Do marginalization and normalization coexist?

In class on Monday we discussed at length how Foucault uses the examples of lepers and plague victims to distinguish between two types of power. There is the power that excludes and represses (“leper power”) which can be understood as negative since its goal is to eliminate by marginalization what Foucault in the context of his discussion of medico-legal expert opinion identifies as the dangerous or perverse individual. Then there is the power that seeks to normalize (“plague power”): a positive power working to mold individuals to fit within the boundaries of acceptability by monitoring them and making them monitor each other. I am interested in thinking about whether the two types of power that Foucault identifies can ever exist simultaneously, or whether their apparent coexistence is the marker of some third formation of power. We touched on this question in our discussion of Mbembe’s “Necropolitics”: in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli government exercises violent “leper power” on Palestinians in the same (or at least a very closely adjacent) geographic space as the “plague power” it exercises on its own citizens. It also uses surveillance, seemingly a tool of “plague power,” to achieve its “leper power” ends. But are these two powers really coexisting in this instance or are they just confusingly layered on top of each other? In class we seemed to agree upon the latter.

I wonder if the tenuous space where the individual meets society could mark a possibility for these two powers’ coexistence. Bruno Latour argues that in fact the individual and society are not separate entities, perhaps precluding the possibility for such a space, but nevertheless there is ample evidence that literary texts comprehend the existence of this space and often understand it as troubled. Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding suggests that there exists a temporal location—puberty—that demands a meeting between the desires of the individual and the societal processes of power.

            At twelve, Frankie Addams encounters a nameless normalizing force that crystallizes in the event of her brother’s wedding. The mysterious restlessness that has already befallen her during “that green and crazy summer” takes shape in her understanding the event of the wedding as the paragon of belonging to some larger society she can hardly imagine. Her efforts to self-normalize in order to participate in that society include buying a “wedding dress” to wear to the event, but the dress is inappropriate for Frankie: Berenice tells her, “Here you got on this grown woman’s evening dress. Orange satin. And that brown crust on your elbows. The two things just don’t mix” (78). It’s possible to understand this statement as an instance of societal self-policing: Berenice tells Frankie that her efforts to execute a gendered performance have failed and need to be reconsidered. Frankie doesn’t wear the dress to the wedding. “Plague power” at work.

But does Berenice’s gender policing constitute inclusion for Frankie? At the event that is supposed to continue Frankie’s normalization, she is mostly ignored, but: “Mrs Williams…asked F. Jasmine two times what grade she was in at school…Mr. Williams also asked her what grade she was in at school; in fact, that was the main question asked her at the wedding” (127-128). These characters are expressing what they understand to be an appropriate form of societal participation for Frankie, but Frankie sees their questions as a denial of how she understands herself. After the wedding is over, “The world was now so far away that Frances could no longer think of it” (138). The possibility for power to normalize an individual by working within some society that remains mysterious to and “far away” from her is dubious.

How does a normalizing power work if the individual can’t understand how to interact with it? What happens when a power that seeks to normalize creates an individual who understands herself as marginalized? Should this kind of power be understood as a type of “leper power” after all, or is the marginalization that Frankie experiences a side effect of “plague power”? But how can this be so? If such questions must remain unanswered in this (already longer than) 600 word blog post, The Member of the Wedding at least shows us that the two types of power Foucault outlines are not mutually exclusive, and offers one model for their interplay.

The People Are Absent (In which Heartbreak House and Jonathan Lamb have a fight about character)

In the theatre, we have the sense that there are the characters . . . and then there are the people. Jonathan Lamb describes this distinction in “’Lay Aside My Character’: The Personate Novel and Beyond” (although he specifically discusses the 18th century novel, the article seems interested in the distinction as such). He writes, “it seems generally agreed that characters, whether particularized or not, are public, while persons, if they are really set on privacy, tend towards a narrower role and ultimately an inaccessible particularity, at which point they become something else altogether” (272). By the end of the article, the person is an essential component of fiction, and one that includes both “an ideal self,” set against and supported by a world of fictions, and the ability to author representations of that self (282-4).

The very experience of theatre is one that reinforces this distinction. We see the character (clearly both public and accessible) played by a person (presumably someone with a private, inaccessible life and mind). And inherent to the form is the presence of the author. We are aware that it is the actor who authors the character before us. Beyond that, we know that there is the costume designer, the director, the lighting designer, the playwright, the technical director, and so on. Lamb stresses the faultiness of our sensing faculties: the person is aware of and resists the fictional nature of “all the contingent details of the phenomenal world, and all systems of arranging and judging them” (283). All of the theatrical authors mentioned are making fiction with our empirical experience, and we assume that they exist beneath, in private, as makers. This private world is what the program pretends to represent, with its headshots, biographical notes, letters to the audience about the process of creating the show, and lists of donors who “made it possible.”

And yet, Heartbreak House contends, such a distinction is all nonsense. Making representations is not distinct from living and experiencing an “ideal self”; character is not distinct from person. All of the characters in Heartbreak House perform a series of roles—just as though they were actors onstage—and so they comment on the making of characters. But they are not persons. They have no sense of inner life; indeed, they entirely lack ground. Ellie, for example, is alone at the beginning of the play. She has time; she has quiet; she has a book (appropriately, it is Othello). Does she spend this time in contemplation? No. Does she spend it in a monologue, informing us of some thoughts that have been troubling her, and suggesting conflicts in the work to come? No. Does she spend it considering characters in a play? Not remotely. She lacks an audience . . . and so she falls asleep.

The characters of Heartbreak House are always performing roles, but they are not conscious actors who assume the roles they play. Each time a façade is given up, another façade takes its place. The burglar, it turns out, is actually just pretending; he is really a con artist taking a collection. Except as soon as we accept this new story, Captain Shotover declares that the con artist is the old pirate Billy Dunn . . . except this is a role he has previously assigned to someone else. And so on. And 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.

If we take Heartbreak House on its face—as a piece in the theatre—it will inevitably appear to redraw Lamb’s distinctions. If, however, we understand the behavior of the characters as an argument about the person underneath those characters, it suggests something entirely different. Actors, authors, and the people whose faces you see in your program? They are a fiction, Heartbreak House argues. They are always characters.

Moretti’s Methodology: The Cure for Symptomatic Reading?

Moretti’s Methodology: The Cure for Symptomatic Reading?

There are four competing versions for the “original” publication of The Portrait of a Lady: two were simultaneously serialized in England and the United States, and each was bound into book form shortly thereafter. I had assumed that perusal of the textual variants might tell us something about the ways in which English usage in England was different from that in the United States. Using Moretti’s system, I confirmed the existence of textual variation, but found also that I had to take care that the reading of these findings was not too symptomatic, as per Rooney’s discussion. Implementing his system myself at once transformed my symptomatic reading into a surface reading and made me desire more context for Moretti’s investigation.

I looked at various versions of the text of The Portrait of a Lady to see how many dashes had been printed; I chose the dash for the unscientific reason of its seeming to me an interesting piece of punctuation in that it has no fast rules governing it; it is a piece of punctuation that is open to interpretation -- thus, one can imagine how my symptomatic reading of the dash might easily lead me to some conclusions re: the temper of the English reader in coping with the mystery of the dash versus that of the American reader; who would be more willing to engage with this nebulus? I assumed we could learn something about the transatlantic readership in the early 1880s: a natural time constraint inheres in the fact that the versions I looked at did not appear over decades like some revisions do, as the artist matures and looks back or as conventions of language change; instead, these four versions of The Portrait of a Lady are issued within the space of only two and a half years.

First, I looked at the first serial installation of the text as it appeared in the English Macmillan’s Magazine in October 1880; next, at the same installation as it appeared in the American Atlantic Monthly in November 1881. After that, I examined the same portion of the work when it was published by Macmillan in book form in 1882; and finally, I looked at the same portion as published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin in 1881. To approximate Moretti’s method, I counted the dashes in each version by downloading an editable version of each and manually using the Find + Replace function (same results, more laborious process).

In Volume I, the Atlantic stripped the Macmillan version of the text of 28% of its dashes, retaining only 80 of the original 110. Although the English Macmillan’s Magazine serial publication began before the American Atlantic Monthly started running The Portrait of a Lady, an American publisher, Houghton Mifflin, bound it as a book first. In doing so, they reinserted (or left intact) 108 of the original 110 dashes. And then Macmillan did the same thing -- a curious choice, since Macmillan already had an edited version of the text. Because both the American and English versions of the bound text appear to be the same, my original hypothesis -- being able to “read” the readerships on either side of the Atlantic through their relationship to the dash -- was undone. The editorial choices made in England were thought fit to travel without doing any real violence to an American set of readers and, in this instance, the dash tells us nothing about the mind of the English reader versus that of the American.

Fortunately, the history of The Portrait of a Lady’s publication is available to further inquiry: the plates for the book were originally fabricated by Macmillan in England then sent over to the United States, where they were first published by Houghton Mifflin and later used by Macmillan to print the English version. This information confirmed the unraveling of my symptomatic reading I would have done. It is, however, not the case that history would yield the 7,000 novels investigated by Moretti to further, perhaps contradictory, investigation. That is, we can never know if the shortening of novels’ titles is a response to the exigencies of advertising unless we are able to confirm this with supporting evidence (i.e. a control group of long titles juxtaposed with shorter ones). So, while his method yields data that would otherwise be too burdensome to calculate and might, as in my case, thwart a desired symptomatic reading, I am not sure that the data does not simply produce another “text” that is equally open to interpretation. The shortening of titles over time may just as well have informed us as to the price of ink and paper as to the necessity of advertising in circulating libraries’ catalogs. While his set of data may offer another data point in the reading of a body of texts, it may be just another data point.

A Poetics of "Nobody In Particular"

    According to Jonathan Lamb, the eighteenth century novel unified two representations of the subject: “the idea and function of the person,” one who is “always in a provisional state of being”’—“a subjunctive mode of self-identification”—and a figure with at least one shred of empirical connective tissue; a thing that is “neither a character nor a person, nor yet quite a nobody.”  (274) Fictional subjectivity of the novel, says Lamb, arose when the onset of rights discourse was synchronic with modern fiction.  Out of this synchrony emerged “strange alliances… [between] politics, property, and poetics.” (274)  Accordingly, person construction in the novel and “the radically new poetics of the subject and the state” engaged in a kind of symbiosis during the eighteenth century.  In reflecting upon this relationship, I want to pose the possibility that Lamb’s argument offers an entry point for thinking about poetry. That a poetics of identity in politics found its way into the aesthetics of 18^th century fiction, raises the question of how a referent of provisional becoming moves from some domain outside of poetry into the poem.

     The speaker of John Berryman's Dream Songs holds clear ties to real events experienced by the author and the eternally returning and developing figure of "Henry"who appears to share a strange space with the speaker's identity.  Clearly, the speaker of a confessional poem might be better thought of as a person than a character. For other kinds poetry, however, character—“a nobody in particular”—might serve as a more appropriate figure for the speaker.  Insofar as characterization, according to Catherine Gallagher and Deidre Lynch, can free up “the Cartesian unity of the self…and the experimental basis of knowledge,” perhaps poetry, when freed “from this kind of referentiality,” can and does “[strike] out on its own, exploiting a set of generic possibilities that enlarge the diversity of character by way of imaginative virtuosity, not empirical knowledge.” (273)  I suggest that Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path performs this operation.  

   Lerner's speaker enjoys a kind of disembodied agency; a schizophrenia that works both for and against one supposed goal of the text--to make "a little path for Ari;" something "composed entirely of edges." (42)   For example:

The ode just visible beneath the elegy
The preemptive elegy composed entirely
This movement from the ground to cloud
Of waves decaying slowly on plucked strings
Is lightning.  I don't know how else to say it
I mean without writing.  Maybe if you let
The false starts stand, stand in for symbols
Near collapse, or let collapsing symbolize
The little clearing loving is.  Maybe then

    A distributed thing, the speaker shatters into fragments jutting at various angles.  Instead of unifying the concept of a "preemptive elegy" being "composed entirely.../of waves  decaying slowly on plucked strings"  we have another thought interposed: "This movement from ground to cloud."  This thought, however, is also interrupted before it can finish with "Is lighting."  The speaker divides into many.  As such, he or she fails to meet a necessary condition for personhood--unification of the subject. Unity of the "I," provides the person's boundaries for becoming.  The split personality, however, is a divided subject--two persons sharing a body.  If a person, as such, depends on unity, does a character also depend it?  Insofar as characters can be "creatures and things as well as invented stories of named but non-existent human beings," they need not follow same existential conditions of personhood.  But does it follow that nothing prevents a character from being massively distributed?  What about the weather, emotions, and atmosphere?--all have characterological roles in a variety of narratives.   Mean Free Path, then, raises an important question:  How stands the gap between the one and the multiple?

What is a Watt?

In “Style, Inc.” Moretti presents a “modest example of what quantitative stylistics [can] do: take those units of language that are so frequent that we hardly notice them, and show how powerfully they contribute to the construction of meaning” (156). His “units” of choice, in this case, are of course titles, and through his analysis he examines “some strategies by which titles point to specific genres” (136). The most interesting titles to me (working with Beckett) are titles that use the protagonist’s name (indeed, Beckett almost exclusively names his prose after the protagonist: Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier, Molloy, Malone Dies, and even The Unnamable). Moretti notes that this choice “was not inevitable” (147), and, like all of the titular choices Moretti quantitatively analyzes, contributes to the meaning of the novel in a very distinct way. Indeed, Moretti highlights that the introduction of abstractions “made titles meaning-ful: nothing but meaning, as if the essence of the novel had been distilled and purified of all narrative contingency.” These abstractions “made readers look for a unity in the narrative structure” (151) in a different way than the titles which use character names.

In trying to force Moretti into a dialogue with Beckett’s Watt, I realize that I do not necessarily take issue with quantitative stylistics per se, and indeed will base my reading of Watt on many of the insights from Moretti’s essay—I do, however, hope to show that quantitative stylistics (in this instance at least) will inevitably need a smaller scale reading of individual works to make its insights meaningful at all. Watt, as always, seems like the perfect novel to achieve such a task.

In Moretti’s assessment, Watt would fall under the category of “character name” (see: Emma, Roxana, Mrs. Dalloway, etc.)—which would be mostly true. I would argue that Watt becomes an abstraction as soon as it becomes a character name, and that throughout the novel Watt is systematically stripped of the traditional characteristics of a protagonist. Early in the novel, before the introduction of Watt, two characters at a train station, Mr. Hackett and Tetty Nixon, slowly perceive the presence of what will become the “protagonist” of the novel:

[the train] moved on, disclosing, on the pavement, motionless, a solitary figure, lit less and less by the receding lights, until it was scarcely to be distinguished from the dim wall behind it. Tetty was not sure whether it was a man or a woman. Mr. Hackett was not sure that it was not a parcel, a carpet for example, or a roll of tarpaulin, wrapped up in dark paper and tied about the middle with a cord…But Watt moved no more, as far as they could see, than if he had been of stone, and if he spoke he spoke so low that they did not hear him. (11-12)

Here Watt straddles the line between subject and object, foreground and background. Not only can Watt “scarcely…be distinguished from the dim wall behind [him],” but his gender is ambiguous and Mr. Hackett is unconvinced that he is not in fact a “parcel…wrapped up in dark paper and tied about the middle with a cord.” In the context of Moretti’s argument, the title Watt would inevitably draw readerly attention to Watt as the protagonist—here, those expectations are resoundingly upset. As you can see from previous posts, Watt gains little else through the novel in terms of characterization, and instead becomes another discrete unit in the signifying system of the novel. I also noted in a previous post that the name “Watt” itself seems like a perversion of the question “What?,” which is itself an abstraction that gestures toward a lack of knowledge rather than a concept that would focus readerly attention and interpretation.

                For me, the profound ambiguity of the seemingly innocuous title Watt would be entirely lost in a quantitative study. If Moretti’s project hopes to have any critical traction at all, it seems as though it needs to always ultimately defer to the study of a single work, rather than treating works (which, whether it be the titles or anything else, are composed of language) as self-evident, superficial data points.

Lamb, Lynch, and Revising the Rise of the Novel

To what extent is character fixed? Jonathan Lamb suggests that the “temporal extension and flexibility necessary for the functioning of a person is not possible for a character,” thereby distinguishing his argument from previous interpretations that conflate character with person (278). Lamb adds further to the eighteenth-century understanding of fiction by tracing the idea of authorship as “productive of a kind of originality…unattached either to the cycles of exchange that define a character, or to the fictions of representation that define a person” (272-274). While I agree with Lamb’s basic argument that the category of character should be inflated to include person and author, I believe that his conception of (modified) character needs clarification. My issues with Lamb are twofold: Firstly, I believe that his claims rest on an understanding that character remains not only static, but stable, an idea that is not fully supported by the sources he cites. This matters crucially to the argument he later makes about Roxana, since Roxana is cast as an author by default, denied both “the sort of self-examination that forges a person out of a self” and the ability to act as a changeable character (Lamb 280).

Lamb moves rapidly through critical contributions to the character debate in eighteenth-century studies, finding that Deidre Lynch and Catherine Gallagher “have been able to emancipate early fiction from what they take to be its servile relation to empiricism and individualism” by “sticking to character and jettisoning person from their histories of the novel” (273). In doing so, however, he fails to mention a simple question that dominates the second half of Lynch’s book The Economy of Character: “Were round characters inside flat characters all along, signaling frantically to get out?” (123). Lynch uses the anachronistic terms “round” and “flat” to signal a confrontation between internal and external characterization that calls into question Lamb’s suggestion that “characters are signs whose value, even if it is a fictional value, is constant” (278). Character, in Lamb’s estimation, must be unchangeable in order to circulate in market culture. Yet Lynch’s argument on character focuses on Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, which features a protagonist marked by his “exchangeability” and fluidity (123). It is indeed possible that Lamb might respond that Lynch is once again conflating character and person, but the fact remains that the anxieties driving the eighteenth-century conception of character resulted in unstable new compounds. To define character as fixed deprives the term of a history caught between new tastes and old movements (that is, novelty and allegory).

Lamb identifies a failed attempt at personhood in Roxana that hinges on the protagonist’s “habit of experiencing herself as a reflected thing, and not as a person consciously representing her own history” (281). Again, I would argue that Roxana’s ability to continually revise her character (since, after all, she is clear from the start that she intends to manipulate the reader) complicates this assumption. A moment of candid self-reflection in the midst of a storm—“what must I be? What must be my Portion?”—is dissolved moments later into the intellectual stupidity Lamb points out—“I had a Mind full of Horrour in the time of the Storm…but my Thoughts got no Vent” (Defoe 129). But must we toss aside the scraps of selfhood Roxana gives us? Robinson Crusoe, whom Lamb praises for “formally and deliberately plac[ing] himself at one remove from his self…” also succeeds in quelling disruptive emotion, gaining “as compleat a Victory over Conscience as any young Fellow that resolv’d not to be troubled with it, could desire” (9). If Roxana “secretly pursues the satisfactions of what Hobbes would call an author,” she does so by momentarily accessing what Lamb would term personhood and turning it on its head (283).

Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998.

Moretti's Method & Measure for Measure

I found Franco Moretti's "Style, Inc." a particularly rewarding read, and I wish to emulate it in this week's blog post. In lieu of his "Seven Thousand Titles," I will look at a meager 35: the titles which appear in the First Folio's table of contents. Hopefully, looking at Measure for Measure in this context will tell me something about why the play may have ended up with the title it did and what it means. Here they are, in the Folio's tripartite organizational scheme:

COMEDIES.

The Tempest.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Measure for Measure.
The Comedy of Errours.
Much adoo about Nothing
Loves Labour lost.
Midsommer Nights Dreame.
The Merchant of Venice.
As you Like it.
The Taming of the Shrew.
All is well, that Ends well.
Twelfe-Night, or what you will.
The Winters Tale.

HISTORIES.

The Life and Death of King John.
The Life & death of Richard the second.
The First part of King Henry the fourth.
The Second part of K. Henry the fourth.
The Life of King Henry the Fift.
The First part of King Henry the Sixt.
The Second part of King Hen. the Sixt.
The Third part of King Henry the Sixt.
The Life and Death of Richard the Third
The Life of King Henry the Eight.

TRAGEDIES.

The Tragedy of Coriolanus.
Titus Andronicus.
Romeo and Juliet.
Timon of Athens.
The Life and death of Julius Caesar.
The Tragedy of Macbeth.
The Tragedy of Hamlet.
King Lear.
Othello, the Moore of Venice.
Anthony and Cleopater.
Cymbeline King of Britaine.

     14 comedies, 10 English history plays, 11 tragedies. Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Two Noble Kinsmen are absent, and since the precise title used in this first collected edition of Shakespeare's work is at issue, I will leave them out of the account. About half of these plays had previously been published in quarto, sometimes with much-expanded titles. The Merchant of Venice, for instance, appeared as The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. VVith the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Iewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his fleshe and the obtayning of Portia by the choyce of three chests. As it hathe been diuers times acted by the Lord Chaimberlaine his Servants. Written by William Shakespeare.

     Measure for Measure was not one of these plays, but this long title, with its inaccurate plot summary focusing on the most sensational aspects of the play, clearly indicates that titles of plays could function as marketing devices in precisely the way Moretti sees novel titles working. It is easy to see, also, how unwieldy such titles might seem in the context of a collection of a writer's complete plays: if such a project is being attempted, it is because a market already exists (or is thought to exist) for whom the author's name has become a reliable brand of quality.

     But why the particular short-form titles we see in the Folio? Clearly, genre has a lot to do with it: all the English history play titles are restricted to the name of the reigning king, even (as in the Henry IV plays) when he is not the protagonist. Likewise, the tragic titles all contain the tragic hero's name (or, in the case of Romeo and Juliet, heroes' names). Indeed, one is tempted to speculate that it is Cymbeline's proper noun-centric title which led the editors to place it in this category, despite its happy ending (modern scholars usually consider it a "romance"). The prominence of names in the tragedies might be read as a marker of the greater focus on character development and introspection we find in these plays.

     On the other hand, the plays grouped as comedies all share an absence of proper names in their titles. Only the earliest, The Comedy of Errors, explicitly declares itself as a comedy. Most of the rest take their titles from proverbial phrases, either appearing in the play's dialogue (The Merry Wives of Windsor; Measure for Measure; The Taming of the Shrew; All's Well That Ends Well; and Twelfth Night, or What You Will) or not (Much Ado About Nothing; As You Like It). These titles seem most analogous to Moretti's "abstractions": "Generosity, Indiscretion, Independence, Delusion", and so on. But where, for Moretti's 19th century novels, "abstractions here really mean--ethics" (150), they self-evidently perform a different significatory function for Shakespeare's plays. Rather than a code of morals, for the most part they seem to indicate a mood: playful frivolity. Measure for Measure, then, stands out like a sore thumb. If the other titles announce their plays as securely as The Comedy of Errors' workmanlike title did as comedies, Measure for Measure's title (though, like theirs, adapted from a catchy saying embedded in the text) announces its play as something else.

McGurl, McCullers, and the failure of the postwar institution

In “The Program Era,” Mark McGurl uses the example of Phillip Roth to discuss the anxiety of a certain kind of writer in the face of institutionalized creativity, arguing that while Roth writes about universities and works within them to write and teach, he also believes in a “drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership” (Roth quoted in McGurl 116) which can be traced in part to the way the postwar American university engages with literature. McGurl’s argument about the effect of institutionalization on postwar American fiction rests on the anxious reflexivity of writers like Roth whose work internalizes the system as they decry it, and it also depends on the university’s attachment to “excellence” as a sought-after but ultimately meaningless quality that creative writers bring to campus. Just as Roth can’t reconcile the ways he hates and uses the institution, McGurl can’t reconcile the university’s attachment to an empty excellence with the fact that programs do indeed produce large quantities of “excellent” writing. As a result the article ends on an unsettling note, with a series of questions meant to be read in two registers simultaneously. “And isn’t postwar American fiction, after all, unprecedented in its excellence? If I could, I would ask this concluding question with two voices in counterpoint, and only one of them sarcastic” (128). And shortly after: “Is there not more excellent fiction being produced now than anyone (especially considering the excellence of television) has time to read?” (129).

            I want to argue that McGurl’s inability to articulate the result of postwar American fiction’s interaction with institutions without resorting to this odd mixture of irony and sincerity is a symptom of a problem that runs through Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1946). Because it asks the wider question of what institutions mean for individuals, McCullers’s wartime American novel can help us comprehend McGurl’s postwar problem.

            Member’s protagonist Frankie Addams comes of age as the U.S. emerges from World War II, and her struggle for a sense of belonging is driven by fear in the face of a world that is “fast and loose and turning, faster and looser and bigger than it ever had been before…cracked by the loud battles and turning a thousand miles a minute” (McCullers 32). Frankie wanders through most of the novel trying to successfully perform masculinity and femininity, adulthood and childhood, worldliness and domesticity, in order to belong to one of these categories because “To the think about the world for very long made her afraid. She was not afraid of Germans or bombs or Japanese. She was afraid because in the war they would not include her, and because the world seemed somehow separate from herself” (20). But her performances are confused, unconvincing, and too loosely defined, as the boundaries of gender, age, and geography refuse to remain stable. Finally Frankie arrives at a shaky sense of comfort by attaching herself to the idea of the wedding. For Frankie, the function of an institution, in this case marriage represented by the wedding, is to offer a sense of security by mediating interaction between the “unjoined” individual and the “fast and big and strange” world (20). But the wedding turns out to be an empty signifier, suggesting possibilities that can never be fulfilled. Since the institution of marriage remains out of Frankie’s grasp—we never see a marriage in the novel and Frankie can barely imagine what it might mean—its function is meaningless.

           As McGurl recognizes when he writes that Roth is in part “staunchly upholding high modernist literary values” (McGurl 117), the longing for art unsullied by institutions is a form of pre-war nostalgia. Writers like Roth dream of art that engages directly with the fast and big and strange world, and only grudgingly acknowledge their inability to participate in such a world.  McCullers’s Frankie does not show us the development of institutions, but rather the development of a longing for their solace. Indeed I suspect that the story of the rise of creative writing, which McGurl leaves out, is a chapter in that larger story of the desire to tame what comes to seem faster and bigger and stranger by the decade.

            So Member suggests to us that one role of the institution is to mediate and thus to comfort. But Member also suggests that institutionalization is a failure: “The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was supposed to have no part” (McCullers 129). Institutions don’t do their job, and they exist as façades that only offer false comfort. Perhaps this can account for the unsettling sense that McGurl applauds and denounces the work of the institution simultaneously. If we understand ourselves as participating in institutions that fail us all the while, how can we not remain unconvinced?

Imagining and Forming Reality in “The Birthmark”

If we were to take Lamb’s definitions of “character” and “person” and categorize the characters in “The Birthmark” as one or the other, each would emerge as more closely “character.” Lamb writes: “It seems generally agreed that characters, whether particularized or not, are public, while persons, if they are really set on privacy, tend towards a narrower role and ultimately an inaccessible particularity, at which point they become something else altogether” (272). In a lack of particularization in physical appearance, backstory, personality, and other defining factors, neither Aylmer, Georgiana, or Aminadab in “The Birthmark” can be termed a “person.” As we have seen before, the characters can be easily allegorized, each with a physicality generally representing a prototype: Aylmer is the tall, thin, pale scientist, Georgiana the blushing, beautiful, soft maiden, and Aminadab the swarthy, hulking foreigner. I don’t believe there is anything in the story that gives these characters an “inaccessible particularity.”

            Continuing to follow Lamb’s argument, the lack of “persons” and predominance of “characters” in the story should garner a plot-based fiction with little psychological intrigue. Specifically, Lamb argues that “Characters have no interest in instrumental fictions or in the real consequences they produce… there is nothing for them to imagine or suppose, and no fiction with which they can keep faith” (285). While part of this claim, namely that Aylmer and Georgiana do not look toward consequences of their “instrumental fictions,” is true, there are elements of the story that defy the inability of a character to “imagine or suppose” and implement instrumental fictions. Hawthorne psychologizes Aylmer’s progressively mutating obsession with Georgiana’s birthmark to a point where Aylmer’s imagination takes control of reality. As I have explained before, the birthmark begins to be connected directly with Aylmer’s gaze as the story progresses, with Georgiana palling each time Aylmer looks at here, thereby revealing the birthmark in greater contrast. Aylmer’s internal horror at the birthmark causes it to manifest itself on Georgiana’s cheek, bringing his imagination to reality. Further, Aylmer has a terrible dream in which he and Aminadab try to remove the birthmark surgically; but “the deeper went the knife, the deeper sank the Hand, until at length its tiny grasp appeared to have caught hold of Georgiana’s heart; whence, however, her husband was inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away” (1323). This dream scenario, which Hawthorne describes as “break[ing] forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one” (1323), mirrors the events of the story’s conclusion. After deciding that the birthmark has “clutched its grasp, into [Georgiana’s] being” (1323), just like the dream, Aylmer gives Georgiana what he knows to be a dangerous potion that does remove the birthmark; however in the process, Georgiana’s life fades slowly with the birthmark. Aylmer’s nightmare has come true.

            The importance in distinguishing the transformation of Aylmer’s imagination to reality lies in its contradiction to Lamb’s argument. He declares that it is a “person” alone who has “a much greater investment in both representation and conjecture, which is their way of transfiguring what is imagined into what is real” (285). Aylmer has demonstrated both representation (his gaze causing the birthmark to appear) and conjecture (his subconscious projecting a future result through a dream) in the process of imagination-reality construction. Yet he is not a “person.” I would argue that the reason for the discrepancy is rooted in the difference in genre. Lamb regards novels primarily in his article, while “The Birthmark” is a short story. In novels, perhaps the length allows for the particularization and development necessary to a “person,” a condition that short stories may not allow. The characters in “The Birthmark,” Aylmer especially, appropriate the authoring and forming qualities that Lamb would argue only a “person” can possess in a novel. The question then remains: do any short stories contain “persons”? Nineteenth-century short fiction relied on the archetypical “character” (think Poe) perhaps more than twentieth- and twenty-first-century short fiction does. I wonder, though, whether the presence of “persons” in short fiction is ever a possibility (lovers of short stories, please contend with this!). 

Found in Translation: Narratorial Gaps as Subject Formation in Lee and Braddon

When Wen Ho Lee insists that “my first language is math, my second language is Chinese, and my third language is English” he suggests that his “language limitation” causes the “deceptive responses” and “involuntary omissions” that make his testimony unconvincing (254). And yet when Lee felt compelled to reassert his guiltlessness he did so through the very medium that failed to exonerate him in the first place. In her essay, “The Literary Case of Wen Ho Lee,” Colleen Lye affirms that reader ambivalence toward Lee’s memoir “is rendered more acute by the gap between the fluent prose of the narration and Lee’s ungrammatical speech as it appears in the reproduced transcripts of FBI interrogation” (254-5). However, she ignores the double meaning in her assertion that “the insufficiency of a linguistic explanation for his unsatisfactory answering,” which suggests that Lee’s limited English as well as the limitations of English a tool for demonstrating innocence are what disable Lee’s purpose (255). Not only does the memoir rely on his third language, it is this third language communicated through the further filter of a ghostwriter/translator. Whether Lee could comprehend and affirm his the accuracy of his finished memoir in English is an issue that Lye chooses to avoid. The layers of translation inherent in Lee’s memoir invite inquiry about why this text was not produced in Chinese, or even in mathematic expressions. Is the need for translation into English what makes this an Asian-American text, or is that slippage between meaning and representation that Lye identifies as the product of an unreliable and naive narrator what truly forms the Asian American subject?

            Lady Audley’s Secret is not a memoir and its third-person narration does not suggest that it wants to be. However, this text suffers from the same unreliability of narration that makes Lee’s memoir unsuccessful. In almost every installment, a mysterious first-person voice interrupts the action of the story to digest its events. Like Lee’s “gestures of withholding” (255), this narrator’s use of language invites suspicion, admitting that “I doubt very much,” “I do not think,” “I do not say,” “I will admit,” “I should be,” “I do not believe” and “I cannot believe” in the descriptions of the other omniscient narrator (Braddon 43, 49, 289, 309, 362). Even when the first-person narrator appears to translate and elucidate the events depicted earlier, it undermines the reader’s trust in the omniscient details of thought and feeling that the third-person narrator has already supplied. While the introduction of this doubt does bring a mimetic quality to the text, it undermines the text’s authority for subject creation of both character and narrator. If a voice within the text distrusts and refashions the language of the narrator it suggests a separation between the narrator and the “fact” of the narrative that must be filled in. The anxiety to fill in this space becomes acceptable in Braddon’s novel because as a sensation and detective novel discomfort and misgiving are feelings expected in the genre. However, the detection of guilt is the goal of this anxiety, hence the difficulty with a similar anxiety produced in a memoir that seeks to demonstrate innocence. Lye suggests that both Lee’s first-person memoir and Susan Choi’s third-person novelistic interpretation of similar events depict “becoming Asian American through being racialized as a national security threat,” providing a telling parallel to Lady Audley’s Secret’s depiction of becoming a female subject by being detected as a domestic security threat (Lye 251).

The suspicions inherent in the multiple voices of Lady Audley’s Secret are recast as the multiple voices of translation in Lee’s memoir. The reader cannot escape the misgiving that an authentic voice can be filtered without being diluted, which is reiterated in Lye’s question about Lee’s memoir: “Who is the narrator?” (259). The “I” narrator gets the last word in Braddon’s novel, asserting that the mimesis of events based on personal “experience” and a hope that “no one will take objection to my story” (446, italics mine). To whom the story really belongs remains evasive and lost in the gaps of shared narration, just as the mathematical voice and authentic Asian-American perspective remains lost in the space of translation. However, it is within this problematic space of deferred disclosure and multiple untranslatable meanings where these texts suggest the real birth of subject takes place. 

Trouble with "Surface and Line"

I want to take issue with Vilém Flusser's essay "Line and Surface," beginning with its title. The geometrical language he uses there to contrast two kinds of communication very soon turns out to be a red herring: Flusser does not contend that written texts are literally one-dimensional objects. He does not say this explicitly, but I think that for Flusser a written text does not lose its status as a "line" whether it is read through visual, aural, or tactile means. Its linearity consists in its directionality: "we follow the text of a line from left to right" (22). At first, Flusser puts forward the idea that reading images ("surfaces") also involves a spatio-temporal motion of the eye from one part of the text to another, but with less rigid conventions about the order in which parts of the visual text ought to be read. But he quickly dismisses this notion, since "We may seize the totality of the picture at a glance"  (23). But this claim seems to me to rely on faulty psychology. Our minds possess a far less comprehensive representation of our field of vision than we generally think they do, as these Youtube videos exemplifying change blindness show. The first is an interview with cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which he discusses the phenomenon of change blindness and the viewer is presented with a change blindness test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYYFQiN052c

The second involves an experiment in which most subjects fail to realize the person they see in front of them is a different person from the one they saw only moments earlier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38XO7ac9eSs

     But if, as these experiments seem to suggest, it isn't possible to capture "the totality of the picture at a glance" in our minds, then Flusser's distinction between line and surface begins to look rather shaky. Both images and written texts consist of parts which must be comprehended by the mind in sequence rather than all at once, and thus partake in "linearity" in that sense. Flusser bumps up against this realization when he notes that "both types of reading involve time" (23). But he insists on distinguishing "linear" time as "historical," "because 'history' has the sense of going somewhere, whereas, when reading pictures, we need go nowhere." This is because Flusser, as we have seen, imagines the acquisition of knowledge of the meaning of a visual text to be practically instantaneous: the kind of knowledge we get from moving our eyes across the image and noting spatial relationships between its parts is then not part of the text's meaning but somehow para- or metatextual: "we [...] get the message first, and then try to decompose it. [... The meaning of the image] is there already, but may reveal how it got there" (23).
     What I propose, by contrast, is that the reading of an image (say, Millais' Mariana in the Moated Grange) and that of a written text (e.g. the text of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure) both proceed through time as an accumulation of noticings relating to the parts that make up the text and their (not least importantly spatial) interrelations. The painting can be seen here:

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/john-everett-millais/mariana-in-the-moated-grange-1851#supersized-artistPaintings-236465

We construct our knowledge of Mariana's arching posture, for instance, by noting the distance between her midsection and the vertical line on the wall behind her, then moving our eyes upwards and noticing that the back of her head intersects this line father up. This is only one of a large number of meaningful spatial relationships between elements of the painting that can only be noticed through a linear process that takes place through time. The elements of Shakespeare's play are also arranged spatially on the pages in a meaningful way. We can even imagine someone beginning to construct the play's meaning with utter disregard for our reading conventions, beginning with the final scene and flipping around at random. As long as this unruly reader is able to keep in mind the location of each noticed detail (Angelo's pardon in 5.1, his attempted rape of Isabella in 2.4, Mariana's relationship with Angelo as revealed in 3.1) within the larger structure, she can produce the text's meaning just as well as the well-disciplined, left-to-right reader. In both cases, of course, it is would be absurd to think we could ever arrive at a complete understanding of the meaning of the work; how much more absurd, then, to think it is "there already" (23) from the very beginning of the process?