are familiar resisting Althussarian “surprise” (Rooney 114). Ripples on the surface of the generalized plot, the “sensation” that the genre suggests, lap harmlessly against the bank of expectation. Before the book has been opened, these unalterable events are come into being so that the reader observes them but does not make them himself.

            Simultaneously, the title of this novel suggests this surface is unreliable. The titular “secret” insists that the surface is artificial and the cacophony of normality, decadence, harmony and settledness drowns out an essential truth. Braddon’s narrative asks to be read in general terms, but the title of the work suggests that to do so is the ignore the work’s intent. Surface is the subject of the novel, but is the unreliability of surface and assumption, rather than surface itself that is its subject. The title of the book denies the reader the luxury of reading the text “neutrally” because the suspicion of a double-game and “guilt” is suggested before the narrative commences.

            Stephen Marcus and Sharon Best’s title, “Reading ‘The Way We Read Now,’” invites a similar inquisitiveness that Rooney is unable to resist responding to in her essay. This title is a pun on Anthony Trollope’s serialized 1875 novel, The Way We Live Now, which is a cautionary tale about the treachery of surface, the ruin caused by lack of inquiry and blind investment in a generalized belief. In his autobiography Trollope explains his target:

a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. (XX)

The very surfaces that Trollope describes are the surfaces of Lady Audley’s country house that, as he suggests, carry the inherent taint of dishonesty and invite an irresistible desire to scratch away the gilt finish. The use of a pun on this work undermines Best and Marcus’s argument by demonstrating the “trace of force never entirely in the control of either reader or writer” that is the implication of Rooney’s defense of symptomatic reading (116). Furthermore, their insistence on the apolitical position of new formalism is undermined by this reference to Trollope’s clearly political novel and the polarizing effects of their approach to reading. Rooney’s argument, though thoroughly defended, could have been argued in title alone since that string of words is always already the textual manifestation of inescapable guilt, a residue that haunts the reader as he produces the text.

Trollope, Anthony. Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. Project Gutenberg, 2004. Web. 25 Oct 2012.

The Telling of The Member of the Wedding: A Case for Strategic Formalism

In “Strategic Formalism,” Caroline Levine argues that the projects of literary and cultural studies should attend not only to literary forms but to a wide variety of forms as “ordering principles” (633) that both shape cultural objects and work within them to destabilize each other. Forms tend to “jostle one another, overlap, and collide,” (634) not only within the objects of analysis that we order under the heading “literature” but in every potential object of cultural study. Thus Levine does not present literature as the favored place where culture represents itself, but instead argues that though the literary is just one category of text among many, literary formalism can be especially useful in that “it offers a highly developed and refined vocabulary for the intricate interactions among different levels and kinds of order” (633).

            Conversely, in “Autumn of the System” Joshua Clover reverts to what I would argue is a more traditional position in literary studies, privileging literature as the place where literary and cultural forms work together to express and reflect upon their era. This is not to say that Clover positions literature somehow outside of the society it examines, but that its place in that society—as in Clover’s “ ‘poetics’ including poetry”—is to provide an “adequate cognitive mode for our present situation” (Clover 49).

            It seems to me that in searching for a poetics of “our historical moment” (34) Clover implicitly suggests there can be (to borrow a phrase) one cultural form to rule them all, while Levine takes a more liberal view of forms, advocating for the use of literary formalism strategically without losing sight of “the crucial importance of diversity, marginality, and excluded subject-positions” (634). But certainly both would agree that literary objects can suggest approaches to cultural discussions such as this one, and in light of this I want to read The Member of the Wedding as a cultural object that has something to tell us about how to study cultural objects.

            At first glance the novel could be seen to side with Clover in the power that it places, not only in the wedding but in “the telling of the wedding” (Member 51). If the wedding represents Frankie’s crisis of belonging and becoming, in the microcosm of the novel the wedding takes on the same kind of power as Clover’s financial collapse. Clover argues that the “fundamental problematic of the historical moment” in which he writes is a need to understand and express the “mystifying and elusive regime which rode American hegemony downward to darkness on extended credit” (Clover 34-35). Ultimately, for Clover, poetry and other non-narrative literature will help us do this.

In Member we can find a need to understand and express the wedding, which is potentially the “fundamental problematic” of the novel, through its telling. In the throes of the wedding’s anticipation, Frankie, who is in this section of the novel F. Jasmine, wanders the streets of her town making (possibly imagined) nonverbal “connections” with people and developing an intense desire to use words to “tell of the wedding and her plans” (48). In this way the novel, through Frankie, would seem to privilege the form of telling, which is comparable, if not equivalent, to the form of literature, as a way to consolidate crisis into expression. When Frankie wants to tell her father about the change that the wedding will create in her, “she sharpened her voice and chiseled the words into his head” (44).

            But the problem at first is that Frankie can find no one to tell, and then that when she finally does find an audience in a Portuguese café owner, she receives no consolation: “F. Jasmine, when she had finished, wanted to start all over again. The Portuguese took from behind his ear a cigarette which he tapped on the counter but did not light. In the unnatural neon glow his face looked startled, and when she had finished he did not speak” (50). Frankie’s earlier nonsense conversations with Berenice and John Henry in the kitchen have already proven the ineffectiveness of language. How, then, is the wedding, the “fundamental problematic,” to be expressed?

This is where we can see the very possibility of a “fundamental problematic” fall apart, and the novel draw closer to Levine’s insistence on the need for a strategic way to deal with diversity and instability. Frankie/F. Jasmine/Frances is a profoundly unstable character, always in the process of becoming and un-becoming and re-becoming (see this post), and membership in the wedding is actually just an imagined possibility that never comes to be. The wedding itself, the “telling of the wedding,” and indeed the subject called Frankie, F. Jasmine, and Frances by turns are forms among many that, in Levine’s words, “jostle one another, overlap, and collide” in the novel, so that when we track the plot by anticipating the wedding or consider subjectivity through Frankie we must always be aware of the strategy at work in these approaches. Though Frankie yearns for a way to consolidate experience through a form of “telling,” just as Clover wants to find a way to express an era through poetry, Member, like Levine, insists on an understanding of forms that never forgets multiplicity and incongruity.