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.