I've heard this phrase often...in fact I've said it myself. Maria, who happens to be Latino, or Paul who happens to be Asian, or Malcolm who happens to be ____________(fill in the blank)
This phrase however, contextualized within the writing of Philip K Dick and Fredrick Jameson is worth exploring and speaks to a literary tradition which neither acknowledge, purposefully or not.
Philip K Dick states that Stuart is the central narrative that ties all of the others together and Jameson asserts that Stuart initiates and enables the narratives to construct and carry out a rather dense interplay that I DO understand, thank goodness for diagrams, but think may be a bit over thought.
Jameson states: "that the the initial point of view figure(Stuart)happens to be black has the function of staging the appearance of the first really unusual character.
Dick states: My favorite character in the novel is.....Stuart Mc Conchie...who happens to be black... it was daring to have a major character be a black man.
I choose to look at Stuart as an object of "American Africanism" a terms coined by Toni Morrison in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. He is so, because he represents in Morrison's words paraphrased:
A trope which little restraint has been attached to that is connected to the denotative and connotative blackness that African people have come to symbolize. A trope that imbues a non-white character with the ability to signify the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about marginalized peoples.
Essentially, Stuart is a part of the disabling virus within literary discourse, that allows a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. The use of Stuart, enables the possibility of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, which leaves him to function as a mere mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom (6-7)
And is he not all of this?
He seems the epicenter of the book, so says Dick. He is the centrifugal force that mediates the fracture(s) of society, by witnessing and partaking in the chaotic, and making possible the restructuring of society even on the microcosmic scale.
And if we look to Stuart as Jameson does, we can position him as enabling Dick to talk of a sexually independent (hedonistic?) woman, the hierarchy of social relations displayed in the "characterological system", and a meditation on value(s).
A truly daring move would've been to make Stuart the psychiatrist or Walt Dangerfield. A truly daring move would've been positioning him at the head of the West Marin community.
While Dick believes he is being progressive by using Stuart in such a way, he fails to acknowledge that he in fact is in-step with a long literary tradition of American Africanism, however intentional or not.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Coming together
I've always found solace in the "beat" writers. And I think Gary Snyder is a good place to start with regards to tying the readings for this week together.
And so to begin with Snyder:
"We can enjoy our humanity with its flashy brains and sexual buzz, its social cravings and stubborn tantrums, and take ourselves as no more and no less than another being in the big Watershed. We can accept each other all as barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground. We can give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt..." (84)
Forrestor and Huxley's societies say: no,no we can't.
While their pro/an tagonists say "yes" in different degrees: Kuno who isn't quite sure about acceptance and others...just difference..and space within which "things" (whatever they are) are possible. And Helmholtz and John the savage who say yes to parts but not to the whole of the statement. The Savage - yes to "taking ourselves as no more and no less than another being.. and accept[ing] each other all as barefoot individuals sleeping on the same ground"..etc. Helmholtz as yes to "flashy brains and sexual buzz, it's social cravings and stubborn tantrums.."
And then on to the second part
"...The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get home."
Huxley via Bernard seems to agree with the "tell a good story when we get home" bit but ignores the learning and the necessary nods that are part of the experience.
Forrestor via Kuno seems to agree with the learning and the nods, the fording of streams and the crossing of ridges, and in telling a good story; however, unfinished it is.
But then there is Kuno's mother and the greater part of Forrestor's society who says no to all "direct experience"
And in Huxley, Lenina with her soma addiction to soften the blow of anything not in agreement with her ordered state of reality especially so when in touch with "the wild" on her excursion to Malpais and interactions with the savage states quite explicitly "no" to Snyder's new "cultural ethic of the wild" (82) And we mustn't forget Mond - internally conflicted - Mond who though acknowledging the benefits highlighted in Snyder's quote finds his freedom as being more important than telling a true...self involved vs divorced story. (I'm thinking the linda stary here)
And throughout all of the above Lefebrvre's idea echos incessantly within the outcasts Kuno and John with regards to how they see the society which has or seeks to exclude or incorporate them into the system:
"The concepts of desire and pleasure were not to be conceived as categories of the impossible, a “bad” utopia, but were an expression of a wider recognition among intellectuals, workers, students and other elements of the underlying population that the emptiness of lived experience demanded a revolutionary transformation of everyday life as the condition of the possibility for the achievement of freedom which remains the highest aspiration of social being."(143)
And so to begin with Snyder:
"We can enjoy our humanity with its flashy brains and sexual buzz, its social cravings and stubborn tantrums, and take ourselves as no more and no less than another being in the big Watershed. We can accept each other all as barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground. We can give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt..." (84)
Forrestor and Huxley's societies say: no,no we can't.
While their pro/an tagonists say "yes" in different degrees: Kuno who isn't quite sure about acceptance and others...just difference..and space within which "things" (whatever they are) are possible. And Helmholtz and John the savage who say yes to parts but not to the whole of the statement. The Savage - yes to "taking ourselves as no more and no less than another being.. and accept[ing] each other all as barefoot individuals sleeping on the same ground"..etc. Helmholtz as yes to "flashy brains and sexual buzz, it's social cravings and stubborn tantrums.."
And then on to the second part
"...The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get home."
Huxley via Bernard seems to agree with the "tell a good story when we get home" bit but ignores the learning and the necessary nods that are part of the experience.
Forrestor via Kuno seems to agree with the learning and the nods, the fording of streams and the crossing of ridges, and in telling a good story; however, unfinished it is.
But then there is Kuno's mother and the greater part of Forrestor's society who says no to all "direct experience"
And in Huxley, Lenina with her soma addiction to soften the blow of anything not in agreement with her ordered state of reality especially so when in touch with "the wild" on her excursion to Malpais and interactions with the savage states quite explicitly "no" to Snyder's new "cultural ethic of the wild" (82) And we mustn't forget Mond - internally conflicted - Mond who though acknowledging the benefits highlighted in Snyder's quote finds his freedom as being more important than telling a true...self involved vs divorced story. (I'm thinking the linda stary here)
And throughout all of the above Lefebrvre's idea echos incessantly within the outcasts Kuno and John with regards to how they see the society which has or seeks to exclude or incorporate them into the system:
"The concepts of desire and pleasure were not to be conceived as categories of the impossible, a “bad” utopia, but were an expression of a wider recognition among intellectuals, workers, students and other elements of the underlying population that the emptiness of lived experience demanded a revolutionary transformation of everyday life as the condition of the possibility for the achievement of freedom which remains the highest aspiration of social being."(143)
Monday, January 19, 2009
Herland
First I must get out of the way faulty assertions presented in the article “Ecofeminist Pragmatism…”
1) “…there is an essential absence of the division between public and private”(29)
Not true “these people had…the most delicate sense of personal privacy”
2) “To purposefully take a human life is unimaginable to herlanders”
Not true “She wanted to kill him – actually” (132)
Random thought that I found interesting
Motherhood desire is seen as productive
Male desire is seen as counter-productive even destructive
IE Terry’s “appetite” that gets him into trouble / women’s wishing into existence new life
Gilman utopia or segue?
Gilman implies that for a true utopia to exist it must be bi-sexual. She exalts the men in that they were greatly sought after as a source of knowledge and a perceived way to once again enact the original natural state of humanity that existed before the beginning of motherhood. In doing this, Gilman insinuates that motherhood is indeed an unnatural but required state (interim?) needed to set back in place an environment that is “balanced” hence the reference to a bi-sexual state.
This idea of Herland not necessarily being a utopia but a segue is one that is not taken into account in the work by Deegan who wished to place her with ecofeminist criticism. What Deegan did was to focus on the current state, within Herland/Ourland, without looking forward or beyond. In doing this, Deegan does not play up the emphasis of “process and relations”(34) evident within Gilman’s text and instead looks at the story and its sequel as an end product incapable of being extended beyond those points in time, that are explicitly, as Arnold would put it, “mapped out.”
And this brings to question the idea of utopia. Must it be seen as a type of end product in that it has attained a transcendent state? Or can it be thought of as something ever changing? For if it is a result of cognitive mapping, as Arnold / Jameson put forth given its subjective properties could it be anything but in constant flux? The idea of utopia and perma-flux so closely seated to one another seems to almost upend the idea of Utopia all together. Isn’t utopia supposed to support a state of predictability and pleasant monotony to an extent?
On the tail end of these types of questions I will add the brief inquiry as to whether Gilman can be read as ecocriticism at all?
Certainly her story involves exploration of “the relationship of the human and the non human” and entails a questioning of the term “human” itself in that she explores the construction of what it means to be more than a gender but a “human being” however superficially executed (Garrard 4).
And so it seems fitting for this label to be applied; however, I have to circle back round to the issue of timing as ecocriticism seems to be involved in what is and what was but not so much with the what will be but isn’t as of yet quality that plays an influential role in Gilman’s text.
1) “…there is an essential absence of the division between public and private”(29)
Not true “these people had…the most delicate sense of personal privacy”
2) “To purposefully take a human life is unimaginable to herlanders”
Not true “She wanted to kill him – actually” (132)
Random thought that I found interesting
Motherhood desire is seen as productive
Male desire is seen as counter-productive even destructive
IE Terry’s “appetite” that gets him into trouble / women’s wishing into existence new life
Gilman utopia or segue?
Gilman implies that for a true utopia to exist it must be bi-sexual. She exalts the men in that they were greatly sought after as a source of knowledge and a perceived way to once again enact the original natural state of humanity that existed before the beginning of motherhood. In doing this, Gilman insinuates that motherhood is indeed an unnatural but required state (interim?) needed to set back in place an environment that is “balanced” hence the reference to a bi-sexual state.
This idea of Herland not necessarily being a utopia but a segue is one that is not taken into account in the work by Deegan who wished to place her with ecofeminist criticism. What Deegan did was to focus on the current state, within Herland/Ourland, without looking forward or beyond. In doing this, Deegan does not play up the emphasis of “process and relations”(34) evident within Gilman’s text and instead looks at the story and its sequel as an end product incapable of being extended beyond those points in time, that are explicitly, as Arnold would put it, “mapped out.”
And this brings to question the idea of utopia. Must it be seen as a type of end product in that it has attained a transcendent state? Or can it be thought of as something ever changing? For if it is a result of cognitive mapping, as Arnold / Jameson put forth given its subjective properties could it be anything but in constant flux? The idea of utopia and perma-flux so closely seated to one another seems to almost upend the idea of Utopia all together. Isn’t utopia supposed to support a state of predictability and pleasant monotony to an extent?
On the tail end of these types of questions I will add the brief inquiry as to whether Gilman can be read as ecocriticism at all?
Certainly her story involves exploration of “the relationship of the human and the non human” and entails a questioning of the term “human” itself in that she explores the construction of what it means to be more than a gender but a “human being” however superficially executed (Garrard 4).
And so it seems fitting for this label to be applied; however, I have to circle back round to the issue of timing as ecocriticism seems to be involved in what is and what was but not so much with the what will be but isn’t as of yet quality that plays an influential role in Gilman’s text.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
