Subscribe now

In an online post written for The Atlantic in January 2010, the cultural commentator Andrew Sullivan directed the attention of his readers to a report on the recent success of a campaign to reduce crystal methamphetamine addiction among gay men in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. As a gay man himself and a “libertarian on the responsible use of soft drugs,” Sullivan used his post to express hatred for this particular psychostimulant:

I have no tolerance for crystal meth. It’s poison. I decided a while back to have a zero tolerance policy for it among my friends and acquaintances. I saw what it was doing to human beings. Not only did it destroy their minds and empty their souls, it also was HIV’s best friend. (‘Crystal Menace’)

The day after he published that post, Sullivan published another entitled, very bluntly, ‘“It Is Not A Recreational Drug. It Is Death.”’ Beneath a harrowing ‘before and after’ photograph of a crystal meth addict, this post aired the testimony of one of Sullivan’s readers whose daughter had succumbed to meth addiction and descended into poverty and was eventually murdered by a man who preyed on addicts in the destitute suburbs of Spokane, Washington. Sullivan used his reader’s story to draw a contrast with the story he had publicised the previous day. “Meth may have declined among the gays,” he wrote, “but it remains one of the red states’ most serious problems. Many red states are beset with higher rates of social dysfunction than many blue ones... but they rarely get the attention that is focused on, say, urban African-Americans. But meth is the poor white rural drug” (‘“It Is Death”’).

Share

What followed over the next few days was a flurry of reader responses to that final sentence, with each response arriving from a different corner of the country. “It is a mainly white, rural horror that is destroying working-class families and towns,” wrote one reader,

yet... ‘tough on drugs’ moralists still demonize all drug use as a black or gay inner-city problem that occasionally seeps into suburbia. Not true with crystal meth. Having lived in Alaska, and having a mother who works in drug crisis in rural New Mexico, I can attest to meth’s horrible grip and extreme societal damage. (‘Dissent’)

Other readers wrote in from Arizona (‘“It Is Not A Recreational Drug” ... Ctd’) and from “a small town in rural Illinois where meth is a big problem” (‘Addiction in the Heartland’). One reader wrote about how he or she “grew up in rural, small-town (pop 300) Iowa [where] me and my entire circle of friends used meth for several years” (‘Culture of Meth’). Another reader advised anyone interested in rural crystal meth addiction to read Nick Reding’s Methland, which also concentrates on a small town in Iowa. Only one reader wrote in from the eastern states and sought to reinforce the overlooked parity between rural and urban areas that Sullivan identified in his first two posts:

During the course of my adult [life], I have lived in D.C., West Virginia, New York City, rural New York State and, most recently, East Tennessee. I currently travel to state courts throughout East Tennessee, including many rural counties, and I am always struck by how similar the problems of rural Appalachia are to those faced by the inner city poor of New York and D.C. (‘Addiction in the Heartland’)

On Sullivan’s webspace, that reader’s status as the lone voice from Appalachia dovetailed with Sullivan’s use of a news story from the urban east as the impetus for airing these voices in the first place. Both before and after Sullivan aired those voices, the Appalachian voice occupied only a marginal space so that, as far as the others were concerned, the social ill of meth addiction was not—is not—as severe in Appalachia as it is in the rest of rural America. But this view of affairs is manifestly inaccurate, as anyone even remotely curious about Appalachian meth addiction has been learning at a steady pace for the last decade or so.

In March 2003, the Christian Science Monitor ran a story on both sides of the addiction divide—addiction to meth itself and addiction to its production—following a police seizure of meth in Johnston County, North Carolina, which turned out to be the second-largest seizure in the history of the state:

But the stuff didn’t come from big labs in California and Mexico. Using readily available ingredients like Red Devil lye, ephedrine, and phosphorous from match strikers, locals are now running thousands of so-called ‘Beavis and Butthead’ operations—small labs set up in trailers, abandoned houses, even cars. ... Meth itself is hardly new... [but now t]here’s more of it in Oklahoma City than New York. ... As methmaking methods have simplified, the process today resembles a high school chemistry lab: a bunsen burner, some beakers, a Mason jar, and a handful of household chemicals. (Jonnson, ‘Cottage Industry’ 1)

“The homemade drug is so pure and addictive that only about a quarter of users are able to quit,” the report added (Jonsson, ‘Cottage Industry’ 2). Nine months later, the Monitor ran a supplementary report on the “meth orphans” of Appalachia, focusing on “the hundreds of children separated each year from their parents as a result of drug busts” in the rural counties of North Carolina and Tennessee, “where methamphetamine use has become a virtual pandemic” (Jonsson, ‘Meth Orphans’ 1). In May 2008, a joint report by researchers at the University of Chicago and at Tennessee State University found that huge gains in meth addiction in Appalachia had coincided with the onset of the Great Recession (Zhang, et al), and, in December 2010, Appalachian Voices set out to convey “the devastation that addiction can wreak on families and communities” by profiling the children admitted to the Grandfather Home, a shelter and recovery centre in Watauga County, North Carolina:

One baby, less than a year old, went through a multi-week detox process when he first arrived [because] his mother had shared her drugs with him as a way to lull him to sleep. The boy was removed from a home drenched in chemicals used to make meth; exposed to the harsh chemicals, his skin was so sensitive and painful he would not allow anybody to touch him.

Three siblings between the ages of three and six also reside in the centre [after having been] into custody when they were found wandering the streets alone at two o’clock in the morning. Their parents were out doing drugs. ... [But t]he problem is not unique to the children of the Grandfather Home, or to Watauga County. Family and cultural disintegration due to substance abuse and addiction have been booming in Appalachia over the past ten to fifteen years. (Schultz, ‘Combating a Culture’)

Appalachia, then, has been particularly hard hit by meth addiction—and yet, when a range of voices chimed together on the webspace of one of the most widely-read online writers in America, all but one of them called attention to the problems caused by meth addiction elsewhere. Whether the culture at large has somehow normalised meth addiction in Appalachia or only turned a blind eye to it, those voices give the unmistakable impression that the scourge of meth addiction is endemic largely outside Appalachia.

But this cultural impression is not confined solely to the venue administered by Andrew Sullivan, since it is also the impression that prevails when crystal meth is taken as the subject of works of popular culture. On the AMC television network, for instance, the acclaimed series Breaking Bad has spent five seasons following the mishaps of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who becomes a fugitive criminal when financial difficulties lead him to establish a mobile meth laboratory with one of his former students. The series is set in the arid deserts around Albuquerque, New Mexico. And the film Winter’s Bone, an adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel of the same name, depicts the violent self-destruction of an entire family of meth addicts and meth producers, from the family elders down through the generations to their infant grandchildren. It is set in the bleak backwoods of the Arkansas Ozarks. Perhaps, then, there is nothing particularly unusual about reader responses to the recent work of Ron Rash—one of today’s most celebrated Appalachian writers—and his representations of Appalachian meth addiction. As the interviewer Ramona Koval confessed to Rash when she spoke with him in 2011,

I was surprised that, in a couple of [your new] stories, meth addicts are... the [main] characters. ... [M]ethamphetamine addiction was something that I didn’t imagine was going to be in your short stories. Is this a new social problem in your area?

“Not too new,” Rash replied:

[I]t’s been around for probably two decades now. It’s a really terrible blight, not just in the Appalachian Mountains but [in] almost all rural areas of the United States. I think the fact that it is a rural phenomenon means it has not been addressed that much, particularly by our national media. But I’ve seen the consequences of it in the region where I live, and I felt like it was part of this place. And one thing I tried to do in these stories, even though they range from the Civil War to the present, is to kind of give a sense of this culture that has always seen hard times. (Koval, ‘Ron Rash’)

But exactly what sense of “hard times” does Rash actually give in his stories, and what does he hope to achieve by giving it? In what ways does he represent the “blight” of meth addiction in Appalachia, and, more importantly, for what reasons does addiction for him constitute a blight? How do his representations engage with existing cultural impressions of meth addiction and attempt to amend their shortcomings? What is it about meth addiction, and about its representation elsewhere, that makes it worthy of detailed observation by Rash?

Meth is a quintessentially modern drug—its primary ingredients are the stuff of machinery and industry: nail polish remover, paint thinner, battery acid, brake fluid, matches, drain cleaner, fertiliser (see Anon., ‘What’s In Meth?’)—and, as such, it is typically an antagonist of cultural tradition. It is by now a truism to say that the greatest traumas caused by meth addiction, or indeed any sort of severe drug addiction, are, in the words of Appalachian Voices, “family and cultural disintegration” (Schultz, ‘Combating a Culture’). With their focus on the misfortunes that befall the families of both meth producers and meth addicts, Breaking Bad and Winter’s Bone subscribe to and propagate this truism. Here, however, I want to show how Ron Rash moves beyond this truism so as to suggest that the greatest trauma caused by meth addiction is not such disintegration but, on the contrary, the preservation of traditional familial structures in ways that render them subservient to addiction. Since most existing analyses of Rash’s work have been concerned with his novel Serena, his short stories in general remain in need of critical attention. This is particularly true of the stories in his most recent collection, Burning Bright, a collection that has so far received no scholarly analysis and includes two representations of meth addiction in ‘Back of Beyond’ and ‘The Ascent.’ In these two stories, I suggest, what makes meth addiction so disturbing is its soulless co-optation of family structures—of the blood bonds between parents, children, and siblings—and the heroism it consequently offers to those individuals of dubious moral character: those who flee from the family, humanity’s most traditional social structure, when they find it poisoned by meth, a monster of modernity.

Share

Rash’s Appalachia is largely Rust Belt territory at the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in western North Carolina. ‘Back of Beyond’ opens in Tuckaseegee, in the vicinity of Nantahala National Forest about sixty miles west-southwest of Asheville, and it proceeds from there to Brushy Mountain, fifteen miles into Nantahala from the town of Sylva. ‘The Ascent’ takes place near Bryson City, twenty miles west of Sylva, and then moves out towards Sawmill Ridge in the Smoky Mountains National Park, between Bryson City and the Tennessee state line. Despite the specificity of these narrative locations, the atmosphere of economic depression and forlorn destitution imbues ‘Back of Beyond’ and ‘The Ascent’ with tonal evocations of more famous and more recent literary representations of rural Appalachia. Rash’s Smoky Mountains backwoods are spiritual kin to the eastern Tennessee of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree and the western Pennsylvania of Philipp Meyer’s American Rust, and they equally exude the post-NAFTA poverty, bitterness, and aggression of Joe Bageant’s Winchester, Virginia, in Deer Hunting With Jesus and Rainbow Pie.

At the same time, though, the specificity of the setting is a crucial element of both stories. Far from being arbitrary and thus interchangeable with the setting of some other comparable work of fiction, the Appalachian backwoods are integral to Rash’s representations of meth addiction so that, in effect, these two stories depict an addiction that might be able to thrive in comparable areas of Appalachia but is unlikely to thrive in the same way elsewhere. Here is how the setting contributes to that depiction. In both stories, the National Parks serve as drawcards for outsiders wealthier than the local residents: in ‘Back of Beyond,’ a man drives into the mountains before veering onto a county backroad which he observes is “poorly maintained because no wealthy Floridians had second homes on it” (26-27), and ‘The Ascent’ begins in the aftermath of a joyflight that crash-lands in the mountains and causes the deaths of its two upper-middle-class participants. Yet those same National Parks and their rugged outskirts are precisely what afford meth addicts the very isolation and reclusion they need in order to become meth addicts: “walls and windows [can’t] conceal the smell of meth,” writes Rash, so that “every way-back cove and hollow in the county” allows meth addicts to hide their habits (20). As Rash construes the situation, then, outsiders are attracted to this part of Appalachia by the spectacular scenery that simultaneously allows meth addiction to thrive amongst the locals and allows the outsiders themselves to overlook it. The beautiful but harsh terrain that entices one group of people to Appalachia is the very terrain that serves to obscure their view of the drug use of another group, simultaneously attracting them to the familial homelands of the locals and distracting them from the locals’ more grotesque modern habits. Given his remarks on the nature of meth addiction as an overlooked problem, Rash effectively appropriates the very situation that has prompted him to draw attention to meth addiction and positions it as the backdrop for the horrors that these two stories depict. As each story moves into the areas that lie beyond the visual limits of the outsiders who appear on the page, each story thereby suggests that what occurs in those areas will emerge as a revelation to the outsiders who read these pages.

Before moving into those spaces, ‘Back of Beyond’ opens in a pawnshop in Tuckaseegee at the start of the business day. The shop is owned by a man named Parson, and this day begins—as most of his days begin—with meth addicts waiting for him to open his doors so that they can pawn their few valuables in exchange for meth money. “His watch said eight forty,” writes Rash, “and the sign in the window said nine to six Tuesday through Saturday, but a grey decade-old Ford Escort had already nosed up to the building. The back windshield was damaged, cracks spreading outward like a spiderweb. The gas cap a stuffed rag. A woman sat in the driver’s seat. She could have been waiting ten minutes or ten hours” (20). The woman nurtures a desperate addiction and, after she enters Parson’s shop, Rash illustrates the severity of her desperation when, invoking the truism that the greatest traumas caused by addiction are familial and cultural disintegration, he shows this disintegration occurring literally by the woman’s own hand. She needs fifty dollars to satisfy her addiction. First she pawns an antique churn and dasher. “It was my great-grandma’s,” she tells Parson, “so it’s near seventy-five years old” (21). He offers her no more than twenty dollars for it. She accepts, hungry for cash, and thereby severs a cherished connection to her family and her heritage. Then, to make up the thirty-dollar shortfall, she pawns a ring: “Class of 2000” (21). Parson offers her only ten dollars. She accepts again, despite the impossibility of reaching the fifty dollars she needs, and thereby severs another connection to her past, her former self, her roots in the community and culture of her youth.

As for Parson, Rash writes that “[b]y noon, he’d had twenty customers and almost all were meth addicts. ... The odor of it came in the door with them, in their hair, their clothes, a sour ammonia smell like cat piss” (22). Rash refrains from spelling it out, but he raises the possibility that two of Parson’s customers on that day or any other day are the two meth addicts of the later story, ‘The Ascent.’ They are the parents of a young boy named Jared. One winter’s day, while out alone in the mountains, Jared stumbles upon a downed aircraft. He works his way inside and finds the corpses of a man and a woman who were either engaged or married to one another. Jared loosens a diamond ring from the woman’s finger and, intending to offer it to a girl at school who he secretly admires, he takes it home to the backwoods shack in which he lives with his mother and father. But that night, before he has a chance to give the ring to the girl, his father spots it and takes it away on the pretense that the county sheriff should examine it. The next day, when Jared’s father returns home without the ring, he says that the sheriff confiscated it because its owner had reported it missing. Since Jared knows that the owner is dead, he knows that his father has lied to him. And since his father returns home with a fresh supply of meth, he knows that the ring has been pawned for meth money.

Insofar as the pawning of the ring forces a deterioration of trust between father and son, Rash could opt at this point to depict the further disintegration of familial structures. Instead, he forges a more unique path. Rather than having Jared’s parents spend all of their new money on meth, Rash allows them to allot portions of it to Jared. With snow falling outside and Christmas fast approaching, Jared’s mother asks him to help her build a makeshift tree out of tinfoil and then his father begins bringing him a series of gifts that were previously unaffordable. At first Jared receives a box of cereal and promises of future extravagances: “a hamburger and a Co-Cola” (89). Then he receives something more: a bicycle. And finally, but not least, he receives renewed affection: his parents can barely open their mouths without doting on him and calling him ‘honey.’ Crucially, however, these signs of affection are contingent upon Jared’s ability to fuel his parents’ addictions, to return to the downed aircraft and recover more treasures which might be pawned for meth money. He proceeds to retrieve a compass and a Rolex watch worn by the dead man in the pilot’s seat, and then he receives adulation and gifts when he brings these treasures home. But if the love this child receives from his parents first requires that they receive from him a means of feeding their meth addiction, then the addiction itself has taken hostage the familial bond between parents and child. Worse than that, as each member of the family offers gifts to the others, each one works to preserve the familial structure not for its own sake but ultimately for the sake of satisfying the meth addiction that requires its preservation. Much as a parasite feeds off its host while simultaneously requiring the host’s survival, the joint addiction of Jared’s parents drains the substance of their bonds to their child while also requiring the reinforcement of those bonds and superficially burnishing them. The love that Jared’s parents express for Jared in words is an essentially soulless love because it extends no further, no deeper into their hearts, than the very fleeting words through which it is expressed.

At some point, Jared comes to grasp this unsettling truth and finds himself driven back to the downed aircraft with the dead man and dead woman inside. Despite their lifelessness, they offer Jared what his parents cannot: an unquestioning and unflagging willingness to entertain his boyish fantasies. Jared yearns to rescue them, to bring them back to life, to reconstruct the broken plane and soar up into the skies. When he first returns to the crash site to recover more treasures for his parents, he pretends to take with him the supplies necessary to revivify the dead couple. “When he got to the airplane,” writes Rash, “Jared pretended to unpack the supplies and give the man and woman something to eat and drink. He told them they were too hurt to walk back with him and he’d have to go and get more help” (87). There is great danger in his visits to the downed aircraft as the winter snows threaten to overwhelm him, and his mother even warns him that he “shouldn’t go off that long without telling us where you’re going, honey” (88). But he returns again, this time actually taking the tools he believes will fix the aircraft, and there he meets his fate. “I fixed it so it’ll fly now,” he tells the dead couple before he sits in the cockpit and waits for the plane to climb into the air (89). “He watched the snow cover the plane’s front window with a darkening whiteness,” writes Rash. “After a while he began to shiver but after a longer while he was no longer cold. Jared looked out the side window and saw the whiteness was not only in front of him but below. He knew then that they had taken off and risen so high that they were enveloped inside a cloud...” (90). He is snowed in, and the implication is that he dies in the company of the dead couple. Ultimately, then, meth addiction is responsible for a familial disintegration, albeit without being the immediate cause of it. What facilitates the disintegration is less the addiction itself than its demand for a preservation of family structures that are so overweening and false that the one non-addict in the family sensed the essential lifelessness of the others and sought refuge in the company of the literally dead.

Share

It would be an understatement to say that ‘The Ascent’ offers a deeply pessimistic vision of family structures contaminated by meth addiction, but its pessimism pales in comparison to the ultimate despair of ‘Back of Beyond.’ In addition to their common locale, the two stories share an interest in relationships between parents and children while differing on which of the parents and children have fallen victim to meth addiction.

In his pawnshop, Parson has barely turned away the day’s first customer when he receives a visit from the county sheriff. The sheriff’s name is Hawkins, and he sets the narrative in motion when he appeals to the longstanding acquaintance that he and Parson share. Hawkins informs Parson that Parson’s nephew, Danny, has stolen and pawned another man’s shotgun. Parson knows that Danny is a meth addict because Danny approached Parson himself to pawn the shotgun for meth money. Hawkins’ allegations are therefore a surprise to Parson only insofar as Parson did not know that Danny had stopped pawning goods stolen from his own father—Parson’s brother—Ray. In order to buy time for Danny and to keep Hawkins’ handcuffs hidden from sight, Parson agrees to visit his brother’s house and confront his nephew. He locks up his shop and drives out to Chestnut Cove, which his father “had called the back of beyond, the place where Parson and Ray had grown up” (26).

Far from advancing a familial disintegration, then, Danny’s meth addiction occasions a reunion between two brothers who have not spoken for many years. Indeed, the closer Parson draws towards Chestnut Cove, the more immersed he finds himself in the family and the heritage he abandoned when he left. As Parson approaches the house in which he and Ray were raised, the house itself becomes emblematic of that heritage. When identified not as “the house” but as “the homestead” (27), it is suggestive of a (white) family’s traditional, almost ancestral connection to this place—a connection likely as old as the republic itself, and perhaps even older than that—and Parson’s memories of his youth here rise to the surface when he observes its “shambling... forsaken” appearance (27). “No cattle huddled against the snow,” he notes, while “the rusting tractor and bailer [and] the sagging fences... held nothing in” (27). Consider the negative terminology denoting the absence of things once integral to this place. When Parson is drawn back to the crumbling site of the formation of his tenuous familial bonds, he is compelled to acknowledge its poor condition and to reminisce on its former health. And while meth addiction has not here contributed to the disintegration of Parson’s family, it is what has propelled the disintegration of the familial dwelling. Parson spies a dark, dank, and decrepit trailer parked beside the house. Like the car with only a rag for a gas cap, in which sat the meth addict who awaited the opening of the pawnshop before Parson had even arrived at his workplace, the trailer is a space perfectly suited to sheltering the indignity of a meth addict—and to allowing the addict to remain indifferent to their own indignity because faced with the more urgent task of satisfying the addiction itself. Danny must be inside the trailer, Parson decides, lazing around in a drug-addled haze.

When Parson enters the trailer, however, Rash pulls off a neat twist. Parson notices a bed near the door and a human figure beneath the bedsheets, but, as he approaches the figure and prepares to castigate Danny, the bedsheets stir and Parson finds himself face-to-face with his brother, Ray, and Ray’s wife, Martha. They are cowed by his presence. “Ray and Martha show[ed] no indication of getting out,” writes Rash. “They looked like children waiting for him to turn out the light and leave so they could go to sleep” (31). Worse than that, Rash depicts them as physically comparable to meth addicts even though they themselves do not harbour an addiction. As Andrew Sullivan’s ‘before and after’ photograph illustrates (see ‘“It Is Death”’), the abrupt erosion of cellular tissue in the facial muscles and the lips leaves meth addicts appearing malnourished and prematurely aged by a decade or more. “Ray was sixty-five years old,” writes Rash, “but he looked eighty, his mouth sunk in, skinny and feeble. [Martha] appeared a little better off, perhaps because she was a large, big-boned woman. But they both looked bad—hungry, weary, sickly. And scared” (28-29). In short, they look as scared as meth addicts approached by a stranger while still insensate from a recent hit—and, as it turns out, Ray and Martha are scared of meth addicts as well.

Parson eventually visits Danny, who has taken over the house alongside his meth addict girlfriend, and Danny and his girlfriend are similarly depicted in terms of physical decay. “Their clothes were worn and dirty and smelled as if lifted from a Dumpster,” writes Rash. “Parson... stepped over rotting sandwich scraps in paper sacks, candy wrappers, spills from soft drinks. If human shit had been on the floor he would not have been surprised. ... Danny sat up slowly... [with] black stringy hair [and] flesh whittled away by the meth” (33) and “muscles melted away same as his teeth” (34). But before he visits Danny, Parson stands above the helpless Ray and Martha and attempts to come to grips with the situation. As well as pawning his father’s stolen goods, Danny has been cashing his parents’ Social Security checks in order to feed his addiction. “That stuff, whatever you call it, has done made my boy crazy,” Ray tells Parson. “He don’t know nothing but a craving” (29). “It ain’t his fault,” Martha insists, “it’s the craving” (29), and, when Parson states the situation as bluntly as possible and tries to force Martha to see the trauma inflicted on her by her son, all she can do to console herself is repeat those feeble words like a mantra: “It ain’t his fault” (31).

Yet despite their mistreatment at the hands of their meth addict son, Ray and Martha not only fail to conceive of their family structure in a way that would entail admonishing Danny but also fail to conceive of it in any other way than as an agglomeration of bonds—genetic and social—which requires them to close ranks around their son and feed his addiction as long as he is unable to conquer it. These failures have caused rifts elsewhere in their family. Their adult daughters refuse to return home anymore because Danny’s presence means that “[t]hey’re scared to come up here” (30). Yet they allow Danny to cash their Social Security cheques, and they allow him to live in the house while they occupy the decrepit trailer, because they love him unconditionally and they find their love for him strengthened by what they see as his having fallen victim to an addiction that has robbed him of all agency and self-determination. Much like Jared’s parents in ‘The Ascent,’ although without the endless fawning, Ray and Martha no longer enjoy a normal and genuinely loving relationship with their child because the relationship has become host to the parasite of meth addiction. But rather than causing the family to splinter apart altogether, the poisoning of the familial bonds results in their preservation for the purpose of servicing Danny’s meth addiction. The parental belief that Danny’s addiction can be overcome in the long-term ensures that it survives for now and for the foreseeable future.

Indeed, what finally causes the family to splinter apart is not Danny’s addiction but Parson’s attempt to forestall its preservation. Parson decides to buy Danny a bus ticket to Atlanta, he demands that Danny leave Chestnut Cove to start anew in the city, and he threatens Danny with arrest if Danny refuses to comply. Danny agrees to leave, which would suggest a resolution to the dilemma at the heart of Parson’s narrative, but then, in Danny’s absence, Parson incurs the anger of Ray and Martha. Martha, in particular, comes to despise her brother-in-law. “I’d rather be in that trailer tonight,” she says, “knowing he was in this house... [and] where he is, if he’s alive or dead,” and she insists that Parson “had no right” to intervene (42). Parson does not protest. He does not even explain his actions to Martha. He acknowledges Martha’s complaints and he leaves. On the surface, then, he appears to take something of a stoic approach to his situation, accepting the inevitable unpleasantness of having chosen a course of action which is simply the lesser of two evils. On closer inspection, however, there is very little stoicism to Parson’s final actions and, as a consequence, very little substantive basis for his superficial appearance as a stoic hero.

“[L]ike emergency room doctors and other small gods,” writes Rash, “[p]awnbrokers... had to abjure sympathy. That had never been a problem for Parson. As [his ex-wife] had told him several times, he was a man incapable of understanding another person’s heart. You can’t feel love, Parson, she’d said. It’s like you were given a shot years ago and inoculated” (31). He and his wife, we learn, “divorced before they’d had children,” and now, as Parson sees it, the divorce strikes him as a “blessing... because it prevented any possibility of ending up like [Ray and Martha]” (29). Consider the depth of the tragedy of ‘Back of Beyond.’ The character who comes out closest to the top, the character who comes out the most unscathed, is the character with the least humanity, the least sympathy for his fellow man: the character who, by and large, remains untroubled by the blight of the meth addiction around him because, as he says at the beginning of ‘Back of Beyond,’ meth addiction and its attendant “troubled times” are “good for business” (23). For anyone not as cold-hearted as Parson, ‘Back of Beyond’ depicts a scenario that is tremendously difficult to stomach. But the logic of the story effectively makes a hero of this man—a man who considers himself “bless[ed]” for his lack of familial bonds, his solitude and his childlessness, his avoidance of having raised children who might have later become meth addicts like Danny (29)—since, after all, he does not flinch in the face of the despair to which he exposes himself. In a world where meth addiction feeds on the preservation of family structures, the closest thing to a hero is a man who altogether seems to despise the very prospect of family.

Share

Given the cultural impression that meth addiction is a problem less endemic to Appalachia than to other regions, and given Ron Rash’s objective of drawing attention to its status as the contemporary manifestation of the “hard times” that Appalachia has “always known” (Koval, ‘Ron Rash’), how do ‘Back of Beyond’ and ‘The Ascent’ distinguish the depiction of meth addiction from its depiction elsewhere in popular culture and with what results for the author’s objective? They distinguish it, I think, insofar as they move slightly beyond the formal conventions of social realism to take a more self-reflexive turn and to incorporate the essence of what they depict into their own formal aesthetics.

Such self-reflexivity is not typical of existing depictions of meth addiction. In a recent article for The New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe explained how Breaking Bad offers an “uncannily accurate” representation of meth production and drug addiction more broadly. Having spent “six months interviewing drug traffickers and D.E.A. agents for an article about the business side of a Mexican drug cartel,” Keefe found himself “startled by how much the show gets right” (‘Uncannily Accurate’). Despite its stylistic affectations—“Technicolor landscapes, hallucinogenic visuals, and a whole bag of narrative tricks (flashbacks, flash-forwards, montages, music videos, etc.)”—Keefe found Breaking Bad replete with substantive verisimilitude, particularly insofar as it depicts crystal meth as a drug so potent, so addictive, that it threatens to make addicts of even those whose awareness of the dangers of distribution should discourage their use of it. The one aspect of the series that Keefe found lacking in verisimilitude was its depiction of “the gleaming subterranean mega-lab” in which the protagonist produces his meth. “To be sure, labs like these exist,” Keefe conceded, “[but] not in the United States,” and, as an example of greater verisimilitude, he pointed to Debra Granik’s film adaptation of Winter’s Bone. “It is much easier to shift production to Mexico or Guatemala, as the major drug cartels have done,” he wrote, so that crystal meth in America is “generally [produced] in smaller ‘shake and bake’ batches more typical of what you see in Winter’s Bone” (‘Uncannily Accurate’). And, of course, verisimilitude was the watchword of Granik’s film—or verisimilitude bordering on cinéma vérité—insofar as she decided to shoot it entirely on location in the Ozarks, using readymade props and costumes procured onsite, and casting largely inexperienced local actors (see Goodwin, ‘Ozarkers Hope’).

‘Back of Beyond’ and ‘The Ascent’ only barely issue such appeals to verisimilitude. Those appeals consist mostly of a stripped-down stylistic realism and the use of very real, precisely identified locations as narrative settings. Otherwise, since their representations of familial preservation differ from the prevailing reports of meth addiction as an agent of familial disintegration in Appalachia (see Jonsson, ‘Cottage Industry’ and ‘Meth Orphans’; Schultz, ‘Combating a Culture’), it seems to me that their governing aesthetic involves something more than merely representing addiction as an element of Appalachian social reality. They aim for something distinct from the use of fiction as a Stendhalian mirror—the fictionalisation of what is effectively reportage and cultural analysis—in order to operate on a more abstract level. In doing so, they engage their readers in a campaign of awareness about meth addiction that differs in an important way from the essential spectatorship—the positioning of audiences as external and thus detached observers of events—which is an inherent component of the cinematic and televisual artforms.

With their depictions of the poisoning of family bonds by meth addiction, both stories represent a social disturbance whose line of logic points back at their own readers. Meth addiction entails the hollowing out of the addict, the sublimation of all other bodily and spiritual needs to the satisfaction of the addiction. Insofar as it reduces the human to a machine that responds only to the biological imperative for survival and to the addiction itself, it is a powerfully anti-humanist phenomenon. What Ron Rash offers in these stories is a speculative extension of the meth addict’s scenario, an associative extrapolation from the dehumanisation of the individual addict to entail the dehumanisation of humanity’s most traditional and essential social structure: the family becomes the addict writ large. But because literature itself is predicated on socialisation—because literature as an artistic experience becomes possible only when one individual consciousness is applied to, and renders intelligible, the rhetorical expressions of another—these stories depict the corruption of the roots of the very social activity we engage in when we read them, and they position meth addiction as both the cause and the beneficiary of that corruption.

If existing cultural impressions of meth addiction overlook its prevalence in Appalachia—if indeed, as Rash presents it, meth addiction remains overlooked precisely because the Appalachian Mountains provide a distraction from it—‘Back of Beyond’ and ‘The Ascent’ propose to remedy that cultural shortcoming not by merely representing Appalachian meth addiction but by using the formal aesthetics of their own artform to force their readers to internalise the logical consequences of what is represented. The act of reading literature requires the connection of two human consciousnesses and thus unfolds in opposition to the desocialisation of the human. But these two works of literature hijack those essential properties of the act, hollowing out the human connections they depict and, in ‘Back of Beyond,’ assailing characters who strive to maintain connections while offering a sort of serenity to a man who is almost entirely desocialised. Insofar as this hijacking involves a subtle departure from the realism that dominates contemporary literary fiction, these stories were written at risk of being ignored by much of the reading public. But to use fiction to attract attention to a problem in an overlooked part of America requires taking a different path to the prevailing modes of approaching the same problem elsewhere—and thankfully, as the recipient of the 2010 Frank O’Connor Prize, the world’s largest prize for a short story collection, the gamble has begun to pay off for Ron Rash. To attract attention to the blight of meth addiction in Appalachia, and to compel an appreciation of its mechanics in a way that strikes harder than cinematic spectatorship, Rash supplements its representation with a formal destabilisation of the very artform through which he attracts attention in the first place.

Share

Works Cited

Anonymous. ‘What’s In Meth?’ Meth Project (2012): <http://www.methproject.org/answers/whats-meth-made-of.html#Whats-in-Meth>. Web.

Bageant, Joe. Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. New York: Crown, 2007. Print.
 —. Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. Melbourne: Scribe, 2011. Print.

Breaking Bad. AMC Network. 2008-2013. Television.

Goodwin, Juliana. ‘Ozarkers Hope for Oscar Bid for Winter’s Bone.’ Springfield News-Leader (8 January 2011): <http://www.news-leader.com/article/20110109/LIFE/101090312/Ozarkers-hope-Oscar-bid-Winter-s-Bone-?nclick_check=1>. Web.

Keefe, Patrick Radden. ‘The Uncannily Accurate Depiction of the Meth Trade in Breaking Bad.’ The New Yorker (13 July 2012): <http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/07/the-uncannily-accurate-depiction-of-the-meth-trade-in-breaking-bad.html>. Web.

Jonsson, Patrik. ‘Appalachia’s new cottage industry: meth (Part 1).’ The Christian Science Monitor (21 March 2003): <http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0321/p03s01-usju.html>. Web.
 —. ‘Appalachia’s new cottage industry: meth (Part 2).’ The Christian Science Monitor (21 March 2003): <http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0321/p03s01-usju.html/(page)/2>. Web.
 —. ‘Towns pitch in to save ‘meth orphans’ of Appalachia (Part 1).’ The Christian Science Monitor (31 December 2003): <http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1231/p01s03-usgn.html>. Web.
 —. ‘Towns pitch in to save ‘meth orphans’ of Appalachia (Part 2).’ The Christian Science Monitor (31 December 2003): <http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1231/p01s03-usgn.html/(page)/2>. Web.

Koval, Ramona. ‘Ron Rash: Burning Bright.’ The Book Show. Sydney: ABC Radio National (23 March 2011): <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/ron-rash-burning-bright/2992116>. Web.

McCarthy, Cormac. Suttree. New York: Random House, 1979. Print.

Meyer, Philipp. American Rust. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009. Print.

Rash, Ron. ‘The Ascent.’ Burning Bright: Stories. New York: Ecco, 2010. 75-90. Print.
 —. ‘Back of Beyond.’ Burning Bright: Stories. New York: Ecco, 2010. 19-43. Print.
 —. Serena. New York: Ecco, 2008. Print.

Reding, Nick. Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print.

Schultz, Jared. ‘Combating a Culture of Substance Abuse in Appalachia.’ Appalachian Voices 4 (December 2009-January 2010): <http://appvoices.org/2010/12/06/combating-a-culture-of-substance-abuse-in-appalachia/>. Web.

Sullivan, Andrew. ‘Addiction in the Heartland.’ The Atlantic (14 January 2010): <http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/01/addiction-in-the-heartland/191741/>. Web.
 —. ‘The Culture of Meth.’ The Atlantic (15 January 2010): <http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/01/the-culture-of-meth/191670/>. Web.
 —. ‘Dissent of the Day.’ The Atlantic (14 January 2010): <http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/01/dissent-of-the-day/191730/>. Web.
 —. ‘Have Gay Men Conquered the Crystal Menace?’ The Atlantic (12 January 2010): <http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/01/have-gay-men-conquered-the-crystal-menace/191844/>. Web.
 —. ‘“It Is Not A Recreational Drug. It Is Death.’” The Atlantic (13 January 2010): <http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/01/-it-is-not-a-recreational-drug-it-is-death/191794/>. Web.
 —. ‘“It Is Not A Recreational Drug. It Is Death” Ctd.’ The Atlantic (14 January 2010): <http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/01/-it-is-not-a-recreational-drug-it-is-death-ctd/191761/>. Web.

Winter’s Bone. Dir. Debra Granik. Roadside Attractions, 2010. Film.

Woodrell, Daniel. Winter’s Bone. New York: Little, Brown, 2006. Print.

Zhang, Zhiwei, Alycia Infante, Michael Meit, Ned English, Michael Dunn, and Kristine Harper Bowers. An Analysis of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Disparities & Access to Treatment Services in the Appalachian Region. Bethesda, MD: National Opinion Research Center, 2008. Print.

1. Affectivity and Aesthetics

Several years ago, in one of the many responses to Ruth Leys’ bold analyses of affective experiences, Charles Altieri issued some provocative remarks on the intersections between affectivity and aesthetics. Making a distinction between “emotions and feelings,” Altieri suggested that “[e]motions lead agents to shape experience in terms of plots with points of incitement leading to projected action” whereas feelings consist of “states of sensation that involve the imagination but that do not enter into the structure of cause and consequence because the state of attention becomes an end in itself” (880). “When I identify as angry,” he wrote by way of example,

it follows that I identify a cause and desire to perform certain actions in relation to that cause. When I identify as fearful or joyful there will be other practical orientations. But is this the case when I suddenly recognise how a bird dips its wings or a color comes alive in relation to another color, as long as I attend to the concrete interplay among visual phenomena? (880)

For Altieri, then, there is something qualitatively unique—and circular—about an act of beholding beauty, an awareness of the arrangement and movement of parts within a striking whole, to which the beholder’s initial response is a sort of dumbfounded attentiveness directed towards seeking out the means by which this very response has been occasioned. The broader point Altieri proceeded to make was that “when artists evoke feelings that depend on what we might call the counter-conceptual use of signification, quintessentially in surrealist art,” this particular use of signification generates the dumbfounded attentiveness which comprises myriad inchoate and perhaps unnameable feelings and thereby renders the work of art an agent of an affective experience. “In many of his landscapes,” Altieri went on,

Paul Cezanne makes rocks virtually balloons that have no weight or mass. Then he has trees serve the counter-intuitive role of providing stability for the painting while insisting that this logic holds only because painting can define modes of vision to which we are blind in practical life. I submit that these trees and rocks elicit powerful feelings precisely because the stance of the painter and eventually the stance of the viewer recognize what cannot be coherently conceptualized except insofar as one honors the logic of the painting itself. And that logic is insistently particular in the sense that it holds only insofar as we see the painting as a distinctive event with qualities that depend on imagination rather than cognition. (880)

What Altieri advances, then, is a view of art that privileges not its capacity to represent the affective experiences of human subjects but its capacity to generate an affective experience for those who stand before it. The work of art is, or can be, an event through which its beholders are, in a sense, shocked out of themselves by having been made privy to a way of seeing the world that subverts or supersedes the norms of human vision—and insofar as this shock escapes articulation and leaves the beholder with a sense of not knowing how to name exactly what he or she feels, it amounts to an experience of affectivity whose origins lie in the realm of aesthetics.

Subscribe now

Altieri is not alone in taking this view of the aesthetic wellsprings of affectivity. Eric Shouse, for instance, likewise contends that “the power of many forms of media,” artistic or otherwise, “lies not so much in their ideological effects, but in their ability to create affective resonances independent of content or meaning” (‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’). Shouse’s point is that a text possessing unusual, unconventional, or somehow idiosyncratic formal properties forces its beholders to engage with it creatively, speculatively, in order to make it intelligible—a view that corresponds to Altieri’s sense that works of art “with qualities that depend on imagination” (Altieri 880) are best able to generate an experience of affectivity. And, prior to drawing a response from Altieri, Ruth Leys took Shouse’s work as a foundation for her exploration of affective experiences. “[W]e human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensities and resonances,” she wrote, arguing that because these intensities and resonances “so decisively influence or condition our political and other beliefs,” “we ignore [them] at our peril” and ought to pay closer attention to the role that our “corporeal-affective dispositions” play in various modes of everyday thought (436). Given that the affects are “nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning,” Leys continued (437), “the way to understand [the affective experiences of] fear or joy is that they are ‘triggered’ by various objects, but the latter are nothing more than tripwires for an in-built behavioral-physiological response” (438). In using the word ‘trigger,’ of course, Leys aligned herself with Silvan Tomkins, whose groundbreaking Affect Imagery Consciousness reserves the word ‘trigger’ for the event that sparks an affective experience (656ff) and in turn “produces attention that brings its trigger into consciousness” (Nathanson xi). Thus, to draw Altieri’s view of aesthetic affectivity into the language of Tomkins and Leys, a work of art can be the trigger for an affective experience in its beholder, and the more counter-conceptual the work—the more formally elastic and hostile towards conventional modes of representation and capable of shocking the beholder out of his or her habits of corporeal cognition—the more forcefully that experience is triggered.

Which other artforms besides surrealist painting might now be brought into the orbit of this notion? Which other artists might make a claim for producing work that triggers affective experiences as powerful as those triggered by the paintings of Paul Cezanne? My aim in these pages is to argue that at least one other artist deserving of attention in this context is the African American writer Edward P. Jones. Jones is perhaps most admired for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World (2003), a harrowing exploration of slavery in antebellum America told from the perspectives of free black slave-owners, but here I want to turn to Jones’ two short story collections, Lost in the City (1992) and its pseudo-sequel All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006). My view is that each of these collections in fact constitutes a short story cycle and that, crucially, the two cycles work together, in parallel or in something of a symbiotic relationship, so as to effectively expand the capabilities of the short story cycle as an art form and, in the process, to generate an affective experience which is in want of detailing although it may remain impossible to name.

Before turning to Jones’ work, however, some qualifications and clarifications are in order. First of all, having until now relied on Altieri’s remarks on the “feelings” generated by aesthetics, it is important to note that affect theorists maintain a general differentiation between the affects and what we call emotions and feelings. “Feelings,” writes Eric Shouse, “are personal and biographical [and] emotions are social,” while “affects are pre-personal” because hardwired into human corporeality (‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’). Yet, in context, Altieri uses the word ‘feelings’ as a term commensurate to ‘affects,’ discussing feelings of a very particular sort which emerge from an experience of mystification in the face of unintelligible or estranging phenomena, a mystification that is pre-personal until the imagination opens up to provide the beholder with a sense of intelligibility drifting towards conclusive resolution. Related to this is the proposition that affective experiences in general, and those triggered by art in particular, are inextricably bound to human corporeality, resulting from what Miranda Burgess calls “the flow of energies among and through sensate bodies and between bodies and the world” (293) and constituting “the states and responses of individuated bodies” (290). This is important to keep in mind because the thwarting of corporeality, of the habits of sensate bodies, is the means by which counter-conceptual art, including the work of Edward P. Jones, triggers an affective experience. Of course, given the autonomic nature of the affects and the individuated nature of affective experience, the very thing I hope to accomplish here may inevitably escape me. On the one hand, autonomic affectivity in its truest sense is fundamentally inarticulable. “Affect cannot be fully realised in language,” as Shouse points out, “because affect is always prior to and/or outside consciousness” and therefore amounts to “a non-conscious experience of intensity” (‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’). On the other hand, even if articulation was possible, any affective experience so articulated would not be applicable or transferable to others. As Burgess argues, an affective experience by definition “impossibly complicates any distinction between a perception and its object, or a stimulus and response,” or a trigger and a triggered response (293), so that the conditions of any given affective experience are, at bottom, irreducibly unique to the individual who owns the experience and are therefore beyond replication. Nevertheless, while what follows from here cannot be expunged of all traces of my experiences with Jones’ work, the argumentative foundation of this essay remains Altieri’s notion that an affective experience can be triggered by a work of art whose counter-conceptual use of signification stimulates the corporeal basis of the affects, and it is on this foundation that I hope to show how the formal properties of Jones’ work trigger exactly the sort of experience that Altieri has urged affect theorists to interrogate.

Share

2. The Aesthetics of the Short Story Cycle

For a writer whose aim is to represent and convey the affective experiences of one or more characters, the art form of the short story possesses capabilities and conventions that make it well-suited to the task. Particularly in its contemporary incarnation as a vehicle for lyrical realism—chronicling some punctuation in the quotidian experience of a character whose inner turmoil, in the wake of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, reaches its apogee with an epiphanic moment matched by an objective correlative—the short story, as Michael Trussler writes, tends to “give voice to hermeneutic incertitude; that is, characters in short fiction discover themselves in situations in which their personal experience and cultural knowledge prove ineffectual for grasping existential and ethical crises” (599). Examples abound, from Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ to Sherwood Anderson’s ‘The Thinker’ and Raymond Carver’s ‘So Much Water So Close to Home,’ as well as almost anything by more recent writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yiyun Li, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Insofar as these writers’ protagonists are typically left to founder in an inarticulable emotional intensity triggered by external stimuli, the experiences depicted on the page are to a large degree affective. Moreover, as Trussler points out, the conventional inconclusiveness of the contemporary short story routinely allows the form to escape the trap of reducing an affective experience to merely one emotional state in a causal chain of events: it “intimate[s] that translating events into a continuum potentially reduces the ‘meaning’ of an event to its relative significance within an ongoing series” (599) and thus respects the quality of irreducibility that makes an affective experience precisely what it is. In terms of strategies of representation, as James Nagel has observed, the situation differs only slightly when a series of short stories are in some way connected so as to form a cycle. When story after story advances multiple representations of the events in which various related characters are swept up, events that include the affective experiences of those characters, the events themselves obtain a dimension of “duplicative time” (37, 48, 176, 186) which emphasizes the irreducibility of an affective experience by allowing a portrayal of the reactions of characters who stand outside it.

Do the short story collections of Edward P. Jones qualify as short story cycles? If we are to follow Nagel’s definition of the form, the answer is surely no. Nagel argues that, by definition, short story cycles must revolve around a single event or a single character (17) and neither of Jones’ collections are so focused as to do that. The stories are recognizably related insofar as all of them are set in the African American ghettos to the north of the government district of Washington, DC, in the midst of what J. Gerald Kennedy and Robert Beuka call the “imperilled communities” of economically marginalized minority groups struggling under a neoliberal socio-economic order (10). Yet because, as Kennedy and Beuka go on to point out, Jones’ collections consist of “disparate stories” that do not feature “a recurrent protagonist or interwoven fictive lives” (11), they are perhaps a better fit for the definition of the short story cycle that Malcolm Cowley put forth in his introduction to Winesburg, Ohio in 1960. They take place against “a single background” and share “a prevailing tone,” as Cowley says the stories of a cycle must do—although he, too, finally insists that a story cycle must focus on “a central character” (14), much as Winesburg does, and in that respect Jones’ story collections again fail to meet the definitional criteria. More recently, however, Susan Garland Mann has articulated a less restrictive and prescriptive definition of the short story cycle, arguing that it possesses “only one essential characteristic.” The stories contained in a cycle, she writes, must be “both self-sufficient and interrelated” (15), and on those terms Jones’ stories unequivocally qualify. “On the one hand,” Mann continues, describing the ideal story cycle,

the stories work independently of one another: the reader is capable of understanding each of them without going beyond the limits of the individual story. On the other hand, however, the stories work together, creating something that could not be achieved by a single story. (15)

In fact, Jones’ two collections satisfy Mann’s definition of a short story cycle much more than a large number of other collections do. Many stories in many so-called cycles—Winesburg, Ohio included—are, after all, not so much interrelated as either simply sequential or connected in only a tangential way when, perhaps, the central character from one story walks on as a background figure in a later story. Jones’ stories, however, are powerfully interrelated on both a narrative and a structural level. Jones is, in my view, the type of writer that Madison Smartt Bell identifies as “a mosaicist,” a writer akin to a craftsman who “assembl[es] fragments of glass and tile to form what can be understood, at a greater distance, as a coherent, shapely image” (213). The work of such a writer, for Bell, achieves “[a] sense of integrity... by symmetrical arrangement of the modular parts” (214). Given its formal capacity for the symmetrical arrangement of individual stories, the short story cycle is the exemplary “modular” form of art, and all the more so when, Bell writes,

narrative elements are balanced in symmetry as shapes are balanced in a symmetrical geometric figure, or as weights are balanced on a scale. ... Modular design replaces the domino theory of narrative with other principles which have less to do with motion (the story as process) and more to do with overall shapeliness (the story as fixed geometric form). (214-215)

Jones’ two story collections appear to take Bell’s observations about structural symmetry almost literally. Each of the two collections contains fourteen short stories. The stories in each collection are sequenced according to the age of the central character, so that each collection opens with the story that focuses on the youngest character and ends with the story that focuses on the oldest. Characters reappear throughout the two collections, as do specific features of and locations within the ghettos that give the stories their setting. More intriguingly, though, each story in each collection corresponds to its equivalent number in the other collection—the first story in Lost in the City is somehow connected to the first in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, the second to the second, the third to the third, and so on—with the most recent story of any structural pair either focusing on a minor character from the earlier story or maintaining a focus on the earlier story’s central character in order to stand as a direct sequel. The overall effect of these features is, for me, precisely what Charles Altieri identifies as the aesthetic trigger of an affective experience: “the counter-conceptual use of signification” (880). As I hope to show here, the use of this signification allows Jones to fashion, for his readers, a way of seeing the world that takes a step towards deification and so thwarts the reader’s corporeality as to generate an affective experience which—because no other term suits it—I think of as an elevated estrangement from oneself.

Share

3. The Aesthetics of Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children

By and large, the stories collected in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children adopt conventional subject matter and follow the stylistic and structural conventions of contemporary literary realism. They typically open in media res as a character finds himself or herself faced with some sort of exceptional incident, some unintelligible rupture of daily routine, so that the incident triggers an affective experience that leaves the character struck speechless and brought to a state of affective and thus inarticulable extremity: extreme misery, extreme fear, extreme bliss, and so on. Each story then usually proceeds to a flashback that establishes the character’s social and personal context—a context that conveys the character’s personal experiences of social difficulties including systemic racial discrimination and the dissolution of a marginalized ethnic community—until a return to the beginning of the story brings the rupture of quotidian routine once more into the narrative foreground. Time and again, however, the character’s experience of this rupture, this affective trigger, remains strictly affective rather than developing into something more epiphanic in the Joycean sense, since the stories typically end abruptly with characters mired in their various experiences rather than drawing lessons from them or arriving at some new understanding of their existence. When they undergo these sorts of experiences, Jones’ characters are plunged into states of attention that orient them towards the experiential trigger but “do not enter into the structure of cause and consequence because the state of attention becomes an end in itself” (Altieri 880).

‘The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,’ the first story in Lost in the City, stands as both an example of and a template for the structure to which the later stories adhere. A widowed father struggles to cope with his young daughter’s insistence on raising a small flock of pigeons she receives from a neighborhood friend. A long flashback portrays the father’s own efforts to raise the girl following the sudden death of his wife, after which the story returns to its own beginning, the pigeons are devoured by a colony of rats, and the father who never wanted to keep them in the first place is plunged into an inarticulate state when faced with their tattered corpses. He arrives at no new insights into his relationship with his daughter or into her needs and wants. He is simply dumbfounded, triggered into paralysis by the carnage he beholds. And this structural pattern holds true for other stories including the title story from Lost in the City, in which a woman’s uncharacteristic behavior arises from an affective state triggered by news of her mother’s death, or in ‘A Rich Man,’ from All Aunt Hagar’s Children, in which there are inconclusive results to the relationship between a widower and the much younger woman who nearly marries him but then leaves him. The outcome, in any given story, is a work that is self-contained and therefore separable from the story collection as a whole, even as the stories collectively assemble a panoramic picture of a community and the affective experiences of its people in ways that correspond to Susan Garland Mann’s definitional quality of a short story cycle: the stories are all “both self-sufficient and interrelated” (150).

As above, however, none of this is particularly unique to the work of Edward P. Jones. Much the same material can be found in the work of the classic lyrical realists as well as the work of most of the writers examined by James Nagel. What makes Jones’ work unique—what enables it to extend the formal particularities of the short story cycle and to thereby constitute an aesthetic trigger for an affective experience—are the various ways in which the interactions of his characters cause his stories to interrelate, so as to advance the counter-conceptual use of signification which allows for a spatio-temporal view of his subjects that transcends human corporeality. Consider, first of all, the character interactions that occur via both the reappearances of characters throughout the various stories and the symbiotic structure of the two story cycles. In ‘The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,’ Betsy Ann Morgan, the young daughter of the widower Robert Morgan, receives her pigeons from a local barber named Miles Patterson, a middle-aged man who lives with his elderly mother and serves as a minor character (12). In the first story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, ‘In the Blink of God’s Eye,’ Miles Patterson is positioned as the central character, and the story details his abandonment by his birth mother and his chance adoption by the old woman in the first collection of stories. Similarly, in ‘The First Day,’ the second story in Lost in the City, the narrator is a child enrolled at Walker-Jones Elementary School, and the narrator of ‘Spanish in the Morning,’ the second story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, is in the same situation; and in ‘The Night Rhonda Ferguson Died,’ the third story in Lost in the City, the doomed Rhonda attends Cardozo High School alongside several other girls including one Anita Hughes, whose story is told in full in ‘Resurrecting Methuselah,’ the third story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. This interrelation of characters continues throughout the two story cycles and is supplemented by the recurrent appearances of minor characters, whose presence is noted in passing, in ways that escape the parallel structure of the two story cycles. For example, in the title story from All Aunt Hagar’s Children, the fifth story in that collection, the narrator meets two women who used to go to school with his brother, and when their names are given as Mary Saunders and Blondelle Steadman (110), they are implicitly identified as the older, married versions of Mary Keith and Blondelle Harris, the two girls who appear together in only one sentence in ‘The First Day’ (33), the second story in Lost in the City.

But these simplistic character interactions are not the only means by which Jones interrelates his stories. The formal uniqueness of his story cycles is strengthened, and the affective experience they trigger is intensified, by other, more subtle interactions that occur without any regard for the temporal divisions amongst characters via the many specific geographical markers that appear in Jones’ stories. In all of his stories, as Kennedy and Beuka observe, “Jones maps the terrain of African American Washington, DC, situating his narratives precisely in areas (Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest) defined by their compass relation to the ‘Washington they put on post cards,’ the city centre that ‘the white people called the federal enclave’” (Kennedy and Beuka 11; Jones, Lost 72, 154). The key word in that observation is ‘precisely.’ In every single story in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children, on almost every page, Jones situates his characters in very specific real-world locations. Every day, he writes in ‘The Sunday Following Mother’s Day,’ Madeleine Williams “pass[es] the apartment building at 427 M Street, Northwest” (Lost 126) while, in ‘Common Law,’ “Carlos [wakes] in his bed at 450 Ridge” (Aunt Hagar’s 212), and Caesar Matthews, the young thug in ‘Young Lions,’ ends up in “the park at the corner of Pennsylvania and 16th” (Lost 72) while Roxanne in ‘Blindsided’ is “able to catch the D.C. Transit bus heading down 14th Street, N.W.” (Aunt Hagar’s 293). These are only four examples of a phenomenon that recurs hundreds of times throughout Jones’ story cycles, and one might just as easily turn to any page of either of the two cycles in search of other instances of it.

Why does Jones pay such specific attention to the geographic markers in the vicinity of his characters? His purpose may simply be to amplify the verisimilitude of his fiction—a verisimilitude geared towards encouraging readers to sympathize with his characters, to understand their turmoils, and so, perhaps, to connect these to the real-world situation of the marginalized communities of present-day Washington, DC. For Kennedy and Beuka, the significance of the specificity of Jones’ geographical markers is first and foremost politically oriented. “Attentive throughout to sectors and boundaries, to unmarked yet unmistakable racial zones,” they write, “Jones reminds us that the geographical difference between ‘the land of white people’ (110) and the neighbourhoods inhabited by his characters physically reflects the centre-margin relationship of dominant and minority cultures” (11). Similar positions have been taken by Jessica Maucione, who argues that the possibility of a close-knit integrated community stands as a “lost world” for Jones’ characters (see ‘Neighborhood’); by Jessica Brown, for whom the architecture and urban planning of the neighborhoods portrayed by Jones bring a physical dimension to socio-economic segregation (see ‘Narrating’); and by Lorraine M. Henry, who sees the preponderance of public buildings and memorials that honor celebrated leaders of the struggle for civil rights as a bitterly ironic backdrop to Jones’ accounts of African American communal disintegration (see ‘Mr. Jones’s Neighborhoods’). Yet whatever Jones’ objectives may be, the immediate effect of his geographic specificity across his two story cycles, in totality, is, if not quite apolitical, then at least pre-political in the sense that it precedes the advancement of an orientation towards a social power structure. Consider, for example, his use of the location of 1st Street. The narrator of ‘The Store,’ the fifth story in Lost in the City, makes a point of having grown up in the area of 1st Street and New York Avenue, “the area around Dunbar [High School]” (98). The nearby area of 1st Street and North Capitol, which New York Avenue intersects at an angle, is where the widower Robert Morgan considers abandoning his newborn daughter at the beginning of ‘The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,’ the opening story of Lost in the City (17), and the intersection of Pierce Street and 1st Street, just south of the New York Avenue intersection, serves as both the home of Blind Willie in ‘In the Blink of God’s Eye’ (21) and a stopping point on the narrator’s journey to school in ‘Spanish in the Morning’ (35), respectively the second and fourth stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. When a reader of ‘The Girl Who Raised Pigeons’ arrives at the later stories, then, it is difficult to read them without noticing the ghost of Robert Morgan, frozen indecisively over the sleeping infant he intends to leave on the sidewalk, while the narrator of ‘The Store’ walks past him on his way to work—and it is difficult not to see Blind Willie coming and going amidst the ghosts of both those characters while the child walks to school through the wispy traces of all three of them.

Each character is caught up in his or her own private drama, separated from the other characters sometimes by many decades, and yet, for the reader who is privy to the stories of all of them and pays close attention to the specificity of their locations at various points in their lives, the reappearances of those locations call to mind the exploits of other characters who have undergone experiences at exactly the same locations in earlier stories. In other words, the actions of Jones’ characters invest various geographical markers with experiential significance, and as a result, for the attentive reader of both story cycles, the recurrent specificity of those markers has the effect of collapsing distinctions between different and disparate temporal moments. Jones’ uses of analepsis and prolepsis, the “deictic shifts” by which he leaps backwards and forwards in time, have been examined in compelling detail by Christopher Gonzalez (see ‘Spatialization’), but Gonzalez focuses only on these things as features of individual stories without looking towards their cumulative effect throughout both of Jones’ story cycles. As the actions of characters scattered across the stories transforms these markers into signifiers of multiple events in the past and the future—that is, the past and the future relative to any given story—the signifiers themselves unite the divergent temporalities of the story cycles and thus force Jones’ readers to focus on a specific location and to see there the actions of characters who cannot see one another. Consequently, the streetscapes of Washington, DC, modified by the actions of human beings who are largely strangers to one another, obtain the status of characters with identities as distinct as characters of flesh and blood. In effect, each recurrent location becomes a ‘character’ in William H. Gass’ infamous sense of the word. “A character for me is any linguistic location of a book toward which a great part of the rest of the text stands as a modifier,” Gass once declared. “Just as the subject of a sentence... is modified by the predicate, so frequently some character, Emma Bovary for instance, is regarded as a central character in the book because a lot of the language basically and ultimately goes back to modify, be about, Emma Bovary” (53). And just as a human being may constitute a ‘character’ insofar as he or she stands as a linguistic location modified by other aspects of the text, Jones’ specific geographic markers constitute characters by virtue of having their signification modified by his human characters’ actions—modified so as to signify not only a particular site in an urban environment but also an accretion of the experiences of the human beings who, unlike the reader of these stories, remain unable to perceive the experiences of others in the very same place.

Countless examples emerge from Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children. Some of them are simple. The narrator of ‘The Store,’ the fifth story in Lost in the City, passes by the house of a character named Mojo, near the intersection of Capitol and North Florida Avenue, while on his way to interview for a job that will change his life (87). The attentive reader can see his ghost walking past Mojo’s window when the narrator of ‘All Aunt Hagar’s Children’ approaches Mojo and his wife Harriet while investigating the mysterious death of an elderly woman’s son (Aunt Hagar’s 110), and both of those narrators linger in the background when Mojo is visited by Melvin Foster, the central character of ‘Blindsided’ (Aunt Hagar’s 213). Likewise, in ‘The Sunday Following Mother’s Day,’ the seventh story in Lost in the City, Samuel Williams is arrested after murdering his wife, leaving his children in the care of his sister, Maddie, who seeks solace amongst her friends at Cleopatra’s Hair Emporium at the corner of 9th and P Streets NW (130), and one can sense a trace of Maddie’s emotional turmoil at Cleopatra’s when the superstitious Laverne Shepherd seeks solace in the same place after an encounter with the Devil in the tenth story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children (273). Other examples are more complex and nuanced than these. In ‘Gospel,’ the eleventh story in Lost in the City, the elderly Maude Townsend decides to join a gospel choir partly in order to escape the tedium of her daily life at a housing complex called Claridge Towers (194). In the Jones oeuvre, the shabby apartments at Claridge Towers serve as something akin to a smaller scale version of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. They reappear in ‘Marie,’ the poignant final story in Lost in the City, when octogenarian Marie Delaveaux Wilson is visited at home by a student of sociology who persuades her to talk frankly about her harrowing past (233-234), and they appear again in ‘A Rich Man’ and ‘Bad Neighbors,’ the twelfth and thirteenth stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. In ‘A Rich Man,’ readers observe the dissolution of the marriage of Horace and Loneese Perkins, residents of Apartment 230 (323), followed by Loneese’s death and Horace’s new relationship with Elaine Cunningham, the friend of a daughter of another resident of Claridge Towers (330). In ‘Bad Neighbors,’ the death of Arthur Atwell, longtime resident of 8th St NW, forces his widow Beatrice to move into Claridge Towers (367), and for readers of the previous stories her arrival at the complex takes place with traces of Marie’s private tragedies and the tensions between Horace and Elaine lingering in the air around her although she herself remains oblivious to them. And similarly, in the eighth story in Lost in the City, Lydia Walsh recalls how she spent her girlhood in the company of an old woman named Georgia Evans who lived at 459 Ridge Street, right beside Lydia’s own house at number 457 (155), and years later, in the eighth story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Georgia Evans remains the occupant of that house (207). Georgia’s favorite place in the city, however, is the corner of 5th and M Streets NW, the “lucky corner” where she once met her second husband (203-204), and readers who watch her reliving her fond memories of that place are made aware, by the specificity of the location, that the pivotal events of Georgia’s life have taken place only a stone’s throw from 427 M Street, where Agnes Williams will be murdered years later by her husband Samuel in ‘The Sunday Following Mother’s Day’ (Lost 126), and from 423 M Street, where Ike Appleton was murdered several years earlier in ‘All Aunt Hagar’s Children’ (Aunt Hagar’s 112). As in the stirring final pages of Jones’ novel, The Known World, readers are presented with a literary map of Washington, DC, in which “[t]he dead... have risen... [and] stand at the [places] where they once lived” (Known World 385).

To further engage the geographical aspects of Jones’ stories, something disquieting happens to the reader who uses these geographic markers as points of transition between the story of one character and the story of another, as well as transitioning from story to story via the symbiotic structure of the two story cycles. A reader of ‘Gospel,’ for instance, can locate Maude Townsend in relation to all of the other characters who are occupants of Claridge Towers—Marie in ‘Marie,’ Horace and Loneese in ‘A Rich Man,’ Beatrice Atwell in ‘Bad Neighbors’—and can then trace a path through all of Jones’ stories by following Maude as she joins a gospel choir whose members include, among others, Anita Hughes. Anita is a friend of Rhonda Ferguson in ‘The Night Rhonda Ferguson Died’ in Lost in the City, and, when she reappears in ‘Resurrecting Methuselah’ in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, she is a middle-aged woman who finds herself driving aimlessly through the city, distraught by the absence of her husband, and noting her location as she passes the intersection of 7th Street and Massachusetts Avenue (64), which is where Betsy Ann Morgan steals candy from a store in ‘The Girl Who Raised Pigeons’ in Lost in the City (26). Betsy Ann’s neighborhood GP is a man named Dr. Jackson (15) who reappears as the cousin of the narrator’s mother in ‘Spanish in the Morning,’ in All Aunt Hagar’s Children (48). That narrator attends Walker-Jones Elementary School along with the orphaned Madeleine in ‘The Sunday Following Mother’s Day’ (Lost 129), and with Carlos Newman in ‘Common Law’ (Aunt Hagar’s 230). Carlos, as a young boy living at 450 Ridge Street, wins the affections of Georgia Evans (212), the same elderly woman who befriends the young Lydia Walsh (207)—Lydia who learns of the death of her mother decades later, distraught by middle age in the title story from Lost in the City, and then, in a haze of confused thoughts, drives the streets of Washington at night, through the intersection of 5th Street and New York Avenue (154). That intersection is where the narrator of ‘The Store’ suffers abuse and humiliation at the hands of a white policeman (85) before he tries to get his life back on track by taking a date to the Howard Theater (97), which is also visited by the confused Roxanne Stapleton in ‘Blindsided,’ in All Aunt Hagar’s Children (293). Roxanne lives at 708 10th Street (297), which is the same block on which the wayward Caesar Mathews grew up in ‘Young Lions,’ in Lost in the City, and the same street along which Caesar walks when he determines, with a toss of a coin, whether to continue his life of crime or to attempt to reinvent himself (100-101). In this way, so on and so forth, alternating between the two story cycles ad infinitum, Jones’ readers can trace a path, and often multiple paths, through this piecemeal but cumulative representation of Washington, DC, webbing together each of the “self-sufficient” stories with the divergent and connective strands that form an “interrelated” network (Mann 15) of which the characters and the geographical markers are together the nodes.

Another way of saying this, however, is that even if a reader does not deliberately move through the stories in the manner outlined above, that reader will nevertheless find that the formal particularities of the two story cycles force the stories to move towards the reader himself or herself. Whenever one’s eyes pass over a geographical marker charged with signification from the events of an earlier story, those events and the characters involved in them are effectively drawn into a story that is not their own, like threads through the eye of a needle, and there they tint or superimpose themselves over the events of the later story. Every story is haunted by the characters of other stories who hover into view not by virtue of having actually been placed in the story but by virtue of having earlier invested a geographical marker with new significance: to see Roxanne Stapleton making her way home in ‘Blindsided,’ for instance, is also to see Caesar Mathews on a different night, in a different year, lingering not too far from her front door as he struggles to decide what to do with his life. Whenever the reader encounters a character in a specific location, the specificity allows the location to carry the signification of every other character who has been in that place—and, whenever the reader is reminded of those characters, he or she is again brought into contact with the locations and the other people they encounter, so that, ultimately, the result of almost any given signifier is multiple signification. Almost every character and specific location in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children is, by varying degrees of association, a signifier not only for itself but also for every other character and location in both story cycles.

That this feature of Jones’ story cycles exemplifies Charles Altieri’s notion of “counter-conceptual signification” (880) is, I think, self-evident insofar as a signifier that signifies both itself and specific elements of other texts, enmeshed within a collection of texts that are each replete with signifiers of a similar nature, is commensurate to a landscape painting containing “rocks... that have no weight or mass” and “trees [that] serve the counter-intuitive role of providing stability” (880). Similarly self-evident is that this use of signification in Jones’ story cycles countermands human corporeality, affording readers something closer to a deistic or even divine view of Washington, DC—a view that utterly disrespects the temporality of human experience, forcing readers to behold the convergence and conflation of past, present, and future events on almost every page as well as the causal connections they bear to other events on other pages—and, crucially, this way of countermanding human corporeality becomes possible only by virtue of Jones’ exploitation of the formal possibilities of the short story cycle, and of two cycles structured synchronically, as distinct from the form of the single short story or the form of the novel.

It is through this imposition of a sort of divinity on the reader that, for me, Jones’ short story cycles generate an affective experience in those who encounter them. Jones’ readers may or may not choose to pay sufficient attention to the details of the text in order to actually undergo this experience, but the details seem to me to have been selected so exactly and in such an elaborate way that some experience of this sort, above and beyond verisimilitude, must be their intended outcome. The experience is, as above, one for which I do not have a name but which I would describe as an uncanny sense of having myself estranged from myself, of becoming godlike, of being given knowledge of certain characters’ actions and then having that knowledge reactivated in a way that is neither explicit nor intrusive. It is a sense of being afforded capabilities of sight and knowledge that transcend the human limitations of these capabilities, and then being made aware, incrementally by the recurrent use of counter-conceptual signification, of the very fact of the estrangement without being able to pinpoint its precise trigger. It is in this sense, and on the basis of these qualities, that I would place Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children alongside the landscapes of Paul Cezanne as engines of affective experiences triggered by aesthetic means. That is not to downplay the political purposes of Jones’ stories or their achievements in the area of literary realism, but only to note that if the connection between affectivity and aesthetics remains largely buried beneath unbroken ground, Jones’ stories should be some of the first jewels to turn up when that territory is mined.

Share

Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. ‘Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys.’ Critical Inquiry 38 (Summer 2012): 878-881. Print.

Anderson, Sherwood. ‘The Thinker.’ Winesburg, Ohio. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919. 99-112. Print.
—. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919.  Print.

Bell, Madison Smartt. Narrative Design: Working With Imagination, Craft, and Form. 1997. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Print.

Brown, Jessica. ‘Narrating Washington, DC, from the Margins: Urban Space and Cultural Identity in Lost in the City and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.’ Berkeley Undergraduate Journal 23.2 (2011): 1-35. Print.

Burgess, Miranda. ‘On Being Moved: Sympathy, Mobility, and Narrative Form.’ Poetics Today 32.2 (Summer 2011): 289-321. Print.

Carver, Raymond. ‘So Much Water So Close to Home.’ What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. 1981. London: Vintage, 2003. 67-74. Print.

Cowley, Malcolm. ‘Introduction to Winesburg, Ohio.’ Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. London: Penguin, 1960. 1-20. Print.

Gass, William H. Conversations with William H. Gass. Ed. Theodore G. Ammon. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Print.

Gonzalez, Christopher. ‘Spatialization and Deictic Shifts in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children.’ Edward P. Jones: New Essays. Ed. Daniel Davis Wood. Melbourne: Whetstone Press, 2011. 185-202. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’ 1927. The First Forty-Nine Stories. London: Arrow Books, 2004. 259-263. Print.

Henry, Lorraine M. ‘Mr. Jones’s Neighborhoods: The Triad of Place, History, and Memory in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children.’ Edward P. Jones: New Essays. Ed. Daniel Davis Wood. Melbourne: Whetstone Press, 2011. 161-184. Print.

Jones, Edward P. All Aunt Hagar’s Children. New York: HarperPerennial, 2006. Print.
—. The Known World. New York: Amistad, 2003. Print.
—. Lost in the City. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. Print.

Kennedy, J. Gerald and Robert Beuka. ‘Imperilled Communities in Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City and Dagoberto Gilb’s The Magic of Blood.’ The Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001): 10-23. Print.

Leys, Ruth. ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique.’ Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011): 434-472. Print.

Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989. Print.

Maucione, Jessica. ‘Neighborhood as the New Lost World in Lost in the City.’ Edward P. Jones: New Essays. Ed. Daniel Davis Wood. Melbourne: Whetstone Press, 2011. 75-91. Print.

Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Print.

Nathanson, Donald L. ‘Prologue.’ In Tomkins, Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition. New York: Springer, 2008. xi-xxvii. Print.

Shouse, Eric. ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect.’ M/C Journal 8.6 (December 2005): <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php>. Web.

Tomkins, Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition. 1962-1991. New York: Springer, 2008. Print.

Trussler, Michael. ‘On the Short Story and the Short-Story Cycle.’ Contemporary Literature 43.3 (2002): 598-605. Print.

Subscribe now

By now, the names have been invoked so frequently as to seem almost fixed in place.  Among those who produced work that paved the way for Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio are Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, and Gertrude Stein (Jacobson 55; Papinchak 3; Phillips 52; Stouck 150; White 10). Among those whose work has since contributed to and burnished the quality of the literary tradition now exemplified by Winesburg are “Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, William Saroyan, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter” (White 10), not to mention J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, John Updike, Shirley Jackson, Bernard Malamud, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Alice Adams, Robert Coover, and Joyce Carol Oates (Papinchak ix). In short, almost anyone who ever assembled a naturalistic depiction of small-town life and its attendant anxieties is either credited for having influenced Winesburg if they published their work before it appeared or otherwise held in debt to Winesburg if they published in its wake.

Of course, to locate Winesburg at the forefront of American literary naturalism is an inclination so justifiable that it would be foolish to contest it, and so I want to be clear up-front that I do not intend to issue a challenge. Rather, I intend to argue that while Winesburg justifiably belongs to the small-town naturalist tradition, it belongs equally, albeit less recognisably, to an alternative and quite different tradition: not instead of small-town naturalism, but in addition to it. However, I see Winesburg as part of this tradition less by virtue of authorial intention or the exertion of influence upon subsequent texts than by the presuppositions about its literary heritage that are customarily brought to it. In other words, my sense is that when we as readers locate Winesburg within the naturalist tradition on the basis of its style and its choice of subject, we approach the text in a way that circumscribes our reading of it. We assume a position from which our attention is inevitably drawn to those textual features that either justify or challenge (but in any case underscore) its placement within that tradition, and so we occlude—and indeed divert our attention from—an entirely different set of textual features whose foregrounding would locate Winesburg elsewhere. Think of it as peering through a sort of critical kaleidoscope. At present, the kaleidoscopic focus is set to direct our attention to the naturalism of Winesburg so that the text at the kaleidoscopic centre is surrounded by a dazzling array of literary kin. But if an adjustment to the focus were to instead direct our attention to something other than the naturalism of Winesburg, the shapes surrounding the text would shift aside and splinter apart and a different set of kinships would coalesce around it.

In this essay, I want to adjust the focus to see what those kinships might be. Looking beyond the naturalism of Winesburg, I begin by probing one of its most remarked-upon but under-examined textual features: its form. Calling its form into question, I attempt to determine its formal particularities in order to advance a reading of the text that acknowledges the nuances of the way in which it has been pieced together. In doing so, I suggest that there is in Winesburg a character residing at a textual level above all other characters, located in an interstice beneath Sherwood Anderson as the author of the text and yet hovering godlike over the denizens of Winesburg; and I argue that to read Winesburg in accordance with the form it ascribes itself is effectively to read it as a piecemeal disclosure of the nature of this character. At first glance, one might simply refer to this character as the narrator, since it repeatedly uses the personal pronoun as it pieces together the Winesburg stories; and, on that note, Marcia Jacobson has undertaken a robust analysis of the sentiments and personal values underlying its first-person disclosures (58-62). On closer inspection, though, this character can be seen to not only narrate the stories but also to select the subject of each story and to sequentialise the stories in a way that controls the shift from subject to subject and thus the shift in textual focalisation; and, for that reason, I refer to this character as the focalising consciousness of Winesburg, Ohio. As patterns and trends emerge via the selection of subjects and the sequentialisation of stories, Winesburg carries the quiet suggestion that the consciousness responsible for the assemblage of the text possesses a discernible interest in certain subjects, a particular disposition towards them, and thus a distinct personality whose nature lies at the heart of this study.

How, then, to recognise the concerns, the disposition, and finally the personality of the focalising consciousness? My strategy entails a three-stage advance. First, I point to the observable presence of the focalising consciousness within the text. Second, I detail several of its characteristic qualities by turning to those moments in which its presence is most clearly perceptible. Finally, I examine George Willard as a figure of special interest for the focalising consciousness who, more than any other character, entices it to reveal its characteristic qualities and thus to disclose its personality—even when other characters become the momentary focus of its attention. This examination involves a reading of Winesburg that traces the disclosure of the personality of the focalising consciousness via its oscillation between George and other characters; and, insofar as literary texts written subsequent to Winesburg likewise disclose the personality of a similar focalising consciousness, this reading provides grounds for locating Winesburg in a literary tradition distinct from small-town naturalism. That tradition is one in which the primary force propelling a narrative is the interplay between its prose and its form, meaning that we can locate Winesburg elsewhere on the literary landscape by first asking what sort of text, in a formal sense, it purports to be and actually is.

Share

Much ink has been spilled in the effort to determine the form of Winesburg, Ohio. “In structure,” as Malcolm Cowley wrote, “the book lies midway between the novel proper and the mere collection of stories” (57), and critics have tended to divide amongst themselves and approach the text as either a novel or a story collection. Each approach is understandable, but each is also beset by its own particular problems. While Winesburg itself consists of twenty-five individual stories set in and around the eponymous Ohio town, seventeen of those stories concern the young newspaper reporter George Willard and thus weave together a larger narrative from a number of freestanding sketches. Are we therefore to privilege the autonomous variety of the sketches over the aggregate integrity of the larger narrative or are we to do the opposite? No consensus yet exists. Ray Lewis White, for instance, describes Winesburg as a text comprised largely of “separable” stories (86): stories which may or may not feature George Willard, but in which, for the most part, George “is of no importance” to the narrative even when he does appear (88). In contrast, Robert Papinchak describes Winesburg as having historically been understood as “a bildungsroman about George Willard... to whom most of the [other] characters... bring their stories” (20) and therefore as “a kind of novel” (106). The implication of the first view of Winesburg is that its constituent stories can be rearranged and read in any sequence because they are united by narrative location rather than causation. Conversely, the implication of the second view is that the stories must be read in their original sequence because only then can readers discern the causal structure (however faint) of the bildungsroman of George Willard. The problem with the first view is that the final stories in Winesburg coincide exactly with the conclusion of George’s narrative, so that his desire to leave the town is satisfied and his story is resolved at the very end of the text. The problem with the second view is that several stories do indeed seem separable, so that George’s bildungsroman contains an abundance of apparently pointless digressions superfluous to the overall narrative. As such, Malcolm Cowley’s positioning of Winesburg “midway” between a novel and a collection of stories is accurate in the most literal sense of the word “midway.” Whether we approach Winesburg as a novel or as a story collection, we cannot read it as either one to the outright exclusion of the other.

If that is the case, how can we determine its form at all? As it happens, this question is easier to answer than the existing critical contention would have us believe because the text itself explicitly identifies its own form before it even opens the first of its twenty-five stories. Right there on the title page, beneath the words Winesburg, Ohio, appears the subtitle: “A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life.” With those words, the text characterises itself as something quite distinct from a novel but, at the same time, something other than a “mere collection of stories” (Cowley 57). On the one hand, that very specific word ‘group’ implies that the various stories in Winesburg possess a certain substantive kinship that would be necessarily lacking in a ‘gathering’ or an ‘assortment’ of tales. On the other hand, that word also implies that the kinship shared by those stories is still too weak or too speculative for them to qualify, in totality, as either a ‘collection’ offering considered variations on a common theme or a ‘series’ whose discrete parts episodically assemble a much more expansive and cohesive narrative. The phrase “a group of tales” suggests that the Winesburg stories ought to be understood as something like distinct members of a diverse society, such that, despite their differences, each one is inextricably yoked to all of the others by virtue of some manifest—if not immediately apparent—commonality. More importantly, the selection of that word as a determination of the form of Winesburg and the actual application of that word to the completed volume together imply the presence of the focalising consciousness that I have suggested infuses the text.1 By ‘focalising consciousness,’ I mean a consciousness that has taken a holistic view of the Winesburg stories, recognised their commonality, and labelled them a “group” in a way that calls attention simultaneously to the commonality of the stories themselves and to the implicit presence of the consciousness that recognises it. Being so openly identified as a “group of tales,” Winesburg immediately throws light on the consciousness by whose determination its various tales have been seen as belonging to, and placed in, a “group”—and so the text itself suggests that if the tales are approached in the aggregate and read in their original sequence, they will incrementally and inferentially disclose certain aspects of the otherwise obscured character of that consciousness.

Perhaps it seems unduly esoteric to approach Winesburg with an eye towards this character. In fact, though, such an approach has haunted the scholarly criticism of Winesburg for nearly as long as that criticism has been produced, lingering on the critical horizon as a site of unrealised potential ever since its contours were first sketched out in 1951 when Irving Howe published his reading of the Sherwood Anderson oeuvre including a reading of Anderson’s first-person stories:

[T]he complexity [of Anderson’s stories] is enforced by an interaction of the four levels of movement in his stories: the events themselves; the feelings of the boy involved in them; the memory of the adult who weighs his involvement in the light of accumulated experience; and the final increment of meaning suggested by the story but beyond the conscious recognition of its narrator. The true action of these stories is thus... not the perceived object but the perceiving subject. ... [T]heir purpose is not to record a resolution of conflict but to refract an enlargement of consciousness. (152-153, my emphasis)

Admittedly, Howe wrote those words with reference only to the first-person narrators of Anderson’s “oral” stories (150) rather than the oblique entity behind the superficially third-person narratives of Winesburg, Ohio. Nevertheless, insofar as the presence of such an entity behind Winesburg is implicit in the designation of the text as a “group of tales,” I think we can justifiably read this text much as Howe read the oral stories and thereby derive from it something quite different to what we derive from reading it as either a novel or a story collection. Moreover, there is a precedent for such a reading in Forrest Ingram’s attempt, in 1971, to draw out the focalising consciousness of Winesburg. “One need not read far into the Winesburg tales,” wrote Ingram, “to discover that a single narrator is relating all the stories [and] operates at the heart of each of the stories” (155). Ingram called this narrator “a persona who is yet the implied author” (155), and who becomes “the chief source of unity” in the text “by controlling [its] feeling and form” (165), such that this persona “may, for heuristic reasons, be the most important of [the] fictively realized characters” in Winesburg (156). Unfortunately, though, Ingram did not hold true to this last assertion or to Irving Howe’s call for a focus on “the perceiving subject” of Anderson’s stories. Throughout his reading of Winesburg (143-203), Ingram diverts his attention from this “most important” character to the other characters, observing only the ways in which the focalising consciousness communicates something about each of them rather than the ways in which it discloses something of itself in the process. I hope here to walk a middle path between Howe and Ingram, building on Ingram’s assured identification of the focalising consciousness of Winesburg while reading Winesburg as a text largely about the focalising consciousness as Howe’s “perceiving subject.”

While it may not narrate the Winesburg stories in the first-person voice as consistently as Anderson’s other first-person narrators, the focalising consciousness does reveal itself almost as fully, if more subtly, in other ways. By selecting a subject, then drifting towards another subject, then returning to an earlier subject, then sequentialising the drift from subject to subject in a particular way, it reveals the subjects that most fascinate it as well as revealing its attitudes towards those subjects, and thus allows a glimpse of its personality. As readers, of course, we tend to direct our attention to whatever attracts the attention of the focalising consciousness at any given moment—we look towards the subject of its narratorial focalisation (Gennette 185-205)—and so we effectively render transparent the focalising consciousness itself. But if we take a step back to observe the focalising consciousness as it finds its attention attracted to certain subjects and then drifting on to others, and if we identify behavioural patterns in the drift from subject to subject, then we can discern something about the personality that permeates the entirety of Winesburg.

Share

Working towards such a reading, what can we discern up-front about the nature of the focalising consciousness? Although, as above, its nature is disclosed incrementally and obliquely rather than immediately and overtly, the occasional use of the first-person voice does very directly reveal aspects of its nature.2 Clearly, for instance, it possesses both self-awareness and social awareness to an extent approaching omniscience. It repeatedly refers to itself as “I” and several times (but less frequently) refers to its audience as “you,” indicating that it understands itself to be an intelligent consciousness in the presence of another intelligent consciousness (Ingram 158-9). However, in ‘Respectability,’ the thirteenth story in Winesburg, Ohio, it also indicates that its omniscience is not quite absolute when it attempts to reveal the history of the outcast Wash Williams before pausing and admitting: “I go too fast” (64), suggesting that it is not entirely aware of the intellectual capabilities of its audience and that it must modulate its narration accordingly. As Wallace Stegner noted, the omniscience of the focalising consciousness is strictly circumscribed by text, allowing the focalising consciousness to access the entire personal history of each character in Winesburg but little else beyond that (142-3); and, on the basis of a remark made in the seventeenth story, ‘The Teacher,’ I would add that this strictly intratextual omniscience is demonstrably panoptical in nature, allowing the focalising consciousness to penetrate the innermost thoughts of a given character just as easily as it can survey every denizen of Winesburg at a glance: “Then [George Willard] slept,” it says, “and in all Winesburg he was the last soul on that winter night to go to sleep” (91). Still, while the focalising consciousness reveals aspects of its nature in passages such as these, at no stage does it disclose the nuances of its personality in anything like the level of detail it devotes to the other characters. Instead, as Forrest Ingram writes, it “usually calls attention to [it]self only as... controller of the material of [its] fancy, and not as a participant” (155), so that, as above, its personality trickles down indirectly from those moments in which it noticeably gives form to the text as a whole via its selection and sequentialisation of subjects and yet says nothing explicit about itself.

Obviously, since the young reporter George Willard appears in a greater number of stories than any other character in Winesburg, he is the subject that receives the greatest and most sustained attention from the focalising consciousness. Our best hope for discerning the personality of the focalising consciousness therefore involves examining its approach to George—not just the favouritism it shows him, but, more particularly, the dissonance between that favouritism and the fragmentation of his narrative. It is certainly the case, as Judy Jo Small suggests, that “[t]he fragmented form of the various tales” is crucial to any understanding of the ways in which “their incomplete truths reflect a complex vision of a town (and a nation) and of perennial human problems” (19). But, on another level, the fragmented form of Winesburg also speaks volumes about the entity by whose hand the text has become fragmented; and since that entity is largely preoccupied with George Willard, the moments at which it fails to sustain its preoccupation and the moments at which it strives to reassert it are together the moments at which we can see what most fascinates it about George and consider what that fascination suggests about its personality. What causes its fascination with George to lapse from time to time, and why does it find itself drawn again towards George after its fascination has lapsed?

In Winesburg, Ohio: An Exploration, Ray Lewis White conducts a long and rigorous analysis of everything we learn about George as a background character in eleven stories and as a central character in several others (35-55). I will not attempt to recount or even to summarise White’s findings; I commend his work to anyone who wishes to see in full what Winesburg reveals only in fragments. I do want to suggest, however, that by privileging the totality of what we learn about George over the piecemeal fashion in which we learn it, White misses the bigger picture. By rearranging the achronological Winesburg stories into chronological order, his textual analysis offers an artificially teleological survey of the burgeoning disquiet within George that culminates in the boy’s departure from Winesburg; and he does likewise when he similarly rearranges the stories of the ‘grotesques’ into chronological order (56-94), placing ‘Death,’ the third-last story, after ‘Mother,’ the fourth story (63-64) and moving the sixteenth and seventeenth stories, ‘The Strength of God’ and ‘The Teacher,’ from the middle of the book to the very end (88-93). Such chronological re-sequentialisation seems to me unwise because it is precisely via the achronological sequentialisation of George’s narrative, and via the interspersion of that fragmented narrative with the equally achronological stories of the ‘grotesques,’ that the personality of the focalising consciousness shines through. What we can discern from this particular sequentialisation is, in short, an entity at once fascinated by George and yet somehow frightened of him—an entity continually attempting to obtain familiarity and even intimacy with George, and yet retreating from him whenever it actually does so. With George at the centre of Winesburg, Ohio, the focalising consciousness orbits him like a satellite and is periodically drawn towards him as if caught in his gravitational pull, only to emphatically distance itself from him whenever it seems to have drawn too close and then, after a breath, to draw close once again: slowly, carefully, but just as fascinated as before. In this oscillating pattern of approach and abandonment, proximity and retreat, its personality begins to emerge.

Before closely examining that pattern, however, I want to account for three pressing questions pertaining to the personality of the focalising consciousness that necessarily arise from any consideration of its fascination with George.

First: is any reference to the focalising consciousness simply, at bottom, a reference to Sherwood Anderson himself? I think not. I understand the temptation to equate the two since Anderson, like the focalising consciousness, gives shape to Winesburg, Ohio, but there are real differences between them that would negate such an equation. Most significantly: the focalising consciousness takes seriously the existence of a town and a people that Anderson knew did not exist, thus accepting as true what was for Anderson entirely imaginary. In doing so, the focalising consciousness invests its narration with a sincerity that Anderson—for all his earnestness—could not have logically shared even if he convincingly feigned it. As noted at the start of this essay, it is less the case that the focalising consciousness and Sherwood Anderson are one and the same than that the focalising consciousness is a character created by Anderson which stands removed from the other characters in Winesburg and in closer proximity to the author himself.

Second: if the focalising consciousness is sort of an authorial entity but remains distinct from the author himself, is it in fact the elderly author who appears in the first story, ‘The Book of the Grotesque’? Again, I think not. Jon Lawry, having posed exactly this question, concludes that the two characters are “nearly one” but nevertheless “distinct” because the elderly author does not actually narrate Winesburg but only provides the focalising consciousness with “a model for [its] art” (57-58). Judy Jo Small has fleshed out Lawry’s reasoning by noting that, in assembling the text of Winesburg, the focalising consciousness “publishes such a work as the old writer wrote but did not [actually] publish” (21-22), to which Marcia Jacobson adds that the focalising consciousness “does not say that he becomes a convert to the [old author’s] ideas, simply that he learns from them” (59). Despite similarities between the two characters, they remain separated by a clear rhetorical distance.

Finally: if the focalising consciousness is neither Sherwood Anderson nor the elderly author at the beginning of Winesburg, is it instead George Willard looking back on his youth as a grown man and retrospectively recounting episodes from his boyhood? Walter Rideout seems to suggest so when he writes that “one can make too much of [George’s] role as a character designed to link the tales, unify them, and structure them into a loose sort of bildungsroman; on the other hand, one can make too little of it” (‘Simplicity’ 173). Elsewhere, Edwin Fussell echoes this point when he summarizes the broader narrative of Winesburg as “the ‘portrait of the artist as a young man’ in the period immediately preceding his final discovery of metier” (41), while David Stouck is less equivocal than either Rideout or Fussell in declaring that George does indeed grow up to become the sophisticated focalising consciousness of Winesburg (145-51). On this point, however, I am inclined to side again with Marcia Jacobson, who contends that “[t]he easy assumption that George and the [focalising consciousness] are one is... not fully justified [because] Anderson does not make the connection within his text” (58). In fact, she writes, Anderson subtly differentiates the focalising consciousness from George not only in terms of personality—the focalising consciousness is “a rather likeable character, whereas George is not always so appealing” (59)—but also in terms of their access to knowledge beyond their own immediate experiences. The focalising consciousness is, as noted, omniscient, while George “knows very little of what [it] knows,” yet somehow “[a] typical Winesburg story includes the current events that lead up to the appeal to George as well as the past events that created the current pressure” even though George himself could not possibly know the specific and often secret details of those past events (60-61). From this, Jacobson concludes:

If we are to believe that George matures to become the narrator of Winesburg, we must believe that he has matured a great deal in the years after leaving Winesburg and grant that he has invented a lot of what makes up Winesburg, because he could not have absorbed enough to be drawing only on memory. ... But there is nothing in Winesburg that suggests the process... by which such change might happen. (62)

If the focalising consciousness is therefore an independent entity, what we have in Winesburg is a text written by Sherwood Anderson and predominantly concerned with George Willard, but filtered through the perspective of the focalising consciousness who is the first character the reader encounters. We can thus discern the personality of the focalising consciousness by examining George Willard not as an individual, but as a studied subject who acquires individuality only incrementally and only insofar as the focalising consciousness that is fascinated with him comes to know him on intimate terms. If we look for the moments at which George assumes ever more individuality, we learn not only about George himself but also about the focalising consciousness by whose hand George has been positioned to assume individuality at those moments. If we then look for the moments at which the focalising consciousness abruptly turns away from the increasingly individualised George before it gradually returns to him, we have the basis of the pattern of behaviour that progressively discloses its personality.

Share

This pattern becomes evident throughout the first ten stories in Winesburg: ‘The Book of the Grotesque,’ the first five ‘grotesque’ stories, and the four parts of ‘Godliness.’

By and large, ‘The Book of the Grotesque’ stands apart from the other Winesburg stories.  It is set apart from them on the contents page, it precedes the first appearance of the title Winesburg, Ohio, and it does not feature George Willard or any other recognisable denizen of Winesburg. Yet as William Philips concludes in his examination of Sherwood Anderson’s original Winesburg manuscript, the manuscript “indicates that the book was conceived as a unit, knit together, however loosely, by the idea of the first tale, ‘The Book of the Grotesque,’ and consisting of individual sketches which derived additional power from each other” (18). It would therefore be a mistake to assume that simply because ‘The Book of the Grotesque’ does not feature George, it has nothing whatsoever to do with him and therefore cannot contribute to a disclosure of the personality of the focalising consciousness. Indeed, George clearly appears in the story in spirit and in a way that speaks directly to the interests of the focalising consciousness. Throughout Winesburg, the focalising consciousness continually emphasises George’s youth, repeatedly referring to him as “young” or a “young reporter” (9, 27, 55, 66, 73, 85, 90, 95, et al) or as a “boy” (11, 22, 28, 55, 66, 89, 98, et al), well beyond the point at which his adolescence has been established. As William Phillips points out, after the first instance in which the focalising consciousness refers to Winesburg as ‘Winesburg, Ohio,’ it sees no need to repeat the word ‘Ohio’ in subsequent references (27-28), so that its repeated emphasis on George’s youth suggests that his youth is part of what the focalising consciousness finds especially significant about him. But why? ‘The Book of the Grotesque’ offers a hint. “Perfectly still he lay,” the focalising consciousness says of the old author in his bed, “and his body was old and not of much use anymore, but something inside him was altogether young” (5). The focalising consciousness then attempts to express the precise nature of the writer’s internal youth but ultimately fails, and so concludes that precision is unnecessary: “The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking about” (5). For the focalising consciousness, then, the clarity of thought with which a young observer is gifted is an ideal to be sought out and dwelt upon by those whose thoughts are confused. Since the focalising consciousness’ own expressive difficulties would suggest that it itself wants clarity of thought, we can infer that its interest in ‘the young thing within the writer’ is at bottom a self-interest derived to some extent from a suspicion that proximity to the ‘young thing’ may provide it with an outlet for what it cannot express. But with the clear-thinking ‘young thing’ inaccessible in the body of an old man, the focalising consciousness effectively comes to prize a ‘young thing’ within a young person’s body as something to which it must draw close, if it should happen to cross paths with one.

It does cross paths with one when George Willard appears as a ‘young thing’ able to help others think clearly—and a ‘young thing’ distinct from his friend Seth Richmond, who “th[inks] with remarkable clearness” (70) but remains utterly silent—although the focalising consciousness does not instantly recognise George’s ability and so does not immediately draw close to him. When it introduces George in the second story, ‘Hands,’ it does so with trepidation, familiarising itself with George only by degrees rather than in a single expository passage. This mode of interaction with George is key to the incremental disclosure of its personality.

‘Hands’ opens “[u]pon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, [where] a fat little old man walked nervously up and down” (9). Notice how the focalising consciousness approaches this man, Wing Biddlebaum, via an effect akin to a rubber band stretched out and then released to snap back into itself. After opening on the veranda, the focalising consciousness zooms out to take in the house, then zooms out further to take in the ravine, then zooms out still further to take in the town, and then rushes back down from a height to find Wing Biddlebaum on the veranda and then closes in on him so tightly that it penetrates his mind and knows that he is behaving “nervously.” The rubber-banding effect that characterises this single sentence typifies the strategy at work throughout the story as a whole. In the next sentence, the focalising consciousness again widens its view to take in a field near the house, then a road near the field, then a wagon on the road, then a voice from the wagon that reveals the old man’s name; and then it rushes back in towards the man to discourse on the symptoms of his nervousness and to suggest that they can be ameliorated only by the presence of his friend George Willard. Hereafter, the focalising consciousness widens its view once more to describe the nature of that friendship within the context of the town—“In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty years had been the town mystery... came forth to look at the world... [and] ventured in the light of day into Main Street” (9-10)—and then it rushes back to uncover the troubled past that Wing cannot reveal even to his friend. This movement recurs time and again throughout Winesburg as the focalising consciousness stands at a distance from a given subject before rushing in close, detailing a subject’s social surroundings before accessing his or her state of mind, oscillating between a panoptical view of Winesburg that reveals a subject’s social standing and a closer proximity to the subject in order to reveal his or her innermost self. Moreover, it extends this oscillatory approach even to George Willard on a macro level via the combination of ‘Hands’ with the stories that follow it.

As Ray Lewis White writes, George is “nowhere fully described” in Winesburg, so that readers are left “to gather scattered information about the youth... from the facts and hints that accumulate throughout the story cycle” (36). What White does not notice is that the accumulative construction of the character of George also takes place within individual stories in the cycle—particularly ‘Hands,’ in which the focalising consciousness only gradually acknowledges George’s capacity for independent thought and action. Introducing George in ‘Hands,’ the focalising consciousness first stands two steps removed from him and pieces together two consecutive sentences that each sketch out his social context before revealing aspects of his private self. First he is placed in his social context as the “son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the New Willard House,” and only then acknowledged as an individual capable of “form[ing] something like a friendship” with Wing Biddlebaum (9). In the next breath he is effectively re-introduced in light of his social function as “the reporter on the Winesburg Eagle” (9), and only then is he seen to possess individual autonomy sufficient to decide that he will “walk... along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum’s house” (9). Yet even now, despite this modicum of individual thought and action, the focalising consciousness conveys no sense of how old George might be—only later is he said to be “young” (10), and his youth is redefined as adolescence only when Wing treats him as a young man on the verge of adulthood (11)—so that, for most of ‘Hands,’ George remains little more than a cipher through whom the focalising consciousness can access the story of Wing Biddlebaum.

This changes, however, when Wing decides that he can no longer speak to George (11), and it is here that, for the first time in Winesburg, the focalising consciousness acknowledges George as entertaining an original thought: “[Wing’s] hands have something to do with his fear of me and of everyone” (11). More importantly, at this point, the focalising consciousness switches into overtly omniscient mode—“And George Willard was right” (11)—and proceeds to reveal Wing Biddlebaum’s haunted past. In doing so, it effectively responds to George’s suspicions of Wing’s past, which is to say that it places George closer to the narrative centre by taking his particular thought as an impetus for telling the remainder of the narrative. In ‘Hands,’ then, what we have is a story that opens with the ostensible aim of focusing on Wing Biddlebaum but becomes side-tracked by the presence of George Willard, introducing George in relation to the central figure of Wing but delivering its summary of Wing’s past on the basis of George’s suspicions. Immediately succeeding ‘The Book of the Grotesque,’ ‘Hands’ implicitly opens with the focalising consciousness on the lookout for the ‘young thing’ that will ameliorate its expressive difficulties—difficulties foregrounded three times over when the focalising consciousness positions itself as expressively inferior to a hypothetical “poet” (12, 14, 15)—and then introduces a man, Wing Biddlebaum, who is already attracted to one such ‘young thing’ and who thereby allows the focalising consciousness and the ‘young thing’ to cross paths. As their paths cross, the focalising consciousness slowly becomes fascinated with George and gradually familiarises itself with him as a means of working towards a state of intimacy—an intimacy that is extended, incrementally, in successive stories.

Yet the third story, ‘Paper Pills,’ does not feature George Willard at all. His absence here is significant, although its significance only becomes clear as we move on to the next three stories in which George does appear. The fourth story, ‘Mother,’ grants George a presence in its very title: to identify a woman as a ‘mother’ is to imply the existence of a child, and since the mother in this story is Elizabeth Willard, George is eponymous and thus central by implication. As such, ‘Mother’ picks up where ‘Hands’ leaves off, with the ostensible subject of the story being placed in relation to George rather than vice-versa. The story then proceeds to incrementally extend the intimacy obtained in ‘Hands’ by taking George beyond being able to think for himself and allowing him to explicitly voice his thoughts and to act upon them: “I thought I would take a walk,” he tells his mother (18) before he confesses his desire to leave Winesburg: “I don’t know where I shall go or what I shall do but I am going away” (21). The focalising consciousness seems to suggest that George’s adventurousness is a result of the clarity of thought possessed only by the young—and that George is therefore precisely the ‘young thing’ it seeks—when it communicates the burnt-out mother’s admiration for her son’s vitality in terms very similar to those in which it expressed its own thoughts of the old writer in ‘The Book of the Grotesque’: “Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow,” she thinks of her son. “It is the thing I let be killed in myself” (19).

Hereafter, ‘The Philosopher’ and ‘Nobody Knows’ further extend the intimacy obtained in ‘Hands’ and augmented in ‘Mother’ until George is more familiar to us than any other character in Winesburg and until all others are placed in relation to him. In ‘The Philosopher,’ for the first time, George not only thinks for himself about himself but also thinks critically about another person: he wonders if Dr. Parcival’s stories are all just “a pack of lies” (23), and, as the focalising consciousness tells us: “It seemed to the boy that the man [only wanted] to make everyone seem despicable” (25). Then, in ‘Nobody Knows,’ the focalising consciousness recognises George as an individual in his own right when it positions him as the protagonist and brings into the open his thoughts, his hopes, his fears, his affections—and, by bringing those things into the open, the focalising consciousness reaches the end of the first act in its own narrative. This act has little to do with George’s desire to leave Winesburg—which is, in any event, expressed only in ‘Mother’—and more to do with the desire of the focalising consciousness to obtain intimacy with George, step by step, throughout ‘Hands,’ ‘Mother,’ and ‘The Philosopher,’ until such intimacy is at last obtained in ‘Nobody Knows.’

The focalising consciousness’ interest in George is reinforced in the following stories, which, like ‘Mother,’ place other characters in relation to him and thus invest George with a tacit centrality even when he has little bearing on the narrative action. This tacit centrality is most conspicuous in ‘Tandy,’ where George is merely an observer of the narrative action whose presence is noted in no more than a single sentence (78). It receives the greatest emphasis ‘Adventure,’ which actually takes place before George has even been born, but in which the focalising consciousness notes the age of its subject, Alice Hindman, at the time of George’s boyhood (59) and specifies that, when Alice was younger, she took a lover who was, “like George Willard... employed on the Winesburg Eagle” (59). And, of course, George’s tacit centrality in the Winesburg stories after ‘Nobody Knows’ begins in the eleventh story, ‘A Man of Ideas,’ whose subject, Joe Welling, has his personal tribulations chronicled beginning with these words: “When George Willard had been for a year on the Winesburg Eagle, four things happened to Joe Welling...” (56).

However, the transition from ‘Nobody Knows’ to ‘A Man of Ideas’—the distance between George’s emphatic arrival at the centre of Winesburg and his tacit centrality in ‘Tandy,’ ‘Adventure,’ and other stories—is disrupted by the four consecutive parts of ‘Godliness’ that are not concerned with him at all. The intimacy obtained in ‘Nobody Knows’ thus plummets into an absence akin to, but more prolonged and more severe than, his absence in ‘Paper Pills.’ This is significant because if the focalising consciousness incrementally obtains intimacy with George throughout the first ten stories in Winesburg, then George’s absence in ‘Paper Pills’ represents a behavioural anomaly in that narrative arc which the four parts of ‘Godliness’ transform into a behavioural pattern—and wherever there is a pattern of behaviour enacted in response to a single subject, there is revealed a disposition towards that subject and thus the basis of a personality.

“As the streets [in Winesburg] le[a]d to each other, and all [branch off] from Main Street,” as William Philips writes, “so one scrap of action [leads] to another, and each ha[s] some reference to George Willard” (28). But with regard to ‘Godliness,’ this is manifestly untrue—unless, of course, the action that has reference to George is the focalising consciousness’ abandonment of him immediately after the intimacy of ‘Nobody Knows,’ which abandonment also has reference to the focalising consciousness itself. This abandonment, while temporary, has long been conspicuous—Irving Howe argued in 1951 that ‘Godliness’ “do[es] not fit into” the text (106)—and it is clearly part of a deliberate strategy because, as Judy Jo Small writes, the four parts of ‘Godliness’ were specifically inserted here into Winesburg without having been previously published (87). Moreover, this abandonment manifests again in ‘Adventure,’ ‘The Strength of God,’ and ‘The Untold Lie,’ each of which shows the focalising consciousness retreating from George immediately after extending its intimacy with him, and thereby shows the focalising consciousness oscillating between a closeness to George and a distance from him in a pattern of behaviour that recurs throughout the text.

This pattern is more easily perceptible when visualised. To that end, let us say that George appears in the Winesburg stories with several distinct degrees of involvement. Although Ray Lewis White identifies three such degrees of involvement—no involvement at all, a secondary involvement by which George becomes “somehow affected” by the narrative action, and a primary involvement by which “he is without question a principal character” (36)—I believe there are at least five:

1. George does not appear in the narrative at all.

2. George appears in the narrative only as a background character or else as a wholly passive foreground observer.

3. George is somehow drawn into or implicated in the narrative action without actually becoming an effective participant in it.

4. George does participate in the narrative action but only as a secondary character engaging with the protagonist, not as the protagonist himself.

5. George becomes the protagonist and actively participates in the narrative action.

If each of these degrees of involvement were to receive a corresponding grade from one to five, a visual representation of George’s involvement from story to story would look something like this:

The pattern should be evident, entailing a cycle of approach and retreat. The peaks in this graph, denoting the periodical positioning of George as protagonist throughout Winesburg, suggest that the focalising consciousness holds an ongoing fascination with and attraction to George and that it thus wants to draw close to him. At the same time, though, the troughs—almost all of which denote George’s complete absence immediately after his positioning as protagonist—suggest that, whenever the focalising consciousness does draw close to George, it retreats as if it has drawn too close.

Noticeably, of course, there are exceptions to the pattern, which increase in frequency as the text unfolds. After playing a major role in ‘The Thinker,’ George is less involved but not rendered entirely absent in ‘Tandy’ and ‘The Strength of God,’ and his involvement is again reduced without being revoked in ‘Loneliness’ following his role as protagonist in ‘Teacher’ and preceding his return as protagonist in ‘Awakening.’ Similarly, although ‘Awakening’ is followed by George’s absence in ‘The Untold Lie,’ the focalising consciousness’ retreat from George is buffered by George’s walk-on role in ‘“Queer”,’ and, finally, after returning George to prominence in ‘Death,’ the focalising consciousness obtains intimacy with him in ‘Sophistication’ and manages at last to sustain that intimacy through to ‘Departure.’ What the above graph reveals, then, is essentially a focalising consciousness riven by a palpable anxiety—an entity torn between a sought-after proximity to the ‘young thing’ it glimpses in ‘The Book of the Grotesque’ and a flight from that ‘young thing’ whenever it acquires proximity. The peaks in the graph represent that proximity while the troughs represent the subsequent flight—and yet, crucially, the focalising consciousness seems to increasingly master the anxiety with which it is burdened insofar as the troughs become shallower and shorter after ‘Adventure.’ “[T]hroughout Winesburg,” writes Edwin Fussell, “runs the slow and often hidden current of George Willard’s growth toward maturity; often the stream is subterranean and we are surprised to see where it comes out; sometimes it appears to lose itself in backwaters of irrelevance” (43). In fact, though, there is nothing “irrelevan[t]” about those “backwaters,” since they are precisely what disclose the personality of the entity who is charting and navigating the “current” of George Willard. If that entity is, in a sense, continually yearning to approach George Willard but hesitant to do so for any length of time, those “backwaters”—the troughs between the peaks—are effectively the moments at which it distances itself from George, draws a deep breath, and summons up the courage to approach him once more and to stay by his side.

Share

This holds important implications for Winesburg as a whole, in that it renders the entire text performative rather than descriptive and so allows the overall “group of stories” to demonstrate the afflictions that the individual stories only depict. Beyond simply telling the tales of grotesques who are drawn to George Willard but hesitate to actually approach him, the text is assembled by an entity that is, so to speak, cut from the same cloth as the grotesques. Wing Biddlebaum senses that he can only let his guard down in the presence of George Willard and yet finds himself unable to do so when he encounters George, and the same is largely true of the focalising consciousness that seeks out the ‘young thing’ but cannot draw close to George and remain close to him.

Joe Welling, we are told, “was... subject to [psychological] fits, [such that] a fit may come upon him suddenly and blow him away into a strange uncanny... state” (53), and the same is again essentially true of the focalising consciousness whose continual fascination with George is repeatedly interrupted by a retreat from him. “It goes without saying,” writes Edwin Fussell, “that the emotions [explored in Winesburg] are loneliness and incompletion, particularly as these emotions take their source from some failure of affection or of creative expression” (39), and later critics have since granted this sentiment a central place in Winesburg scholarship (Weinstein 92): Malcolm Cowley, for instance, writes that the ‘grotesques’ “have been distorted... by their inability to express themselves,” so that most of them “are attracted one by one to George Willard [in hopes] that he might be able to help them” (58). But, more often than not, their own inarticulate nature gets the better of them and forces them to retreat from him, so that, as David Stouck writes, “inarticulate characters in a moment of passion [repeatedly] wave their hands in the air and burst into a run” (44). Doctor Parcival launches into an impulsive monologue in the presence of George (23-6), as does Wash Williams (66-8). Seth Richmond’s “habitual silence” (72) is not actually broken by George but is fuelled by his presence, while Kate Swift’s approach to George is “unpremeditated” (87), as is her later return to him for a second confession after her first attempt at confession ends with a retreat: “The impulse that had driven her out into the snow poured itself out in talk” (90). Insofar as the progression from story to story in Winesburg also entails a cycle of approach and retreat, the text as a whole represents a single Winesburg story writ large with the focalising consciousness in place of a grotesque; or, better, the grotesques’ approach to George Willard as a conduit for the expression of something inexpressible is projected onto the entire text via a focalising consciousness that approaches George in the same way and for similar ends. Winesburg, then, does not merely explore the state of mind of the grotesques across a number of stories, but rather, in the totality of the stories it contains and in their original sequence, the text performs the grotesques’ state of mind. Winesburg as a whole enacts and embodies the essential core of its individual components.

It is for this reason that I think of Winesburg as something besides a work of small-town naturalism: namely, an example of the literary formalisation of obsession in a small-town setting. By the literary formalisation of obsession, I mean that Winesburg is not just a text about an obsessive personality but one which inscribes that personality into its literary form. It is a work of literature so thoroughly about an obsession with a particular subject on the part of its focalising consciousness that its form discloses an obsessive personality even when an apparently unrelated subject enters its field of focalisation. On the one hand, the focalising consciousness of Winesburg is fascinated to an obsessive degree with George Willard as a possible outlet for its expressive difficulties. On the other hand, in its repeated retreat from George, the focalising consciousness fixates upon others—the grotesques—who share its expressive difficulties and its consequent fascination with George. In other words, there is a cross-referentiality between its looking at George and its looking away, so that George is at all times on its mind. Whether we read Winesburg with an eye towards George’s role throughout the various stories or with an eye towards the grotesques who populate them, George and the grotesques alike point towards the focalising consciousness, its expressive difficulties, and its ongoing attraction to either the one individual who is best able to ameliorate those difficulties or the plurality of individuals who seem to share both its difficulties and its attraction. Precisely what the focalising consciousness feels the urge to express we will never know, since it manages to approach George only at the very end of the text just as he leaves Winesburg behind him. But what it yearns to express is ultimately less important than the expressive difficulties through which it acquires an obsession with those very difficulties and with one possible means of amelioration, since this obsession is what locates Winesburg in a literary tradition distinct from that of small-town naturalism.

I would not say that the literary formalisation of obsession has a clearly discernible history, but amongst the progenitors of the tradition I would name the first-person stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the ‘K’ stories of Franz Kafka. While Poe’s stories purport to be the work of a sane narrator, they repeatedly flirt with a descent into madness and thus, in totality and by repetition, disclose a focalising consciousness so obsessed with madness that his very obsession effectively renders him mad. In much the same way, and again in totality and by repetition, Kafka’s stories of a man named ‘K’ forever attempting to escape from oppression disclose a focalising consciousness so obsessed with such oppression that it weighs upon his mind even in the heat of the escape. However, further to naming these two progenitors of the literary formalisation of obsession, I would make note of three more recent texts which, like Winesburg, recognisably straddle the overlap between formalised obsession and a naturalistic depiction of small-town life—texts that are not confined to America, but are much more global in nature.

Alice Munro has spent some sixty years writing stories of life as a young woman in the small towns of her native Canada. “Here’s the story [she] keeps telling,” as Jonathan Franzen observes:

A bright, sexually avid girl grows up in rural Ontario without much money, her mother is sickly or dead, her father is a schoolteacher whose second wife is problematic, and the girl, as soon as she can, escapes from the hinterland by way of a scholarship or some decisive self-interested act. She marries young, moves to British Columbia, raises kids, and is far from blameless in the breakup of her marriage. ... When, inevitably, she returns to Ontario, she finds the landscape of her youth unsettlingly altered. Although she was the one who abandoned the place, it’s a great blow to her narcissism that she isn’t warmly welcomed back. (‘Alice’s Wonderland.’)

“And that’s pretty much it,” Franzen concludes. “[T]he same elements recur and recur,” and their ‘recurrent recurrence’ is precisely the point: in totality—but particularly in collections such as Lives of Girls and Women, The Beggar Maid, and Runaway—these stories disclose a focalising consciousness that is obsessively drawn towards women unable to escape their small-town origins and is itself unable to escape the confines of the small town because it is unable to shake its obsession with such women.

The same is largely true of the stories of Tim Winton, set on the remote coasts of Western Australia, and especially the stories brought together in The Turning. Nine of the seventeen stories in that collection revolve around the character of Vic Lang, once the son of a small-town policeman and now caught in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Like the women who recur in Munro’s stories, Vic at once remains nostalgic about his life in a small town and yet yearns to dismiss his memories of it. He is a classically Andersonian grotesque—when he tells his wife about a chance encounter with a long-lost school friend, he admits that he found himself unable to talk to the man because “[i]t suddenly got too... complicated” (301)—and, accordingly, the focalising consciousness of The Turning proves likewise, as the eight stories that do not feature Vic Lang do feature characters who are either similarly wallowing in a past that has metastasised into a middle-aged obsession or else trapped in a small-town youth that will doom them to such an obsession when they reach middle-age.

What is true for small-town Canada and Australia as well as small-town America is also true for small-town Ireland in the Bagot stories in Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection. Now in middle-age, Mr. and Mrs. Bagot continue to be haunted a traumatic incident from their past: the loss of an infant son shortly after childbirth. Although the trauma is never vocalised, it is obsessively brought to mind whenever the Bagots turn their attention to their two young daughters, Lily and Margaret, who effectively foreground the perpetual absence of the child that would have been their elder sibling. In much the same way, the focalising consciousness of the Bagot stories dwells over the absent child by dwelling over the two girls, with its obsessive personality disclosed via the repeated punctuation of a prolonged silence with the obtrusive recollection and restatement of a trauma that has already been carefully detailed. Mrs. Bagot, we are told in the first story, “was very thin to be the mother of three children, one of them dead,” after which we are introduced to the two surviving children: “Lily was six and Margaret was four” (204). Then, in the next story, the girls are reintroduced with particular attention paid to their advancing ages and thus to the prolonged absence of their dead sibling: “Lily Bagot, who was seven, had the day off from school...” (220) and “Margaret, who was five, was in bed with a cold” (221). Then, two stories later, the girls are reintroduced in the same way: “There were only two children—Lily, who was nine, and Margaret, who was seven” (245). The trauma of the loss of Mrs. Bagot’s son, which is contained but not expressly articulated in the phrase “only two children,” is brought to the fore in the fifth of the eight stories about the Bagots, ‘The Eldest Child’ (252-60), but otherwise it remains unremarked upon and yet forever foregrounded as the focalising consciousness of the stories obsessively details the physical development and deterioration of the family members who have survived it.

So the kaleidoscope turns and, with an adjustment to its focus encouraging us to look towards its formal rather than its stylistic approach to small-town life, a different set of texts coalesces around Winesburg, Ohio and locates it in a different literary tradition. Again, I would not suggest that Winesburg directly inspired or exerted a demonstrable influence upon subsequent and formally similar texts; I mean only to show that, when we focus on its textual form, it obtains a place amongst texts more diverse than those with which it is usually associated and thus becomes a text of greater versatility. While the various portraits of George Willard and his fellow denizens in the town of Winesburg remain integral to the text, the form of Winesburg is equally integral such that to focus on the form is to understand the text as much more than an exploration of inarticulate loneliness or an exercise in literary portraiture. The textual form is what makes Winesburg about more than the words on the page and instead about the consciousness that has put the words on the page: a consciousness that is itself confined to the town of Winesburg, Ohio, but that belongs to a society of similar consciousnesses who inhabit texts scattered across a literary landscape of global extent.

Share

Works Cited

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. Eds. Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. Print.

Brennan, Maeve. The Springs of Affection. London: Flamingo, 2000. Print.

Cowley, Malcolm. ‘Introduction to Winesburg, Ohio.’ 1960. New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. John W. Crowley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 49-58. Print.

Crowley, John W., ed. New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print.

Franzen, Jonathan. ‘Alice’s Wonderland.’ The New York Times Book Review. New York Times Co., 14 November 2004. <http://www.nytimes.com/ 2004/11/14/books/review/14COVERFR.html?pagewanted=all>. Web.

Fussell, Edwin. ‘Winesburg, Ohio: Art and Isolation.’ New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. John W. Crowley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 39-48. Print.

Gennette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Print.

Howe, Irving. Sherwood Anderson. London: Methuen, 1951. Print.

Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971. Print.

Jacobson, Marcia. ‘Winesburg, Ohio and the Autobiographical Moment.’ New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. John W. Crowley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 53-72. Print.

Lawry, Jon S. ‘The Arts of Winesburg and Bidwell, Ohio.’ Twentieth Century Literature 23.1 (Feb. 1977): 53-66. Print.

Munro, Alice. The Beggar Maid. 1978. London: Vintage, 2004. Print.
 —. Lives of Girls and Women. 1971. London: Penguin, 1982. Print.
—. Runaway. 2004. London: Vintage, 2005. Print.

Papinchak, Robert Allen. Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Print.

Phillips, William L. ‘How Sherwood Anderson Wrote Winesburg, Ohio.’ 1951. New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. John W. Crowley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 18-38. Print.

Rideout, Walter B., ed. Sherwood Anderson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Print.
 —. ‘The Simplicity of Winesburg, Ohio.’ Winesburg, Ohio. Eds. Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. 169-77. Print.

Small, Judy Jo. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson. New York: G.K. Hall, 1994. Print.

Stegner, Wallace. The Writer’s Art: A Collection of Short Stories, Volume 6. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972. Print.

Stouck, David. ‘Winesburg, Ohio and the Failure of Art.’ Twentieth-Century Literature 15.3 (October 1969): 145-51. Print.

Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Print.

White, Ray Lewis. Winesburg, Ohio: An Exploration. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Print.

Winton, Tim. The Turning. 2004. London: Pan Macmillan, 2006. Print.

Subscribe now

In the months building up to the publication of the first issue of Marvel’s Civil War, and once again on the front cover of that issue, readers were asked a question that served as the tagline for the series as a whole: “Whose side are you on?” Following the passage of the Superhero Registration Act and its requirement that all Marvel superheroes subject themselves to government oversight and accountability, the two sides available for readers to establish a sense of allegiance were, of course, the supporters of registration, led by Iron Man, and the opponents of registration, led by Captain America. But the stylistic simplicity of that question—those five words offering only a binary choice—whitewashed the moral and political complexity of the issue at hand, suggesting that the matter of choosing a side in this conflict would be, for readers, inevitable and therefore obligatory, and in any event straightforward. The only hint of the possibility that one might remain impartial or ambivalent towards the issue of registration appeared halfway through the series when Dr. Strange refused to take a side and remarked that “[t]here is no right or wrong in this debate” (Millar et al 150). Aside from those words, the absence of all traces of acceptable neutrality elsewhere in the series effectively coerced readers, by the omission of political options, into taking a stance on registration and choosing one set of heroes to side with.

But on what basis, exactly, were readers supposed to choose which set of heroes to side with? Some readers were no doubt guided by emotions and affections to simply take the side of their favourite characters almost reflexively and without careful thought. It is easy, and almost instinctual, to know oneself as a reader with a soft spot for Spider-Man, for example, and then to follow his lead as he chooses a side in the conflict. Other readers, conversely, were perhaps guided more by reason and ended up taking the side of the characters who put forth the most persuasive justification for their own political stances, regardless of whether or not those characters are in any way likeable. To speak personally on this issue, while I have always found Iron Man a more compelling character than Captain America, I felt that Steve Rogers made a more persuasive case for resisting superhero registration than Tony Stark did for supporting it. But then, of course, there must have been some readers who found themselves little moved by either personalities or persuasion—readers as uninterested in playing favourites as in following superheroic discourses—insofar as they held fast to certain political principles prior to opening the first issue of Civil War, and they simply sided with whichever heroes espoused, adopted, and defended them.

Across the existing critical analyses of the series, regardless of whether many critics would number themselves among the latter category of readers, there exists now a broad consensus that, at the very least, the characters involved in the conflict over superhero registration were guided by political principles and that, for readers, the two sides were intended to allegorise arguments over political principles in cultural discourses contemporaneous to the publication of the comics. For instance, as Rebecca Wanzo puts it, the conflict that split apart the Marvel Universe arose “from post-9/11 debates about the patriot act and citizen surveillance” (93). More specifically, as Francisco Veloso and John Bateman write, “Civil War is not rooted in the conflict of good versus evil personified by heroes and villains, but is instead motivated by a conflict of values and challenges to the system mirroring well both the landscape of dissent surrounding the PATRIOT Act and the need not to alienate potential dissenters” (431). For the readers as well as “numerous media sources” who followed the serialised ups and downs of the conflict throughout late 2006 and early 2007, its aftermath seemed to be, as Bond Benton observes,

a thinly veiled (and some might suggest hackneyed) attempt to create a metaphor for the concerns of a population increasingly uncomfortable with both the power and judgment of its government. ... Politically motivated opportunists preying on the fears of a nation? A conflict based in part on questionable intelligence, arguably lies? [It] appears to be a fairly transparent effort to parallel the debates over the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, the Bush domestic surveillance program and other controversial programs in the post-September 11 period in the United States. (75-76)

Benton goes on to characterise the conflict as one that stems from a principled disagreement between those heroes who see registration as “a responsible obligation” and those who oppose it “on the grounds that it violates civil liberties and threatens the privacy constitutionally guaranteed to all citizens” (79), while similar views have been expressed in almost identical terms by Veloso and Bateman (430) as well as Travis Langley (426) and Jason Dittmer (150). Langley even builds his principled analysis of the conflict on the political theorisations of Erich Fromm, while Dittmer alone concedes that there may be something too convenient, too contrived, about the discourse from which the conflict erupted. He argues that by forcing superheroes to either support or oppose registration, Civil War presents readers with what Veloso and Bateman call “a dichotomy of values” which finally advances a “reductionist” view of some extraordinarily complex political issues (431).

But while that may be the case for readers, skewing our ability to choose a side in the conflict on the basis of informed deliberation, the same cannot be said of the characters involved in the conflict. After all, every law, real or hypothetical, is essentially reductionist, since everyone to whom it applies must at bottom either be for it as it is passed or against it as it is passed, without occupying any middle ground except in purely rhetorical terms. Yet even if some readers of Civil War were guided towards choosing a side on the basis of political principle, why should the above critics assume that the superheroes would do likewise? Although Captain America and Iron Man and their respective followers may have occasionally professed to be adhering to principles whose violation they cannot abide, why should critics not take a critical approach to what these characters say? Why, in other words, have we so far overlooked the extent to which the various superheroes chose sides in the conflict on the basis of rational self-interest rather than principle? And, to follow on from that, why not consider which aspects of registration and the registration legislation might have affected the self-interests of different superheroes in different ways so as to move some heroes to support it while others rebelled against it?

In these pages, I look at several problems with the Superhero Registration Act to argue that political principle played very little role in the choosing of sides in Civil War, and that, as a result, to read the series as an allegory of its contemporaneous political discourses is to downplay, if not wholly dismiss, the particularities of and variations between the characters involved in it. Another way of saying this is that the focus on the series’ political allegorisation is sustainable only by a continued abandonment of interest in the subtleties, the artistry, and the requirements of its narrative. Given the series’ political context and its overtly political content, of course, it may seem counterintuitive to advance an argument of this sort, but I hope to advance it by first considering both sides of the registration divide and then focusing on why the dissenters are moved to dissent and, more specifically, why their particular natures, their particular powers and origins, offer them much stronger motivations to dissent than their politics do. I eventually arrive at case studies of five major heroes affected by registration in different ways—Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, and Spider-Man—in order to look at the particular problems each of them faces as a result of the registration legislation. Overall, then, I do not contend that criticism of and opposition to the Superhero Registration Act are somehow misguided, but I do intend to suggest and to show that they rest on shaky foundations when grounded in the rhetoric of political principles at the expense of an analysis of the circumstantial particularities of those involved in the registration dispute.

Share

As readers unaffected by the drama of Civil War, watching events unfold from the extradiegetic space of the text, it is easy for us to side against the Superhero Registration Act for any one of a number of reasons: because it practices a form of legislative persecution, because its legal validity is questionable if not altogether disputable, and, of course, because its implementation cannot be categorised as anything less than catastrophic. Opponents of the act might feel that it possesses anti-humanistic associations, as Travis Langley notes (429-430), given the history of comparable registration acts already passed in the Marvel Universe. As these acts have typically targeted the mutant population, they have been driven less by political principle than by bigotry towards minority groups, and the Superhero Registration Act may be simply a larger scale expression of the same brute fears that led to their passage. Or opponents might simply contend that the act is plainly unconstitutional. Like Bond Benton (79), some might view the requirement that superheroes reveal their secret identities as a violation of fundamental guarantees of personal privacy—even though such guarantees are only implied, not explicitly enumerated, in the United States Constitution—while others might share my view that it is unconstitutional because it undercuts the Constitution by legitimising unconstitutional behavior, offering official legal sanction to administrators of justice who operate far outside the justice system established in the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution. Or, finally, opponents might point out that the implementation of the act unleashed extraordinary chaos and carnage, and that its supporters made ethically dubious responses to the resistance it attracted. These responses include, after all, genetically manipulating Thor without his consent (Millar et al 94) as well as effectively offering amnesty to mass-murdering supervillains (Millar et al 101-102) and creating a prison in the Negative Zone specifically to house political opponents. They also include, most egregiously, the hypocritical determination of the act’s supporters to remain above the law: “I just read [the President] the Riot Act,” Reed Richards tells Tony Stark, “and told him I wouldn’t play a part in our big finale unless I had an absolute guarantee that Sue and Johnny wouldn’t face arrest. ... He said he’d give us twelve immunities” (Millar et al 140). Even without being privy to the text of the act, then, readers of Civil War have no shortage of good reasons to oppose it.

If this is the case, however, then on what grounds does the act receive support? The event used to justify the passage of the act is the massacre of school children at the hands of villains who are provoked to attack innocents by the media-hungry New Warriors. The implications are that irresponsible superheroism resulted in the deaths of the very people who were supposed to be protected by heroes, and that superheroic behaviour must therefore be subject to government approval and oversight. But a close reading of Civil War reveals that there are more reasons than this one behind the support for registration. In fact, by my count, there are at least three other reasons given for supporting it. The first reason is voiced by Goliath, despite his opposition to registration, when he acknowledges that registration may be justified by “Philly getting bombed” and “the Hulk trashing Vegas” (Millar et al 15), references to the Winter Soldier’s metropolitan firebombing of Philadelphia in Captain America #6 and #8 (Brubaker et al) and the Hulk’s rampage through Nevada in Fantastic Four #533-535 (Straczynski et al). Registration, from this perspective, institutes a means of controlling carnage caused by superheroes rather than by supervillains. The second reason is voiced by the mother of one of the children killed in the New Warriors incident, a woman who spits on Tony Stark and disparages his private funding of superheroes. “Who’s been telling kids for years that they can live outside the law as long as they’re wearing tights?” she asks him. “Joe Billionaire here says all you need are some powers and a badass attitude, and you can have a place in his private super-gang” (Millar et al 17-18). Registration therefore also institutes a means of diminishing the privatisation and implicit corruption of the United States justice system. The third reason is voiced by Tony Stark himself, when he concedes that the New Warriors have done discredit to superheroes en masse and he says that registration is a way of “making [superheroes] more legitimate. Why shouldn’t we be better-trained and publicly accountable?” (Millar et al 22). “[R]egulating our behavior,” he admits elsewhere, is in fact “[t]he compromise we offered [SHIELD and the federal government]” (Millar et al 117) in order to secure what is elsewhere referred to as a way of “giving us all a future” (Millar et al 130). Registration thus garners supporters by virtue of its potential to legitimise otherwise illegitimate superheroic activity. But since none of these reasons for supporting registration are exactly equatable to the reasons for which the passage of the registration legislation is justified in the wake of the New Warriors debacle, their expression suggests that registration has a more nuanced and multifaceted set of justifications and thus a broader base of support than it may at first appear to possess. And since these qualities do not allow opponents of registration to write it off simply by excusing or rationalising the New Warriors debacle, supporters of registration are able to characterise themselves as pragmatists while tarring their opponents as fools who are “not meeting new contingencies” and remain “living in the past” (Veloso and Bateman 438).

In fact, however, opponents of registration have a very pragmatic reason for taking their position. They, too, have three grounds for objection, three lines of argument which have little to do with principled defenses of civil liberties and rights to privacy. Firstly, as several heroes point out, registration is non-consensual and so, to a large extent, coercive with an element of indentured servitude to it: Sue Storm describes it to Namor as “a superhuman draft” (Millar et al 142) while, elsewhere, Luke Cage describes it as tantamount to slavery and segregation (Bendis et al 2-3). Secondly, building on this aspect of registration are the concerns that its establishment of a formal alliance between superheroes and the government—the breaking of which is a punishable offense for the heroes—empowers the government to define the purposes towards which superheroic activities should be directed. Captain America describes it as de facto contract employment in a fledgling government militia, a slippery slope towards superheroes receiving proactive assignments from government agencies rather than independently engaging in responsive action when faced with a destabilisation of the existing social order: “Superheroes need to stay above that stuff,” he says, “or Washington starts telling us who the supervillains are” (Millar et al 26). Thirdly, though, it is the likely response of supervillains towards the registration of superheroes that most strongly leads some heroes to oppose registration—and in this reason for opposition lies the heart of the problem.

Prior to revealing his secret identity, Spider-Man voices concerns about using coercion to force all other heroes to reveal theirs. He worries that by exposing himself, by making his private self public, he will incur reprisals from supervillains targeting his private life. Sue Storm, before she becomes an opponent of registration, tries to reassure him: “The secret identity thing isn’t such a big deal,” she says. “The Fantastic Four have been public since the very beginning, and it’s never really been a serious concern” (Millar et al 23). But Spider-Man remains rightly unconvinced. “Yeah, well,” he replies, “[it’s] not [a concern] until that day I come home and find my wife impaled on an octopus arm and the woman who raised me begging for her life” (Millar et al 23). His anxieties are echoed in that conversation by Daredevil, and, in a later scene, Captain America warns Maria Hill that despite his own more principled opposition to registration, most of the resistance is coming from “the heroes who work close to the streets like Daredevil and Luke Cage” (Millar et al 25). Far from matters of political principle, then, the foremost problem with the Superhero Registration Act seems to be that the act itself is too principled, too committed to total and absolute registration, too weak in terms of pragmatic application, to distinguish between the different types of villains that different heroes customarily face and to consider how those villains might react differently towards those heroes if the heroes’ identities were to be exposed. It is easy for Sue Storm to say that having one’s secret identity made public “isn’t such a big deal” because she and the remaining members of the Fantastic Four customarily face large-scale and generally depersonalised threats. Galactus, Thanos, Doctor Doom, and the Mole Man all occupy a level of supervillainy far removed from the day-to-day and face-to-face contact with the people they seek to harm and the heroes who seek to stop them: they operate, respectively, on intergalactic, cosmic, international, and subterranean scales, not on the metropolitan or urban scales of more petty supervillains. For Spider-Man and Daredevil, however, it is far less easy to say that the revelation of one’s secret identity is of little consequence. Dr. Octopus, the Vulture, Bullseye, the Kingpin, and others of their ilk are one-on-one antagonists with no-holds-barred personal vendettas against the heroes they cross, villains who would not hesitate to launch personal reprisals against Peter Parker, Matt Murdock, and heroes of their stature. On this side of the superhero divide, as Veloso and Bateman write, “the opinion is constructed that the means are not justified by the ends” (438), rendering universal and mandatory superhero registration a disproportionate means of regulating superheroic activity.

This is where readers first catch a glimpse of the major fault in the Superhero Registration Act: its foundation on the principle of universal registration leaves it ill-equipped to make room for the circumstantial particularities of each member of the vast pantheon of heroes in the Marvel Universe, and as a result it incites a rebellion against registration among those heroes whose particularities would make them the most adversely affected by a revelation of secret identities. If we, as readers, acknowledge the pre-existing self-interests of the various superheroes prior to giving any credibility to the principled positions they espouse, adopt, and defend, then we must also acknowledge that the Civil War is driven by forces that exist prior to, and are entirely independent of, whatever allegorical meaning we may read into the resultant political conflict. Ironically, among the supporters of registration there was one who identified a problem similar to the problem of the diversity of superheroic self-interests before the conflict erupted. As Travis Langley notes,

[a]fter Congress proposes superhero registration in Fantastic Four #335 and wants Reed Richards, leader of the Fantastic Four, to develop superhuman detection technology, Richards speaks before a congressional panel in the following issue to argue the philosophical problem with such a proposal and to demonstrate the sheer impracticality of establishing operational criteria for defining and detecting any superpowers. (430)

This is, of course, typical of Reed Richards, missing the forest for the trees by worrying over the scientific problems with detecting a diversity of superpowers rather than worrying over the responses to registration on the part of diverse superheroes facing diverse supervillains. But when we recognise this problem at the heart of the Civil War, this failure to respect particularities and differences in a law that applies equally to radically different people, related problems become apparent elsewhere. How can it be the case, for instance, that the Winter Soldier’s firebombing of Philadelphia and the Hulk’s rampage through Las Vegas are sufficiently equatable to the New Warriors’ provocation of supervillains so as to equally justify superhero registration? It is true that the New Warriors acted irresponsibly, and perhaps even to an extent that warrants some regulation. The Winter Soldier, however, firebombed Philadelphia under the control of the villainous General Lukin, not acting as an independent superhero and therefore not subject to the Superhero Registration Act at all, and the Hulk rampaged through Las Vegas because Nick Fury and SHIELD tricked him into going to Nevada, which effectively leaves those government representatives as culpable for the destruction as the Hulk himself—and as responsible as the New Warriors for the provocation of a disaster. More intriguingly, though, when the problem of simplistically equating disparate superheroes causes troubles for the supporters of registration, those troubles are explicitly aired but then brushed aside rather than resolved. “I just can’t understand why our Thor-clone killed a man,” Ant-Man complains after Tony Stark’s genetic monstrosity electrocutes Goliath. “Is he missing a human conscience? Do we need to fuse him with Donald Blake or Jake Olson to have him function properly?” (Millar et al 101). These are the sorts of questions that Stark and his supporters should have been asking before adopting their preferred stance on registration—as are corollary questions such as how the Thor clone could be physically and psychologically bound to the terms of registration, and who exactly would be so bound if he was indeed fused with another person.

Share

Civil War is rife with these and other difficulties, double-binds, and absurdities, all arising from the disjuncture between an absolutist law and the particularities of superheroic self-interests. One need only look at some of the more prominent Marvel superheroes in order to further illustrate the point, and to see how further variations on this disjuncture cause an already problematic law to collapse under the incompatibility of its principled strictures with its practical application.

Consider, first of all, Iron Man. Supporting registration ostensibly as a means of legitimising superheroic behaviour, he cannot adopt this position purely as a matter of principle or out of disinterested pragmatism, since he, above all other superheroes in the Marvel Universe, is the one most likely to adopt exactly this position, the one most guided towards this position by his own vested interests. Because Iron Man’s superpowers are self-developed and externalised, created by Tony Stark and separable from his body in a way that offers him the possibility of not acting as a superhero at all, Iron Man by definition operates outside the justice system established in the Constitution and therefore operates above the law. This brand of superheroic behaviour gives Stark the greatest possible incentive to support registration as a means of legitimising superheroism—superheroism in general, as well as his own brand—so that, far from leading a moral crusade in support of registration, Stark’s self-interest drives him to ameliorate his “tense relationships with the government” (Veloso and Bateman 430) by obtaining governmental legitimisation of his heretofore unregulated use of advanced weaponry. His history and his superheroic particularities effectively foreclosed the possibility of Stark ever speaking out against the Superhero Registration Act. For series writer Mark Millar, it would have been implausible to have Stark behave any other way.

Captain America, on the other hand, adopts an opposing position on the issue of registration largely because his distinct self-interests lead him into doing so. As a “sickly boy transformed by American medical ingenuity to become a peerless soldier” (Benton 76), Steve Rogers’ superheroic particularities were sanctioned by the American government from the very beginning. Francisco Veloso and John Bateman contend that, because Captain America “gained his powers as part of an experiment carried out by the US Government to create super-soldiers who could win the war against Germany,” “having him as a leader against the Registration Act brings interesting overtones” to Civil War (430)—with ‘interesting’ here connoting something surprising about his opposition to registration. But Captain America was always destined to oppose registration in much the same way that Iron Man was destined to support it because, in the 1940s, his creation by the very government that now requires registration prospectively invested him with the legitimacy that registration would now otherwise afford him. In other words, he does not need the one thing that the Superhero Registration Act offers to those who abide by it because he has possessed as much from the moment of his creation, which leaves him absolved of the incentive to register that motivates the self-created Iron Man. Indeed, the requirements of the Superhero Registration Act may well be unconstitutional when applied to Captain America because they are tantamount to ex post facto demands, entailing a governmental about-face on the issue of registration which effectively invalidates the informed consent that Steve Rogers must have granted the government before he submitted himself to the super soldier serum all those decades ago. For Captain America, then, registration is redundant at best and, at worst, illegal—and so, in any event, it is not something he would ever support, regardless of whatever political principles he might hold.

Other difficulties with the Superhero Registration Act become apparent in the cases of heroes like Thor and the Hulk, both of whom do not have secret identities to be revealed so much as they have double identities that raise questions of legal culpability. It is true, of course, that neither of these heroes appears in Civil War, since the Hulk has been exiled to the planet Sakaar (see Pak et al) and Thor is technically dead before the conflict erupts, but the Superhero Registration Act is nevertheless complicated by their very existence in several important ways. Early in J. Michael Straczynski’s relaunch of the Thor comic series, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of Civil War, Thor relocates the Kingdom of Asgard to rural Oklahoma and so attracts the ire of an increasingly authoritarian Iron Man. “Things have changed around here while you were—gone,” Iron Man tells him. “It’s real simple, Thor. You either work with the government, for the government, or you’re against the government. There’s no middle ground” (Straczynski et al, “Everything Old” 6). But how can a deistic entity like Thor possibly count as a citizen to be bound by the laws of a single human nation? Indeed, how could he be bound any more than God himself or, at the other end of the legal spectrum, an animal lacking all understanding of human legal responsibility? Thor dwells in an entirely different realm to that of mankind and its laws—and, more importantly, the fact that the law requires force in order to be upheld means that those who possess superior force can simply evade or disregard the law.

This is the lesson that Iron Man quickly learns when Thor refuses to comply with registration and backs up his refusal with a display of force that leaves Iron Man decimated. In response, Iron Man accepts that there may be a “compromise position” after all. “If we treat Asgard as a separate entity, like a diplomatic mission or embassy, then it’s not officially United States territory,” he says, and “[t]hat would put Asgard and anyone who lives there outside of the jurisdiction of the Registration Act” (15). As Iron Man admits, this is a rationalisation intended above all to make sure that his superiors “don’t lose face” (15), particularly since it merely plays semantics with the definition of United States territory, but it highlights the point that entities like Thor—entities who are not really human, let alone superhuman—cannot be bound by the Superhero Registration Act because their use of superpowers is part of their essential nature, as much as sleeping, eating, and breathing are a part of ours. The only way that Thor could possibly be subject to the act is if registration was forced upon Donald Blake so as to regulate his transformation into Thor, but this situation would not involve the registration of the superhero himself—and this point applies also to entities such as the Hulk, with added complications. To the extent that Bruce Banner’s transformation into the Hulk is involuntary, can Banner be justifiably held responsible for the actions of the Hulk, including the rampage through Las Vegas, and can he therefore also be subject to registration? Entities so dramatically empowered as to no longer count as human beings cannot fall under the jurisdiction of the Superhero Registration Act, and still less can they do so when they are contained within human hosts who disappear when they emerge, and yet the act itself is not qualified to accommodate, exempt, or otherwise make provisions for them.

By this logic, the only major superhero who could conceivably be made subject to the Superhero Registration Act without facing any significant difficulties is Spider-Man. Unlike Tony Stark, of course, Peter Parker should not be required to register simply as a matter of principle because, whereas Stark becomes a superhero after transforming himself into one, Parker never asked to be bitten by the radioactive spider that imbued him with his superhuman abilities. In practice, however, Parker makes a conscious decision to use his abilities and could just as easily decide not to use them, and it seems to me that this sort of entirely independent administration of justice—a form of justice intended to provide supplementary services to an established justice system riven by perceived weaknesses and shortcomings—is precisely what the Superhero Registration Act is intended to countervail. As painful as it may be for Peter Parker to not act on his belief that his possession of great power invests him with a responsibility to use it for the common good, his altruistic intentions do not offset the damage he does to the long-term stability of the justice system via repeatedly engaging in what is effectively illegal superpowered vigilantism.

It is impossible to say what problems the Marvel Universe would face if this sort of vigilantism was simply outlawed, since the preponderance of superpowered antagonists is itself a problem that superpowered vigilantism already addresses. Yet it is also impossible to suggest that lawmakers acted irrationally or irresponsibly in fighting for the passage of the Superhero Registration Act, since, in the pre-Civil War Marvel Universe, superheroism had flourished for so long with so little regulation that it had effectively invalidated the justice system belonging to the government that those same lawmakers represent. The flaw in the actions of the lawmakers was the expediency with which they drafted and approved the registration legislation, an expediency driven by the sense of a need for urgent action in the wake of the New Warriors debacle. What lawmakers should in fact have acted on was not the aftermath of that debacle, not the urgency they felt, but rather the sustained and incremental accession to the actions of independent administrators of justice who, solely by virtue of possessing superhuman abilities, establish themselves as adjudicators of societal disturbances acting on senses of presumed omniscience and omnipotence instead of respecting the slow, complex, and cumbersome dictates of due process. Had lawmakers paid more attention to the daily undermining of the established justice system as distinct from the outrage unleashed by the New Warriors, they might have attempted to address a longstanding political problem without succumbing to the rush and overreach of the Superhero Registration Act.

What this all means, finally, is that the legal dilemmas that led to the passage of the Superhero Registration Act far predated the debacle that precipitated it, in much the same way that the circumstantial particularities that led the Marvel superheroes to take sides on the issue of registration far predated the legislation that precipitated their division. The Civil War was, in other words, woven into the fabric of the Marvel Universe well before it actually broke out. Where is there space, in this view of the conflict, for advancing a politically principled understanding or allegorisation of events, aside from simply adopting the principles underpinning contemporary judicial processes, which are at any rate enshrined in the Constitution? The hostilities of Civil War thus do not mark the commencement of some extraordinary event in the Marvel Universe—an event that forces those involved in it to search deep within themselves for the principles they hold dear—so much as it marks the culmination of theoretical conflicts embedded in the Marvel Universe long before the Superhero Registration Act divided the Marvel superheroes and asked its readers which side they would stand on.

Share

Works Cited

Bendis, Brian Michael (writer), Leinil Yu (artist), Dave McCaig (color art). “New Avengers: Dissassembled, Part 2.” New Avengers #22 (September 2006), Marvel Comics. Print.

Benton, Bond. ‘Redemptive Anti-Americanism and the Death of Captain America.’ Studies in Communication Sciences 13 (2013): 75-83. Print.

Brubaker, Ed (writer) and Steve Epting (artist), and Frank D’Armata (colorist). “Out of Time, Part 6.” Captain America #6 (June 2005), Marvel Comics. Print.
—. “The Winter Soldier, Part 1.” Captain America #8 (September 2005), Marvel Comics. Print.

Dittmer, Jason. ‘Captain America in the News: Changing Mediascapes and the Appropriation of a Superhero.’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 3.2 (2012): 143-157. Print.

Langley, Travis. ‘Freedom versus Security: The Basic Human Dilemma from 9/11 to Marvel’s Civil War.’ International Journal of Comic Art 11.1 (Spring 2009): 426-435. Print.

Millar, Mark (writer), Steve McNiven (penciler), and Dexter Vines (inker). Civil War #1-7 (May 2006-February 2007), Marvel Comics. Print.

Pak, Greg (writer), Carlo Pagulayan (penciler), and Jeffrey Huet (inker). “Planet Hulk: Exile, Part 1.” The Incredible Hulk #92 (February 2006), Marvel Comics. Print.

Simonson, Walt (writer), Rich Buckler (penciler), and Romeo Tanghal (inker). “Death by Debate.” Fantastic Four #335 (December 1989), Marvel Comics. Print.

Straczynski, J. Michael (writer), Mike McKone (penciler), and Andy Lanning and Cam Smith (inkers). Fantastic Four #533-535 (January-April 2006), Marvel Comics. Print.

Straczynski, J. Michael (writer), Olivier Coipel (penciler), and Mark Morales (inker). “Everything Old is New Again.” Thor #3 (September 2007), Marvel Comics. Print.

Veloso, Francisco and John Bateman. ‘The Multimodal Construction of Acceptability: Marvel’s Civil War Comic Books and the PATRIOT Act.’ Critical Discourse Studies 10.4 (2013): 427-443. Print.

Wanzo, Rebecca. ‘The Superhero: Meditations on Surveillance, Salvation, and Desire.’ Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.1 (March 2009): 93-97. Print.

By now it has become a critical habit to laud The Old Man and the Sea for the remarkable clarity of its prose. In 1954, when Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, praised the novella for its “unique combination of simplicity and precision” (‘Ceremony Speech’). Ten years later, Hemingway’s posthumously-published memoir, A Moveable Feast, revealed the author’s struggles to write fiction by first setting down “one true sentence... [one] true simple declarative sentence” (7), and since then critics have attributed the aesthetic power of The Old Man and the Sea to its prosaic simplicity, its descriptive precision, its declarative ‘trueness.’ For example, in a recent collection of essays on the novella edited by Harold Bloom, David Timms expends great energy accounting for its “singleness and clarity” (86), while the 2011 edition of Harvard University’s New Literary History of America allows Keith Taylor to wax lyrical on the same qualities. “[Hemingway’s] exquisite novella,” writes Taylor, “brought together his old theme of man’s defining and ultimately tragic encounter with the natural world and the stylistic clarity he had learned in writing [his] early stories” (‘Paradise’). Today, the Vintage Classics edition of the novella blurbs a Guardian review which declares that “[t]he writing is as taut... as the line on which the old man plays the fish.” Appreciation of the novella, then, is significantly derived from the seeming objectivity it achieves—the apparently total third-person omniscience—via its extreme stylistic naturalism, its ‘true simple declarative’ prose, and the total absence of any stylistic peculiarities and narratorial interjections that would imply the presence of an overt narratorial persona.

But, of course, someone narrates The Old Man and the Sea; and even if the narrator does not reveal much about itself or refer to itself in the first person, its presence is made perceptible via its practice of focalisation—that is, the ways in which it draws the reader’s attention to certain aspects of the old man’s ordeal while leaving other aspects unexplored (see Gennette 185-205). Such focalisation is necessarily the result of a series of decisions that this aspect of the old man’s experience deserves attention while that aspect is worth glossing over; and, as such, focalisation implies the presence of someone who has made those decisions. To see this focalisation in action, consider a remark made a little under halfway into the novella. The old man, we are told, “knew no man was ever alone on the sea” (39). While the remark claims to say something about the old man, the fact that the remark is made at all reveals the truth of what is said. Who makes the remark? Who is out there at sea with the old man and close enough to him to know what he knows? Whose is the focalising consciousness of Hemingway’s novella, of which the narratorial voice is the intelligible mask? The old man cannot be alone on the sea because he is observed by someone who relays his actions and thoughts to readers and occasionally makes remarks about them—someone who stands between us and the old man and thus muddies the ostensible clarity of his story.

Subscribe now

Who exactly is that someone? If it remains impossible to attribute a fixed identity to the focalising consciousness of The Old Man and the Sea, it is certainly possible to discern its personality. The first thing to be said of it is that it possesses an intelligence superior to the old man’s intelligence and also superior to our intelligence as readers. It knows more than what the old man knows, and it knows more than what we know, and it knows that the old man sometimes knows more than we know, and so it attempts to bridge the gaps between our knowledge and his. This is made evident in the opening paragraph of the novella:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. (5)

In translating the word salao into English, the focalising consciousness presumes that we as readers do not understand Spanish and then endeavours to help us overcome the language barrier. And it continues to undertake such endeavours throughout the novella, either translating the old man’s Spanish thoughts into English or expressing his thoughts in English via free indirect discourse and then translating them into the original Spanish. When the old man experiences a cramp in his hand, for instance, we are told that “he thought of it as a calambre” (40), and later, when he decides to eat a dolphin fish, we are told that “[h]e called it dorado” (49). In a similar vein, the focalising consciousness also explains things to us that we could not know unless we, too, were fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico. The old man, for instance, “rowed over the part of the ocean that the fishermen called the great well because there was a sudden deep of seven hundred fathoms where all sorts of fish congregated” (15), and, later, “the fishermen called all the fish of [a particular] species tuna and only distinguished among them by their proper names when they came to sell them or to trade them for baits” (24). There is mediation at work here—explanations and explications designed to facilitate the reader’s understanding of the old man’s social context on land as well as his ordeal on the seas—and that mediation implies a mediator, the focalising consciousness, which has made the judgment that its audience requires such mediation.

But the focalising consciousness does not stop at simply translating the old man’s thoughts. Crucially, it also recognises itself as a translator and thus demonstrates the self-awareness of a sentient entity. When the old man says, in despair, “Ay,” the narratorial voice informs us that “[t]here is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood” (73-74). Yet the failure of the focalising consciousness to translate certain phrases is not restricted to phrases that are impossible to translate. Sometimes, the focalising consciousness simply refuses to translate, as when we are told that the old man “thought of the Big Leagues, to him they were the Gran Ligas, and he knew that the Yankees of New York were playing the Tigres of Detroit” (44). Gran Ligas is translated but Tigres is not; and although Tigres may not require translation insofar as we can easily infer its meaning, there are other phrases for which a translation is not forthcoming even when we cannot as easily infer their meaning. At one point, for instance, the old man thinks to himself: “This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos” (44) and then he thinks: “Un espuela de hueso” (45), and there is no translation in either instance.

The focalising consciousness, then, discloses and withholds information at whim—which is to say that, far from being merely an external observer or impartial recorder of events, it has a verifiable personality, and to some extent the shape of the narrative reflects the rigours of that personality. Indeed, there are other instances in the novella in which this personality more clearly shines through the ostensible objectivity of the prose.

For instance, the prose contains a number of descriptive similes that seem to have come from someone other than the old man, that do not reflect what we know of his existing sentiments and his prior experiences, and that therefore raise the question of their source. We are told that the sail of the old man’s boat, furled around his mast, “looked like the flag of permanent defeat” (13). Who is it, exactly, that makes this comparative assessment? We are told as well that clouds clustered together in the sky were “white cumulus built like friendly piles of ice cream” (40), that “the fish’s eye looked as detached as the mirrors in a periscope or as a saint in a procession” (66), and that an enormous shark “came like a pig to the trough if a pig had a mouth so wide that you could put your head in it” (77). Who exactly makes these comparative assessments? Who determines the similes? Who is familiar enough with piles of ice cream, the mirrors in a periscope, a saint in a procession, and a pig at the trough to determine that the clouds, the fish’s eye, and the shark respectively resemble these things? And to whom do we attribute the prosaic lyricism of the moment at which the old man first catches a glimpse of his enormous fish? The fish, we are told, “jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun” (48), and “jumped again and again in the acrobatics of its fear” (48), but surely those words are much too poetic, too self-consciously literary, to have originated in the simple mind of the old man himself.

So in addition to the personality it reveals via the selection and translation of narrative details, the focalising consciousness also positions itself in relation to both the old man and the readers of his narrative, and makes itself known as an entity in possession of far greater knowledge than either one. Sometimes, in fact, this positioning and this possession of greater knowledge are made startlingly obvious, if not quite explicit. We are told that the old man “was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility” (4), presumably by a wiser entity that has passed judgment on him, “[b]ut he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride” (4). And, further, the focalising consciousness reveals that it knows more than the old man knows when it tells us, as he gazes into the night sky, that “[h]e did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it” (50); and, too, the focalising consciousness reveals that it presumably knows better than the old man when it remarks upon his attempts to contort himself into a more tolerable sitting position in his cramped skiff. The new position, we are told, “actually was only somewhat less intolerable” than the last, but the old man “thought of it as almost comfortable” (29). Thus, when we receive no clues as to the actual nature of the fish that devours the old man’s bait—“It could have been a marlin or a broadbill or a shark,” he muses (32), entirely without interjection or clarification from the focalising consciousness—we must acknowledge that we are being played and toyed with much like the fish at the end of the old man’s line. The focalising consciousness could tell us exactly what sort of fish steals the bait, and it wants us to know that it could tell us, but it chooses not to tell us for reasons only it can know. Just as the old man unspools and then revokes the line with which he catches the fish, the focalising consciousness of his narrative discloses and withholds certain details from its readers.

As above, the old man “knew no man was ever alone on the sea” (39). By the end of the novella, we, as readers, know that to be true—although, unlike the old man, we at least can discern the persona of the entity in whose company he is not alone. The result, however, is that The Old Man and the Sea is a more complex text than we have been led to believe by claims of its ostensible clarity. It offers less an example of true, simple, declarative prose than a highly subjective impression of the old man’s ordeal, conveyed by a focalising consciousness whose calm and reserved narratorial voice offers only a semblance of clarity.

Share

Works Cited

Gennette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. 1936. London: Arrow Books, 2004. Print.
  —. The Old Man and the Sea. 1952. Harlow, Essex: Heinemann, 1977. Print.

Österling, Anders. ‘Award Ceremony Speech.’ 1954. Nobelprize.org: The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize. <http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1954/press.html>. Web.

Taylor, Keith. ‘Hemingway’s Paradise, Hemingway’s Prose.’ A New Literary History of America. Eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Excerpt: <http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2011/07/becoming-hemingway.html>. Web.

Timms, David. ‘Contrasts in Form: Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Faulkner’s ‘The Bear’.’ Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea—New Edition. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2008. 81-94. Print.

Subscribe now

With Blood Meridian, his fifth novel, Cormac McCarthy departed from the lush mountains of the Appalachian South which had provided the setting for his earlier work and instead turned to the merciless deserts of the American Southwest in the wake of the Mexican-American War. Based on actual events in 1848 and 1849, Blood Meridian chronicles the reign of terror of the Glanton Gang, a posse of bounty hunters which repeatedly clashed with the Apache and Comanche marauders who razed fledgling settlements along the new U.S.-Mexico border. Given its subject matter, the novel tends to be read, unsurprisingly, as an indictment of American expansionism and its ideological rationalisation: “the definitive statement on Manifest Destiny” (Kollin 558) or even “a counter-narrative to the overly santized rhetoric of Manifest Destiny” (Eaton 160). More surprising, however, is how much the articulation of its indictment depends on its development of an environmental consciousness—and not only a human consciousness of the environment, but the environment’s own consciousness of its exploitation by human hands.

Territorial expansion is driven, at bottom, by the political imperative to possess and control access to valuable natural resources, and the American expansion into what was formerly the northeast of Mexico was driven by the imperative to mine and cultivate the rich Californian soil. But the expansionist mindset is not content to simply own the land: it must ensure that the land is occupied and its occupants subdued in order to demonstrate dominance over them. Blood Meridian incarnates and literalises this mindset in the form of the monstrous Judge Holden. As the de facto leader of the Glanton Gang, the Judge is a seven-foot-tall albino with an overpowering intellect, an unquenchable thirst for violence, and a chillingly totalitarian worldview that posits environmental exploitation as a means of assuring one’s social superiority:

Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. ... [A]nonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last [natural] entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. ... The Judge placed his hands on the ground. ... This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. ... The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos. (198-199)

The problem, however, is that the Mexican deserts annexed by the United States are so hostile to human habitation that the settlers who enter them are rendered “half crazed with the enormity of their own presence in that immense and bloodslaked waste” (7). The environment itself disdains the human presence and so, with its human occupants already antagonising one another in their race to lay claim to the land, it furnishes them with the means to turn their antagonism into carnage. “[O]ur mother the earth,” the Judge declares, “contain[s] all good things within her” (130). So the “broken stobs of a mesquite” offer limbs from which to hang the dead (57) while the dust offers enough saltpetre, nitre, and charcoal for the Judge to concoct gunpowder (130). Throughout Blood Meridian, tensions among men erupt into slaughter when an environment hostile to human beings offees them the very instruments they need for bloodshed. Human self-destruction is aided and accelerated by a natural world that wants human beings to destroy themselves so that it may be purged of their presence.

Crucially, this investment of the environment with a sort of consciousness is one of the novel’s most carefully-constructed and prominent features. The narrator of Blood Meridian—whoever or whatever that may be—explicitly construes the environment as a vast conscious entity that observes, largely antipathetically, the various creatures and objects it contains:

In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. ... [H]ere was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship. (247)

Moreover, the ‘optical democracy’ mentioned in this passage is not merely a subject for the narrator to remark upon but is the very basis of the narrator’s own observational practices. In other words, Blood Meridian refuses the notion that human beings hold a position in the environment over and above that of anything else they exist alongside and thus, as David Holloway writes, the novel “diminish[es] language as an agency of human cognition, binding [its] aesthetic ever more tightly to a phenomenal world upon which language might otherwise go to work” (‘Modernism’ 192). As such, the narrator of Blood Meridian emerges as a consciousness that is at least empathetic to the conscious environment it observes and perhaps even is the environment itself. Mimicking what is described above as the environment’s equalisation of everything it contains, the narrator registers “[m]inute details and impalpable qualities [so precisely] that the prejudices of anthropocentric perceptions are disqualified,” and instead offers “a kind of perception before or beyond the human. This is not a perspective upon the world... but an immanent perspective that already is the world” (Shaviro 153-154).

In effect, then, Blood Meridian depicts the environment’s view of its own exploitation by human beings whose purpose in exploiting it is ultimately to brutalise one another; and to the extent that the novel advances an indictment of American expansionism, environmental exploitation is fundamental to that indictment. Finally, however, McCarthy concedes that the nineteenth century was essentially defined by the institutionalisation of such exploitation when he concludes Blood Meridian with an epilogue set several decades after the end of the Glanton Gang’s narrative. In this epilogue, a man with a post-hole digger proceeds across an open field to mark the trajectory of what will eventually become a fence (337). Fencing, of course, suggests the formal segmentation and occupation of the land and the socio-political legitimisation of its exploitation, and by raising these suggestions on its final page Blood Meridian anticipates the opening pages of its successor, All the Pretty Horses, the first volume in Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed Border Trilogy. That novel finds its protagonist, John Grady Cole, disgusted by the ubiquitous fencing of the Southwest and compelled to retreat to Mexico on “a quest for reconnection with some undefined but older, notionally purer or more authentic landscape” (Holloway, Late Modernism 61). In the shadow of Blood Meridian, however, his quest is doomed to futility since Blood Meridian demonstrates, at bottom, that absolute environmental purity is unattainable for human beings insofar as the source of impurity is humankind.

Share

Works Cited

Eaton, Mark A. ‘Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction.’ Modern Fiction Studies 49.1 (Spring 2003): 155-180. Print.

Holloway, David. The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy. London: Praeger, 2002. Print.
—. ‘Modernism, Nature, and Utopia: Another Look at ‘Optical Democracy’ in Cormac McCarthy’s Western Quartet.’ Southern Quarterly 38.3 (Spring 2000): 186-205. Print.

Kollin, Susan. ‘Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the Contemporary Western.’ Contemporary Literature 42.3 (Autumn 2001): 557-588. Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. 1992. The Border Trilogy. London: Picador, 2002. 1-306. Print.
—. Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness in the West. 1985. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print.
—. The Border Trilogy. London: Picador, 2002. Print.

Shaviro, Steven. ‘‘The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian.’ Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (Revised Edition). Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. 145-158. Print.

In 1966, in the first scholarly study of the entire Hemingway oeuvre, Philip Young targeted A Farewell to Arms for particular praise. Ernest Hemingway’s prose, he wrote, “has never been finer or more finished than in this novel. Never have those awesome, noncommittal understatements, which say more than could ever be written out, been more impressive” (91). The style, of course, is vintage Hemingway, characterised by short, often monosyllabic words; by terse, stilted sentences; and by the minimisation of what Ray West calls “the ordinary [literary] dimensions of exposition and description” (173). For West, such minimisation allows Hemingway to successfully convey “the full quality of [an] emotional experience” (173) so that, as James Phelan describes it, Hemingway’s “impressive control of [the] narration... allows the reader to build the appropriate inferences from [the narrator’s] tight-lipped descriptions” (‘Distance’ 53). What are these ‘appropriate inferences’? At present, a critical consensus recognises them as being that the two most prominent aspects of the story narrated by Frederic Henry—his wartime exploits on the Italian front and his subsequent love affair with Catherine Barkley—are finally only masks for the deeper and more subtle story of his prolonged traumatisation. Michael Reynolds, for instance, has suggested that, despite its focus on war and love, A Farewell to Arms is much more than “a study in war, love or initiation” (First War 271), while Millicent Bell has similarly suggested that it is “about neither love nor war; it is about a state of mind” (111). More recently, Trevor Dodman has argued that the prose style not only evokes the emotional and psychological import of the narrative events but is itself a consequence of those events. “From the very first page,” he writes, “Frederic suffers from shell shock; his voice is always already the voice of a traumatized survivor of grievous wounds and losses” (251)—a survivor who “suffers from the compulsion to remember and retell his traumatic past” even as he remains “both unable and perhaps unwilling to put that very past into words” (249).

It is unsurprising that critics should have arrived at this view of the novel. As Anne Whitehead observes, “[n]ovelists have frequently found that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterised by repetition and indirection” (3); and, insofar as A Farewell to Arms readily employs each of these representational strategies, the novel itself suggests the conclusions that the above critics have drawn. It is surprising, however, that there should be such critical consensus on the source of the trauma that compels Frederic to narrate his experiences. Without probing any further, Reynolds, Bell, and Dodman all agree that, in Reynolds’ words, Frederic “has been changed by his violent wounding” and that “his behavior [after his wounding] let[s] the reader see” the ways in which he has been changed (‘Doctors’ 119). I am not so convinced of this. Although Frederic’s wounding obviously disrupts his psychological stability, it seems to account only for his outbursts of irrationality—the cold-blooded murder he commits in Italy and his intermittent anger at Catherine, his lover—and thus stands distinctly at odds with the calm and patient articulation of experience that he presents on the page. In other words, as I see it, the wounding that Reynolds, Bell, and Dodman identify as the source of Frederic’s narrative is more accurately only the source of the experiences recounted in the narrative rather than the source of the compulsion to recount them. Taking the form of Frederic’s first-person testimony, A Farewell to Arms comprises a series of narrative events which are conveyed via something of a speech act, an act of narration, which begins only after the events themselves have ended. Although the novel famously concludes with Frederic left alone in the rain, he has already been left alone and has possibly even sheltered himself from the rain before he begins offering his testimony and explaining how he came to be in the situation from which he speaks. As a result, while Frederic’s battlefield wounding may well be the traumatic source of the narrative events that follow, it is not necessarily the same trauma that invests Frederic with the compulsion to recount those events. Where, then, does he receive the compulsion to narrate? If his is the testimony of a traumatised man, what sort of trauma facilitates his transition from traumatised protagonist to traumatised narrator—and how can we identify it?

I think that the trauma that compels Frederic to narrate his story is occasioned by a crisis of identity, and I think this crisis becomes perceptible when we move beyond the prose style of A Farewell to Arms to examine the tension between that style and the novelistic form. Frederic’s limpid, taciturn, reticent voice suggests that he endures great difficulty in recounting his various experiences, almost as if he is reluctant to recount them at all. Yet his testimony billows out to several hundred pages in length—indeed, the length of a novel—almost as if he is unable to stop himself from speaking and cannot maintain the brusqueness evident in his tone. Frederic thus hangs suspended between understatement and logorrhoea, effectively incarnating the disembodied narrator of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable—“you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (408)—which suspension points towards the trauma that compels him to narrate. If the style of A Farewell to Arms suggests that Frederic is a reluctant narrator while the novelistic form shows that he narrates at great length, the tension between the style and the form indicates to me not that Frederic resists narrating per se but that he resists reaching the end of his narrative once he has begun it. Since he begins recounting his narrative after the events at the end have taken place, it is likely that the trauma associated with those events is what first invests him with the compulsion to narrate the events that have preceded them. As he narrates those preceding events, however, he continually foreshadows the trauma towards which they inexorably and fatefully sweep him, and yet, at the same time, he postpones and defers addressing that trauma in a way that would entail the cessation of his act of narration. In short, Frederic knows how traumatically his narrative will end from the moment he begins narrating it, but his knowledge of that trauma leads him simultaneously to resist addressing the trauma itself and to tint his recounting of other, earlier events with his helpless anticipation of the trauma to come.

Subscribe now

What precisely is that trauma, and how does it raise its head throughout Frederic’s narrative even as he defers addressing it? Michael Reynolds goes some way towards naming it when he classifies A Farewell to Arms as “a study in isolation” (First War 271). More specifically, however, the novel is a study of isolation in isolation, as Frederic Henry finds himself utterly alone in the world and attempts to explain—to himself, if no-one else—how he came to be that way. As Reynolds observes,

Frederic’s progress [throughout] the novel is from group participation to total isolation. ... When the novel begins in the fall of 1915, Frederic Henry is an ambulance driver with the Italian Second army, which was a key link in the defences of the Italian army. The Italian front, in turn, was an extension of the western front in France; Italy was part of the alliance that placed Frederic at the end of a long chain of command. By the end of the novel Frederic is totally alone and in another country. He owes allegiance to no chain of command; he has no friends; he has no prospects. (First War 271-272)

Finding himself in such a state of isolation and looking back on the disintegration of his group participation, Frederic seems to suffer a crisis of identity, as the isolated narrator who looks back recognises that he is no longer the same man as the protagonist he looks back upon. The trauma of this crisis is, I think, what compels Frederic to assemble a narrative simultaneously understated and logorrhoeic. It is understated insofar as Frederic is troubled by the gradual erosion of his social self, an erosion that intensifies as he continues recounting his journey towards isolation. It is logorrhoeic insofar as Frederic is equally troubled by the outright demise of his social self—a demise upon which his very act of narration is predicated—such that he both defers discussion of the deaths of Catherine and her unborn child which ultimately brought him into isolation and, as Ben Stoltzfus points out, attempts to retrospectively reassert and reinforce his faltering identity in the face of intensifying isolation. “It is not until Chapter 5,” writes Stoltzfus, “that the narrator is identified [as] an American in the Italian army, and not until Chapter 12 that his first name is mentioned in Italian: Federico. The narrator’s full name, Frederic Henry, does not appear until Chapter 13” (67). The narrator, then, more definitively recognises the protagonist as ‘Frederic Henry’ the closer the protagonist comes to entering the state of isolation that differentiates narrator from protagonist, generates a crisis of identity, and compels the act of narration. It is as if he strives to stand against recounting his inevitable traumatisation, the very traumatisation he has suffered before he even begins to speak.

More than that, because this traumatisation forms both the basis of his act of narration and the culmination of the events he narrates, he repeatedly foresees it even as he endeavours not to confront it so that it colours even those events that do not directly relate to it. How so? Conceptualising Frederic’s trauma as a “disruptive experience that disarticulates the self,” Trevor Dodman argues that, as Frederic’s narrative “shifts unpredictably between past and present, between the time of the action and the time of the telling,” Frederic attempts to reassert and reinforce his selfhood by “confront[ing] the ‘holes’ in his subjective experience of the war, despite the fact that he might not have full mastery over the memories” (251). What Dodman overlooks, however, are those shifts between past and present that Frederic is unable to confront—shifts that in fact enable him to defer or evade a confrontation with the traumatic events he must ultimately discuss. Consider, for example, his abrupt recollection of the time he threw an army of ants in a campfire:

Once in camp I put a log on top of the fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first towards the centre where the fire was, then turned back and ran towards the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whisky in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants. (252)

The narrator decides to outline this recollection in the form of a lengthy monologue while the protagonist sits on the very cusp of isolation, waiting for a doctor to deliver the news that the narrator has already received regarding the death of Catherine and her unborn child. Inserted there without explanation and without immediate relevance to the concurrent narrative events, this recollection effectively amounts to the narrator’s resistance of the inevitable: it bespeaks his desire to extend his narration, to simply keep talking, rather than to narrate the events that plunged him into isolation and invested him with the compulsion to narrate. In short, then, the narrator speaks from a state of isolation that he does not want to speak about, but he must speak about it because it lies at the conclusion of his narrative, so that he attempts simultaneously to definitively reassert and reinforce the identity he lost via isolation and to forestall a recollection of the moment at which his entry into isolation rendered his identity more ambiguous than it once was. The novel’s particular tension between understatement and logorrhea derives from Frederic’s being at once eager and unwilling to reconcile his twin identities as actor and as spectator of his own actions, to narrate the entry into isolation by which the protagonist loses agency and becomes both the product and the narrator of his own inevitable traumatisation.

In recognising that the narrator appropriates his earlier self as his narrative subject but construes that subject as one distinct from his present self, the hidden centre of the novel emerges and foregrounds the conceit around which the entire narrative revolves. As the novel progresses, it repeatedly points towards this centre even when it seems to be directing our attention elsewhere. For instance, given that Frederic speaks within and towards an isolation occasioned by the dual deaths of his lover and child, even Frederic’s recollection of the ants in the campfire at once anticipates and avoids the events that are destined to occur: it offers a meditation on the senselessness of death even as it provides a distraction from the two senseless deaths whose discussion is then imminent. Additionally, as Philip Young points out, there are two clearer examples of this same phenomenon in two of the novel’s best-known sequences. The first appears in the opening pages. Throughout the novel, writes Young, “the use of [the] rain... cannot be called symbolic so much as portentous,” since it continually signals impending disaster (92). In Chapter 19, of course, Catherine has a vision of herself dead in the rain and confesses to Frederic that she fears she will actually die that way (99-100), while Frederic, as Young writes, “professes a disbelief in signs, and tells himself that Catherine’s vision... is meaningless. But she [does eventually die] in [the rain] and actually... a short introductory scene at the very start of the book [presents] an ominous conjunction of images—rain, pregnancy and death,” which tacitly look ahead to the climax (92). Those images appear at the very end of Chapter 1 when Frederic remembers watching soldiers drenched with rain as they march towards their deaths, all of them carrying artillery beneath their cloaks “as though they were six months gone with child” (8). Here, the protagonist is as far away as he can possibly be from the deaths that plunge him into isolation, but the narrator, who has only just begun speaking, has very recently experienced those deaths and so entered his state of isolation, leaving even this distant recollection tinged with the causes of his fresh traumatisation. The second example of this phenomenon appears in one of Frederic’s most famous musings in Chapter 34:

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. (193)

“Catherine Barkley, as it happened, was very good, very gentle, very brave,” writes Philip Young, and so, “unlike [Frederic], who broke and survived to become eventually quite strong, she would not break and so she was killed” (94). When the above thoughts occur to Frederic, Catherine is in fact still alive and lying beside him in bed; but, insofar as these thoughts suggest that the narrator is musing on how the world has already treated Catherine before the protagonist witnesses Catherine being treated that way, Catherine’s death and the death of her child and Frederic Henry’s subsequent isolation again tinge the narrative ahead of any depiction of the deaths themselves and the actual isolation that Frederic experiences.

The two deaths that plunge Frederic into isolation make him a different man to the man he was when involved with Catherine, thus compelling him to recount his exploits as the protagonist of a narrative and yet, in the act of narration, to enforce a distinction between the protagonist and his narratorial self. As he does so, then, those deaths are always at the back of his mind: it is towards them that he knows his words will finally lead, and so he adjusts his words to proceed as gently as possible towards that raw, troubling memory. This is why the novel is the way it is—why Hemingway describes events, as Philip Young writes of the author’s oeuvre, “in terms of chronologically ordered, mechanical, deliberate movements which begin to wear on one’s nervous system” (45). The stilted prose style and the novelistic form together stand as outcomes of the narrative events—in some sense, the narrative is about how a man could become so traumatised as to tell his story in a prose style at odds with his narrative form—as they disclose the trauma victim’s simultaneous compulsion and unwillingness to recount precisely what has left him traumatised. Frederic’s story is the story of the man he has ceased to be by virtue of telling the story, such that the very telling of the story is a perpetual reminder to him that the man he is now is not the sort of man he was or wants to be. The tension between the style and the form bears out the narrator’s dilemma—and, as a result, it suggests that his compulsion to narrate originates from his yearning once again to be the protagonist whose exploits he narrates, and not to be a narrator at all.

Share

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. 1953. New York: Grove Press, 2009. Print.

Bell, Millicent. ‘A Farwell to Arms: Pseudoautobiography and Personal Metaphor.’ Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context. Ed. James Nagel. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Print.

Dodman, Trevor. ‘‘Going All to Pieces’: A Farewell to Arms as Trauma Narrative.’ Twentieth-Century Literature 52.3 (Fall 2006): 249-274. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. London: Penguin, 1974. Print.

Phelan, James. ‘Distance, Voice, and Temporal Perspective in Frederic Henry’s Narration: Successes, Problems, and Paradox.’ New Essays on A Farewell to Arms. Ed. Scott Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 53-74. Print.
—. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1996. Print.

Reynolds, Michael. ‘A Farewell to Arms: Doctors in the House of Love.’ The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 109-127. Print.
—. Hemingway’s First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. Print.

Stoltzfus, Ben. Lacan and Literature: Purloined Pretexts. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Print.

West, Ray B. The Writer in the Room: Selected Essays. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1968. Print.

Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Print.

Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. University Park, PA, and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966. Print.

Subscribe now

The so-called ‘evasion’ at the end of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the most famously contentious narrative sequences in all of American literature. Having recognised the essential humanity of the slave Jim and deliberately broken the law to help Jim escape to freedom, Huck is reunited with his friend, Tom Sawyer, and then becomes willingly complicit in Tom’s heartless plan to prolong Jim’s enslavement simply for fun. With gleeful recklessness, the sequence violates the spirit and undermines the politics of everything that precedes it, and it has generated much critical discussion for that reason.1 But with so much attention paid to the sequence itself, what remains under-examined is the way in which Huck’s about-face is first made possible. The prevailing assumptions in the existing critical literature are that Huck experiences increasing sympathy for Jim as they escape together and that the ‘evasion’ entails the sudden, inexplicable collapse of that sympathy. But a closer look at their early interactions, as they set out together on the Mississippi River at the start of Chapter 9, reveals that Huck does not feel sympathy for Jim so much as he undergoes a sort of synthesis with Jim. The two of them are essentially fused into a single entity on the river and thereafter prised apart—beginning with the physical separation that befalls them when they leave the river and return to land in Chapter 17, and intensifying with the segregation that emerges when Huck encounters the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons and the King and the Duke—so that, in effect, the ‘evasion’ is more the culmination of this painstakingly protracted scission.

The foundations of Huck and Jim’s synthesis are laid early when Huck’s abusive father, Pap, re-enters the boy’s life after a long absence. Forcibly seizing control of Huck, Pap soon claims official guardianship of his son in order to command Huck to work for him and make money for him (33), and he twice refers to himself not as Huck’s father but as his “boss” (33, 36) before he kidnaps Huck and takes him into what is essentially slavery. It is true, of course, that Huck is not legally enslaved to his father in the same way that Jim is enslaved to his mistress.2 Nevertheless, Huck’s experience of pseudo-enslavement puts him on as close to equal footing with Jim as he is ever likely to be and thus prepares the ground on which his synthesis with Jim develops. The synthesis itself begins a little later, as Huck and Jim set off up the Mississippi River in their found canoe:

‘Jim, this is nice,’ I says. ‘I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot cornbread.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t a ben here, ’f it hadn’t a ben for Jim. You’d a ben down dah in de woods widout any dinner, en gittin’ mos’ drownded, too, dat you would...’

The river went on raising and raising for ten or twelve days, till at last it was over the banks. The water was three or four foot deep on the island in the low places and on the Illinois bottom. On that side it was a good many miles wide; but on the Missouri side it was the same old distance across—a half a mile—because the Missouri shore was just a wall of high bluffs. (60-61)

The ‘I’ in the first paragraph, signifying Huck’s first-person-singular narration, disappears as each paragraph in this passage gives way to the next. In the first paragraph, Huck speaks—meaning that, as the narrator of the novel, he affords himself a line of dialogue. In the second paragraph, Jim speaks—meaning that Huck, as narrator, allows Jim to speak; and, more importantly, he allows Jim to speak at greater length than he himself has just spoken, without interruption or correction, even though Jim’s words amount to a rebuke of Huck. Then, in the third paragraph, neither Huck nor Jim speak at all: instead, a landscape is depicted without a single person located anywhere in it. In these three paragraphs, then, Huck first makes a statement and then allows Jim to reply with a more significant statement—thus hinting at his burgeoning egalitarianism, his willingness to allow Jim to speak for himself and to hear him out—before Huck induces his readers to retreat from his sphere of interaction with Jim and to pull back, as a camera pulls back in a movie, and admire the surrounding world as time passes by and they continue on their journey. However, upon returning from the glories of natural scenery to focus again on Huck and Jim, the reader discovers that things have changed:

We paddled all over the island. ... It was mighty cool and shady in the deep woods even if the sun was blazing outside. We went winding in and out amongst the trees; and sometimes the vines hung so thick we had to back away and go home some other way. (61)

The first-person-singular now is not only absent, but has been altogether replaced by the first-person-plural. No longer do Huck and Jim escape as two individuals side-by-side in a canoe. Instead, the emerging synthesis between them means that they escape as one: “we paddled,” “we went,” “we had to back away...” and, shortly thereafter, the synthesis is complete as the two of them not only inhabit the world in the second-person-plural, but now look out at the world through a single pair of eyes:

We could see saw-logs go by in the daylight, sometimes, but we let them go. ... [One] night... here comes a frame house. ... She was a two-story. ... [Day]light begun to come before we got [near it]. Then we looked in at the window. We could make out a bed, and a table, and two old chairs... (61, my emphasis)

Huck and Jim now are one, as Huck has assumed that Jim sees what he himself sees and that he can accurately detail what Jim sees simply by detailing what he too has just seen. And this synthesis persists beyond these few pages, right through to the end of Chapter 9 when Huck and Jim return to shore and Huck says: “We all got home safe” (62). By ‘safe,’ he does not simply mean ‘uninjured’: he means ‘safe’ in a way that encompasses the particularities of Jim’s situation as well as his own. He notes that they “hadn’t no accidents, and didn’t see nobody” (62). Not having any accidents is Huck’s own individual criterion for safety, but not seeing anybody—and not being seen in turn—is Jim’s criterion, since he can remain free only as long as he remains unseen by others who would re-enslave him. So, in saying “We all got home safe,” Huck recognises the mutual dependency that exists between Jim and himself despite their individual differences: if either one is endangered, both of them are.

Of course, as above, their synthesis does not survive past Chapter 17, when their departure from the river entails a separation that places each of them in company of other people, and their synthesis collapses entirely when Huck reunites with Tom Sawyer during the climactic ‘evasion’ sequence. But their synthesis itself is precisely what makes the evasion as troublesome as it is: their synthesis invests their relationship with overwhelming significance, but the evasion sequence is only able to undermine that relationship by first invoking the significance invested in it. Moreover, the evasion is all the more troublesome insofar as it undermines Huck and Jim’s synthesis by articulating a new synthesis in the very same terms in which the original synthesis developed. Beginning in Chapter 34, Huck again narrates the story in the second-person-plural—“We stopped talking,” he says, “and got to thinking” (241)—but this time, the other person implicated in the ‘we’ is not Jim; it is Tom. The synthesis of old has irrevocably collapsed, and a new one has emerged in its place.#

Share

Works Cited

Leonard, James, Thomas Tenney, and Thadious Davis, eds. Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Print.

Gollin, Richard, and Rita Gollin. ‘Huckleberry Finn and the Time of the Evasion.’ Modern Language Studies 9.2 (Spring 1979): 5-15. Print.

Marx, Leo. ‘Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn.’ The American Scholar 22 (1953): 423-440. Print.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884. Ed. Thomas Cooley. New York: Norton, 1999. Print.

Share

Endnotes

If American literature today enjoys a widely respected global profile, that is due in large part to its long and distinguished history. From Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn to The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and scores of others, American authors have produced a slew of novels that are arguably among the best ever written. More recently, as Marc McGurl reminds us in The Program Era, the post-War vocationalisation of the discipline of creative writing has produced such literary luminaries as Flannery O’Connor, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Franzen, Joan Didion, and David Foster Wallace, amid countless others. Obscured by the current respectability of these writers, however, are the less refined, less craft-oriented origins of the national tradition to which their output contributes. Those origins are equal parts slapdash, rambunctious, and ostentatious, because rooted in a good old-fashioned literary hoax—a public deception of fantastic proportions masterminded by one of the most shameless muckrakers of early nineteenth century America. His name was Washington Irving.

From a purely professional point of view, Irving stands as the first definitive American author. I do not mean to suggest that he had no predecessors or that the literature of his predecessors is somehow unimportant. Benjamin Franklin, St. Jean de Crèvecœur, Thomas Paine, Phillis Wheatley, William Hill Brown, and Charles Brockden Brown all published landmarks in American belles lettres before Irving made a name for himself. I mean only to reiterate what Brian Jay Jones has illustrated in his recent Irving biography: that Irving was the first American litterateur to attract a readership wide enough to earn a living solely by virtue of what he wrote. These days, Irving is best known for two of the many short stories he wrote in mid-career. ‘Rip van Winkle’ tells the tale of a man who falls asleep for twenty years and then awakens into a life in which his loved ones have long presumed him dead. It has survived the passage of time thanks largely to the tone of fairytale whimsy that makes it a mainstay of children’s picture books. ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ has survived, somewhat similarly, thanks to the efforts of Walt Disney Productions and Tim Burton, both of whom have successfully adapted it for the cinema. It tells the tale of Ichabod Crane, a cowardly schoolteacher assigned to a classroom in a small New York town haunted by the ghost of a headless horseman astride a gigantic black stallion. When these two stories were published together in 1820, however, they were credited not to their actual author but to a man named Diedrich Knickerbocker—and Knickerbocker emerges, in retrospect, as the beating heart of the hoax with which Irving launched his literary career.

A decade earlier, in 1809, Irving and his brother Peter set about writing a humorous guide to New York City and its inhabitants. “Our idea,” Irving recalled in 1848,

was to parody a small hand-book which had recently appeared, entitled, ‘A Picture of New York.’ ... [O]ur work was to begin an historical sketch; to be followed by notices of the customs, manners and institutions of the city; written in a serio-comic vein, and treating local errors, follies and abuses with good-humored satire.

To burlesque the pedantic lore displayed in certain American works, our historical sketch was to commence with the creation of the world; and we laid all kinds of works under contribution for trite citations, relevant or irrelevant, to give it the proper air of learned research. [But b]efore this crude mass of mock erudition could be [written], my brother departed for Europe, and I was left to prosecute the enterprise alone.

What Irving did next was ingenious, sparking a word-of-mouth publicity campaign at a time when the only form of large-scale social media was the classifieds section of the daily newspaper. As Irving later wrote, he found himself surprised by how few of his fellow New Yorkers “were aware that New York had ever been called New Amsterdam... or cared a straw about their ancient Dutch progenitors,” and so he “altered the plan of the work” to strengthen its focus on New York’s “period of Dutch domination.” What he proceeded to write was pure fiction under the guise of scholarly history, a grab-bag of rural myths and folkloric fantasies ostensibly passed down from the ancient backwoodsmen of the New Amsterdam colony to the frontiersmen of western New York. The colonial era, Irving wrote later,

broke upon me as the poetic age of our city; poetic from its very obscurity, and open... to all the embellishments of heroic fiction. I hailed my native city as fortunate above all other American cities in having an antiquity thus extending back into the regions of doubt and fable; neither did I conceive I was committing any grievous historical sin in helping out the few facts I could collect... with figments of my own brain...

But, crucially, Irving cast a veneer of gentlemanly propriety over his work when he attributed it to one Diedrich Knickerbocker, and then he began galvanising public interest in the work when he injected a dose of his fiction into the everyday reality of New York.

On October 26, 1809, prior to the publication of his History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, Irving persuaded two friends to visit the offices of New York’s Evening Post and to purchase, on his behalf, a public notice that would introduce readers to the mysterious but apparently very real Knickerbocker:

DISTRESSING.

Left his lodgings some time since, and has not since been heard of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons for believing he is not entirely in his right mind, and as great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning him, left either at the Columbian Hotel... or at the office of this paper, will be thankfully received.

For more than two weeks, Irving let word of the disappearance of this patrician stranger spread throughout New York City. The Evening Post received dozens of reported sightings of Knickerbocker, and city officials considered offering remuneration for any advice on his whereabouts. Irving even fanned the flames when, identifying himself only as ‘A Traveler,’ he purchased another public notice in the Evening Post on November 6:

Having read... a paragraph respecting an old gentleman by the name of Knickerbocker, who was missing from his lodgings; if it would be any relief to his friends, or furnish them with any clue to discover where he is, you may inform them that a person answering the description given was seen by the passengers of the Albany stage[coach], early in the morning, about four or five weeks since, resting himself by the side of the road, a little above King’s Bridge. He had in his hand a small bundle tied in a red bandana handkerchief: he appeared to be traveling northward, and was very much fatigued and exhausted.

Then, on November 16, identifying himself as Seth Handaside, landlord of the hotel from which Knickerbocker went missing, Irving published a letter to the editor of the Post:

SIR,—You have been good enough to publish in your paper a paragraph about Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, who was missing so strangely some time since. Nothing satisfactory has been heard of the old gentleman since; but a very curious kind of a written book has been found in his room, in his own handwriting. Now, I wish you to notice him, if he is still alive, that if he does not return and pay off his bill... I shall have to dispose of his book to satisfy me for the same.

Of course, since there was no Knickerbocker, there was neither a book left behind nor a bill left unpaid; and yet, because the reading public believed in Knickerbocker’s existence, readers were in turn led to believe in both the book and the bill and to anticipate the publication of the book as Knickerbocker’s absence promised to leave the bill unpaid. Aware of this, Irving next published a ‘Literary Notice’ in the Evening Post of November 28:

INSKEEP and BRADFORD have in the press,

and will shortly publish,

A History of New York,

In two volumes, duodecimo. Price three dollars.

Containing an account of its discovery and settlement, with its internal policies, manners, customs, wars, &c.... under the Dutch government, furnishing many curious and interesting particulars never before published, and which are gathered from various manuscript and other authenticated sources... interspersed with philosophical speculations and moral precepts.

This work was found in the chamber of Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, the old gentleman whose... mysterious disappearance has been noticed. It is published in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind.

And, on December 6, Irving purchased one final notice to advise Post readers of the publication of A History of New-York, released in stores that same day and credited to Diedrich Knickerbocker.

This was not the first instance in which Irving assumed a false identity to publish his satires: he had done so at the turn of the century, when he published occasional newspaper pieces as Jonathan Oldstyle and Launcelot Langstaff. But it was the most sustained instance, and it was the instance most directed towards broader aims than the mere concealment of identity, and it did not end with that final notice in the newspaper. The History of New-York, credited to Knickerbocker, contained another public notice by Seth Handaside, landlord of the Columbian Hotel, as well as a notice that Knickerbocker had supposedly intended to release upon the later publication of his History, partly to explain his reasons for writing the book but also to glorify himself as a sort of latter-day Herodotus:

‘To rescue from oblivion the memory of former incidents, and to render a just tribute of renown to the many great and wonderful transactions of our Dutch progenitors, Diedrich Knickerbocker, native of the city of New York, produces this historical essay.’ Like the great Father of History, whose words I have just quoted, I treat of times long past, over which the twilight of uncertainty had already thrown its shadows, and the night of forgetfulness was about to descend for ever. With great solicitude had I long beheld the early history of this venerable and ancient city gradually slipping from our grasp, trembling on the lips of narrative old age, and day by day dropping piecemeal into the tomb. ... Determined, therefore, to avert if possible this threatened misfortune, I industriously set myself to work to gather together all the fragments of our ancient history which still existed; and, like my revered prototype, Herodotus, where no written records could be found, I have endeavored to continue the chain of history by well-authenticated traditions.

Handaside, meanwhile, offered a less lofty portrait of the missing man. “[I]n the early part of the fall of 1808... a stranger applied for lodgings at [the hotel] of which I am landlord,” he wrote:

He was a small, brisk-looking old gentleman, dressed in a rusty black coat, a pair of olive velvet breeches, and a small cocked hat. He had a few gray hairs plaited and clubbed behind, and his beard seemed to be of some eight-and-forty hours’ growth. The only piece of finery which he bore about him was a bright pair of square silver shoe-buckles; and all his baggage was contained in a pair of saddle-bags, which he carried under his arm.

During the whole time that he stayed with [my wife and I], we found him a very worthy, good sort of an old gentleman, though a little queer in his ways. He would keep in his room for days together, and if any of the children cried, or made a noise about his door, he would bounce out in a great passion, with his hands full of papers, and say something about ‘deranging his ideas’; which made my wife believe sometimes that he was not altogether compos. Indeed, there was more than one reason to make her think so, for his room was always covered with scraps of paper and old mouldy books, lying about at sixes and sevens, which he would never let anybody touch; [... and] I shall never forget what a [b]other he once made, because my wife cleaned out his room when his back was turned, and put everything to rights; for he swore he would never be able to get his papers in order again. ... Upon this my wife ventured to ask him, what he did with so many books and papers? and he told her, that he was ‘seeking for immortality’; which made her think... that the poor old gentleman’s head was a little cracked.

Cracked it must have been for the elderly Knickerbocker to disappear into thin air and leave behind his precious manuscript. More than anything else, though, it was this dissonance between the Knickerbocker who painstakingly assembled the erudite if pretentious History and the Knickerbocker who seemed to have completely lost his mind that worked wonders for sales of the book, for Washington Irving’s career, and thus for American literature.

Thereafter, Irving extended and capitalised on the Knickerbocker legend as much as he possibly could. First he announced that the missing Knickerbocker had lately been discovered, explaining, in the second edition of the History, that Knickerbocker had travelled to “a small Dutch village on the banks of the Hudson... for the purpose of inspecting certain ancient records,” and had contacted Seth Handaside when he chanced upon the published edition of his own work. “As this was one of those few and happy villages, into which newspapers never find their way,” Irving wrote under the guise of the second edition’s anonymous editor, “it is not a matter of surprise, that Mr. Knickerbocker should never have seen the numerous advertisements that were made concerning him.” Then, reporting that Knickerbocker had been disgusted by the sudden celebrity he received as author of the bestselling History, Irving sent Knickerbocker into hiding and effectively killed him off. “[He] took up his residence at a little rural retreat,” readers of the History’s second edition were advised, “[but h]ere, we are sorry to say, the good old gentleman fell dangerously ill of a fever, occasioned by the neighboring marshes.” In an ironic twist that would have made Irving proud, his satirical History has since obtained a modern Dewey classification number that places it, on library shelves, not where it belongs with Irving’s other fictional writings but alongside dozens of other very real and very earnest histories of New York.

Irving did not publicly reveal that he had invented Diedrich Knickerbocker until the History was republished in 1848; but, before that, he managed to build a successful literary career on a feigned pillaging of Knickerbocker’s estate when he published a number of folkloric stories supposedly recovered from the late historian’s private papers. ‘Rip van Winkle’ and ‘Sleepy Hollow’ were both among these, and were prefaced by a brief note informing readers of Knickerbocker’s authorship when they first went to press in Irving’s Sketch Book of 1820—a book that mimicked Knickerbocker’s History in being credited not to Irving himself but to another of his pseudonyms: Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman.

With that, American literature embarked on the journey that would culminate in its becoming less haphazard and ragged around the edges, more craft-oriented, and more respectable. If it is today largely the province of writers for whom writing is a professional activity, this is partly the case because Irving was the American writer who first transformed it into a profession—and that transformation, at bottom, was the fruit of a hoax that manifested as a fictional history credited to an old man who was himself fictitious.

Subscribe now

On September 11, 2001, with the Twin Towers reduced to rubble, the novelist Jay McInerney fled to the home of his friend and fellow novelist Bret Easton Ellis. On September 15, with McInerney’s celebrated 1984 début Bright Lights, Big City billed as “the definitive modern New York novel,” The Guardian asked the author to consider the literary implications of ‘9/11.’ To that end, he recalled his conversation with Ellis:

‘I’m glad I don’t have a book coming out this month,’ I said—a selfish and trivial response to the disaster, but one I thought he would understand. Nobody was going to be talking about fiction this week. ... ‘I don’t know how I’m going to be able to go back to this novel I’m writing,’ I said. The novel is set in New York, of course. The very New York which has just been altered for ever. ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he said. (‘Brightness Falls’)

But what exactly did he mean? Underpinning McInerney’s lament are several assumptions in need of explication—assumptions about the nature of literary fiction; about its relationship to social, political, and cultural actuality; and about what readers of literary fiction expect of those who write it—which have informed not only his own fiction after 9/11 but also the fiction of many of his contemporaries.

In this essay, I chart the differing responses to these assumptions amongst those who share them and those who do not—writers and readers alike. My intention, however, is not to produce a work of literary criticism that analyses various post-9/11 fictions in order to identify their reliance on those assumptions, but to contribute to the literary history of post-9/11 fiction with the suggestion that there is a particular mode of fiction which occupies an important place in that history even though it has not been included in literary-historical scholarship thus far. It has been overlooked, I think, because it refuses to explicitly address 9/11 as a subject, even though it implicitly addresses 9/11 via its literary form; and so I suggest that as publishers, reviewers, and readers have been increasingly attracted to this particular mode of fiction, they have demonstrated a widespread dissatisfaction with the dominance of post-9/11 fiction by literary realism and have thereby offered a counter-narrative to the view that post-9/11 fiction necessarily and exclusively consists of those works that address 9/11 itself.

My approach is threefold. First I explicate McInerney’s assumptions and survey the responses he elicited in making them, and I suggest that the ensuing debate between opponents and supporters of his position discloses a crisis of confidence in the value of fiction in post-9/11 American culture. Then I align myself with Camilla Nelson, author of the most thorough analysis of that debate yet published, before I update her analysis with an account of developments that have taken place since its appearance in 2008. Finally I argue that growing numbers of American readers have sensed a failure amongst American writers to adequately address this crisis of confidence, and have thereby been drawn to—and created a fledgling market for—fiction that situates itself within a particularly European literary tradition. This fiction, I suggest, has become the unlikely beneficiary of post-9/11 American literary aesthetics by virtue of readers who find that the problem with contemporary American fiction is not its failure to address the crisis realistically enough, but the attempt to address it realistically at all. Post-9/11, in short, readers have been beset by a disillusionment with realism as a credible mode of fiction, and so they have come to embrace fiction from a literary tradition whose approach to realism has historically ranged from ambivalence to outright hostility.

Share

1. A Crisis of Confidence

Jay McInerney’s fear that he could not return to his work in progress after 9/11 rests on the assumption that his task as a novelist is to represent social, political, and cultural actuality. His belief that popular interest in literary fiction would diminish in the wake of 9/11 rests on the assumption that his capabilities as a novelist had just been outrun by actuality itself. In combination, these two assumptions betray his crisis of confidence: he feels an obligation to respond to 9/11 even as 9/11 undercuts his ability to respond as he believes he must. He is not the only novelist to have voiced this crisis. 9/11, for Don DeLillo, “was so vast and terrible that it was outside imagining even as it happened. We could not catch up to it. ... The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon?” (‘In the Ruins’ 39). “[O]n September 12,” Martin Amis concurred, “all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation. ... [W]ork in progress had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble” (‘The Voice’).

Three weeks after publishing McInerney’s lament, The Guardian featured a response by the critic James Wood (‘Tell Me’). At that time, Wood was still riding the wave of acclaim he received for a year-old essay in which he had identified an emerging genre of fiction he called “hysterical realism” (‘Human’ 41). Naming Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace as the genre’s founders and Zadie Smith as its latest practitioner, Wood described these authors’ “big contemporary novel[s]” as “perpetual-motion machine[s]” wherein “[s]tories and sub-stories sprout on every page” and “conventions of realism are not being abolished but... exhausted, and overworked” (‘Human’ 41). By this he meant that these authors were casting a veil of verisimilitude over a sort of literary cartoon, exhibiting the realists’ affinity for carefully observed character traits and worldly details but including an overwhelming excess of those qualities in order to produce a narrative that was deliberately and consciously beyond credibility. As such, Wood saw something intemperate and thus “inhuman” in hysterical realism, and in The Guardian he argued that McInerney’s brand of social realism now seemed comparably inhuman because too temperate, too staid, to adequately engage with the quotidian incredibility of his post-9/11 milieu.

While social realism “strives to capture the times [and] to pin down an entire writhing culture,” Wood wrote, 9/11 offered a reminder “that whatever [fiction] gets up to, the ‘culture’ can always get up to something bigger” (‘Tell Me’). “[W]ho would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and society now?” he asked. “It ought to be harder, now, either to bounce around in the false zaniness of hysterical realism or to trudge along in the easy fidelity of social realism” (‘Tell Me’). As an alternative, he called for “works of fiction [whose] foci are human and metaphysical before they are social and documentary... stories, above all, about individual consciousness... novels that tell us not ‘how the world works’ but ‘how somebody felt about something’” (‘Tell Me’). What he wanted, in short, was psychological realism: not a retreat from realism in general, but realism with less emphasis on the convoluted nature of social, political, and cultural actuality and more emphasis on the human experience thereof.

Of course, there was little new about the divide between McInerney and Wood or about the debate that ensued along it. A full forty years earlier, Philip Roth had lamented the difficulty of the novelist’s ostensible obligation to “understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality” (224). More than twenty years earlier, with Roth having reluctantly come down in favour of psychological realism, Tom Wolfe used Roth’s diagnosis of the novelist’s obligations to champion social realism instead (45-56); and just five years earlier, Jonathan Franzen had argued for some combination of the two (35-54). Rather than retracing each step in the evolution of this debate, I refer interested readers to Camilla Nelson’s superb analysis of it (50-54, 57-59) and I reiterate her key findings. 9/11, Nelson argued, did not spark a new crisis of confidence in American literary aesthetics so much as it renewed a crisis already in progress: it did not ignite a fresh debate about the relationship between fiction and actuality so much as it rekindled a debate long underway.

Share

2. The Disenchantment with Realism

Skip to 2008, when Nelson published her analysis. “[T]wo wars, and a series of world-changing events later,” she wrote, “a growing number of literary works addressing the global fallout post September 11 [have] enter[ed] the public domain” (58). The titles named by herself and by other critics of post-9/11 fiction include Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, John Updike’s Terrorist, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (see Nelson; Gray 130; Miller 32; Jones and Smith 933). But insofar as each of these novels was written in the context of the above tension between psychological realism and social realism, each one tends to favour either of those varieties of realism without rejecting realism altogether. Despite a preference for psychological interiority over social externality or vice-versa, each one is similarly “set in a disenchanted modern cityscape inhabited by middle- or lower-middle-class characters” as it strives towards some conception of post-9/11 verisimilitude, plausibility, and thus credibility (Jones and Smith 934). Only since 2008, however, have critics and readers of these novels begun expressing misgivings about such a recourse to realism as a means of conveying the crisis of 9/11—which is to say that Nelson’s survey is now in need of an update as reader responses to the above works have since taken the debate she surveyed in a direction as yet uncharted.

Fittingly, the first complaints against the recourse to realism came from Zadie Smith, whose White Teeth was cited by James Wood as a textbook case of hysterical realism. In a long review of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a classically realist portrayal of intercultural relations in post-9/11 New York, Smith declared that “realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time... with most other exits blocked,” but that, with Netherland, it had reached—and breached—a sort of critical mass:

For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis. (‘Two Paths’)

For Smith, O’Neill’s attempt to convey the consequences of 9/11 by striving towards verisimilitude was flawed—not credible—insofar as that very striving is predicated on the novelist’s failure to internalise the crisis of 9/11. An internalisation of that crisis would necessarily preclude any recourse to realism, so that, in approaching the event and its aftermath without fundamentally altering his literary practice, O’Neill failed to register and to convey an experience of the crisis it ignited. As Smith saw it, post-9/11 realism attempted to contain rather than convey the crisis, and so it essentially distanced itself from the very thing with which it maintained a pretense of engaging.

After Smith presented her complaints to the broad readership of The New York Review of Books, they found an echo in academe when the scholars Richard Gray and Michael Rothberg reissued them in American Literary History. Writing in late 2008, Gray contended that post-9/11 fiction needed to better acknowledge the crisis of 9/11 by articulating “a recalibration of feeling so violent and radical that it resists and compels memory, generating stories that cannot, yet must, be told” (129). But, citing Don DeLillo’s “beautifully structured” Falling Man as an example, he complained, like Smith, that “the structure is too clearly foregrounded [and] the style excessively mannered” in a way that left DeLillo ameliorating the severity of the very crisis he was purportedly compelled to convey (132). Finding the same to be true of the other novels cited above, Gray wondered “just how new, or at least different, the structures of these books are,” and concluded: “for the most part, not at all. ... [They] simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures. The crisis is, in every sense of the word, domesticated” (134).

In early 2009, Gray’s diagnosis elicited Rothberg’s assent. “While American novelists have... announced the dawn of a new era following the attacks on New York and Washington D.C.,” wrote Rothberg, “the form of their works does not bear witness to fundamental change” (152). Crucially, though, neither he nor Gray went on to reject realism outright but only to advocate another readjustment of its foci. Gray asked for a blend of psychological and social realism that would reveal the interiority of the ethnic minority citizens of an America in crisis as the outside world intrudes upon it. Rothberg asked for a similar blend revealing the interiority of the citizens of other nations who watch the American crisis unfold at a distance and yet sense its influence on their own societies—and, as a prime example of that sort of fiction, he praised Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, the very novel Zadie Smith dismissed.

Critics of realism thus agreed that 9/11 rendered realism problematic, but they reached no agreement on what exactly a less problematic post-9/11 fiction would look like. If, for James Wood, neither social realism nor hysterical realism can adequately convey the crisis of 9/11; and if, for Gray and Rothberg, neither pure social realism nor pure psychological realism can do so; and if, for Zadie Smith, no mixture of social and psychological realism can do so, then what alternative remains? Is fiction even capable of adequately conveying the crisis at all—and, if so, how?

Share

3. Rebirth of the Nouveau Roman

Despite their differing opinions on Netherland, Smith, Gray, and Rothberg all found something newly dissatisfying about the hitherto satisfying staples of characterisation and conflict, drama and denouement, which now seemed to evade rather than engage the inexpressibility of post-9/11 social, political, and cultural actuality. However, only Smith proposed an alternative that seems to me to have genuinely struck a chord with readers who shared her dissatisfaction. In her review of Netherland, she contrasted it with, and ultimately celebrated, the English writer Tom McCarthy’s début novel Remainder. Opening with its narrator being crushed by “something falling from the sky,” perhaps airplane parts (5), and closing with the narrator hijacking a plane to embark on a suicide flight, Remainder implicitly invokes 9/11 and so positions itself as a work of post-9/11 fiction. In the narrative interim, though, it explicitly refuses verisimilitude in a way that rebukes and ridicules those who strive towards it. The narrator receives a fortune in compensation from the company that owned whatever ‘something’ fell from the sky and hit him, and he uses his payout to employ actors to re-enact a series of banal events he remembers from his past. In doing so, he himself strives toward verisimilitude—orchestrating increasingly detailed, complex, and supposedly accurate re-enactments—but to no avail, as there is no way for him to fully and faithfully evoke the actuality he remembers. At the same time, he shows no interest in his own social, political, and cultural actuality—“I got an urge to go and check up on the outside world,” he says: “Nothing much to report” (154-155)—and so he grows increasingly obsessed with superficially reconstructing an actuality that is lost to him. In a sense, then, Remainder finds a way to embody the crisis of 9/11: it acknowledges the irreclaimability of actuality and writes that very irreclaimability into its own aesthetics.

In reviewing Remainder, Zadie Smith recognised its literary lineage when she repeatedly named as its progenitor the work of the novelist and literary theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet. As well as the fiction he produced in the 1950s and 1960s, Robbe-Grillet’s lasting achievement has been his advocacy for the nouveau roman, a type of avant-garde fiction which rejects verisimilitude in favour of formal innovation, which engages rather than evades its own inadequacies as a means of representing actuality, and which thus holds a fascination with its own poetics over and above any concern with the real world. In 1957, writing against the dominance of both the social realism of Balzac and the psychological realism of Flaubert—and, post-World War II, writing in the thick of the Modernist crisis of authority (see Britton)—Robbe-Grillet called for “writers [to be] aware... that the systematic repetition of the forms of the past is not only absurd and sterile, but can even become harmful” (45). Thus championing an abandonment of characterisation and story (59-65) and of social, political, and cultural commentary in fiction (65-70), he asked, in short, for something like Remainder: a novel that revels in plotlessness, that undermines characterisation, that fetishises stasis, and that does not reflect on social, political, and cultural actuality so much as it self-reflects on the limitations of its own ability to reflect on such things.

In the mid-twentieth century, the nouveau roman flourished in the work of the European avant-garde, from Robbe-Grillet’s contemporaries Maurice Blanchot, Nathalie Sarraute, Margeurite Duras, Michel Butor, and Claude Simon, through to later figures such as Thomas Bernhard in Austria, W.G. Sebald in Germany, Italo Calvino in Italy, Enrique Vila-Matas in Spain, and Ann Quin in England. Comparatively few practitioners emerged in America, however, with the possible exceptions of Gilbert Sorrentino and David Markson. American avant-garde readers largely preferred the freewheeling postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon, the minimalist absurdism of Donald Barthelme, and the metafiction of John Barth and Robert Coover, while mainstream readers continued to prefer realism such that, in 2000, the arch-realist John Updike could claim without much dissent that “a writer at his peril strays too far from realism... [e]specially in [America], where realism is kind of our thing” (Gardner). Now, though, it seems to me that one of the consequences of the realists’ failure to internalise the crisis of 9/11 has been an American embrace of the nouveau roman—not just insofar as a hitherto untapped readership has been attracted to it, but insofar as a whole institutional apparatus of publishers and critical venues has developed for the purposes of producing it, promoting it, evaluating it, and calling for more of it. Dissatisfied with the failure of American writers to internalise the crisis of 9/11, many American readers have turned to a literary tradition whose formal aesthetics represent an internalisation of crisis broadly conceived, even when dealing with subjects other than 9/11.

As I see it, this turn began in 2001 with the founding of Melville House Publishing, an outgrowth of the literary weblog ‘Moby Lives’ dedicated to fostering original avant-garde fiction. Then, in 2005, the critic Scott Esposito founded the online journal The Quarterly Conversation as a forum through which to call attention to avant-garde fiction in general and the European avant-garde in particular; and, in 2006, the University of Illinois acquired and rejuvenated the Dalkey Archive Press—founded in 1984 as a partner of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, a journal of avant-garde criticism—specifically in order to bring translated European fiction to America. At that point, the institutional structures were in place for the nouveau roman to garner its current readership—and, since 2008, the strength of those structures and that readership has been underscored by a number of attacks against them.

In early 2010, the novelist David Shields published Reality Hunger, a Zadie Smith-style assault on contemporary realism which concluded, contrary to Smith, that writers of fiction need to allow “larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’” into their work via the inclusion of memoir and reportage (3). At about the same time, Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, took to Mother Jones to share Shields’ view—“[G]iving two shits about the world,” he complained, “has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism” (‘Death’)—and then the New York Observer critic Lee Siegel rounded out this emerging triumvirate of aggressive realists when he lamented that, nowadays, “no one goes to a current novel or story for the ineffable private and public clarity fiction once provided” (‘Mailers’). It wasn’t long, though, before The Quarterly Conversation devoted more than 5,000 words to opposing this triumvirate by upending Shields’ manifesto with the suggestion that “our hunger for reality is the biggest fiction of all” (Brown), which followed a similar excoriation in The Guardian, several months before Reality Hunger went to press, written, of course, by Zadie Smith (‘An Essay’ 2).

However, if the best defence is a good offence, then the strength of the support for the nouveau roman would come not from responses to its opponents but from alternatives to their arguments, and the first concerted alternative came from Dalkey Archive. Having already published early nouveaux romans by Ann Quin and Gilbert Sorrentino in the 1980s, Dalkey Archive inaugurated the Best European Fiction series in late 2009 to offer American readers an annual anthology of new work by writers from a literary tradition more respectful towards, and clearly influenced by, the nouveau roman. Tellingly, Zadie Smith wrote the preface to Best European Fiction 2010 and asserted that none of the writers therein “mentions O. Henry... [o]r Hemingway. Laurels are offered instead to the likes of John Barth and Donald Barthelme... [and] Beckett, Bernhard, Sebald, Claude Simon” (‘Preface’ xii). The Quarterly Conversation ran a rave review and offered particular praise to the Icelandic author Steiner Bragi who, it was said, “cuts to the heart of and transcends the problem”—“that it’s all a sham [and] verisimilitude is sleight of hand” (Elkin).

Then, in late 2010, Melville House joined the effort when it published The Canal, the début novel by Tom McCarthy’s friend Lee Rourke. Like McCarthy’s Remainder, Rourke’s Canal is implicitly a post-9/11 novel insofar as it features a long meditation on suicide bombing and the London attacks of July 7, 2005; yet it too rejects verisimilitude when its narrator similarly disengages from social, political, and cultural actuality in an effort to deliberately enter a state of almost catatonic stasis. Rourke had earlier taken to The Guardian to praise the English nouveau romancier Ann Quin: he wondered why “no one else seem[s] to remember this writer from the front rank of Britain’s literary avant-garde” and he thanked Dalkey Archive, her American publishers, for keeping her in print (‘Who Cares’). Upon the release of his own nouveau roman, The Quarterly Conversation ran a rave review (Bursey) before Rourke and McCarthy jointly and publicly celebrated their particular literary tradition upon the publication of What Ever Happened to Modernism? by the critic Gabriel Josipovici. In that book, Josipovici—himself a practising nouveau romancier ever since he débuted with The Inventory in 1968—defines Modernist literature as literature that is self-aware enough to acknowledge its own inadequacies, and in doing so he offers great appreciation to Alain Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman. In The Guardian, his book won a rave review by Tom McCarthy (‘What Ever Happened’) and then won further acclaim when The Guardian published a conversation between McCarthy and Lee Rourke wherein they praised Josipovici, Blanchot, and other such nouveau romanciers (Rourke, ‘In Conversation’).

Since then, the nouveau roman has thrived as Melville House followed up The Canal with Lars Iyer’s Spurious (2011). Already the author of two books on Blanchot, Iyer has written a classic nouveau roman—a long, circumlocutory conversation between two navel-gazing academics obsessed with the minutiae of daily life—which name-checks various nouveau romanciers including Gabriel Josipovici. The Quarterly Conversation, of course, ran a rave review (Auerbach), and, just after that review was published, Dalkey Archive announced that Melville House alumnus Lee Rourke as the representative of English literature in the Best European Fiction 2012 anthology.

The path that connects the collapse of the Twin Towers to Remainder, The Canal, Spurious, and the nouveau roman more generally is, admittedly, long and winding. It would be foolish to pretend that the connection is an obvious one. But novels such as these would not have been written and published unless there were people out there willing to read them and critics willing to push them into readers’ hands; and those people involved in the writing, production, distribution, and reception of such novels are largely motivated, I think, by a dissatisfaction with realism as a mode of fiction. Some of those dissatisfied with realism have blamed their dissatisfaction on the realists’ failure to acknowledge the limitations of their mode of fiction—a failure brought to prominence, of course, in realist responses to the crisis of 9/11. As such, the attraction of readers to the contemporary nouveau roman as an alternative to post-9/11 realism positions the contemporary nouveau roman itself—including but not limited to the above-mentioned titles—as a substratum of post-9/11 fiction deserving inclusion in post-9/11 literary history, one whose refusal to explicitly address post-9/11 social, political, and cultural actuality is implicitly a response to that actuality and a statement on its relationship to fiction. In short, I think, we are witnessing the rebirth of a literary tradition born from a crisis that precedes 9/11 but that has nevertheless resulted in the literary internalisation of crisis in general, thereby attracting the attention of American readers with a hunger for a more credible response to crisis than the response on offer in the polite realism of the American literary mainstream. In writing the literary history of post-9/11 fiction, then, we should accordingly broaden our definition of that phenomenon to make space for those works whose attempts at coming to grips with 9/11 involve acknowledging that the event and its aftermath are beyond their grasp.

Share

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. ‘The voice of the lonely crowd.’ The Guardian (1 June 2002): <http://guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jun/01/philosophy.society>. Web.

Auerbach, David. ‘Pile of Shit Reviews Profound Philosophical Rhapsody.’ The Quarterly Conversation 23 (March 2011): <http://quarterlyconversation.com/pile-of-shit-reviews-profound-philosophical-rhapsody-a-review-of-lars-iyers-spurious>. Web.

Britton, Celia. The Nouveau Roman: Fiction, Theory, and Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print.

Brown, Donald. ‘Novel Ideas? Problems With Reality Hunger by David Shields.’ The Quarterly Conversation 21 (September 2010): <http://quarterlyconversation.com/novel-ideas-problems-with-reality-hunger-by-david-shields>. Web.

Bursey, Jeff. ‘The Canal by Lee Rourke.’ The Quarterly Conversation 22 (October 2010): <http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-canal-by-lee-rourke>. Web.

DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Scribner’s, 2007. Print.
—. ‘In the Ruins of the Future.’ Harper’s Magazine (December 2001): 33-40. Print.

Elkin, Lauren. ‘The So-Called Other Europe.’ The Quarterly Conversation 19 (February 2010): <http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-so-called-other-europe-best-european-fiction-2010-edited-by-aleksandar-hemon>. Web.

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Print.

Franzen, Jonathan. ‘Perchance to Dream.’ Harper’s Magazine (April 1996): 35-54. Print.

Gardner, Dwight. ‘John Updike: ‘As close as you can get to the stars.’’ Salon.com (24 February 1999): <http://salon.com/1999/02/24/updike_4>. Web.

Genoways, Ted. ‘The Death of Fiction?’ Mother Jones (January/February 2010): <http://www.motherjones.com/media/2010/01/death-of-literary-fiction-magazines-journals>. Web.

Gray, Richard. ‘Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis.’ American Literary History 21.1 (2009): 128-151. Print.

Iyer, Lars. Spurious. New York: Melville House Publishing, 2011. Print.

Jones, D.M. and M.L.R. Smith. ‘Terror and the Liberal Conscience: Political Fiction and Jihad—The Novel Response to 9/11.’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 33 (2010): 933-948. Print.

Josipovici, Gabriel. The Inventory. London: Michael Joseph, 1968. Print.
—. What Ever Happened to Modernism? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Print.

Kalfus, Ken. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print.

McCarthy, Tom. Remainder. London: Alma Books, 2007. Print.
—. ‘What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici.’ The Guardian (4 September 2010): <http://guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/04/gabriel-josipovici-modernism-tom-mccarthy>. Web.

McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage, 1984. Print.
—. ’Brightness falls.’ The Guardian (15 September 2001): <http://guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/15/september11.usa1>. Web.
—. The Good Life. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print.

Messud, Claire. The Emperor’s Children. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print.

Miller, Cheryl. ‘9/11 and the Novelists.’ Commentary (December 2008): 32-35. Print.

Nelson, Camilla. ‘You Can’t Write a Social Novel After September 11.’ New Writing 5.1 (2008): 50-64. Print.

O’Neill, Joseph. Netherland. New York: Pantheon, 2008. Print.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. ‘On Some Outdated Notions.’ 1957. Towards a New Novel. Trans. Barbara Wright. London: Calder and Boyars, 1965. 58-74. Print.

Roth, Philip. ‘Writing American Fiction.’ Commentary (March 1961): 223-233. Print.

Rothberg, Michael. ‘A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray.’ American Literary History 21.1 (Spring 2009): 152-158. Print.

Rourke, Lee. The Canal. New York: Melville House, 2010. Print.
—. ‘In conversation: Lee Rourke and Tom McCarthy.’ The Guardian (18 September 2010): <http://guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/18/tom-mccarthy-lee-rourke-conversation>. Web.
—. ‘Who cares about Ann Quin?’ The Guardian (8 May 2007): <http://guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/may/08/whocaresaboutannquin>. Web.

Siegel, Lee. ‘Where Have All the Mailers Gone?’ The New York Observer (22 June 2010): <http://observer.com/2010/06/where-have-all-the-mailers-gone>. Web.

Smith, Zadie. ‘An essay is an act of imagination.’ The Guardian Review (21 November 2009): 2. Print.
—. ‘Preface.’ Best European Fiction 2010. Ed. Aleksandar Hemon. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. xi-xiii. Print.
—. ‘Two Paths for the Novel.’ The New York Review of Books 55.18 (20 November 2008): <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/?pagination=false>. Web.

Updike, John. Terrorist. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print.

Wolfe, Tom. ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.’ Harper’s Magazine (November 1989): 45-56. Print.

Wood, James. ‘Human, All Too Inhuman.’ The New Republic (24 July 2000): 41-45. Print.
—. ‘Tell me how does it feel?,’ The Guardian (6 October 2001): <http://guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct/06/fiction>. Web.

Subscribe now

Although it is arguably one of her most admired short stories, Eudora Welty’s ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ is also among her most misunderstood. In part, I think, the misunderstanding persists because the story has received scant attention from literary critics: only three full-length articles have appeared since its initial publication in 1963 (see Clerc; Hargrove; Harrison), supplemented by several summary analyses, usually not longer than one or two pages, in various surveys of Welty’s oeuvre (see Binding; Devlin; Gretlund; Pingatore; Schmidt; Vande Kieft). To a greater extent, though, I think the misunderstanding persists because none of this extant scholarship takes a comprehensive and holistic view of the story in order to examine its particularities and its purposes from a distinctly literary perspective. On the contrary, scholarly critics tend to approach this story with largely utilitarian intent, citing it as a means of opening a discussion of other subjects to which the story itself is only circumstantially related. Insofar as these subjects include either the literary form of the monologue or the socio-political upheavals of the civil rights era, this approach to the story is understandable. After all, ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ reads as a relatively straightforward account of the murder of a civil rights activist in segregated Mississippi, retrospectively narrated in a confessional monologue by the murderer himself while he evades police; and, given that Welty wrote the story following actual events of that kind and in anticipation of an actual murderer’s confession, a discussion of its socio-political salience is always going to overshadow any discussion of its comparatively inconsequential literariness and thus leave such a literary discussion comparatively undeveloped.

As a result of this situation, however, the story has fallen under a critical gaze that reflexively glances away from its powerful literary subtext. With such overwhelming attention paid to its extra-literary properties, and with the importance of its purely literary properties consequently downplayed, critics to date have found no cause to seek out its subtext nor any cause to dwell on that subtext should they spy it in passing. Of course such a disregard for subtext will occasion a misunderstanding of almost any work of literature, not just this particular story; but here it strikes me as a greater shortcoming than usual because, in this story, the subtext is the means by which the author realises a purpose far more subtle than the mere articulation of a response to a socio-political situation. It seems to me, in other words, that Eudora Welty is asking something of her readers in this story—something as difficult to do as it is to discern—but we, as readers, occlude our view of it when we approach the story with an eye towards its socio-political content at the expense of its carefully nuanced artistry.

In this essay, after illustrating the ways in which the existing discussion of this story has disregarded its subtext and so removed from view the author’s purpose, I want to throw light on that purpose by examining what exactly Welty is asking of us and how exactly I think she asks it. In 1980, when questioned on her reasons for writing about the tensions of the civil rights era, Welty admitted that she had been unsatisfied by the attempts of northern writers to adequately represent those tensions and felt she could represent them more accurately by writing “from the inside of [the] people” experiencing them (Bonassin 294). Given that she had earlier expressed her belief that writing in general involves deploying words to “follow the contours of some continuous relationship between what can be told and what cannot be told” (Welty, Eye of the Story 143), her efforts to write “from the inside of people” would require investing equal significance in what those people are willing to reveal about themselves and what they prefer to pass over in silence. ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ seems to me to have been written precisely along these lines. Each time I read the story, I find myself struck not only by the power of its socio-political polemic, but more so by a rhetorical abyss at its center—a point at which the words of the otherwise loquacious murderer collapse into an inexplicable silence—as well as a series of minor but no less conspicuous ambiguities scattered throughout the rest of the work. This silence and its attendant ambiguities are, I think, the gateways to the subtext of the story, so that we can begin to discern Welty’s purpose when we attempt to account for them. To that end, I first want to address the critical silence that has fallen upon the literary artistry of ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ and then to show how this silence has so far left critics deaf to the subtext through which the story invites us not to rebuke the murderer who narrates it, but
rather to extend our sympathy to him. Thereafter, I want to access this subtext by addressing the silence of the story itself and the ways in which Welty both uses that silence to present us with the possibility of actually extending our sympathy to the murderer and effectively challenges us to do so. I take Welty’s own words as justification for this approach to the story. “I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters,” she writes in the preface to her Collected Stories (829). Since she reports having been told as much immediately after discussing the murderer in ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’—and since she reports it, most notably, without denying or correcting it—I take her very act of reportage as a tacit self-endorsement of the sentiment of those remarks. She seems to love all her characters, it is true; and it is no more true for her most easily lovable characters than it is for her most loathsome.

Share

1. The Critical Silence

Shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, the NAACP Field Secretary for Mississippi, was shot outside his home in Jackson by a gunman who quickly fled the scene. Although Evers was rushed to hospital, he died about an hour later. When reports of his assassination reached the public, Eudora Welty was so troubled by what she heard that she felt compelled to make sense of it by writing a story that would lay bare the murderer’s innermost consciousness as he described, explained, and rationalised his crime. “I thought,” she later recalled, “with overwhelming directness: Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from [living] here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind” (‘Preface’ 829). Overcome by an irrepressible urge to set the story on paper before continuing the other work in which she was immersed at that time, Welty completed it on the very day she learned of the crime and sent it to The New Yorker for immediate publication. On June 23, however, before the story was to be published, Mississippi police arrested Byron De La Beckwith, an ardent segregationist and Klansman, and charged him with the murder of Medgar Evers. Between then and July 6, when ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ appeared in print, The New Yorker insisted that Welty alter the details of characters and events because, as Welty admitted, “the story must not be found prejudicial to the case of a person who might be on trial for his life” (‘Preface’ 829). So the author’s hometown of Jackson became the fictional town of Thermopylae, Medgar Evers became the fictional activist Roland Summers, and the murderous narrator remained unnamed throughout. That such alterations were even deemed necessary implied that “the fiction’s outward details [might have] resembled too closely those of actuality” (‘Preface’ 829); and indeed, when Beckwith later took the stand to defend himself, Welty’s speculations were held up against reality and their verisimilitude was put to the test. Notwithstanding several superficial differences between the real murderer and his imagined counterpart—differences, for instance, in their personal and familial histories—their essential likeness was unmistakable. In particular, the shamelessly racist and unrepentant Beckwith spoke in what seemed to be the same voice as the fictional murderer who proudly boasts of his crime.

Since then, the murder of Medgar Evers has been so tightly bound up with the murder in Welty’s story that several critics of the story have come to read it less as an example of carefully crafted literature than as a politically-charged editorial with the veil of fiction cast over it in haste. Albert Devlin, for instance, dismisses it as a work of no greater literary sophistication than an “explicit testimony to th[o]se unholy days in Jackson” (139). Likewise, Jan Gretlund suggests that “the quick transmutation of fact into art” left Welty with “no time for a recollection of the murder in tranquillity” and thus no time for the artistic deliberation that literary sophistication requires (225). “The brief mention this story is accorded in the critical response to Welty’s short fiction most often occurs in one of two contexts,” as Diana Pingatore explains:

[Either] the story is cited as a later example of Welty’s skill with the form of the monologue, or it is discussed... as a story that serves as Welty’s fictional response to the racial tensions that beset her American South in the decade of the sixties. ... [Yet e]ven those responses [that focus on the literariness of the monologue form] give considerable attention to the historical event that prompted the story. (401, 403)

This is true; but, as a result, such attention to actual socio-political events has clashed with what Suzan Harrison identifies as the prevailing “view of Welty as an apolitical writer” (634). In turn, this clash has lured critics into an ongoing and possibly irresolvable effort to rationalise the atypically overt politics of this story by comparing it to, and aligning it with, the consistently political work of
Welty’s Southern peers—most notably Flannery O’Connor, whose cast of grotesque characters could easily accommodate Welty’s grotesque murderer. O’Connor, of course, favoured the literature of the grotesque as a means of satirising and criticising certain behaviour to which she held a moral objection, on the understanding that her readers would be persuaded to hold a similar objection only if that behaviour was first made grotesque: “To the hard of hearing you shout,” she famously explained, “and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures” (34). Thus, as Harold Bloom observes, “[t]he people who throng O’Connor’s marvelous stories are the damned, a category in which [she] cheerfully included most of her readers” (51-52)—and that is a category in which Welty’s readers have also tended to include her fictional murderer insofar as he, too, is so obviously damned. Noting, for instance, that the murderer repeatedly complains about a feeling of atmospheric heat so intense that everything he now holds in his hands is “just that hot to the touch” (606), Joyce Carol Oates infers from these remarks that “his life is entering a phase of a kind of Hell. ... [H]e is being dragged down into Hell” (‘Hearing Voices’). Oates elsewhere positions this damned murderer as kith and kin to O’Connor’s grotesques when, having compared Welty with O’Connor and determined that “[Welty’s] range is wider, her narrative voice more varied, and her compassion for her characters greater,” she singles out ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ as “so atypical a Welty story” and thereby effectively locates it in the O’Connor tradition (‘Eudora Welty’ 481).

To varying degrees, all of those who have published work on this story have either openly or tacitly endorsed Oates’ view of its literary bloodline, such that the only substantial bone of contention among critics today is the precise target of Welty’s displeasure. If she has grotesquely exaggerated a real murderer in order to satirise and criticise something to which she objects, what exactly is that something? The line of division amongst critics parallels the divide between essentialism and socialisation. For some, Welty plainly and simply objects to the essential qualities of the murderer himself, not least his vehement racism and his shameless self-vindication. For others, Welty advances a more subtle objection to the socio-political and socio-economic forces that have enabled a man with these qualities to emerge in this place at this point in history. Specifically, she appears to condemn the political institutions that have allowed the flourishing of the squalour in which the murderer finds himself, as well as the broader culture whose indifference to his impoverishment has allowed his resentment to fester for so long that he feels as if he can exorcise his rage only by violently opposing those who aspire to a social advancement that would leave him behind in the dust. As Devlin writes,

Welty characterize[s] the anonymous killer as a displaced country-man, victim [of the] agricultural distress which forced successive waves of Mississippians to [migrate to] towns and cities after the First World War. His country-bred mind... necessarily resist[s] any modernization of racial folkways. (141, my emphasis)

And as Devlin points out, while “[Welty’s] moral indignation suffuses [the murderer’s] rough diction and racial epithets,” that indignation “is tempered at every point by the soothing effect of [her] historical understanding” (140). “Pity and a desirable moral solution have no dramatic part to play in [this story],” adds Paul Binding, “yet clearly [Welty] believes in compassion and has a strong moral vision. Otherwise we, too, would feel that it was a good thing to kill Roland Summers” (11). For Devlin and Binding, then, Welty opens a distance between the murderer and her readers and works to maintain it throughout the story. We might feel sorrow for someone whose dire socio-economic situation leaves him so emotionally and psychologically crippled, but we must stop short of extending our sympathy to him as soon as he commits his crime. He deserves our sympathy to the extent that he has been burdened by a humiliating poverty and succumbed to a racial ideology that together compel him to kill, but we must withdraw whatever sympathy we hold for him once he actually commits the murder and should instead direct our sympathy towards his defenceless victim. In much the same way, I would suggest, we must question whatever empathy we hold for him, and whether we are actually able to empathise with him at all—for if we were to truly stand alongside the murderer, feeling as and what he feels, we too would be embittered enough to be convinced of the righteousness of his bloodshed.

I will elaborate on this distinction between empathy and sympathy towards the end of this essay, but at this point I want to challenge the notion that we must not feel sorrow for or extend our sympathy to the murderer once the murder has taken place. Surely there are circumstances in which we would have reasonable grounds for extending our sympathy to him even after he commits his crime, not least if he were to come to regret his actions and demonstrably suffer remorse when he reflects upon them. At the same time, though, it seems to me that the emotionally and psychologically crippled state of this murderer would impede his ability to express such remorse if indeed he were to suffer it. In that event, we as readers would be inhibited from extending our sympathy to him because prevented from recognising the very thing that would otherwise invite us to extend it. With his fevered state of mind encumbering his clarity of expression, whatever remorse the murderer might attempt to articulate would necessarily be clouded by digression and circumlocution, the omission of key details, and an obscurantist recollection of key events. As a result, if we are to recognise his remorse at all—as Welty invites us to do via her remarks on her love for her characters—then these expressive encumbrances are exactly the features of his monologue to which we should pay attention.

Admittedly, on the surface of things, the murderer’s obdurate tenor and unapologetic arrogance would seem to preclude any possibility of his suffering remorse. First he opens his monologue with a recounting of a televised news report about a local civil rights rally attended by the activist who will soon become his victim. When his wife watches the report beside him and grows agitated at the on-screen appearance of the activist, the murderer tells her: “You can reach and turn it off. You don’t have to set and look at a black nigger face no longer than you want to” (727); and then, in an aside, he confesses: “I reckon that’s how I give myself the idea” (727). Later that night, he sneaks away under cover of darkness and drives to the activist’s neighborhood where he finds the activist’s house and hides himself in the nearby bushes. He patiently waits for his victim to return home; and then, when the activist at last pulls into his driveway and steps out of his car, the murderer shoots him in the back with the sort of absolute self-conviction usually reserved only for the gunslingers of the Wild West:

As soon as I heard wheels, I knowed who was coming. That was him and bound to be him. ... That was him. I knowed it when he cut off the car lights and put his foot out and I knowed him standing dark against the light. I knowed him then like I know me now. I knowed him even by his still, listening back.

Never seen him before, never seen him since, never seen anything of his black face but his picture, never seen his face alive, any time at all, or anywheres, and didn’t want to, need to, never hope to see that face and never will. As long as there was no question in my mind. (728)

“Stopping a human life,” observes Ruth Vande Kieft, “is no more to the [murderer] than turning off the television” (142), except insofar as it is the consequence less of impulse than of deliberation: the murderer carries out his crime with forethought and in full awareness of what he is doing. “[He] does not appear to be unbalanced,” notes Gretlund (231), to which Charles Clerc adds: “He is an isolato: unsavory, malevolent, ignorant, grotesque. But he is not demented. ... [H]e has to be adjudged sane, even though he is [seemingly] capable of committing an act of murder without feeling any guilt or recrimination” (390). Worse, he also apparently wants to be known as having committed his crime with forethought and with total self-awareness. Twice, as Nancy Hargrove notes, he boasts “that he committed the murder for ‘my own pure-D satisfaction,’ implying with the words ‘my own’ a totally personal, totally selfish interest, and with the words ‘pure-D satisfaction’ perhaps even a kind of pleasure” (82). And later, when he finds his crime reported by the mass media, “[h]is identity,” writes Binding, “acquires new lustre in his eyes. Hasn’t he acted true to his own and his community’s convictions...? His secret fame (for he is a talked-of man) causes him only delight... and it sustains him when he makes himself face up to the possibility of arrest—and even of the electric chair” (5).

If this is so, then what evidence might there be to suggest that the murderer acknowledges the wrongness of his actions and suffers remorse when he reflects upon them? On the one hand, for those who believe that Welty’s purpose is to damn this man for his essential inhumanity, such a question is altogether misconceived. Vande Kieft, for instance, declares herself “unwilling to believe that a man cowardly enough to shoot his helpless victim in the back would be capable of thinking of that victim humanely” and of thereby suffering remorse (‘Teaching’ 200). Paul Binding similarly laments that we can neither “bring home to him the wrongness of [this] act” nor “persuade him to pity when he has long since let hatred... stifle any promptings of it” (5). On the other hand, for those who believe that Welty’s intention is to condemn the socio-political and socio-economic forces that have given rise to this murderer, the above question is not so much misconceived as it is simply misarticulated: the murderer’s failure to suffer remorse is the point, since that very failure is as much a symptom of the deterioration of his material wellbeing as the resentment that drives him to kill in the first place. Given that the story itself places a decisive emphasis on this deterioration, there is obviously a degree of validity to such an interpretation of events. The murderer drives to his victim’s home “in my brother-in-law’s truck” (727) because he is unable to afford a vehicle of his own; and so, when he arrives at his destination, he is disgusted to find that his victim lives in a house with a garage, that he has “a new white car” parked in “his paved driveway” (728), and that he returns home “[d]riving his own car” (730) before he is shot down. Furthermore, as Clerc points out, “[t]he black man’s property has thick grass; the white man is envious of that lawn because his place is barren” (394), and worst of all, as Hargrove observes, the murderer resents “that [his victim’s] wife, in contrast to [his own] wife, seems to care greatly for her husband and her home. She left a light on and waited up for [him], while, as the [murderer] says to his wife, ‘You didn’t even leave a light burning when you went to bed’” (85). This is not to suggest, of course, that the socio-political and socio-economic discrepancies between the murderer and his victim are the sole and specific motive for the murder, but rather that those discrepancies make it easier for the murderer to commit his crime because they distract him from recognising the essential humanity of his victim. “As long as he can keep the shooting completely impersonal by de-individualizing his target,” writes Gretlund, “there is no doubt in his mind of what he must do” (238)—although Gretlund stresses that we “reduce the effect of Welty’s warning” if we think of the murderer as “less than human” (238) for his apparent failure to sympathise with his victim:

Her warning is against the consequences of man’s inhumanity to man. Only by accepting that even a killer is a human being, can we begin to understand that his voice is a part of our voice, and therefore also our responsibility. ... [Thus] Welty slowly lets her reader discover that the whole population of Thermopylae, past and present, is responsible for the death of the black civil rights leader. (238, 242)

I find this interpretation of events persuasive as far as it goes, given the extent to which the story itself seems to support it—or, at least, I find it more persuasive than the alternative interpretation which holds the murderer alone responsible for his actions without acknowledging the contributing factors that have been so clearly woven into the narrative. Nevertheless, from a third perspective, neither one of these two interpretations is in any way fundamentally distinct from the other because both of them equally disregard the possibility that the murderer suffers remorse for his crime. At bottom, if there is a disagreement between those critics who believe that Welty’s purpose is to condemn the murderer on essentialist grounds and those who believe that she condemns his socialisation, it is only a disagreement over the origins of the murderer’s lack of remorse. That he does indeed lack remorse seems to be wholly beyond doubt.

By now, however, it should be plain that I believe that the murderer is indeed remorseful. My sense is that he begins to suffer remorse at the very instant he kills Roland Summers, but that he remains utterly unable to express it and thus unable to unburden himself of it. As such, I contend that his remorse is made perceptible in his monologue not via the words he actually uses but via the breakdown of those words, at those moments when he finds that words themselves have failed him and so allows crucial words to remain unspoken. More than that, I think his remorse suffuses every word he does actually speak, such that his ostensible pride at having committed his crime is an essentially disingenuous attempt to gloss over an irrevocable course of action which, on a deeper level, he wishes he had not pursued. Welty’s purpose in this story therefore seems to me to involve soliciting our sympathy for the murderer by showing us how his inability to articulate and unburden himself of his remorse leaves him, in his own way, just as dehumanised by his own vehement racism as his unfortunate victim. For some readers it may seem as if Welty is here soliciting empathy rather than sympathy for the murderer, but my sense is that the equilibrium between reader and murderer—a precondition for empathy in the fullest sense of the concept—is destabilised by an emergent tension between the reader’s awareness of the murderer’s inarticulate dehumanisation and the murderer’s unawareness of the same.

Once again, I will elaborate on this distinction between empathy and sympathy towards the end of this essay. For now, though, I wonder why the silences that seem to me to convey the murderer’s remorse—and to thus solicit sympathy for him—have escaped the attention of earlier critics. I suspect that they have so far escaped attention because the story is written in the confessional mode and therefore carries the pretense of explicitly articulating everything that the speaker deems necessary for sufficient self-expression. But, I think, if we interrogate the confessional mode itself and unpack its presuppositions, we can identify the ways in which Welty manipulates those presuppositions in order to infuse the murderer’s confession with scattershot silences signifying his remorse and to thereby present us with the possibility of extending our sympathy to him even though it seems to be unwarranted. This interrogation will require a consideration of three key issues raised by the use of the confessional mode. First: the selection of the mode itself. What exactly motivates the murderer to speak at all and compels him to confess his crimes? Second: the presumptive audience for his confession. Since every confession is by definition directed to an audience—even if only another aspect of the confessor’s own self—to whom does the murderer address his confession and to what end? Finally: his failure to actually confess despite the pretense of confession. What does the murderer pass over in silence or else allow to remain shrouded in ambiguity, and in what ways does his selection of the confessional mode make his silences and ambiguities significant?

Share

2. The Narratorial Silence

“The unnamed murderer,” writes Peter Schmidt, “can  never stop talking” (196). This is true enough, but what are we to make of his logorrhoea? His conversations with his wife reveal that he is occasionally able to bite his tongue and to exercise control over what he says, so that the logorrhoea that drives his confession would imply a loss of control brought about by a troubled state of mind. That he “can never stop talking” is true in the most literal sense of the term: it is not that he fails to know when to stop speaking, but that he is literally unable to stop. What motivates him to speak of his crime, then, is not some epiphany he receives after a period of meditative reflection, but the sheer force of some overriding and inexplicable compulsion to confess almost immediately following the act. What could possibly arouse such a compulsion? Schmidt comes close to accessing the subtext of this story when he suggests that the source of the murderer’s compulsion is guilt. The “guilty subtext” of the confession, he writes, “can neither be successfully repressed nor successfully liberated” (196); and Paul Binding also appears to share this view, albeit only in passing, when he takes the “voice” of the story’s title to refer to “some deep-feared and unacknowledged voice whispering somewhere in the back of the [murderer’s] own mind, telling him of a universal law profounder still than the one he believes he is serving, a law that enjoins all of us to do as we would be done by” (11-12). Guilt, however, is not equivalent to remorse. Guilt is a regret of one’s actions occasioned by a fear that their consequences will attract recrimination or retribution and thereby imperil one’s own wellbeing. Remorse, on the other hand, is a regret of one’s actions occasioned by a subsequent recognition that the actions themselves were inherently wrong. So even though both Schmidt and Binding head in the right direction in search of the source of the murderer’s compulsion to speak, neither one attempts to elaborate on their findings or to consider that the source of the murderer’s compulsion is more severe than mere guilt. Nor, for that matter, does either one attempt to identify evidence of the guilt that attracts their attention.

Ironically, other critics have identified such evidence in the story but have neglected to attribute it to any sense of guilt, much less remorse, even though remorse is exactly what it implies. After all, if remorse originates from a recognition of the inherent wrongness of one’s actions, and if the murderer’s actions entail the victimisation of another human being, then his particular remorse would have to originate from a recognition of the essential humanity of his victim, which in turn would have to be preceded by some sort of identification with his victim—and indeed, throughout the story, such an identification slowly and subtly emerges. Contrary to Jan Gretlund’s assertion that the murderer “keep[s] the shooting completely impersonal by de-individualizing his target” (238), the murderer’s victim becomes recognisably more individualised as the story unfolds. Originally introduced as merely a face on a televised news report and thus as an individual with a wholly politicised identity, the victim begins to acquire a distinct personality upon the murderer’s arrival at his house. When the murderer acknowledges the presence of his victim’s wife at the crime scene, the victim’s politicised identity softens to accommodate his status as a family man; and when his wife rushes to his aid as he lies dying on the ground, we catch a glimpse of this man as a lover and a confidante—not just someone who holds a place within a family, but a human being who is visibly cared for by the person closest to him. Additionally, as Charles Clerc notes, “the victim acquires a name—Roland Summers—only when killed. Before, he was always ‘that nigger’ in the [murderer’s] mind” (391); and, as noted by both Clerc (400) and Suzan Harrison (601), the murderer actually concludes his confession by likening himself to his victim. After acknowledging that Summers has been mortally wounded, he says: “He was down. He was down” (728), and then he returns home where he awaits police apprehension by taking up his guitar and singing to himself: “I set in my chair... and I start to play, and sing a-Down. And sing a-down, down, down, down...” (732).

Most importantly, though, the retrospective nature of his confession suggests that he has come to identify with his victim in hindsight and to belatedly recognise his victim’s essential humanity. When he recounts the series of events that have ushered him into his fugitive situation, and when he does so without digression and with a focus on only those events that have directly contributed to this situation, the implication is that he knew that he would end up in this situation from the moment he opened his mouth to begin explaining its development. In other words, the events he recounts at the end of his monologue are events that he has already experienced before he commences his monologue, meaning that he has already sung “a-down, down, down, down” before he begins recounting his murder and therefore not only identifies with his victim but ultimately recounts the murder from the point at which he identifies with his victim. In a subtle way, contained within the story he tells about the crime he committed, there is the hidden story of the burgeoning identification with his victim that compelled him to tell his story in the first place. Not that this should be surprising, of course, since the murderer finally ends up in, and begins speaking from, a situation not unlike that of his victim: hunted by an adversary whose moment of arrival he cannot foresee and facing certain execution when that adversary eventually arrives. Once we recognise that this situation has compelled him to confess—a compulsion not explicitly articulated, but implicit in the presuppositions of the confessional mode—the actual words of the confession lose their obstinate gloss and obtain a greater degree of self-knowing introspection. Consider, for instance, the murderer’s final admission: “I was evermore the one” (732). On one level, these may well be the words of a man who is proud to identify himself as the murderer of Roland Summers. On another level—particularly with the inclusion of that definitive “evermore”—they could equally be the words of a man who now recognises the irrevocability of his actions and who has consequently come to regret them.

But to whom does he speak these words and address his confession? He is, as Charles Clerc writes, “telling a story directly to a particular but unseen audience” (390), although there is no critical consensus on who exactly this audience might be. Perhaps, as suggested by Albert Devlin (148) and Nancy Hargrove (40), the confessional monologue is addressed to us, as readers; or perhaps, as Vande Kieft argues, it is “addressed to Thermopylae (the fictional Jackson)” and, in particular, “its white citizens” (141). Since the murderer at one point makes a remark to his audience that is plainly unintelligible to a wide and diverse body of people, I am inclined to agree with Vande Kieft; although again I would go further to say that the confession is addressed to an identifiably particular subset of Thermopylae’s white population: namely, the policemen who will soon apprehend the murderer and extract a confession in any event. Halfway through his confession, the murderer admits: “I reckon you have to tell somebody” (730), and then, a short while later, he speaks directly to that ‘somebody’ in order to correct the record of events: “[T]he first thing I heard [on the news] was the N. double A. C. P. done it themselves, killed Roland Summers, and proved it by saying the shooting was done by a expert (I hope to tell you it was!)” (731). And although he later rises to address his confession to “Everybody” (731), the deliberately ambiguous remark he makes at the beginning of his confession is clearly intended to be understood only by a very specific group of individuals, so that the subsequent “Everybody” would refer to everybody within that group. Discussing his means of identifying the Summers household without first knowing its exact location, the murderer suggests that members of his audience would also be able to identify it because, for ethically dubious reasons, they are already familiar with that neighbourhood:

I ain’t saying it might not be because [the house is located] pretty close to where I live. The other hand, there could be reasons you might have yourself for knowing how to get there in the dark. It’s where you all go for the thing you want when you want it the most. Ain’t that right? (727)

Whose validation does he sarcastically seek with those final three words? What exactly is “the thing you want when you want it the most,” and, more importantly, who is “you”? “It is implied,” writes Gretlund, “that this black neighborhood is where white men go to visit whores” (232), although only Clerc seems to have also picked up on the implication (394). Again, though, I think that the murderer is addressing not just white men in general, but white policemen in particular, and I infer this from the confluence of three facts: first, that the murderer is expecting an imminent confrontation with the police; second, that he holds the police in contempt and ridicules them throughout his confession; and third, that those final words following the implication that his audience would seek out prostitutes—“Ain’t that right?”—seem intended to taunt his audience with the same contempt as his earlier ridicule. When the murderer speaks of the police elsewhere, he belittles them as “babyface cops” (731), “half of ’em too young to start shaving” (731), and he later attempts to pre-emptively undercut the credit that they could claim if they were to apprehend him: “Oh, they may find me,” he says, “May catch me one day in spite of ’emselves” (732). He also admonishes the police for privileging black civil rights advocates over white citizens like himself, so that his inference that police would seek out prostitutes in a black neighbourhood is consistent with the mockery he repeatedly casts upon them. Furthermore, he has good reason to believe that the police will find him very soon and with little effort—and this reason in turn points to the exact moment at which he acts on the remorse he suffers in a way that invites the police to apprehend him.

After the murderer kills Roland Summers, he knowingly leaves his rifle on the ground at the scene of the crime. What else but remorse could drive him to do that? He commits a murder, he leaves his weapon to be found by the police, he returns home to learn that the police are after him, and he recounts his actions while he awaits their arrival. If he felt neither guilt nor remorse, he would have taken extraordinary pains not to lose that gun. If he felt guilt but did not feel remorse, the fear of recrimination and retribution—which is what characterises guilt—still would have led him to keep the gun by his side. “He is,” writes Jan Gretlund, “a man who boasts that he has never once dropped, forgotten, lost, or pawned his guitar for good... [so] it seems [that he has] left his weapon as a clue” (239). For Gretlund, however, the murderer leaves this clue so that “he can be sure to be credited with [an] act of national importance” (239)—but if that were the case, why would he not willingly and proudly turn himself in? The fact that he refuses to turn himself in and yet gives the police a means of tracking him down suggests that, on some level, he knows he has done wrong and believes he should be punished for it—which is the precondition for the remorse that compels him to confess, even if he remains unable to put that remorse into words. And prior to that, before the murderer abandons his weapon, we can pinpoint the exact moment at which he is struck by the remorse that compels him to act in this way. In recounting the build-up to and execution of the murder, he undermines the pride of his own words when he postpones and then entirely disregards the moment of the murder itself—and at this point we come to the most profound silence of the entire story. First, rather than moving on directly from his decision to kill Roland Summers to discuss his departure from home and his arrival at the Summers household, the murderer—so ostensibly proud of his crime—inexplicably prolongs the time it takes him to recount the crime itself. He insists on both recounting the route he took from his own home to the Summers household and carefully noting an abundance of trivial environmental details:

So you leave Four Corners and head west on Nathan B. Forrest Road, past the Surplus & Salvage, not much beyond the Kum Back Drive-In and Trailer Camp, not as far as where the signs starts saying ‘Live Bait,’ ‘Used Parts,’ ‘Fireworks,’ ‘Peaches,’ and ‘Sister Peebles Reader and Adviser.’ (727)

“In his mind he goes over his route,” writes Gretlund, and “[e]very detail is fully realized and its reality accepted” (231). For Gretlund, this signifies the pleasure that the murderer derives from his familiarity with his surroundings; but, as these words come between the beginning of the murderer’s confessional monologue and the event at its narrative centre, they seem to me to signify the murderer’s impotent efforts to find some sanctuary in the static certainties of his everyday environment as he draws ever closer to recounting the event that has since thrown his life into turmoil. Then, when it comes time for him to detail the event itself—the murder that makes him the murderer he now is—his words collapse into a silence so absolute that this man who purports to be so proud of his crime is utterly unable to attribute it to himself:

I’d already brought up my rifle, I’d already taken my sights. And I’d already got him, because it was too late then for him or me to turn by one hair.

Something darker than him, like the wings of a bird, spread on his back and pulled him down. He climbed up once, like a man under bad claws, and like just blood could weight a ton he walked with it on his back to better light. Didn’t get no further than his door. And fell to stay.

He was down. He was down, and a ton load of bricks on his back wouldn’t have laid any heavier. There on his paved driveway, yes sir. (728)

Notice the break distinguishing the first paragraph of this passage from the paragraph beneath it. That otherwise innocuous space entirely swallows up the central action of the narrative. The murder happens, but, when recounting the actual moment of the murder, the murderer who elsewhere identifies himself as the one who made it happen does not actually make it happen at all. He denies himself enough agency to demonstrably commit his crime. He raises his gun and he takes his aim, but at no stage does he fire the weapon. He raises his gun and he takes his aim, and then, all of a sudden, without any recounting of the shooting itself, Roland Summers has been shot. For all the tireless attention the murderer pays to the events both preceding and following the crime, he experiences a lapse of attention when the time comes for him to discuss the crime in detail. Despite the ostensible pride he derives from the murder, he ultimately deems it more important to name-check Nathan B. Forrest Road than to concentrate on the tension of the trigger beneath his finger, and more important to acknowledge the Surplus & Salvage than to describe the kickback of the rifle when he fires the bullet, and more important to specify that he passed by the Kum Back Drive-In than to detail the smell of gunpowder at the moment of the blast, and more important to anticipate the “Sister Peebles Reader and Adviser” sign than to retrospectively savour the sound of the slug thudding into his victim. It is difficult to overstate the importance of his failure to fully and actively depict himself as the man who pulled the trigger of the gun that fired the bullet that killed Roland Summers. The murder is the centre and the driving force of his entire narrative—everything else either builds up to it or flows on from it—and yet, when it is brought into the foreground to the exclusion of all else, the murderer cannot abide it and grant it the attention that he otherwise insists it deserves. What are we to make of this man who defines and champions himself as a murderer but fails to describe the very moment at which he became one? What are we to make of the dissonance between the pride he expresses when he discusses his crime in the abstract sense and the silence that consumes him when he discusses it as an actual event?

“[One] advantage of a monologue of this sort is a gain in irony,” writes Charles Clerc, explaining what he sees as Welty’s means of advancing her purpose in this story: Welty uses irony to undercut the murderer by allowing her readers to “discern the discrepancy between what [we are] told by the [murderer] and what actually exists” (391). No doubt that is how irony works, but the real discrepancy in this story is different to the discrepancy Clerc describes and therefore produces a different effect. The discrepancy here is not a discrepancy between what the murderer says and what the reader can see, but is firstly a discrepancy between what the murderer says and what he cannot say, and secondly a discrepancy between the reader’s awareness of what the murderer cannot say and the murderer’s lack of such awareness. This second discrepancy is what, in my view, disrupts the possibility of fully empathising with the murderer. When we, as readers, are able to discern within the murderer a characteristic failure that he is unable to equally perceive, we are effectively elevated to a position of superiority over him insofar as we know something about him that he does not know about himself, and that elevation destabilises the equilibrium between reader and murderer that would be necessary for the forging of a properly empathic connection. The first discrepancy, however, is what opens the possibility of sympathising with the murderer—a possibility made all the more stark when the possibility of empathy is disrupted. By foregrounding the failure of the murderer to express remorse for his crime even though he demonstrably suffers it, the discrepancy between what he says and what he cannot say renders him a man not in control of his own faculties despite his proud insistence, in the wake of the murder, that he committed the crime exactly as he had intended. In short, this discrepancy leaves him unwilling to admit to the full reality of his situation, and—worse—unable to acknowledge his unwillingness to make that admission. His behaviour, then, is ultimately self-delusional, and therefore, in my view, deserving of the sympathy of those who can see it for what it is in a way that the man himself cannot and likely never will.

Just because the murderer fails to express his remorse does not mean that he fails to suffer it: as above, it comes through in his actions when he deliberately drops his weapon at the murder scene and invites the police to apprehend him; it comes through in his compulsive articulation of a confessional monologue that betrays a retrospective identification with his victim; and it comes through in his ultimate inability to detail his direct involvement in the very murder that his monologue is about. Still, the intensity of his racially-motivated hatred renders him powerless to express himself when he is struck by a remorse that he clearly never expected, leaving him only to let flow the hateful words that comprise his vocabulary in an attempt to avoid being at a loss for words altogether. Therein lies the artistry of this story. The layering of text upon subtext, the predominance of embittered words that conceal a more telling lack of words, the murderer’s attempt to explain his actions using a vocabulary so insufficient for that purpose that the truer explanation resides in the spaces between the words he actually speaks—all this is sharply distinct from the historical socio-political salience of this story, so that to focus on it is to be faced with possibilities that are not presented to us in a strict historical and socio-political reading. Into those inarticulate spaces we can extend our sympathy for this man, for those spaces alone allow us to see how the ideology that empowers him to claim the life of his victim also erodes his own humanity—against his will, beyond his comprehension, and even without his awareness. It remains true, of course, that we are under no obligation to actually fill those spaces and extend our sympathy to the murderer: we may find his crime utterly unforgivable and hold our sympathy in reserve. But, simply by opening those spaces, Eudora Welty enables us to fill them and thus implicitly challenges us to do so, asking us to ask ourselves whether or not we are up to the task. That is, I think, her purpose in this story—but we can only discern that purpose when we turn away from the historical and socio-political aspects of the story and look instead to the words on the page and what lies beneath them.

Share

Works Cited

Binding, Paul. The Still Moment: Eudora Welty—Portrait of a Writer. London: Virago, 1994. Print.

Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Print.

Devlin, Albert J. Eudora Welty’s Chronicle: A Story of Mississippi Life. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1983. Print.

Clerc, Charles. ‘Anatomy of Welty’s ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’.’ Studies in Short Fiction 23.4 (1986): 389-400. Print.

Gretlund, Jan Norby. Eudora Welty’s Aesthetics of Place. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Print.

Hargrove, Nancy D. ‘Portrait of an Assassin: Eudora Welty’s ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’.’ The Southern Literary Journal 20.1 (Fall 1987): 74-88. Print.

Harrison, Suzan. ‘‘It’s Still a Free Country’: Constructing Race, Identity, and History in Eudora Welty’s ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’.’ Mississippi Quarterly 50.4 (Fall 1997): 631-646. Print.

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. Eds. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1961. Print.

Oates, Joyce Carol. ‘Eudora Welty.’ The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 481. Print.
—. ‘Hearing Voices.’ The New Yorker (9 March 2009): <http://www.newyorker.com/online/2009/03/16/090316on_audio_oates>. Web.

Pingatore, Diana R. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Eudora Welty. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996. Print.

Schmidt, Peter. The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Print.

Vande Kieft, Ruth M. Eudora Welty (Revised Edition). Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987. Print.
—. ‘‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’: Teaching Eudora Welty.’ Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller. Ed. Dawn Trouard. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989. 190-204. Print.

Welty, Eudora. ‘Preface to ‘Collected Stories’.’ 1980. Stories, Essays, and Memoir. Eds. Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling. New York: Library of America, 1998. 827-829. Print.
—. The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. 1978. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.
—. ‘The Lady of Letters Collects Her Work.’ Interview with Sarah Bonassin. 1980. Eudora Welty: The Contemporary Reviews. Ed. Pearl McHaney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 293-296. Print.
—. ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ 1963. Stories, Essays, and Memoir. Eds. Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling. New York: Library of America, 1998. 727-732. Print.

Subscribe now

Since its original publication in the late 1980s, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen has been hailed as a masterpiece: “the Ulysses of graphic novels” (Landon 232; Nathan). Serialised monthly in comic-book format throughout 1986 and 1987 before its dozen episodes were collected into a single volume, Watchmen, like most of the work in the comic-book medium, is fundamentally a superhero story, albeit one with a postmodern streak that upends and inverts the entire concept of the superhero. Opening with the murder of a vigilante known as the Comedian, the story at first takes the form of a detective mystery as the members of the eponymous Watchmen—the superhero team of which the Comedian was once a member—attempt to identify the killer of their former ally. But soon the story switches gears and turns the tables on the heroes themselves, exposing them as corrupt abusers of power so closely aligned with the United States Government that they willingly accrue popular support for its military incursions in Southeast Asia and Latin America before they fall out of favour as their vigilantism begins to foment popular unrest verging on anarchy. Despite the sensationalist narrative, however, the comparison to James Joyce’s Ulysses is justifiable insofar as the formal aspects of Watchmen have entirely rewritten the rules and norms of the comic-book medium. With a formal structure that opens up a “near-infinite recursiveness of text [and] of metatext” (Dietrich 137), Watchmen is, in the judgment of Time critic Lev Grossman, “[t]old with ruthless psychological realism, in fugal, overlapping plotlines and gorgeous, cinematic panels rich with repeating motifs,” which combine to make it “a heart-pounding, heartbreaking read and a watershed in the evolution of a young medium” (‘Watchmen’). Indeed, Time even went so far as to select Watchmen as the only graphic novel to appear on its list of the top one hundred novels since 1923 (see Grossman and Lacayo), declaring it “a landmark in the graphic novel medium [that] would be a masterpiece in any” (Grossman, ‘Ten’ 110).

Of course, as well as acquiring an air of literary credibility and critical reverence atypical for a story about comic-book superheroes, Watchmen has also acquired a more stereotypical army of fans whose ongoing appreciation of the original comic-book series has kept it alive and in print for the twenty-five years since it first appeared. Something else those fans kept alive was a yearning to see the series adapted for the cinema—a yearning that was satisfied when the director Zack Snyder, himself an ardent fan of Watchmen (see Lovece), released his long-anticipated film adaptation in early 2009. In making the film, however, Snyder met with several dilemmas. On the one hand, precisely because he was a fan of the original comic-book series, he determined to leave as much as possible unaltered in the process of adaptation, reproducing “key panels from the comic... with apparently obsessive precision” (Moulthrop)—a precision that occasionally entails “slavish[ness] to the original text” (Nathan). On the other hand, the events of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries have largely outdated the political concerns of the original text, so that the contemporary vitality of Snyder’s film necessitated and has come to depend upon certain alterations to its source material. And yet, however necessary and limited those alterations may have been, they have in turn posed a number of new problems to the overall narrative.

The awkward handling of these problems, especially in the radically altered climax, drew a mixed response from the film’s initial viewers, fans and critics alike. As a result, only a few years after its cinematic release, Snyder’s Watchmen is teetering on the edge of cinematic obscurity—a fate that puts the film sharply at odds with the decades-long flourishing of the comic-book series that inspired it. Since it lacks much of the complexity and subtlety of Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen and is, to be blunt, an utterly mediocre tale of superheroic adventure, obscurity may well be just what it deserves. Nevertheless, Snyder faced a number of very unique challenges in adapting Watchmen for the screen and devised a number of equally unique and occasionally quite subtle ways of attempting to overcome them; and for those reasons, as Stuart Moulthrop writes, the film adaptation of Watchmen deserves consideration with as close a focus on the nature and purpose of its “significant departures from Moore and Gibbons” as on its “ability to translate their conception to the IMAX Experience” (Moulthrop). In other words, whatever aesthetic and cultural value Snyder’s film may or may not possess, the director’s responses to the challenges of adaptation are worthy of serious analysis—not least because his source material has received such attention from serious critics writing for a broad readership while its film adaptation has received almost none. In her Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon argues that “the act of adaptation always involves both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation” (8) which makes it simultaneously “[an] act of appropriation [and of] salvaging” (9). This is to say that, by definition, a film adaptation of another text both entails the appropriation of its source material in the creation of a new text and requires the salvaging of the new text from the complications that arise as a consequence of the appropriation. In this essay, I argue that even if Zack Snyder did a poor job of adapting the Ulysses of graphic novels, the sheer complexity of the process of adaptation means that his adaptation strategies are as deserving of examination as they would be if he had adapted Ulysses itself. How does he appropriate the Watchmen comic-book series for the cinema, and by what means does he attempt to salvage the resultant cinematic text from complications caused by appropriation?

Share

1. Adaptation

An interval of some twenty-three years separates the initial publication of Watchmen in comic-book format and the release of its film adaptation. In many respects, the film hews closely to its source material: Stuart Moulthrop describes it as “remarkable for its frame-to-panel fidelity” (‘Watchmen’), which, as Rjurik Davidson writes, “at times [entails] reproducing [the comic-book series] as if it had been used as a storyboard” (19). Obviously, though, as must be done in any film adaptation of any literary text, Zack Snyder made several alterations to the original in order to translate its narrative into a cinematic medium. But the most substantial alterations to the original are neither those that twist its narrative to suit the requirements of Snyder’s medium nor even those made to reflect his personal preferences: they are instead those wrought, and required, by the passage of time, by the twenty-three years separating the adaptation from the original. The comic-book series and the film both tell the same tale of tensions between superheroes and the U.S. Government at the height of the Cold War, and both ground this tale in a realistic world-historical socio-political context whose emphasis on the dynamics of geopolitical power and institutional authority serves to counterbalance the fantasy of the superhero genre. The adaptation does differ from the original in its narrative climax, and the significance of its differences will be discussed here; but even so, supposing that there were no differences at all, the comic-book series and its film adaptation would still inevitably tell different tales given the differing circumstances of their respective periods of production.

Set in late 1985 and completing its serial publication some eighteen months later, Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen told a story whose temporal setting was roughly contemporaneous to its time of publication and thus allowed it to address social and political concerns then prevalent. Snyder’s Watchmen, however, preserves Moore and Gibbons’ mid-1980s setting even though it was released in early 2009; and, as such, the concerns it addresses have been so outdated by later events that the film would seem to lack any meaningful contemporary relevance. The Cold War, so absolutely crucial to the narrative of Watchmen, is over. The arms race has been run; the hands of the Doomsday Clock have ticked back a notch. So, notwithstanding the fact that Snyder freely makes several departures from the work of Moore and Gibbons, his Watchmen would be substantially different from theirs even if he adhered to his source material with unwavering fidelity. After all, whereas their Watchmen only briefly used the device of an alternate history narrative in order to open a much broader narrative that depicted what was, in the 1980s, an alternate reality, Snyder’s Watchmen tells an alternative history narrative in its entirety, from the opening credits all the way through to the closing reel.1 This simple but inescapable difference between the original and the adaptation would of course destabilise the salience of Moore and Gibbons’ socio-political commentary in any adaptation produced outside the original historical context of the comic-book series; and, so destabilised, Snyder’s film would appear to be little more than a purely retrospective and therefore comparatively trivial look at Cold War paranoia—a speculative but ultimately toothless story of Mutual Assured Destruction built around the gimmick of having superheroes embroiled in the upheavals of the day.2

Snyder clearly knows that he must at least recognise this problem, if not resolve it outright, before he can get his narrative properly underway: hence his deliberate and early emphasis on the motif of passing time. It is true, as Douglas Wolk has detailed, that Moore and Gibbons make a motif of passing time in their comic-book series as well. Citing their introduction of the Minutemen, a superhero team that predated the Watchmen,3 Wolk points out that “[b]oth the minute and the watch are part of the book’s theme of time, its measurement, its effect, and its terminus.” He continues:

One major character, the son of a watchmaker, has come unmoored in time, and he’s free of temporal causality and the morality that goes along with it... [and t]he most prominent visual motif of the book, an arrow or line pointing just left of the top of a circular shape, alludes to a clock poised at a few minutes to midnight—specifically, to the ‘doomsday clock’ of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. (237)

“Even the storytelling techniques and page format Gibbons uses for Watchmen practically tick,” Wolk adds. “His line art is understated, even muted, with no sense of motion [so that] each panel shows a discrete, infinitely thin slice of time” (239). In much the same way, Snyder manipulates time in his film via a frequent use of extreme slow motion punctuated by a sudden and almost impulsive speeding-up of the action; but more than that, Snyder explicitly calls attention to his preservation of Moore and Gibbons’ motif of passing time by twice foregrounding that motif in the opening moments of his film. In particular, when he depicts the evolution of the Minutemen into the Watchmen against the backdrop of the turbulent political situation in the America of the 1960s, he sets this transitional montage to the tune of Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.’ Reviewing the film in the New Yorker, a skeptical Anthony Lane singled out this tune for complaint: “Must we have [that song] in the background? How long did it take the producers to arrive at that imaginative choice?” (82). In fact, though, that particular song in that particular context not only testifies to the generational evolution unfolding on-screen but also conveys self-referential meta-textual meaning about the nature of the film adaptation itself to the viewers who watch that evolution unfold. (Although the songs of Bob Dylan also appear in the original comic-book series, only ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘All Along the Watchtower’ are actually quoted, indicating that Snyder specifically selected ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ for inclusion in this sequence.) Additionally, but more subtly, in the opening scene depicting the murder of the Comedian, the victim acknowledges the strength of his assailant and the inevitability of his own murder with the fatalistic words: “Just a matter of time, I suppose.” As the first words spoken by any of the central characters in the film—words that, crucially, are not spoken in the corresponding scene in the comic-book series (Moore and Gibbons, Chapter 1, 1-4)—their conspicuous foregrounding might be justifiably interpreted as tantamount to a sort of acknowledgement on Snyder’s part that the passage of time has handicapped his film before it can even begin.

Alternatively, of course, these words and the inclusion of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ might be just as easily understood as nothing more than aesthetic felicities that Snyder found instinctively appropriate to his narrative—throwaway details placed in the film with little thought, deliberation, or purpose. However, given that they appear at the very beginning of the film and in succession, they more likely constitute Snyder’s way of openly but unobtrusively telling his audience that he knows, firstly, that times have changed between the original publication of Watchmen and the release of his film adaptation and, secondly, that his film must somehow accommodate the changes wrought by passing time if it is to possess a contemporary salience equal to that of the comic-book series. As adaptation theorist Pascal Lefèvre writes, “[f]ew [film] adaptations respect meticulously the storyline of a particular comic” because “[e]very real artisan of cinema knows that this medium has its own laws and rules. A direct adaptation is seldom a good choice: some elements may work wonderfully in a comic, but cannot function in the context of a film” (4). In the case of Watchmen, though, a director who did seek to make a direct adaptation found his efforts upset by events in the world outside the film—so that, as viewers, we have a reason and perhaps even a duty to pay attention to the somehow of his attempts to salvage his narrative from contemporary relevance by accommodating the changes wrought by passing time, the strategies through which he invests a film set in a bygone era with relevance for audiences in the present day. It is not possible, here, to advance a complete or even a comprehensive view of these strategies, but, in the interests of opening a scholarly discussion on this subject and extending the fledgling scholarly literature concerning Snyder’s Watchmen, what follows are some preliminary notes on one such strategy in particular and a consideration of the textual implications it holds for the remainder of the film.

Share

2. Appropriation

“At the moment,” said Alan Moore during the original serial publication of Watchmen,

a certain part of [Ronald] Reagan’s America isn’t scared. [Some Americans] think they’re invulnerable. There’s this incredible up mood that leads at its worst excesses to things like the Libyan bombing and things like that, and they worry me and frighten me. The power elite of America and an awful lot of the people who vote for them [believe] that they can do whatever they want because they’re invulnerable, they’re not afraid, and they can gloss over the terror of the nuclear stockpiles, the world situation and all that and just think, ‘Hey, we’re doing all right, we’re okay.’ That’s unhealthy. (Groth and Fiore 100)

Leaving aside the question of whether or not there is any validity to Moore’s criticism of Reagan and Reaganism, it must be said that the essence of that criticism is crucial to any study of Watchmen. Moore was incensed with the ethic of Reaganism insofar as it entailed taking a brusque, brash, ‘big stick’ approach to politics in both the international and the domestic spheres—a flexing of American muscle abroad that engendered widespread concessions to authority at home—and Watchmen is essentially a graphic dramatisation of Moore’s critical worldview. That, however, is exactly the problem Snyder faced in filming Watchmen. With the Reagan Administration and Reagan himself both now artefacts of history, no twenty-first century Watchmen adaptation could simultaneously preserve the mid-1980s concerns of the original and possess critical relevance for its own time. Or, at least, it could not do so without somehow extending and expanding upon Alan Moore’s criticism of the ethic of Reaganism by gesturing towards the causal relationship between that socio-political ethic and the social and political problems of the modern day.

Ironically, for all his famous refusal to become directly involved in any cinematic adaptations of any of his works, it was Alan Moore himself who identified the means by which Zack Snyder could make a Watchmen film that did indeed extend the criticism at the heart of the original to advance a criticism of the present. In 2004, shortly after the death of Ronald Reagan and in the midst of a presidential campaign overshadowed by the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ Moore delivered an interview in which he explicitly identified Reagan as “the architect of much of the world’s present misery... [who] created Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, or at least set in motion the policies that would create these creatures” (Thill, ‘The Man Who Invented the Future’). Very simply, then, the obvious way to identify Snyder’s strategies for making his film contemporarily relevant would be to identify the several references it makes to the War on Terror in the course of dramatising a critical position that is ostensibly concerned with the ethic of Reaganism. “[T]he Watchmen film,” as Stuart Moulthrop argues, “proceeds from, and reproduces, a distinctly post-9/11 ideology” (‘Watchmen’), but in what ways exactly does it anticipate the ‘post-9/11’ War on Terror from the vantage point of a narrative set wholly in the late 1980s? At what points in his film does Zack Snyder faithfully replicate Alan Moore’s original criticism of the ethic of Reaganism while also tweaking aspects of the narrative in a way that looks ahead to the War on Terror and thus positions Reaganism as the cause of the present conflict?

Most noticeably, the film opens with, and repeatedly returns to, the televised Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1985. This event not only recalls the more recent U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan but also reminds us that the United States responded to the Soviet invasion by funding and training the mujahideen who would later sponsor the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—the impetus for the more recent invasion. In addition, when the villain of the story, Adrian Veidt, expresses a yearning for world peace by bemoaning the preponderance of international wars fought over dwindling oil supplies, the film repeatedly recalls the criticisms levelled at the Bush Administration in the build-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Thus implicating Afghanistan and Iraq in his adaptation of Watchmen, Zack Snyder effectively updates Alan Moore’s original criticisms of Reaganism by co-opting Moore’s more recent intimation that the key antagonists in the War on Terror are Reagan’s inadvertent political offspring. Thereafter, Snyder invests that intimation with a greater degree of certainty in the film when he makes a third and more emphatic connection between Reaganism and the War on Terror by literally depicting the still-standing Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as the destination of those individuals who adopt the ethic of Reaganism and put it into practice.

In general, Snyder’s use of the Twin Towers entails a brazen manipulation of the buildings themselves as well as the sentiment attached to them, and for that reason he has attracted close and unfavourable scrutiny from his more scholarly viewers. Scott Kaufman, for instance, calls attention to the scene in which the Comedian is buried in a New York cemetery (Moore and Gibbons, Chapter 2, 1-28) while the remaining Watchmen unite around his grave:

[Zack Snyder] shoehorn[s] the Twin Towers (formerly located in Lower Manhattan) into what had been in the [comic-book] a shot of the Chrysler Building in Midtown Manhattan. ... [He] moves the Twin Towers in order to keep them in-frame both in the establishing shot and the long-shot of the priest approaching the grave. (‘Watching Watchmen’)

Moreover, Kaufman adds, “this undue attention to the Towers continues throughout the film. When Dan Dreiberg first arrives at Adrian Veidt’s office, the Towers are clearly visible through the window. One of the ubiquitous Veidt Industries blimps creeps from the left side of the screen to the right and is seemingly aimed directly at the Twin Towers” (‘Watching Watchmen’). For Kaufman, such manipulation of the Towers is gratuitous and therefore inappropriate. “If Snyder had done something meaningful with [the] World Trade Center that would be one thing,” he writes. “Sticking [the Towers] in as many shots as possible is little more than an undignified grasp at an unearned gravitas” (‘Watching Watchmen’). Actually, though, Snyder does do something meaningful with the Twin Towers—perhaps not in every shot that shows them, but certainly in one crucial shot which is invested with obvious cultural significance arising from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as additional textual significance derived from the events of the narrative that build up to this shot.

The shot in question shows an airborne vehicle thrusting upwards into the sky from a departure point beneath the surface of New York’s East River. There are two passengers inside the vehicle, bound for Adrian Veidt’s Antarctic hideaway. Alongside the psychopathic vigilante Rorschach is the comparatively benevolent Dan Dreiberg, a one-time superhero known as Nite Owl, and the airborne vehicle is a small airship in the shape of an owl that belongs to him. Importantly, both of these men have, before now, revealed themselves as believers in and practitioners of the ‘big stick’ approach to problem resolution—indeed, that much is implicit in the very concept of the superhero as an agent of vigilante justice (see Klock 62-76)—and so, in different ways and to different degrees, they both stand as representatives of the ethic of Reaganism. As the airship rises from the water, the Twin Towers loom in the background; and as the airship zooms off into the distance, it appears to be aimed straight at the Towers, flying directly towards them. Notably, in the corresponding scene in the comic-book series (Moore and Gibbons, Chapter 10, 11), the Twin Towers are nowhere to be found: here as elsewhere, Snyder specifically inserts them.

But there is more to this scene than can be seen with the eye or retrospectively described, given that it draws on what has previously been disclosed about the airship. Concealed in Dan Dreiberg’s makeshift basement in the New York subway, the airship remains unnamed for viewers of the film until Dreiberg’s lover, Laurie Jupiter, asks him about its provenance. Dreiberg identifies the oversized owl by the nickname ‘Archie’—then he specifies, firstly, that ‘Archie’ is short for its full name, ‘Archimedes,’ and secondly, that Archimedes takes its name not from the famous ancient mathematician, but from the pet owl belonging to the wizard Merlyn in the Disney film adaptation of T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. Although it may seem trivial at first, this detail acquires greater significance insofar as Merlyn enjoys a very unique experience of passing time and that Archimedes plays an important role in that experience (see White 34-39). In The Sword in the Stone, Merlyn explains that he experiences the future first and has therefore spent his life moving backwards through time, into the past, while everyone else around him moves out of the past and into the future. Merlyn thus relies on his memories of the future in order to negotiate his encounters with the individuals he meets in the present; and, in the process, he is accompanied by his pet owl Archimedes, who serves as something like Merlyn’s anchor to those who are swept up in the opposite temporal flow, or as his interlocutor with those who experience time in the way that the rest of us do. Archimedes, in other words, follows the reverse-chronological Merlyn through the world but himself experiences time in the usual way, moving into the future from the past.

As a result, the relationship between Merlyn and those around him mirrors the relationship between the viewers of Snyder’s film and the film itself: when we watch a contemporary film set in 1985, we, like Merlyn, are located in ‘the future’ but we step backwards in time to experience an aspect of the past, while the characters in the film move forward in time, presumably towards our present moment. In Archie’s rise from the East River, then, we might understand the airship heading for the Twin Towers as an interlocutor between the allegorical historicity of the film and the film’s viewers, just as T.H. White’s Archimedes acts as Merlyn’s interlocutor with those who move forward in time around him. Zack Snyder’s use of Archie is here akin to White’s use of Archimedes as a means of connecting those viewers who know what is destined to happen to the Twin Towers with those characters who are unwittingly making it happen. Accompanying those viewers who move backwards in time as they watch the film, Archie identifies for them those aspects of the past that influenced the conditions of the future they have temporarily left behind. In its flight towards the Twin Towers with Rorschach and Dreiberg as passengers, Archie unites the past and the present in a single shot that shows those vigilantes who wield the ‘big stick’ of Reaganism aimed straight at the buildings whose collapse ignited the present-day War on Terror and was, for Alan Moore, one of the inadvertent consequences of the triumph of Reaganism. So, whereas the comic-book series uses an alternate present to issue a warning of a prospective future, the film implies an indictment of the recent past based on an awareness of how that past has led us to our troubled present.

Share

3. Salvaging

In unpacking the cultural and textual significance of Snyder’s mise-en-scène in this shot as well as in the opening moments of his film, I do not mean to suggest that his ability to invest the film with such significance—and thus to reclaim some of the salience of Moore’s socio-political criticisms—is proof of his sophistication as a filmmaker. I mean only to identify the strategies through which he seeks to prevent the passage of time from casting his film into immediate irrelevance, regardless of the sophistication of those strategies and the extent of their success. In turn, however, those strategies present the film with new dilemmas—particularly insofar as a criticism of the ‘big stick’ ethic of Reaganism cannot just be abandoned and left untethered to the narrative once it has been raised. How, then, does Snyder appropriate other aspects of the comic-book series in order to augment this criticism and better integrate it into the narrative of the film and to thereby salvage the film as a whole? An answer can be found in the climax.

In the comic-book series, Dan Dreiberg and Rorschach arrive at Adrian Veidt’s Antarctic hideaway too late to prevent Veidt from committing mass murder: Veidt has already successfully orchestrated a massacre, so Dreiberg and Rorschach are left merely to listen to him explain how and why he did it. Veidt reveals that he managed to genetically engineer an alien life-form which he set loose in New York, where it triggered a sort of psychic atom bomb that claimed millions of lives. But despite the catastrophic human toll, the faux alien attack proves beneficial to mankind in general—just as Veidt supposed it would. “His expectation,” as Aeon Skoble writes, is “that the sudden appearance of an alien foe threatening human life will bring together all the otherwise warring nations in peaceful collaboration against this new common enemy” (36), and so the people of Earth unite in common purpose to defend themselves against any further alien threats that may arise in future. Thus giving the United States and the Soviet Union just cause to broker a détente, Adrian Veidt effectively brings about world peace.

In the film, on the other hand, Veidt’s decimation of innocents is carried out not by an artificial extraterrestrial but by a man named Jon Osterman. As the sixth member of the disbanded Watchmen, Osterman is the only one to possess actual superhuman abilities; the others are all self-made vigilantes. Formerly an American scientist working on nuclear weapons tests during the Second World War, an equipment malfunction bombarded him with radiation: he was blown apart, obliterated, atomised, and declared dead. Somehow, though, his consciousness survived, lingering in the ether until it grew strong enough to rebuild his body one atom at a time—in the process of which it allowed him to imbue himself with the ability to enlarge his body to the size of a building or shrink to the size of a subatomic particle, as well as to make multiple copies of himself, to teleport to any location, and to travel back and forth through time. In the film, as distinct from the comic-book series, it is Osterman who detonates what is essentially an atomic bomb on a helpless world populace when Adrian Veidt dupes him into doing so. Moreover, Osterman’s unwitting attack is not confined to New York but destroys dozens of cities around the world, and so the people of Earth unite against a common enemy when they find themselves apparently at the mercy of this infuriated and indestructible deity.

Surprisingly, not all scholarly critics of Watchmen have been willing to admit that this radical difference between the original and the adaptation is in any way significant. Sharon Packer, for instance, insists that, despite their climactic differences, “the film and the [comic-book series] are strikingly similar” (21), and she implies that the conclusions she draws from her reading of the film could just as easily apply to the comic-book series. In doing so, however, she dismisses—without responding to—the skepticism and even the hostility of devoted fans of the original comic-book series who have engaged in over a decade’s worth of close reading and found the alterations to the climax in Zack Snyder’s film to entail profound repercussions for the film overall. In particular, as the administrator of the hugely popular ‘geek film’ website Ain’t It Cool News, über-fan Harry Knowles had been monitoring the progress of the Watchmen adaptation for some thirteen years; and, after having seen it, he asked himself: “What doesn’t work for me?” He answered:

The new ending. I just don’t like it as much as the ending of the [comic] books. As the movie nears its ending, it felt like it was rushing to an established conclusion. It’s more than the [absence of the alien]. It’s that... it makes [Jon Osterman] the big scary guillotine instead of alternate dimensional attacks. ... I always got that the localized event in New York felt small in a post-9-11 adaptation [so that the global scale of the attack in the film is understandable], but honestly—having the [alien] happen on the scale of this event—would have been fine. NOW—does this ending change [or] RUIN the film for me. No. But it will always be one of the reasons I’ll push people to reading the book. There’s just a reality to adaptations. You lose things. (‘Harry Watches The WATCHMEN’)

Other fans of the comic-book series on similar ‘geek film’ websites issued similar criticisms (see Faraci), and Zack Snyder himself conceded their validity (see ‘Merrick,’ ‘No Squid for You!!’). Meanwhile, at least part of Scott Kaufman’s more articulate dislike of the film seems to stem from his deep appreciation of the ways in which Alan Moore subtly establishes Jon Osterman as an avatar of the reader of the comic-book series rather than as simply a character to be manipulated in the course of the narrative (‘Dr. Manhattan’). And since Douglas Wolk (241), Brandy Blake (‘Trauma Fiction’), and, most recently, David Barnes (51-60), have each expressed a similar appreciation of this technique, it is reasonable to assume that each of their responses to the climax of the film would be somewhat similar to Kaufman’s response. Whether viewers come to the film as scholarly critics or as fans of the comic-book series, most of them seem to arrive at the same conclusion: Snyder’s rewritten climax violates the letter and the spirit of Moore and Gibbons’ climax, and therefore pales in comparison.

Consider, though, not only the surface differences between the faux alien attack and Osterman’s unwitting attack but also the differences in their respective implications. For an alien attack to inspire the people of the world to reconcile their differences, by implication it must first inspire a worldwide reassessment of loyalties; it brings mankind to a point of unity by forcing human beings across the world to see their species as one under attack by another species and to agree to dismiss intra-species disputes in order to preserve the species as a whole. However, for the Osterman attack to inspire a similar reconciliation, it need not at all impel a reassessment of loyalties because it dramatically replaces inter-species conflict with the total subjugation of an entire people by a godlike overlord wielding absolute power. In both the comic-book series and the film, Osterman is finally persuaded by Veidt to abandon Earth altogether and to find himself a home elsewhere in the galaxy; but in the film, as Stuart Moulthrop observes, “[he] is not merely tricked into exile; he is stripped of his charisma as the condition for a new world order. ... In both comic and film, [he] remains at large, whereabouts unknown; but in the film, this absence constitutes an impending threat. ... [A]ny future geopolitics must [therefore] account for his possible return” because “the world will always live in fear of [his] judgment” (‘Watchmen’). In the film, then, the people of the world have no incentive to recognise anything so internal and introspective as common humanity: they need only recognise the external omnipresence of a common enemy forever threatening additional strikes with a ‘big stick’ clenched in his fist—which is to say that Osterman’s actions in the climax of the film augment the strategies by which Zack Snyder attempts to preserve Alan Moore’s socio-political criticisms at earlier moments. Rather than leaving prior alterations to the comic-book series as free-floating adjustments or addenda, Snyder also alters the climax of the film in a way that makes his prior alterations point towards it—and so, in a certain sense, those prior alterations pre-emptively or prospectively rationalise his climactic alterations. Buried amidst an avalanche of Watchmen fan comments, one writer on Ain’t It Cool News noted something similar to this, although with less favour than it has been noted here:

[L]eaving out the [alien] does [ruin] the ending. ... [T]he [alien] unites humanity against a common, EXTERNAL foe. If the disasters are blamed on [Jon Osterman] (who represents perhaps a future evolution of man, a ‘perfect’ being)—what exactly is mankind supposed to unite against? ... It’s fucked up and misses a big point. (‘captainalphabet,’ comment 2370759, quoted in ‘Merrick,’ ‘No Squid for You!!’)

Those words are close to the mark, but they do not quite hit it. Far from entirely missing the point, the replacement of the ‘external’ alien foe with Osterman as an ‘internal’ foe simply makes a different point—a point in line with the more contemporary socio-political criticisms of the film and thus better attuned to Snyder’s attempts to accommodate the changes that the passage of time has wrought on Watchmen. In substituting Adrian Veidt’s faux extraterrestrial for Jon Osterman, Snyder finds a way of overcoming mere gestures towards the inherent oppressiveness of the ‘big stick’ approach to problem resolution and instead foregrounds the very oppressiveness of that approach so that it stands as the final note of his film.

Snyder, then, concludes the film by substantially underscoring the indictment of the political past that he was compelled to advance by the passage of time and by the consequent possibility that his film would lack the political relevance of the original Watchmen as soon as it hit cinema screens. While critics and fans alike, and cinema audiences in general, might rightly accuse his film of lacking the aesthetic sophistication and political salience of his source material, those who make such accusations should bear in mind that the passage of time required alterations to the source material and that, even though the alterations to the climax were not among those requirements, the rewritten climax does still serve a purpose within the context of the earlier alterations. As such, we cannot justifiably interpret any of these alterations as products solely of the independent agency of the filmmaker, nor can we hold him entirely responsible for them. On the contrary, they are products of the historical events that subsumed Zack Snyder’s agency—and, if we are to place responsibility for them anywhere at all, we must place it largely on the twenty-three years that preceded the film he made.

Share

Works Cited

Barnes, David. ‘Time in the Gutter: Temporal Structures in Watchmen.’ KronoScope 9.1-2 (2009): 51-60. Print.

Blake, Brandy Ball. ‘Watchmen: The Graphic Novel as Trauma Fiction.’ ImageTexT 5.1 (Winter 2010): <http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v5_1/blake>. Web.

Davidson, Rjurik. ‘Fighting the Good Fight: Watching Watchmen.’ Screen Education 64 (2009): 18-23. Print.

Dietrich, Bryan D. ‘The Human Stain: Chaos and the Rage for Order in Watchmen.’ Extrapolation 50.1 (2009): 120-144. Print.

Faraci, Devin. ‘EXCLUSIVE: IS THE SQUID IN WATCHMEN AFTER ALL?’ Chud (18 February 2009): <http://chud.com/articles/ articles/18204/1/EXCLUSIVE-IS-THE-SQUID-IN-WATCHMEN-AFTER-ALL/Page1.html>. Web.

Grossman, Lev. ‘10 of Time’s Hundred Best Novels.’ Time 166.17 (24 October 2005): <http://time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1118375, 00.html>. Web.
—. ‘100 Novels.’ Time 166.17 (24 October 2005): <http://time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,195793,00.html>. Web.
—. ‘Watchmen (1986).’ Time 166.16 (16 October 2005): <http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/watchmen-1986-by-alan-moore-dave-gibbons>. Web.

Groth, Gary and Robert Fiore, eds. The New Comics: Interviews from the Pages of The Comics Journal. New York: Berkley Books, 1988. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Kaufman, Scott Eric. ‘Does Dr. Manhattan act as a figure of the reader in Alan Moore’s Watchmen?’ Acephalous (11 March 2009): <http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2009/03/dr-manhattan-as-a-figure-of-reader-of-alan-moores-watchmen.html>. Web.
—. ‘Watching Watchmen.’ Acephalous (10 March 2009): <http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2009/03/watching-watchmen-how-unfilmable-novels-become-unwatchable-films.html>. Web.

Knowles, Harry. ‘Harry Watches The WATCHMEN And Can Remain Silent Not One More Second!’ Ain’t It Cool News (24 February 2009): <http://aintitcool.com/node/40225>. Web.

Landon, Brooks. Science Fiction After 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Lane, Anthony. ‘Dark Visions.’ The New Yorker 85.4 (9 March 2009): 82. Print.

Lefèvre, Pascal. ‘Incompatible Visual Ontologies?: The Problematic Adaptation of Drawn Images.’ Film and Comic Books. Eds. Ian Gordon, Mark Jancovich, and Matthew P. McAllister. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 1-12. Print.

Lovece, Frank. ‘CGI: Watchmen.’ Film Journal International (19 February 2009): <http://filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/news-and-features/features/movies/e3i8f6bf92e292731581559af0969092ce9>. Web.

‘Merrick.’ ‘No Squid for You!! 30 Minutes of WATCHMEN Screens In UK & Snyder Talked 5th-dimensional Squidish Thingies!!’ Ain’t It Cool News (17 November 2008): <http://aintitcool.com/node/39131>. Web.

Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1986-1987. Print.

Moulthrop, Stuart. ‘Watchmen Meets The Aristocrats.’ Postmodern Culture 19.1 (September 2008): <http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.908/19.1moulthrop.txt>. Web.

Nathan, Ian. ‘Watchmen.’ Empire Online (February 2009): <http://empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=11018>. Web.

Packer, Sharon. Superheroes and Superegos: Analyzing the Minds Behind the Masks. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010. Print.

Skoble, Aeon J. ‘Superhero Revisionism in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.’ Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way. Eds. Thomas V. Morris and Matt Morris. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2005. 29-41. Print.

The Sword in the Stone. Dir. Wolfgang Reitherman. Walt Disney
Productions, 1963. Film.

Thill, Scott. ‘The Man Who Invented the Future.’ Salon.com (22 July 2004): <http://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/2004/07/22/moore/print.html>. Web.

Watchmen. Dir. Zack Snyder. Warner Bros., 2009. Film.

White, T.H. The Sword in the Stone. London: Putnam, 1939. Print.

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2007. Print.

Share

Endnotes

The national borders of present-day Sudan were first drawn when the Egyptian proxy authorities of the Ottoman Empire annexed the land around the southern Nile in 1820, and were later adopted by the British when they began ruling Sudan in condominium with Egypt in 1899 (Thomas 4-5). But those borders were drawn with scant regard for the cultural complexities of the people within them—Arab Muslims in the Saharan north, African animists on the southern plains—so that political instability has plagued Sudan almost from the instant of its inception (Holt and Daly 146-148). When the mid-twentieth century unravelling of the British Empire precipitated Sudanese independence, speculation arose that north and south might achieve independence as two distinct nations; but ultimately a split between them never eventuated, and in 1956 the borders of the newly-independent nation were virtually identical to the Ottoman borders of more than a century earlier (Carmichael 117-119). In consequence, as post-independence sovereignty was vested in the north at the expense of the south, two very distinct cultural groups were left sharing land over which one held legislative dominance but could not enforce its legislation on a nationwide scale—a truth made disastrously evident in 1983 when the north’s imposition of a nationwide Islamic legal code plunged Sudan into civil war (O’Ballance 131ff). Lasting more than twenty years, this was in fact the second civil war to afflict Sudan since independence and was arguably the most catastrophic, particularly as northern mercenaries known as murahaleen (horsemen) raided and destroyed southern villages and in the process displaced some 27,000 children, mostly boys, who have since come to be known as the Lost Boys of Sudan (McMahon 3-5). One among the Lost Boys was Valentino Achak Deng, who, at ten years of age, fled his ancestral village of Marial Bai and walked thousands of kilometres across Sudan to seek refuge in Ethiopia, and then, failing that, walked further to the UN-administered refugee camp at Kakuma in the north of Kenya. After a decade in Kakuma, the USA officially recognised Deng as a refugee and resettled him in Atlanta, Georgia, where, over the following years, other Lost Boys who had resettled in North America came to recognise him as their public representative with responsibility for raising both awareness of their troubles and funds for their futures. Beginning in 2001, these efforts culminated in the 2006 publication of What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, which afforded an unprecedented level of public exposure to Deng’s own story and the stories of other Lost Boys, and which garnered critical as well as popular acclaim for using those stories to illustrate the personal consequences of Sudan’s troubled political history. Yet in outlining that history here, I have deemed it necessary to refer to five additional authoritative texts because, by Deng’s own admission, his so-called autobiography is not his own work and therefore cannot be taken as authoritative at all.1

This admission appears in the book’s opening pages, but a glance at the cover is evidence enough that some such disclaimer must be made: beneath the subtitle The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng is the second subtitle A Novel, and, beneath that, authorship of the book is credited to a man whose name is not Valentino Achak Deng. That man is Dave Eggers, the American novelist, screenwriter, journal editor, and author of his own deliberately unreliable memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.2 What Is the What, we soon learn, is entirely Eggers’ work but for a preface in which Valentino Achak Deng recalls how Eggers befriended him upon his arrival in America and persuaded him to use literature as well as oratory to raise awareness of the Lost Boys of Sudan. “Over the course of many years,” Deng explains, “I told my story orally to [Eggers]. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation” (5). Although Deng admits that “because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel [and] should not be taken as a definitive history,” he insists nevertheless that “the world I have known is not so different from the one depicted within these pages” (5). In so saying, Deng situates his ‘autobiography’ in a recent strand of postcolonial writing that upsets the nature of autobiography itself—one that, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson write, “troubles the fiction/nonfiction boundary by both calling on readers to read... narratives against autobiography and asserting authoritative witness to subjective truth,” thus “play[ing] on the different readerly expectations of fictional and nonfictional texts” (362). Essentially, Deng asks his readers to accept Eggers’ words as truth, even as he grants Eggers permission to alter, embellish, and falsify the truth of his experiences until they meet the demands of narrative literature.

Since “[a]utobiography’s project” is “to tell the story of one’s life,” as Leigh Gilmore writes, the autobiographical form itself “appears to constrain [the author’s] self-representation through its almost legalistic definition of truth telling, its anxiety about invention, and its preference for the literal and verifiable” (3). But insofar as this project “establish[es] expectations [of truthful narratives] in audiences” (Gilmore 3), Deng and Eggers’ creative approach to the form is self-evidently fraught with ethical complications—in the author-audience relationship as well as in the relationship between the two authors. Yet among critics who have undertaken a close reading of the text, only one has so far found these complications worthy of both consideration and, more importantly, condemnation. “How strange,” writes Lee Siegel, “for one man to think that he could write the story of another man—a real living man who is perfectly capable of telling his story himself—and then call it autobiography” (53). The result, he argues, is a text that ostensibly gives voice to the survivor of a postcolonial nightmare even though, in truth, “the survivor’s voice does not survive,” so that Eggers’ work amounts to little more than “a postcolonial arrogance—the most socially acceptable instance of Orientalism you are likely to encounter” (53). For Siegel, The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng is essentially an act of ventriloquism in which Deng himself, already the victim of extraordinary trauma, is humiliatingly taken as the ventriloquist’s dummy. “Where,” he asks, “is the dignity in that?” (53).

In its original context, Siegel’s question is clearly only rhetorical—less an invitation to critically examine Eggers’ obligations to preserve the dignity of his subject, more a tacit contention that Deng has already been stripped of his dignity and that Eggers’ attempt to speak for him only exacerbates the problem. But I have deliberately foregrounded the question here because I believe it is considerably more important than Siegel himself admits, and I want both to reissue it and to suggest one answer to it while also exploring an aspect of Deng and Eggers’ creative methodology that Siegel overlooks: namely, the subject’s consent to be spoken for. Valentino Achak Deng publicised the plight of the Lost Boys with their consent, and Dave Eggers publicised Deng’s efforts with Deng’s consent as well as his co-operation. Where exactly is the dignity in that? Or, to rephrase the question in a way that exposes its presuppositions: does Deng and Eggers’ text purport to restore dignity to an individual who has been stripped of it; and, if so, how can it actually attempt to accomplish such an objective? Although I begin to answer such questions by examining literary texts, my ultimate concern is not with the strictly literary content of those texts so much as with their practical import and the consequences they hold for individuals here, now, outside literature, in the real world.

Subscribe now

By definition, postcolonial literature of any kind either explicitly or implicitly explores the efforts of an imperial colony to achieve national independence and self-determination, usually with a focus on the consequent socio-political victimisation of certain individuals in the fledgling nation-state. It offers “strong, emotive stories... chronicling degradation, brutalisation, exploitation, and physical violence, [and] the denial of subjectivity,” as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith write. “Sometimes these stories are told in the immediacy of catastrophic conflict, sometimes only years or decades after the recollected event, [but] all [such] stories invite an ethical response from [readers]” (4). However, the ways in which individual postcolonial texts explore these issues and invite this ethical response differ according to whether a text is fiction or non-fiction or some combination of both. For example, postcolonial non-fiction generally illustrates the origins and effects of the victimisation of certain individuals with reference to documentary data and empirical evidence, while postcolonial fiction tends to explore victimisation as an experience best conveyed emotionally rather than empirically and with greater reliance on speculation than on documentation. The difference between the two is the difference between victimisation as a social phenomenon and victimisation as a personal ordeal—that is, between illustrating the vast systemic conditions that stripped away the dignity of a significant number of real people, and stirring sympathy for a range of imaginary persons without thoroughly illustrating the systemic conditions that stripped their dignity from them. Creative non-fiction, however, resides somewhere between these two poles, at once illustrating the conditions of victimisation in empirical terms and exploring its personal consequences in order to purposefully garner sympathy for those who undergo the experience. Taking real individuals whose victimisation has stripped them of their dignity, the authors of such texts warp the experiences of those victims in order to persuade an audience that they are worthy of dignity and thus to restore it to them. These texts, write Schaffer and Smith, “issue a call... to recognize the humanity of the teller and the justice of the claim [for dignity]; to take responsibility for that recognition; and to find means of redress” (3), thus “interven[ing] in the public sphere, contesting social norms, exposing the fictions of official history, and prompting resistance beyond the provenance of the story within and beyond the borders of the nation” (4). In other words, while the authors of such texts may not openly admit it, they in fact advance a project of political activism by crafting texts with an activist politics woven into their very structure.

Insofar as Deng and Eggers have crafted a text of this sort, it is justifiable for Lee Siegel to presuppose that Eggers, as its credited author, holds both the intention and the obligation to restore the dignity of Deng, its subject. Less justifiable, though, is Siegel’s concurrent presupposition that Eggers necessarily fails in his attempt to restore Deng’s dignity because the dignity of such a victim can be restored only if that victim speaks of his or her victimisation in his or her own voice. Such a presupposition not only denies Dave Eggers the right to speak for Valentino Achak Deng even after receiving Deng’s consent, but also denies Deng the right to speak for the Lost Boys of Sudan after receiving their consent. Two further implicit assertions follow as logical consequences of these denials. First, that the activist project to restore dignity to a victimised people demands a factually accurate representation of their collective experiences, even though those experiences differ amongst individuals and so cannot be represented collectively; and second, that this project is primarily a literary endeavour, such that a victimised individual can restore his or her dignity simply by assembling a literary recount of how they were stripped of it. But both of these implicit assertions are misguided, I think, to the extent that they invalidate the very presuppositions from which they follow—a point best illustrated not by What Is the What, which refutes them on its own initiative, but by a similar work of creative non-fiction that validates them with decidedly unsettling results.

With a landmass of only 280 square kilometres rather than 2.5 million, with an economy built on foreign investment and tourism rather than agriculture and oil, and with a marked absence of war and refugee crises on its historical record, the Caribbean island of Antigua could hardly appear more distinct from Sudan. But it too was once a British colony and its people were also victimised and stripped of their dignity and left to inherit a legacy of socio-political disorder that has perpetuated their victimisation long after they won their national independence. This inheritance is the central concern of the Antiguan expatriate Jamaica Kincaid, who, like Valentino Achak Deng, resettled in America at a young age and thereafter rose to prominence by publicly addressing the postcolonial conditions in her country of origin. In A Small Place, her pessimistic assessment of present-day Antigua, she contends that, like all former imperial colonies, the nation is now one whose previous domination by foreign criminals has left its native tenants corrupted by equal criminality. “All we seem to have learned from [the British],” she writes, “is how to imprison and murder each other... how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts... how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants” (34). Having identified this problematic inheritance, Kincaid proceeds to attribute it primarily to British obstinacy and ineptitude, and, in so doing, she attempts to restore the dignity of the Antiguans using the same creative non-fiction methodology as Valentino Achak Deng and Dave Eggers—and thus advancing the same activist politics.

There are, however, two important differences between the two texts. First, if we presuppose with Lee Siegel that individual victims of postcolonial turmoils can have their dignity restored only if they speak of their own experiences in their own voices, then Kincaid is automatically better able to achieve this objective than Deng because that is precisely how she speaks. And second, she speaks against the influence of a vast colonial power on a colonised people by utilising her inherent power as an author to force her powerless audience into what is effectively a literary simulacrum of colonial power relations. “There was an attempt by English colonization to make a certain kind of people out of me [and] it worked, it really worked,” she said in an interview after the publication of A Small Place (Simmons 234); and in the text itself she responds to this assault on her identity by taking a cue from the British and making a certain kind of people out of her readers. Just as imperial powers defined the cultural identities of their colonial subjects and then regarded them with disdain, so Kincaid forcibly identifies her readers as tourists visiting Antigua before she declares: “A tourist is an ugly human being” (14). “You are,” she goes on, “a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you” (17). Thus, whereas Valentino Achak Deng, through Dave Eggers, attempts to restore the dignity of the Lost Boys by depicting them as worthy of dignity, Kincaid attempts to restore the dignity of the Antiguans by declaring us to be unworthy of it; and while Deng and Eggers stir sympathy for the Lost Boys by persuading us to feel for them, Kincaid demands that we sympathise with the Antiguans by compelling us to feel like them. The two texts advance the same project of political activism via creative non-fiction, but they vary in the details of their creative methodologies and therefore meet with divergent results. Which one of the two most successfully realises the aims of the project? Since success depends largely on the response of an audience to the subject of a text, we can measure success by considering the ways in which each text acknowledges and answers the demands that its audience implicitly makes of its particular subject.

Subscribe now

As a black man under white colonial rule, Frantz Fanon spoke from personal experience when he defined a colonised people as one “in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality” (18) at the hands of the more “sophisticated” culture of an imperial power. Following this cultural death, Fanon argued, the colonised subject effectively “becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness,” evolving from “savagery” to “sophistication” in the eyes of the culture that now defines him “in proportion to his adoption of [its] cultural standards” (18). But the sharp declarative nature of those last few words imbues them with a sense of permanence which conflicts with the inherent transience of cultural standards in general. Cultural standards are fluid, not fixed, in such a way that the gradual shift from Fanon’s imperial milieu to our present postcolonial age has occasioned a consequent shift in the attitudes of the citizens of former imperial powers towards citizens of former colonies. One proof of this shift is the very existence of texts like What Is the What and A Small Place, both published in former imperial nations and other similarly developed nations on the implicit assumption that their citizens would be interested in, and even sympathetic towards, the experiences of individuals in postcolonial situations. The problem for the authors of such texts, however, is that similar records of postcolonial experience are currently published in such abundance that they rarely attract the interest of readers prima facie, and so must be constructed in a way that actively attracts it. This means, in effect, that if an author of postcolonial creative non-fiction is to restore the dignity of victimised individuals, he or she must consciously emphasise the severity of their victimisation in order to satisfy contemporary cultural standards that confer the most attention on the most haunting postcolonial experiences—so that, put crudely, the victims of those experiences become whiter as they display their blackness. But this being the case, those authors then face the temptation to not only emphasise but also exaggerate the severity of their subject’s postcolonial victimisation, and thus to produce a work of creative non-fiction whose creative stylisations finally usurp its non-fiction substance.

Neither Kincaid nor Deng and Eggers are immune to this temptation, as evident in their mutual reliance on a narrative teleology as the basis of their textual structures—that is, their respective texts catalogue a steady accretion of postcolonial ordeals which build in severity towards a climax, thus exhibiting a narrative structure typical to fiction even though they give shape to factual experiences. Can it really be that tourists visiting Antigua will find themselves first defrauded by their taxi driver, then in danger of death on the perilous Antiguan roads, and finally at swim in an ocean pumped full of their own excrement? Can it really be that after the Antiguans threw off the shackles of colonial rule, they first sold away their national territory to foreign interests, then became dependent on tourism for economic solvency, and finally began electing politicians more interested in murdering one another than in resolving the nation’s political problems? Logically, yes, these claims may be true; but by structuring them teleologically, Jamaica Kincaid implies causality between them and so conveys the impression that the nation’s troubles flow from a single source—and logically, this can be little other than exaggeration. Indeed, Jane King calls “naïve” those readers who assume that “[Kincaid’s] non-fiction books intend to give information and that [we] can therefore be informed by them” (905), and, responding to Kincaid’s own admission that her explicitly fictional texts are essentially exaggerations of her personal experiences, King argues that “[an exaggeration] is essentially what her nonfiction is too” (899). I accept this argument, although I also accept that Kincaid’s exaggerations would be justifiable to the extent that they advance her efforts to restore dignity to her fellow Antiguans. As Leigh Gilmore argues, when our concern with autobiography “is narrowed to the legalistic question, ‘Did she lie?’” we dismiss the possibility of textual complexity and risk overlooking the author’s more pointed aims (5). “A different question,” Gilmore writes, “would focus on the way her testimony tests a crucial limit in autobiography, and not just the one understood as the boundary between truth and lies, but, rather, the limit of representativeness” (5). The problem for Kincaid, though, is not simply that she exaggerates her representations of life in Antigua, but that she does so in a way that threatens to derail her efforts to restore the dignity of her fellow Antiguans, because, at bottom, she takes real victims deserving of real dignity and yet attempts to restore their dignity by making them progressively unreal. Moreover, I would add, there is a way in which Kincaid might have justifiably exaggerated her claims without derailing her larger project—and this way of doing things is best demonstrated by Valentino Achak Deng and Dave Eggers, not simply because Deng’s experiences are structured along similarly teleological lines and are thus similarly exaggerated, but also because Deng and Eggers explicitly show their readers how, as readers, they have implicitly demanded that Deng teleologically exaggerate his experiences in this way. “I have been starved,” he begins, before cataloguing his ordeals:

I have been beaten with sticks, with rods, with brooms and stones and spears. ... I have ridden five miles on a truckbed loaded with corpses. I have watched too many young boys die in the desert, some as if sitting down to sleep, some after days of madness... [and I] have faced the guns, a dozen times, of armed Arab militiamen on horseback. (12, 14)

And this teleological litany of sorrows does not cease even after he resettles in America. As a refugee, Deng loses everything he ever owned in Sudan, including his family’s ancestral land; then in Atlanta he cannot find any paid work above the minimum wage and cannot accumulate enough college credits to enter university; then he is assaulted in his own home by an African American thief who speaks to him as if their shared skin colour makes them brothers; and finally the woman he intends to marry, a fellow refugee, is murdered by another Lost Boy who fails to win her affections. But whilst he recounts his sorrows in this teleological fashion, Deng, through Dave Eggers, acknowledges the artifice of the entire enterprise and openly rebukes his own readers for compelling him to make his experiences conform to it. This sort of interaction between author and reader has recently become a significant focus of concern for critics of creative non-fiction (see, for example, Rusk 2), with some suggesting that readers of such works are effectively placed on the same footing as authors since they are impelled to create a fresh narrative by sifting through an author’s deliberate obscurantism (see, for example, Lejeune; Whitlock 203-204), while others, like Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, see readers as literally pre-scribing the narrative requirements such authors are expected to fulfil:

[Postcolonial] storytellers take risks. They hope for an audience willing to acknowledge the truthfulness of the story and to accept an ethical responsibility to both story and teller. There is always the possibility, however, that their stories will not find audiences willing to listen or that audiences will ignore or interpret their stories unsympathetically. (6)

Given this scenario, Schaffer and Smith ask how “contexts of reception direct and contain the ethical call of stories and their appeals for redress” (6). Deng and Eggers together provide one answer. Deng, through Eggers, confesses first that although the Lost Boys did experience unimaginable horrors on their journey across Sudan, their experiences were not deemed worthy of public attention until they actively played up those horrors to their most traumatic extremes. “If you have heard of [us],” he writes, “you [must] have heard of the lions. For a long while, the stories of our encounters with lions helped garner sympathy from our sponsors and... enhanced the newspaper articles, and no doubt played a part in the U.S. being interested in us in the first place” (33). It is true that a number of Lost Boys were killed and eaten by lions en route to Ethiopia, but that number was only small. Nevertheless, audiences have made such demands of the Lost Boys that the reports of the survivors “have become remarkably similar over the years” (25), and, as a result:

everyone’s account [now] includes attacks by lions, hyenas, crocodiles. All have borne witness to attacks by the murahaleen... to Antonov bombings, to slave-raiding. But we did not all see the same things [because] our [journeys] were very different. ... But now, sponsors and newspaper reporters and the like expect the stories to have certain elements, and the Lost Boys have been consistent in their willingness to oblige. (25-26)

“My own story,” admits Deng, through Eggers, “includes enough small embellishments that I cannot criticize the accounts of others” (26), and a close reading of the text reveals this to be demonstrably true even as the text itself is in progress. On page twelve, for instance, it is said that lions seized only three boys in Deng’s company, but by page thirty-three that number has grown inexplicably to five. Then, more explicitly and most damningly, Deng’s embellishments cease to pass by without remark, forcing us to unambiguously understand that What Is the What is a ventriloquist’s act in which readers, not the author, are Deng’s collective puppet-masters: “Survivors tell the stories the sympathetic want [to hear],” he says, through Eggers, “and that means making them as shocking as possible” (26). Thus, in defiance of George Rosenwald and Richard Ochberg’s contention that “how individuals recount their histories—what they emphasize and omit, their stance as protagonists or victims, the relationship [they establish] between teller and audience—all shape what individuals can claim of their own lives” (1). What Is the What throws light on the practices of emphasis and omission to show how audiences rather than individuals primarily determine what those individuals can claim of their own lives. And similarly, in defiance of their subsequent contention that “personal stories are not merely a way of telling someone... about one’s life; they are the means by which identities may be fashioned” (1). What Is the What positions itself as a text that tells its individual readers how they themselves have, in advance of reading, predetermined the identity of the teller. Survivors tell the stories the sympathetic want to hear and, in so doing, they distort themselves to suit the preferences of those who would sympathise with their testimonies.

Jamaica Kincaid similarly admits the truth of this statement, I think, albeit obliquely, in practice, rather than in declarative prose; but I think, too, that Deng and Eggers restore the dignity of the Lost Boys by admitting it in declarative prose, so that Kincaid’s restoration of dignity to the Antiguans is less successful by comparison. This is because, when an audience implicitly demands that a people stripped of its dignity must exaggerate the experience, the demand itself implicitly strips that people of whatever dignity remains; but when that audience is explicitly confronted with the demand it has made, it is in turn confronted with the damage it has inflicted upon an already damaged people. As a result, each member of the audience is both positioned and persuaded to experience guilt—the guilt of a manipulative voyeur upon whom a spotlight has suddenly been cast. While Kincaid merely accuses her audience of guilt for inflicting such damage, then, Deng and Eggers instead induce their audience to suffer it—and this difference between their respective texts influences the dignity restored to their respective subjects. An audience that suffers guilt for the victimisation of a people is an audience that by extension aligns itself with the imperial power responsible for their actual victimisation; and What Is the What guides us towards making this equation. In A Small Place, however, Kincaid equates herself with a colonial power and equates us with the victimised Antiguans so that we cannot but experience their victimisation vicariously. This means, primarily, that Kincaid’s accusations of guilt do not inspire the suffering of guilt, because guilt is definitively a consequence of an introspective reassessment of one’s own free behaviour and yet Kincaid exercises such complete control over her readers that we cannot freely respond to her authority. This also means, as a corollary, that Kincaid is unable to then accuse her audience of having demanded her exaggerations of daily life in Antigua, which ultimately leaves her unable to justify those exaggerations as part of a broader effort to restore dignity to her fellow Antiguans. So she rebukes the Antiguans for building “this monument to rottenness, that monument to rottenness... as if... they have made the degradation and humiliation of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction” (68-69)—she rebukes them, that is, for answering the demands of an audience—yet she does not admit that essentially the same reasons have led her to erect an essentially identical monument to rottenness, only in a literary medium. Where is the dignity in that? Following Lee Siegel, I would suggest that when Valentino Achak Deng surrenders his experiences to his audience and surrenders his voice to Dave Eggers, he does indeed suffer a loss of dignity; but I would also suggest that insofar as he articulates the loss in order to illustrate the lost dignity of the Lost Boys in general, he gears his own individual indignity towards the greater ends of appealing for the restoration of the dignity of the wider refugee community. Applying this logic to Jamaica Kincaid, however, I would again follow Lee Siegel to suggest that Kincaid indeed restores dignity by speaking of her own experiences in her own voice; but I would also suggest that she restores dignity more to herself than to the Antiguans who are in arguably greater need of her efforts. This can be made demonstrably true if we take the authors of these two texts and reposition their respective subjects as new audiences making demands of them—in other words, if we observe them when they return to their countries of origin and are brought face-to-face with the very victimised individuals about whom they have been writing.

Share

Three years after the publication of A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid said in an interview that if she were to visit Antigua after depicting it so negatively, “it would not be at all impossible that... I could get killed” (Birbalsingh 143). Later, she explained exactly how and why this might happen. “I imagine that I’d be shot,” she said. “God knows if they would shoot me, but it is a criminal place. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had henchmen who would do it because politics in the West Indies is very tribal” (Vorda). This was not to suggest that the Antiguan authorities would somehow place a bounty on her head, but rather that those Antiguans who honour tribal loyalties would independently interpret her exaggerations of postcolonial Antigua as insults worthy of her execution. I doubt neither the veracity of her claims nor the validity of her fears. At the same time, though, the tribal conflicts of Antigua pale in comparison to the warfare that continues to plague Sudan, and I am not convinced that Valentino Achak Deng would face a less severe threat if he were to return to Sudan after having also subjected it to distinctly unflattering exaggerations. And yet Kincaid refused to return to Antigua for years after A Small Place was published in 1988,3 while, conversely, Deng twice returned to his native village and its surrounding areas after the publication of What Is the What, once in the company of Dave Eggers and both times without incident and for weeks or months in duration (see Anon.). Would it therefore be safe to say that no-one who encountered Deng during his time in Sudan took issue with his and Eggers’ embellishments? I suspect not; but I also suspect that part of the reason why those exaggerations might have been at least disregarded, if not altogether excused, is because Deng and Eggers used them to generate income with which to restore the dignity of a victimised people in more than a strictly literary sense. The following note appears on both the last page and the back cover of What Is the What:

All proceeds from this book will go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which distributes funds to Sudanese refugees in America; to rebuilding southern Sudan, beginning with [Deng’s village]; to organizations working for peace and humanitarian relief in Darfur; and to the college education of Valentino Achak Deng. (478)

It is true that an individual loses some dignity when spoken for by another individual. But an individual loses more dignity, and loses more than dignity, in situations far more traumatic than being spoken for. Dignity is lost in war, in poverty, in dispossession and displacement and most especially in powerlessness, in being in thrall to another person or people. Moreover, those individuals who are stripped of their dignity by such forces as these are, I think, less likely to take umbrage with their lack of dignity in a literary text if that text itself can undertake work that helps to alleviate their most pressing ills. Deng and Eggers seem to realise this, but Kincaid, by contrast, does not. By taking as her subject a nation whose people rely on tourism for economic solvency and for everyday survival, and by then exposing that country’s manifold grotesqueries for potential tourists to see, Kincaid aims to staunch the flow of tourists to Antiguan shores—which, however, would impair the income of those Antiguans who have minimal income to begin with, who cannot earn an income any other way, and who desperately need it to simply maintain their domestic wellbeing. Where is the dignity in that?

It is commendable, of course, that Kincaid and Deng and Eggers create literature that daringly resides at the nexus of artifice and reality, of fiction and fact, in order to advance a project of political activism. But Deng and Eggers are to be commended more than Kincaid because they go on to strive for what she does not even consider: a way of not simply advancing an activist politics in writing, but of practicing that politics by writing. Because they together wrote What Is the What, however true or untrue it may be, the people about whom they wrote are today materially better off than they were before the text was published, meaning that their dignity now rests more in their own hands than in the hands of some distant audience. Yet if the same can be said of Kincaid’s impact on the Antiguans, it can be said only indirectly: she certainly made an international audience aware of the Antiguan situation, but at no stage did she either plead with her audience to remedy that situation or attempt to remedy it herself. Her concerns were strictly literary. That is not to diminish their literary value, but rather to wonder how much more valuable they might have been if Kincaid had raised her eyes from the page to concern herself with more than just literature. Too often, imperial powers spilled blood across the ground only after first spilling ink across paper, drafting documents to formalise territorial annexations and sketching artificial territorial borders across the surfaces of maps. But ink and paper are not intrinsically tools of demarcation and destruction; they can be taken instead to draft documents of reconciliation and reparation for past injustices, and to rearrange the borders on a map in recognition of cultural differences, and so to work towards erasing the stain of spilled blood. This sort of labour is neither easy nor likely to generate immediately recognisable results—but it does engender real-world progress and thus dignifies its intended beneficiaries as well as those who perform it.

Share

Works Cited

Anon. ‘Community development in southern Sudan.’ The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation (2009): <http://valentinoachakdeng.org/community_development.php>. Web.

Birbalsingh, Frank. ‘Jamaica Kincaid: From Antigua to America.’ Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. Ed. Frank Birbalsingh. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1996. 138-150. Print.

Carmichael, Harold. The Sudan. London: Ernest Benn, 1954. Print.

Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Print.
—. What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel. London: Penguin, 2007. Print.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. 1967. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Print.

Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Print.

Holt, P.M. and M.W. Daly. A History of the Sudan: From the Coming of Islam to the Present Day: Fifth Edition. 1961. Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2000. Print.

Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000. Print.

King, Jane. ‘A Small Place Writes Back.’ Callaloo 25.3 (2002): 885-909. Print.

Lejeune, Phillippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989. Print.

McMahon, Felicia R. Not Just Child’s Play: Emerging Tradition and the Lost Boys of Sudan. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Print.

O’Ballance, Edgar. Sudan, Civil War and Terrorism, 1956-1999. London: Macmillan, 2000. Print.

Rosenwald, George C. and Richard L. Ochberg, eds. Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Print.

Rusk, Lauren. The Life Writing of Otherness: Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

Siegel, Lee. ‘The Niceness Racket.’ The New Republic 236.14 (April 23, 2007): 49-53. Print.

Simmons, Dianne. ‘Loving Too Much: Jamaica Kincaid and the Dilemma of Constructing a Postcolonial Identity.’ Postcolonialism & Autobiography. Eds. Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Alfred Hornung, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Ernstpeter Ruhe. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998. 233-245. Print.

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. ‘The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes for Narrative Theorists.’ A Companion to Narrative Theory. Eds. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 356-370. Print.

Thomas, Graham. Sudan, 1950-1985: Death of a Dream. London: Darf Publications, 1990. Print.

Vorda, Allan. ‘An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.’ 1991. Mississippi Review 2.4 (April 1996): <http://www.mississippireview.com/1996/ kincaid.html>. Web.

Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London and New York: Cassell, 2000. Print.

Share

Endnotes

Subscribe now

The American Civil War boasts more than its share of visionaries who saw impending disaster and spoke against it to no avail, but few of them saw and spoke against it in the terms favoured by Herman Melville a decade before the conflict broke out. Melville’s clarity of vision, however, was commensurate to the distance at which he stood from antebellum America, having been consigned in his middle years to a cultural obscurity that left him as frustrated by the political discourse which would ignite the conflict as by his inability to make himself heard when he tried to raise his voice above it. After an auspicious début, the rapid decline of his career paralleled the decline of American social cohesion in general,1 while his consequent marginalisation increased in step with rising animosity in American public debates (see Mumford 259), so that he was left to look on helplessly as the national discussion over slavery became a dispute in which he could offer sympathy to neither side. This is not to suggest that he advocated or felt ambivalent about either the secession of the Southern states that triggered the Civil War or the restrictions on slavery that triggered secession itself: far from it, Melville was a resolute abolitionist. But in the years preceding the conflict, American culture allowed the debate over slavery to be conducted on terms and in a terminology that the culturally alienated Melville could not accept. As a result, when he stepped forth to confront slavery and to articulate his abolitionist politics in a work of fiction, he did so by constructing a narrative that altogether denied the validity of the existing terms of debate and instead depicted them as having engendered only a discursive spectacle, style without substance. That is the narrative of his 1855 novella ‘Benito Cereno.’

The terminology that Melville rejected was theological, and the terms he rejected were those that held the slavery debate subject to divine resolution. It is true, of course, that God has always been granted a prominent place in American political affairs, but this has rarely been more true than it was during Melville’s time. Throughout the early 1800s, the overtly theological rhetoric of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson gave presidential legitimacy to the emerging belief that both the economic development and the territorial expansion of American interests were divinely mandated (see McDougall), and this belief evolved apace throughout the 1830s and 1840s until, in 1845, the journalist John O’Sullivan declared that unobstructed growth was the nation’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ (Johannsen 7-20). Thereby and thereafter, such heavenly sanction was conferred upon American political and cultural institutions that the nation itself came to be construed as no mere worldly sovereign state, but as the ‘New Israel,’ the true Promised Land of God—and the slavery that had been so instrumental to its growth thus came to receive God’s tacit approval.

Not that advocates of slavery actually needed God to stand as a bulwark against abolition as early as the 1840s, however, since slavery at that time afforded the American elite such significant social stability and economic prosperity that its benefits were all but self-evident. As a source of free labour, it generated immense wealth for that minority of Americans privileged enough to enjoy the spoils; and as an organisational structure of society, it reinforced social stratification by distinguishing wealthy Americans from those less wealthy as well as from mere African commodities. Essentially, slavery so reliably maintained the high material quality of life for those with influence in legislative affairs that no abolitionist argument could be advanced on materialist terms. In an attempt to overcome this argumentative immunity, then, abolitionists began to abandon socio-economic objections to slavery in favour of arguments more resistant to objection because more absolute, making an appeal to divine morality and invoking God for their purposes. As a result, via a loose coalition of evangelicals, Catholics, Quakers, and Unitarians, God came to dominate antebellum political discourse as an arbiter of immutable laws that made a divine offence of slavery and made sinners of those who supported it (see Noll 2).

Unsurprisingly, though, supporters of slavery responded to these abolitionist claims not by rebuking their absolutism but by justifying slavery with absolutism in equal measure.2 Appealing to God for their own purposes, they contended that certain Old Testament regulations on slave ownership were tantamount to a divine endorsement of the institution,3 as were those New Testament accounts of slavery that failed to incur explicit divine admonition.4 In addition, they held Africans en masse to be “heirs to curses of perpetual subjugation” (McKivigan 30) who bore collective responsibility for the sins of their supposed Biblical ancestors5—a claim identified by David Goldenberg as “the ideological cornerstone for... Black slavery... [which] legitimized and validated the social order by divine justification” (175-177)6—and, now that they needed it most, they cited Manifest Destiny so as to mount a dually nationalistic and theological challenge to the abolitionist movement:7 “Open the Bible, read it, believe it. ... If God through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery... how could genuine Christians attack [it] as an evil?” (Noll 33). So, after having been conducted on essentially political terms throughout the early nineteenth century, the slavery debate devolved into a mid-century theological dispute in which “both defenders of slavery and abolitionists believed it essential to prove that their cause was fully compatible with the basic sources of Christian faith” (McKivigan 30). However, just as that dispute was intensifying, Herman Melville was grappling with the traumatic loss of his Christian faith and it was in that spirit of emerging unbelief that he wrote ‘Benito Cereno.’

Melville had fallen far, and fast, to reach this low point. His public and private writings from less than a decade earlier attest to an optimistic belief in the God of Manifest Destiny and its attendant nationalism (McWilliams 133),8 but then, of course, having achieved critical and commercial success with his début novel Typee in 1846 and Omoo in 1847, he had good cause for optimism. In 1849, however, Mardi and Redburn were poorly received, and in 1850 so too was White-Jacket, leading Melville to acknowledge and lament the downturn in his fortunes. “I have [recently] felt obliged to refrain from writing the kind of book I would wish to,” he wrote at the time, “and independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail’” (‘Letter’ 92). But since those were exactly the sort of books he did go on to write, he met the sort of failure he expected to meet. In 1851, Moby-Dick was a disaster; in 1852, Pierre was an even greater disaster; and in 1853, Melville hit bottom when his publishers rejected Isle of the Cross in its entirety (see Levine xviii). These professional setbacks, as well as misfortunes of a more personal nature, cast Melville into a crisis of such overwhelming self-doubt that he began to question the value of his entire body of work on almost every conceivable level—personally, culturally, aesthetically, and, not least, spiritually. As his cascade into cultural obscurity in America increasingly reflected America’s own descent into chaos, he found himself unable to sustain his belief in a benevolent Americanised deity. By 1854 his faith in the God of Manifest Destiny had disappeared, and by 1856 he had lost faith in God altogether (McWilliams 143). ‘Benito Cereno’ was written in the intervening months, just before Melville set out for the Holy Land on a voyage of spiritual self-discovery (Mumford 259-263),9 and met up en route with his friend and fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who made note of Melville’s ongoing spiritual turmoil after they parted company. “Melville will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief,” Hawthorne wrote in his journal. “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other” (232).10

Thus, in the words of Stan Goldman, “Herman Melville was a God-chased and a God-chasing man” (12). From early personal experience he understood the urge to embrace an Americanised theology, but from later personal experience he could not embrace it as he once did. When he addressed the increasing volatility of American political discourse, then, he did so with both the clarity of an outsider’s view and the empathy of an insider’s experience. He saw what could not be seen by those with more deeply vested interests in a theologised slavery debate: that with recourse to theology they had turned a genuine dialogue into a mere discursive masquerade, and that their use of what Allan Moore Emery calls the “rhetorical camouflage” (54) of Manifest Destiny in fact protected slavery from real interrogation and thus kept abolition at bay.

Share

From this standpoint, Melville assembled a work of literature that speaks to the terms of that discourse as much as it speaks of them, but that denies their discursive validity in light of their theological essence—a text, therefore, in which behaviour is a more meaningful mode of discourse than language, since behaviour reveals through gestures what has been hidden by spoken words. It is important to note these textual qualities because, for the most part, critics of ‘Benito Cereno’ have tended to read the text as an unambiguously abolitionist broadside against proslavery politics rather than as a more conflicted attempt to acknowledge that abolitionists and supporters of slavery shared common ground in public discourse, that this indulgence of the opposition had set abolitionists on the path of discursive self-defeat, and that this situation warranted the outlining of a fresh abolitionist line of attack unencumbered by discursive sophistry. To cite only a handful of recent examples, Helen Lock has read the text as a detailed illustration of the moral absurdity of institutionalised slavery (54-70), Paul Downes has read it as a call for the universalisation of human rights a century before such calls began to be heeded (465-488), Dan Manheim has read it as an examination of how slaveowners upheld their power via the manipulation of language (151-154), and Jonathan Beecher has read it as a rationalisation and celebration of the slave uprisings that threatened slavery in the Caribbean in the early 1800s (43-58). All of these interpretations rightly and justifiably focus on the ways in which Melville’s abolitionist politics informed the content of ‘Benito Cereno,’ but at the same time they overlook the ways in which the abolitionist figures in the text exhibit theological qualities that compare to the theological qualities of the proslavery figures and so point towards the complicity of abolitionists in perpetuating the theological justification of slavery. For these reasons, such critical interpretations are largely representative of the existing literature on ‘Benito Cereno,’ which therefore leaves space for a consideration of the ways in which this abolitionist text criticises more than just opponents of abolition—a consideration that begins with what might be the only words in the text that are spoken truly.

At the end of the narrative, the cry rings out—“Ah, this slavery breeds ugly passions in man!” (75)—and by placing those words in the mouth of a speaker whose actions are sharply at odds with their sentiment, Melville essentially distils into a single utterance his entire opposition to slavery and his disillusionment with the slavery debate as a whole. Those words are, in effect, Melville’s plea to his readers on both sides of the discursive divide to relinquish their abstract theological biases and to instead understand slavery in firmly empirical terms—to understand it, that is, as a force that demonstrably perverts human behaviour, that has had its perverse influence hidden behind a discursive veil, and that deserves condemnation for thriving on both those evils. In order to articulate this condemnation in more detail, Melville divides his narrative into two sections. A condemnation, after all, is the product of a moral judgment, but since a purely behavioural depiction of slavery would be necessarily amoral, Melville supplements his depiction of slavery in practice with a depiction of various responses to it, thereby inviting his readers to see how slavery has influenced those responses and, where they are objectionable, to subject slavery to a moral judgment on behavioural grounds, independent of any incontrovertible laws. In this way, rather than articulating his condemnation explicitly, Melville encourages his readers to logically infer it on his behalf after witnessing slavery first in action and then in consequence and so perceiving how it poisons everyone it touches.

The first part of the narrative (34-89) chronicles an outbreak of brutal violence directly attributable to the practice of slavery. In 1799, an American merchant vessel, the Bachelor’s Delight, is northbound off the coast of Chile when its captain, Amasa Delano, notices a nearby Spanish slave vessel in a state of distress and disrepair. Delano approaches the foreign ship, the San Dominick, and offers assistance to its captain, Benito Cereno—but, once aboard, he is astonished to find that Cereno allows his slaves to move around unshackled and essentially free, and that, moreover, his courtesy is apparently reciprocated by the slaves’ representative spokesman, Babo, who willingly serves as the captain’s personal attendant. It is Benito Cereno himself, however, who most captures Delano’s attention by exhibiting behaviour so awkward and seemingly devious that Delano suspects him of intending to attack and plunder the American ship. But while Delano’s suspicions are eventually validated when Cereno does force his way aboard the Bachelor’s Delight, they are also revealed to be fundamentally misguided insofar as Cereno is motivated less by a desire to attack the ship than by the need to escape the attack of the unshackled slaves, who have, unbeknownst to Delano, successfully mounted a mutiny against Cereno and seized control of the San Dominick under the leadership of the deceptively servile Babo.11

The second part of the narrative (89-102) allows each individual involved in this practice of slavery to reflect upon and evaluate his involvement in the violence it provoked. Some months after the mutiny is quelled and resolved in favour of Delano and Cereno, a court of law conducts an inquiry into the incident and reveals the truths Delano failed to see. Benito Cereno did indeed permit his slaves to loosen their bonds aboard the San Dominick, but the unshackled slaves then fell in line behind Babo as he overthrew the captain, executed most of the crew, and threatened Cereno himself with death unless he charted a new course to the African free state of Senegal. Later, however, when Delano boarded the beleaguered ship, Babo was compelled to avoid Delano’s scrutiny by transforming his rebellion into a meticulous theatrical exhibition in which he and his followers pretended that Cereno was still their master, and he carefully sustained that charade until Cereno’s escape destroyed it and thus triggered a bloody feud between the rebel slaves and the merchant seamen. By the end of the court’s inquiry, however, readers realise that this violence was not the sole consequence of any one man’s actions because all three men contributed to it in some measure: Babo explicitly ordered it, Cereno freed his slaves and invited it, and Delano sympathised with Babo and held suspicions against Cereno and thereby exacerbated it.

As the court sets the truth before the three men and confronts each one with his part in the bloodshed, it enables us to observe each man’s response to the part he played and thus to assess the content of his character. Does he decry or defend his complicity in the violence? And if he defends it, does he do so with reservations or with pride? The more each man comes to understand himself as having played the part that readers have just watched him play, the more favourably we are inclined to view him and vice-versa, leading us to admire or admonish each man accordingly. Of course, it is true that we are more inclined to admonish all three men in varying degrees than to admire any one absolutely, but it is also true that we tend to admonish one man in particular much more than the others, and that man is the American captain. Unlike both Cereno and Babo, Delano reflects upon the violence only to deny any responsibility for it, and, more importantly, his denial is a product of his blind faith in the God of Manifest Destiny—the faith with which Herman Melville was so personally familiar and of which he was so critical. Amasa Delano therefore resides at the heart of Melville’s condemnation of the slavery debate; but in order to gradually place Delano at its heart, Melville first depicts slavery as an institution worthy of condemnation on the basis of its inherent power dynamics and their perverse influence on the behaviour of all those who enter into them.

Share

Slavery is, fundamentally, an unwilling engagement in action motivated by a superior power and conducted for the benefit of the individual who wields that power: servitude under threat of force. Each person involved in the practice of slavery therefore inhabits a particular position in the power structure that regulates its practice: one either threatens the use of force as a master or unwillingly engages in servitude as a slave. And then, beyond slavery in general, race slavery makes this power structure visible by determining one’s position and practices simply on the basis of one’s skin colour: in the American context, for the most part, masters of slaves were white while slaves themselves were black.12 But while such a power structure is surely necessary to regulate and pacify the inherently antagonistic relationship between masters and slaves, it is also ultimately self-contradictory insofar as it ascribes certain behavioural intentions to masters and slaves which in fact only aggravate the antagonism between them: masters intend to preserve their power through violent subjugation while slaves intend to end their subjugation by evading or rebelling against their masters. However, a slave rebellion such as the one led by Babo warps this power structure in two significant respects. It inverts the power structure of slavery in general, so that servitude under threat of force remains the established practice while those who practice it switch places; and it subverts the power structure of race slavery in particular, so that black masters now subjugate slaves with white skin. Then, each of these changes generates a corresponding consequence.

First, the inversion of the power structure of slavery in general alters the behavioural intentions of those who inhabit that structure. As master of his slaves, Benito Cereno intended to subjugate them for transportation to the port of Lima, while the slaves intended to undermine him and free themselves from subjugation. But both sets of intentions changed when Babo overthrew Cereno, and both men encountered an impediment to the satisfaction of those intentions. Babo intended to exercise his newfound power in order to journey to Senegal, but he could neither exercise it without enforcing it through violence nor enforce it through violence without risking its loss: he and his followers violently subjugated Benito Cereno, but they would die at sea if their violence left him incapacitated or dead. Conversely, Cereno intended to reclaim the power he lost, but he could neither reclaim it without surviving Babo’s violence nor survive that violence without acknowledging his powerlessness: he would die if he did not acquiesce to Babo, but he could not escape so long as he acquiesced. As a result, both men trapped themselves in a state of symbiosis within which they at once relied on each other for survival but were mutually competitive for dominance. They locked themselves into the power structure of slavery that positions one man as master over the other as slave in a way that forces both master and slave to act antithetically to their own intentions as individual men, and thus forces them to restrict their own individual pursuits of power and freedom in order to simply survive another day as inhabitants of the power structure itself. Slavery therefore not only turns slave against master and master against slave, but also, crucially, turns both master and slave against themselves by forcing each one to curtail his own behavioural intentions in view of the threat posed by his adversarial opposite.

Second, the subversion of the power structure of race slavery ensures that although slavery in general continues to function in practice, race slavery functions only as a performance, as exhibitionism—as what Michel Imbert calls a “masquerade stage-managed” to showcase “theatralize[d]” racial identities (78) in order to distract unwanted spectators from the actual situation on the San Dominick. But obviously, at bottom, there is no need at all for the freed slaves to perform race slavery as long as there is no such spectator to racialise them; yet they acquire one when they encounter Delano, so that his very spectatorship both provokes and perpetuates their performative exhibitionism and in the process both realigns and reinforces the power structure of slavery. It realigns the power structure in appearance insofar as Delano’s preconceived notions of race slavery leave him capable only of seeing Babo as a slave and Cereno as his master, so that, with a mere glance, Delano instantly whitewashes Babo’s subversion of the power structure and forces it to accord with his racial assumptions. But his spectatorship reinforces the power structure in fact, if inadvertently, insofar as his mere presence simultaneously impels Babo to further subjugate his slave Cereno and inspires Cereno to renew his efforts to escape, so that Delano only aggravates the already antagonistic symbiosis between master and slave—and does so with disastrous consequences.

That these consequences are to be attributed largely to Delano is evident in the care with which Melville foregrounds Delano’s spectatorship as the key factor in the perpetuation of the charade and the antagonism of the master-slave power dynamics. At one point, when Babo pretends to serve Cereno by grooming his ‘master’ in Delano’s presence and shaving the stubble from his chin, Melville specifies that “the scene was somewhat peculiar, at least to Captain Delano... as he saw the two thus postured [for the shave]” (72, my emphasis). And if the razor that Babo holds to Cereno’s throat now acquires a sinister double meaning, it acquires that double meaning from Delano’s witnessing of the action: the blade is an instrument of death masquerading as an instrument of grooming, but it could not masquerade as anything at all and would simply remain an instrument of death if Delano were not watching the scene. Then, later, in similar fashion, Babo literally treats Cereno as a puppet with which to maintain his charade as “master and man came [towards Captain Delano]; Don Benito leaning on his servant” (75), but here too Delano’s spectatorship imbues the scene with its meaning because, after all, Cereno no longer actually has anyone who might rightly be seen as his servant—except when seen through Delano’s eyes.

Ultimately, then, Delano’s spectatorship embroils him in a bizarre three-way conflict. He ignites a conflict with Babo that he fails to perceive because his presence threatens Babo’s power; he ignites a conflict with Cereno that need not exist because his suspicions threaten Cereno’s freedom; and, worst of all, he ignites a conflict with himself because he readily fulfils his role as spectator to the charade and thus hinders his own understanding of the situation he has entered. When he first boards the San Dominick, he not only intends to understand how the ship came to be in such a state of disrepair but, more importantly, as Allan Moore Emery argues, “he hopes to discover moral truth. Who on the [ship] is guilty and who is innocent? Who is evil and who is good?” (60). But because Delano entertains preconceptions that lead him to accept Babo’s servitude as truth and to interpret Cereno’s awkwardness as villainy, he actually fuels the deception that he has provoked and so obstructs his own capacity to understand its machinations. Although it is true that the court inquiry concludes that the success of the charade was mostly due to the cunning duplicity of Babo (91-94), the actions of the three men involved in the charade suggest that its success depended at least as much on Delano’s blindness to it. “Even when a Spanish lad is knifed by a Negro boy and a sailor is trampled by two Negroes,” notes Edward Gredja, “Delano’s veil of bias enables him to rationalize [it]. His comfortable assumptions about the Negro character do not allow for the possibility of their being savage; his superficial appraisal [of Babo’s servitude] does not admit that [enslaved] Negroes might seek their freedom” by resorting to brutality (139-140). Indeed, if Babo demonstrates cunning at all, he does not do so by constructing some sophisticated charade from the ground up, but simply, as John Haegert suggests, by exploiting the racial preconceptions with which Amasa Delano has clothed him, against his will, in the costume of the slave (7).13

Share

So Delano’s intrusion into this warped power structure causes the strong party to grow stronger and the weak party to grow weaker even as it prevents Babo from exercising his strength and prevents Cereno from bemoaning his weakness, thus constituting a self-defeating impediment to Delano’s attempt to satisfy his own intentions. Clearly, there are no winners in this situation—but then, just as clearly, there is more to the situation than that. So completely does the slavery onboard the San Dominick pervert each individual engaged in it that every time any one of them even attempts to pursue his individual intentions, he in fact reduces his chances of actually satisfying them; and, in so doing, he only perpetuates the power structure that thwarts his attempts so that any later attempts he may make are thwarted before he is even able to make them. Melville’s behavioural condemnation of slavery reaches fever pitch with this depiction of the absurd and indiscriminate misery that slavery has wrought. Now, by confronting those involved in this slavery with their particular deeds and misdeeds, Melville opens the way for a moral judgment of the institution and the ugly passions it has bred in these men.

After Babo’s attack on Cereno, the change of scene to the court of law offers an evaluation of the incident and implicitly encourages us to undertake our own evaluation of it. But because the court’s legal ruling is followed by a series of summary vignettes that depict the effects of the ruling on each of the men it names (100-102), our evaluative scope expands to include not only each man’s behavioural alterations in the heat of the moment but also his later, more sober reflections upon them. Each man arguably bears some responsibility for the violent outbreak, but which of them is prepared to admit it? Who will swallow his pride and exhibit humility in the face of his actions? He who does, understands how his position in the power structure of slavery has altered his behavioural intentions, laments the alteration, and by extension laments slavery itself. He who refuses, understands and laments nothing, and, for that reason, he is somehow less human; he dismisses the stain that slavery has left on his soul. “The past is passed,” Delano tells Cereno in these vignettes (101). “Why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.” But, in reply to this inordinate optimism, Cereno simply points out that those things “have no memory... because they are not human” (101). That remark holds a clear implication for the humanity of Delano himself, and sets the brash and boisterous American in contrast to the other two men.14

Benito Cereno acknowledges his share of responsibility for the slave rebellion that destroyed his property, his livelihood, his reputation, and his innocence, insofar as he acknowledges that the compassion that led him to unshackle his slaves also led him to underestimate their desperate yearning to escape captivity. And although he is rueful in acknowledging this responsibility, he at least acknowledges it also in a state of reservation and reflection, exiling himself to a monastery atop ‘Mount Agonia,’ literally ‘Mount Agony,’ where he resides in silent contemplation until his death: “There were [topics] upon which he never spoke at all; on which, indeed, all his old reserves were piled” (101). In this respect, Cereno’s fate does not differ greatly from the fate of Babo. Of course, Babo ultimately suffers a state execution, but before he is put to death he too accepts his share of responsibility as the instigator of the violence, albeit tempered by a recognition of the circumstances that made his violence necessary. Justifying his subjugation and slaughter of Benito Cereno’s crew with the claim that “he and his companions could not otherwise be sure of their liberty” (92), Babo renders his bloodshed neither irrational nor gratuitous, but essential for the preservation of his newly-won freedom.15 Even so, as soon as he realises he has been defeated, he too meets a voiceless end and makes no further attempts to explain himself to his captors: “Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to. His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words” (102). Like Cereno, he faces death silently, and, like Cereno, he is finally left to dwell upon Mount Agonia when his severed head is put on public display and made to face the mountain. On the part of both men, therefore, there is a visible and respectful deference to the judgment of institutional authorities, even if offered begrudgingly and offset by an embittered attempt to maintain dignity in the process. While both men are left perturbed by their defeats and the self-defeating behaviour that brought them down, each one nevertheless accepts defeat and does not attempt to evade or excuse it—and, as such, they together display a measure of solemn personal humility.

But the third man makes no such display. Even though “the narrative initially seems to ascribe [to Delano] such attributes as ‘quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception,’” as Tuire Valkeakari notes, “this flattering characterization later proves to be [only] part of... [his] pompous self-understanding” (233). Delano’s refusal of deference and lack of humility leave him the least dignified of the three men, and all the more so when he offers weak, insipid excuses in defence of his own ignorance. “You were with me all day,” Benito Cereno tells him, “[you] stood with me, sat with me, talked with me, looked at me, ate with me, drank with me; and yet, your last act was to [defend] a monster,” the murderous Babo (101). But far from taking Cereno’s words as cause for self-reflection and self-criticism, Delano merely makes the absurdly naïve claim that “acuteness might have cost me my life” (101). Prior to this defence, we have watched him intrude upon a master-slave conflict, exacerbate the conflict as a spectator to the charade provoked by his intrusion, and remain dismissive of its consequent violence even as it raged around him. Now he shamelessly excuses himself for his actions and dismisses any responsibility for the chaos and then, worst of all, he returns to the very attitude of mercantilist superiority upon which slavery is founded, even though his fellow mercantilist, Cereno, decides to exit the slave trade altogether after having been seized as a slave himself. As a result of this behaviour, Delano not only contributes to the likelihood of future conflict, but contributes so proudly and so boastfully as to invite future conflict. Yet for all the emotive power that such flaws of character contain in a work of fiction like ‘Benito Cereno,’ their true power lies in the real-world applicability they hold beyond the printed page.

Share

Charles Glicksberg phrases it delicately: Delano is “a composite reflection of the righteous stereotyped attitudes prevalent” in 1855 (209). Warren D’Azevedo is more direct: “[t]he withering irony created by Captain Delano’s patronizing good will might have been too close to satire for the comfort of many northern whites” of that time (140). And John Bryant draws a line from the damaging effects of Delano’s attitude to the disaster then looming on the national horizon: each of Melville’s readers, he argues, was himself “a Delano blithely performing a mercantilism doomed to trigger civil war” (ix). Delano is perhaps the kind of man Melville himself might have become if the change in his cultural circumstances had not eroded his optimism. He is certainly one of those men whose personal beliefs and practices contributed to the cultural marginalisation that swept Melville’s optimism away.

But because such men wielded such immense discursive and legislative power in America when Melville wrote ‘Benito Cereno,’ Delano’s flaws reflect not only the flaws of Melville’s original readership but also those of the culture and nation over which that readership held sway. Indeed, Delano’s patriotism, his entrepreneurialism, and his Christian faith are all such prominent aspects of his character and so strongly in accord with the civic ideals of antebellum America that he is, in effect, his nation incarnate, characterised as much by the personal virtues it held in esteem as by the flaws that corresponded with them. He was raised on the Massachusetts coast where, as a younger man, he would have witnessed the Revolution with which his nation won its independence, and he proudly exhibits the patriotism of that national history but also exhibits the uncritical self-regard that patriotism can foster. He is the archetypal self-made man, having gradually improved his station in life by way of commercial enterprise, and he takes pride in his achievements but also casts aspersions on the Old World aristocrat and inheritor of privilege, Benito Cereno, with consequences that imperil the both of them. Most significantly, however, Delano holds faith in the God of Manifest Destiny and his justifications of slavery echo the theological justifications of Melville’s time. For instance, when he momentarily suspects that the unshackled slaves aboard the San Dominick might attempt to harm him, he forces himself to banish that thought because “by harboring [it] even for a moment, he should, by implication, have betrayed an atheist doubt of the ever-watchful Providence above” (83), and surely Providence would not allow those heathen to harm an upstanding Christian like himself. And yet, even when the slaves do lash out, he rationalises his survival as having been divinely assured because “all was owing to Providence” (102).

Delano’s worldview is thus characterised by a blissful confluence of optimism and fatalism. The God of the American captain is a God who simultaneously maintains paramount concern for American affairs and absolute power over their success, thereby accounting for Delano’s faith in his personal wellbeing as well as for his justifications of his absurd behaviour. But by allowing Delano to hold such a worldview amidst the violence and agony of the slave rebellion, Melville foregrounds its dangerous implications and suggests that it is all the more dangerous for being the accepted social norm. In other words, while Melville depicts Delano as a figure who typifies this worldview and accordingly attracts condemnation, he nevertheless places Delano amidst others who share some of its qualities and exhibit comparably theological characteristics; and to the extent that these others represent both the proslavery and abolitionist factions of American political discourse, Melville reveals his disillusionment with the theologisation of the slavery debate. Most notably, the court of law reshackles the freed slaves and so represents the proslavery faction, and makes its ruling against the slaves by asserting its theological authority as the “Notary Public of the Holy Crusade of this Bishopric” (89), while the slaves themselves practice abolition and so represent the abolitionist faction, and yet appear in theological terms of their own as “a shipload of monks” and as “Black Friars pacing the cloisters” in a ship resembling “a white-washed monastery after a thunder-storm” (36). With these and other such theological allusions imbuing both the court and the slaves with the same theological essence as the damnable Delano, Melville establishes an equivalency between both sides of the slavery debate which renders them damnable by association. He deliberately depicts the proslavery forces in ‘Benito Cereno’ as Delano’s theological kin; but just as deliberately, if less expectedly, he depicts the abolitionist forces in the same way, and so the condemnation already incurred by Delano’s Providential self-satisfaction now extends to all those whose appeals to Providence brought the slavery debate into an intractable theological deadlock.

Carolyn Karcher identifies an Americanised theology as one of several “arbitrary fictions” that the participants in the slavery debate accepted as fact, thereby inflicting “more violence [on their] human nature than the vengeful passions destined to [physically] obliterate them” (158-159). This violence is the violence of a righteous appeal to God with which those who intend to wreak havoc pre-emptively absolve themselves of any blame for disaster, and thereafter contend that they are able to wreak even more havoc in future with divinely-accorded impunity. Far beyond the violence of blades and bullets, however, the greater violence of this appeal to God is the violence it inflicts upon one’s humanity, one’s soul. Whether overtly or subtly, each of the men in ‘Benito Cereno’ inflicts and suffers this violence insofar as each one justifies his destructive and self-destructive actions as necessary for the satisfaction of a higher power or purpose. But the one man who clearly inflicts and suffers this violence most of all is the American who represents America at large, so that when Melville lets the cry at the end of the narrative spill from Delano’s lips—“Ah, this slavery breeds ugly passions in man!” (75)—he makes his condemnation of American slavery all the more resonant. With the utterance of those words, the man who has most blinded himself to slavery and denied his part in its consequences at last acknowledges and laments its poisonous impact on human behaviour, allowing Melville to illuminate the single most abhorrent aspect of the slavery debate: that many members of the American public condoned slavery whilst knowing exactly the humanitarian damage they inflicted on others and on themselves, and yet they consciously chose to debate the issue on irresolvable terms, to delay, deny, or evade responsibility for the resultant wounds.

Share

Works Cited

Beecher, Jonathan. ‘Echoes of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno.’’ Leviathan 9.2 (June 2007): 43-58. Print.

Bryant, John. ‘Preface.’ Melville and Milton: An Edition and Analysis of Melville’s Annotations on Milton. Ed. Robin Grey. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004. ix-xiii. Print.

Craven, Avery. The Coming of the Civil War. New York: Scribner’s, 1950. Print.

D’Azevedo, Warren. ‘Revolt on the San Dominick.’ Phylon 17.2 (Summer 1956): 129-140. Print.

Delano, Amasa. ‘A Narrative of Voyages and Travels.’ Melville’s Short Novels. Ed. Dan McCall. New York: Norton, 2002. 199-228. Print.

Downes, Paul. ‘Benito Cereno and the Politics of Humanitarian
Intervention.’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 465-488. Print.

Emery, Allan Moore. ‘‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny.’ Nineteenth Century Fiction 39.1 (June 1984): 48-68. Print.

Glicksberg, Charles. ‘Melville and the Negro Problem.’ Phylon 11.3 (Autumn 1950): 207-215. Print.

Goldenberg, David M. The Curse of Ham: Race Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity & Islam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Print.

Goldman, Stan. Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993. Print.

Gredja, Edward. The Common Continent of Men: Racial Equality in the Novels of Herman Melville. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974. Print.

Grimstead, David. American Mobbing: 1828-1861: Toward Civil War.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.

Haegert, John. ‘Voicing Slavery Through Silence: Narrative Mutiny in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno.’ Mosaic 26.2 (Spring 1993). 21-38. Print.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. ‘Hawthorne and Melville in Liverpool.’ Melville’s Short Novels. Ed. Dan McCall. New York: Norton, 2002. 231-232. Print.

Imbert, Michel. ‘Ethnic Purification in ‘Benito Cereno.’’ Letterature d’America 16.65 (1996): 77-95. Print.

Johannsen, Robert. ‘The Meaning of Manifest Destiny.’ Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism. Eds. Sam Hayes and Christopher Morris. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1997. 7-20. Print.

Karcher, Carolyn. Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and
Violence in Melville’s America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Print.

Koger, Larry. Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Print.

Levine, Robert. ‘Chronology of Melville’s Life—Introduction.’ The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Ed. Robert Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xv-xx. Print.

Lock, Helen. ‘The Paradox of Slave Mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass.’ College Literature 30.4 (Fall 2003): 54-70. Print.

McDougall, Walter. Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Print.

McKivigan, John R. The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830-1865. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Print.

McWilliams Jr., John. Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character: A Looking-Glass Business. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Print.

Manheim, Dan. ‘Benito Cereno.’ The Explicator 63.3 (Spring 2005): 151-154. Print.

Melville, Herman. ‘Benito Cereno.’ Melville’s Short Novels. Ed. Dan McCall. New York: Norton, 2002. 34-102. Print.
 —. ‘Letter to Lemuel Shaw, October 6, 1849.’ The Letters of Herman Melville. Eds. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960. 90-92. Print.

Mumford, Lewis. Herman Melville. Rakway, NJ: Quinn & Boden, 1929. Print.

Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Print.

Valkeakari, Tuire. ‘The Politics of Perception in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage.’ Studies in American Fiction. 33.2 (Autumn 2005): 229-250. Print.

Share

Endnotes