eJournals

31 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 31 (2015) Reading Practices Edited by Winfried Fluck, Günter Leypoldt and Philipp Löffler Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 31 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Winfried Fluck Herbert Grabes · Donald E. Pease 31 Reading Practices Edited by Winfried Fluck, Günter Leypoldt and Philipp Löffler Notice to Contributors The editors invite submissions of manuscripts appropriate to the topics of the forthcoming volumes of REAL. The 2016 volume, edited by Ingo Berensmeyer, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning, will be on „Literature and Cultural Change.“ The 2017 volume, edited by Sarah Fekadu, Isabel Kranz and Tobias Döring, will be on „Meteorologies of Modernity: Weather and Climate Discourses in the Anthropocene.“ Each author will receive one copy of the yearbook and a pdf file of the article. Articles submitted for consideration may be sent directly to the volume editors or via an advisor. They should reach the volume editors by December 1 of the year prior to publication, and should not exceed 10,000 words (including endnotes and references). To facilitate processing, they should be sent in duplicate and on cd or disc; they must be typed in English, doublespaced, and should observe the conventions laid down in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003 sqq.). Editors Tobias Döring, LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, D-80799 München, Germany Winfried Fluck, Freie Universität Berlin, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Lansstraße 5-9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany Herbert Grabes, Universität Gießen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10, D-35394 Gießen, Germany Donald E. Pease, English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), Catherine Belsey (University of Wales), Marshall Brown (University of Washington), Ronald Shusterman (Université Jean Monnet), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen) Text-editing and final layout: Dominik Fungipani, Berlin. © 2015 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. http: / / www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-8233-4186-4 ISSN 0723-0338 Acknowledgements This volume first took shape during a conference at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, that was hosted by Günter Leypoldt and Philipp Löffler in June 2013, entitled “Acquired Taste: Reading and the Uses of Literature in the Age of Academic Literary Studies.” We are grateful to all the participants for their presentations, their lively discussions during the four days of intellectual exchange, and also their inspiring comments during the conception of this volume. For making this conference possible we wish to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG), the American Embassy, and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. Wendy Griswold’s and Hannah Wohl’s contribution has appeared in Poetics 50 (2015), Copyright Elsevier. Amy Hungerford’s contribution will be included in her forthcoming monograph Making Literature Now, copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. Thanks to the copyright holders for their permissions, and to the authors for having tested early versions of their texts at Heidelberg. Günter Leypoldt, Philipp Löffler, Winfried Fluck Contents Acknowledgements........................................ ................................... V Contributors . . . . . . . .......................................... .................................. IX P hiliPP l öffler Introduction: Reading in the Age of Academic Literary Studies ................ 1 W infried f luck Shadow Aesthetics ........................................ .................................. 11 G ünter l eyPoldt Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah)............................................ 45 A my h unGerford GPS Historicism. . ............................................................................ 65 W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl Evangelists of Culture: One Book Programs and the Agents Who Define Literature, Shape Tastes, and Reproduce Regionalism .......... 81 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn Reading the Supernatural in Contemporary American Ethnic and Christian Fiction ......................... 101 t imothy A ubry The Discipline of Feeling: The New Critics and the Struggle for Academic Legitimacy .................. 127 m erve e mre Fulbright Love . . . . ........................................................................... 141 P hiliPP l öffler Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory .............................................. 149 A my l. b lAir “Tasting and Testing Books”: Good Housekeeping’s Literary Canon for the 1920s and 1930s ................... 167 c hristA b uschendorf Reading Shakespeare Matters: Symbolic Struggles over Literary Taste among Black Intellectuals .......... 185 P Aul b. A rmstronG How Historical is Reading? What Literary Studies Can Learn from Neuroscience (and Vice Versa) .... 201 d ustin b reitenWischer Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience (and the Case of Sylvia Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist”) .................... 219 Contributors A rmstronG , P Aul . Department of English, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA A ubry , t imothy . Department of English, Baruch College, One Bernard Baruch Way, New York, NY 10010, USA b lAir , A my . Department of English, Marquette University, 1217 W. Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53233, USA b reitenWischer , d ustin . Englisches Seminar - Nordamerikastudien, Albert- Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Rempartstraße 15, 79085 Freiburg, Germany b uschendorf , c hristA . Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, Goethe- Universität Frankfurt, Grüneburgplatz 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany e mre , m erve . Department of English, Yale University, 63 High St, New Haven, CT 06511-6642, USA f luck , W infried . John-F.-Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Abteilung Kultur, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstraße 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany G risWold , W endy . Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208-1330, USA h unGerford , A my . Department of English, Yale University, 63 High St, New Haven, CT 06511-6642, USA l eyPoldt , G ünter . Anglistisches Seminar, Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Universität Heidelberg, Kettengasse 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany l öffler , P hiliPP . Anglistisches Seminar, Universität Heidelberg, Kettengasse 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany s illimAn , d Aniel . Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Hauptstraße 120, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany s tievermAnn , J An . Theologische Fakultät, Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Universität Heidelberg, Hauptstraße 120, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany W ohl , h AnnAh . Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208-1330, USA P hiliPP l öffler Introduction: Reading in the Age of Academic Literary Studies I. The History of Reading and the History of Literature The institutionality of literature has been at the center of literary-historical scholarship for a number of years now. 1 It still seems, however, that this interest has not produced full-fledged alternatives to the dominant practice of literary historiography. Standard works, such as the Norton and Heath anthologies, invite us to see the history of art and literature as a series of mediated responses to world history at large, unfolding in more or less linear time (from the Early Republic, say, to Postmodernism and beyond). The tradition invoked by these works goes back to early Romantic identity models following the “expressivist turn” and has been dominant in a variety of cultural and literary histories since the early nineteenth century. 2 While the expressive response model of literary history has been crucial to an important political turn in literary criticism (significant not least because it triggered 1 This interest is reflected in broad institutional histories, such as Richard Ohman’s English in America (1976), Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature (1987), John Guillory’s Cultural Capital (1993), and, most recently, Ted Underwood’s When Literary Periods Mattered (2013). But there are also a number of influential studies dedicated to particular historical periods and contexts of writings. Prominent examples would be Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word (1986), Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic (1990), Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books (1997), Nancy Glazener’s Reading for Realism (1997), James English’s The Economy of Prestige (2005), Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009), and Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief (2010). 2 The “expressivist turn” describes a number of simultaneous efforts in late eighteenthcentury literary-historical discourse to define the value of art as a manifestation of distinct cultures rather than by the artwork’s proximity to a universal aesthetic or moral ideal. This tradition can be traced in a number of works in European intellectual culture, beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sentimentalist conception of nature as a voice within, Johann Gottfried Herder’s notion of a folk culture, the literary nationalism of the Schlegel brothers, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s history of aesthetics. The transatlantic dimension of this debate is reflected prominently in a number of early nineteenth-century literary-philosophical movements in the US, among them the New England Transcendentalists around Ralph Waldo Emerson and the more conservative ‘School Room’ poets around Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant. For a comprehensive discussion of the “expressivist turn” see Taylor, 368-390. For a more specifically American perspective on this debate and its intellectual contexts see Buell, 3-102. 2 P hiliPP l öffler important interventions into the literary canon debates), 3 it tends to obscure important questions about the different modes and values of literary production and the phenomenology of reading: What, for instance, do authors have to accomplish to become artistically relevant within the community of writers and readers they work in? How, for instance, is the economic success or failure of their books connected to their retroactive consecration as culturally significant objects? Where do such moments of consecration take place and how are they authorized? How important is the relationship between academic and non-academic gate-keeping institutions (e.g. book clubs, The New York Times Book Review, the Pulitzer Prize, Oprah Winfrey) for our understanding of what counts as valuable? In what ways have academic reading practices contributed to the emergence of artistic/ literary avant-gardes? How have they influenced debates about the proper uses of literature (for example, reading for hermeneutic meaning or a “politics” of form rather than for “enchantment,” cathartic pleasure, or therapeutic self-culture)? Finally, how can literary studies still legitimize its own professional practices in light of the revisionist shifts the field has undergone since the 1960s? A socio-institutional history of literature complements the linear time lines of traditional literary historiography with a spatial dimension of a literary field and its institutions. It thus allows for inquiries into the specific loci of literary production and its various scales of value (for example, avantgarde poetry vs. mass-marketable crime fiction, serious middle-brow fiction vs. academically consecrated standards of excellence). The present volume of essays is based on a broad understanding of literary institutionality and seeks to address in particular the impact of academic reading on twentiethcentury literary history. Central to all essays is the observation that the twentieth-century academicization of literary criticism in the US has solidified a hierarchy of higher and lower forms of readerly practice that effectively define the values and functions of the literary as such - both within and without the confines of the university. In other words: this collection of essays explores how US research universities were able to become central in classifying literatures and readerships according to a socially binding system of literary taste-sensibilities. The age of academic literary studies - alluded to by this volume’s title - may thus be considered to be shaped by the “culture of the school” (Guillory 1993, 37), a semi-autonomous taste-making formation whose tacit rules explain why some uses of literature and some types of literature come to seem right or wrong - or better or worse - than others. 4 In this sense, the present 3 For comprehensive accounts of these political turns see, for example, Radway 2002; Lauter; Fluck 2009, and Fluck’s contribution to this volume. 4 Guillory’s terminology combines Marxist materialist categories with a Bourdieuderived sociology of art, and it is useful in particular to differentiate historically and institutionally the fields in which particular literary texts become valuable while others fade into oblivion. As all of the contributions to this volume maintain, however, such value hierarchies reflect varying degrees of institutional prestige and historically specific conceptions of literary craft, rather than universalist ideals of literary greatness or truth. Introduction 3 volume investigates the proliferation of different reading and writing practices in the US not primarily as direct results of key events and transitions in world history (for example, the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam) but in conjunction with twentieth-century shifts in third-level education and literary institutions - the spread of academic literary studies, the growing influence of literary theory and criticism since the 1960s, the growth of college-educated readerships, and the institutionalization of universitybased networks of patronage. 5 Such institutionalized spaces and practices may of course also reflect broader cultural movements and historical shifts. The “humanities revolution” (Menand 2010, 59-92) of the postwar decades was in fact enabled in large parts by the rapidly expanding university system and corresponding structural and political changes in the US educational system between the 1940s and 1960s (for example, the G.I. Bill in 1944, Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Higher Education Act in 1965). Yet, as Guillory cautions, what “is transmitted by the school, is, to be sure, a kind of culture; but it is the culture of the school.” The school projects “an imaginary cultural unity never actually coincident with the culture of the nation-state” (38). The essays in this volume take seriously this notion of institutional semi-autonomy in order to show how the manifest differences between reading cultures today relate to specific fields of practices or social locations, and how claims about the constituents of legitimate reading translate into claims about cultural authority, that is, about what sort of embodied practice, affective economy, or taste is associated with society’s cultural center. II. Professional Reading and the Rise of Academic Literary Criticism The extension of the university and the emergence of a school culture in the postwar period have redefined the value of reading as a social practice; the growing influence of academic reading communities has raised questions not only about the purpose of reading, but also about how we read, and what we should or should not read. These distinctions of course did not emerge for the first time in the twentieth century. Literary competence has been talked about in the terms of taste acquisition for centuries. In the US, debates about the most appropriate uses of literature arose in the late eighteenth century as the result of two entwined developments: the professionalization of literature and the rise of literary nationalism. 6 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries literary value was then “largely defined within the high-cultural networks of a public sphere (connecting 5 Mark McGurl’s account of the rise of creative writing in the postwar university (“Planet MFA”) presents one of the most nuanced discussions of how academy-based networks of patronage have shaped the literary landscapes of the postwar decades in the US and beyond. See in particular Part I of McGurl’s The Program Era, 127-181. 6 For very useful accounts of early literary professionalism see Charvat 3-48; Lanzendörfer 9-32; Evelev 1-21; Leypoldt “Aesthetic Specialists”. 4 P hiliPP l öffler academies, museums, art and music associations, and learned societies with various literary establishments).” 7 The rise of academic English Studies in the twentieth century shifted the currencies of literary value from a high-cultural public sphere towards university-based scholarly criticism, without, however, abandoning the value-based stratification of different reading practices. The first larger set of questions this special issue aims to address concerns institutional shifts and practices within the university itself: How do literary scholars differ from other people when they read? What exactly qualifies as scholarly reading? Why is reading in a classroom different from reading at the beach? How does reading the late work of James Joyce compare to reading the final Harry Potter novel? Underlying these questions is the central distinction between professional readers, on the one hand, and lay readers, on the other, that is, between those who are paid for reading and do so in a more serious fashion, and those who might have a number of non-professional uses for texts: reading for therapy, for pleasure, for entertainment, for instruction, or for edification. Historically, academic literary criticism gained authority in the wake of controversies between so-called scholars and critics in the first half of the twentieth century. 8 As Timothy Aubry proposes in his essay “The Discipline of Feeling,” the rise of the New Critics in the 1920s and 1930s must be viewed as a first serious attempt to disentangle literature as an autonomous field from the hegemony of science, and to establish criticism as a standardized language to approach the literary artwork. Aubry shows how the New Critics “devised a series of systematic principles and critical procedures aimed at lending rigor to the practice of criticism,” and thus countering the historical and biographical studies of nineteenth-century literary scholars. Merve Emre expands on Aubry’s historical perspective by discussing F.O. Matthiessen’s memoir From the Heart of Europe to trace the transatlantic outreach of American literary criticism. Her essay “Fulbright Love” discusses how English Departments and study abroad programs, such as Fulbright, helped to institutionalize a mostly Whitman-based notion of literary Americanness designed “to rescue Eastern European civilization from the damage done to it by World War II.” Emre emphasizes the transnational dimension of academic literary criticism at mid-century, contextualizing the ideological uses of critical discourse at the dawn of the Cold War period. 7 Leypoldt, “Shifting Meridians” 769. The most influential study on the rise of an autonomous public sphere, emerging in the early eighteenth century and then significantly shaping nineteenth-century intellectual culture in the West, has been Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). For the connection between the rising public sphere, early professionalized print cultures, and reading in the US see Warner 1-33; Dowling 1-16. 8 For the historical context of this debate see Graff, 121-144, and Timothy Aubry’s contribution to this volume. Introduction 5 III. The Impact of Literary Theory Even though debates about the functions of academic literary criticism began in the early twentieth century, the real breakthrough of academic reading occurred with the rise of literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent ‘Americanization’ of continental critical theory at Yale and Berkeley. 9 Journals, such as New Literary History (1969), Diacritics (1971), Critical Inquiry (1974), Semiotexte (1974), Glyph (1978), and Representations (1983), promoted this shift in exemplary fashion. The “theory journal” itself became a distinct instrument for structuring an expanding Humanities market on the basis of verifiable, quality-based standards of academic practice. 10 The vision of objectified academic excellence reflected by the rise of the “theory journal” generated a variety of different reading postures, each of which endowed with higher and lower values in the academic reading world - suspicious reading vs. naïve reading, reading for form in contrast to reading for content, reading with a critical distance as opposed to reading with affective interest. The corresponding uses of literature could in turn be judged on the basis of the consequent distinction between professional and lay readers. In other words: the twentieth-century university enabled the production of literary sense-making categories designed to translate the mere intuition that some reading practices are more valuable than others as the objectified expression of a particular professional identity: that of the academic literary critic. And in as much as academic literary criticism has become an increasingly influential cultural practice throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the act of reading itself, that is, the question of what happens when we read has been examined from a growing number of different theoretical and historical perspectives (from book history and sociology to phenomenology and reader-response studies to the more recent neuro-scientific models and digital technologies). The contributions of Dustin Breitenwischer, Paul Armstrong, and Amy Hungerford offer three in-depth studies that all attest to the gradual diversification of literary theory since the 1970s. Breitenwischer argues for the particularity of aesthetic experiences in a discussion of what he calls “reading in-between.” Following the literary anthropology of Wolfgang Iser, Breitenwischer 9 We may think here of the 1966 Humanities conference (“Critical Languages and the Science of Man”) at Johns Hopkins as a crucial watershed in the history of academic reading. The 1966 conference brought leading European intellectuals, such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Tzvetan Todorov, to the US, and thus helped to introduce central paradigms of the Structuralist movement into US academic literary and cultural theory. The emergence of the Yale critics and, later, the New Historicists at Berkeley may be read as institutionally mediated responses to the event. The papers of the Johns Hopkins event in addition with prefatory remarks about the significance of the event were published by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato in 1971 under the title The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. See especially the opening chapter “In-between - 1971.” 10 For a discussion of this shift in the publication system see Jeffrey J. Williams’ “The Rise of the Theory Journal.” 6 P hiliPP l öffler defines the aesthetic as an infinitely open space that emerges between and in fact incorporates readers and texts. Reading, for Breitenwischer, is the “raison d’ être of perception as such. It is a general mode of sense-making that treats the aesthetic as a paradigmatic play space.” Armstrong’s “How Historical is Reading” discusses a broad array of neuro-scientific approaches to reading that he contrasts with contextualist models used by book historians and literary sociologists and phenomenological models in the wake of Husserl. Unlike Breitenwischer, Armstrong questions the singularity of the aesthetic, proposing that scholars will have to take seriously and combine a number of traditionally distinct theoretical perspectives to provide a full account of what reading really means. Aesthetic experiences “may feel ‘special,’” as he claims, while also insisting that “we read Shakespeare with the same cortical functions and anatomy that supported hunting and gathering on the African savannah.” Amy Hungerford’s essay “GPS Historicism,” finally, offers a foray into the world of digital literatures, exploring what it means when a (digital) “novel knows where you are standing while you read it” and what the consequences of that type of knowledge could be for the act of reading literature. Using the digital novel The Silent History as her case study, Hungerford claims that the new reading practices generated by the new medium will have a dramatic effect on the ways we conceive of literary history, and she also ponders the question what it means when writing a novel requires not only artistic talent but also technical skill. An obvious if often disregarded consequence of academic reading concerns the business of organizing literary history according to genres and periods. Academically sanctioned reading practices go hand in hand with relatively specific expectations about literature. When we read we expect novels, poems, dramatic texts, or essays to function in particular ways. Teaching and studying literature in the university class-room standardizes these expectations in the sense of establishing formalized genre conventions and corresponding literary periods or movements. Classes on the ‘Postmodernist Novel,’ for example, ‘The Elizabethan Sonnet,’ or ‘The Nineteenth-Century Short Story’ provide assumptions about what these texts should entail, what they are supposed to look like, and what their message should be. Such labels, in short, reflect how scholars read as they organize literary history according to periods, genres, styles, and movements. This point is taken up in Philipp Löffler’s essay “Identity Fiction and the Rise of Literary Theory.” His essay shows that the political underpinnings of much minority writing in the wake of the Civil Rights movement gained momentum during the 1970s and 1980s primarily in conjunction with university-based debates about the function of literary theory, particularly reader-response models and deconstruction. The nomenclatures of literary periodization do not simply reflect a natural historical system of artistic forms. Rather, they are acquired and rehearsed within the institutional structures of modern English Departments, devised to authorize the requirements of curricula and standardized exam procedures. Introduction 7 IV. Readerships and Canons These intra-systemic mechanisms are of course not completely detached from the world at large. As academic reading has defined professional literary study it has at the same time also influenced other forms of reading that are located beyond the frameworks of the academy (e.g. reading crime fiction on your daily commute to work, reading the latest John Irving on the beach in your summer vacation, reading holocaust memoirs as a form of moral education). Amy Blair’s essay “Tasting and Testing Books” provides a case in point, discussing how early-twentieth-century women’s magazines in the US, such as Good Housekeeping, became central institutions for establishing a middle-class literary canon in contrast or in opposition to the academic elitism practiced by the New Critics at around the same time. As Blair’s essay underlines, the value of particular reading practices are defined by their perceived proximity to or distance from centers of cultural authority, such as the university - regardless of how trivial or melodramatic the purposes of reading are. And in that sense, the professional/ lay distinction has become crucial for creating group coherence among readers not just within but also outside of the university. Christa Buschendorf’s essay “Reading Matters” continues Blair’s discussion by examining how Afro-Americans appropriated a white literary canon in order to gain cultural recognition and to fight the constraints of a racially segregated intellectual field. In five case studies (Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Ishmael Reed, Edgar Wideman, and Gloria Naylor), Buschendorf explores the uses of William Shakespeare as a politically and culturally significant object of reading, examining how the “acquisition of literary taste in the black writer’s intellectual socialization as well as the subsequent canon debates are part of a necessarily relational process that is always already referring to the white dominant culture.” The question here is of course not only whether there can be a canon of books that everyone or only a few should read. Even more importantly, the question of what people read has to do with the cultural authority that comes with some readers’ memberships of specific groups. Some people like to be caught reading high theory; others do not care about their public appearance as readers. Some find it intellectually ‘unhealthy’ to read genre fiction, even if they sometimes like it, and then some do not read at all, while yet others - the “reading class” - spend most of their free time reading. 11 What we read and how we read indicates our audience membership, and each audience requires different readerly commitments. The mechanisms that produce different reading audiences and their membership requirements are informed directly by the transmission of values by central cultural and social institutions. The ways in which these mechanisms work are the subject of Wendy Griswold and Hannah Wohl’s contribution “Evangelists of Culture.” The authors illustrate the “outreach efforts” of the reading class in order to convert people to reading. Based on broad sociological data of US readerships, the 11 Cf. Griswold 36-69. 8 P hiliPP l öffler essay shows that while the university has been central within the “front line of culture,” it is also correlated with a network of other socially influential taste-making institutions (for example, schools, book clubs, public libraries) that determine how and what people read. V. Gate-Keeping Institutions, Charisma, Conversion One way of approaching the problem of distinguishing reader groups, their readerly commitments, and their social locations is to look at the relationship between academic and non-academic gate-keeping institutions. The reading lists of English Departments tend to feature consecrated, prizewinning fiction (the Booker Prize or the Nobel prize would be important indicators), which makes for a different list of books than we would find on, for example, the New York Times Book Review. How can we account for these differences? At first sight, these differences seem to indicate different uses of literature and corresponding practices of reading that are simply not compatible. Therapeutic reading à la Oprah Winfrey may be far away from advanced theory seminars in graduate schools, and yet there are popular examples - we may think of Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, or Jonathan Franzen - where such distinctions become conspicuously blurry and several audiences or disciplines seem to overlap. Novels such as Paradise and The Corrections (and obviously many more) conjoin several reading worlds and their incorporated practices despite their more obvious institutional and social disparity. 12 Günter Leypoldt’s discussion of the “Oprah Effect” - based on the Princeton-Episode of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club - presents a conspicuous example. Leypoldt reveals how one and the same novel (or in fact any art work) can attain “higher” and “lower” bodies depending on the social location of its audience and the relevant institutions for promoting the novel’s or artwork’s use. His essay thus illustrates where and under what circumstances oppositions between distinct audiences collapse and where such moments of collapse create new and often unlikely readerly alliances. A similar phenomenon is explored in Jan Stievermann and Daniel Silliman’s “Reading the Supernatural in Contemporary Christian and Ethnic Fiction.” The authors show how the appropriation of the supernatural helps to solidify the structures of two reader communities that would seem hardly compatible at first sight: that of popular evangelical fiction and that of postwar and contemporary ethnic minority fiction. The supernatural informs various uses of literature at the same time, oscillating between different reading goals (for example, religious conversion vs. ethnic identity formation) and different reading institutions (for example white Christian middle class audiences vs. ethnically and religiously diverse university class rooms). Whereas the critical acclaim for ethnic fantastic literature - and the rather mixed critical reception of evangelical fiction - may be reduced to the 12 For instructive discussions of this phenomenon see Leypoldt’s essay in this volume and Aubry 2006. Introduction 9 question of literary quality, Silliman and Stievermann suggest a different explanation: “The networks of institutions that produce and support these texts, and establish the interpretive communities that define them, seem more important in shaping the critical responses of academics than any actual textual features.” VI. The Politics of Reading A final set of questions explored by the contributors to this volume concerns the political dimension that some reading practices may or may not take on. Reading and writing will always be embedded within larger social and political environments, without, however, simply reproducing them. In order to illustrate the complex relation between politics, on the one hand, and the logic of readerly discourses, on the other, this book also looks at the invention of a “politics” or “ethics of reading” with a particular focus on the gradual politicization of the academy since the 1960s. Winfried Fluck’s essay “Shadow Aesthetics” discusses this phenomenon in exemplary fashion. Fluck examines three major shifts in the institutional history of American studies since the 1940s, revealing that the field has been in perpetual need to authorize its existence from within its very own disciplinary confines - sometimes in correspondence with and sometimes in opposition to a politically pervasive Zeitgeist. Insisting on the distinctly aesthetic uses of the literary artwork as a “de-pragmatized object,” Fluck’s essay highlights a set of questions that are central to this special issue in general: How is what we do within academic reading circles related to - or relevant to - what we do beyond them? Is there a connection between the politically inspired liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Civil Rights, The Free Speech Movement, Gay Liberation after Stonewall) and, for instance, the institutionalization of deconstruction as a critical paradigm? Or, more broadly: how does the institutional history of the English Department correlate with the larger shifts in twentieth-century US political history? Works Cited Aubry, Timothy. “Beware the Furrow of the Middlebrow: Searching for Paradise on the Oprah Winfrey Show.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.2 (Summer 2006): 350-73. Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge UP, 1986. Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America: 1800-1870. 1968. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Dowling, David. Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace: Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America. Baton Rouge: U of Louisiana P, 2012. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. 10 P hiliPP l öffler ---. “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After ‘the Sociology of Literature’”. New Literary History 41.2. (2010): v-xxiii. Evelev, John. Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York. Amherst and Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2006. Fluck, Winfried. “American Literary History and the Romance with America”. American Literary History 21.1 (2009): 1-18. Glazener, Nancy. Reading For Realism. The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850- 1910. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Griswold, Wendy. Regionalism and the Reading Class. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital. The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief. American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Lanzendörfer, Tim. The Professionalization of the American Magazine: Periodicals, Biography, and Nationalism in the Early Republic. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2013. Lauter, Paul. From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park. Activism, Culture and American Studies. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2001. Leypoldt, Günter. “Aesthetic Specialists and Public Intellectuals: Ruskin, Emerson, and Contemporary Professionalism”. Modern Language Quarterly 68.3. (2007): 417-436. ---. “Shifting Meridians: US Authorship in World-Literary Space.” American Literary History 27.4. (Winter 2015): 768-787. Macksey, Richard, ed. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era. Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas. New York: Norton, 2010. Ohman, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. Athens, OH: Ohio State UP, 1976. Radway, Janice. A Feeling For Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. ---.“What’s in a Name? ” The Futures of American Studies. Eds. Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 45-75. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. Underwood, Ted. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Rise of the Theory Journal.” New Literary History 40.4, Tribute to Ralph Cohen (Autumn 2009): 683-702. W infried f luck Shadow Aesthetics What do Literary Studies do? Ever since literary studies was defined as a field of study in its own right and institutionalized at colleges and universities, the field had to grapple with questions of legitimation. I am thinking not so much of attacks by natural scientists who questioned the field’s status as a science, or of die-hard positivists and empiricists in the social sciences who questioned how literary scholars could ever hope to provide hard evidence for such elusive concepts as aesthetic value or aesthetic experience. I am thinking of the challenges, often voiced from within the field, what the relevance of the field is. Ever since I was a student in the 1960s, these debates have stood at the center of the field, which explains why I have returned repeatedly in my own work to questions about the function of literature and the changing functions of fiction. The Hegelian Answer When I look at literary studies from this perspective, I see three major stages in the self-legitimation of literary studies. The first may be called Hegelian and was long the dominant paradigm for the study of literature and for its justification as a field of study in higher education. 1 From a Hegelian perspective, questions about the relevance of literature are easy to answer, since the literary text embodies the spirit of its time 2 and can thus be taken as a supreme expression of a national or regional identity, or, in the Marxist 1 Hegelianism also stands at the beginning of the discipline of art history. On the constitutive role of Hegelianism in the formation and institutionalization of the humanities see my essays on “Transatlantic Narratives about American Art” and “Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings.” 2 More precisely, human history is the process of a gradual self-recognition of the universal spirit that manifests itself in different cultures and nations at different times. In “Transatlantic Narratives About American Art,” I have provided a description of the three central assumptions on which a Hegelian approach is based: 1) the assumption that art can be read as a historical manifestation and significant cultural expression of a nation, society or particular group; 2) the claim that art is an instrument of selfrecognition of that nation, society or group and can thus provide superior insights into their identity; 3) the assumption that the historical development of art is organized by unifying principles that give certain historical or social formations their characteristic identity. The challenge for the interpreter therefore consists in identifying this unifying principle, often called the “spirit” of a nation or period. 12 W infried f luck appropriation of Hegelianism, of the spirit of capitalism or of a particular class identity. These Hegelian claims were ideally suited, not only to justify the study of literature, but to put it at the center of a humanistic education. Expressing the inner spirit of a particular historical or social formation - such as, for example, of the Renaissance or of “America” or of the American South or of the middleclass - the literary text gains national or social representativeness and becomes something like a key to understanding a nation, region or social formation. In effect, not only a key, but a privileged key, because the study of literature offered two advantages that strongly recommended it for a liberal arts curriculum. Not only could one circumvent the otherwise complex and cumbersome study of historical or social formations by focusing on one of their representative self-expressions. This turn for example to the study of a nation through its representative texts also held the promise of a deeper understanding than social or empirical studies could provide. 3 For as an expression of the spirit of a nation or particular region, the representative literary text provided something like a condensation of the essential features of this formation, that is, a key medium of self-recognition. To study a nation through its representative literary texts thus also promised to gain a deeper understanding of that nation since, as a condensed articulation of its essential spirit, the literary text or the work or art could bring us closer to the true spirit of a nation than any other form of expression. Hegelianism in American Studies In American Studies, this line of argumentation can be found in exemplary fashion in the founding period of the field. Much of the work of this period stands in the tradition of intellectual history and is firmly grounded in an underlying Hegelianism, although I suspect that many, if not most, American scholars were not necessarily aware of this philosophical underpinning. The basic assumptions of Hegelianism seemed so self-evident and were so readily 3 In the formative years of American Studies, this promise of a “deeper” understanding was a regular feature of theoretical reflections on the theory and method of American studies. Formalism is considered inadequate to help us understand American culture, but so is sociology. See, for example, Henry Nash Smith: “We are no better off if we turn to the social sciences for help in seeing the culture as a whole. We merely find society without art instead of art without society. The literary critic would cut esthetic value loose from social fact; the social scientist, despite his theoretical recognition that art is an important aspect of culture, uses techniques of research which make it difficult or impossible for him to deal with the states of consciousness embodied in serious art” (Smith 203). Cf. also Robert Spiller’s musings on the failure of an interdisciplinary seminar in his essay “Value and Method in American Studies: The Literary versus the Social Approach”: “The social scientist strives to isolate the social fact from its cause and its consequence so that it may stand up and be counted; and the literary critic strives to free the work of art from both intention and effect so that its supposed meaning may be read from its own being, the text, unconfused by what are considered to be extraneous circumstances. Not only is the artist once more being deliberately alienated from his society, but society is being deliberately robbed of its aesthetic experience” (21). Shadow Aesthetics 13 accepted as the basis of intellectual history that they shape the work of scholars of all political persuasions, from the left liberal progressivist Vernon Louis Parrington, who focused on Main Currents of American Thought, to the liberal conservative Perry Miller who studied The New England Mind, from the liberal radical F.O. Matthiessen who wanted to describe the true spirit of American democracy in his seminal study American Renaissance, 4 to such influential intellectual historians as John Higham or cultural historians like Warren Susman, who set out to determine the unifying principle that gave the Progressive Period, the Twenties, or the Thirties their distinctive character. In one way, the myth and symbol school rebelled against this tradition, but only on the basis of a metaphorically condensed Hegelianism: instead of studying the mind of a nation or region, for which Perry Miller still needed two packed volumes, it became now possible to understand a nation like the United States through one of its key myths or symbols. Again, the promise was not merely to provide an important insight, but a better, deeper understanding. In a key essay of disciplinary self-definition called “American Studies - A Defense of an Unscientific Method,” the major theoretician of the myth and symbol school, Leo Marx, argued, for example, that the study of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick would provide deeper insights into America than any sociological study: “I would submit that the argument for the usefulness of Moby-Dick in the kind of inquiry I have described is identical with the argument for the intrinsic merit of Moby-Dick as a work of literature. It is useful for its satisfying power, its capacity to provide a coherent organization of thought and feeling, or in a word, for its compelling truth value” (89). However, the essay by Leo Marx also highlights the main problem of Hegelianism which brings us to a second major stage in the self-legitimation of American literary studies. The problem of Hegelianism is how the representativeness of a literary work can be determined. After all, Hegelianism’s whole reasoning depends on the assumption that the literary work is nationally and culturally representative. But how can we determine whether and to what extent a literary text is representative of a particular historical period or social formation? From a Hegelian perspective, the literary work should be put at the center of a humanistic education, because it expresses a deeper truth; it expresses a deeper truth, because it reflects and condenses the spirit of a historical or social formation. However, not every literary text can do this. Many texts, especially in the realm of popular culture, only blindly reproduce prevailing conventions or ideologies. Only the work of art can provide this kind of deeper insight. The question then is what a work of art is, and the Hegelian answer is circular at this point: art distinguishes itself from other texts and cultural objects, because it has successfully managed 4 There is some uncertainty whether Matthiessen should not be classified as a formalist. But in his study on Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman, Günter Leypoldt claims correctly that “Matthiessen staged aesthetic excellence as a mark of cultural expressiveness, implying that the art of America’s Whitman ‘illuminates’ its cultural essence better than the conventional writing of her Longfellows (that is, representatives of a second-order literature that merely ‘reflects’ contingent cultural surfaces)” (251). 14 W infried f luck to capture the spirit of a nation. In other words: the text itself cannot tell us whether and to what degree it is truly representative or not. In the final analysis, it is the critic or scholar who determines what counts as a deeper insight, and, as a rule, he or she will do this on the basis of already existing assumptions about what the deeper truth is, for example about America. One of the reasons for the longevity of Hegelianism is that it is a self-confirming system that can be easily used for positive self-definitions of a social formation (or, at the other end of the spectrum, for stinging critiques). Most myth and symbol scholars were left liberals, who used literature and its use of myth and symbol to argue against the threat of a materialistic, superficial, and conformist American consumer society. By doing this, they used the authority of the literary work of art for the confirmation of their own left liberal critique of America. The Formalist Answer When I began my studies in the early 1960s, intellectual history was already on the way out, however, not only because it works with sweeping generalizations about the national mind, but also because it easily lent itself to nationalist apologies. Thus, any alternative would have to meet two criteria: it would have to be less speculative, more firmly grounded in evidence, and it would have to be more resistant to ideological misuse, perhaps even provide an antidote to it. If one looks for an explanation for the almost complete dominance formalism had in literary studies for several decades, whether in the form of Russian formalism, Czech structuralism, American New Cricitism, French “Explication de Texte,” or German “werkimmanente Methode,” then one answer is that formalism turned out to be the perfect counter-perspective to Hegelianism. Whereas Hegelian American Studies argues that the analysis of a literary work should focus on the national or regional spirit by which it is shaped, for formalists it is the work’s artistic form that distinguishes it from other texts. Instead of relying on broad generalizations about the mind of a nation or region, only a close reading of a literary text’s formal structure can therefore do justice to its meaning and cultural significance, and hence its specific value. Formalism therefore placed the legitimation of literary studies on a professional expertise that only experts, who had systematically studied literary form and linguistic expression, could apply competently. The interpreter was no longer an intellectual who indulged in large-scale generalizations, for example about America, but a trained professional who insisted on close readings as the only reliable source of insights. Close reading became an almost magic word, as if it could already in itself produce ideologically untainted knowledge that had been obscured before. The basis for this shift lay in a redefinition of the field’s function. Its importance, that is, the reason why it should be studied, did no longer lie in its national representativeness but in its aesthetic value. This aesthetic value seemed to exist independently from national or ideological content; in effect, Shadow Aesthetics 15 the fact that it transcended national and ideological borders (so that readers in other nations or political systems could also enjoy it), was now considered one of the main reasons for its status as a supreme cultural value. If the value of a literary text no longer lies in its national or cultural representativeness, it must lie somewhere else, and this somewhere else are the text’s formal strategies that determine the reading experience. Every literary text has characteristic forms of expression, but not in every case these forms are valuable. Formalism thus also needed an aesthetic theory that would help to determine what kinds of literary forms were especially valuable and possessed aesthetic value. The idea of aesthetic value became central and crucially important for the justification of the field, not because of an ingrained elitism, as has sometimes been argued, but because of expectations connected with the idea of a humanizing power of art that can make us better, more self-aware and selfreflexive human beings - and thus immune to the pitfalls of ideology. But what were the aesthetic qualities of art that could produce such an effect? Are there formal elements that have an inherent aesthetic value? As it turned out, formalism drew its idea of what constituted aesthetic value largely from the literary modernism of its time, which meant that certain forms of expression - myth and symbol, ambiguity, irony, paradox, semantic indeterminacy, and, frequently, defamiliarization - were considered supreme aesthetic values and became almost identical with the idea of the aesthetic itself. One casualty was American realism, which had an increasingly hard time to qualify as an aesthetically valuable form of literature and lost the high cultural status it had had in the 1930s. In order to qualify as art, a literary work had to have structure, but the term structure was not simply used to describe any type of formal organization (as would later be the case in structuralism). Structure here refers to a unifying formal principle that gives the literary text its own, semantically self-contained Gestalt which is the precondition for its autonomous status. 5 Formalism in American Studies Formalism’s role in American Studies was never one of entirely unquestioned authority. During the heyday of the myth and symbol school, it was considered an indispensible part of the professional tool-kit of literary studies, including American literary studies, but not sufficient as a method. Two problems remained. One was that for formalism cultural significance was dependent on aesthetic value; only if a literary work possessed aesthetic value could it be considered culturally significant. The other problem was that formalism equated aesthetic value with a New Criticism-version of it 5 This is the reason why formalism is not identical with close reading. The latter can be done in the service of many different approaches; the former is based on a specific view of literature that locates its aesthetic value in organizing principles that provide the literary text with a self-contained unified structure that a close reading sets out to reveal. For an analysis of this logic see my essay on “Aesthetic Premises in American Studies.” 16 W infried f luck that excluded not only realism, but a whole body of texts, ranging from ethnic literatures to African-American literature or female traditions such as the sentimental and the domestic novel. I have traced the consequences of this conflation of the category of the aesthetic with a particular New Critical version of it in my dissertation on the history of reception of Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Fluck 1975). The example is of special interest, because after World War II a general critical consensus existed that Twain’s novel was one of US-America’s literary masterpieces. However, if it was a masterpiece, it must be distinguished by specific formal qualities that provide it with a unified structure. Thus, in the heydays of formalism, we encounter about twenty-five years of Huck Finn-criticism in which ever more questionable claims are made about the compositional unity of a literary text that had been carelessly crafted over a period of altogether seven years and shows all kinds of formal flaws and inconsistencies. Never mind, if one wanted to call the novel a literary masterpiece in order to justify the book’s central role in higher education, one had to find an argument through which one could attribute a unifying aesthetic structure to the book. Or, to put it differently, in contrast to Hegelianism, formalism may make claims for a more objective, “unbiased” method, but in the final analysis it is merely projecting different assumptions into the literary text. No matter how “close” and appreciative a formalist reading is, it will nevertheless confirm the premises from which it took its point of departure. The Revisionist Turn The formalist legitimation of literary studies, based on the idea of aesthetic value, began to collapse in the 1970s, and with this collapse we are beginning to enter a third stage in the self-legitimation of literary studies. It is a stage in which the field’s legitimation is put on entirely new grounds. This third stage has been ushered in by a far-reaching revisionist turn in the wake of the 1960s. It has produced a broad spectrum of different approaches within literature departments that range from Cultural Studies to a new form of structuralist Marxism, from Foucauldian discourse analysis to New Historicism, from poststructuralism to Race and Gender studies, all of them also shaping American literary studies decisively. However, despite their many differences in theory and method, these approaches share two basic assumptions. One is a rejection of the category of the aesthetic as a key concept for literary analysis, the other is a shift from aesthetics to the politics of literature as the main criterion of relevance. Both aspects are logically intertwined. The concept of the aesthetic is dismissed, because a focus on the aesthetic dimension of the literary text will obscure its politics. Contrary to the claims of formalism, the aesthetic and the political do not constitute two distinctly separate realms; rather, throughout its history literature has also had important political functions, and a discussion of literary texts primarily in terms of their aesthetic dimension has helped to hide this fact. Literary studies have thus Shadow Aesthetics 17 played a major role in obscuring power relations or being in complicity with them. What formalists have praised as the power of art has thus really been the art of power, to quote Mark Seltzer’s chiasmatic bonmot about the politics of the novels of Henry James. Views of the role and relevance of literature have changed radically in the new revisionism. Before, literature was praised for its supreme potential to embody ideals and values that had not yet been subjected to (political or other forms of) instrumentalization and could therefore be enjoyed “for their own sake” and on “their own terms,” that is, without asking for a practical use value. The ability to resist or evade instrumentalization was a virtue celebrated with terms like “disinterestedness,” “play,” or references to a “utopian” dimension of literature. In contrast, revisionist critics argue that one cannot stand outside of politics or of other power relations and that aesthetics therefore cannot be separated from its politics, so that an analysis in which the literary text is approached primarily or even exclusively through the category of the aesthetic must be seen as a screen for ideological and political interests. In order to draw attention to a literary text’s politics, one must get rid of the aesthetic as a central or privileged analytical concept. Thus, Walter Cohen, in an essay on “Political Criticism of Shakespeare” published in the mid-1980s, can already state that “political interpretation has become central to work on Shakespeare (…) to the point where political approaches arguably form the cutting edge of academic criticism in the United States” (18). The same can be said about interpretations of American literature. This rejection of the aesthetic is part of a wider shift in political and intellectual perspectives that began to transform American humanities in the 1970s. It has dominated American literary criticism and American Studies ever since. With Leo Marx we may speak of periods before and after the divide. 6 Before the divide, the politics of American literary criticism and American Studies were basically liberal. Then, in the 1960s and its Marcusean critique of “repressive tolerance,” this “liberal tradition” - although certainly not homogeneous in itself - was replaced by a new form of radicalism that, in contrast to the political radicalism of the 1930s, may be called cultural radicalism. In political radicalism, the source of political power (and hence of political repression) lies in political institutions like the state or the judicial courts or the police that are controlled by the ruling class. Change can thus be envisioned only where control can be wrested from these forces, for example by a leftist party or the labor unions. In this scenario, literature may be used to enlighten and move the masses in the right political direction. On the other hand, the cultural radicalism that emerged in the 1960s took its point of departure from the puzzling fact that workers in the post-War Western world did no longer show any willingness to get engaged in such political struggles. Cultural radicalism’s explanation was that before questions of political engagement could even arise, the identity of the oppressed (and hence their perception and interpretation of reality) had already been decisively 6 Cf. his important essay “On Recovering the ‘Ur’ Theory of American Studies.” 18 W infried f luck shaped by culture. Culture thus becomes the actual source of power, because it constitutes subjects and their identities before they are even aware of it - either, and this is where the varying positions within cultural radicalism differ, by language (the subject is spoken by language), or by discursive regimes (Foucault, New Historicism), or by misrecognition in the mirror stage of subject-formation (Lacan, Althusser, New Materialism), or by race, gender, or sexual preference as regulatory cultural norms. 7 Whiteness Studies offer an exemplary argument for the latter: the key aspect about racial discrimination is not legal discrimination, as liberalism claims, but “whiteness” as a basic constitutive norm of identity. 8 For the perception of the aesthetic, this shift from liberalism to cultural radicalism had to have consequences. In liberalism, the aesthetic has a high status because, as a “disinterested,” that is, not-yet instrumentalized form of communication, it can counter the self-alienation produced by modernity or by capitalism and help the individual to become aware of its potential as a subject. For cultural radicalism, this is a naïve liberal illusion, for if the subject is already constituted or “interpellated” by culture, it is not free to develop its potential; on the contrary, as part of the cultural system, the only role of the aesthetic is to contribute to this type of subject-formation. Whereas in liberalism the aesthetic, as a seemingly disinterested mode of experience, is the antidote to ideology - in fact, the place where ideology is successfully undermined or rejected -, it can now be an especially effective agent of ideology. It must therefore be the starting point for revisionist literary studies to expose the illusory character of the liberal notion of art and of the aesthetic. While intellectual history claims to have an important function 7 An interesting consequence of these different positions is that they attribute the crucial constraints on the subject’s freedom to very different social forces. For political radicalism, the source of the problem is capitalism, for liberalism it lies in mass society (as an unforeseen perversion of democracy), and for cultural radicalism it lies in modernity and its project of enlightenment. 8 For Terry Eagleton, the aesthetic is another one of these cultural power effects through which the sensuous nature of the subject is “reconstructed from the inside”: “For before ‘interpretation’ in its modern hermeneutical sense was brought to birth, a whole apparatus of power in the field of culture was already firmly in place and had been for about a century. This was not an apparatus which determined the power-effects of particular readings but one which determined the political meaning and function of culture as such. Its name was and is aesthetics.” It will “be part of my argument that the ‘aesthetic,’ at least in its original formulations, has little enough to do with art. It denotes instead a whole program of social, psychical and political reconstruction on the part of the early European bourgeoisie” (327). “The aesthetic, in other words, marks an historic shift from what we might now, in Gramscian terms, call coercion to hegemony, ruling our and informing our sensuous life from within while allowing it to thrive in all its relative autonomy” (328). “It is easier, in other words, for reason to repress sensuous Nature if it has already been busy eroding and subliming it from the inside and this is the task of the aesthetic” (329). “Structures of power must become structures of feeling and the name for this mediation from property to propriety is the aesthetic. (...) What matters in aesthetics is not art but this whole project of reconstructing the human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily responses with this law which is not a law” (330). Shadow Aesthetics 19 in supporting a nation’s self-recognition, and formalism sees itself as guardian of superior values that prevent us from being instrumentalized by mass society, revisionist literary studies set themselves the task of recovering the political or social subtext that the literary text and its aesthetic surface hide. Revisionist literary studies have developed several ways of pursuing this project. In fact, the history of literary theories in the last decades could be rewritten on the basis of their changing conceptualizations of the relation between the aesthetic and the political. In the following section of this essay I will trace different attempts to eliminate the separation of the aesthetic and the political and focus on three especially interesting examples, namely British Cultural Studies, Structuralist (=Althusserian) Marxism as one of the strongest proponents of a hermeneutics of suspicion, and the New Historicism. Although these approaches have been frequently discussed, they deserve another look in the context of our discussion, since most discussions have focused on how political these approaches really are. In contrast, I want to focus on what happened to the aesthetic in some exemplary approaches that stand at the center of the revisionist turn in literary studies. Symptoms of an Absent Cause Although Cultural Studies did not constitute itself against the aesthetic but against the limitations of literary studies more generally, it did so in part because it considered literary studies to be an uncritical champion of social distinctions based on the idea of aesthetic value. In his book Marxism and Literature Raymond Williams argues, for example, that the emergence of aesthetics as a separate philosophical branch and the increasing importance of the concept of the aesthetic in literary studies must be seen as a result of the division of labor established by industrialization which has led to the creation of a class society. Whatever the merits of a particular aesthetics may be, the category itself leads to a separation of social spheres that were originally part of a whole way of life. In order to overcome this social separation one has to reject the idea of the aesthetic as a separate value and ontological sphere. For Williams aesthetic theory is a form of evasion: “Art and thinking about art have to separate themselves, by ever more absolute abstraction, from the social processes within which they are still contained. Aesthetic theory is the main instrument of this evasion. (...) Thus we have to reject ‘the aesthetic’ both as a separate abstract dimension and as a separate abstract function” (154-56). Similarly, Fredric Jameson argues at the beginning of his study The Political Unconscious, certainly one of the most influential books of the revisionist turn, that “the convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life. Such a distinction reconfirms that the structural, experiential, and conceptual gap between the public and the 20 W infried f luck private, between the social and the psychological, or the political and the poetic, between history or society and the ‘individual,’ (…) maims our existence as individual subjects” (20). 9 Stephen Greenblatt provides an apt summary of this argument when he writes: “A working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not - that is, an aesthetic domain that is in some way marked off from the discursive institutions that are operative elsewhere in a culture - becomes for Jameson a malignant symptom of ‘privatization.’” (1989, 2) Both Williams and Jameson reject the aesthetic as a concept that deepens class distinctions and obscures the absent cause by which social relations are perverted. But there are also important differences. Both argue against the separation of the aesthetic from the political dimension, but they do so for different reasons and on the basis of different views of the role of culture in society. These different views also lead to different reconceptualizations of literary studies: on the one hand as Cultural Studies, on the other hand as a revised form of Marxism. For Willliams, the aesthetic has been elevated to the status of a separate sphere because of its usefulness as a form of class distinction, and hence for the consolidation and maintenance of a class society. For Jameson, the aesthetic has come to take on an important role in the humanities, because it can help to hide the “absent cause” that shapes society and culture decisively - which is capitalism and its mode of production. For Jameson, the separation of the aesthetic and the political therefore has an even deeper effect than the humiliation produced by a new, classbased status order. It “maims” the subject by arresting it in a state of permanent self-alienation that stands in the way of any potential revolutionary self-awareness. As a consequence of these different views, Williams and Jameson also go in different directions in their methods of interpretation. For Williams, it is crucial to recover the sense of a whole way of life in which artificial separations are overcome and the aesthetic dimension becomes part of a common culture again. As he argues in The Long Revolution in (unacknowledged) pragmatist fashion, everyday life is inherently creative and hence potentially “aesthetic.” In this sense, culture is “ordinary”: the fact that certain texts are privileged for their special aesthetic value has historical reasons and can be undone by a careful historical reconstruction, as Williams himself shows in his history of the changing meanings of culture in his Culture and Society. The method best suited to put the aesthetic back into the context of a whole way of life is a Cultural Studies approach for which as Dick Hebdige has shown in his book Subculture. The Meaning of Style even a mundane everyday object like a safety pin can be turned into an aesthetic object, depending on the cultural context in which it is used for particular purposes of resignification, and possibly, resistance. 9 In Jameson’s argument, to focus on the aesthetic as a separate sphere leads to a perpetuation of self-alienation, whereas, for example in the Frankfurt School Critical Theory of T.W. Adorno it is the only remaining antidote against self-alienation. Shadow Aesthetics 21 Jameson’s position must be seen in the context of a transformation of classical Marxism into a Structuralist Marxism, inspired, above all, by Louis Althusser. In a radical revision of the Hegelian premises of classical Marxism, ideological analysis is moved from a focus on content to one on form, from the analysis of a spirit that expresses the whole to the postulation of a structure that constitutes the whole. 10 But in bourgeois society, this truth cannot be told, so that the determining structure cannot be represented and can only be traced through its effects. The aesthetic is such an effect. In analogy to Lacan’s description of the mirror-stage in which the mirror provides the child with a mistaken sense of wholeness, literary texts can be effective in providing a mistaken sense of reality - not necessarily because of a particular ideological content, but because literary forms can create coherent images of the world. In a stunning reversal, classical realism, in Marxism long considered a privileged literary form to provide at least some degree of critical insight into the “true” nature of capitalist society, is now seen as the ideologically most harmful literary form. The political determines culture, and the aesthetic is merely a symptom of its hidden presence. However, although the aesthetic is now reduced to the status of a symptom, there is a shadowy aesthetic implied here. If a realist aesthetic of truthful mimesis is the epitome of ideological deception, then anti-mimetic forms, no matter whether they reflect a conscious choice or are produced inadvertently, may have a subversive or deconstructive effect, because they can undermine the illusion of the “reality effect.” In American literary studies this has led to a revisionist revival of the genre of the “American romance,” but the problem with this strategy is that the politics of the romance are often dubious. Jameson thus pursues another way in The Political Unconscious. It lies in the deconstruction of realist claims for successful mimesis by regarding textual surfaces as symptoms of something that cannot be openly admitted and has to be repressed. This absent cause may be hidden, but since the literary construction of a false totality is, by definition, a forced imposition, the literary text will never be entirely successful in hiding all traces of this repression, and the strain of this failed attempt will show up in cracks, ruptures, and tensions of the text that emerge where the illusion of a false totality can no longer be successfully maintained. The result is a shadow aesthetics of semantic heterogeneity that undermines representational claims for coherence and homogeneity, but should not to be confused with a poststructuralist aesthetics of heterogeneity, as propagated by Roland Barthes and others. Jameson takes pains to distance himself from Barthes’s aesthetics of semiotic liberation; heterogeneity, for him, is only useful where it can be read as symptom of an absent cause. One may therefore also call his shadow aesthetics an aesthetics of the absent cause. I have elsewhere discussed this approach as an example of a hermeneutics of suspicion in which the textual surface is analyzed as only a screen that hides an absent political cause. This absent cause can only be retrieved by 10 For a more detailed analysis, see my essay on “Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings.” 22 W infried f luck seeing the textual surface - and hence the text’s form as symptom of an underlying reality that cannot be openly acknowledged. In their essay “Surface Reading,” Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have pointed out to what extent such symptomatic readings in search of the absent political cause have come to dominate contemporary criticism: “The influence of Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading can be felt in the centrality of two scholarly texts from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991), which crystallized the emergent field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set forth an agenda for studying the structuring role of race in American literature. Both showed that one could read a text’s silences, gaps, style, tone, and imagery as symptoms of the queerness or race absent only apparently from its pages” (Best 6). To this list of influential, agenda-shaping texts in queer studies and African American Studies, Edward Said’s book Culture and Imperialism (1994) may be added as a paradigmatic work in postcolonial studies for example, when Said claims that Jane Austen’s social and literary world is grounded in the absent cause of imperialism. Race, queerness, empire, or the nation-state have been the dominant absent causes in revisionist literary studies of the last decades. It is interesting to look at the interpretive practice that has developed from this claim. Whereas myth and symbol critics like Leo Marx are still in - an often desperate search for a formal element of the literary text that can provide unity of structure, so that the literary text can be interpreted as a condensed expression of a national spirit, political revisionists are in search of the hidden political reality of a text, and for this purpose, it does not really matter whether a formal element is carefully crafted or not, or whether a literary composition is skillfully patterned, or whether a literary text is held together by a unifying principle. The starting premise of a New Americanist book like Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture is that imperialism is the absent cause that is everywhere and shapes every aspect of the literary (and, in her case, also filmic) text, so that it can be found in the often most surprising aspects of the text. It is, under these circumstances, irrelevant at best and suspicious at worst, to use categories like the aesthetic. Once one no longer accepts that the aesthetic and the political belong to different spheres, the question arises how their relation can still be described. All approaches within the revisionist turn reject the formalist claim of separate spheres, but they differ significantly in their reconceptualization of the relation. For Raymond Williams and British Cultural Studies, the separation is an artificial one created by historical forces. It reflects the division of labor ushered in by industrialization which has led to a perversion of the idea of culture in its original meaning as a whole way of life. However, for Williams industrialization is not a negative force per se. Whether it is positive or negative depends on whether and to what extent its negative consequences can be controlled by politics. The separation between the aesthetic and the political Shadow Aesthetics 23 may therefore be overcome by a cultural politics that takes the aesthetic back into the context of a whole way of life in which it is one manifestation of creativity among others. For Jameson, on the other hand, the separation between the aesthetic and the political is not merely a deplorable result of historical developments that have been insufficiently controlled but may still be corrected. Rather, the separation is an inherent systemic feature of capitalism, needed to obscure its true nature. As such, it is an indispensable part of capitalism’s ideological system, and cannot be overcome (unless one finds a way for systemic change). Whereas the Cultural Studies-scholar wants to eliminate cultural class divisions by revealing the creative dimension of everyday cultural practices, including popular culture, all the Structuralist Marxist can hope to do is to undermine the ideological hold of the aesthetic by using interpretation to lay bare the contradictions that the unacknowledged absent cause produces. In Cultural Studies, the conceptual separation between the aesthetic and the political is overcome by dissolving the aesthetic into culture, so that it can be reinserted into a whole way of life. In Structuralist Marxism, the separation is not overcome, but dissolved by interpreting the aesthetic as only a deceptive, “symptomatic” surface manifestation of a political subtext that has to be recovered in interpretation. The separation between the aesthetic and the political is erased, but at the price of redefining literary studies as a form of political criticism. From Absent Cause to Criminal Continuity Structuralist Marxism rejects claims that the aesthetic and the political can be seen as belonging to different ontological spheres. The New Historicism agrees but goes even one step further in radicalizing the claim. Thus, Mark Seltzer also argues against “the critic’s eagerness to define the literary as the reverse of the political and thus to posit the freedom and resistant autonomy of the literary” (160). However, to overcome this dichotomy, New Historicists have taken a course that is different from other revisionists, moving from a vertical reflection model, in which the aesthetic is merely a reflection or symptom of the political, to a horizontal model of relations, in which the aesthetic and the political are on the same level. In consequence, as Walter Benn Michaels has put it, “the only relation literature as such has to culture as such is that it is part of it” (Michaels 1997, 27). Such a part cannot stand for a larger whole (as in Hegelianism), it cannot represent superior or alternative values (as in formalism), it cannot reflect, and therefore provide insight into, the economic base (as in Marxism), and it cannot even exemplify the creative potential of culture (as in British Cultural Studies). The literary text can only 24 W infried f luck exemplify the culture of which it is one part among many, and that means, more precisely, the systemic logic that is at work in this culture and shapes all of its parts. 11 In New Historicist studies of American literature this reasoning has led to an almost complete dissolution of the concept of the aesthetic. If everything is shaped by the same systemic logic, and there is no escape from it, then the aesthetic cannot stand out as having a different quality or function. In Walter Benn Michaels’s book The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, this pervasive, all embracing logic is that of the market; in Mark Seltzer’s study Henry James and the Art of Power, together with Michaels’s book one of the best known New Historicist studies of American literature, the logic is that of power as defined by Foucault. Seltzer’s rejection of the separation between the aesthetic and the political is thus based on a “Foucauldian view of the politics of the novel” (147). To be sure, the Jamesian novel hardly shows overt instances of the exertion of power. But it is, in its content as well as in its form, enacting the very technologies of power that Foucault has identified as the central aspect of modernity. Since power pervades the system even on the microsocial and micropolitical level, and since literature is part of the system and cannot stand outside of it, there exists “a discreet continuity between literary and political practices” (15). 12 Worse, since the Jamesian novel is not suspected of having any political aims because of its status as an aesthetically especially valuable literary form, it can be especially effective in its politics. What has long been celebrated in literary studies as the power of art is thus really an art of power. 11 See Walter Benn Michaels’s essay “The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism,” where the title already indicates that literary naturalism will be explained by a logic that shapes it decisively as a literary movement. At the end of the essay, Michaels emphasizes that the positions that he has discussed do not interest him per se: “I want only to locate both these positions and their negations in the logic, or rather the double logic, of naturalism, and in so doing, to suggest one way of shifting the focus of literary history from the individual text or author to structures whose coherence, interest, and effect may be greater than that of either author or text” (129). 12 See also one of Seltzer’s programmatic opening statements: “I explore the ways in which James represents social movements of appropriation, supervision, and regulation and examine how both the content and the techniques of representation in James’s works express a complicity and rigorous continuity with the larger social regimes of mastery and control that traverse these works” (13). At other points, Seltzer pushes his rhetoric even further and speaks of a “criminal continuity”: “It is the criminal continuity between art and power and the ways in which the novelist and critic through an aesthetic and theoretical rewriting of power have worked to disown it that I want to examine. The novel does not simply refer to an ‘extraordinary’ history of politics that lies beyond it; nor is history merely a ground or background of the literary text. The movements of power do not lie in some hidden depths, but are visible on the surfaces of the literary discourse; and the historicity of the text is to be sought not in the grand designs and teleology of an absent History but in the microhistories and micropolitics of the body and the social body, in the minute and everyday practices and techniques that the novel registers and secures. What follows is an attempt to define these practices and techniques and to trace the immanence of power in the novel” (24). Shadow Aesthetics 25 In replacing a vertical relation between the aesthetic and the political by a horizontal continuity, Seltzer seems to have escaped the Marxist dilemma of describing the aesthetic merely as a surface that hides political reality. As he claims at one point: “The movements of power do not lie in some hidden depths, but are visible on the surfaces of the literary discourse…” (24). But he comes closer to an Absent Cause-Aesthetics than this programmatic statement indicates when he says: “I mean to suggest that James’s art of representation always also involves a politics of representation, and one reason for suspecting this link between art and power is that James works so carefully to deny it” (16). 13 Instead, the novel “secures and extends the very movements of power it ostensibly abjures” (18). What we need, then, is a hermeneutics of suspicion that can help us realize that “the assumption that the novel, necessarily and in principle, provides a haven or escape from power has become one of the ideological supports of that power” (194). And, in an argument also familiar from Absent Cause-Aesthetics, the literary genre that does this ideological work most effectively is the realist novel, “the genre that so closely resembles the police report and judicial dossier … not merely in its detailed and ‘criminal’ content but also in its form” (172). 14 The aesthetic dimension has not entirely disappeared, then. Although it only continues to exist in a state of radical shrinkage to a shadowy existence, it is still needed to prove that power is really everywhere, even in literature. In the same vein, interpretation is also still needed; however, not to decipher suspicious surface symptoms to arrive at a deeper truth, but to demonstrate that even those elements that seem to be unaffected by the logic of the system are really only another manifestation of it. Michaels’s interpretation of Sister Carrie, for example, has the purpose of showing that desire is not undermining the system but that it is one of its driving forces. In the same “it’s exactly the other way round”mode of argumentation, Seltzer’s attempt to trace “the dispersion of the political into the most ordinary and everyday relations” in The Golden Bowl (67) comes to focus on the personal and intimate relations among the novel’s characters, and more specifically, on the “extent to which supervisory mechanisms have been embedded in procedures of caring, curing, instructing, and nurturing in the novels” (76). This claim can be made, because if “power is a relation, then every exercise of power is inevitably doubly binding (…) and the bond thus formed is reciprocally coercive” (70). Even “the ability to put oneself in the other’s skin underwrites the infiltration and displacement of the other fellow, even as this colonization proceeds in the name of benevolence and sympathy” (72). 13 See also Seltzer’s claim that the criminal continuity between art and power is the secret of the Jamesian novel: “It is this ‘same criminal continuity’ between art and power that is the artfully dissembled secret of James’s art” (146). 14 In the same vein, literary form, for example in “the Jamesian imperative of organic form,” “underwrites and ratifies” a “system of supervision” (61). The literary form that so many critics have praised is thus only another “social mechanism of policing and regulation” (19). 26 W infried f luck Such political claims have interesting interpretive consequences. If single aspects of the text do not stand for a larger whole, whether metaphorically or metonymically, but must be seen to stand in continuity with other aspects of the system, then every single textual aspect can only exemplify a logic that characterizes all other aspects as well. Interpretation can thus only lead to a potentially unlimited set of equations: “Far from being opposed, love and power in The Golden Bowl are two ways of saying the same thing” (66). 15 Love is only another form of exerting power, and so is care, just as benevolence and sympathy, not to forget the novel’s “organic form,” as well as its literary techniques. In effect, the whole point of Seltzer’s interpretation is to dispel the illusion that any of these things could still stand outside of power. But if they are all part of the same web of relations and stand in a seamless continuity, then the literary form of expression does not really matter; it is only another technology of power, and all that needs to be said about its function is that it “registers and secures” (24) manifestations of power. Ironically, to claim that single aspects of the literary text do not reflect reality but are merely a part of it, does not liberate these aspects from their representational burden, but condemns them to always mean the same thing. The aesthetic becomes identical with the political to such a degree that it has no longer any signifying power or experiential potential of its own. The only task left for the interpreter is to point out this logic again and again and thus to turn the literary text into an allegorization of a privileged political theory, in this case of Foucault’s theory of power. Circulation and Exchange This is where New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt differ. To be sure, in his case, too, the starting point is a critique of the separation-model: “Inquiries into the relation between Renaissance theater and society have been situated most often at the level of reflection: images of the monarchy, the lower classes, the legal profession, the church, and so forth. Such studies are essential, but they rarely engage questions of dynamic exchange. They tend instead to point to two separate, autonomous systems and then try to gauge how accurately or effectively the one represents the other” (11). In reality, however, it is impossible to keep these two spheres apart so neatly. The historical and political spheres always have an aesthetic dimension, and the aesthetic object always and inevitably has a historical context and a political function. Hence, the relation between these spheres should not be seen in terms of separation but as a continuous exchange. At first sight, this may look like another 15 See also the following argument for an equation of aesthetics, love and power, all “saying the same thing”: “Finally, if my reading of the criminal continuity between love and power in The Golden Bowl is correct, the traditional notion of the Jamesian novel, and of the aesthetics of the novel that it has been appropriated to support, must be thoroughly revised. In James’s late fiction, love and power are two ways of saying the same thing, but criticism of The Golden Bowl, and of the novel generally, has worked not only to keep these two terms separate but to see them as absolutely contradictory” (94). Shadow Aesthetics 27 conflation of the aesthetic and the political, so that a reading would have to focus on erasing the (illusionary) difference between the two, as Walter Benn Michaels and Mark Seltzer do. But although Greenblatt agrees that the aesthetic and the political do not constitute ontologically separate spheres, he does not want to give up a claim of difference; in fact, he - cautiously raises the question whether it is “not possible to have a communal sphere of art that is distinct from other communal spheres” (3). This brings our discussion to an interesting point: even if one agrees that a strict separation between the aesthetic and the political is untenable, because art and society do not constitute ontologically separate spheres, does this also mean that the aesthetic and the political can no longer be kept apart analytically? Greenblatt does not challenge the priority of history as a determinant of aesthetic phenomena. He, too, sees capitalism as determining this history since early modernity. But in Greenblatt’s view, capitalism has different effects than those emphasized by Williams and Jameson. It does not produce a single, monolithic ideological structure but, on the contrary, an array “of distinct discursive domains and the collapse of those domains into one another” (8). In other words, capitalism, in a typical pattern of boundary making and boundary breaking, is the force that constitutes the aesthetic as a separate realm and category, while, at the same time, it is also the force that stands in the way of any autonomy of the aesthetic. The two spheres remain thus tied to each other; in fact, “only capitalism managed to generate a dizzying, seemingly inexhaustible circulation between the two” (8). This is an important paradigm change. Formalist and Marxist models of the relation between the aesthetic and the political are uni-directional, so that one realm determines the other, or has dominance over it. In contrast, the term circulation implies a continuous process of exchange. But if the aesthetic and the political are in a process of continuous circulation and exchange, then this also means that there is no stable pattern of relation - which also means that there is no clearcut causality, no clear-cut hierarchy of influences. Circulation and exchange no longer follow predictable patterns. 16 Relations cannot be determined on the basis of a model known in advance. Instead, they are now characterized by often unforeseen, unexpected linkages, subject to change at any point, so that Greenblatt can characterize their changing relations as dynamic, if not dizzying, and seemingly inexhaustible. At one point, he even speaks of a “restless oscillation” (8). For the interpreter, this unpredictability of relations opens up entirely new possibilities. Possibilities of linkage multiply, and so does the freedom to establish connections between unexpected and seemingly random elements. As a consequence, the aesthetic can be set in relation to practically every historical or cultural phenomenon. New Historicists can seize “upon something out of the way, obscure, even bizarre: dreams, popular or aristocratic festivals, denunciations of witchcraft, sexual treatises, diaries and 16 Cf. Greenblatt: “The mistake is to imagine that there is a single, fixed, mode of exchange; in reality there are many modes, their character is determined historically, and they are continually renegotiated” (Greenblatt 1988, 8). 28 W infried f luck autobiographies, descriptions of clothing, reports on disease, birth and death records, accounts of insanity” (Cohen 33-4). The main methodological critique leveled at the New Historicism has therefore been that of establishing its analysis by means of “arbitrary connections” that allow the interpreter to set up any - often utterly unexpected, “anecdotal” combination between the aesthetic and the political. In his essay “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” Walter Cohen has described this principle of “arbitrary connectedness” pointedly: “The strategy is governed methodologically by the assumption that any one aspect of a society is related to any other. No organizing principle determines these relationships; any social practice has at least a potential connection to any theatrical practice. Hence new historicist studies of Shakespeare have a radically unpredictable quality” (34). In contrast to other New Historicists, Greenblatt has extended these theoretical considerations to also address the question of aesthetic value. Why, he asks, do literary texts often possess more appeal than other “textual traces” of the past in our attempts to make history speak to us? 17 What is it about Shakespeare’s plays that provides them with such a “compelling force” (5)? Formalism refers to the powerful effects well-crafted formal strategies can have. Greenblatt looks for an explanation in “the social dimension of literature’s power” and finds it in “the half-hidden cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered” (4). All literary works are embedded in their culture and draw on “the collective genres, narrative patterns, and linguistic conventions” (5). A writer like Shakespeare is no exception. The question then is “how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable aesthetic form, offered for consumption”(5)? Why should the circulation of cultural materials produce aesthetic enchantment or works of compelling force (two of Greenblatt’s favorite terms of praise), so that we may still enjoy them today? Does something happen to them when these cultural materials are moved? (7) Is there any kind of aesthetic reinscription? Does the answer lie in the experience of mobility itself that can affect us with a sense of the “social energy initially encoded in those works”? (6) But that would be true of literary texts in general and would not yet explain cases of particular aesthetic force such as Shakespeare’s. No explicit answer is provided, but one is implied that fits Greenblatt’s (in contrast to Seltzer’s radicalism, faintly) Foucauldian view of modernity. On the one hand, since Shakespeare’s plays are fueled by a circulatory energy, they draw force from their capacity for boundary-crossing; on the other hand, since this boundary-crossing takes place in a particular social institution, the theater, these plays also have an ideological effect that takes political advantage of their “air of improvisatory freedom” (17). Circulation and exchange may provide aesthetic experiences of boundary-crossing, but if this claim is carried too far, it would suggest that the aesthetic can have an oppositional function and force of its own. On the 17 The by now often quoted first sentence with which Greenblatt begins the book is “I began with the desire to speak with the dead” (1). Shadow Aesthetics 29 other hand, if the plays would merely have an ideological function, then any claim of difference between the aesthetic and the political would be lost. In true New Historicist fashion, Greenblatt wants to eat his cake and have it too. One reason why Greenblatt cannot be more concrete at this point becomes clearer when one looks more closely at the force that drives the process of circulation and exchange. Greenblatt calls this force social energy: “What then is social energy that is being circulated? Power, charisma, sexual excitement, collective dreams, wonder, desire, anxiety, religions lure, free-floating intensities of experience” (19). In short: everything that is somehow culturally active and holds some kind of imaginary attraction. But if the aesthetic is the result of a circulation of social energies that remains undefined, but is somehow appealing to the imagination, then the only conceptualization of the aesthetic still possible is to use attributes that evoke some intensity of experience like forceful or powerful. 18 The attempt to overcome the separation between the aesthetic and the political through “mobile,” flexible terms like circulation, exchange, negotiation, or transaction leads to a conceptualization of the aesthetic as something that - somehow - is so powerfully driven by the energy generated by imaginary attractions that it affects us and has some kind of impact on us. If the aesthetic is generated by the circulation of social energy, then the “Shakespeare-effect,” the fact that we value his plays more highly than other texts, must be attributed to the fact that they provide an especially powerful or compelling expression of social energy. This means to take back the aesthetic to manifestations of force or energy that do not have any characteristic contour of their own, and can only be identified by their impact, described with terms like power, force, effect, resonance or intensity. But how, then, do we distinguish a play by Shakespeare from other fictional texts such as, for example, a bestseller by Mickey Spillane, that also has a strong impact on many readers? In the final analysis, Greenblatt’s argument only works within an institutional context that has already determined that Shakespeare is a superior writer. Shakespeare is thus ideally suited to authorize a political criticism, because the political lesson Shakespeare teaches us (in the view of the New Historicists) has more force and authority than that of a writer like Spillane who does not have the same cultural authority. Ironically, the extension of the sphere of the political cannot leave the political unaffected and leads to an aestheticization of politics. Aestheticization of politics means that the authorization of politics is no longer provided by a systematic analysis of the political, social or economic system but by privileged forms of cultural representation. The attempt to overcome the separation between aesthetics and politics has the effect that the boundaries between them become 18 See also Greenblatt’s definition of his key word energy: “English literary theorists in the Renaissance needed a new word for that force, a force to describe the ability of language (…) to cause ‘a stir to the mind’; drawing on the Greek rhetorical tradition they called it energia” (Greenblatt 1988, 5-6). 30 W infried f luck permeable. The political extends into the aesthetic dimension but the aesthetic dimension also extends into the sphere of the political and transforms the political into cultural performance, that is, into an aesthetic object. 19 Contemporary Aesthetic Theory and Practice Greenblatt’s de-essentialization of the aesthetic as something that is subject to constant changes in appearance and function and therefore cannot be defined as an inherent quality or value of an object, shows surprising affinities to developments in contemporary artistic practice and aesthetic theory, where the problem of a separation of the aesthetic from political or social reality is thematized more broadly as the separation between art and life. This debate in which the boundaries of art are questioned starts with John Dewey’s redefinition of the aesthetic as aesthetic experience, and it has been radicalized by Jan Mukařovský’s concept of aesthetic function. 20 In both cases, the goal is to get away from an identification of the aesthetic with particular forms or qualities of the object. The aesthetic is not an inherent property of a literary text or an aesthetic object, so that a text or object either possesses aesthetic qualities or fails to do so. Instead, the aesthetic is constituted by an attitude we take towards an object. 21 It is thus not a word for a particular formal quality but for a distinct communicative potential. We can, in principle, look at any object as an aesthetic object. As Dewey points out in his example of five people approaching the Manhattan skyline on a ferry, passengers can all look at the same object but nevertheless see different things in it, depending on the attitude they take towards it. 22 However, if we can take different 19 For more extensive analyses of these mechanisms see my essays on “Radical Aesthetics” and “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.” 20 The term “aesthetic function” refers to a specific communicative potential (the German “Wirkungsbedingung”). It does not yet tell us anything about “real” functions art may have had in history (something only a detailed analysis can bring to light); it only tells us something about the specific communicative conditions for trying to realize these functions. 21 On the concept of taking an aesthetic attitude see Jerome Stolnitz: “An attitude is a way of directing and controlling our perception. We never see or hear everything in our environment indiscriminately. Rather, we ‘pay attention’ to some things, whereas we apprehend others only dimly or hardly at all. Thus attention is selective it concentrates on some features of our surroundings and ignores others” (78). 22 Cf. Dewey, Art as Experience: “Some men regard it as simply a journey to get them where they want to be a means to be endured. So, perhaps, they read a newspaper. One who is idle may glance at this and that building identifying it as the Metropolitan Tower, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and so on. Another, impatient to arrive, may be on the lookout for landmarks by which to judge progress toward his destination. Still another, who is taking the journey for the first time, looks eagerly but is bewildered by the multiplicity of objects spread out to view. He sees neither the whole nor the parts; he is like a layman who goes into an unfamiliar factory where many machines are plying. Another person, interested in real estate, may see, in looking at the skyline, evidence in the height of buildings, of the value of land. Or he may let his thoughts roam to the congestion of a great industrial and commercial centre. Shadow Aesthetics 31 attitudes towards one and the same object, among them an “aesthetic attitude,” then this also means that this object can be an aesthetic object at one point and something else at the next. Take a subway map of Berlin, for example. 23 I can look at it in terms of its practical use value (how many subway stops do I need to get to the Free University) but, in the next moment, I can switch attitudes and can look at the same map, but now as a composition that draws attention to itself as a form of expression. All of a sudden, I begin to notice that the subway network resembles a spider’s net or that one of the subway stops, strangely enough, is called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” However, at the next moment, I can switch attitudes again and look at the subway map in terms of the information it provides. At one moment, I may regard it as purely referential and rely on its truth-value; at the next moment, I may bracket the referential function for the time being and look at the pattern of subway lines as an aesthetic object that transcends a merely referential function and, for that reason, appeals to my imaginary; finally, in a third moment, I may reflect on what this strangely irregular pattern can tell us about the historical growth patterns of Berlin and its subway system. In other words: referential and aesthetic dimension do not occupy ontologically different planes. They interact and complement one another. In even more radical fashion than Dewey, for whom aesthetic experience marks a culminating moment in which fragmented elements of daily experience are successfully reintegrated, the aesthetic, for Mukařovský, is created by a temporary and, possibly, fleeting shift in a hierarchy of functions that is in constant flux, so that each of the functions remains present and can, at every given moment, regain dominance. 24 Consequently, the aesthetic can no longer be defined as separate sphere. 25 Neither does it present a counterworld, nor does it come into existence by an act of transcendence or a retreat from reality. While looking at the subway map as an aesthetic object, I cannot completely suppress my awareness that it is a subway map. In fact, only on this background does the hieroglyphic pattern take on significance as an aesthetic object. It is not that we find hieroglyphic patterns pleasant or interesting in themselves. On the contrary, without reference to that which has been turned (temporarily) into a hieroglyphic pattern, the transforma- He may go on to think of the planlessness of arrangement as evidence of the chaos of a society organized on the basis of conflict rather than cooperation. Finally the scene formed by the buildings may be looked at as colored and lighted volumes in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river. He is now seeing esthetically, as a painter might see” (140). 23 The following example is taken from my essay “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.” 24 Cf. the summary of Mukařovský’s position by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature: “Art is not a special kind of object but one in which the aesthetic function, usually mixed with other functions is dominant” (153). 25 Cf. Mukařovský’s description: “The border lines of the aesthetic realm are thus not firmly drawn in reality. On the contrary, they are highly permeable. (...) We all know people for whom everything takes on an aesthetic function, and, on the other hand, those for whom an aesthetic function hardly ever exists; in fact, we know from our own personal experience, that the relations between the realm of the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic (...) may shift with age, health or even our current mood” (1966, 14, m.t.). 32 W infried f luck tion would be pointless. 26 Many forms of recent art, such as, e.g., pop art, junk art or abject art, therefore set out by declaring everyday objects or, increasingly, thoroughly “profane” objects to be art objects in order to dramatize the redefining power of shifting attitudes that can transform even the “lowest” the most vulgar, junkiest or most repulsive materials into aesthetic objects. Contemporary art has pushed this practice to extremes. Avant-garde movements like Performance Art or Concept Art are constantly confronting us with objects and phenomena that would not have qualified as aesthetic objects in the past in order to demonstrate that everything can be turned into art, once we are willing to take an aesthetic attitude towards it and consider it as an aesthetic object. And the purpose of this transformation is not to escape reality but to have another look at it, so that aspects that may have been overlooked, ignored, or suppressed may be seen in a new light or perhaps for the first time. 27 Jürgen Peper therefore describes the aesthetic function as “experimental and experiential epistemology” (296). There is an interesting similarity here to Greenblatt’s concepts of circulation, exchange, and transaction in that in both cases the relation between art and life is not stable but can shift. But there is also an important difference. In Greenblatt’s argument the separation between art and life becomes possible, because this separation has already been overcome in the constitution of the object itself. Since the object is animated by the circulation of social energy, it is inherently “transactional.” The theorists discussed here would not deny this, but they go one step further by arguing that it is not the object itself in which the separation is overcome but the freedom that we have as readers or spectators to set one of its potential functions - such as its referential or aesthetic function - dominant. The difference - and its consequences for interpretation can be clarified by returning to the example of Shakespeare. If we want to explain the compelling force of Shakespeare’s plays from the perspective of Greenblatt, we have to focus on the cultural materials that circulate in his plays. Beyond that point, the argument gets nebulous. Since in principle all literary texts are subject to the circulation of social energy, what did Shakespeare do differently than others? The powerful effect of his plays, it seems, is attributed to the 26 Or, to draw on Mukařovský’s argument: as an in comparison with other functions - “empty” function, the aesthetic function depends on other functions in order to manifest itself. 27 In his essay “Die Bedeutung der Ästhetik” (The Importance of Aesthetics), reprinted in the collection Kunst, Poetik, Semiotik, Mukařovský gives the example of an observer of gymnastics. As long as our perception of physical exercise is dominated by practical functions (gaining strength, strengthening certain muscles etc.), we will focus on aspects which are helpful for achieving those goals and will judge the single exercise in relation to how well it helps to realize the desired result. Once the aesthetic function becomes dominant, on the other hand, the exercise takes on interest in itself as a performance or spectacle. The various movements, the sequence of movements, and even the “useless” details of the periods between different exercise may now become objects of attention for their own sake. The significatory dimension of reality is foregrounded and the sign is of interest sui generis. Even the “wrong” movements may now be of interest as movements, not just as “wrong” movements. Shadow Aesthetics 33 cultural material and its transgressive potential. This may be one reason why Greenblatt made an attempt to change the name of his approach from “New Historicism” to “Cultural Poetics.” In contemporary aesthetic theory, on the other hand, even this tie of the aesthetic to an experience of boundary-crossing is severed, so that the concept of the aesthetic becomes an empty signifier that can be put in the service of different aesthetics. Once we consider a text or object an aesthetic object, the aesthetic function becomes the precondition for the realization of other functions, because these other functions depend on the specific potential of the aesthetic. However, what that potential consists of is a matter of changing views and definitions. Perceptions and evaluations of literary texts are thus constantly changing. What the reader or critic sees in Shakespeare’s plays, once he focuses on the aesthetic dimension, will depend on the explanatory frame and the aesthetic values he brings to the object, so that even the plays’ “compelling force,” Greenblatt’s shadow aesthetics, cannot be firmly tied to a particular feature such as a mobility attributed to social energy. To look at an object in terms of its aesthetic function, then, does not mean to interpret it in terms of a stable explanatory frame called the “aesthetic.” Rather, it means to determine ever anew what we consider to be the source of aesthetic experience in particular contexts and cases. The aesthetic attitude allows us to take into account that the aesthetic itself is constantly changing in fact, that this is one of its major attractions and reason for enjoying and studying it. As contemporary artistic practice shows, new ways of looking at the world will then also lead to the formulation of a new aesthetics. To give up definitions of the aesthetic in terms of inherent qualities thus does not mean to give up attempts to explain why we are affected by certain literary texts and consider them valuable. Shadow Aesthetics The story we have traced so far is that of a growing flexibilization of the relation between aesthetic and the political and, linked with it, of an increasing retreat in definitions of the aesthetic. New Historicists like Greenblatt on the one hand, and contemporary artistic movements like Performance Art or Concept Art on the other, stand for a major development in contemporary views of the aesthetic. Aesthetics is no longer defined by qualities like the beautiful or the sublime. It is reconceptualized as aisthesis, that is, as a sense perception that is epistemologically prior to conceptual knowledge, because it includes psycho-somatic processes. Vivian Sobchak’s influential phenomenological reconceptualization of film experience as an embodied experience in her study The Address of the Eye provides an example, as does Richard Shusterman’s well-argued case for somaesthetics in his Pragmatist Aesthetics in which somatic affect moves to the center of aesthetic experience. 28 In contrast, American Studies, by and large, has continued to deal with the 28 See also Rita Felski’s argument for a neo-phenomenological aesthetics, superbly argued in her book Uses of Literature. 34 W infried f luck aesthetic from the perspective of a hermeneutics of suspicion in which the aesthetic hides an ideological purpose, so that interpretations - for example of Moby-Dick - should not let themselves be sidetracked by focusing on the aesthetic dimension. Instead, their focus should be on the novel’s political meaning and function. But this is where an unintended irony sets in. For in order to be able to describe how a novel like Moby-Dick does its ideological work effectively, one has to provide some kind of description of its working principles, that is, its aesthetic dimension. Many texts do ideological work, but obviously some do a better, more effective job than others. No matter whether one considers the aesthetic dimension crucial in itself or not, one still needs to point out how the literary text can do its cultural or ideological work. Even where a political reading dominates completely, an analysis of the literary text must be able to say something about the source of the impact the text has had - and may still have on its readers. Hence the basic paradox or dilemma of revisionist literary studies: on the one side, it wants to legitimate itself by going beyond aesthetics, on the other side, that “beyond” - in most cases the political meaning or function - has gained its effects, including its political effects, by a particular structure or organization of the text that cannot be ignored and is in need of description and analysis. But if this is so, it is also impossible to dismiss the aesthetic as a category of interpretation. At one point, interpreters have to say (or to imply) why they are focusing on certain texts or certain aspects of texts and not on others. Even where they claim that the text has been canonized only for the purpose of gaining cultural capital, there has to be a reason why a particular text can fulfill this role and why it can do so better than others. Raymond Carver’s status as a minimalist may have been constructed in programs for creative writing but not every text by Carver is equally interesting or equally useful for explaining the impact he has on readers. Similarly, every line Herman Melville wrote may be, in one way or another, political but not every book or tale of his is equally interesting (and thus effective in communicating his politics). Among other texts, political criticism continues to focus on Moby- Dick, and in doing so, there has to be a reason provided what the difference is between Moby-Dick and, say, Mardi or Israel Potter. Canons, aesthetic evaluations and judgments of taste may be institutionally constructed or shaped, but in order to do so successfully, lines of argumentation and legitimation have to be developed that can justify these constructions of value or specific function. Obviously, some arguments are more convincing than others, and although this impression may not necessarily be due to the force of argument itself but to its institutional context, there nevertheless will have to be some kind of reference to an aesthetic dimension that others find convincing, acceptable, or wrong. This is what I mean by using the term “Shadow Aesthetics.” Shadow Aesthetics 35 The Example of Moby-Dick One of the paradoxical phenomena of the decades-old revisionism is that scholars have continued to put their main focus on canonized works and have thereby contributed to keep works at the center of curricula and their own interpretive activities that they often consider sites of ideology, of unseen power effects, or interpellation. They have thus also put pressure on themselves to explain their choices. On what basis were these choices made? To be sure, when one asks a revisionist scholar why he or she is still dealing with Moby-Dick and not Pierre or The Confidence-Man, although the latter texts may provide a much better basis for a critique of American society or American capitalism, the answer most likely is that Moby-Dick is the more powerful text. But what makes it more powerful? Is it the ideology expressed, or the political critique the novel entails, or is it the fact that they are more powerfully expressed? And if so, what are the textual sources of this more powerful effect? In the introduction to a more recent edition of Moby-Dick, reprinted in his essay collection Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said asks “What is Moby-Dick all about? ” and, somewhat predictably answers: it is not about whaling but about the “imperial motif that runs consistently through United States history and culture,” and that the novel has caught, as Said phrases it, “very accurately.” How has the novel caught it accurately? Said speaks of the “greatest and most eccentric work of literary art produced in the United States.” Because it describes the imperialism ascribed to the U.S. accurately? No, that would make it a mere political pamphlet. What Said emphasizes again and again is the intensity of the novel which, by implication, must also mean the intensity of the reading experience. This aesthetic dimension, he claims, gives it a specific American quality: “No novel in Europe was ever so undomesticated and so unruly in its energies…” Thus far, we would have two sources of the novel’s significance, its focus on the new American imperialism and its aesthetic intensity, and it is a logical next step to link the two, so that the “energy unloosed” in the novel dramatizes the energy unloosed by imperialism: “And the point becomes, I think, that you can neither apply brakes to such a juggernaut nor expect things to remain the same. Everything discrete, clear, distinct is transformed by the energy unloosed in such a drive to fulfillment even unto death or total destruction.” What Moby-Dick manages to do in this way is to emphasize the ambivalence Melville and Americans had toward imperialism. He admired its energy unloosed but also realized its destructiveness, for example in the figure of Ahab. For Said, this ambivalence is a gain, not a loss; it provides genuine insight, but it can do so only through its aesthetic dimension, the “terrifying intensity” and unruliness of its representation. In contrast to Leo Marx’s reading of Moby-Dick, the aesthetic dimension is not described in very elaborate fashion; in fact, it consists of hardly more than a repeated reference to the powerful reading effect the novel has. Actually, we are back to Hegelianism at this point, but in a reverse order: the aesthetic value - Said’s 36 W infried f luck energy unloosed is not the key to a national condition, but a national condition - namely American imperialism - is used to explain the aesthetic power of the text which now has its source in politics. But in order to make this point, the aesthetic side has to be reduced to a skeleton-like, almost allegorical dimension, that is, a shadow existence. This dimension is needed - for otherwise Moby-Dick would be merely another book about imperialism - but it also has to be reduced in order to be able to function as an expression of the political meaning of the book. Similarly, Don Pease in an essay on transnational perspectives in American Studies “From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature: The Emergence of Literary Extraterritoriality,” and Timothy Marr in his study The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism see Moby-Dick in a primarily political context - that of the state of exception and of nineteenth-century Islamic Orientalism -, but both also emphasize that Melville’s novel opens up the possibility of going beyond these ideologies, for Pease by dis-interpellation, for Marr by the “artistry with which he used these stereotypes.” What constitutes this artistry? In both cases, it is an aesthetic dimension that makes the difference, but in both cases, this dimension is only hinted at, not described or elaborated, because to do so may raise the suspicion of indulging in aesthetics for its own sake. Both interpretations confirm that political readings cannot do without an aesthetic dimension, but that, as a rule, this aesthetic dimension does not go beyond the level of a shadow aesthetics. In all three examples, we encounter a tendency that we have already described before, namely to move the aesthetic away from formal qualities and to redefine it as strong, powerful effect. This may be in keeping with developments in the contemporary art world, but as description of an aesthetic object it remains shadowy. However, the usefulness of this shadowy power aesthetic is not hard to grasp: the aesthetic effect has to be strong and powerful, because only in this way can it determine and affect the reader’s subject position, and the reader’s subject position or identity is where aesthetics and politics meet in cultural radicalism. From the point of view of cultural radicalism, the main political impact literature has is to determine the reader’s subject position. But in order to be able to do this, the aesthetic object has to have a powerful effect, no matter what the source of this effect is. The argument for a forceful interpellation is one of the reasons why aesthetics cannot be given up altogether, for otherwise it would be hard to make a case for the literary text’s political function. But at the same time, descriptions of the aesthetic cannot go beyond “power” terms, for otherwise the aesthetic would gain too much of a life of its own. Contrary to its own dismissal of the category of the aesthetic, political criticism needs the aesthetic, but although it needs the aesthetic, it must stay away from describing the aesthetic object and its effect in any detailed and elaborate fashion. In current cultural radicalism, aesthetics has to be smuggled in through the back door, and as a result it does not present itself in a very developed form. Shadow Aesthetics 37 The Aesthetic as Cultural Capital As we have seen, the revisionist turn in literary studies, inspired and driven by the shift from a liberal consensus to cultural radicalism, has provided a major challenge to definitions of the aesthetic as a separate sphere. It has insisted that the aesthetic cannot and should not be separated from the political and the social sphere to which it is inextricably linked and by which it is crucially determined. In consequence, it has become the main project of American literary studies to recover the political and social reality that is hidden by the aesthetic dimension of the text. But this revisionist political criticism has not provided the only challenge. Another one has come from the sociology of literature in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that the idea of aesthetic value has been created by bourgeois society to acquire cultural capital in order to gain social distinction. The political function of the aesthetic is no longer to hide the true nature of capitalism or the all-pervasive presence of power, but that of providing prestige based on cultural capital, that is, dispositions, knowledge, and practices in the realm of culture that may justify claims of a particular class or social group for social superiority and dominance. For Bourdieu this class is the bourgeoisie. But, typically, members of the bourgeoisie are not working on interpretations of Moby-Dick. The challenge for literary studies therefore was to redefine the cultural-capital-seeking class, a redefinition ushered in by John Guillory’s book Cultural Capital, in which the class using the idea of the aesthetic for their own social distinction are academics who belong to a new professional-managerial class. In order to strengthen its own social status and professional relevance, this class has had a vested interest in providing objects of analysis like Moby-Dick with the authority and social prestige of the aesthetic. In doing so, they have only done what writers have been doing all along, namely to make use of literature and art for gaining cultural capital. Thus, writers like Melville have been pioneers of the professional-managerial class; the reason why they have been canonized is thus not due to a particular aesthetic value of their work, but because they have already done what today’s academics also have to do. They have set an example for the professional-managerial class for how to strive for cultural capital. Do we still have to talk, then, about the literary forms of works like Moby- Dick or about the reasons why they are experienced as compelling or powerful by readers? Melville may have been subject to status anxieties as an author and therefore may have tried to elevate the novel to a new level of aesthetic innovation in order to gain professional distinction, but in the pursuit of that goal, he wrote very different novels and tales which are not yet sufficiently explained by seeing them as pursuits of cultural capital. Similarly, it may be convincing to claim that, sociologically speaking, American modernism, including the art novels by Henry James, was the product of “beleaguered gentry” writers (McGurl 18), but it does not yet explain the different forms 38 W infried f luck produced in response to this status anxiety. 29 Not every beleaguered gentry member that tried to use art for the purpose of gaining cultural capital and social distinction succeeded. Does that have something to do with the different literary texts they produced? The question, then, is: are there links between the literary text and its usefulness for a search for cultural capital? As far as I can see there are three answers given to this question. One is exemplified by Mark McGurl in his study of the Jamesian art novel, 30 The Novel Art, in which central narrative strategies of James are no longer discussed as aesthetic forms designed to provide certain reading experiences or to achieve certain aesthetic effects, but as ingenious forms of product innovation and product differentiation: “It was in dialectical relation to this audience, and working for the most part within the institutions of an expanding mass market, that the novel would attempt to reinvent itself as fine art. The rise of the art-novel thus becomes visible as a version, of sorts, of the widespread contemporaneous phenomenon of product differentiation - that status-conscious aspect of mass consumerism in which, for famous instance, the mass-produced regularity of the black Ford Model T gives way in the 1920s to the multicolored hierarchies of automotive distinction” (5). If the purpose of such formal features as color is to provide some kind of product differentiation in order to provide consumers with the illusion of going beyond mass-produced regularity, then it is no longer necessary to look at the colors more closely, because their choice will be determined by the need for differentiation and not by any expressive quality of their own. If objects have been red so far, the new one will have to be blue. Applied to James, this means that a whole array of formal innovation can be taken down to the level of mere product innovation. Aesthetic innovation is good for establishing cultural capital, and whatever one may think of James and his writings, he was certainly successful in establishing his brand. To say that a literary text is canonized because of its usefulness in the search for cultural capital does not yet say anything specific about the text itself and its characteristics. A theoretically more ambitious approach would be to show how these textual characteristics can be linked to the search for cultural capital. 31 Such an attempt is made in John Evelev’s analysis of 29 As a member of the gentry, James was “beleaguered” throughout his life, but the anxiety that may have been linked with this social status led to the development of an aesthetic project that went through several phases and is impressive in the variety of different aesthetic forms it produced. 30 Because James was one of the heroes of the long dominant formalist tradition in literary studies, his work poses a special challenge to radical revisionists. 31 A second answer to the question whether there is any link between literary text and its usefulness in the search for cultural capital is provided in Bourdieu’s own work when he claims that the dominant segment of the dominating class - for example merchants and the dominated segment of that group such as artists or intellectuals, have developed very different aesthetic preferences that mirror their class position. Merchants prefer decorative uses of the aesthetic, whereas intellectuals, mirroring their status as poor relatives, prefer more ascetic forms. But this interesting suggestion has remained on the level of a very general claim and has so far not been taken up in literary studies. Shadow Aesthetics 39 Melville’s work in his study Tolerable Entertainment, in which he discusses Melville’s literary career in the context of a middle-class professionalism that began to emerge in the antebellum era and established new status regimes. Evelev is not content to merely state that Melville produced his literary work in the search for cultural capital. He also wants to provide closer readings of how this search has shaped a novel like Moby-Dick. His starting premise is that “Moby-Dick participates in a broader ideological project to establish new terms for cultural hierarchy in American life, shifting authority from the earlier dominant forms - both Jacksonian working-class cultural democracy and patrician cultural stewardship - to a new professional middleclass dominance” (12). As the Astor Place Riots showed, Shakespeare could be useful for this purpose and was skillfully appropriated by Melville in the scenes involving Ahab. On the other hand, Ishmael, for example in the cetology-chapter, uses the strategies of the Lyceum and public lecturers who contributed to a new culture of professionalism based on specialized knowledge. 32 In other words: the very strategies that most critics have described as a special aesthetic achievement of Moby-Dick turn out to be, at a closer look, really tools to make use of literature in the search for professional distinction, a practice that is then repeated by those intellectuals and academics who rediscovered and canonized Moby-Dick in the 1920s: “Modern American critics and scholars who have written about and taught Melville’s work as a means of defining literary merit and national identity have, in the process, used Melville to legitimize a version of their own professional authority” (180). Even though Evelev, in contrast to reductionist uses of Bourdieu, makes an effort to focus on formal strategies of Moby-Dick, the novel’s aesthetic dimension is thus defined through its effectiveness in establishing a professional ideology. Moby-Dick has been canonized in the twentieth-century because a professionalized literary academy recognized its own professional values in the novel, namely a “search for distinction on the basis of ‘complicated acts of distinction, differentiation, discourse analysis, and interpretation’” (144). Moby-Dick’s challenge to the reader is thus not an epistemological or existential one, but one that uses “difficulty” as an instrument of professional class politics - so that Evelev can claim: “Ostensibly an ‘epic’ about whaling, Moby-Dick is more concretely an epic about professional-class cultural politics, a veritable lexicon of the distinctions to be made between other available models of cultural politics and the skills needed to construct one’s self as a cultural professional” (144). The major reading experience it provides is that of being introduced to the “subtle work of cultural distinction,” (136) to “subtle acts of interpretative distinction,” (141) or to “a veritable lexicon of the 32 Cf. Evelev’s characterization: “In Moby-Dick, the narrator Ishmael uses elaborate rhetoric and oratorical strategies to establish exactly the kind of relationship with his readers upon which the antebellum popular lecturers depended” (125). “This process of challenging readers’ epistemological impulses and demanding ‘subtle’ interpretative work is repeated throughout the cetology. The cetology, in effect, instructs its readers in the benefits (and pitfalls) of professionalism’s investment in the ‘subtle’ work of cultural distinction” (136). 40 W infried f luck distinctions to be made…” (144). In other words: readers are introduced to the subtle cultural work of establishing status distinctions on professional grounds, and the fact that they are sometimes also encouraged by the novel to look at these strategies critically only seems to enhance the novel’s effectiveness as a “professional epic”: “Reading Melville’s work allows us to see the best and worst possibilities of modern middle-class professionalism and, with that, consider our own investment and/ or complicity in the distinction of work and culture that structure our own class landscape” (x). To be critical is part of the role of the professional after all. At no point does Moby-Dick address the issue of professionalism explicitly. As in the case of cultural radicalism’s “absent cause”-readings, the “actual” political and social reality that is supposed to inform Moby-Dick is not visible on the textual surface and thus not immediately apparent. Rather, it is embedded in its literary forms. Generations of interpreters have taken the sea adventure as a counter-world to the lives of a professional-managerial class. But none of these interpreters seems to have realized that the novel’s subtle distinctions and interpretive complications, usually seen as formal equivalent of an expanding romantic subjectivity, are really forms that interpellate the reader into a professional subject-formation. The novel thus draws its impact from a rehearsal and replication of a professional habitus. The only way, however, in which Moby-Dick can do this work of interpellation is through the reading experience - an experience that is shaped by the novel’s literary forms, that is, its aesthetic dimension. It is a dimension, however, that is again boiled down to the rudimentary level of a shadow aesthetics. In this respect, cultural capital-criticism does not offer any alternative to the political criticism of the revisionist turn. A shadow aesthetics, we have said, is an aesthetics that cannot be named (because it is supposed not to be there), but that also cannot be entirely ignored, because there must be some way in which the literary text realizes its politics in the act of reading. The political criticism of the revisionist turn and the search-for-cultural-capital argument provide examples for this inevitability. But they fail to acknowledge it, most likely, because they would then have to say more about this dimension and go beyond the aesthetically impoverished readings that have become the rule in American literary studies. What do Literary Studies do Now? Studies like Evelev’s or McGurl’s are very much books for our time. In political criticism, the legitimation for studying literature lay in an uncompromising analysis of political and social power structures. Now the focus has shifted and there is only one of these power structures left. As Evelev puts it: “It is one of the central premises of this book that Melville is so important to twentieth-century visions of nineteenth-century American literature, because he, more than any other writer, embodies and works through the tenets of professionalism, the values that have guided the twentieth-century Shadow Aesthetics 41 and present-day American literary academy” (19). These values are no longer intellectual, aesthetic, or even political values; they are the values of a professional class that is doing literary studies for professional reasons. This may indeed be the reality of American academic life today, but should it also be the goal by which literary studies define themselves? Political criticism tried to overcome the separation of art and life in order to give literary studies relevance as a political practice. This provided a profession once associated with the dust of archives with the allure of an avant-garde existence in postmodern times. In comparison, it is interesting to ask what the new role is that is created by a redefinition of the intellectual as professional? The prevalent tone, it seems to me, is that of an often cynical self-deprecating. As an intellectual critic in the Hegelian mode or as an expert voice on non-instrumental values in the formalist mode, the literary scholar was moving beyond cultural boundaries and social conventions. But the truth is, as McGurl and Evelev point out almost in self-disgust, that literary scholars are really members of a professional-managerial class and thus, like it or not, they represent technobureaucratic values. The starting point of this essay has been the question how literary studies can legitimize itself as a field of study. As we have seen, the field started out with grand visions and promises. As the result of an ongoing intellectual self-scrutiny, these grand visions have been taken down one by one. What self-legitimation can the field still have, then? Its current self-justification seems almost entirely parasitic: it justifies itself by “deconstructing” the cultural capital others have accumulated. 33 At one point, however, one may begin to wonder why we need a discipline like literary studies in order to study subtle acts of distinction or to analyze product differentiation in a body of works that are rapidly losing importance, because there seems to be no longer any good reason to study them. At present, it seems, literary studies is in danger of losing its ability to make a convincing case for why one should still study literary texts. The problem is condensed in the phenomenon of the shadow aesthetics. That is why I have put it at the center of this essay. Why do people read literary texts? I think it is reasonable to assume that literary texts are not merely chosen for the pursuit of cultural capital, but also, or even more so, because they open up imaginary spaces that invite intellectual and emotional explorations. Even if we de-essentialize the aesthetic as far as possible, the term is still needed to describe this potential. To be sure, this aesthetic potential may become the basis for ideological and other political (mis)uses, but that should not be a sufficient reason to dismiss the potential of the aesthetic itself. For, 33 For example, when Betsy Erkkila analyzes visions of democracy in the work of Melville and Whitman, she must tacitly assume that these works are of more importance for discussing the issue than, say, the work of T.S. Arthur. But why should the vision of democracy in the work of Melville or Whitman merit special attention, unless these works themselves merit attention? Erkkila’s analysis of how politics inform and shape the work of these authors is only meaningful on the basis of a prior assumption about the works’ special value. 42 W infried f luck after all, what is the consequence of the fact that the aesthetic does not constitute an autonomous sphere of value? As we have seen, contemporary artists have been in the avant-garde of making the point, but their conclusion has not been that one should stop producing art. Similarly, what is the consequence of the fact that literary studies have become a profession like others? Does it mean that literary texts should now be read in a professional manner or does it mean that they should be read as expressions of managerial professional values? In the story we have traced, a novel like Moby-Dick or the late novels of James have become more and more reduced in meaning and in their potential to provide an aesthetic experience up to the point where the only aspect that still distinguishes literary texts from other discursive manifestations of capitalist ideology, or the market, or power, or imperialism, or orientalism, or status distinction is a shadow aesthetics that is ill equipped to serve as a justification of the field of literary studies. It cannot be ignored or dismissed, because in this case there would be no specific characteristics left that could explain the effects of reading fiction. But in its reduced mode, it also cannot provide a sufficient justification of the field. This is not to reject political, economic or social readings of literature but to resist a tendency to ignore the aesthetic dimension on which these other functions depend for their impact. Works Cited Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations No. 108 (2009), 1-21. Cohen, Walter. “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Reproduced. The Text in History and Idealogy, eds. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor. London: Methuen, 1987, 18-46. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. The Later Works, 1925-1953. Volume 10: 1934. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1987. Eagleton, Terry. “The Ideology of the Aesthetic,” Poetics Today 9 (1988), 327-338. Erkkila, Betsy. “Melville, Whitman, and the Tribulations of Democracy,” A Companion to American Literature and Culture. Ed. Paul Lauter. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010, 250-283. Evelev, John. Tolerable Entertainment. Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2006. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Fluck, Winfried. Ästhetische Theorie und literaturwissenschaftliche Methode. Eine Untersuchung ihres Zusammenhangs am Beispiel der amerikanischen Huck-Finn-Kritik. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975. ---. “Radical Aesthetics,” REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 10 (1994): 31-47. ---. “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, eds. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton and Jeffrey Rhyne. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2002, 79-103. ---. “Aesthetic Premises in American Studies,” in; Fluck, Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, eds. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009, 15-38. Shadow Aesthetics 43 ---. “Transatlantic Narratives About American Art: A Chapter in the Story of Art History’s Hegelian Unconscious.” Art History, 35: 3 (2012), 554-573. ---. “Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings: American Studies and the Realities of America.” Towards a Post-Exceptionalist American Studies, eds. Winfried Fluck and Donald Pease. REAL 30 (2014), 41-65. Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Circulation of Social Energy,” Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 1-20. ---. “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser. London: Routledge, 1989, 1-14. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital. The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago, London: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture. The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. Hegel. G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1961. ---. Ästhetik I/ II. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1971. Higham, John. “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890’s,” Writing American History. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana UP, 1970, 73-102. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Levin, Richard. “The New and the Old Historicizing of Shakespeare,” REAL 11 (1995), 425-448. Leypoldt, Günter. Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman. A Transatlantic Perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. McGurl, Mark. The Novel Art. Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. ---. “American Studies - A Defense of an Unscientific Method,” New Literary History 1 (1969), 75-90. ---. “On Recovering the ‘Ur’ Theory of American Studies,” REAL 19 (2003), 3-17. Matthiessen. F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP, 1941. Michaels, Walter Benn. “The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism,” Representations No. 9 (1985), 105-132. ---. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Miller, Perry. The New England Mind. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1939, 1953. Mukařovský, Jan. Kapitel aus der Ästhetik. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1966. ---. “The Significance of Aesthetics,” Structure, Sign, and Function. Selected Essays. New Haven. Yale UP, 1978, 17-30. ---. “Zum Problem der Funktionen in der Architektur,” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 5 (1983), 217-28. ---. Kunst, Poetik, Semiotik. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1989. Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. 3 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1930. Pease, Donald. “From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature: The Emergence of Literary Extraterritoriality,” REAL 23 (2007), 9-35. 44 W infried f luck Peper, Jürgen. “The Aesthetic as a Democratizing Principle,” REAL 10 (1994), 293-323. Said, Edward. “Introduction to Moby-Dick,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002: 356-371. Seltzer, Mark. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. Smith, Henry Nash. “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method? ” American Quarterly 9 (1957): 197-208. Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. Sobchak, Vivian. The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Sontag, Susan. “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1969, 294-304. Spiller, Robert. “Value and Method in American Studies: The Literary Versus the Social Approach,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 4 (1959): 11-24. Stolnitz, Jerome. “The Aesthetic Attitude,” in: Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 78.83. Susman, Warren. “The Thirties,“ in: The Development of an American Culture, eds. Stanley Coben and Lorman Ratner. Englewood Cliffs, N.].: Prentice Hall, 1970, 179-218. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. ---. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. G ünter l eyPoldt Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 1. Being Spoken to From Above A consecrated artifact can give us a sense that it “speaks to us from above,” as Peter Sloterdijk puts it, in a reading of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1908). In Rilke’s famous poem, the fragment of the sculpture of a human figure (which he probably encountered in the Louvre in Paris) seems to be looking down at the poet from a superior position, as if to say to him: “You have to change your life [Du must Dein Leben ändern].” 1 The sheer presence of this artifact urges Rilke to raise himself up, towards a higher sphere, towards contact with a higher principle. Sloterdijk considers this a perfect image for what he calls the “vertical tension” 2 of cultural space, the phenomenon that whenever we enter the field of cultural production, we seem to experience this as a space that is polarized into more or less attractive regions, regions that we perceive as having a greater or a lesser “pull,” as being closer to or further away from a source of cultural authority or power. The American sociologist Edward Shils presumably had something similar in mind when in the 1950s he adapted Max Weber’s concept of charismatic authority to suggest that modern societies had a “charismatic center” around which they construct their systems of core values. 3 In contrast to Max Weber’s definition of the charismatic as an “extraordinary [außeralltägliche]” 4 form of authority that intermittently disrupts the normal course of modern organizational rationality 5 but rarely survives “routinization [Veralltäglichung]” or “institutionalization,” 6 Shils conceives of charisma as a more lasting, often low-grade intensity at the level of “the routine function of society” that “not 1 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2013) 22ff. Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, transl. Stephen Mitchell (NY: Modern Library, 1995) 66-7. Rilke possibly refers to the Louvre’s torso of a standing nude youth, Kouros from Miletus, ca. 490-480 BC (Louvre MND, 2792). 2 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life 13 3 Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982) sec II. 4 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1985) 141. 5 Hitler’s effect on the masses has often been considered paradigmatic for this conception. See, for example, Ludolf Herbst, Hitlers Charisma: Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2010). 6 According to Weber, charisma becomes diluted and unstable when it is transformed into “charisma of office [Amtscharisma]” or “inherited charisma [Erbcharisma].” See Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 146. 46 G ünter l eyPoldt only disrupts social order” but “also maintains or conserves it.” 7 Whereas Weber regards charismatic rule as a throwback to the premodern that increasingly disappears with modernity’s process of bureaucratic reason and secular enchantment, 8 Shils suggests that modern democracies continue to produce sites of charismatic authority or “deference.” And in contrast to the vernacular meaning of charisma as a personality trait (which locates the source of charismatic attraction in a powerful personal magnetism, the specific charm, allure, or je ne sais quoi of such naturally gifted performers as John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King), Shils puts emphasis on a dispositif of social relations: charismatic attractiveness is thrust on individuals (or things, institutions, and texts) who happen to embody a felt core of charismatic value. If we apply Shils’ view to Rilke’s poem we might say that the speaker experiences the torso in the Louvre with such life-changing force because it performatively puts him in touch with what he or she intuits (or aesthetically perceives) as society’s charismatic center. Of course the idea of a “center of values” sounds counterintuitive today, given the plurality of value systems in the world. We like to frame contemporary society in terms of a subtraction narrative that associates modernization with an erosion of authority (a decline of the sacred, a subversion of normative values, a loosening of status hierarchies, an increasing ability to tolerate difference, etc.). 9 But even in today’s most “open” democracies, the perception of values continues to be polarized by hierarchical distinctions (sacred/ profane, high/ low, pure/ impure, deep/ superficial, etc.). 10 As the pragmatist social theorist Hans Joas has argued in a recent book on human rights, some values can touch us with an “affective intensity” and “subjective certainty” that recalls the phenomenology of the sacred because our attraction to these values eludes the skeptical questions of rational or scientific discourse (the rise of human rights, Joas says, is not simply a result of “objective” moral reasoning; it required a slow and complex historical process, the “sacralization of personhood,” that gave the moral reasons for the protection 7 Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975) 257. 8 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 681. 9 Two important variants of this subtraction narrative come to mind: The first is a Frankfurt-school type of declension story about cultural “incorporation” - an advancing capitalism pushes back the frontiers of inalienable value to create an empire of commodities (“all that is solid melts in the air”); since our cultural values have yielded to the economic rationalities of the marketplace, our lives have not only become less authentic; we also suffer from a loss of experiential intensities (“diminishment of aura”) that we compensate with various forms of ersatz-authorities (“commodity fetishism”). The second variant is a story of increasing procedural neutrality - modern societies are able to tolerate a plurality of values by creating procedural (that is, content-blind) mechanisms of elimination that separate moral, aesthetic, or religious values from the public, relegating them into a private sphere (where people may be as irrational as they please so long as they do not hurt their fellow citizens). The sphere of the public becomes a domain of reasonable common sense or value neutrality (as suggested in, for example, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice [Cambridge: Belknap, 1971]). 10 See, for example, Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006). Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 47 of human rights their historically and geographically specific performative power). 11 Whether or not a cultural experience (a value, a thing, a person, a practice, a site, etc.) strikes us as speaking to us from above does not therefore primarily depend on its connection to a specific social domain (religion, say, or morality); it rather depends on whether a collective cultural topography connects this experience with cultural regions that are associated with “weak” or “strong” value judgments. When we are in the sphere of “weak” valuation - “I like strawberry and you vanilla” 12 - we can be near relativists and practice an almost complete tolerance of the radically other. But as we move from disagreeing about ice-cream flavors to debating strong values (abortion, say, Guantanamo Bay, human rights) we are more likely to touch upon a core of charismatic “hypergoods” 13 that raises the temperature of dissent and makes the public less open to tolerance or procedural neutrality. An aesthetic or literary artifact, too, can be perceived in terms of either weaker or stronger valuations: for some the difference between The Scarlet Letter and The Wire is merely about the question of what entertainment one prefers (I like Hawthorne, you like HBO), for others it is about contact with the higher moral life of the culture. 14 2. Regimes of Taste Acquisition (Lerner in the Prado, Reynolds in the Vatican, Oprah in Princeton) If consecrated space is supposed to speak from above, why is it so often experienced with a sense of anti-climax? (You get bored in a famous museum; fall asleep over a prestigious avant-garde novel, your eyes glaze over while visiting an eminent site of memory). We have all at one time or another expected to be deeply touched by a higher object, but then felt nothing much at all except, perhaps, a nagging sense that this non-response is somehow inadequate. Ben Lerner’s recent novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) provides a good account of this predicament. The narrator’s anxiety is triggered by a man who breaks into rapturous sobs when contemplating canonical paintings in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, presumably because, as Lerner’s narrator-alter-ego puts it, he is having “a profound experience of art”: 11 The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Georgetown: U of Georgetown P, 2013) 173. Joas reminds us that the sacred/ profane distinction is not identical with the secular/ profane. His approach is Durkheimean in that it takes the sacred seriously as a social thing, without suggesting a functional view often associated with Durkheim (which collapses the distinction between the sacred, the religious and the cultural). 12 Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011) 297. 13 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) 63ff. 14 “Moral life” here does not pit the moral against the aesthetic, a binary that, though it dominates literature and art criticism, is unhelpful for understanding the ways in which we orient ourselves within our imagined cultural space. On how pragmatists from Dewey to Rorty have contested this binary, see my “The Uses of Metaphor: Richard Rorty’s Literary Criticism and the Poetics of World-Making,” New Literary History (Special Issue: Remembering Richard Rorty) 39.1 (Winter 2008): 145-63. 48 G ünter l eyPoldt I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change. […] Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity. 15 Lerner’s fears and suspicions sound contemporary enough; let us consider a comparable but historically and socially more distant moment: In an anecdote he recorded in his old age, the eighteenth-century British portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds recalled that when as a young man he encountered the famous Raphael frescoes for the first time in the original (during a visit of the Vatican in the 1740s), he was “disappointed and mortified at not finding myself enraptured with the work of this great master.” 16 Not being touched by Raphael was “one of the most humiliating circumstances that ever happened to me” (xi). The higher object speaks to you from above, but your aesthetic perceptions seem unable to register an adequate sense of beauty. But when Reynolds “confessed” this to others, he found that many of his peers in fact admitted that they, too, had been unmusical to Raphael in their time of youth and innocence. Reynolds concluded from this that “the relish for the higher excellencies of art” was an “acquired taste” necessitating “long cultivation and great labor and attention” (xii). In other words, he felt that he needed to engage in a regime of aesthetic training to improve his embodied perception. Oprah Winfrey drew similar conclusions after having selected Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise for the thirteenth episode of Oprah’s Book Club (1998). 17 When it turned out that Winfrey and her audience failed to “connect” 15 Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis: Coffee House P, 2011) 8-9. Thanks to Merve Emre for bringing this passage to my attention. 16 The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols., ed. Edmund Malone (London: Cadell, Davis, 1797) I: xi. 17 The Oprah Winfrey Show was the highest-rated US talk show almost from its inception in 1986 until its conclusion (May, 2011). Oprah’s Book Club became a regular feature in 1996, shortly after Winfrey shifted her programming towards themes of moral and spiritual uplift (“Change your Life TV”) that distanced her from the tabloid scandals that surrounded the daytime talk show genre in the mid-1990s. Her own celebrity and her show’s national medial presence produced the legendary “Oprah effect,” which converted her selections into immediate bestsellers and made her a taste-maker in the market of serious literature for middle-class audiences. Toni Morrison visited Oprah’s Book Club four times, forming an iconic relationship that began with the book club’s second episode in October 1996 (featuring Song of Solomon). Morrison was then already an internationally acclaimed novelist who represented the cutting edge of literary innovation. Her literary credentials aided Oprah’s efforts toward genre-gentrification, while the Oprah effect propelled even her more experimental works into the paperback bestseller lists. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 49 therapeutically 18 with Morrison’s difficult text, Winfrey decided to move the televised discussion of the novel to a classroom at Princeton University, presided over by Morrison herself - “we needed help,” she explained, “because some of us couldn’t make it to Paradise.” 19 The task was to find, with the help of the author, more adequate ways of engaging with the high-cultural literary artifacts: “Ms. Morrison, are we supposed to get it on the first read? ”, one of the participants asked; Morrison and Winfrey replied that in order to connect with the mysterious object everyone should work on “opening” themselves to a higher reading practice. Regimes of taste acquisition can be hard work. For Reynolds this process took several years of unlearning his English taste: it was “necessary,” he said, “that I should become as a little child” again, and to submit to a rigorous routine of deand refamiliarization: “Notwithstanding my disappointment” with Raphael, “I proceeded to copy some of those excellent works. I viewed them again and again.” This training program led Reynolds through a period of nagging negativity that turned him into a momentary snob: “I even affected to feel their merit [i.e. of the Raphael works he was copying], and admire them, more than I really did.” Eventually his embodied perception followed suit: “a new taste and new perceptions began to dawn upon me.” 20 Why, one might ask, did Reynolds commit to such a daunting training regime? This question emerged more clearly at Oprah Winfrey’s Princeton session, when one of her guests said: “I really wanted to read the book [i.e. Paradise] and love it and learn some life lessons from it,” but when “[Paradise] was so confusing I questioned the value of a book that is that hard to understand, and I quit reading it.” And indeed, if Toni Morrison’s novels leave me cold, whereas popular romances (or in fact day-time television talk shows) strike me with a powerful sense of affective intensity or therapeutic growth, why should I feel the need to adapt my aesthetic habitus? 18 On The Oprah Winfrey Show’s relation to therapeutic discourse, see Eva Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture (NY: Columbia UP, 2003). On the therapeutic in postwar literary culture, see Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011) 26-31. 19 Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from Oprah’s show refer to the thirteenth bookclub episode (Harpo Production Inc., March 6, 1998) devoted to Morrison’s Paradise that was filmed at a classroom at Princeton University and featured Oprah, Toni Morrison, and twenty-two selected guests. See Michael Perry, “Resisting Paradise: Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey,” The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, ed. Cecilia Konchar Farr, Jamie Harker (Albany: State U of NY P, 2008) 119-140; Timothy Aubry, “Beware the Furrow of the Middlebrow: Searching for Paradise on the Oprah Winfrey Show,” Modern Fiction Studies 52.2 (Summer 2006): 350-73; Rona Kaufman, “‘That, My Dear, Is Called Reading’: Oprah’s Book Club and the Construction of a Readership,” Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response, ed. Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2004) 221-255. 20 The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds x. 50 G ünter l eyPoldt 3. Charismatic Trust One way of approaching this issue is to ask what exactly it is that we desire from a cultural artifact - what do we want from an experimental Morrison novel, a painting by Raphael, a sculpture in the Louvre, a painting in the Prado? According to Charles Taylor, when we orient ourselves within the moral polarities of our life world we tend to classify “our desires in such categories as higher or lower, virtuous and vicious, more and less fulfilling, more and less refined, profound and superficial, noble and base,” and so on. 21 Similarly, an artifact for which we have little direct use (because it seems neither pleasurable nor instructive) can seem worth exploring if we sense its “connection” to the sort of higher cultural sphere that Edward Shils calls society’s “charismatic” center. Consecrated artifacts, in other words, inspire an atmosphere of social trust. If the most intuitive reaction to an artwork that truly eludes our horizon of expectation is to wonder whether familiarizing ourselves with the perplexing object is worth the trouble, the “social magic” of institutional charisma lies in its power to convince us that the effort of further engagement is justified: “I encourage you to stay with Ms. Morrison,” Oprah Winfrey said when she announced her selection of Song of Solomon: “Put your trust in her because she knows what she’s doing.” 22 But trust in what exactly? There is a tendency to define the uses of literature and the arts in terms of more or less tangible kinds of audience satisfaction - the work is considered to possess an intrinsic ability to deliver concrete aesthetic-cognitive effects: pleasure, knowledge, wisdom, catharsis, epiphany, moral growth, political instruction, etc. Putting it in these terms (literariness as a set of deliverable goods) makes our faith in literary institutions a relatively simple question of calculative probability: If Oprah’s selections have reliably provided you with pleasure, knowledge or moral insight, trusting her literary authority would seem no less rational than trusting the Italian grocer, say, whose wine selections have reliably satisfied your tastes. In other words, to trust Toni Morrison in this sense is a matter of strategic calculation or rational choice. Consider, however, how even such a seemingly straightforward pleasure as drinking coffee can qualitatively change if it takes place at an establishment where the consumption of caffeine is refined by a sense of higher 21 “What is Human Agency? ” Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1. (Cambridge: CUP, 1985) 15-44; 16. For example, a drug addict can have a very strong desire for a drug, in fact spend most of his time on drugs, and yet classify his wish to be free of the drugs as a higher desire. In a similar way it is common to distinguish the “pleasure of reading” into higher and lower forms (think of the nineteenth-century distinction between the addictive pleasure of superficial beauty and the more edifying, “expansive” pleasure of difficult beauty; or consider Roland Barthes’ distinction between the plaisir of reading a realist novel and the jouissance of reading the late novels of James Joyce). 22 18 Oct. 1996. See Rona Kaufman, “‘That, My Dear, Is Called Reading’” 230. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 51 purpose (Starbuck’s “coffee ethic,” for example). 23 This implies a more complex kind of trust, based not on calculative strategy or rational choice but on our relational perception of an object’s proximity to power. Objects that give us a sense that we are being spoken to from above invoke a charismatic rather than calculative kind of trust that follows from our relational perception of power, the feeling that we are being put in touch with something larger than ourselves. The question of whether an experimental novel or a painting (or perhaps unfamiliar tasting coffee) seems worth exploring even if it does not at first seem to delight or teach us much, hinges on our trust in its “connection” to a “charismatic” value center. Since we experience this connection through a practical sense of spatial orientation (rather than calculative reason), charismatic trust is perceived aesthetically - we do not so much rationalize the issue (“Toni Morrison has the Nobel prize, so it is reasonable to assume she must be a good writer! ”) as sense an upward pull we like to phrase in the semantics of the sublime: a presence, an aura of a work that we perceive with our senses. Consecrated artifacts thus differ from more profane ones in that they can produce two kinds of intensities that should be analytically distinguished (even though they might produce similar affective symptoms): the one concerns the intensity of a more immediate aesthetic/ cognitive/ moral engagement with an artifact (which eluded Reynolds, in his first encounter with Raphael, and Oprah and her audience, when they failed to submit Paradise to a therapeutic reading); the other intensity concerns our attraction to something larger that the artifact embodies for us (an attraction that motivated Reynolds and Oprah and her audience to submit themselves to a regime of rehabitualization). Of course it would seem commonsensical here to invoke the problem of authenticity: if one does not like the coffee at Starbucks but still goes there because of a gentrified coffee ethic; if one detests experimental novels and yet submits to tedious classroom routines to learn how to read them; or if one is bored by Raphael paintings but nonetheless changes one’s life to acquire a taste for them, does this not mean that one mistakes the real event - the pleasure of caffeine, the power of literature, the beauty of painting - for something that is merely added, or “thrust upon” the real event by an institutional or economic system? This skeptical question comes so natural to literatureand-art criticism that we hardly notice its main conceptual move, namely to sustain the unity of the aesthetic event by distinguishing between primary and secondary affective reactions to artworks. Accordingly, primary aesthetic pleasures are those that are deemed “rational” in the sense that they are considered to be grounded in the “logic of the work” (the “politics,” “structure,” “meaning” of the aesthetic event itself). “Irrational” pleasures are the 23 See Slavoj Žižek’s take on “cultural capitalism,” where the consumption of organic apples or Starbucks products (with its “coffee ethic” and “‘Ethos Water’ program”) implies connection to a higher realm of meaning (“we are not merely buying and consuming” but “simultaneously doing something meaningful,” such as “showing our capacity for care, and our global awareness, participating in a collective projects” (First as Tragedy, Then as Farce [London: Verso, 2009] 52-4). 52 G ünter l eyPoldt fetishistic, ersatz-religious, or libidinous emotions that emerge in commercial markets (a culture industry) and consecrating institutions (elitist canons, art religions). These are classified as secondary because it is assumed that the logic of the work precedes markets and institutions and can therefore not be held accountable for the affective reactions produced by markets and institutions (fits of weeping, charismatic trust, fetishistic desire, undemocratic high-low distinctions, etc.). 24 From this viewpoint, Lerner’s museum visitor, Rilke in the Louvre, Reynolds at the Vatican, and Oprah at Princeton are either fraudulent snobs (pretending to be touched by the higher objects while in reality playing for social distinction) or else commodity fetishists: They may think they are enjoying the beauties of art but in reality are in the thrall of something else: for instance, the “theological quirks of the commodity” that turn aesthetic objects into surrogates for absent parents, religious certainties, or sacred presences. 25 4. The Two Bodies of Things But what if “theological quirks” are what we want from cultural artifacts? Perhaps the charismatic attraction of aesthetic objects (as things that embody something larger) is just as relevant as their more direct uses (as things that delight and instruct and have a hermeneutic “meaning,” a “politics” or “ideology”). I would suggest that we consider charismatic and direct uses of artworks not as alternative but potentially simultaneous functions. Let 24 Note how the primary/ secondary distinction emerges from the agency of literary criticism’s tools of the trade: Our traditional skills (cultural hermeneutics, narrative analysis, and ideology critique, for example) want us to ground the aesthetic experience or political-ideology value in “the work” because the idea of a “science” of literature and art that can analytically reconstruct a work’s “politics of form” best legitimates these skills. If we can trace the essence of the aesthetic to an internal structure (the ability of Rilke’s torso to “glisten like a wild beast’s fur,” say) and find a compelling reason how this structure becomes political (how the glistening “wild beast’s fur” eludes the beholders’ conceptual understanding, producing in them a state of mental “free play” that in turn enables a radical politics), our scientific tools seem well exercised and worth their while. If, on the other hand, we allow that people’s affective reactions are irreducible to the structure of a work (because they are co-produced by charismatic institutions), our skills in hermeneutic reading and formal analysis become less central to our critical practice than the skills of ethnographic observation that traditionally belong to cultural anthropology, religious studies, and the social sciences. Hence the defensive tendency in literature and art criticism to downgrade the question of whether or not an object produces charismatic trust to a question of “significance” (as opposed to “meaning”), as if this question could be left to reception historians, literary sociologists, and cultural anthropologists while the “real” labor of literary criticism requires allegorical “readings” or structural-formal analysis of “the work.” 25 “[D]ie theologischen Mucken der Ware” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Band 1, Erster Abschnitt, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke Berlin/ DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1968. 23: 49-98; 85). Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 53 us say that cultural artifacts can possess two bodies in Kantorowicz’ sense: 26 a “mortal” body that circulates through the profane world of the everyday (where it may be locked in rapid cycles of being commodified, desired, used, exhausted, and discarded), and a more enduring, iconic, transubstantiated body that invokes contact with a higher order. While the former inhabits the “lower” economies of short-term desires for weaker values, the latter body provides us with long-term desires and strong valuations we tend to associate with a sphere beyond the ordinary. These simultaneous materialities of things follow differing rhythms of growth and decline: The most mundane commodities (shower gels, tooth pastes, entertainment media, BMWs) can acquire a second, socially magical existence when they become attached to an imagined space above the quotidian. Take Theodore Dreiser’s classic exploration of consumer magic: when the protagonist of Sister Carrie (1900) is seduced by the siren voice of department store wares (“‘Ah, such little feet,’ said the leather of the soft new shoes; ‘how effectively I cover them. What a pity they should ever want my aid’”), 27 this is not just a clear case of commodity fetishism. It is true that Carrie’s response may also have to do with the more profane materiality of shoes (their use as quotidian objects of short-term desires that might range from a banal need for good footwear to a fetishistic interest in leather shoes). But Dreiser’s point is surely that the department store strikes Carrie with a sense of accessing the charismatic, so long, that is, as she feels “keenly the fact that not any of these things [are] in the range of her purchase.” 28 When towards the end of the novel she is a celebrity actress earning more money than she knows how to spend, the world of department stores has virtually disappeared, in her perception of charismatic centers, behind the Arnoldian culture that now orients her moves (Balzac rather than sentimental fiction, tragic acting rather than cabaret, Ames rather than Hurstwood). The discontinuity of the higher and lower bodies of things subverts simplistic distinctions between commodities and singularities, and - in literature and art criticism - the attempt to locate “the work” as a singular object in cultural space. At the lower end of the spectrum, the most commercial entertainments may develop a charismatic body, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a best-selling sentimental novel that also became The Novel That Caused the Civil War); Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (an easy accessible gothic romance that also embodied, for Europe’s elites, fascinating concepts of medievalism and nationhood), or Zola’s L’Assommoir and Nana (sensationalist bestsellers that also became credentialed as “naturalist” scientific experiment). At the higher end, the most consecrated cultural objects (Picasso paintings, rare antiquities, Shakespeare) might develop parallel 26 E.H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957). See Jeffrey Alexander, “The Democratic Struggle for Power: The 2008 Presidential Campaign in the USA,” Journal of Power 2.1 (April 2009) 65-88; 75. 27 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (NY: Norton, 3rd edition, 2006) 72. 28 Dreiser, Sister Carrie 16. 54 G ünter l eyPoldt lives in a secondary process of commoditization that ranges from auctioneers trying to price the priceless to the merchandising of reproduced cultural icons in “heritage” markets and museum shops. The two bodies of things often exist in separate historical moments, as we can see in the characteristic lag between emergent and institutionalized avant-gardes, 29 and they can also emerge in differing spaces of social practice or differing audience sensibilities, when a specific artifact is disseminated across socio-institutional divides. Toni Morrison’s cross-over to Oprah Winfrey’s turf is a good example of this. When the Oprah effect catapulted Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon into the 1996 bestseller list, Morrison expressed her gratitude to Oprah for infusing her work with a “new life that is larger than its original life.” 30 But Song of Solomon has in fact been given numerous lives: Apart from the novel’s diverging historical presences (peer-recognized experiment in 1977, consecrated museum object in 1996), its “higher” and “lower” bodies were flourishing in relatively separate social regions: the more profane life of Morrison’s text, as an object of entertainment, edification, or instruction, arguably thrives best among audiences whose reading habits allow them to “consume” her often opaque prose with a certain ease. Experiencing a novel like Song of Solomon as ordinary reading (a “page-turner,” meaningful commentary on the African American condition, or source of redemptive self-knowledge) requires a degree of familiarity with recent literary tradition. Such familiarity would seem most likely within the social sphere of Wendy Griswold’s “reading class,” the “highly educated, affluent, metropolitan” social elite that comprises about 15% of the general population in today’s developed countries. 31 Conversely, within the atmospheres of less restrictive cultural markets (the popular terrain of Michael Crichton, say, or Dan Brown), the consumption value of experimental prose becomes nearly insignificant, though such loss of consumability can heighten a work’s symbolic power. Within Oprah’s 29 Emergent avant-gardes are authorized by a relatively small establishment of professionalized peers (an “art world”). Their most defining feature is not a “counter-cultural” sensibility but a specific “economy of prestige” (see James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005]), characterized by lower economic profits and higher elite recognition (think of Wordsworth around 1800, Whitman in the 1860s, Henry James or T.S. Eliot in the 1910s, or Toni Morrison in the early 1970s). Once avant-gardes are institutionalized in canons and museum, they become more widely known cultural icons, with the effect that their charismatic authority translates into wider public recognition (for example, Wordsworth as a leather-bound Victorian commodity, T.S. Eliot lecturing in 1950s football stadiums, or Toni Morrison on Oprah), although their charisma as “cuttingedge” might be replaced by the “historical” charisma as a site of memory (think of how Walter Scott’s image shifted from peer-recognized literary innovator to that of a heritage figure, as the inventor of the historical novel and the founder of Scottish nationalism). 30 18 Nov. 1996. See Edith Frampton, “Toni Morrison, Body Politics, Oprah’s Book Club,” The Oprahfication of American Culture, ed. T.T. Cotton, and K. Springer (UP of Mississippi, 2011) 145-160; 146. 31 Wendy Griswold, Regionalism and the Reading Class (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2007). Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 55 world the elusiveness of Morrison’s writing - its resistance to “therapeutic” reading - seems to have increased its magnetism, in a similar way, perhaps, to how conventional languages can become magic from the perspective of those unfamiliar with the relevant codes (medieval books among the illiterate; the Latin Mass for non-Latin-speakers, or consecrated novels for the uninitiated). 32 By the same logic Oprah’s institutional charisma becomes less intense within the sphere of the “reading class.” As we can gauge from comments by reviewers and academic critics, more bookish audiences, even as they welcome the Oprah effect as a worthy attempt to “get the whole country reading again,” 33 they also tend to look down upon Oprah’s Book Club as a mere mediator institution, a distributor of literary works rather than a legitimate authority on their real literary value, which is considered to be established elsewhere, within a higher consecrating institution (“over our heads,” as Winfrey said at Princeton). Even Morrison’s own consecrated status becomes thinner among the high-status groups of readers who are more familiar with third-level English classrooms and tend therefore to be more cynical about the validity of the Nobel Committee’s decisions. The published poet and MFA graduate Kathleen Rooney, for instance, insists, in her discussion of the Oprah phenomenon, that Paradise is “unnecessarily cryptic and impenetrable in style and composition.” 34 Arguably the confidence with which Rooney can dismiss Morrison as an emperor without clothes has to do with her familiarity with the academic institutions that play a more significant role than Oprah in shaping Morrison’s cultural prestige. Rooney might rejoin that her verdict is based on a structural logic that precedes questions of higher or lower charisma or prestige, namely a distinction between literary works that merit multiple rereading (“James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, or even The Sound and the Fury by Morrison’s antecedent William Faulkner”) and those that, like Morrison’s Paradise in Rooney’s view, are “needlessly muddled” and “deliberately and unnecessarily obfuscating” (82). The scientistic implication is that this finest of distinctions - between gratuitous and justified literary difficulty - has an objective basis in the work itself, visible to those who acquired the necessary expertise. This suggests that the superiority of some reading practices (“Princeton”) over others (Oprah’s world) simply derive from an inequality of invested labor. When Oprah and her readers acquaint themselves with the “logic” of experimental prose, the argument goes, they will see that Paradise is a perfectly ordinary artifact, and Morrison’s charisma will be exposed as a mirage. But it is a fallacy that educational labor and adequate reception are in a linear 32 On medieval books as holy objects, see Christopher De Hamel, “Books and Society,” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. II: 1100-1400. ed. N. Morgan, R. Thomson (Cambridge: CUP, 2008) 3-10. On the Latin Mass, see Amy Hungerford, “Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass,” Contemporary Literature 47: 3 (2006): 343-380. 33 The Oprah Winfrey Show, September 17, 1996. 34 Kathleen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America. 2nd Edition (2005; Fayettesville: U of Arkansas P, 2008) 82. 56 G ünter l eyPoldt relationship, however persuasive the analogies to the applied sciences (better trained engineers will build better bridges). In the humanities the value of a practice hinges not on the quantity but the authority of invested labor - it is possible to spend a great amount of time and effort to “professionalize” forms of knowledge or skills that, within the shifting hierarchies of generational succession, might well turn out as relatively esoteric (like Longfellow studies, say, or mid-twentieth-century Prague structuralism). Whether or not we find Rooney’s rejection of Morrison convincing thus depends on our charismatic trust in the judgment devices on which her verdict is based. 35 5. Charisma as Embodied Perception Scholarship on trust often characterizes non-calculative trust relationships as a kind of belief or faith. 36 This analogy to religious belief can provoke an attitude of critical realism: Surely we can resist charismatic attraction by adopting an “atheist stance” and refuse to believe in consecrating institutions? 37 The suggestion is that any “naïve” trust in the authority of consecrated things (Reynolds’ Raphael, Oprah’s Morrison, Rilke’s torso) can be dispelled with a healthy dose of enlightened reflection. This misconception is apparent in the media scandal over Jonathan Franzen’s public remarks after Oprah announced The Corrections as a bookclub selection in September 2001. Franzen stumbled into a now infamous public relations debacle when in a string of promotional interviews during his book tour he voiced his ambivalence about his association with the Oprah label. The media fastened on his comments about literary taste - in a radio interview he had placed himself “solidly in the high-art literary tradition” and mentioned that Oprah’s more sentimental (“schmaltzy”) selections made him “cringe.” When Winfrey promptly rescinded her invitation (“It 35 This in turn depends on our trust in the consecrating institutions to which these judgment devices are linked. The main institution behind Rooney’s book is E.M Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927), which will seem weightier in Oprah’s world than in the practice space of professionalized criticism. And again, our trust in Forster will have less to do with the question of appropriate intellectual labor (whether Forster is “over-” or “under-theorized,” say) but mainly concern Foster’s critical consecration (whether he is trusted to be profanely “dated” or singularly “fresh”). 36 Since we can never be sure that our trust in a probable outcome will be rewarded (if we could be sure we could rely on this outcome), genuine trust necessarily implies a “form of faith,” according to Anthony Giddens (The Consequences of Modernity [Oxford: Polity, 1990] 27), or, in Georg Simmel’s formulation, a “social-psychological” kind of “‘belief’” that seems somehow “related to the religious” (Philosophie des Geldes [Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1900] 151-196). See Guido Möllering, “The Nature of Trust: From Georg Simmel to a Theory of Expectation, Interpretation and Suspension,” Sociology 35.2 (2001): 403-20; 413; and Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006) chap. 5. 37 Pascale Casanova’s concept of a Greenwich literary meridian encourages such a reaction when she implies that “one way to resist” the allure of consecrated world-literary space “is to adopt an ‘atheist’ stance, and not to believe” in the “dominance” and the “prestige” of such space (“What Is a Dominant Language? Giacomo Leopardi: Theoretician of Linguistic Inequality, New Literary History 44.3 [Summer 2013]: 379-399; 380. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 57 has never been my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or conflicted”), 38 Franzen backpedaled with a series of apologetic retractions. He conceded that the high-low distinction was “meaningless,” 39 and that he had “no-one but myself to blame.” 40 But blame for what exactly, other than having badly managed his media appearance? The most vehement condemnations came from critics who took Franzen’s discomfort itself as an offensive gesture: no-one cringes about popular culture unless they look down upon the mainstream. It was assumed that Franzen’s dislike of Oprah’s selections presupposed a creed or ethics that justifies such dislike. In the manner of the new-atheist critique of religion as essentially consisting of false propositional statements about the world (fantastic beliefs rather than verifiable realities), Franzen was accused of a faith in the existence of “the middle-brow” that critics attributed to the “sacred conversations” of a reactionary “priesthood of English professors.” 41 Understandably, Franzen declared himself an unbeliever: “I know,” he said to the Chicago Tribune in November 2001, “that the distinction between high audiences and low audiences is false.” 42 Franzen presumably meant to acknowledge the equal dignity of all tastes, and who would want to disagree? But how does such an abstract philosophical position affect the empirical realities of our embodied reaction to differing aesthetic atmospheres or intensities? 43 Rooney’s engagement with Oprah is a case in point: Highly critical of Franzen’s insensitivity, she prefaces her account with a disclaimer that her academic expertise as a reader does not “negate the value” of the experience of any less educated member of Oprah’s club, who “may deal with fiction in a different way than a member of the academy” (79). 44 This democratic principle did not prevent Rooney, however, from experiencing Oprah’s more accessible picks as painfully simple, predictable, overly schematic and sensational, 45 nor has her theoretical tolerance mitigated her practical aversion to what she perceives as Oprah’s “studiously immature” and “sophomoric” (159) response to literature. Rooney and Franzen 38 Susan Schindehette, “Novel approach,” People Magazine (12 November 2001): 83-4; 83. 39 David Kirkpatrick, “‘Oprah’ Gaffe by Franzen Draws Ire and Sales,” New York Times, 29. Oct. 2001. <http: / / www.nytimes.com>. 40 Julia Keller, “Franzen vs. the Oprah Factor,” Chicago Tribune (12 November, 2001) <http: / / www.chicagotribune.com> 41 Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2012) 21. 42 Keller, ibid. 43 See Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (NY: Polity, 2000) 184-5. 44 Careful to dissociate herself from the harsher critics of Oprah’s book club, Rooney stresses that she has learned how to tolerate difference: she says that in the “original draft” of her book she had still “announced with great fanfare” that she was “‘qualified’ to distinguish good literature from bad” (“owing to my extensive literary education”). Yet upon “further thought” she had realized how “reactionary” it would be to believe “that only a minority of trained professionals can interact critically with texts” (78-9). 45 Such as Alice Hoffman’s Here on Earth (1997); Chris Bohjalian’s Midwives (1997); Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife (1998); Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road (1998); and Elizabeth Berg’s Open House (2000) (85ff). 58 G ünter l eyPoldt both “cringe” in the atmosphere of the middlebrow because their embodied sense of high and low (or singular/ cheap, sacred/ profane, pure/ impure, etc.) goes deeper than their ideas (ethical, political) about this distinction. These bodily reactions indicate that institutional charisma does not originate from belief but from “the sense of something larger or more deeply meaningful about which we may have beliefs.” 46 To speak of a “sense” implies a tacit, practical kind of knowledge about an object’s location (its proximity to charismatic authority) that can be felt relatively independently from one’s belief about this object. It is hard to see how any author who, like Franzen, moves mainly in the more prestigious literary spheres where success is defined by prizes instead of large print runs would feel unambiguous elation when crossing over into the atmospheres of middle-brow book clubs and daytime TV. This does not mean, as critics have suggested, that authors striving for peer recognition cannot at the same time be thrilled (as Franzen said he was) with the prospect of the Oprah effect turning them into national bestsellers. Since the desire for money and recognition are located in different spaces of practice (an economy of the sacred vs. an economy of the everyday), it seems entirely coherent to be both glad and ashamed about having an Oprah label stamped on your novel. Unlike Toni Morrison, whose worldwide prestige made her immune to any contact-stigmatization, Franzen, as a non-experimental writer with fewer credentials, had a more vivid feeling of downward mobility upon being shelved with the “schmaltzy” company of Oprah picks. The feeling of downward mobility, to be sure, is not the only reason for Franzen’s response, which can be better understood if we distinguish the charismatic and aesthetic intensities that make his body cringe. One element of discomfort is about relational orientation, the feeling of moving away from charismatic authority. This might be reinforced by another, essentially different, element, the perception of crude emotionality with which professionalized readers typically experience literary artifacts intended for less bookish audiences. The latter perception has to do with the weak or short-term values of aesthetic taste: Franzen’s professionalized reading practices have ruined Oprah’s picks for him for everyday literary consumption. To make middlebrow texts viable for him Franzen would have to “unlearn” his aesthetic habitus by submitting himself to a training regime no less comprehensive than Reynolds’ replacement of “English taste” with a taste for Raphael. Of course, Reynolds’ efforts were motivated by the upward pull of Raphael’s charismatic attraction. It is harder to see why one would want to change in the opposite direction. 46 Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010) 11. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 59 6. The Charismatic and the Social If cultural upward-mobility involves a sense of moving closer to a charismatic center, such a move is not identical with social advancement or “distinction.” But charismatic values have a way of embodying themselves in social materialities, that is, they situate themselves within constellations of places, people, practices, and institutions that are collectively experienced as closer or further away from authority. While in theoretical space, an object can have an intrinsic meaning that seems extraterritorial to social hierarchy, in practice even the most abstract meaning comes already “bundled” with some materiality that influences its “social biography.” Just as you cannot have, according to Webb Keane, the quality of “redness in abstraction” (“redness in an apple,” for instance, “comes along in a spherical shape, light weight, sweet flavor, a tendency to rot, and so forth”), 47 concepts, things, practices, places can become radiant, banal, or obnoxious depending on the material economies in which they are embedded. The meaning of Morrison’s Paradise, for example, has a thingness that can come in the shape of a singularity (when its resistance to non-professional readers produces the phenomenology of sacred objects), it can exist as a quotidian commodity (when professional audiences “consume” it as bed-table reading), and in the generational succession may well acquire the thingness either of a consecrated site of memory (like Shakespeare’s Hamlet) or that of trash (if in the future literary field it is no longer relevant). As contemporary museum theory reminds us, the most obvious material aspect of the sacred is that the process of consecration usually includes a removal of things from the spheres of everyday uses, meanings, laws, and markets - collection pieces develop the phenomenology of the sacred when they are withheld from quotidian cycles of consumption, 48 just as avant-gardes in literature and the arts tend to draw their aura (“autonomous,” “disinterested,” “priceless”) from their momentary distance to large-scale consumption. The trouble with the emphasis on the removal process is that it can encourage a reductive view of sacralization as based on an object’s evasion of the social, as if the materiality of the sacred could be recognized simply by its distance from quotidian markets and pragmatic uses. Indeed literature and art criticism have a long history of elevating resistance to pragmatic uses to the defining trait of literariness or beauty. Consider, for instance, how Toni Morrison discussed the difficulty of Paradise in her session with Oprah at Princeton: she said that rather than writing a novel that could be reduced to an idea or thesis (“a book in which there was a formula and a perfect conclusion 47 Webb Keane, “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham: Duke UP, 2006) 182-205; 188. 48 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: CUP, 1996) 64-94; and Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” The Social Life of Things 1-63. On the history of museum in the context of sacralisation see Karl-Heinz Kohl, Die Macht der Dinge: Geschichte und Theorie sakraler Objekte (Munich, Beck, 2003) and Stefan Lauber, Von der Reliquie zum Ding: Heiliger Ort - Wunderkammer - Museum (Berlin: Akademie, 2011). 60 G ünter l eyPoldt and that was the meaning and the only meaning”), she had wanted to create an open literary space that, by withholding positive clues, would entice its readers towards more “powerful” ways of engagement. Forcing the audience to face an unfamiliar world would heighten their aesthetic experience and ethico-moral astuteness (as Oprah rephrased Morrison’s point: “Wise author that she is, she knows the rewards are twice as great when we readers get to unlock the secrets on our own”). This idea that the relentless negativity of the work itself produces or heightens its literariness draws from the delivery model of literature in a way that recalls the literary ethics of Martha Nussbaum: just as a forbiddingly heavy burgundy wine rewards us with a deeper satisfaction, the refined complexities of Paradise (in Nussbaum’s account, the later Henry James) are more likely than “easy” entertainment to improve our ethical-political powers of judgment. But clearly the merits of textual alterity vary with social context. Just as the outside of the cultural market contains all manner of unfamiliar, inaccessible, enigmatic things that can still be experienced as trivia or trash, an alterity becomes charismatic only if it is pulled, not only out of the quotidian, but also upward in cultural space, towards a site of power. Morrison’s Paradise seems worth exploring to those who trust its connection to society’s charismatic center, which in turn depends on Morrison’s location within a hierarchical structure of consecrating institutions (Oprah, a network of literary prizes, an art world, prestigious journals, editors, critics, English departments, the reading class, etc.) that inevitably differ along various scales of symbolic power, on the basis of the degree of trust they muster, the singularity-levels they generate, the cultural centrality they invoke. To be sure, if consecration means to rise upward in cultural space (towards charismatic institutions), this seems hardly possible without moving up in social space (towards empowered elites). For positions of institutional charisma - in the 1890s, for example, the Atlantic group of magazines, the Metropolitan Opera, the Henry Jamesian novel, etc. - are not only privileged sites within the sacred-profane polarity of cultural space, they also connect certain aesthetic practices with real networks of people and social goods, thus accumulating a great deal of social power (prestige, economic wealth, political agency, etc.). To put this point with Martina Löw, the “atmospheres” 49 that distinguish consecrated from more profane cultural sites are also shaped by how we perceive the people and things that are “spaced” within or connected to these sites. It is hard to separate, in other words, the consecrated atmosphere that emanates from the “white cube” of the modern art museum or the short-list of the Booker Prize from the social atmospheres of things, people, practices that our spatial 49 Martina Löw, “The Constitution of Space,” The European Journal of Social Theory 11.1 [2011]: 25-49; 44. See also Gernot Böhme, Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich: Fink, 2001). To say that atmospheres emerge from pre-interpretive experience is to suggest that they are felt rather than rationally deduced, but it does not imply that such experiences are natural or universal; the perceptive schemes for this need to be acquired and trained. On the problems of the term “pre-interpretive” see John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (NY: Free Press, 1995) 133-4. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 61 orientation locates in a similar region of practice to art museums and literary prizes. To suggest that atmospheres are rooted in social configurations is not, however, the same as reducing them to aesthetic illusions whose deeper reality consists in sociological “hard facts” in Philip Fisher’s sense. 50 Focusing on certain “hard facts” about socioeconomic hierarchy is one kind of practice; experiencing an atmosphere as higher, more sacred or charismatic is another; but just how both practices relate to one another would seem to depend on the individual case. Consider, for example, an account of Oprah, Morrison and Franzen that describes their motivations in terms of a rational exchange of social “assets.” We can then see Oprah’s adding a book club segment to her commercially successful show as a financial investment (a Maussian “gift”) 51 in an economy of social prestige. Hosting literary authors in order to “get the whole country reading again” 52 is an expensive business, paid for with low ratings, but its symbolic returns have given The Oprah Show a cultural clout beyond the reach of any other contemporary daytime talk-show (completing a gentrification effort she began in the 1990s). This context makes Oprah’s cooperation with Toni Morrison a win-win situation for both participants - she connects herself to the Nobel Prize, while Morrison sells a great deal more books. But the Franzen incident temporarily disturbs this exchange: less confident about his status than the securely credentialed Morrison, Franzen weighs the middlebrow stigma of the Oprah label against its financial value and hesitates, for a moment. He may have realized immediately that the minimal symbolic risk was not worth the scandal, but having now voiced his shame in the press, he performatively (however unintentionally) ruined his value for Oprah, who now had little to gain from hosting an author whom the media had come to associate with an exposure of her middlebrow taste. Sticking to her disinvitation despite Franzen’s apology was a rational move, as was her immediate turn towards classic authors (Tolstoy, Faulkner, Dickens) who were unable to wince in her company. It was equally rational, finally, for Oprah and Franzen to restore their gift exchange once the settling of the dust had enabled them to do so (in 2010, Franzen appeared on the show with his new novel Freedom, describing himself as “mellowed”). This story of investments and returns pleases the part of our scholarly self that prizes literary critique for its ethos of hard-headed exposure of concealed politico-economic agendas. And indeed, this story is not false or uninteresting (it would be disingenuous to deny the motivating power of social prestige). But neither does the emphasis on a rational exchange of assets exhaust the complex realities of charismatic attraction. Since the “social magic 50 See Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (NY: Oxford UP, 1985). 51 See Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992), Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999) and Mark Osteen, “Gift or Commodity? ” The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines (London: Routledge, 2002) 229-47. 52 The Oprah Winfrey Show, September 17, 1996. 62 G ünter l eyPoldt of institutions” can “constitute just about anything as an interest,” 53 Oprah’s sense that Morrison puts her in touch with something larger (genius, the infinite, her best self, etc.) may well be more vivid than her sense of a gain in social prestige. This would also seem to be Dreiser’s point, when towards the end of Sister Carrie he suggests that Carrie’s social rise had little to do with strategic motivations (“reason had very little part in this”). As a sensitive artist type (a “dreamer” who simply “follows” “the sound of beauty”) Carrie “instinctively” moves towards sites of attraction (places that offer “more of loveliness than she had ever known,” where people wear “fine raiment” in “elegant surroundings” and “see[m] to be contented”), 54 that is to say, she is drawn towards an atmosphere in which power, wealth, beauty, and higher values seem to become indistinguishable or reinforce one another through spatial contact. It seems that the promise of the charismatic is based on a relational trust that subverts strictly value-rational moves, encouraging a leap of faith and a suspension of skeptical questioning. Your embodied sense of orientation cannot yet tell you much about the social returns of a charismatic connection at the moment you are hit by its affective intensities. And this affective response seems relatively independent of our more calculating moods as social snobs or sociological analysts. Works Cited Alexander, Jeffrey C. The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. ---. “The Democratic Struggle for Power: The 2008 Presidential Campaign in the USA.” Journal of Power 2.1 (April 2009): 65-88. Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. Aubry, Timothy. “Beware the Furrow of the Middlebrow: Searching for Paradise on the Oprah Winfrey Show.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.2 (Summer 2006): 350-73; ---. Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. Böhme, Gernot. Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre. Munich: Fink, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. NY: Polity, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Casanova, Pascale. “What Is a Dominant Language? Giacomo Leopardi: Theoretician of Linguistic Inequality. New Literary History 44.3 (Summer 2013): 379-399. Collins, Jim. Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. De Hamel, Christopher. “Books and Society.” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. II: 1100-1400. Ed. N. Morgan, and R. Thomson. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. 3-10. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Ed. Donald Pizer. NY: Norton, 3rd edition, 2006. 53 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992) 117. 54 Dreiser, Sister Carrie 353. Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) 63 English, James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. NY: Oxford UP, 1985. Frampton, Edith. “Toni Morrison, Body Politics, Oprah’s Book Club.” The Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture. Ed. T.T. Cotton, and K. Springer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2011. 145-160. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Oxford: Polity, 1990. Godelier, Maurice. The Enigma of the Gift. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Griswold, Wendy. Regionalism and the Reading Class. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Herbst, Ludolf. Hitlers Charisma: Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2010. Hungerford, Amy. “Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass.” Contemporary Literature 47.3 (2006): 343-380. Illouz, Eva. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. NY: Columbia UP, 2003. Joas, Hans. The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights. Georgetown: U of Georgetown P, 2013. Kantorowicz, E.H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Kaufman, Rona. “‘That, My Dear, Is Called Reading’: Oprah’s Book Club and the Construction of a Readership.” Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response. Ed. Patrocinio P. Schweickart, and Elizabeth A. Flynn. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2004. 221-255. Keane, Webb. “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Materiality. Ed. Daniel Miller. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Keller, Julia. “Franzen vs. the Oprah Factor.” Chicago Tribune (12 November, 2001) http: / / www.chicagotribune.com. Kirkpatrick, David. “‘Oprah’ Gaffe by Franzen Draws Ire and Sales.” New York Times, 29. Oct. 2001. <www.nytimes.com>. Kohl, Karl-Heinz. Die Macht der Dinge: Geschichte und Theorie sakraler Objekte. Munich: Beck, 2003. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The Social Life of Things, Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. 64-94. Lauber, Stefan. Von der Reliquie zum Ding: Heiliger Ort - Wunderkammer - Museum. Berlin: Akademie, 2011. Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Minneapolis: Coffee House P, 2011. Leypoldt, Günter. “The Uses of Metaphor: Richard Rorty’s Literary Criticism and the Poetics of World-Making.” New Literary History (Special Issue: Remembering Richard Rorty) 39.1 (Winter 2008): 145-63. Löw, Martina. “The Constitution of Space.” The European Journal of Social Theory 11.1 (2011): 25-49. Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke. Berlin/ DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1968. Möllering, Guido. Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity. Oxford: Elsevier, 2006. ---. “The Nature of Trust: From Georg Simmel to a Theory of Expectation, Interpretation and Suspension.” Sociology 35.2 (2001): 403-20. Osteen, Mark. “Gift or Commodity? ” The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines. London: Routledge, 2002. 229-47. 64 G ünter l eyPoldt Perry, Michael. “Resisting Paradise: Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club. Ed. Cecilia Konchar Farr, and Jamie Harker. Albany: State U of NY P, 2008. Rawls, John. Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap, 1971. Reynolds, Joshua. The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols. Ed. Edmund Malone. London: Cadell, Davis, 1797. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke. Transl. Stephen Mitchell. NY: Modern Library, 1995. Rooney, Kathleen. Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America. 2nd Edition. 2005. Fayettesville: U of Arkansas P, 2008. Searle, John. The Social Construction of Reality. NY: Free Press, 1995. Shils, Edward. Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1975. ---. The Constitution of Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Schindehette, Susan. “Novel approach.” People Magazine (12 November 2001): 83-4. Simmel, Georg. Philosophie des Geldes. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1900. Sloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Taylor, Charles. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. ---. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. ---. “What is Human Agency? ” Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1. Cambridge: CUP, 1985. 15-44. Warner, Michael, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (eds.). Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr, 1985. Weiner, Annette. Inalienable Possessions. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso, 2009. A my h unGerford GPS Historicism When a novel knows where you are standing while you read it, how does the act of reading change? The question is something more than a thought experiment because of a collaboration between a writer and editor named Eli Horowitz and a programmer named Russell Quinn, two men who met through their mutual connection with McSweeney’s, the small San Francisco based press that publishes the literary journal McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. The unusual collaboration between Horowitz and Quinn led to what I will argue is a significant formal innovation for the novel: a novel contained in an app, one that attempts to shuttle fluidly between the virtual and material worlds. Horowitz wanted to produce, he says, “a novel you could explore,” and he meant that in a literal sense as well as an imaginative one: that by travelling around the country and around the world a reader could experience the novel more and more fully and discover different parts of its narrative. 1 The idea became a work called The Silent History, which was released in daily installments through the app’s delivery system beginning in the spring of 2012 and was, in short order, declared by Wired magazine to be “Entirely revolutionary.” While Wired may have overstated the case, given the novel’s commitment to classic forms of storytelling, The Silent History, by its very design, invites us to consider not only how reading might change when the novel migrates to a new medium, but also how the methods and claims of literary history might change along with the practices of reading. The interaction between novel and reader that GPS-enabled devices make possible has interpretive implications - that is, implications for how we read The Silent History’s meaning and significance as a novel - but it also affects method: the conjunction of literature and new technology makes it possible to know things about readers and their behavior that have rarely been known and have thus rarely been included in accounts of literary history. The use of space in the novel urges the reader to take up a set of concrete practices that differ in important respects from traditional novel-reading, and compel readers to produce traces of their reading practice in an entirely new kind of data. Or rather, a kind of data that became central to business and social networking platforms with the advent of Web 2.0 in the early 2000’s, but that had not yet been harnessed to the form of the novel. That delay, and its meaning for the future of the novel as a form, is something I consider in the second half of this essay. Across the arc of the whole, I argue that building a novel into an app, among its other interpretive consequences, allows one to observe with unusual clarity how New Historicist modes of reading - which 1 Horowitz, Interview with Contents, Issue no. 4, 25 July, 2012-4 October, 2012. Web. Accessed 7 June 2013. 66 A my h unGerford take the form and content of a work to reflect, or even to allegorize, the deep structures of the historical moment in which it is made - might collide with both a sociological mode of reading and with other, more dramatically criticcentered, ways of constructing literary and cultural history. The Silent History speaks to its historical context in two distinct voices - the voice of narrative and the voice of data. The narrative and its GPS features answer my opening questions in ways that suggest the limits of both classic New Historicism and emergent big-data approaches to literary study. At its most venturesome, this argument gestures beyond what I will suggest is New Historicism’s decline to a bifurcated methodological future. On the one hand, historicism may mean something more scientific than we have assumed in the past - exemplified by the use of large-scale data - and, on the other hand, historicism may be abandoned in favor of a more old fashioned reliance on the critic’s unique mind, creativity, and voice - in favor, that is, of the critic’s explicit participation in ongoing literary history. The critic may tell the history of a specific phenomenon (something closer to the history of ideas) or narrate acts of reading for their own sake in hopes of modeling a transformed experience of reading for others. Silent Reading The Silent History borrows significant formal features from the nineteenthcentury novel. First released as a serial, its installments were timed, and composed, for each day of the week. But unlike its Victorian progenitors, the parts of The Silent History were not written by the creator of the work, Eli Horowitz, but commissioned, assembled and edited by him in collaboration with the writers Kevin Moffett and Matthew Derby who produced the days’ stories according to a detailed plot outline that Horowitz drew up in advance. Russell Quinn developed the app itself. This is not to say that Quinn’s role was similar to that of someone who designs a book’s cover and chooses paper and fonts. It is more like saying that he’s a specialist who provided structural services to the novel, as if someone other than Joyce had determined the chapter divisions of Ulysses. From the start, the novel’s content and its digital form developed symbiotically, with the story in some ways reverse engineered from the sense of how it would be produced and structured in the app. 2 2 Here is Horowitz’s fuller explanation: “I guess the first element was that I wanted to create a novel that you could somehow explore. But I knew there was no way I could fill a whole country myself, so that led to the system of field reporters. But I knew they’d need to be inspired and unified by a central narrative, so that led to the testimonials. But I realized I could never write that narrative by myself, so I found collaborators (Matt Derby and Kevin Moffett), but then I needed to make the varied voice a strength, rather than something to hide, so I settled on the oral history format, and I needed a plot that would allow for hundreds of different perspectives, so I ended up with a sort GPS Historicism 67 Set in 2044, the novel presents itself as a chronologically organized archive of transcribed oral histories that track an epidemic beginning in the United States in 2011, when suddenly, occasionally, children are born without the capacity for written or spoken language. These children come to be called “the silents” and the archive is a government-funded project intended to produce “some understanding, or at least a clear record, of [the] ever-changing phenomenon” of the silents. It contains contributions, we are told, from “teachers, classmates, little league coaches, government officials, faith healers, cult leaders, militia members, pilgrims, imposters.” 3 As we learn over the course of the novel, the silents do communicate with one another, through complex facial expressions, and their formation into communities of various kinds triggers responses in the mainstream culture over time - responses ranging from the violent to the mystical. It is telling, I think, that The Silent History imagines its own project - the project of documenting the history of a public health epidemic - as requiring an institution much larger and even less individually controlled than the four-person team that is in fact responsible for most of the novel. The fictional conditions of the novel’s existence are laid out in the introductory materials of the work. This begins with “The Archives,” a video of just over two minutes, that explains the structure of the story. As the camera slowly pans across the Georgian façade of an institutional-looking building, a voiceover in a faintly British or Indian accent explains that “In 2011, 32 years ago, we began collecting stories from families and medical professionals who were first encountering a strange new silence among our sons and daughters.” The label, “The Archives,” is superimposed upon the shot of the library-like building, a scene that dissolves into a panning shot of the file drawers housed inside. A second segment of the app’s front matter, titled “The Condition,” opens with the emblem of the US Department of Health and Human Services. It offers a Power Point of graphs and maps documenting the growing population of silents, diagrams of the institution for silents where their communication was first observed, MRI scans of silent and nonsilent brains, and black screens with pithy quotations from doctors, teachers, and concerned citizens about the condition and its social implications. The novel’s ambition, then, is cast in terms of institutional forms of knowledge: the novel imagines a story so extensive, so important, that only a governmental agency has the reach and resources to tell it. Indeed, there would be no story, in the logic of the novel, if silents had not been institutionalized - and thus gathered together. This is why “The Condition” takes such pains to note the role of the Red Oaks Academy in the emergence of communication between silent children. An institution for the care and education of the children, it was simultaneously dedicated to of epidemic, and…well, like that, all the way down to the day of the week in which a given testimonial is released - a Monday entry should feel different than a Friday. The form and content were constantly shaping each other.” Horowitz, interview in Contents. 3 This and all further quotations from The Silent History are taken from the edition released through Apple’s iTunes in 2012, published by Ying, Horowitz and Quinn, LLC. The quotations here are from the Prologue. 68 A my h unGerford collecting information about them; thus the emergence of the silents’ collective life occurs entirely within an institution already prepared to structure knowledge about silent life. That said, it is worth noting, for reasons to which I will return, that neither the market nor a shared national culture is imagined in the novel as capable of containing the development of that collective life or shaping the development of speaking culture’s treatment of silents. Indeed, the pharmaceutical industries associated with treatments and implants don’t enter the story in any robust way - we hear from just a single entrepreneur marketing a device that caters to silents’ existing capacities, and we hear repeatedly from the doctor responsible for inventing the implant device that, later in the story, allows silent children to speak. His reflections focus on his own thoughts and feelings about his work rather than its cultural uptake. The market is imagined as incapable of addressing a population that does not use language. Silents take up residence in the brownfields and abandoned warehouses of post-industrial America, among the detritus of the global manufacturing economy that no longer pulls goods from American factories. This is apparent in the novel’s video trailer (included in the app itself), which prominently features such sites as it introduces the atmospheric settings of the story. For those in the non-silent mainstream who are drawn to these places, the silents are in fact cultural producers, producing something the world needs: an experience and a life outside the shell of American mass-market cultural production. In a striking scene, a curious boy, a silent wannabe, follows a group of silent teenagers into an urban street attraction where customers can have the virtually induced sensual experience of falling out of a plane with a bunch of gorillas. The silents cooperate as they fall out of the plane, forming a human chain in the virtual air, taking the boy along with them, and, once on the virtual ground, they slip through a hole in the skin of the entertainment (as John Barth’s Ambrose does in his own porous fictional funhouse) where they hang out together on a dune until they are discovered and kicked out by the amusement’s operator. It is as if the silents are producing an alternate world from a tear in the seamless surface of American consumer capitalism, a tear through which physical and collective human presence can penetrate a culture centered on increasingly private virtual experience. Government power, then - the power to archive, and, later in the story, the power to make and enforce public health laws, the power that steps in where the market fails - remains the driver of the silents’ history despite the silents’ alternative forms of culture-making, and the novel imagines that state power as faceless. We do encounter the mayor of a small town in California, where the silent commune called Face to Face is located; we see him at first protecting and then sacrificing the commune to federal enforcers as public sentiment about silent people shifts across time. And we come to know some doctors who treat silents, particularly Dr. Theodore Greene, who pioneers the implantation device and is father to the silent Flora. We come to understand the device as a misguided product of his longing for connection with his daughter. What we don’t see is the political movement to mandate implants for silent GPS Historicism 69 children; we never know who advocated for this idea or why, or how its proponents persuaded the public to go along. We are left with the feeling that the law was inevitable, an expression of the double hegemony of language and the American “normal.” The mandatory implantation program is the dark complement to the regime of knowledge that the Archives represent, and the implantation program is itself implicitly represented as a collective initiative powered by a hive of persons even more anonymous, and less differentiated, than those responsible for the Archives. In other words, government steps in to reinforce culture structured by a shared language, acting as the regulating institution in a region where the market can’t function - because the silents are not effective consumers - and where money can’t be made. Quinn and Horowitz together have created an institutional narrator that acts as the counterpart to this governmental function: the app’s algorithm, which parses and controls the information we read, which places the story on the map, organizes the narrative, and orients us to our physical and imaginative location within it. Like the “archives” within the novel, the app’s design is a faceless narrator, a narrator created not by that recognizable literary personage, an “author,” but by the quiet technical “developer” and the bureaucratic “editor” - the sort of actors who remain, like the silent culture-makers within the story, culturally invisible within the production networks of the contemporary novel. Given the comprehensive institutional frame of the story itself, it comes as a surprise, in the third section of the front matter, called “The Prologue” to see a report from “Hugh Purcell, Executive Director, Washington, DC” dated 2044, which departs strikingly from the institutional decorum of the other two segments of the novel’s framing introduction. The distinct voice of Purcell, his humor and his philosophical musings, suggest the very flexibility of this imagined institutional frame and the institutional structure that is the app itself. Purcell opens his introduction to the archives with the colorful memory of his first day as a junior epidemiological archivist working to document the phenomenon of the silents, a day that included wandering around seedy neighborhoods, “getting mugged and dryhumped by a group of teenage girls in football uniforms,” and discovering a hidden community of silents thriving within an abandoned building. Eighteen years later we find him as the Executive Director of the project. Purcell’s reflections suggest his fascination with the very idea of a region of human experience shut off from language - and he thus cues the reader to the Big Questions that the novel grapples with: “Are words our creation, or did they create us? And who are we in a world without them? Are there wilder, more verdant fields out beyond the boundaries of language, where those of us who are silent now wander? Each of us will come to know the answer to that in our own way. We all enter and leave the world in silence, after all, and everything else is simply how we make our way through that middle passage.” (Prologue). Even if Purcell is in charge of the archives we read, the quirkiness of his introduction - he does not speak in a recognizably institutional voice - separates the individual human voice from that structure’s conventions. In a way this is the 70 A my h unGerford product and the thematic echo of the work’s production: the writers, Moffett and Derby, are playful and funny, attracted to an absurdist strain of contemporary literature exemplified by the work of George Saunders. “Dryhumped by a group of teenage girls in football uniforms”? Falling out of a plane with gorillas? They take Horowitz’s central directives and seed them with the quirky traces of their writerly autonomy. Reading on Site The preceding account of The Silent History is meant to introduce readers to the novel’s basic themes and structures in such a way that one can begin to see how the work interacts with the world we know and how it reflects back on the unusual way the novel was made. Enter, now, GPS tracking: There are certain sections of the novel I have not yet mentioned, called “Field reports,” that can be read only in specific places - very specific. To access any of these documents the reader’s device must be within about ten meters of a location to which such a document has been pegged; for the report to make sense, the reader needs to be looking at the particular thing - be it a dent in a fire hydrant or the trunk of a tree or the opening of an alleyway - that figures in, or is somehow accounted for, in the field report. The reports are written by an array of contributors beyond the four main creators of the novel. The app invites its readers to offer field reports from whatever location they wish and provides detailed instructions about how to write and submit one for review (there will be more to say about this element of the reports). As a reader, one can either travel to see a specific report or make a habit of checking the novel as one goes about daily life to see whether there are newly active reports popping up (if the app is left open, it can alert users when there is an active field report nearby). When one arrives at the site of a report - say, the Henry Whitfield House museum in Guilford, CT - the report turns green on the map and is marked as “active,” and the text tells one where to look, what to notice: That tree in the center of the property is where the fictional author of this report would have his lunch and observe the growth of mushrooms; that well near the house is where the silent girl would linger, tracing the stones with her fingers. This reading practice - and the writing practice that produces it - is made necessary by the noise in the GPS positioning within the app. Horowitz’s editorial instructions to aspiring field reporters explain: “The pin placement within the app is not always perfectly precise, and a reader may have access while not yet standing exactly at your desired spot. Thus, it’s helpful if the text itself can include subtle cues helping readers properly orient themselves.” 4 The technical necessity becomes, however, a literary invitation to be oriented through the novel and its medium - to wander with one’s eyes pinned to the blue dot of one’s current location. In this way it is also an invitation both to be the silent and to experience a world not unlike the virtual 4 From Eli Horowitz’s “Guidelines for Field Reporters.” Private communication with the author. GPS Historicism 71 street entertainment that the silents penetrate (but usually without the gorillas and the airplane). Readers are asked to locate themselves in space so as to understand a particular story in a particular way, toggling back and forth between the view within the device’s fictional world and the view within the space they’ve come physically to occupy. The invitation to file one’s own field report from a chosen site asks the reader to become a producer of the work, producing content for the app but also producing a shared experience of a place across time, accessible to others who follow the app’s GPS to that location. In this sense the reader is no longer the silent’s double but the actual speaking occupant of an imagined world whose writing brings that virtual world further into being. The reader is also actually standing on a street or lot, becoming the wanderer who begins to change the real-time demographic flow of that place at the behest of the novel. These locations are imagined within the novel as places where “the silences collided with our physical world” (“The Archives,” The Silent History); in real time they become places where The Silent History collides with our physical world. We can understand a field report as an individual reader’s imaginative response to the novel. The app stitches that response to a location, making it possible for the next reader to replicate the first reader’s imaginative extension of the main storyline into a new part of the world. Private acts of reading thus accrete to the novel’s public form, not as paratext - such as blog post, literary-critical essay, or author interview - but as part of the novel itself, subsumed into the editor’s central vision. Horowitz’s vision for these elements of the novel is articulated in his instructions to field reporters, and that vision chimes with the kind of editorial control he exerted over Moffett and Derby, the main writers of the novel. I will quote at length here to give a sense of the sort of teaching these guidelines provide - they run to six single-spaced pages. “The specific physical location of the report must play a central and necessary role,” Horowitz writes. “Ideally this will manifest itself in ways both large and small; for example, an unusual intersection provides a vivid setting for an incident, but the incident also results in odd marks still visible in the pavement. A successful field report integrates the setting in creative and enriching ways, earning the reader’s trip to the location; in fact, field reports should feel incomplete if read anywhere else.” 5 And again: The setting should be utilized more than described; there’s no need to list the facts that will already be obvious to a reader/ viewer standing in that spot. Instead, the location serves as a parallel source of information, accompanying your written narrative; the two sources can subtly support and amplify each other to deepen the authenticity of the incident being described. The setting can also be driving the action, an active force in the story. 6 Reports that contradict the backbone of the novel (contained in the testimonials supplied through the “Archives” to all readers regardless of location) are not accepted for publication. 5 Horowitz, “Guidelines.” 6 Horowitz, “Guidelines.” 72 A my h unGerford The writing practice Horowitz thus guides grows from an imaginative interaction with the story that has long precedent in literary reading practices: “In its own way,” Horowitz explains in an interview, “this project is about interactivity and augmented reality. . .: you interact with the story by physically standing inside it; it augments reality by just providing a different explanation of what’s already there.” 7 We might think of many low-tech analogous cases from the last hundred and fifty years of literary culture: readers touring Baker Street in London to see “where” Sherlock Holmes lived, or travelling to Wordsworth’s Lake District, or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a region roughly corresponding to Dorset (both Hardy and his publishers encouraged his fans to associate the region with his novels). It is as if such literary tourists could then turn around and add to Arthur Conan Doyle’s collected stories, or Wordsworth’s poetry, or Hardy’s novels. Readers are thus drawn by the novel itself into a structure for experience - which is to say, an institution - that assigns both writers and readers to certain roles. It moves us through space, requires our work for expansion, and controls or guides our access to both experience and knowledge. The structure is rigorously historical in a topsy turvy sense possible only in fiction: as Purcell explains in his 2044 Prologue, the story contained in the archive, “presumes nothing about the future; it is strictly a record of the past, of what we looked like before, and how we got here” (Prologue). The chronologically controlled production of the novel in its initial release of six month-long sets of daily installments reproduces for the reader herself Purcell’s claim that we cannot know the future. The app limits the reader’s access to the unfolding story. Post-release, the app prevents readers who purchase the whole novel at once from skipping parts or reading ahead; any one of the chronologically organized “testimonials” will not open if all the previous entries have not been opened (and, presumably, read) first. This interaction between writer and reader is the zone of literary experiment that most preoccupies Horowitz. His previous book, Clock without a Face (McSweeney’s, 2010), is a puzzle-book inspired by the activity of geocaching, where hikers with GPS units hunt for hidden caches where geocachers have left notes, gifts, log books, and the like. The book’s conceit revolves around an apartment building of 12 stories. Each page spread shows the minutely illustrated floor plan of each story; these floor plans act as maps and keys to an actual geographic location in the United States where Horowitz had buried a hand-wrought, bejeweled bronze number corresponding to the floor of the apartment building where its location was encrypted. These were the numbers of the eponymous clock face, to be discovered one by one and kept by the readers who could first solve the puzzles of the book’s pages. Clock Without a Face is ostensibly aimed at young readers - or at those adults who still fancy maps and buried treasure - though the puzzles are so challenging that the numbers seem mainly to have been found by adults working with 7 Horowitz, Contents. GPS Historicism 73 their teenage children. 8 The book induces a heady and aesthetically pleasing kind of play, a kind of play that asks readers to map book onto landscape and to be present in the geography denoted by the book, checking page against real ground with a real shovel, for real payoff. Horowitz’s next project - an ebook created with the writer Chris Adrian, a book with multiple false endings - aims to experiment further with the power dynamics between reader and writer, dynamics with which both Clock Without a Face and The Silent History have meddled. He recounts, as inspiration, the intensity of some readers’ complaints that they cannot access distantly located field reports and their demands for the delivery of new installments of The Silent History, a kind of desire that narrative seriality has always relied upon, but that the instant interactivity of the virtual medium makes newly pressing. Horowitz wondered: what if a reader could earn the right to access the next installment either by waiting a set amount of time (as all readers did who subscribed to the serialized form of The Silent History) or by performing some task - going somewhere, finding something, doing something? 9 Horowitz is experimenting with the ways that new devices for reading, equipped with a whole array of features ostensibly unrelated to reading, might be drawn into a reading practice that blends the virtual reality of fiction with the reader’s bodily, historical life. Contemplating actual readers just before the app began to release its first installments, Horowitz confessed to feeling the limits of his powers rather than their breadth: “Words are easy - you choose which ones you want and they stay where you put them. But the world is messy - these field reports only really exist via a weird combination of text, reader, and physical environment, far beyond anything we can hope to control.” 10 Authors, even those who felt they were the gods of their universes, have always felt the world’s power shouldering in on their own. What is new about Horowitz’s version of authorial control is that the medium itself, powered by smart algorithms, can more decisively giveth and taketh away. Novel Data I have begun to show how several aspects of The Silent History’s form and content reflect the conditions of its production and reception as well as the literary preoccupations of its makers. I’ve noted how the novel imagines silents occupying abandoned zones of the market economy; we might ask whether literary endeavor is also that region where the market can’t function and money can’t be made? We could note how, in the novel, the government puts implants in the brains of silents in order to pipe in language and meaning. The central processing center in Maine, wirelessly connected to the implants, takes its language from public-domain novels, advertising, 8 This profile fits the accounts of number-hunters’ successes that I was able to find posted on the web, where a reading community inspired by the book popped up to track which of the numbers had been found and where. 9 Horowitz, conversation with the author, Feb. 14, 2013. 10 Horowitz, Contents. 74 A my h unGerford and movie trailers. Walking silently around the site of a field report, looking where your device bids you, noticing what it tells you to notice, you find yourself manipulated by a central processor that pipes language into your brain, creating the sort of metafictional experience that ramifies out to our experience of the culture at large. Attaching the novel to the devices that render us silent even as we communicate furiously through them makes us into the very figure of the wandering silent - the person who walks staring intently down at her phone, absorbed in the wilder, more verdant fields of the virtual. And the novel offers a world where institutions much larger than the individual set the parameters for how we narrate history, a thematic feature of the novel that points both back to Horowitz’s experiments with narrative control and outward to the world we live in. In short, I’ve offered a typical New Historicist reading, revealing how at every turn the novel invites us to see in its story an allegory of its production, the reflection of the historical moment in which it was made, and the authorial conditions under which it came into being. Countless novels and other works of art do this for the attentive reader as research uncovers more information about context and as we make more detailed, or more sophisticated, observations about the work at hand. But this novel, as I said at the outset, speaks towards context in two distinct voices. Having listened to the one, we must listen to the other. When Horowitz decided that he “wanted to create a novel that you could somehow explore,” in the physical sense that I’ve been describing, he was presented with an immediate production problem: he “knew there was no way [he] could fill a whole country [him]self.” In turn, this determined the form and authorship of the novel, a system that would mobilize a whole cadre of readers and make them into writers. 11 But even in the diffusion of authorial control that resulted, the raw materials of a different kind of control were amassing within the technical structure of the app. I asked, in the first sentence of this essay, what happens to the act of reading when your novel knows where you are standing while you read it. And so there is another kind of answer that comes into view: reading produces new kinds of traces. The Silent History produces entirely new data about readers’ behavior. We can watch the reader as she moves through the novel - it is possible for Horowitz and Quinn to know how far each reader has read in the story, for instance, and how fast they read it, and on what day; readers’ imaginative responses, in the form of those field reports, are gathered and selectively added to the novel itself; Horowitz and Quinn know when and how often field reports are accessed. If they wanted to they could determine exactly when a reader stopped reading and where they were in the novel. There is nothing to suggest that Horowitz and Quinn are interested in the 11 Horowitz, Contents. GPS Historicism 75 creepier forms of surveillance and control that one can easily imagine given these features of the technology built into the novel. 12 But we might be interested in that data. And by we of course I mean we who are interested in literary history and the history and practice of reading. This is just the sort of thing that scholars laboring in archives try to reconstruct, and always in a provisional way. Thankfully for us, some of the data The Silent History’s app gathers is both accessible and nicely visible through the novel itself. Even simply using the field reports and the GPS mapping an ordinary user can amass a certain kind of data and from that data establish some basic inferences about the novel’s social network. First, we might observe that field reporters are in some sense a network made by the guidelines Horowitz supplies for those who might like to contribute: “There was a lot of trial-and-error required to craft guidelines that would elicit a pretty reliable level of success from a varied group of writers,” Horowitz says. “In theory, the specificity of the form will result in a smaller but more dedicated group of contributors.” 13 And he’s right: Horowitz’s six-page, detailed, guidelines do create a group, a group defined by their investment in writing as a craft and by their willingness to become students of that craft. And who, in the social sense, were the dedicated group of contributors? “The first group of reporters were a couple of friends,” Horowitz says, “[t]hen it was friends of friends, then friends of friends of friends - wider and wider circles, in order to simulate the even-wider circles” that the novel would ultimately create. To return to the meditation on literary method: The Silent History’s multiple authors and its GPS innovations construct an actual map of its own literary sociology, making visible the expanding “circles” that constitute the repeated formal structure of the work itself, from its design to its narrative structure to its actual production. Horowitz makes it clear that the collaborative aspect of the work is not modeled on the classic interactivity of multiplayer games, or posting to a blog, though the field reports seem to follow that logic. The Silent History works differently because of Horowitz’s editorial “guidelines” and because the contributors are drawn from a preexisting set of social connections rather than being generated by the work itself - which is to say, Horowitz embraced the primacy of other social networks in the 12 Horowitz explains that the data the app collects is by no means without complications, even regarding the number of “readers” who have used the app. Special offers such as free downloads on a certain day, or different purchasing options (volume 1 free, then you get the option to pay for the rest when you finish that volume, or you buy all six volumes at once but only pay for five) suggest analogs to, say, picking up a book off a shelf in the store, browsing it, but not buying it. Horowitz attests to being mildly curious about some aspects of reader behavior but also leery of what he might find out. “I would guess that the numbers would be slightly chilling,” he says, considering whether he’d want to figure out where readers stopped reading - noting, however, that this would be potentially discouraging data to possess if we could know it for any kind of book. Interview with the author, 29 May 2014. 13 Horowitz, Contents. 76 A my h unGerford generation of virtually networked literature rather than relying, as other digital literature innovators have tried to do, on social circles entirely assembled by the virtual work itself. Sociology, and the novel itself, tell a story about those social networks. For instance, we can note the importance of the writing program to its existence as we look at two regions of The Silent History’s integrated world map: the UK and Florida. In both these regions - distinct, say, from the empty maps of European countries such as Germany - there are clusters of field reports pegged to locations. One of these clusters was generated when Horowitz’s invitation to contribute a field report, sent to a friend in a writing program at the University of Florida, was circulated in the department’s newsletter. The dense UK plot, Horowitz explained, was occasioned by the writing program at the University of East Anglia, where an enthusiastic contributor was studying. The cluster of reports in Australia is the product of a different network: a young man living there who is a subscriber and fan of McSweeney’s invited Horowitz to a literary festival he was running; Horowitz went, and talked about The Silent History, and the connection bore fruit in the Australian field reports. What Horowitz describes as simply “a fluid community of readers and writers with an element of guidance at its core” is revealed to be just that, except that the element of guidance is visible on the map as an effect not of editorial control, but of social acts and facts outside the novel that produce the aesthetic investments that define the network the novel in turn produces. 14 In its very bones, in its foundational data structures, the novel reveals other sociological realities as well. The Silent History makes visible particular kinds of workers who are important to the contemporary development of the novel. These include workers we might call “subsistence writers,” people who write often without pay in what is experienced as a gift economy, and whose income comes mainly from other forms of work (they are economically speaking what the sociologist Bernard Lahire calls plural actors, writers with a “double life.”) 15 The two main writers of The Silent History were recruited by Horowitz with the promise of only modest payment: they were offered a small sum up front as an advance, and a generous percentage of anything made on the app; both writers turned down the advance. More persuasively, Horowitz offered the incentives of working on a new kind of novel, of breaking new artistic ground, and of working collectively with other writers. That appeal worked - perhaps in part because Moffett and Derby had enough other employment to make a living (one is a professor, and the other works for a videogame company), and perhaps also in part because the project provided other kinds of capital - it was, for instance, a project that distinguished 14 Certainly manipulation was not Horowitz’s point, or at least that is not the aspect of the project he emphasizes: “I do know that I wasn’t trying to build a wiki, and I don’t particularly see this as ‘user-generated content.’ To me, it’s not so modern or unusual, just a fluid community of writers and readers, with an element of guidance and structure at its core.” Horowitz, Contents. 15 See Lahire, “The Double Life of Writers” and, for his broader analysis of the individual’s social plurality, The Plural Actor, tr. David Fernbach (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). GPS Historicism 77 Moffett when he applied for academic jobs. Field reporters are not paid, unless they contribute a number of good reports, in which case, Horowitz says, he might send them a little check, out of the blue. The interaction preserves the sense of generosity and surprise that lies at the heart of the collaborative dynamic Horowitz created. 16 Subsistence writers have always been with us, even if the forms of their subsistence might change over time. But literary experiment on digital devices also requires technical craftspeople who will sign on to the same inverted economy that has been shaping literary taste - and sustaining subsistence writers - since the 19th century, an economy where the intrinsic interest of art and its cultural value are not bolstered but threatened by commercial success. What’s more, technical craftspeople must be recruited to that inverted economy against the pull of the right-side-up economy, since technical craftspeople, unlike writers, are voraciously absorbed by the institutions of mass market capitalism. Even small-time programmers, it seems, can get rich quick, or at least subsist, with a nifty app and 99 cent downloads, and those truly skilled as programmers - as Quinn is - are the targets of intense desire emanating from the start-ups and behemoths that rule the virtual universe. In this sense, the Silent History app itself, like the communities of silents whose stories it tells, is operating in a space little developed by market forces. The fact that it is a highly designed app rather than a beautifully designed book, say, places the novel in a region of cultural production that has been almost entirely owned by capitalist enterprise. Russell Quinn, the app’s developer, is that unusual programmer who is content to work without massive salary or the hope of massive future returns. Glancing back to the story’s preoccupation with abandoned warehouses, we might think differently about where the novel speaks loudest to contemporary capitalist culture. Its very existence as an app novel - the data point described by the novel itself - tells us more about the conditions under which literary experiment can happen in the corners of capitalist culture than any creative reading of those old warehouses. But it is worth noting that Horowitz himself doesn’t see the novel’s social networks in these terms. To him, “friends of friends, then friends of friends of friends, all the way out” produces something more like a random demography, a community of strangers. This is part of an ideology of art important to contemporary literary production: that creativity is socially connective, in and of itself and apart from structures such as the school or the market; that its connectivity serves an aesthetic democracy. For neither Horowitz nor Dave Eggers at McSweeney’s seem to want to know, or need to know, what 16 My account of the recruitment and payment of writers contributing to The Silent History is the product of a series of interviews I conducted with Horowitz in early spring of 2013 and 2014. For details on the process of writing the novel as a team, from Kevin Moffett’s point of view, see Moffett’s interview with Adam Levin, The Rumpus, 1 Oct. 2012. Web. Accessed 28 May 2014. Money is not mentioned at all in the interview’s discussion of Horowitz’s appeal and Moffett’s work on the project. We might also note, in passing, that Levin is a McSweeney’s author: his enormous novel, The Instructions, was published by the press in 2010. 78 A my h unGerford they might know about their readers - Eggers reacted negatively to an early request to survey the quarterly’s readers for this project, for instance, associating the effort to gather such information with the marketing strategies of publishers like Condé Nast. Horowitz and Quinn do not broadcast or seek to use the data on readers that their remarkable novel produces; that data is time-consuming to clean up and inessential to their creative or business purposes. The kind of knowledge valued by a literary scholar stands in this sense at odds with, or at least apart from, the values of the creative enterprise. The critic Andrew Goldstone has been urging the digital humanities to attend to readers as a source and object of large-scale data analysis - a version of this line of research is evident in his analysis of the professional readers who leave traces of their reading in the pages of journals and books cataloged by the MLA bibliography. 17 But far more reading is done by amateur readers - and it is the amateur reader who still drives the literary culture, if only by virtue of her aggregated preferences as these are assessed by editors and suppliers of books. The experiment of The Silent History suggests that there is a lot more to know about ordinary readers, that there are things we can and may soon routinely know if more literary workers like Russell Quinn emerge (we are already awash in subsistence writers). While the market for a programmer’s skills might underwrite her literary projects - in her double life she can easily earn money as a consultant - the facts of literary culture virtually require that literary programmers use money in this way. The Silent History thus relies on a classically inverted artistic economy that not only thrives on scarcity - where small market share suggests elite cultural value - but also leads to a kind of scarcity unhelpful to the development of the art form in a technical age. The scarcity of literary programmers sharply limits the pace of artistic development for the novel in digital media. Can the aura of literary taste and the social networks that revolve around literary enterprises produce literary programmers in numbers great enough to allow the novel to continue to develop as a virtual form? The world’s cultural institutions, it seems, must somehow produce the technical artist who will donate his labor at well under its market value - ramping up a process of cultural reproduction that has caused the over-supply of writers, successfully turning out ever-increasing numbers of would-be novelists, but that hasn’t yet produced many programmers of app novels. Our culture probably won’t produce them until the Program Era gives way to the Programming Era. The rise of standard programming courses in primary, secondary, and postsecondary curricula indicates that this will happen eventually. At Stanford, already, the largest major is Computer Science, and the English department looks to grow its numbers by partnering with them in a double major program. One wonders what broad effects these disseminated means of cultural reproduction will have on literary experiment, when one considers, for instance, the ethnic and gender profiles of the technical elite. While the GI Bill 17 Andrew Goldstone, “Seeing with Numbers” panel, Modern Language Association annual convention, January 2014. GPS Historicism 79 and multiculturalist politics dramatically expanded the demographic range of writers working in the literary field, what will it take to create a similar effect in forms of digital literature that require programming skills? There is one last thing to say about the data-point that is The Silent History: the novel, as of the summer of 2014, also exists as, yes, a book. On paper, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. The critic Kate Marshall reviewed the novel upon its release in this traditional form, charged with assessing how it compared with the app version, and what she actually read, in order to do the job, was the paper version. Her argument therefore focuses on the difference that serialization as such makes to the novel, and in this sense her interaction with The Silent History plays out exactly what Horowitz didn’t want to happen: the print form, which is easier or at least more familiar to read, overshadowed of the app version and its formal innovations, which are all too easily dismissed as a set of inessential extra features. 18 What is ephemeral in our study of literary culture? In this case, the very form of a novel. 19 Works Cited Horowitz, Eli. “Interview.” Contents, Issue no. 4, 25 July, 2012- 4 October, 2012. Web. Accessed 7 June 2013. ---. “Guidelines for Field Reporters.” Private communication with the author. ---. “Interview with the Author”. May 29, 2014. Horowitz, Eli, Mathew Derby, Kevin Moffett, and Russell Quinn. The Silent History. Released in serialized form as app through Apple’s iTunes from October 1 2012 until April 19, 2013. Lahire, Bernard. “The Double Life of Writers”. New Literary History 41.2 (Spring 2010): 443-465. 18 In her review, Marshall poses the crucial formal questions: “to what degree do the serialized, electronic format and limited interactivity provided by the app version of The Silent History contribute to its status as an innovative, experimental work of fiction, and if they do, why should you read the print novel instead? ” Kate Marshall, “Waiting for the Plague: A Field Report from Contemporary Serialization,” (review of The Silent History, both app and print forms), Iowa Review 44.2 (Fall 2014). 19 We may wonder, then, why Horowitz published the novel in paper form. He explains that he did it for two main reasons: for money, and to increase readers’ access to the story, which its creators had come to care more about having worked on it for two years (at the beginning, he says, their main focus was on the intrinsic interest of the form). The firm - Ying, Horowitz and Quinn, LLC, which owns the novel - was paid a $25,000 advance for the right to print it, which was split between the agent and the four creators. This was not the first time that the original form of the novel was provisionally set aside, either: before the app was released, also in an effort to generate some income, Horowitz sold the film rights, which, if a film were ever made, would again translate the novel to a different medium. Horowitz was content to allow these formal permutations of the work, and happy for the income, because he thought that neither one impeded what he calls a “full reckoning” with the electronic form of the original release. He notes he would not have agreed with a simultaneous release of the app and paper versions, because doing so would forestall a full engagement with the app on its own terms. (Horowitz, interview with the author, 29 May 2014.) 80 A my h unGerford ---. The Plural Actor. translated by David Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Marshall, Kate. “Waiting for the Plague: A Field Report from Contemporary Serialization”. The Iowa Review 44.2 (Fall 2014). Web. Accessed 14 July 2015. Moffet, Kevin. “Interview with Adam Levin”. The Rumpus, 1 Oct. 2012. Web. Accessed 28 May 2014. W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl 1 Evangelists of Culture: One Book Programs and the Agents Who Define Literature, Shape Tastes, and Reproduce Regionalism 1. Introduction The reading class is that portion of the public who does some considerable amount of reading in their leisure time, reading that is not necessary for work, studies, or daily life. 2 Members of the reading class are self-aware, they see reading as almost sacred, and they encourage other people to read more. In this, they are cultural evangelists. Many images can represent the outreach efforts of the reading class - educators, health workers, gift givers, the marketing wing of some literaryindustrial complex - and this paper offers a religious metaphor: professional members of the reading class are evangelists, fighting at the front line of culture to convert people to reading. Examples include teachers, professors, writers, editors, publishers, journalists, and - the subject of the present research - librarians. 3 While they offer pastoral care to non-professional members of the reading class, they direct their outreach to non-readers (the reading class in general tends to associate the failure to read with ignorance, inequality, narrowness, and/ or intolerance). Non-readers have endless sources of easy entertainments and gadgets, so evangelists believe they must be zealous, fighting such distractions and proselytizing to win over new readers. 1 The authors’ names are in alphabetical order; they worked equally on this research. This article was published in Poetics, 50, 96-109, Copyright Elsevier (2015). An early version of this research was presented at the conference on “Acquired Taste: Reading and the Uses of Literature in the Age of Academic Literary Studies” at the Heidelberg Center of American Studies, University of Heidelberg. We wish to thank Günter Leypoldt and Philipp Löffler, who organized the conference, for the comments we received. We presented initial findings at the American Sociological Association’s Annual Meeting in August, 2014. We are grateful for the comments received on these occasions, as well as the judicious course corrections urged by the Poetics reviewers. Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at http: / / dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/ j.poetic.2015.03.001. 2 For a review of the reading class, see Griswold (2008). 3 Non-professionals, especially parents, can be evangelists for reading as well, though they focus on small and typically intimate pools of potential converts rather than on the public at large. For the contradictory position of book industry professionals, see Miller (2006) and Thompson (2013). 82 W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl We are particularly interested in the reading-class professionals who operate at the front line, dealing directly with the public. Behind them are the upper levels of an organizational hierarchy, managers who handle administration, logistics, and the flow of information. We might think of publishers, Library of Congress staff, university administrators, New York Review of Books editors, and directors of public library systems all as such. 4 In contrast, teachers, booksellers, lecturers, and librarians have direct engagement with the public, and they energetically try to influence its reading habits and tastes. This paper investigates their choices and the resulting cultural consequences. 2. The front line of culture Sociologists tend to envision the direction of cultural influence as proceeding from either the top or the bottom of some socio-cultural hierarchy. The image of top-down control comes in two versions: the stratification version whereby elites mandate and control cultural productions and tastes, generally in support of the status quo and their own positions on top of it, or the culture industry version whereby gatekeepers channel cultural flows, here motivated by profit-seeking although the effect also supports the status quo. The bottom-up image sees cultural products and choices as forms of popular expression, and it too comes in two versions: one emphasizes markets wherein consumers vote with their wallets and the other emphasizes popular culture, often resisting elite domination, whereby the people’s tastes and preferences just keep bubbling up. These are ideal types, of course, and most theories are dialectical, but the point for the present analysis is that the flow of influence is seen as initiating at one extreme or the other of some hierarchy of social and/ or cultural advantage. As suggested previously, one can envision this as a battle for hearts and minds, where the forces of enlightenment are indoctrinating the masses or, conversely, where people are occupying and defending their space of cultural freedom. Educational institutions look rather precisely like the former, while Internet hackers, leaders, and bloggers look like the latter. 5 The outcome of the struggle for cultural influence is determined either by the strategies of the generals or by the resistance of those the generals seek to overcome. 4 In our evangelist metaphor, these folks are roughly comparable to the bishops of many Christian denominations, people whose dealings are primarily with other members of the organizational staff rather then with congregants or potential converts. Sociologists (e.g., Abbott, 1988) have shown that in professions and organizations, the most prestigious positions are those at furthest remove from the people outside the organization, from the actual patients, clientele, public, congregants, students, or - in the case at hand - general readers. Universities encourage their faculty to engage in public service and community outreach, for example, but professional prestige does not accrue to these activities; instead it goes to research addressed to a small niche of other academics, far away from the public. 5 The top-down view, essentially Marx’s idea of the ruling class using culture to legitimate its dominance, is associated with the work of Bourdieu (1984) and his followers. The bottom-up view, which emphasizes people’s capacity for resistance and agency, is Evangelists of Culture 83 On the front lines are professionals, who are philosophically aligned with the enlightenment mission and who are in direct contact with the public that the mission seeks to influence. Teachers would be a familiar example, ministers and rabbis another, and librarians - the objects of the present research - yet another. While such people work to carry out the organizational mission, they have some room for maneuver, as when a priest looks the other way at parishioners using birth control or the teacher inserts her favorite books into the curriculum. At the same time, they operate in the public eye, and their jobs involve making their institutions (their schools, churches, libraries) attractive and avoiding controversy. While there has been a wealth of sociological work on organizational operatives dealing with the public ever since Lipsky (1980) described how street-level bureaucrats worked and Abbott (1988) examined how higher professionals avoided the street level altogether, typically such research sees these positions as mediating between a set of rules and policies on the one hand and a local context of clients and situations on the other. 6 We suggest that mediation, the taken-for-granted metaphor, warrants closer scrutiny. Mediation occurs when someone or something intervenes between disputing parties to produce reconciliation in the form of an outcome acceptable to all. For example, in labor mediation, the mediator is a neutral third party who aims to negotiate a settlement, typically a compromise whereby each party gets part of what it wants. A culture-specific variant of mediation theory comes from the production-ofculture school with its emphasis on boundary spanners, gatekeepers, media outlets, and all the various roles and institutions that intervene between the producer and the ultimate consumer (Hirsch, 1972). This mediation/ mediators/ intermediaries is inadequate and, in the case of professional front-liners, misleading. Cultural evangelists indeed resemble street-level bureaucrats, for both come in contact with the public and exercise discretion in the context of on-the-ground decision making. They have more freedom than street-level bureaucrats typically do, however, for they are professionals operating under a relatively general, flexible set of guidelines, they are looked up to by the public, and they are free from direct market or client pressure. Structurally, they indeed sit between cultural and/ or organizational authorities and the public, but they are neither neutral nor associated with members of the Birmingham School (e.g., Willis, 1977 and Hebdige, 1979) and with popular cultures studies (Fiske, 1987), Radway’s (1984) study of the romance novel offering an exemplary case. 6 E.g., “we examine the programming practices that programmers use to determine what records will work for their station’s format as they mediate between record companies and audiences” (Ahlkvist and Faulkner, 2002: 196). “Within trade publishing houses, acquisition editors engage in a diverse array of tasks and roles, the majority of which require active engagement in mediating between different values, not least of which involves selecting titles for the firm to publish and having a substantial degree of latitude in making these decisions” (Childress, 2012: 607). For some recent work on front-line bureaucrats, all of which employ the mediation terminology, see Maynard- Moody and Musheno (2003) and Watkins-Hayes (2009); for an overview see Maynard- Moody and Portillo (2010). 84 W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl especially constrained by rules. They have their own agendas based on institutional interests, professional identifications, and personal cultural preferences. Moreover, they are strikingly free, and it is perfectly acceptable for them to act with considerable independence. It was this free and creative aspect of front-line activities that we wanted to explore. Our research question asks if reading-class evangelists align their decisions with the high-end cultural authorities (elite tastes) or with the consumers (popular tastes) - or if they make choices based on neither of these. In their conversion efforts, do they innovate, as we hypothesize, or merely carry out implicit or explicit directives from above or below? And if innovations occur, what do they look like, what accounts for them, and what is their impact? 3. Data and hypotheses In order to address these questions, we needed to look not just at what the evangelists say about what they do but at the actual decisions they make. To do so, we have analyzed One Book programs and their books selections. 7 Since the idea of an entire community reading and discussing a single book was first launched in 1998 in Seattle, One Book programs have proliferated widely in the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. 8 They come under various names - One Book, One Middletown; Books to Bridge the Region (Lake County, Indiana); Tacoma Reads Together; Books on the Bayou (Houston); Readin’ in the Rain (Eugene, Oregon) - though most adhere to the “One Book, One [geographic unit]” formula. While the Library of Congress offers encouragement and some resources, and while the National Endowment for the Arts offers competitive grants via The Big Read, local public library systems organize and run One Book programs. 9 These programs select a book for a specific period (usually several months), make it readily available, organize activities around it including but not limited to discussion groups, and promote it widely. The programs typically operate at the level of a town or city, though county, state, and regional programs also exist. 10 7 In this respect our research complements Fuller and Sedo’s (2013) recent study of “Mass Reading Events,” including One Book One Community programs, television books clubs, and reading outreach programs, which offers an acute analysis of the production side of these MREs, thus focusing on the selection process but not on individual selections. 8 “One Book, Once Community” programs started in 1998 when Nancy Pearl, who headed the Washington State Center for the Book, launched “What If All Seattle Read the Same Book? ” This and subsequent programs have proven irresistible, “tapping into readers’ desires for intelligent discussions, libraries’ desires to increase visibility in the community, and mayors’ desires to associate their cities with the prestige of literature” (Griswold et al., 2011). “One Book” programs have proliferated in the U.S. and have spread through the English-speaking world. 9 For the Library of Congress’s One Book resources, see http: / / www.read.gov/ resources/ . For the NEA The Big Read, see http: / / www.neabigread.org/ . 10 Many high schools, colleges, and universities run One Book programs as well, but these are not included in the present analysis. Evangelists of Culture 85 Drawing on the top-down vs. bottom-up ideal types, we can sketch three different proto-hypotheses regarding the people who select the books for One Book programs. The first envisions them as agents of cultural elites, sharing the tastes of nationally recognized cultural authorities or, if not totally sharing them, at least seeing their jobs to be to transmit these tastes to the local community. There could be a number of reasons for this - indoctrination, class aspirations, hegemonic influence of the canon-builders, independently achieved tastes that match those of the elite - but the result would be the same: a close fit between the books and authors that the elite deem to be worthwhile and those that the front line operatives select for One Book programs. The second envisions the planners of One Book programs to be representatives of the general public and therefore responsive to its tastes. Again this could be for several reasons - they share the preferences of the majority in their communities, they take their marching orders from public opinion, they want One Book programs to draw as many people as possible - but the result would be One Book programs closely aligned with popular tastes. And the third envisions the front-line operatives as independent actors, not following either elite or popular leads. This could be because they are oblivious to both, because their decisions are not seen as consequential, because their institutional contexts shape their agendas, and/ or because they have their own idiosyncratic tastes. The result would be One Book programs that adhere neither to elite or popular choices in any systematic way. Such programming might be random or might fall into identifiable patterns. If the latter were the case, the One Book decision makers, in carrying out their cultural evangelism, would be making selections that were not mid-range compromises but, instead, distinct innovations. Beginning with the Library of Congress records and following up with Internet searches, we identified 567 One Book programs operating in every state. Our database is the list of books that these One Book programs have selected over a thirteen-year period, from 2000 through 2012. We uncovered 3110 book selections, comprised of 1506 books written by 1193 individual authors. We have collected data on book choices to indicate what those who selected the One Book titles believed would draw people - readers and nonreaders, congregants and converts - into their programs. Early in the research we conducted participant-observation at two One Book, One Chicago sites and we interviewed the librarians and city officials who organized Chicago’s program. Once we had constructed the data sets, we randomly selected one program from all fifty states. We interviewed the librarians and others who ran the programs and oversaw the decisions about which books to feature. 11 We asked them about the process: Who made the selections, according to what process, what were the criteria and considerations, and what controversies emerged? 11 In most cases these were librarians, but in a few cases we spoke with community members who had been central to the decision making, for example by chairing the selection committee. 86 W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl For comparison with the One Book program selections, we looked both at highly prestigious books and at extremely popular books. For the Prestigious Books, those that were held up by a leading voice of cultural authority, we used the New York Times lists for the year’s best books, including both the New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2012” and the New York Times “The Ten Best Books of 2012.” 12 For the Popular Books, the books bought by the public regardless of what the critics might have to say, we used the Publishers Weekly lists of the bestselling books of 2012 (online Appendix A). 13 4. Prestigious, popular, and One Book authors The following analysis focuses on authors, the people who write the books chosen for One Book programs. We compare them with the authors of the Prestigious Books and of the Popular Books in terms of age, sex, ethnicity, and place of birth. We examined how closely the authors of the One Book selections line up with the others as well as how and to what extent they are distinctive. 4.1. Year born Virtually all Prestigious Books (New York Times “Ten Best” and “100 Notable Books”) and virtually all Popular Books (Bestsellers) have living authors. Since these annual lists draw from that year’s publications, this is largely true by definition (occasionally something like a new translation of the Iliad makes it into one of the notable books lists and in June 2013 the National Security Administration surveillance scandal suddenly pitched 1984 back onto the bestseller lists, but such cases are exceptional). 14 Prestigious authors tended to be somewhat older than popular authors, their careers well established, their craft perfected. Seventy percent of the “100 Notable Books” authors were born in the first half of the twentieth century (although the N is small, the “Ten Best” authors were younger in 2012, with seven of the ten born after 1950). Popular authors were notably younger, with only a quarter of the Bestsellers written by anyone born before 1950. Although not dependent on recent publication, and indeed avoiding very new books that have not yet appeared in paperback, One Book programs usually select books by living authors as well. 15 Of the twenty-five books most often selected, only two were by authors no longer living: The Great 12 http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2012/ 12/ 09/ books/ review/ 10-best-books-of-2012.html? _r=0 and http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2012/ 12/ 02/ books/ review/ 100-notable-books-of-2012.html. 13 Because the One Book program books have widely various publication dates, our data do not allow for a direct comparison of One Book selections, Prestigious Books, and Popular Books for any particular year. 14 Hendrix, Jenny. 2013. “NSA surveillance puts Orwell’s ‘1984’ on bestseller lists.” Los Angeles Times June 11. http: / / www.latimes.com/ features/ books/ jacketcopy/ la-et-jc-nsasurveillance-puts-george-orwells-1984-on-bestseller-lists-20130611,0,5672562.story. 15 We know the year of birth of 945, or 79.8%, of the 1184 One Book authors. The median year of birth is 1950. Evangelists of Culture 87 Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston died in 1960). 16 Half of the authors were born since 1950, and less than seven percent are from the nineteenth century or earlier. 17 The cultural weight of canonical dead authors does not seem to bear heavily in the decision-making. What is much more important is relatively recent buzz and the possibility of getting an author to come as a speaker. The typical One Book author is living, working, and maintains a website. 4.2. Gender Men write the majority of the Prestigious Books, as Table 1 shows. Popular Books (bestsellers) show somewhat less of a masculine bias. One Book selections are virtually identical to the Popular books in this respect, with women writing forty-three percent of both. It is also notable that the book that is, by far, the most frequent One Book selection, To Kill a Mockingbird, has a female author (see online Appendix B for the most commonly selected books). Table 1 Authors by gender: One Book authors (1193) compared with Prestigious (New York Times Notable Books of the Year and Ten Best) and Popular (Bestselling) authors. Prestigious Popular One Book 100 Notable Books authors Ten Best authors Bestsellers authors One Book authors Male 62 (62%) 7 (70%) 12 (57.1%) 682 (57.2%) Female 38 (38%) 3 (30%) 9 (42.9%) 510 (42.8%) Total 100 (100%) 10 (100%) 21 (100%) 1192 (100%) Note: The 3110 One Book selections had 1193 individual authors. However Coming Out the Door for the Ninth Ward had a collective author, the Nine Times Social and Pleasure Club, so we are using 1192 in this calculation. 4.3. Ethnicity Minority authors write many of the Prestigious Books. Fourteen of the “100 Notable Books” authors are non-white; these include two Hispanics (one born in the U.S., the other in the Dominican Republic), two Native Americans, two South Asians (one Indian American, one British Indian), and eight Blacks (one South African, five African American, one French, one British). One “Ten Best” author, Zadie Smith, is a minority (Black, with a Jamaican mother and British father) (Table 2). 16 Ray Bradbury, whose Fahrenheit 451 is the second most popular One Book selection, died in 2012 so he was a living author for almost all of the selections under consideration. 17 Of the 945 authors with known birth dates, sixty (6.3%) were born before 1900. 88 W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl While the literary elites who select the Prestigious Books seek out or at least acknowledge minority authors, the market does not. Only one of the twenty-one best selling authors was not white: Sylvia Day, who writes steamy romances and describes herself as a first-generation Japanese American. In terms of ethnic diversity, One Book selections do reasonably well, even a touch better than the Prestigious Books: sixteen percent are by minority authors. Minority authors also account for four of the twenty-five books most often selected (again sixteen percent). So the pattern with ethnicity is the opposite of what we saw with gender: One Book selections are more ethnically diverse than Popular Books, thereby resembling Prestigious Books, whereas they matched Popular Books in terms of gender inclusivity. Table 2 Authors by ethnicity: One Book authors (1193) compared with Prestigious (New York Times Notable Books of the Year and Ten Best) and Popular (Bestselling) authors. Prestigious Popular One Book 100 Notable Books authors Ten Best authors Bestseller Authors One Book authors White 86 (86%) 9 (90%) 20 (95%) 1002(84.0%) Hispanic 2 (2%) 40 (3.4%) Native American 2 (2%) 16 (1.3%) Black 8 (8%) 1 (10%) 76 (6.4%) South Asian 2 (2%) 13 (1.1%) East Asian 1 (5%) 29 (2.4%) Arab, Middle Eastern, Central Asian 15 (1.3%) Other 2 (0.2%) Total 100 (100%) 10 (100%) 21 (100%) 1193 (100.1%) Note: The Black authors include Africans, African Americans, and West Indians. The Nine Times Social and Pleasure Club is an African American New Orleans marching group who put out a book, Coming Out the Door for the Ninth Ward, following Hurricane Katrina. Because all of the members are African American, we are coding this collective author for ethnicity although we did not code it for gender. 4.4. Place of origin While Americans, especially members of the reading class, worry about the country being insular or insufficiently cosmopolitan, none of the three categories of books seems to avoid foreign or foreign-born authors. Prestigious books, considerably more cosmopolitan than Popular Books or One Book selections, have over a quarter of the “100 Notable Books” and two of the Evangelists of Culture 89 “Top Ten” written by foreign authors. One Book selections and bestsellers are perhaps surprisingly global as well; sixteen percent of the One Book authors come from outside of the US, as do ten percent of the Bestseller authors. A look at the regions of the United States where the authors come from suggests that Prestigious Books have a surprisingly strong regional bias. Forty percent of the “100 Notable Books” authors, and five out of eight U.S.born Top Ten authors, were born in the Northeast (see Table 3; we have used bold type where the percentage of authors from a particular region is ten percent or more different from that of the population). Since only eighteen percent of Americans actually live in the Northeast, authors having experience of, and perhaps a worldview shaped by, that part of the country seem disproportionately influential. Bestsellers are less New York-centric, with a quarter of the U.S.-born authors from the Northeast, and One Book selections in between at thirty percent. Both of these have a tilt toward the Northeast, though not nearly as much as the Prestigious Books, but they diverge in terms of the South: Bestsellers favor Southern authors while One Book programs avoid them. Table 3 Authors by place born compared to 2010 population. Place Prestigious authors Popular authors One Book authors Population 2010 (000) Northeast 27 (40%) 5 (26%) 289 (31%) 55,317 (18%) South 19 (28%) 9 (47%) 241 (26%) 114,556 (37%) Midwest 12 (18%) 3 (16%) 247 (27%) 66,927 (22%) West 9 (13%) 2 (11%) 147 (16%) 71,946 (23%) Total US 67 (99%) 19 (100%) 924 (100%) 308,746 (100%) Foreign born 25 (25%) 2 (10%) 179 (16%) Total known 92 21 1103 Unknown 8 0 90 Total authors 100 21 1193 Notes: (1) Population statistics taken from United States Census Bureau, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin 2010,” Table 11, Non-Hispanic White Alone Population and the Minority Population for the Regions, States, and for Puerto Rico: 2000 and 2010. (2) Bolded cells differ by 10% or more from that of the population. Since the median birthdate for One Book authors is 1950 and the mode is 1954, it is possible that the authors represent the population distribution at that time, rather than at the present. In the 1950 Census, 26.2% of the population lived in the Northeast, 29.5% in the Midwest, 31.3% in the South, and 13.0% 90 W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl in the West. 18 So when we take the mid-twentieth century as the reference point, the bias of Prestigious Books toward the Northeast region and away from the Midwest remains strong, as does the pattern of Popular Books favoring Southern authors. We see that the One Book selection authors mirror the population distribution of mid-century, never exceeding five percentage points difference (Table 4). Table 4 Authors by place born compared to 1950 population. Place Prestigious authors Popular authors One Book authors Population 1950 (000) Northeast 27 (40%) 5 (26%) 289 (31%) 39,477 (26%) South 19 (28%) 9 (47%) 241 (26%) 44,460 (30%) Midwest 12 (18%) 3 (16%) 247 (27%) 47,197 (31%) West 9 (13%) 2 (11%) 147 (16%) 19,561 (13%) Total US 67 (99%) 19 (100%) 924 (100%) 150,697 (100%) Foreign born 25 (25%) 2 (10%) 179 (16%) Total known 92 21 1103 Unknown 8 0 90 Total authors 100 21 1193 Notes: (1) 1950 population statistics from Hobbs and Stoops (2002). (2) Bolded cells differ by 10% or more from that of the population. Overall we can say that when compared with the authors of Prestigious Books, One Book authors are more likely to be women, less likely to be from the Northeast, and equally diverse. Compared with the authors of Popular books, One Book authors are equally female, much more ethnically and nationally diverse, and less apt to be from the South. In other words, One Book authors do not systematically line up with the authors of either of the other two groups, the Prestigious or the Popular. 5. The books While the analysis reported in the present paper focuses on authors, we can say a bit about the books. In a nutshell: Prestigious books are about history and social problems. They aim to inform. Popular books are about crime and sex. They aim to entertain. One Book selections are about diverse lives. They aim to expand readers’ horizons and extend their reach of human sympathy. 18 Hobbs and Stoops (2002). See also Figs. 1-7. Population Distribution by Region: 1900 to 2000. 19. Evangelists of Culture 91 The target reader for much contemporary writing is the educated middleclass American woman. Bestsellers typically feature this type of woman, often young, often under threat physically or romantically. For example, the Fifty Shades trilogy is about a twenty-one-year old American college student, though its readership is largely older women and its author is British. Of the fifteen fiction bestsellers, ten featured women protagonists. The typical participant in One Book programs is herself an educated middle-class woman. 19 This is also the profile of most public library professionals. One Book selections, however, are seldom about educated middle-class women. The fourteen most popular selections are, in order, about a young girl’s encounter with race in 1930s Alabama, a fireman who burns books and then tries to save them in a future society, a male humanitarian promoting peace and education in Pakistan and Afghanistan, an Afghan boy/ young man, a teenage boy scientist in a West Virginia coal town, an African American male teacher in the mid-20C south, a Vietnam War veteran, a muckraking woman writer, an autistic boy, a man walking the Appalachian Trail, a man coping with his unruly dog, a man visiting his dying teacher, a man who epitomized the Roaring Twenties, and a boy who launches a social movement for kindness. Twelve males, two females. One Book selections are diverse, but their diversity is more one of geography than of gender. Unlike what we find in either Prestige or Popular Books, One Book authors represent the regional dispersion of the American population. Why would this be the case? Given that the front liners who chose them want to have programs that are both serious in terms of literary merit and successful with the community, why would their selections follow neither the Northeastern preferences of the Prestigious Books nor the Southern preferences of the Popular Books? To understand this, we need to look at how the people on front line think about their cultural selections. 6. Front-line decisions One Book selections usually take place at the town or county level, individual library systems picking the book for that season. Two exceptions exist - The Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts, and a few states run statewide programs - but the majority of decisions are local. The selection process varies in terms of bureaucratization and formalization, ranging from programs where a single person chooses the book each year, based on what he or she feels would work for that community, to programs with a selection committee and a series of meetings and votes. Programs that are well funded and/ or serve a larger population tend to have larger committees, more institutions involved, and more formal selection procedures. Sometimes just committee members make suggestions and vote, while other times patrons are involved. Committees are sometimes made up 19 Most private book club members are also well-educated middle-class women (Long, 2003 and Childress and Friedkin, 2012). 92 W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl only of library staff and other times made up of community partners, such as college and high school English teachers, booksellers, and cultural organizations. Committees tend to be not particularly selective about members, grateful for everyone who will volunteer their time. While committee members will initially promote their personal favorites, serious controversy over book selections is rare. The criteria for selection are sometimes formalized, though often implicit. Decisions made on the front lines of culture are not compromises between elite and popular tastes. While the librarians share the elite preference for “good literature,” this does not determine their decisions. While they share the popular preference for entertainment and accessibility, they refuse to select books with only these qualities. Instead they insert a particular set of front-line, institutional considerations. Public libraries must first and foremost serve their communities. Their success and their funding depend on measurables such as circulation, subscription, program attendance, grants, outreach to underserved segments of the community, and the satisfaction of local notables, including educators, journalists, officials, and opinion leaders. The librarians whom we interviewed repeatedly referred to seven criteria they and their committees were looking for when making their One Book selections. 6.1. Books that appeal to the community as a whole Librarians and selection committees want to use the One Book program to reach wide segments of the local population, including those who are not regular users of library services. This means books chosen must be accessible, which in practice means not too “literary.” As a Louisiana librarian put it, We were very careful to pick books that had a wide appeal and a fairly comprehensive reading level, because we have a low literate county, and we did not want to set people up for failure. So we picked doable books, books that had large print, movie, and audio versions, being mindful of our readers. Our population is about twenty percent functionally illiterate, and we were not going to do Dostoyevsky, we were not going to do a fat book that would scare people. To Kill a Mockingbird, kids and grownup read it, people who struggle to read can watch the movie. We did months of program related to race relations, the mentally ill, Southern food, ham, and we flew in the actress [who played] Scout, had mock trials, plays, music of the South. We try to mix it up, and it did almost kill us. So, the next year when we did Fahrenheit 451, we planned to do it in the spring. We had the book for area schools and gave away thousands of books. We had Ray Bradbury on telephone, and the auditorium was filled with people. The fire department was heavily involved, they delivered the books, we had a fireman’s calendar … A lot of people are afraid of science fiction and we were afraid the film would seem dated, but people gave it a shot. Evangelists of Culture 93 6.2. Books that are non-controversial Local communities vary in terms of what they find objectionable. Many librarians try to forestall religiously based objections; as a South Carolina librarian put it, “We know our audience pretty well. We live in a very religious area, so we stay away from books that have adultery and things like that.” Another worried that picking Huckleberry Finn as the One Book might offend the African American community (it did not). One Midwestern librarian reported that, Because we are putting books in schools, we try not to choose issues with controversial topics, no language or controversial issues. We want to feel that we can support the selection as a committee if someone asks us, so we don’t go for gratuitous violence and sex, unless it has a purpose. The Kite Runner caused conflict because of violence, and Georgia’s Key to the Universe, because it got into some evolution stuff, so even when we think through whole process, things jump out from corners that we didn’t expect. But we’ve weathered all sorts of stuff. 6.3. Books that are available in multiple formats Libraries serve communities, not just readers. Some members of the community have limited vision, or prefer audiobooks, or like movies, or read Spanish better than English. Selectors look for books that are available in all of these formats. Selected books must be in paperback editions so that the libraries can afford to disseminate many copies. This means that a just out, critically acclaimed, front-page-of-the-New-York-Times-Book-Review book will virtually never be a One Book selection. A Nebraska selector said: Collection development staff pre-selected books, because they are very well read, and they collaborated on things that would appeal to large audience and had a wide variety of formats. So we put forth books available in English, Spanish, several languages, and audiobook, eBook, movie format. So we look at all of those pieces and what would appeal to the widest audience. That’s how they narrow it down. Just interesting topics that appeal to men, women, translate into a children’s theme, … 6.4. Books that appeal to teenagers as well as adults There are two reasons for this. First, reading declines in the teenage years, even for children who were avid readers earlier, and libraries would like to turn this around for at least some youth. Second, books that can appeal to several generations are likely to bring in greater program participation and thus be deemed successful. A typical response from Georgia: We choose authors that we feel like would have community interest, who would appeal to both adults and high school students. We choose both fiction and nonfiction. Last year, we had Kelsey Timmerman, who wrote Where Am I Wearing. We thought that would appeal to younger and older people - it looks at clothing and where it comes from, and talks about global economy. We had a good turnout. We 94 W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl choose authors we can bring. Part of it is interaction with students and the community, so they come spend the day and visit schools and then give a lecture at night for the community. 6.5. Books that might interest men Again the same two reasons: Men read less than women, so getting them involved helps the numbers and encourages a wider range of community involvement. 20 Moreover librarians perceive that women are willing to read male-oriented books, while men are unwilling to read what they dismiss as chick lit. A southern librarian reported a notable success with Edgar Allan Poe: We are having a lot of fun with the collection of Edgar Allan Poe, because any age can do Poe, we had an impersonator that we took all over town. We have good penetration to private, public, home schools, retirement community. Poe was interesting to men. I can’t tell you how many men and boys were happy, and that was wonderful, because finding something that 7th grade boys and retired businessmen will read is hard. Everyone was happy with Poe, so I was happy with Poe. We have caskets lying around that people can take their picture in. 6.6. Books that suggest programing possibilities Some books seem to stimulate program ideas beyond just book discussion sessions (e.g., the casket photo-ops). Author visits are highly desirable and a main reason that One Book selectors prefer contemporary works. Organizers fret when an author is too expensive or not available, and they are delighted with personable, accessible authors, as in the case of this Illinois library: We also want an author that can come … We want it to be an event across several months. Kathryn Stockett (The Help) was here for a few days. When we did Water for Elephants, because the author lived close she could come on two different days. It depends on the author and their schedule and where they live. When we chose The Kite Runner it was really quite interesting, because there were actually only 50,000 copies published at the time. We chose it before it became the success that it is today. But it was a book that resonated with us, it was a book that touched you, and we knew that people would fall in love with it and we were right, and by the time the author came it was already becoming the phenomenon that it is today. So that was very exciting, to be part of that before it became big. 6.7. Books that have a local connection Librarians stressed this over and over again: Ideal selections will have regional interest, they will be about the state or region, and/ or they will have an author from that area. These professionals working at the front line of reading believe that books with regional interest garner more participation, 20 Gender differences in reading are strongest for fiction and literature, but are present in all types of leisure reading. For example the American Time Use Survey found that men devote 0.52 h per week to leisure reading, while women devoted 0.71 h per week (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012: Table 11). Evangelists of Culture 95 since local readers feel a personal connection to books with familiar contexts and concerns. Moreover, librarians want to support local authors and they recognize that locals were more likely to be able to participate in author visits, an important feature given both the need for programming and the inevitable budgetary restrictions. West Virginia: We look at authors that write about Appalachia, and West Virginia if possible. They are usually fiction, and it is usually their most recent book. We did The Big Stone Gap, about a small town in the Virginia area, so we used her book, because it was about community life. We have also done The Miner’s Daughter, because it dealt with a young woman whose family lived in a coal-mining town. These all are really well-known Appalachian writers. Then we did Colored People, which is a non-fiction book by a West Virginia author. Montana: We used to do one in the fall and one in the spring, but there is enough demand that we now do it five times a year. The organizer is one of the board members who started as one of the discussion participants, and took a liking to the program and wanted to facilitate it. He organizes the facilitators, and as a group we choose books. We generally choose local books, where the setting or author is from Montana or the region. We sponsor the High Plains Book Award that honors regional writers, so we try to choose some of the winners of that award. Washington, DC: What we have is a very standard list of requirements: under 300 pages, multiple formats, needs to have some tie-in for Washington D.C., appeal to male and female readers, and appeal from teens to adults … [Talking about current decision-making] one contender that I think is great is Lost in the City by Edward P Jones. He has written other books more recently that were very well received. These are all short stories set in D.C. He is an African American writer, and most of his characters are African American, and at the period it was set, D.C. was a segregated city … An older reader is entranced by the quality of the writing, whereas a teenager could still get involved in the plot of the stories. We find that we are tending towards books that are set in D.C. In the past we have had both, and the set-in-D.C. books have worked better. The other book that seems like the next strongest contender is The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, which is set in D.C. and written by an Ethiopian immigrant. So that appeals to immigrant groups, and gentrification is a theme and that’s a big deal here. It is situated on a borderline area of the city that touches on a black area, a white area, and the Washington Monument, so we think this would have an interest for a wide segment of the population. Iowa: We tend to focus on books that have some kind of Iowa and Midwest connection, books that are newer, not classics, not the best seller, but those that have great merit and didn’t get all the attention they might have deserved … We chose a book several years ago, Sing Them Home, about a family in Nebraska, woman from a big city who winds up in a tiny town in Nebraska, in the story the woman’s physical condition deteriorates, and we watch her as her life is taken by a tornado, so everything about that story seemed to fit the community. She was on a mission to change a town and comes up against small town minds, the family who loses a mother, we just were so struck by the colorful story, the imagination, and it was not widely read anywhere. I think there is a sense that the community of Iowa readers enjoys something that they can relate to closely. 96 W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl 7. Conclusion One Book program selectors are cultural evangelists in two senses: (1) they promote reading, and (2) they promote a specific type of book. Free to make their One Book selections as they choose, the librarians have been strikingly innovative; they have come up with books that are not compromises between elite and popular tastes but, instead, are independent choices resulting from carefully considered efforts to attract converts. This is particularly true of the regional tropism, whereby selectors repeatedly favor local, regional, placebased books and authors. 21 As we have seen, the decisions librarians make at the front line of culture, as registered in One Book selections, do not conform to either elite or popular tastes. Librarians and selection committees are attuned to both prestigious titles and popular interests, but they exert considerable independence from both. They base their decisions on (1) institutional requirements and (2) a strong localism. The institutional requirements are straightforward. One Book programs in public libraries need to be accessible to everyone, to draw people in who might not otherwise be there, to come up with events that enhance the library’s visibility in the community, and to offend no particular constituency. The localism gets expressed in three different ways. First is a straightforward tie to institutional needs: An author who lives in the area is more likely to be available for a visit. Since this is a programming plum, such authors have an advantage when it comes to being selected. Second, professional librarians and their committees understand their local communities. They want to attract participants as well as challenge them (“Our population is about twenty percent functionally illiterate, … we were not going to do a fat book that would scare people”). And they distinctly do not want to court controversy, so if adultery or evolution are problematic with the local sentiments, librarians will avoid books with those subjects. Third, those who select the books are convinced that members of their communities want to read about their place, their region. They repeatedly select books, authors, or subjects that have some regional tie, and they reject 21 Strictly speaking, One Book selectors are not cultural intermediaries because usually these librarians themselves have initiated their One Book programs. They have done this neither because of commands from above nor because of public demand, but because of their own cultural evangelism. Moreover, the popular conception of “cultural intermediaries” continues to mislead, for it gives too much weight to the parties at either end of the relationship chain and not enough agency to the front-line professionals themselves. See for example Nixon and du Guy (2002), Negus (2002), Maquires and Matthews (2012). One study in this area that does accord front-line operatives some agency is Wright’s (2005) research on bookstore workers; although he adopts Bourdieu’s cultural intermediaries language, he sees workers exerting some independence in their recommendations and handwritten reviews, though Wright does not analyze patterns of such recommendations, seeing them essentially as offering an illusion of cultural power that helps bookstores keep the wages low. Evangelists of Culture 97 elite guidance if suggested books lack it. A number of times we heard that libraries had started out following the NEA’s Big Read but then had dropped out because the selections did not fit local interests. Hawaii: The books for The Big Read, even though they are of interest, they are not really directly related to our experiential history. For example, Grapes of Wrath, none of that experience really directly deals with Hawaii. Minority relations here are really quite different than in other states. Idaho: In recent times, when we were part of The Big Read, they looked at suggestions and voted on one. Now, they just toss around ideas of books that are important to the community, that people in the community would fine interesting. We chose Bel Canto because Boise has a big music festival, so it is a big part of who the people in Boise are. They are musically inclined, very interested in music. Sometimes they go for Idaho authors, so one year, they did Angles of Repose … Sometimes they just start out with a thought: have you read a good book that you think would be good for Boise and why? The committee is made up of representatives from Idaho’s newspaper, a Boise state university English teacher, and library staff from two different libraries in town. It just depends on who can come. Kentucky: The first few years I was here we did The Big Read Program. We did To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. Living in Kentucky we had the challenge of picking books from list that would be compelling for our readers. For The Big Read, many of the books were older fiction and more literary fiction. That is not a reflection on people in area, that they don’t like literary fiction, but part of the purpose of the program is to expose the book to people that don’t usually read books. The literary people we know will participate, but we want to pull in other people, appeal to the general population. The Big Read authors were often dead, and part of what we do to stir up interest is bring in the author … plus a challenge with The Big Read is having to match the 5000 dollars. We have a small budget. The last couple of years we have chosen a book by Carolyn Wall [Sweeping Up Glass], which is based in Kentucky, although she is from Oklahoma. There is something quite American about this decentralization of cultural decision-making (comparable to the American decentralization of education). These librarians and committees on the front line of reading are not rebels. Those who turn away from The Big Read are not cultural Tea Partiers who resent the federal government telling them what to read. The front line decision makers are neither rejecting the intellectual elite’s ideas about what makes good literature, nor do they dismiss the people’s ideas about what makes a good read. They are simply operating independently of both elite and consumer tastes. They are identifying and enacting local tastes that they find to be concerned with this particular place or this type of place. They are willing to take a broad view of what is regionally appropriate - a small-town Nebraska story can work in Iowa, a Kentucky-based novel is okay for a Kentucky program even if its author comes from Oklahoma - but they are not willing to let regional interests retreat in the face of centralized programming, cultural authorities, or a lowest common denominator of entertainment. One Book programs define and reinvigorate a culture of place. They constitute yet another means through which literature and reading practices identify, confirm, and stabilize regional cultures (cf. Griswold, 2008 and Griswold 98 W endy G risWold And h AnnAh W ohl and Wright, 2004). While the cultural evangelists who run the programs see themselves as expanding horizons through the promotion of reading, their One Book selections paradoxically work to delineate and sharpen horizons as well. Cosmopolitanism and localism are not mutually exclusive but go hand in hand. For some time now people have expected the digital age finally to eclipse place-based culture. Through digital media the dictates of prestigious authorities and/ or the preferences of the market would be immediately and universally known, and the objects of their affections would become instantly available to everyone. All of this latter has come to pass: The New York Times Book Review can be and is downloaded everywhere on earth, and Fifty Shades Darker can be on your e-reader in seconds. What has not come to pass is the corollary, which is that in the digital age culture would become homogeneous, losing local distinctiveness and a shared sense of place. 22 This has not happened, and one of the reasons it has not is that the people on the front lines of culture, the reading-class evangelists, retain and exercise considerable autonomy. They make their decisions based on their informed sense of what the immediate context of institution and community calls for, not on what the general public thinks it wants or on what centralized elites think it should have. Adapting to this context, the cultural evangelists nudge readers toward gender and ethnic diversity, and they push them firmly toward the local and regional, thereby reproducing and strengthening a literary culture based on and distinctive to particular places. Works Cited Abbott, A. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Ahlkvist, J., Faulkner, R. “‘Will This Record Work for Us? ’: managing music formats in commercial radio.” Qual. Sociol. 25 (2, 2002): 189-215. Bourdieu, P. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U. S. Department of Labor. American Time Use Survey - 2011 Results, 2012. Childress, C., Friedkin, N. “Cultural reception and production: the social construction of meaning in book clubs.” Am. Sociol. Rev. 77 (1, 2012): 45-68. Childress, C. “Decision-making market logic and the rating mindset: negotiating bookscan in the field of US trade publishing.” Eur. J. Cult. Stud. 15 (5, 2012): 604-620. Fish, S. Is There a Text in this Class? : The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. 22 Other work on literary interpretation emphasizes its localness, analyzing book clubs and classrooms as “interpretive communities” (Childress and Friedkin, 2012 and Fish, 1980); however, they have primarily analyzed localness in terms of interpersonal interactions rather than regionalism. Griswold (2008) has shown that the elite reading class cross-nationally has maintained an interest in regional literature despite their cosmopolitanism; this study expands on Griswold’s findings by showing how regionalism is defended on the frontlines of culture for non-elite readers. Evangelists of Culture 99 Fiske, J. Television Culture. London: Methuen, 1987. Fuller, D., Sedo, D.R. Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. New York/ London: Routledge, 2013. Griswold, W. Regionalism and the Reading Class. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Griswold, W., Lenaghan, E., Naffziger, M. “Readers as audiences.” Handbook of Media Audiences. London: Blackwell, 2011. Griswold, W., Wright, N. “Cowbirds locals, and the dynamic endurance of regionalism.” Am. J. Sociol. 109 (2004): 1411-1451. Hebdige, D. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. Hirsch, Paul M. “Processing fads and fashions.” Am. J. Sociol. 77 (1972): 639-659. Hobbs, F., Stoops, N. “Total Population for the United States, Regions, and States: 1900 to 2000.” U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Special Reports, Series CENSR-4, Demographic Trends in the Twentieth Century. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office (2002): pp. A-1, Table 1. Lipsky, M. Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1980. Long, E. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2003. Maquires, J.S., Matthews, J. “Are we all cultural intermediaries now? An introduction to cultural intermediaries in context.” Eur. J. Cult. Stud. 15 (5, 2012): 551-562. Maynard-Moody, S., Musheno, M.C. Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2003. Maynard-Moody, S., Portillo, S. “Street-level bureaucracy theory.” Durant, R. (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of American Bureaucracy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. 252-277. Miller, L.J., . Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2006. Negus, K. “The work of cultural intermediaries and the enduring distance between production and consumption.” Cult. Stud. 16 (4, 2002): 501-515. Nixon, S., du Guy, P. “Who needs cultural intermediaries? ” Cult. Stud. 16 (4, 2002): 495-500. Radway, J. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1984. Thompson, J.B. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, second ed. New York: Plume (Penguin), 2013. Watkins-Hayes, C. The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race Class, and Policy Reform. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Willis, P.E. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough, England: Saxon House, 1977. Wright, D. “Mediating production and consumption: cultural capital and ‘Cultural Workers’.” Br. J. Sociol. 56 (1, 2005): 105-121. d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn Reading the Supernatural in Contemporary American Ethnic and Christian Fiction Looking at the wider landscape of contemporary Euro-American fiction, it appears that themes of the supernatural are mostly confined to particular niches. Compared to the literary field of, for instance, the Romantic period, serious literature in Mark McGurl’s program era - from “institutionally subsidized high-art experimentalism” to “economically viable domains of serious middlebrow fiction” (29) - looks fairly disenchanted, in the Weberian sense of the term. There is no supernatural reality represented in that fiction. Even postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and Don DeLillo, who have been characterized by John McClure as post-secular for their interest in exploring “new forms of religiously inflected seeing and being” (ix), represent the supernatural mostly in a non-mimetic, fabulistic manner. If writers in the (neo-)realist vein choose to confront their characters with something like an experience of transcendence, these are imagined as immanent, often internal, psychological events. 1 Where religious beliefs are dealt with on the plot level, they usually do not come in supernatural forms that would openly violate a modern understanding of the natural order. There is a significant exception, however. What seems to be almost a taboo for Euro-American writers with ambitions to high-cultural prestige does not apply to those areas of contemporary American fiction usually demarcated as ethnic literatures. Among the practitioners of “high cultural pluralism,” a strong and often quite unironic interest in the supernatural and magical is, in fact, widespread. Remarkably, their often serious, even solemn approach to the supernatural does not keep these writers from gaining lots of academic attention and winning prestigious prizes. Nor does it keep them from attracting large and diverse readerships. Some of the most successful and critically acclaimed African-American, Native-American, and Asian- American authors writing today - who are simultaneously read in literature classrooms and endorsed by Oprah - have engaged with supernatural themes in ways that involve literal manifestations of various spirit beings or magical phenomena. When it comes to the treatment of the otherworldly or magical, these ethnic writings all share certain basic characteristics that distinguish them from the various types of genre fiction that typically feature the supernatural. In contrast to the alternative worlds created by genre fantasy, the supernatural in contemporary minority literatures seemingly emerges from a fictional reality represented as a model of “our” mundane world through recognizable 1 On religion in contemporary American fiction, see also Hungerford. 102 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn settings, objects, and psychologically-plausible characters. Also, in contrast to fantasy and most Gothic literature, the marvelous occurrences or entities in ethnic fictions of the supernatural assume forms that belong to, or are presented as belonging to, traditional religious beliefs. Typically, the entities are from the cultural heritage peculiar to the ethnic group into whose world the story introduces the reader. These fictions are further distinguished from horror or Gothic literature by the fact the supernatural is not primarily intended to thrill or frighten, nor is it a narrative means of, first and foremost, probing the dark side of the human soul. In the literature of high-cultural pluralism, these “dramatic disruptions of secular structures of reality” (McLure 3) are almost without exception linked to the religious quests of the fictional characters and tied into the larger spiritual concerns of the books. Interestingly enough, there is another large segment of contemporary American fiction that takes a markedly similar approach to the supernatural, but has not gained cultural authority as “serious literature” or slipped past the gatekeepers of the middle-brow: evangelical fiction. It exists in a distinct mass-market niche, similar to but separate from fantasy and horror. In many novels written for the evangelical fiction market, one also finds “dramatic disruptions of secular structures of reality” that link to religious quests and larger spiritual concerns, are presented as being part of traditional religious beliefs, and situated in recognizable, “mundane,” mimetic realities. These novels are never shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, though, nor are they regularly reviewed by middle-brow tastemakers. When they are published by mainstream houses, publishers sometimes have to hold their noses. 2 They have been largely ignored by academia, and are especially rare in literature classes. Like ethnic fiction, these novels have been quite popular, but in this case, commercial success is seen as incompatible with respectability. These novels violate the high-culture taboo against the supernatural in structurally similar ways to the often well-regarded ethnic fiction, but are treated quite differently by professional readers. This essay intends to shed some light on the question of why ethnic supernatural fiction and Christian supernatural fiction have fared so differently among professional readers. It seeks to delineate ethnic and Christian supernatural fictions as literary genres, offer some necessary differentiations, and more clearly shows the strategies by which these bodies of literature represent the supernatural. Moreover, it wants to examine the deep similarities in the way these fictions are read by “ordinary,” non-professional readers, and why they are read, and what they do for people. For this purpose, this essay will briefly consider the respective histories of the literatures, and one paradigmatic text for each type of supernatural literature will be discussed in a little more detail. As an example of ethnic supernatural fiction, Louise 2 As one New York editor put it as her publishing house prepared to enter the Christian fiction market, “whatever we all think about the Christian right, if we in New York only published to please ourselves, we’d all be out of business” (Kennedy). Reading the Supernatural 103 Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum will be examined, while William Paul Young’s 2008 bestseller The Shack will serve to illustrate the treatment of the supernatural in evangelical fiction. *** Ethnic supernatural fiction came into its own in the wake of the post-1960 new ethnicity movements that led to the creation of African-American, and subsequently other ethnic minority studies programs. This also lead to the adaption of certain models of “ethnic writing” within proliferating MFA programs. At the same time, with the critical but also commercial success of post-colonial writers, “magical realism” emerged as a model for how to combine in “serious literature” the basic representational code of Western literary realism, certain experimental features of high modernism, and marvelous elements, often derived from non-Western belief systems. Authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and, later, Salman Rushdie produced works in this vein. These works were both best-selling and prize-winning. Consequently, magical realism became a category U.S. publishers, reviewers, and critics frequently used in framing the works that North American ethnic writers, most of them women, were beginning to produce in the late 1970s. This began with works such as Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1981), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). The cachet of the category of magical realism and the interpretative possibilities for which it allowed proved crucial in gaining high establishment recognition for these authors. It also significantly helped their marketability. The term magical realism has been widely overused. This is especially true when discussing American minority writers who somehow conjoin the representational code of Western literary realism with marvelous elements. As Shannin Schroeder has argued, there is a “need to counteract the critical tendency to label anything and everything unreal or supernatural in literature as ‘magical realism’” (xii). This labeling leads to a blurring of important distinctions, both on the level of narrative representation and on the level of intended reader-response. 3 American ethnic fictions of the supernatural, in particular, require a more nuanced approach than the ones offered by existing studies. Although they do share certain general characteristics, and some authors have associated themselves with the label, these fictions are quite diverse in how exactly and to what effect the elements of the otherworldly are narrated. While the history of the term magical realism is complex and its definition contested, it is probably fair to say that most Anglo-American scholars working on the subject would follow Wendy B. Faris’s influential Ordinary Enchantments. In Faris’s view, the one indispensable requirement for magical realist works is that the narrated worlds mostly follow the code of realism, 3 A recent example for such an all-inclusive use of the category of magical realism is Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures (2009) by Jesús Benito, Ana Ma Manzanas, and Begoña Simal. 104 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn but contain “irreducible elements of magic.” Magical realism signals readers to abstain from any attempts to rationalize away what are unambiguously supernatural phenomena, and to simply accept their matter-of-fact representation. Indeed, as Faris puts it, the elements of magic and the supernatural in magical realism are generally “well assimilated into the realistic textual environment, rarely causing any comment by narrators or characters, who model such an acceptance for their readers” (8). As a consequence, the conflicts or at least tensions between a naturalistic and a supernatural perspective on the world, which a modern educated audience (regardless of its ethnic, cultural or religious affiliation) would perceive outside of literature, tends to be eliminated within the fictional universe and, by implication, also in the experience of reading. Taking this admittedly very rough definition as a measuring stick, the use of the term magical realism seems quite appropriate when talking about a sizable portion of American ethnic fictions featuring the supernatural. But not all. The narrative naturalization of the supernatural can serve quite different functions, as far as the intended reader-response is concerned. Christopher Warnes pointed this out in his study of British postcolonial magical realist fiction. “The magic in the magical realist text may have, in postmodern fashion, the effect of unmasking the real, showing up its claims to truth to be provisional and contingent on consensus,” he writes. “Alternatively, the magical may seek to force its way into the company of the real, and thereby to share in the privileged claim the language of realism has to representing the world” (2005, 9). Here there is a helpful distinction between two paradigms of magical realistic fiction. One Warnes calls the irreverence paradigm, in which the supernatural primarily works as a metafictional device that enhances skepticism towards ontologies, epistemologies, and meta-narratives. The other he calls the faith paradigm. In the faith paradigm, the supernatural serves as a means to expand the secularized, naturalistic assumptions about the “real” underlying modern literary realism, often in the service of affirming “non-western world views and cultural modalities” (2005, 1). In the first case, the self-conscious suspension of disbelief in the reading process primarily works toward a heightened awareness of the make-believe nature of realist fiction and, indeed, of the cultural constructs of reality. In the second case, readers are encouraged to accept the veracity of what is narrated as a way of immersing themselves in an alternative world-view, “no matter how different this perspective may be to the reader’s non-reading opinions and judgments” (Bowers 4). Warnes’s paradigmatic examples for the irreverence paradigm are Rushdie’s novels, including Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988). The faith paradigm is most clearly on display in The Famished Road (1981) by Nigerian Booker Prize winner Ben Okri. With U.S. ethnic writers, we can also find examples that clearly lean toward a religiously irreverent, highly ironic treatment of the supernatural. Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, Reading the Supernatural 105 Sherman Alexie, and Gerald Vizenor are all examples of this. 4 For the most part, though, ethnic supernatural fiction in the U.S. has tended toward the faith-paradigm. Even in early, otherwise fairly experimental works such as Song of Solomon or Ceremony, the supernatural is always also represented as reflecting authentic religious minority traditions, which are believable to characters and narrators, who model an attitude of serious attention for the reader. It is important to emphasize, therefore, that Warnes’s “irreverence” and “faith” paradigm are not be regarded as separate genres. They are rather two different sets of strategies, aimed specifically at structuring particular sorts of readings and eliciting certain reader responses. As such, they are not mutually exclusive but are frequently combined, even if one paradigm dominates. This is true not only for the above-named pioneers of magical realism in the US, but also for younger authors such as Gloria Naylor, Ana Castillo, or Cristina García. 5 A good number of ethnic supernatural fictions do not meet even the basic formal requirements for magical realist fiction, however. They encourage quite different responses from readers. Whereas magical realism naturalizes the supernatural, in these writings the characters’ encounters with the supernatural are ambiguated. They are presented as indeterminate in such a way as to forbid a seamless integration into the realistic narrative environment. In these texts, the same kind of phenomena that are usually admitted by the characters of magical realist novels without much ado and that are portrayed by the narrator in an unconcerned, casual style, are presented as irrevocably strange. They are represented as disconcerting disruptions of the initially established fictional world. 6 There are a few relatively early examples for this in American ethnic literature, notably Tony Hillerman’s Dance Hall of the Dead (1973) and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983). Mostly however, this variety of ethnic supernatural fiction has been produced by younger writers who pushed into the market in the 1990s and early 2000s. This group includes novels by such acclaimed and successful authors as Louise Erdrich and Amy Tan, but also less well-known names like Randall Kenan, Nora Okja Keller, and Loida Maritza Pérez. 7 4 Compare, for instance, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972); Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993); or Vizenor’s Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel (1997). 5 Compare Naylor’s Mama Day (1988); Castillo’s So Far From God (1993) and García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Aguero Sisters (1997). 6 The best theoretical work that, drawing on examples from South American literature, offers a systematic narratological distinction between magical realism and the fantastic is still Amaryll Beatrice Chanady’s Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy (1985). For a detailed definition of the ethnic fantastic, compare Stievermann, “Towards a Theory of the Ethnic Fantastic: A Comparison of Gloria Naylors Mama Day and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow” (171-76). 7 On Erdrich, see below. Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) squarely falls into the category of the ethnic fantastic. So do Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989), Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) and Pérez’s Geographies of Home (1999). 106 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn In these novels, the experience of the supernatural comes as a problematic disturbance of the fictional world and hence is met by narrators and characters with surprise, awe and, frequently with hesitation or outright skepticism. Harking back to Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of fantastic literature, a better term for this sub-group of ethnic supernatural fiction is “the ethnic fantastic.” In common parlance (and often in scholarly writing, too) the fantastic and fantasy are still used interchangeably. However, as Tzvetan Todorov suggested in Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970; transl. 1975), the term fantastic should be reserved for a very particular kind of literature that is characterized by an irresolvable hesitation of the reader over how to interpret the occurrence of seemingly supernatural phenomena in a narrative universe that otherwise seems to abide by the conventions of realism. Todorov’s defining exemplar of the literary fantastic was Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898). James’s work uses the techniques of psychological realism to create an interpretative impasse: characters and narrators struggle to account for the extraordinary events. Their disconcerted and skeptical response (their vacillation between naturalistic and supernatural explanations) mirrors the readers’ hermeneutic conflict about whether and how to adjust their understanding of the ground rules on which the fictional universe is based. Structurally, the ethnic fantastic works in a similar way even if its themes, contexts, and intended audiences are of course very different. Although there is a lot of overlap and some authors have experimented with both forms, the distinction between magical realism and the ethnic fantastic seems one well worth making. They constitute two closely related but distinct modes of combining the representational conventions of realism with elements of the marvelous that, each in their own way, have appeared significant to both professional academic critics and lay readers. Perhaps the popular and critical success of magical realist fictions in the U.S. has to do with the way in which the naturalization of the supernatural can be simultaneously read in a faith-oriented and an “irreverent,” selfreflexive, and subversive manner. Academic criticism of these novels, especially when sailing under the flag of minority studies, has not been averse to affirmative interpretations. In these interpretations, the unproblematic incorporation of the supernatural into a realist environment is understood as a way to expand rather than undermine the literary concept of realism and the dominant secular construals of reality. The protagonists’ encounters with the supernatural in such works as Song of Solomon or Ceremony are interpreted as a way of engaging readers in acts of recognition and self-recognition, respectively, of cultural difference and the value of that difference. In other words, these novels have been seen as ethno-religious attempts at expanding the boundaries of Euro-American norms of artistic expression. The fiction asserts certain indigenous supernatural beliefs as distinguishing a minority group’s alternative - even superior - view of reality. Yet even during the heyday of multiculturalism, a kind of literature that demanded no more of its readers than a literal, realistic recuperation of characters and plots would have been seen as wanting in aesthetic complexity. A naive propagating of Reading the Supernatural 107 faith in spirits, conjuring or healing ceremonies would, likewise, have been something of an embarrassment. However, by virtue of the inherent ambiguity of magical realism, even of those works that primarily belong to Warnes’s faith-paradigm can at the same time be understood as philosophical metafiction. By inserting elements of myth and oral storytelling traditions containing elements of the supernatural into the representational code of realism, ethnic writers are taken to de-familiarize this code and challenge the empiricist epistemology and the ontology of the factual underlying the Western realist novel. Ethnic fiction in the magical realist vein is often read as simultaneously seeking to make its audience accept the “realness” and dignity of minority worldviews and as undermining normative construals of realism. In the case of the ethnic fantastic, the constitutive hermeneutic conflicts allow for both a more literal, identificatory reading and for a more self-reflexive, theory-driven interpretations. Some texts encourage readers to focus on the one, some texts on the other. Again, though, these are not mutually exclusive. For instance, Avey Johnson, the African-American protagonist of Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, struggles to make sense of her extraordinary spiritual experiences during a trip to the Caribbean (involving encounters with her dead aunt and husband as well as epiphanies during a dance ceremony). Avey’s conflict, on the one hand, lends itself to an identificatory, faith-oriented reading that focuses on her personal, cultural, and religious struggle, as she is trying to find some closure with her past and reconnect to her black heritage. At the same time, the novel has been interpreted by academic critics as reflecting a larger clash of cultural epistemologies, a clash written into the very narrative structure of the text. The text will not allow for a complete recuperation of Avey’s experiences, in accordance with the conventions of traditional Western realism, nor enable their full integration into an alternative type of realism. The ambiguity persists to the end. 8 Between the practitioners of “high cultural pluralism” and the burgeoning field of minority studies, there emerged strategies of writing and reading “higher,” theoretically validated, meanings into the different narrative modes of representing the supernatural in ethnic fiction. At the same time, strategies developed for endowing the supernatural entities and events on the plot level with the potential for “higher” symbolical or allegorical meaning, without, however, necessarily canceling out the possibility of a realist recuperation by the reader. In texts belonging to the irreverence paradigm, this claim might be more or less completely suspended. However, works belonging both to the faith-paradigm of magical realism and the ethnic fantastic depend on such a primary realist recuperation, although they also allow for secondary symbolical or allegorical interpretations. Significantly, these higher levels of meaning are usually derived from Western academic discourse such as psychoanalysis, theories of race, ethnicity, and gender, or post-colonial studies. Supernatural elements (say the appearance of ghosts) have been overlaid with such concepts as cultural 8 See Stievermann. 108 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn trauma or the invisibility of marginalized women. This allows for superordinate, secular interpretations of the novels’ otherworldly occurrences, turning them into allegories for various identity struggles. A striking example for this would be Kathleen Brogan’s concept of “Cultural Haunting.” In contrast to academic readings of the supernatural in Christian fiction, these superordinate interpretations are usually understood as having been intended by their authors (probably rightly so), even if that might raise questions about possible tensions between the authentic expression of indigenous or folk beliefs and their theory-driven employment on the secondary, symbolic level. In this way, the ghosts in Morrison’s Beloved or Marshall’s Praisesong for instance, appear to have been designed and interpreted in such a way that could make them simultaneously an authentic expression of black vernacular spirituality and a symbolic embodiment of black female traumatization or self-alienation. Similarly, the Indian witches who create the Europeans in Silko’s Ceremony lend themselves to a double reading, in which they are at once realistic narrativizations of an ancient Native American tradition and an allegory of a post-colonial counter-narrative of cultural history that reverses the priority of the white race. In addition to having a dimension of critical metafictionality, establishing such levels of symbolic complexity associated with recognized theories has been crucial to the institutional success and canonization as high-brow literature of many works of ethnic supernatural fiction by professional readers. *** Evangelical Christian fiction arose in the same historical moment as the ethnic fantastic, but in very different institutions and institution-supported interpretive communities. Starting in the mid-1950s, some white, upwardly mobile Christian fundamentalists began to push for re-engagement with the broader culture and increased interdenominational cooperation to that end. This was the so-called neo-evangelical movement, embodied by Billy Graham and also James Dobson. Neo-evangelicals maintained their theological conservatism, but adopted a more pragmatic, moderate sensibility. They were folksy rather than aggressively anti-intellectual. The style was suitable to the post-war expansion of the middle class, and sustained by a burgeoning network of institutions, including publishers, an evangelical booksellers association, and gatekeeping organs such as Christianity Today and Focus on the Family. 9 As the movement expanded with the influx of baby boomers “born again” in the 1970s, the institutions also nurtured new forms of cultural engagements, including evangelical fiction. 10 The literature was defined by this matrix of evangelical institutions and the movement, in turn, was shaped by the imaginative work of the literature. 9 See Stephen P. Miller, Eskridge, and Worthen. 10 There were, of course, novels written by evangelicals and with evangelical themes prior to the creation of an evangelical Christian fiction market. The market and its institutions have been such a powerful force in producing fiction and producing specific Reading the Supernatural 109 The paradigm for evangelical fiction is a combination of traditional Christian conversion narratives with popular fiction genres, reframing mass-market, “escapist” entertainment as para-scriptural devotional texts. The earliest examples of this among the neo-evangelicals were Christian romance novels. Janette Oke, the wife of an evangelical minister on the Canadian prairie, wrote a story where the standard romance narrative is layered with evangelical theology. The heroine finds love - both human and divine (Logan 207-216; Neal 26-30). Oke’s first novel, Love Comes Softly (1979), is generally considered the first work of contemporary evangelical Christian fiction. It was written, published, and sold through evangelical institutions and widely read by evangelical consumers, most of whom were white, middle-aged, and middle class women. The novel does not prominently feature supernatural elements. Though the protagonist does have a conversion experience she describes as an otherworldly “surge of joy” (208), the fictional world of the novel is strictly secular. Evangelical Christian fiction changed, in this regard, with the publication of Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness in 1986. Peretti adapted the popular genre of horror fiction. His story of secret occult forces controlling an idyllic American town is similar to Stephen King’s 1986 novel It, in which a malevolent power memorably takes the form of a clown. In the evangelical novel, the evil takes the form of a multi-national corporation run by a secretive New Age group that is controlled by demons. This Present Darkness is recognizably part of the tradition H.P. Lovecraft called the “spectrally macabre.” The supernatural elements serve - at least at first - to give readers a shiver of the numinous. The hideous demons are described in detail so that readers might “tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse” (Lovecraft 14). In Peretti’s adaptation of this genre, however, it is not the moonstruck who sense the cosmic horror, but the faithful. The spectral does not forever elude the grasp of sane minds, but rather becomes apparent to those open to a broader view of reality. The narrator presents the supernatural in a casual manner. Though characters often initially respond to the otherworldly entities as irrevocably strange, their sense of reality soon expands and demons and angels are accepted as part of the ontological furniture in this otherwise mimetic fictional model of “our” reality. Peretti’s protagonists are roused to recognize the evil lurking beneath the so-called culture wars. As they become aware of the “beating of black wings” and the “scratching of outside shapes” (Lovecraft 16), they turn to prayer and rally angels to spiritual warfare (Peretti 401-402). The novel’s narrative arc, then, can be thought of as moving characters from a world of supernatural horror to a world of magical realism. In this evangelical adaptation of the horror genre, the supernatural elements that disrupt mundane realism take traditional sorts of very defined fiction, however, that these novels need to be examined separately. For an early period of evangelical writing, see Brown. For more on the evangelical book market see Balmer 193-208, Hendershot, and Silliman. 110 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn religious forms and end up linking to larger spiritual concerns, very much in the manner of the magical realism. This Present Darkness ultimately naturalizes the supernatural in a way that would be quite familiar to Warnes. It is structured according to his faith paradigm. As Warnes might phrase it, This Present Darkness puts the spectral in the company of the real, both finally sharing the privileged claim of mimetic representation (2005, 9). Peretti’s novel was quite well received among evangelicals. This Present Darkness sold 500,000 copies by 1989 and there were more than 200,000 preorders of the sequel, Piercing the Darkness (1989). It was a blockbuster by the standards of the evangelical book market, though it barely registered with the wider world (Bickle and Jantz 94; McDowell). Despite the critical tendency during this period to label any literature with supernatural elements expressed in naturalistic language as magical realism, scholars didn’t take note of this religious fiction that described spiritual warfare in the language of the newspaper. Among evangelical subculture, however, This Present Darkness had the notable effect of expanding the range of acceptable Christian literature. Though the Christian fiction market would continue to be dominated by genres of romance novels, a small but not insignificant portion of fiction experimented with supernatural elements. In the years immediately after Peretti’s success, T. Davis Bunn’s The Presence (1990), Larry Burkett’s Illuminati (1991), Pat Robertson’s The End of the Age (1991), and Bob Larson’s Dead Air (1991) all followed This Present Darkness in depicting occult forces in a recognizable, mimetic reality, using the code of realism to naturalize the supernatural. By the end of the decade, there were more representations of the supernatural in Christian fiction and they had gotten more diverse. Francine Rivers’ The Last Sin Eater (1999) makes use of traditions of Appalachian shamanism. Lynn Marzulli’s The Nephalim (1999) adapts New Age alien-deityabduction myths. Ted Dekker and Bill Bright’s Blessed Child (2000) imagines an African orphan with otherworldly powers. The most successful evangelical novel, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind, came out in 1995. 11 Its narrative centers on a dramatic disruption of secular structures of reality, as true Christians all over the world are miraculously, supernaturally “raptured” by God. The fictional world they are raptured out of is presented mimetically. The novel treats the supernatural differently than This Present Darkness, however. In Left Behind, the supernatural is presented as fantastic, in Todorov’s sense. Its reality is ambiguous. The novel puts the reader into a position of hesitation that, if not irresolvable, is hesitation nonetheless. This is clear in a metafictional moment in the first half of the novel. A character notes that if the fictional narrative were a fiction in the fictional reality of the novel, it would be implausible. “If someone tried to sell a screenplay,” the protagonist thinks, “about millions of people disappearing, leaving everything but their bodies behind, it would be laughed off” (110). In the everyday reality of the reader, the novel can here be taken as plausible in how it is implausible, or the implausibility can be seen as implausible, 11 For an account of its commercial success, see Silliman. Reading the Supernatural 111 which would make it plausible. The problem is recursive. The characters do, as per the rules of Christian fiction, eventually have their conversion experience, which is here depicted as accepting the realism of the supernatural. This choice, however, does not simply resolve the problem of the disruption of the supernatural. As Amy Hungerford notes, the conversions happen as acts of submission (124-127). Belief is not portrayed as certain knowledge. Instead it is imagined as something that must be rehearsed and repeated, as “articulating the knowledge is part of the practice” of belief (Hungerford 112). The protagonists make extensive use of Christian apologetics, never getting to the point that such arguments are no longer necessary. The supernatural never achieves the status of taken-for-granted reality. The novel doesn’t give readers any reason to think the protagonists are wrong to choose to believe the realism of the supernatural, but the protagonists themselves doubt their knowledge and readers are never given more information than the protagonists. Left Behind is narrated from a close third person, so unlike This Present Darkness or some other works that fit into the faith paradigm of magic realism, the narrator never pulls back to show readers the true breadth of reality. Readers, like the protagonists, are rather asked to accept the plausibility of the supernatural, to believe in it, but only in the provisional sense of suspending disbelief. Professional readers have interpreted this representation of the supernatural according to the discourses of Western academic theory, specifically psychoanalysis. Left Behind is most frequently read symptomatically, the critic unmasking suppressed trauma and confused identity. “Clearly,” writes religious studies scholar Glenn W. Shuck in what is, to-date, the longest academic study of Left Behind, “beneath the bizarre, supernatural plots, something important is happening” (19). Shuck diagnoses the representation of the supernatural as resulting from the trauma of cultural changes. The texts serve to show that “prophecy believers already are, in a very real sense, the ones left behind by bewildering social, cultural, and economic changes” (18). Other critics see the “higher” meaning as sexual. Jason Bivins, for example, argues that the fiction teaches its audience to expect the culmination of human history but then that culmination is continually delayed, prolonging the believers’ (political) arousal (210-211). The text functions erotically. Hungerford also detects an “erotic charge” (123) between the two male protagonists, seeing Left Behind in part as being about illicit homosexual desire sublimated into practices of belief. There is, of course, ample textual evidence for psychoanalytical readings of Left Behind. This is an evangelical novel, after all, that opens with a penis joke (“Rayford Steele’s mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot …” (1)). Nevertheless, the academics’ approach to this text is notably different than similar critical efforts to reveal the “higher” meaning in magical realist and ethnic fantastic fictions. Here, one cannot find affirmative interpretations that suggest the protagonists’ encounters with the supernatural serve to engage readers in recognition and self-recognition and thereby embrace the values of cultural difference. One does not find “critical” readings suggesting 112 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn the evangelical representations of the supernatural push against modernist Enlightenment norms and asserting a more expansive and holistic alternative or even superior understanding of reality. Even where evangelical and ethnic fictions’ representations of the supernatural are markedly similar, academic interpretations are not. Academic readings of the supernatural in evangelical fiction are most often framed with a certain aggression and hostility, as “counter,” and in some sense corrective. These readings are conceived as running against the presumed design of the text, the authorial intention. Where the theory-informed reading of the ethnic fantastic “reveals” a higher meaning, the same strategy applied to evangelical fiction “exposes” it. Professional readers have also rarely, if ever, allowed for a dimension of meta-fictionality to these Christian novels, even when the novels are very self-reflexive, ironic, ambiguous, and so on. There are standard explanations for the differences in how these respective representations of the supernatural have fared with professional readers. It’s commonly accepted that the cultural prestige awarded to the ethnic fantastic and denied evangelical fiction is a direct and objective reflection of quality. That could well be true. Yet, as James English has noted, there are also “these neglected agents and instruments of cultural exchange” that are always at work (14). The networks of institutions that produce and support these texts, and establish the interpretive communities that define them, seem more important in shaping the critical responses of academics than any actual textual features. In contrast to the divergent reactions of professional readers, both types of supernatural fictions, ethnic and Christian, seem to elicit similar responses on the “lay” level, even if readers come from different segments of the American middle class. There are good reasons to believe the majority of readers who consume ethnic fantastic and evangelical supernatural fiction tend to treat it as a spiritual variety of what Timothy Aubry has called therapeutic fiction. That is to say, the fiction is taken as a means to understand, confront and possibly manage one’s own desires, anxieties, losses, and hopes. Therapeutic reading hinges on identification with characters and their stories, and thus on readers’ realistic recuperation of the narrated world in analogy to their own. Lay readers engage with the supernatural elements in these novels using a faith paradigm, in which the supernatural serves as a means to expand the secularized, naturalistic assumptions about the “real,” and allows for an empathetic, imaginative experience of spiritual fullness. *** An important key to the success that many ethnic supernatural novels have had with popular audiences is how the characters’ struggles with their ethnoracial identities are linked with a religious quest. Most feature protagonists who have been born into a minority group or are of at least partially ethnic ancestry, but have adapted to mainstream, white American culture. They do not fully embrace what are represented as the traditional supernatural beliefs of their forebears. The search for what it means to be black or Native Reading the Supernatural 113 American is then presented as a search for faith and spiritual fullness. The individual’s struggle over racial or ethnic self-definition in the final analysis appears as a matter of faith. With those novels that can be classified as belonging to the ethnic fantastic, this struggle, by virtue of the texts’ in-built hermeneutical conflicts, appears as open-ended and without final closure. By making this link, the novels offer possibilities of identification for diverse audiences. Readers can identify with these characters regardless of race or ethnicity. In imaginatively participating in the protagonist’s experiences, their search for answers, explanations and identities, different readers are free to switch between foregrounding the spiritual or the ethno-racial dimensions. Whether these protagonists are middle-aged members of the black bourgeoisie estranged from a distinctly African spirituality, mixedrace Native Americans largely ignorant of their tribal heritage, or secondgeneration Chinese or Korean immigrants with a bicultural upbringing, the heroes and heroines of the ethnic fantastic all find themselves in a condition of liminality. The protagonists of the ethnic fantastic all make extraordinary, possibly supernatural encounters that are connected with a minority culture to which they are only tentatively connected. These encounters potentially constitute something akin to conversion experiences of spiritual self-discovery and regeneration, which also promise to establish new ties to the minority culture. However, due to the tenuous nature of these experiences and the characters’ abiding uncertainty how to interpret or integrate them into their lives, works of the ethnic fantastic typically stop short of allowing full personal closure or an actual spiritual-cultural re-birth to their protagonists. Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum serves as a case in point here. Supernatural or mythic elements almost always play into Erdrich’s novels, as they do into the works of many contemporary Native American authors. 12 Unlike some of the classics of the so-called Native American Renaissance, such as Silko’s Ceremony or N. Scott Momaday’s The Ancient Child (1989), however, Erdrich has frequently chosen to “hedge in” the magic so as to keep its ontological status within the fictional universe uncertain. This certainly applies to those of her novels that are set in the late twentieth century, such as Love Medicine (1984), The Bingo Palace (1994), The Painted Drum (2005), and The Round House (2012), for which she received the National Book Award. While Erdrich has also written texts that are more magical realist, all of the abovementioned works are better classified as ethnic fantastic fictions. Laid out for the reader in the style of traditional literary realism, the frame story of The Painted Drum takes place at the beginning of the new millennium in the rather mundane setting of a small New Hampshire town. The main protagonist and first-person narrator of the frame-story is Faye Travers. Faye knows that through her mother Elsie, with whom she lives in a rather strained symbiosis, she is partly of Ojibwe ancestry. She passes for white, though, and has never lived on the Northern tribal reservation, from where her maternal ancestors came. While she does have a certain interest in the 12 For helpful introductions to Edrich’s fictional universe, compare Stookey, Beidler, Jacobs, and Sarris. 114 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn traditional culture of the tribe, she does not identify as a Ojibwe, and neither she nor her mother are legally members of the tribe. Faye does not really believe in the religious views of her native ancestors, let alone practice their ways. And yet she reflects on how “we are more captive to our background than we admit” (32), and often wonders how she would look at things, “Were I a traditional Ojibwe” (33). Raised in an ordinary but troubled middle-class home, Faye is now a middle-aged estate agent and antique dealer specialized in indigenous art. She is suffering through an ongoing existential crisis linked to a childhood trauma, the death of her beloved sister and non-native father. That bereavement “prevents her from engaging fully with the events of her own life” (Wyatt 13). Called to appraise the estate of the Tatro family, whose grandfather was an agent on the Ojibwe reservation, she comes upon a ceremonial drum, which she then, on a sudden mysterious impulse, sneaks out of the house and takes home with her. When Faye discovers the drum it immediately and quite literally resonates with her in a scene clearly marked as a truly extraordinary event. Yet, due to the point-of-view technique so typical of the fantastic, the experience remains irreducibly ambiguous. I’m not a sentimental person and I don’t believe old things hold the life of people. How can I? I see the most intimate objects proceed to other hands, indifferent to the love once bestowed. Some people believe objects absorb something of their owner’s essence. I stay clear of that. And yet, when I step near the drum, I swear it sounds. One deep, low, resonant note. I stop dead still, staring at the drum. I hear it, I know I hear it, and yet Sarah Tatro does not. (39) A psychological as well as a supernatural account of the sensation seems possible. As Faye assures herself (and the reader): “I don’t just hear things, and I’m not subject to imaginative fits. There will be an explanation. Something’s shifting to strike the skin. A change in air pressure” (39). And yet, such naturalistic explanations fail to fully convince, especially given the mysterious power the drum seems to exert over Faye: “I set my hand on the drum and then I feel, pulled, through me like a nerve, a clear conviction. It is visceral. Not a thought but a gut instinct” (40). Soon it becomes clear that Faye’s “instinctual theft” (44) is driven by her need to come to terms with her traumatic past and her cultural-religious deracination. As her mother explains to Faye how in traditional Ojibwe culture ceremonial drums were venerated as living beings with magical, curative powers, she makes sure to add: “Of course, that is a traditional belief, not mine.” Faye finds herself nodding with relief, “for although I am surprised by my actions this afternoon, I do not believe of course that the drum itself possesses a power beyond its symbolism and antiquity” (43). And yet, Faye comes to admit to herself that the finding of the drum “signifies a matter so essential that it might be called survival” (44). With the drum rested beside her bed at night, Faye experiences something like a spiritual rebirth: “A greatness, a lightness. I grow heavier, then so inert my body seems without life. Between breaths, I loose feeling. And then my chest fills, a resurrection” (44-45). There are also unsettling but ultimately comforting visions of her sister, for whose accidental death she feels Reading the Supernatural 115 responsible. As with the initial drive to take the drum, Faye, a thoroughly modern woman, wavers in her explanations for these disturbing occurrences, and the feelings they stir up: Has she stolen the drum because she, with expert eyes, was struck by its beauty as an artifact and saw its great value? Or is the drum a magical thing, indeed a living spiritual being (as indigenous belief would have it), which has recognized her as an Ojibwe, and called her in order to revive its healing power? Are the night-visions of her sister supernatural visits from the spirit-world, which are miraculously caused by the powers of the drum as part of Faye’s healing process? Or were they nothing but dreams triggered by the accidental death of her lover’s daughter? Faye cannot decide. She nonetheless has the clear sense of a change in her life. Eventually, Faye decides to repatriate the drum to the reservation on the Northern plains. There she learns about the drum’s origin and multi-generational history from the mouth of Bernard Shawaano, the great-grandson of the builder. According to Bernard’s stories, which were told to him by his father and other members of the tribe, the drum was made by the devastated Shawaano at the bidding of his dead daughter after she sacrificed herself to attacking wolves in order to save her mother and sister. The drum contains the bones of the little girl. It is said to house her spirit, and to exert, if really believed in and treated right, a regenerative influence on the grief-stricken by reconciling them to their dead loved ones. Even though Faye becomes deeply fascinated by this myth and feels more and more connected with these oral traditions, she cannot shake off her Western education. She remains doubtful. The way Bernard’s stories are inserted into the realist framework of the novel and the tensions that arise from the co-existence of these two narrative forms invites metafictional interpretations. The structure of the narrative can be read as addressing the clash of cultural epistemologies. 13 These are not forced upon readers, however, who can also choose to simply take them as embedded tales told by a character. While Faye shows signs that she might eventually be able to let go of her grief and allow herself to love once more, her existential troubles, like the identity conflict of which she has become aware through the drum, ultimately remain unresolved. She has undoubtedly undergone a change for the better but it is not clear that she will fully heal, nor whether the drum supernaturally initiated such a process. For Faye all proof of the spirit-world and the miraculous powers of the drum are “contained” within these second, or third hand, legendary stories, and hence rendered questionable. The reader gets one more startling glimpse of the drum’s alleged wonder-workings when another little girl from the reservation named Shawnee, who is seeking to save herself and her younger siblings from the deadly cold, hears mysterious beating sounds, leading her to Bernard’s house where his greatgrandfather’s legacy has found its rightful place. This additional first-hand account given by an anonymous, extradiegetic narrator works to increase the 13 On this clash as an overarching theme in Erdrich’s fiction, see Rainwater. 116 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn reader’s willingness to give more credit to the traditional stories about the drum. They support the reading of Faye’s experiences in supernatural terms. But by no means does it completely overturn the basic interpretative ambiguity which the novel is careful to sustain throughout. The supernatural in this novel appears less palpable and thick than it does in magical realist works. Hinted at rather than directly thrown in the readers’ faces, it cannot be called irreducible in Feris’s sense of the term. Everything possibly supernatural is explicitly marked as appearing to specific characters and does not get confirmed by anyone else. Faye consistently second-guesses her experiences. While supernatural explanations of the extraordinary occurrences might be presented as plausible all of the texts make a point of always offering an alternative explanation in naturalistic (e.g. psychological) categories. In this way, the supernatural or magical phenomena in a novel such as The Painted Drum are ultimately never fully integrated into a carefully established realist framework. The extra-ordinary experiences of the characters are marked as violations of the rules or assumptions that are inscribed into this framework and also go against the worldview held by the central character. Faye, like all main protagonists of ethnic fantastic novels, finds herself in an intractable explanatory conflict. In seeking to integrate her disturbing experiences into modern modes of thinking and being, she is torn between belief and disbelief. She is, as it were, caught between different construals of reality. Again, this hermeneutical conflict lends itself to academic interpretations under the auspices of diverse identity theories. 14 But it can also be read in more simple terms as struggle for personal belonging and spiritual fullness. Significantly, in the novels of the ethnic fantastic this struggle always remains unresolved. And so it is with Faye. As Wyatt points out, she certainly undergoes a transformation: “her perception of reality has shifted toward an Ojibwe worldview, she has a new vision of her relationship with the dead, and she is more open to the unfolding experiences of her life” (13). However, Faye’s new faith and sense of belonging remains tentative. This is forcefully expressed by her at the very end of the novel. “For to suddenly say, I believe, I am convinced, even saved, and to throw myself into Native traditions ... is not in my character,” Faye tells the reader. “Salvation seems a complicated process with many wobbling steps, and I am skeptical and slow to act” (269, original emphasis). If, as McClure has shown, the characters of much contemporary, postsecular fiction are rarely granted more than “partial conversions,” this is true in a special way for the protagonists of the ethnic fantastic. Their vacillation between belief and unbelief in rediscovering their ancestral traditions parallels their inability to either completely submerge themselves in the cultural mainstream, or to fully embrace the religious legacy and a faith in the supernatural that are represented as essential to the self-definition of this group. Through an active identification with the protagonists’ quest for a new sense 14 On the theme of Native American identity in The Painted Drum, see, for instance, the essay by Stokes. Reading the Supernatural 117 of self the reader can imaginatively participate in the conflicts surrounding their hyphenated identity. Arguably, though, the majority of non-ethnic, middle-class lay readers will identify with the character’s conflict more as a troubled, open-ended quest for faith, for a sense of belonging and spiritual fullness. *** Nearly identical fictional strategies are deployed in William Paul Young’s novel The Shack. Like The Painted Drum, The Shack starts with a frame narrative. A first-person narrator directly addresses the reader and the readers’ presumed skepticism. “Who wouldn’t be skeptical,” the opening line asks, “when a man claims to have spent an entire weekend with God, in a shack no less? ” (xi). It is soon revealed that the narrator is the neighbor of the man making this claim. He has been Mackenzie Allen Phillips’ friend and neighbor for more than 20 years. He knows him well enough to call him “Mack,” and well enough to trust him. Yet, he tells readers, even he struggled to accept Mack’s story about this supernatural experience. “It’s a little, well … no, it is a lot on the fantastic side,” the narrator says (xvii, emphasis original). He has, nonetheless, come to accept it. That is not, importantly, exactly the same as saying he thinks it is real. The ontological status of the supernatural is, for the narrator and the reader after him, unresolvable. He can’t be certain. He wants to believe it, but that only further heightens the uncertainty. “I confess to you,” the narrator says, “that I desperately want everything Mack has told me to be true. Most days I am right there with him, but on others - when the visible world of concrete and computers seems to be the real world - I lose touch and have my doubts” (xviii, emphasis original). The narrator thus models belief for the reader. That belief is not the resolution of the question of the reality of the supernatural, though, but rather an acceptance of a broader, more generous sense of how something can be “true.” While the narrator won’t vouch for the reality of the supernatural, he does testify to the effect that the events, whether they happened or not, have had. Despite the unresolvable hermeneutic conflict about how to interpret the seemingly supernatural, the events can be accepted on the basis of their transformative power. Mack is changed, readers are told. The narrator claims to have been changed too merely by the power of the story, dangling before the reader the possibility, via an identificationary reading, that reading this story could be a spiritually transformative act. If there were any question this novel will insist on certain insoluble ambiguities, the first-person foreword is signed “Willie.” Since this is a diminutive form of William, the signature could be taken by readers as identifying the narrator as the author, William Paul Young. Supporting that, the narrator identifies himself as the ghostwriter of Mack’s story, as Mack “is not comfortable with his writing skills” (xvii). In every English-language edition of The Shack, however, Young’s first name is abbreviated on the cover as “Wm.” In fact, the author, in his everyday life, goes by his middle name, Paul. Thus, just as the frame narrative works to alert the reader to the fact the narrator is not 118 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn the protagonist, the frame-narrative’s indication of the narrator’s identification with the author is presented to the reader as problematic. The narrator further warns readers that he appears in the narrative, but in the third person, described by the narrator from the protagonist’s perspective, possibly unreliably. The narrator is extradiegetic in part to warn the reader that he is also intradiegetic, and that there is an unstable relationship between the ways the narrator is inside and outside the story. While these strategies of destabilizing the identity of the author are familiar to readers of postmodern literature, they are remarkable in a work of evangelical fiction. These metafictional moves serve to send readers a strong signal from the start that this narrative will dwell in ambiguities, content to leave things unresolved. At the same time, unlike magical realism, the text does not signal to the reader that characters will and readers should treat these disruptions as obvious and unproblematic. As the narrator is problematized, so too the text will call into question what is real in the reality of the fictional world of The Shack. The narrative centers on Mack’s weekend visit to the titular shack, where his young daughter was violently murdered some years before. Mack has been overwhelmed by depression in the intervening years, overcome by what he refers to as “The Great Sadness.” During a snowstorm, while his family is away, Mack receives a note in his mailbox summoning him to return to the shack, “the icon of his deepest pain” (62). The note is signed by God. He’s quite skeptical that God put a note in his mailbox. He decides, however, to act as if this is a supernatural message, despite his doubts. “I guess part of me would like to believe that God would care enough to send a note,” he says, though at the same time acknowledging his confusion (69). As he approaches the shack, a startling, magical transformation occurs. Winter becomes spring. A pristine lake is suddenly visible. The dilapidated shack becomes a larger, cleaner, and beautiful log cabin. “Little, if anything, was the same” (80), and then, there, in that transformed space, Mack meets God. God is a large black woman called “Papa,” a Middle Eastern-looking Jesus, and an Asian woman called “Sarayu.” When Mack asks which one and if one of them is God, they answer in unison, “I am” (87). As with the ethnic fantastic, The Shack persistently leaves open the possibility that these apparently supernatural disruptions of reality can be accounted for naturally. The divine figures appear only to Mack, their reality confirmed neither by another character nor by the narrator. Mack himself considers a variety of natural explanations: he’s lost his sanity, he’s imagining all this, he’s dreaming, he’s suffered an accident and is in a coma, or he’s dead. The realism of the realistic narrative unsettled, the bulk of the novel amounts to an account of a spiritual retreat. Mack spends the weekend having long conversations with the respective persons of the Trinity on topics such as the problem of evil and the nature of God’s grace. He engages in various planned activities, such as gardening with the Holy Spirit and walking on the water of the lake with the Son of God. Though Mack never picks a single natural explanation for this experience, he continues to question its reality. God acknowledges the confusion. Rather than settling the question, Reading the Supernatural 119 though, or naturalizing the supernatural, God makes the argument that this uncertainly is part of the spiritual lesson Mack is to learn. “I understand how disorienting all this must be for you, Mack” says God the Father, who confounds Mack quite a bit by appearing in an unexpected race and gender. “I am what I am. I’m not trying to fit anyone’s bill …. I’m not asking you to believe anything, but I will tell you that you’re going to find this day a lot easier if you simply accept what is, instead of trying to fit it into your preconceived notions” (124). To accept “what is,” in the novel, is to accept doubt and uncertainty. It is to make peace with unresolvable ambiguity, even the ambiguity of a genderqueer God. Mack is shown to heal from his trauma through the adoption of this expanded perspective on reality. At the same time, the supernatural elements of the novel are never fully integrated into the mimetic, mundane reality of the fictional world, thus giving readers a chance at the denouement to embrace this same healing acceptance of uncertainty. Mack’s weekend ends, for example, when he wakes up in the shack. The shack is again the shack. The world has reverted to winter. “He was back in the real world,” the narrator says. “Then he smiled to himself. It was more likely he was back in the unreal world” (261). That might seem like a resolution into naturalistic realism, but then the novel vacillates in the final pages, the realism resolving and unresolving again. Mack leaves the shack, but gets in an accident on the way home. He regains consciousness slowly, emerging from a black sleep in a hospital with only a tenuous grasp on what happened. “He vaguely remembered the drive to the shack, but things got sketchy beyond that,” readers are told. Fragments of the weekend come back to him, “but he wasn’t sure if they were real or hallucinations conjured up by collisions between some damaged or otherwise wayward neurons and the drugs coursing through his veins” (265). He then remembers and, for a moment, the supernatural experiences are presented as part of the real world of the novel. Their status is then immediately thrown into doubt again when Mack is informed that he has been in the hospital the whole weekend. Mack decides this question of chronology is ultimately irrelevant, as God is not bound by time. His human conception of time, like his human conception of God, and his human conception of reality, is too limited. Mack tells his wife of the supernatural experience he had on his weekend with God and “there was life in what he was telling her, and she quickly understood that whatever had happened had greatly impacted and changed her husband” (268). Like Willie, Mack’s wife is persuaded to accept the supernatural even as it remains unassimilated into reality. This is the evangelical novel’s version of the “wobbling” conversion of Faye Travers. Though not identical to the “partial conversions” of other sorts of fiction, this is a partial conversion nonetheless. Characters achieve a spiritual fullness by pushing back on the boundaries of rationality, accepting and rising above their own persistent uncertainty. 120 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn The Shack has not, thus far, attracted much critical attention from professional readers. 15 It has been quite popular, though, both with evangelical audiences and non-evangelical audiences alike. By 2015, The Shack sold more than 10 million copies in the United States and another 9 million internationally. It is being adapted to film by a major studio - early rumors suggesting Oprah might play the character of God the Father (Sneider; Meeks). All the evidence suggests that a wide range of lay readers identify with the character’s troubled, open-ended quest for a sense of spiritual fullness. The Shack lends itself to this sort of therapeutic, identificationary reading. Evangelical fiction generally is very amenable to that sort of “devotional” reading, as the network of institutions that create the market also define what this fiction is and frame it, most frequently, as para-scriptural texts serving a spiritual purpose. There are a number of major ethnographic studies of evangelical readers of evangelical fiction, all of which have found this mode of reading to predominate. In evangelical reading groups, the book under discussion serves “more as an aperture than a focal point” (Weaver-Zercher 108). The focus is on personal responses to the text by means of transference, and the formal elements of the novel are relevant “only inasmuch as they illuminate readers’ own lives and connect them with the experiences of others” (Weaver-Zercher 109). Amy Frykholm, in her study of readers of Left Behind, notes that this hermeneutic is also the one evangelicals use in reading the Bible. She calls it the life-application method: “Readers of both the Bible and Left Behind constantly ask, ‘How does this apply to my life? ’” (111). The text of The Shack encourages this approach. In the afterwards, the reader is again addressed directly by Willie. He offers his own life-application, suggesting that the best way to understand the preceding narrative is to talk about “how it has affected me” (273). He models a book discussion. “Do I think it’s true? ” Willie asks. “I want all of it to be true. Perhaps if some of it is not actually true in one sense, it is still true nonetheless - if you know what I mean” (273). This is a recuperative reading, emphasizing reader-character identification through the creation of analogies. The readers do not regularly claim to have undergone similar supernatural experiences themselves, but find ways to meaningfully identify and imaginatively, temporarily try on the experiences of those who have. Via that identification, readers can feel they come to confront their own desires, anxieties, losses, and hopes. *** Given the predominance of these reading strategies, it seems likely that the popular appeal of ethnic and evangelical supernatural fiction should be seen as part of a broader cultural trend since the 1960s, described by Robert Wuthnow and others as a movement toward a “spirituality of seeking.” Wuthnow convincingly argues that one striking manifestation of seeker-oriented spirituality is the burgeoning interest in spirits, miracles, and “special appearances, such as near-death experience and angels” (8). In his opinion, 15 The financial success of The Shack has received more attention than its literary merits. See Grossman, Lisa Miller, Rich, Rosenfeld, and Streib. Reading the Supernatural 121 this is symptomatic both of a general uncertainty of belief, and an uncertainty about what exactly to believe. In this situation in which many people feel an irresistible fascination for supernatural experiences and a demand for “a vicarious sense of spiritual authenticity” (140), the (imaginary) traditions of ethnic religions have become an important resource for religious selfsearch and self-expression, alongside older Euro-American forms of alternative spiritualities. 16 What makes these traditions so attractive to so many Americans is that they perceive them to be a residuum of more authentic and holistic forms of spirituality rooted in an uncomplicated, unwavering faith in the transcendent, a faith which Western culture had irretrievably lost. Indeed, many white Americans also pick and choose elements from these traditions (or what is represented to them as such) and seek to incorporate them in their highly individualistic and syncretic religious identities. However, rather than just offering readers explications of beliefs or devotional spirits in the fashion of spiritual advice literature, the ethnic fantastic and some evangelical fiction represent the supernatural in a way that engages audiences in a basic hermeneutic conflict that is rooted in the tension between the (nostalgic) yearning for a pre-modern form of religiosity that does not yet recognize the distinction of natural/ supernatural, matter/ spirit so fundamental to modernity and the conditions of faith in the secular age. These novels give readers the opportunity to imaginatively immerse themselves into an essentially pre-modern spiritual worldview. They are allowed to experience the existence of another reality in which the opposition between the natural and the supernatural doesn’t exist and “belief” is a kind of instinctual certainty. In the simulated space of the novel, readers can have vicarious encounters of the sacred in a manner that, outside of art, has become fundamentally problematic, if not altogether unavailable to the modern mind under the condition of secularity: The sacred is encountered in an immediate and often tangible manner that leaves no doubt as to its reality, and this within the recognizable framework of their readers’ own mundane world. These fictions - the ethnic fantastic and the evangelical - thus respond to the religious yearnings for a re-enchanted, spiritually inhabited universe. The ethnic fantastic and evangelical fictions do problematize (at least for readers willing to engage in such problematizations) the possibility of a supernatural reality that can be taken for granted. With the emphasis on the disturbing quality of supernatural phenomena and the built-in structure of interpretative hesitation, the fictions reflect the basic epistemological uncertainty of modernity and confront readers with the seemingly irresolvable conflict between a life in the condition of secularity and the naïve or unbroken faith ascribed to pre-modern spiritualities. Due to their literary nature, however, these representations of the supernatural do not confront the reader with a direct, unreserved truth claim in the manner of non-fictional 16 On Native American traditions in particular, see Jenkins. 122 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn writings. After all, readers always know that they are “just” reading a novel, which might possess verisimilitude but does not purport to be a mirror of the real world. Even in willingly suspending skepticism, readers will keep a self-conscious distance from what Western modernity has irreversibly problematized. The ethnic fantastic, in particular, calls attention to this distance by frequently telling the stories of characters who never complete their journey from alienation and doubt to fullness and certainty of faith. They merely undergo what McClure has called “partial conversions.” The protagonists always struggle with the question of what to believe, how to explain or interpret disturbing experiences and how to come to terms with their implications. In the ethnic fantastic, traditional religiosity is represented as something that the protagonists might have been in touch with through older members of their family, but which is no longer available to them. For them, to believe in the reality of supernatural beings and magical causalities is not an instinctual, quasi-natural way of life. On the contrary, they have come to regard this kind of worldview as something that is irreconcilable with science, rationality and modern life at large. If the protagonists of these novels in the end open up to a new respect for their ethno-relgious tradition, they clearly stop short of converting to the faith of their ancestors. The inherited faith will at best be to them, to borrow a phrase from Charles Taylor, “an embattled option” (3), which the characters tentatively embrace, highly self-conscious of surrounding alternatives. The worldview of their ancestors can never become an unchallenged, unproblematic reality, but stands as one construal of reality competing with other such construals in the plural environment of (post)modern America. Hence, in the literature of the ethnic fantastic the unresolvable self-reflexivity and hesitancy of faith−which Taylor has described as a hallmark of religion in the secular age−is made to mirror the abiding uncertainties and ambiguities of the characters’ hyphenated state between communities and cultures. And maybe the ultimate therapeutic function of these novels is to help readers reconcile themselves to this and, like the protagonist, accept partial conversions and a permanent state of in-between. In these characters and their attempts to find a way back to the belief of their ancestors, readers confront an awareness of their own impossibility to return, by any conscious effort, to a naïve, lived faith in an enchanted universe. In this manner, the ethnic fantastic makes its readers face one of the great paradoxes that haunt the contemporary spirituality of seeking: The same forces of modernity that create the wide-spread desire for extraordinary, authentic experiences will always render these experiences uncertain, just as they inevitably problematize the notion of authenticity. Individuals might choose to hold certain supernatural beliefs, but these can never be more than self-conscious convictions, however strongly they are felt. Under the conditions of modernity, direct manifestation of spiritual forces in the natural world demand experiential confirmation. But such experiences, even if people personally have them (or think they do), can never be had without Reading the Supernatural 123 hesitation, that is without being aware of other explanations, including the explanation that the experiences were just a projection of their own religious imaginary. The “spirituality of seeking” is not only something that happens beyond the bounds of traditional Christianity, however. There are also American Christian traditions that have adapted or emerged in response to this new situation of secularity, where emotional apprehensions of the sacred seem fleeting, if not radically elusive. These churches assume believers struggle with belief and feelings of spiritual emptiness and yet yearn for a (nostalgic, pre-modern, authentic) religious experience. It is in these faith communities that one finds “practices [that] share a good deal with psychotherapy,” as T.M. Luhrmann has shown (101). These practices are central to the religious life of these believers and, notably, are quite similar to the popular strategies for reading the supernatural. People valorize their own emotional responses (xxi), exercise the imagination (84), suspend disbelief, and “pretend in order to make the pretense into a reality” (73). They learn to commit themselves to the “play that occurs in the boundary between the mind and the world” (87), and thus expand their experience of reality (133). The goal of these religiotherapeutic practices, Luhrmann notes, is to develop a “state of mind ... a lot like being engrossed in good magical fiction” (83). That is to say, the exercises of re-enchantment are effectively similar to the “faith paradigm” by which readers of ethnic and evangelical supernatural fictions achieve the experience, at least temporarily, of fuller, deeper realities. Both evangelical and ethnic fiction are thus commonly read as spiritual varieties of therapeutic fiction involving (partial) conversion narratives, stories of, at least, partial regeneration from alienation and unbelief to a new, more authentic self. These fictions engage the reader with the problems and uncertainties of religious experience under the conditions of secularity but, due to their literary nature, do not confront the reader with a direct, unreserved truth claim in the manner of non-fictional writings, whether of Christian theology or alternative spirituality. It is their bracketed truth claims that make the spiritual content of these literary works especially palatable for a college-educated, middle-class audience. By allowing readers to recuperate in a realistic fashion encounters of the supernatural, these fictions suggest to the reader the possibility of such experiences in the extra-literary world, while not making any direct calls for commitments. In these particular niches in the wider landscape of contemporary Euro-American fiction, the fictional worlds are partially and problematically enchanted. Works Cited Aubry, Timothy. Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. Balmer, Randall. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 124 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn Beidler, Peter G., ed. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Revised and Expanded Ed. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006. . Benito, Jesús, Ana Ma Manzanas, and Begoña Simal. Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures. Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi, 2009. Bickle, Bruce and Stan Jantz. His Time, His Way: The CBA Story: 1950-1999. Colorado Springs, CO: CBA, 1999. Bivins, Jason C. Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Bowers, Maggie Ann. Magic(al) Realism. The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2004. Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1998. Brown, Candy Gunther. The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, 2004. Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland, 1985. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. Erdrich, Louise. The Painted Drum. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Eskridge, Larry. God’s Forever Family. Oxford, Oxford UP, 2013. Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2004. Grossman, Cathy Lynn. “Aim at ‘spiritually interested’ sparks ‘The Shack’ sales.” USA Today. 1 May 2008. Web. 11 August 2015. Hendershot, Heather. Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and the Conservative Evangelical Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2004. Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2010. Jacobs, Connie A. The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Jenkins, Philip. Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Kennedy, Douglas. “Selling Rapture.” The Guardian. 9 July 2005. Web. 11 Aug. 2015. LaHaye, Tim and Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 1995. Logan, Laurel Oke. Janette Oke: A Heart for the Prairie. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1993. Lovecraft, H.P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1973. Luhrmann, T.M. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Knopf, 2012. McClure, John A. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007. McDowell, Edwin. “Book Notes.” New York Times. 28 June 28 1989. Web. 11 August 2015. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 2009. Meeks, Gina. “Will Oprah Winfrey Play God in ‘The Shack’ Film? ” Charisma. 6 May 2014. Web. 11 August 2015. Reading the Supernatural 125 Miller, Lisa. “Christian Novel: ‘The Shack’ Sells 3.6 Million.” Newsweek. 29 August 2008. Web. 11 August 2015. Miller, Stephen P. The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Neal, Lynn S. Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, 2006. Oke, Janette. Love Comes Softly. Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 1979. Peretti, Frank. This Present Darkness. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1986. Rainwater, Catherine. “Reading between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich.” American Literature 62.3 (1990): 405-422. Rich, Motoko. “Christian Novel is Surprise Best Seller.” New York Times. 24 June 2008. Web. 11 August 2015. Rosenfeld, Jordan E. “William P. Young’s Cinderella Story.” Writers Digest. 13 January 2009. Web. 11 Augues 2015. Sarris, Greg, ed. (2004). Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich. New York: MLA. Schroeder, Shannin. Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Shuck, Glenn W. Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity. New York: New York University, 2005. Silliman, Daniel. “Publishers and Profit Motives: The Economic History of Left Behind.” Religion and the Marketplace in the United States. Ed. Jan Stievermann, Philip Goff, Detlef Junker. Oxford: Oxford University, 2015. 165-188. Sneider, Jeff. “Tim McGraw, Alice Braga Join Sam Worthington in Faith-Based Drama ‘The Shack.’” The Wrap. 7 June 2015. Web. 11 August 2015. Stievermann, Jan. “Towards a Theory of the Ethnic Fantastic: A Comparison of Gloria Naylors Mama Day and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” Heilige Texte: Literarisierung von Religion und Sakralisierung von Literatur im modernen Roman. Hrsg. Klaus Antoni, Matthias Bauer, Jan Stievermann, Birgit Weyel, Angelika Zirker. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2013. 168-204. Streib, Lauren. “Paul Young’s Publishing Miracle.” Forbes. 4 June 2008. Web. 11 August 2015. Stokes, Karah. “’Who They Are, What it Means’: Native American Identity in Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum.” Kentucky Philological Review 21 (2006): 53-57. Stookey, Lorena Laura. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2007. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. 1970. Trans. Richard Howes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975. Warnes, Christopher. Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence. London: Palgrave, 2009. ---. “Naturalizing the Supernatural: Faith, Irreverence and Magical Realism.” Literature Compass 2 (2005): 1-16. Weaver-Zercher, Valerie. Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2013. Worthen, Molly. Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 126 d Aniel s illimAn And J An s tievermAnn Wuthnow, Robert. After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkley: U of California P, 1998. ---. After the Baby Boomers: How Twentyand Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Wyatt, Jean. “Storytelling, Melancholia, and Narrative Structure in Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 36: 1 (2011): 13: 36. Young, William Paul. The Shack. Newbury Park, CA: Windblown Media, 2007. Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. t imothy A ubry The Discipline of Feeling: The New Critics and the Struggle for Academic Legitimacy When critics argue that literature is capable of performing a therapeutic function, they invariably try to dignify the idea by attributing it to Aristotle. The latter, after all, famously suggests that tragedy inspires catharsis in its spectators, allowing them to experience and purge dangerous feelings (Aristotle 61). Thus, as New Critic John Crowe Ransom attempts to articulate what he regards as the value of literature, he pauses, midway through his 1938 book The World’s Body, to discredit, as strenuously as he can, Aristotle’s notion. Ransom observes: On the one hand, the name of Aristotle behind this remark is revered beyond any earthly name that Europe knows how to spell. On the other hand, there could not well be the occasion for a cathartic without there being a nasty and toxic excrement somewhere, and a state of disease resulting from its presence within the system; nor can the joy of art be anything but the pleasure that attends an act of elimination; and all the fine notions which Europeans have entertained so easily about their arts and artists must be dissipated. By this view poetry is not a pretty business; the best that can be said is that it takes the place of something worse. (176) Aristotle’s claim is a sign, Ransom contends, not of his reverence, but rather of his disdain for literature and the feelings it is thought to inspire - as the generally under-emphasized scatological meanings of his metaphor reveal. In order for citizens to be “dutiful and effective” (186), they must find an outlet for their “ungovernable propensities” (184), and thus tragic theater functions as a benign release valve or laxative. Literature is not valuable in itself; it simply allows spectators to dispose in a sanitary fashion of their otherwise dangerous impulses, so they can return to what Aristotle regards as truly valuable: the “public life as citizen, scientist, worker or whatever career was sober and desirable” (210). Aristotle cannot recognize the true significance of literature because he is, according to Ransom, a scientist - a member, in other words, of that esteemed profession bent on destroying all possibility of aesthetic cultivation and appreciation (181). It is, to be sure, a somewhat ill-fitting if not anachronistic designation, but having observed, with horrified fascination, the stunning growth of science’s influence in the twentieth century, Ransom has developed a knack for spotting its signature tendencies practically everywhere 128 t imothy A ubry he looks. 1 While the attack on Aristotle is necessary to prevent his name from conferring a kind of timeless validity upon the idea that literature might serve primarily as a form of therapy, the more elaborate version of this argument propounded by the scientifically oriented critic I.A. Richards is of even greater concern to Ransom. Thus in several essays, he attempts to disentangle the New Critical approach from Richards’s - to translate a psychological description of the reader’s experience into a purportedly objective description of the text, in order to ascribe an absolute value to the literary work, independent of any effect it might have on a potential reader, and thereby reject any equation between the value of literature and its therapeutic capacity. The language of literature, Richards argues in both Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism, is emotive not referential; its function is not to offer knowledge or truths about the world but to inspire particular attitudes. Moreover, the function of literature is not merely to elicit our feelings, but to manage or order them. Most individuals’ minds are poorly organized; their impulses interfere with each other, so that the satisfaction of one urge will prevent the satisfaction of others. “In order to keep any steadiness and clarity in his attitudes the ordinary man is under the necessity on most occasions of suppressing the greater part of the impulses which the situation might arouse. He is incapable of organizing them; therefore they have to be left out” (Principles 184). The poet, by contrast, is able to reconcile his seemingly opposed impulses through a finer, more comprehensive mental organization, and he transmits this mental organization to the reader through the work of literature. “It is in terms of attitudes,” writes Richards, “the resolution, interanimation, and balancing of impulses - Aristotle’s definition of Tragedy is an instance - that all the most valuable effects of poetry must be described” (Principles 113). “The equilibrium of opposed impulses, which we suspect to be the ground-plan of the most valuable aesthetic responses, brings into play far more of our personality than is possible in experiences of a more defined emotion” (251). The attitudes that literature provokes, according to Richards, also help to produce a more durable mental organization in the individual, making him or her a healthier, more effective, more satisfied human being. Over the years, numerous critics, as Gerald Graff notes, “have rejected Richards’ openly therapeutic approach to poetics as cheapening” (Poetic Statement 12). That anyone might be struck by a critic’s “openly therapeutic approach” suggests that this mode of reading is, however widespread, embarrassing. Why might that be? Ransom offers one possible answer, contending that an excessive concern for mental health of the kind that marks Richards’s work could easily be thought to imply a lack thereof in the serious critic. 2 But the growth of the therapeutic professions during the middle of the 1 Chicago formalist R.S. Crane accused the New Critics of harboring a “morbid obsession with the problem of justifying and preserving poetry in an age of science” (“Critical Monism” 105). 2 When we eschew Richards’s emphasis upon the emotional effects of poetry, according to Ransom, we avoid “the ignominy of concerning ourselves about our mental ‘health,’ when we are occupied healthily and naturally with our external concerns.” The Discipline of Feeling 129 twentieth century, the increasing numbers of high-functioning individuals who were in treatment, and the sense among intellectuals that certain forms of emotional repression and nervous disorders were ubiquitous especially within the urban populations of the United States and Europe had all served to destigmatize therapy, making it a fairly commonplace practice. 3 Moreover, such an explanation does not indicate why serious critics might view a therapeutic approach to literature as “cheapening.” In our current literary culture, we tend to associate such an approach with middlebrow readers and middlebrow novels, with the Oprah Book Club and the naïve, narcissistic, interpretive responses that the show purportedly encouraged. But therapeutic styles of reading were not burdened with those negative connotations in the 1930s and 40s. Indeed, Richards, the champion of such modes, despised mass market and middlebrow literature. “With the increase of population the problem presented by the gulf between what is preferred by the majority and what is accepted as excellent by the most qualified opinion has become infinitely more serious and appears likely to become threatening in the near future” (Principles 36). Nor did he approve of readers who sought to discover a connection between works of literature and their own life experiences: “These are misleading effects,” he remarked, in Practical Criticism “of the reader’s being reminded of some personal scene or adventure, erratic associations, the interference of emotional reverberations from a past which may have nothing to do with the poem” (13). The kind of therapeutic experience that Richards believed serious literature could offer was distinct from readerly identification with the protagonist or unadulterated sentiment; what he imagined was a rigorous mode of therapy, a strangely impersonal experience that involved harmonizing rather than indulging one’s feelings. Despite Richards’s hopes, serious intellectuals and scholars did come, as Graff’s comment suggests, to regard any kind of therapeutic approach to literature as a sign of bad, uncritical reading. But such views were not inevitable, and they emerged, arguably, as a result of the way the New Critics defined literature, in opposition to Richards. If the New Critics ultimately rejected the therapeutic approach to literature, it was partially owing to the institutional challenges they faced as they sought to turn literary criticism into a legitimate academic discipline. Disciplining Criticism In the early part of the twentieth century, the majority of faculty in English departments across the United States were scholars, not critics; they produced historical or philological research. They traced the text’s allusions to earlier works or the genealogy of its terms and phrases, or they sought to He continues: “Something like this consideration was in Mr. Eliot’s mind when he referred respectfully to Mr. Richards’ studies but declined to discuss them because he felt that the preoccupations of psychologists were ‘morbid’” (The New Criticism 26). 3 See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace; Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology. 130 t imothy A ubry describe the historical context or the biography of the author. 4 According to the New Critics, traditional scholars were so focused on cataloguing facts about the literary work’s historical context that they tended to ignore the work itself. They made no attempt to articulate why particular texts might be worth reading in the first place - a question that the masses of first generation students who were entering the university during the 1920s and 1930s desperately needed answered. These students and the even larger numbers that followed them after World War II as a result of the G.I. Bill generally lacked the historical and linguistic knowledge necessary to appreciate the scholars’ erudition. The method of close reading pioneered by the New Critics, which sought to explain the meaning and value of literary works by analyzing short passages removed from any broader biographical or historical context, did not require any previous knowledge and was thus more attractive to these students. 5 But in order to introduce it as a central component of the university curriculum, the New Critics needed to differentiate their approach from other prevailing forms of criticism practiced primarily by journalists and trade authors. These, Ransom and his colleagues feared, were too subjective and impressionistic to qualify as a serious intellectual enterprise worthy of inclusion within English departments. 6 While Ransom worried that the expansion of scientific forms of thought within the twentieth century would entail a corresponding marginalization of literature, he also recognized that criticism would need to appropriate scientific protocols in order to achieve academic legitimacy. “Criticism,” he maintains, “must become more scientific, or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained effort of learned persons - which means that its proper seat is in the universities” (The World’s Body 329). Thus during the 1920s and 1930s, Ransom and his fellow New Critics, including Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and W.K. Wimsatt, devised a series of systematic principles and critical procedures aimed at lending rigor to the practice of criticism. In particular, Wimsatt’s famous admonition against the “intentional” and the “affective” fallacies attempted to sequester the feelings and thoughts of the author and 4 As MLA president Douglas Bush argues in his defense of traditional methods, the historical focus of scholars represents an “attempt to see a piece of writing through the minds of its author and its contemporaries” (13). Cleanth Brook’s characterization of scholarly work is less generous; he concludes, quoting Browning, that efforts to ascertain “What porridge had John Keats,” did nothing to illuminate his poetry. (The Well- Wrought Urn, 141.) Ransom summarizes the reasons for the New Critics’ dissatisfaction with literary scholarship somewhat more carefully in “Criticism, Inc.” See The World’s Body, 327-50. See also See Richard Ohmann, “Teaching and Studying Literature at the End of Ideology,” 145; Richard Foster, The New Romantics, 194; Rene Wellek, “The New Criticism: Pro and Contra,” 614; Vincent Leitch, American Literary Criticism, 27. 5 Numerous observers have recognized how well-suited New Criticism was for the pedagogical demands of the moment. See for instance Graff, Professing Literature, 173; Bush, “The New Criticism,” 13; “American Scholar Forum: The New Criticism,” 88. 6 See Ransom, The World’s Body, 329-342; Brooks, “The New Criticism,” 593; Mark Royden Winchell, 409; Graff, Literature Against Itself, 140-1; Leitch, American Literary Criticism, 53. The Discipline of Feeling 131 the reader from the act of criticism, in order, like any scientific practice, to isolate the object under investigation from all extraneous phenomena and to reduce the influence of the investigator’s own bias. 7 Richards of course also aimed to make criticism more scientific, and in Practical Criticism he even issued surveys and gathered empirical data about readers, but in his research he stripped from poetry all of the intellectual powers that he invested in the critic: to employ logic, to issue propositions, and to produce knowledge. Thus Ransom worried that no matter how scientific Richards’s procedures were, he could still be accused of investigating what was merely a form of emotional calisthenics entirely cut off from any real-world knowledge. “The theory of poetry as agitation,” writes Ransom, “gives us a muscular or gymnastic view of poetry: the poem resembles a gymnasium with plenty of dumb-bells and parallel bars for all the member interests; and what the member interests obtain from it is pure or abstract exercise, which does not pretend to have any relation to affairs.” But “to be interested,” Ransom continues, “is to try to obtain a cognition, to do what Mr. Richards wickedly denies to poetic experience and grants exclusively to science: to seek the truth” (The World’s Body 154-55). To deny poetry “any relation to affairs,” is, ostensibly, to presume that it is incapable of serving any worldly purpose. At times Ransom seems concerned that Richards’s definition will relegate the reading of literature to the leisure hours, placing it on the wrong side of a series of invidious oppositions, between work and play, between seriousness and triviality, and less obviously between masculinity and femininity. Parodying Richards’s account, Ransom writes: “Poetry is needed as a complement to science because it is prepared to give to the emotions, and through them to the attitudes, their daily work-out; science intends to suppress them in order to map the objective world without distraction. Science is for use in our overt or gross practical enterprises, but poetry ministers directly to the delicate needs of the organism” (New Criticism 22). Describing what he sees as a similar attempt to trivialize various forms of art in Aristotle, Ransom observes, “He has a sort of addiction to the drama, and is like some sober modern thinker, a scientist, let us say, who permits himself one single indulgence for relaxation, namely, the reading of detective stories, but while he is about it makes himself an authority on the subject, knowing all the good murder novels and the tricks of all the authors” (The World’s Body 185). In determining whether drama and music belong within the category of work or play, according to Ransom, Aristotle “stops as if to say that here the violence [of Phrygian music and tragedy] hardly consists with mere pastime, but the violence may as well be conceded as indicating the existence of dangerous passion, and the arts in question will pass it off during the play-period, and leave the citizen ready for his business” (188). 7 See “The Intentional Fallacy,” 5-28, and “The Affective Fallacy” 21-39, in W.K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon. As Christopher Herbert has noted in discussing these principles, “Only the limitless prestige of the scientific could possibly have rendered acceptable so drastic an insult to the natural interplay of readers’ personalities and literary texts” (198). 132 t imothy A ubry The Delicate Needs of the Organization Man It is odd to find Ransom accusing Richards of refusing literature a role within the world of “affairs.” The former, after all, is famous for denying any relationship between literature’s value and its perceived usefulness within society; and it is the latter, Richards, who attributes a practical, therapeutic function to literature. Indeed, a focus on the emotional, psychological services that literature renders does not, one could argue, relegate it to the leisure realm; after all, such services are perfectly commensurate with the forms of white collar work, the modes of immaterial labor, that become increasingly prevalent in the postwar period. As C. Wright Mills observes, in his seminal 1951 study, White Collar, “fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols” (65). And: “In the great shift from manual skills to the art of ‘handling,’ selling, and servicing people, personal or even intimate traits of the employee are drawn into the sphere of exchange and become of commercial relevance, become commodities in the labor market” (182). As corporations expanded, and means of production grew more efficient, more Americans became involved in administrative tasks and selling material goods to consumers rather than producing them. By the 1950s, ministering to the “delicate needs of the organism” had turned into an extremely profitable industry. While Ransom worried that associations between poetry and feelings would assign the former to the leisure realm, sociologists and journalists such as David Riesman and William Whyte were describing the erosion of any clear distinction between labor and leisure, work and play: both featured patterns of compulsive sociability centered around the need to fit in and get along; both rewarded those individuals capable of placating, charming, and influencing the people around them. 8 Though Richards does not explicitly acknowledge any resemblance between the tasks that he assigns to poetry and the forms of emotional labor that are coming to dominate the white collar sphere, the language he uses in certain moments to describe the purpose of poetry bears an uncanny resemblance to the discourse of business administration - the kind of language that one might find in book like Peter Drucker’s classic manual, The Practice of Management. A primary goal of the affective organization that poetry produces is, for Richards, efficiency. “The belief that - on the whole and accidents apart - finer, subtler, more appropriate responses are more efficient, economical, and advantageous than crude ones, is the best ground for a moderate optimism that the world-picture presents” (Practical Criticism 240). Often Richards sounds like he is describing the operations not of a work of literature or an individual mind, but of a corporation, offering strategies for running it effectively. “[Tragedy] can take anything into its organization, modifying it so that it finds a place” (Principles 247). Or: “That organization which is least wasteful of human possibilities is, in short, the best” (Principles 52). The 8 See Whyte, Organization Man, 150; Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 158-159. The Discipline of Feeling 133 values that Richards identifies: efficiency, the elimination of waste, the capacity to put everything in its proper place, the maximization of human potential - are the ones that generally dictate the decisions of corporate managers. Moreover, the relationship between good literature and effective executive management need not be merely metaphorical. If reading literature is the best means of organizing the individual’s impulses, it also appears to be ideal training for a future manager, preparing him to organize the competing impulses of his employees. Harmonious mental organizations are, after all, as Richards suggests, entirely transmittable. The poet has attained an extraordinary balance between his various affective impulses, but he is able to impart this balance to the reader; and one can imagine that a good manager, trained by a serious study of literature, would be able to do the same for his workers, making them happier and more efficient. That studying literature might serve as a useful form of preparation for business managers was not as unorthodox a view as one might think. Executive training programs in the humanities proliferated during the 1950s; AT&T annually offered several dozen employees a 10-month leave of absence so they could immerse themselves in the liberal arts. 9 Ransom’s fears that Richards’s arguments would serve to marginalize literature might seem based, then, on a misunderstanding of the nature of modern work - particularly the kind of work that a central constituent of his target audience, i.e. college students, hope to perform. And yet it is important to note that Ransom was not alone in his disdain for those efforts to tend to the “delicate needs of the organism.” His assumption that such work would necessarily be viewed as unimportant echoed the widely shared sense that the tasks performed by white collar workers were, due to their intangible character, trivial, unmasculine, and even superfluous. 10 And one means of combatting such perceptions, in keeping with the tendency identified by Ransom to value the exercise of reason over the cultivation of feeling, was the rise of a scientific approach to corporate management: one that sought to systematize its method and quantitatively measure its results, so as to draw clearer connections between white collar managerial work and actual concrete consequences, in the form of profits or losses, within the free market. While a majority of the initiatives designed to make literary study a central component of training for managers, including AT&T’s Institute of Humanistic Studies, were discontinued within a decade, business schools, increasingly dedicated to promulgating a scientific approach to management, experienced dramatic growth. 11 9 See Mark D. Bowles, “The Organization Man Goes to College”; Timothy Aubry, Humanities, Inc. 10 Mills, Whyte, and Riesman all describe, and in some moments, reproduce this anxiety. 11 Robert R. Locke discusses the embrace of scientific paradigm within business schools after World War II. He also notes the extraordinary growth of these programs during this period. The percentage of students majoring in business in the U.S. grew from 3.2 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in 1920 to 17 percent in 1950, and enrollments in graduate programs doubled between 1953 and 1963 and tripled in the following decade. (161-2). 134 t imothy A ubry Though Richards argues that reading poetry can be profoundly useful in many areas of life, he admits: The organisation and systematization of which I have been speaking in this chapter are not primarily an affair of conscious planning or arrangement, as this is understood for example by a great business house or by a railway. We pass as a rule from a chaotic to a better organised state by ways which we know nothing about. Typically through the influence of other minds. Literature and arts are the chief means by which these influences are diffused. (Principles 57) What literature does bears no resemblance to the modes of conscious planning required by a “great business house.” The way texts influence readers, the kind of changes they produce, and the concrete results of these changes are, in Richards’s description, unsystematic and resistant to exact measurement or description. Even if many companies provide intangible services and rely upon affective labor, this does not necessarily dictate a commensurately intangible, unscientific approach of the kind that poetry might offer. The operation of corporations demanded, according to most executives and business school professors, rational, scientific methods. While it is unlikely that Ransom paid much attention to the growth of scientific models of management within business education programs, this phenomenon does lend support to his larger argument: that scientific modes of thought were increasingly dominating all variety of spheres, monopolizing knowledge production about subjects both concrete and immaterial, assuming mastery over areas that might have otherwise lent themselves to a traditional humanistic approach. And thus as long as critics like Richards insisted on defining literature merely as a means of producing or organizing emotions, rather than a rational form of cognition, like science, then they would, Ransom suggested, inevitably trivialize the very thing whose importance they were seeking to defend. Poetry vs. Science In their attempt to legitimize academic criticism, Ransom and his fellow New Critics sought to present literature as a source of knowledge about the world, but in doing so they necessarily confronted the question of how to position literature in relationship to the sciences. They knew of course that criticism could never compete with science on its own terms, since nobody, after all, was going to read Shakespeare to learn about anatomy or Donne to learn about astronomy, and thus they presented literature as a fundamentally different kind of knowledge, one that was, at least by certain measures, preferable to science. Scientific accounts of reality, Ransom argues, are “its reduced, emasculated, and docile versions. Poetry intends to recover the denser and more refractory original world which we know loosely through our perceptions and memories. By this supposition it is a kind of knowledge which is radically or ontologically distinct” (New Criticism 281). Science approaches the individuals objects that it seeks to describe as instances of universal The Discipline of Feeling 135 laws, as examples of broader taxonomic categories, thus translating concrete objects into abstract concepts, under which various particulars can be subsumed. “The work of science,” concludes Ransom, “is a work of classification in terms of universals, not a work of imitation in terms of particulars” (The World’s Body 199). Literature, by contrast, according to the New Critics, seeks to represent objects in their wholeness and their particularity. Because of its texture, its rhythms, its incongruous connotations, its metaphors, and its capacity to yoke together contradictory qualities, poetry is able to offer an ontologically richer sense of reality: “The density or connotativeness of poetic language reflects the world’s density” (The New Criticism 79). While Richards had argued that the capacity of poetry to balance contradictory impulses allows it to meet the emotional needs of readers, Ransom maintains that this capacity actually reflects the complex and contradictory nature of reality. But how exactly can one verify or defend the grandiose claim that poetry offers a more complete form of knowledge than science? How exactly can the truth of poetry be assessed? The New Critics respond to this challenge by rejecting scientific truth criteria as a means of judging the knowledge that poetry offers. Science searches for tendencies that recur in various circumstances; it aims to abstract from a particular situation rules or principles for predicting the behavior of larger categories of phenomena, and the scientific community deems propositions true only after the tendencies it identifies are shown to be repeatable in multiple experiments. Poetry, by contrast, emphasizes “incessant particularity” (The New Criticism 25), in which each moment is an entirely new and unprecedented event, focusing on elements that are particular to a given situation, thus refusing the broad patterns or rules that science equates with truth. Poetry, in other words, represents phenomena that are by definition non-repeatable and thereby produces a kind of knowledge resistant to verification via scientific measures. While the New Critics often assert the superiority of poetic knowledge to scientific knowledge, they never seek to disprove or invalidate particular scientific theories. Their rhetoric is best read as a strategic response to an intractable institutional reality. The scientific disciplines had earned for themselves a position of hegemony as a form of knowledge within American universities, and the New Critics were content merely to carve out a space for the study of poetry alongside science - in part by borrowing some of its rigor for their own discipline. Aware of their own institutional disadvantage, they pragmatically rejected positivistic assumptions that require an either/ or decision between poetry and science, refusing the premise that reality lends itself to a single description, the truth of which entails the negation of other descriptions. 12 If we read Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” correctly, avers Cleanth Brooks in The Well-Wrought Urn, “we shall not feel that the 12 Brooks writes: “The poet attempts to fuse the conflicting elements in a harmonious whole. And here one may suggest a definition of wit. Wit is not merely an acute perception of analogies; it is a lively awareness of the fact that the obvious attitude toward a given situation is not the only possible attitude. Because wit, for us, is still associated with levity, it may be well to state it in its most serious terms. The witty poet’s glancing 136 t imothy A ubry generalization,” i.e. the final sentence of the poem, “is meant to march out of its context to compete with the scientific and philosophical generalizations which dominate our world” (The Well-Wrought Urn 151). The New Critics’ philosophical premises allowed them to avoid any direct confrontation with science and to deny any empirical test through which their views about the deep ontological truth of poetry might be examined or discredited. The Importance of Being Useless One reason literature is able to offer such a robust and complex picture of the world, according to Ransom, is that its representations do not aim to serve any purpose other than knowledge itself. “Art exists for knowledge, but nature is an object both to knowledge and to use; the latter disposition of nature includes that knowledge of it which is peculiarly scientific, and sometimes it is so imperious as to pre-empt all possibility of the former” (The World’s Body 197). Science, in a majority of cases, seeks to make use of nature, and this sometimes precludes its capacity to know or understand nature. Literature, by contrast, suffers from no such conflict of interest. Its knowledge is untainted by any concern for the purposes it can make nature serve. Ironically, however, this ideal, disinterested knowledge, is one to which science, notwithstanding its corrupted form within the modern society, also subscribes. “We may define a chemical,” Ransom suggests, “as something which can effect a certain cure, but that is not its meaning to the chemist” (343). While Ransom generally positions literature in direct opposition to science, in certain moments he seems to suggest that literature merely pursues a purer version of what science, in its true essence, also pursues - as if literature were somehow science’s better half, better at performing what science would also seek to perform, if only it could avoid getting ensnared in utilitarian calculations. Ransom’s argument, astonishingly enough, is not merely that literature aims to offer knowledge without regard for the short or long term utility of that knowledge; rather the very sign of literature’s superiority as a form of knowledge is its uselessness. If poetry is doomed to prove itself inferior to the scientific disciplines when it comes to all practical and worldly measures, then Ransom has identified a criterion of rigor according to which literature and literary criticism are absolutely unrivalled. When it comes to manifest uselessness, absolute impracticality, no other discipline can compete with literature. But this also means that to appreciate the importance of reading literature, no search for the immediate or long-term consequences that it might yield is necessary; its value is not displaced onto a scene of action external to its own being; literature, as a form of pure knowledge, is its own justification. In some moments, Ransom’s refusal of any instrumental function to literature entails some fairly extreme conclusions, among them, that at other attitudes is not necessarily merely “play” - an attempt to puzzle us or to show off his acuteness of perception; it is possible to describe it as merely his refusal to blind himself to a multiplicity which exists” (Modern Poetry 46). The Discipline of Feeling 137 literature’s value has nothing to do with the impact it produces on readers’ minds: “When you think of a thing as the cause of something else, you waive interest in it for itself” (New Criticism 15). While such an impractical conception might seem like a futile attempt to push back against the utilitarian tides that had overtaken the United States, the New Critics were actually motivated in part by pragmatic considerations. To determine literature’s value on the basis of its perceived usefulness, its ability to satisfy people’s practical or emotional needs, as Richards had attempted, was to defer to a standard rooted in the marketplace, in a modern industrial society that turned all objects into instruments or means of producing profits. But judged by that standard, especially in comparison to other commercially or vocationally oriented disciplines whose popularity was steadily growing during the middle of the twentieth century, literary criticism would never stand a chance. Thus Ransom appealed to a different standard altogether, seeking to protect literary study from the ruthless logic of the market, by securing permanent institutional support for it in the university. Presenting poetry as a mode of pure knowledge and criticism as a form of disinterested inquiry, Ransom invoked ideals that universities and specifically liberal arts departments were, at least in theory, designed to foster. Uselessness was a mark of poetry’s peculiar prestige and a means of justifying its need for protection inside the academy. As Louis Menand has argued, ever since the BA programs were instituted as a prerequisite rather than an alternative to professional schools in the late nineteenth century, undergraduate education, though offered as a general form of preparation for future life, has been organized around the ideal of cultivating knowledge for its own sake (49). Richards’s notion of poetry, which emphasizes its utility and denies its capacity to offer knowledge about the world, Ransom fears, jeopardizes its standing within the one place where it might find safety: the academy. While academics in recent decades have obviously challenged New Critical doctrines and come to underscore the function that literature performs in larger social and political processes, they have, with a few exceptions, continued to disregard the more immediate everyday therapeutic uses that literature serves for its readers, of the kind described by Richards. 13 Moreover a majority have continued to accept the mutually exclusive opposition established by the New Critics between intrinsic aesthetic value and worldly or political usefulness. They have simply reversed without overturning the New Critical binary, now favoring politics to the exclusion of aesthetics. And in this regard, interestingly enough, they may have something to learn from the scientific disciplines. Were he alive today, Ransom would likely not be surprised by the increasing popularity and influence of scientific procedures within academic literary scholarship. While the most salient examples include computer driven 13 Good examples of scholarly work focused on the more practical and therapeutic functions of literature include Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs; Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books; Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature; and Beth Blum, “Ulysses as Self-Help Manual.” 138 t imothy A ubry data analysis, the digital mapping of literary trends, and neuroscientific approaches to the phenomenology of reading, literary scholars may have something slightly less technical to learn from the scientific disciplines about how to affirm the importance and legitimacy of what they do. Recall Ransom’s image of the chemist who investigates a chemical with medicinal powers, but who does not find meaning in its ability to “effect a particular cure.” This scientist is admirable to Ransom because she is interested in analyzing the chemical merely for the sake of producing knowledge, not because of the practical medical purposes that chemical might serve. But unlike the New Critic who fears that any consideration of the possible usefulness of the object they consider will somehow call into question the intrinsic value of that object, the scientist, in Ransom’s account, is explicitly investigating a kind of medicine, and is apparently untroubled and certainly unimpeded by the tendency to define the object of her study as “something which can effect a particular cure.” If scientists, generally speaking, are able to acknowledge the utility of their research without worrying that such concerns will somehow corrupt or undermine the significance of their work, the likely reason is that they hold the importance of the knowledge they are producing to be clear and incontestable regardless of the practical functions it may or may not subsequently serve. The fear evinced by Ransom that any concern for the potential utility of what one studies will somehow demonstrate a lack of conviction in the intrinsic value of the knowledge being sought actually betrays far greater insecurity regarding the importance of that knowledge than the more open, less defensive stance of the scientist. At least for the purposes of securing disciplinary legitimacy, the attitude of the scientist seems significantly more effective than that of the New Critic. Those literary scholars who want to proceed more like scientists, in other words, might recognize that it is possible to appreciate a literary text’s practical, political, or therapeutic functions without thereby forfeiting the ability to affirm its intrinsic value. But the converse is also true - a point that may be harder to accept for many politically oriented literary scholars working today. To appreciate or to explore the intrinsic aesthetic value of a literary work, just as scientists seek knowledge of the world for its own sake, in other words, need not entail a denial of that work’s potential social or political function. Following the example of the scientist means recognizing that formalist criticism does not necessarily entail a rejection or repudiation of more politically oriented modes of interpretation. Indeed the capacity to entertain both possibilities, both ways of valuing one’s discipline - in terms of intrinsic aesthetic value and extrinsic social or political utility - without the fear that one will undermine the other, may be the most important lesson that literary scholars have to learn from the scientific disciplines. The Discipline of Feeling 139 Works Cited Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics, Trans. Francis Fergusson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Aubry, Timothy. Humanities, Inc.. American Studies 53 (2014): 5-29. Blum, Beth. “Ulysses as Self-Help Manual: James Joyce’s Strategic Populism.” Modern Language Quarterly 74 (67-93). Bowles, Mark D. “The Organization Man Goes to College: AT&T’s Experiment in Humanistic Education, 1953-1960.” Historian (1998): 15-31. Brooks, Cleanth. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. Chapel Hill: UNC P, 1939. ---. “The New Criticism.” Sewanee Review 87 (1979): 592-607 ---. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. Bush, Douglass. “The New Criticism: Some Old-Fashioned Queries.” PMLA 64 Supplement, Part 2 (1949): 13-21. Crane, R.S. “The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks.” Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, Ed. Crane. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952. Drucker, Peter E. The Practice of Management. New York: Harper & Row, 1954. Felski, Rita. The Uses of Literature. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Foster, Richard. The New Romantics: A Reappraisal of the New Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1962. Graff, Gerald. Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. ---. Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970. ---. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Herbert, Christopher. “The Conundrum of Coherence.” New Literary History 35 (2004): 185-206. Herman, Ellen. The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon: 1981. Leitch, Vincent B. American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Locke, Robert R. Management and Higher Education Since 1940: The Influence of America and Japan on West Germany, Great, Britain, and France. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in The American University. New York: Norton, 2010. Mills, C Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford UP, 1951. Ohmann, Richard. “Teaching and Studying Literature at the End of Ideology.” The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays on the Teaching of English, Ed. Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter. New York: Pantheon, 1970, 130-159. Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle- Class Desire. Chapel Hill: UNC P, 1997. Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1941. ---. The World’s Body. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1938. 140 t imothy A ubry Richards, I.A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1929. ---. Principles of Literary Criticism. London: K. Paul, 1924. Riesman, David. Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, collaborators, Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1950. Wellek, Rene. “The New Criticism: Pro and Contra,” Critical Inquiry 4 (1978): 611-624. Whyte, William. The Organization Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956. Wimsatt, William K. Jr. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954. Winchell, Mark Royden. Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996. m erve e mre Fulbright Love Imagine that it is 1947, and that you, one of the first Fulbright Scholars to Eastern Europe, have been tasked with “promoting love between nations? ” How would you go about doing such a thing? Or rather, how would you scale “love,” a seemingly private and affective state, into a transnational bond? This brief essay reads F.O. Matthiessen’s 1948 Fulbright memoir From the Heart of Europe to show how Americanist criticism developed a political project of love at mid-century. This project had various institutional dimensions, including the foundation of American studies departments in Europe and Asia; the consecration of an American literary canon keyed to Whitmanian “amativeness”; and the international circulation of thousands of American literary scholars acting as “warm-hearted communicators,” 1 a phrase favored by Robert Spiller, president of the American Studies Association (ASA) in 1954 and 1955, and one of the first administrators of the Fulbright Program. In reading From the Heart of Europe, however, I consider a more micro-sociological approach to affective politics. By micro-sociological, I mean the speech acts, gestures, bodily movements, sensory perceptions, and interaction rituals that were performed in the pursuit of love, both individually and socially. For Matthiessen, I argue, these actions manifest themselves most obviously in transnational scenes of literary pedagogy in Eastern Europe. Attending to his descriptions of these scenes helps to recuperate the collaborative and interactional techniques that route affect through such practices as close reading and textual interpretation, canon formation, classroom discussion, and translation. In considering these textual practices, I revisit some familiar questions about the relationship between mid-century literary criticism and transnational politics from an unfamiliar vantage point. How did Matthiessen and his fellow scholars use scenes of literary reception to theorize the strength and durability of transnational exchange? To what degree could such local encounters prompt national subjects to abandon their attachments to the postwar or Cold War state? What alternative attachments were formed in its place? How long could such attachments last? My essay thus looks backwards to a crucial archive in the foundation of global American studies, and, at the same time, grounds that archive in a more granular and detached approach 1 Robert Spiller, “American Studies Abroad: Culture and Foreign Policy,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 366.1 (July 1966): 1-16. 142 m erve e mre to reading love out of Matthiessen’s descriptions of his actions and interactions. Such a reading stands in contrast to the readings of love produced by psychoanalysis or affect theory, the standard approaches to affective politics. 2 From the Heart of Europe is particularly well suited to this method of analysis. Whatever else it may be - an elegy for international socialism, an uneasy repudiation of American empire - Matthiessen’s text is first and foremost a meticulously detailed description of his lectures, syllabi, and classroom and conference activities during his year as a Fulbright Scholar in Eastern Europe. To sketch a very brief history: Matthiessen’s responsibilities began in 1947 at the inaugural Salzburg Seminar, where he delivered the keynote address; continued in Prague, where he taught for a semester in the fledgling American studies department at Charles University; and concluded with a lecture tour through Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia. The Heart of Europe records and, in doing so, reflects upon these everyday performances of pedagogy, which have long been neglected in favor of the memoir’s more explicit ideological pronouncements. But there’s reason to believe that Matthiessen’s account of his pedagogical self-presentation offers an even more revealing object of study. As Alfred Kazin, also in attendance at the Salzburg Seminar noted: “Much of the drama at the seminar is provided by F.O. Matthiessen who fascinates the European students, holds them in his grip, through an astonishing personal intensity, a positively violent caringness about everything he believes in and is concerned with that he cannot suppress in public. What drives the man and torments him so? ” 3 While a number of critics and biographers have provided compelling answers to Kazin’s question, I am interested in what it might mean to perform an “astonishing personal intensity” or a “positively violent caringness” to one’s students, and how that might align with the real contexts of literary reception Matthiessen was in the process of designing. As he announced at the outset of From the Heart of Europe, Matthiessen’s goal at the Salzburg Seminar was to devise a set of criteria that would clearly distinguish between “our best and our worst writers,” who Matthiessen worried were “read indiscriminately” as they all seemed to offer “something new” to consumers of American culture abroad. Matthiessen believed that the worst American writers were those who presented “a lively story,” but betrayed “a lack of distinction in language.” 4 Distinction in language, and particularly the distinction of literary language, is always produced by the dialectical interplay between literature and mass culture in a socio-historical process that encompasses many different ideologies of class and status, without being reducible to any single one of them. Thus Matthiessen dismissed the “crude sensationalism” of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Paul Cain’s pulp fiction, and Mary O’Hara’s ranch stories as the worst writing America had to offer; 2 See the debate between Michael Hardt and Lauren Berlin over the phrase “for love or money,” in Cultural Anthropology 26.4 (2011): 676-91. 3 Alfred Kazin, A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 83. 4 F.O Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford UP, 1948) 25. All future citations are in-line and from this edition. Fulbright Love 143 a dismissal touched off by a New Critical valorization of formally difficult writing, but simultaneously registering the alleged inferiority of regional literature, popular literature, and Hollywood-friendly writers. Despite the overtly American subjects of these works - Southern Reconstruction, urban living, the Wild West - Matthiessen feared that these texts’ lack of literary distinction, compounded by their thematic material, would “project[t] an imaginative violence” about America to international audiences, a violence that would “seem authentic to Europeans” after the horrors of World War II. Against the institutional legacy of state-sponsored brutality experienced by Europeans in prisoner-of-war and concentration camps, Matthiessen proposed the “masterfully exact style” of America’s best writers as a “critical luxury” with which to combat the recent deprivations of political and civic society. The mission of American studies abroad, he suggested, was to show how “a new expression of that awareness [and] discrimination” in reading the American literary canon could link literary expressions of solidarity to lived social relations, helping to once again “build the civilization” of Europe after its devastation by fascist forces (55). But for Matthiessen, this new expression of aesthetic discrimination took its inspiration not from craft but from love: first, love as a political aesthetic to be consecrated in the best writing that America had to offer; and subsequently, love as a performative act that Matthiessen would repeatedly evoke in his classroom readings. In articulating love as an aesthetic category, Matthiessen’s Salzburg teachings in From the Heart of Europe traced the origins of love to two emblematic figures in American poetry, Walt Whitman (“the poet as inspired seer”) and Poe (“the poet as craftsman”), who Matthiessen presented in tandem as exemplary and complementary theorists of democratic intimacy (149). While Whitman’s vision of a maximally inclusive fraternity had already found a receptive audience in European Marxists ranging from Ferdinand Freiligrath to George Lukács, and while the World Peace Council would soon use Leaves of Grass as the primary text in its campaign against Cold War imperialism, Matthiessen’s task was to remind his readers of the essentially American nature of Whitman’s affective politics. Thus his seminar at Charles University, “on the age of Whitman and Melville” (112), emphasized the politically and socially enabling aspects of “adhesive love,” a sensual awareness of the body that Matthiessen claimed made “our literature” distinct (36). The embodied poetics of democratic love, Matthiessen proposed, had to be understood as an antidote to the possessive logic of “finance capitalism” (143, 176) that had troubled Whitman in 1840, and continued to trouble Matthiessen in his complicity with American internationalism. Only Whitmanian sensuality, he told his students, could counteract the exploitative and alienating nature of the liberal capitalist agenda, which invested disproportionately in the abstractions of individual liberty and equality over embodied, fraternal feeling: What makes Whitman the central figure in our literature affirming the democratic faith is that he does full justice, as no one else does, to all three elements in the classic French articulation of that faith. Liberty and equality can remain 144 m erve e mre intellectual abstractions if they are not permeated with the warmth of fraternity […]. Whitman knew, through the heartiness of his temperament, as Emerson did not, that the deepest freedom does not come from isolation. It comes instead through taking part in the common life, mingling in its hopes and failures, and helping to reach a more adequate realization of its aims, not for one alone, but for the community. Something like this was what Whitman had in mind when he said that his ‘great word,’ the one that moved him most, was ‘solidarity.’ (90; italics mine) Just as Spiller’s “warm-hearted communicator” was responsible for transmuting formally sensitive criticism into social feeling, Whitman’s amorous address - “the heartiness of his temperament” - brings to life the chilly “intellectual abstractions” of democratic faith through the “warmth of fraternity.” Here the metaphor of the animated American body politic is literalized in the act of “mingling,” a term Matthiessen invoked time and again in American Renaissance (1941) to describe the conjoining of “flesh and spirit” essential to a thriving democracy. 5 Such adhesive love emerged as the aesthetic suture of American political community - the glue that bound American social institutions to an American canon that was in the process of being stitched together. Consider, for instance, how Matthiessen’s reading of Whitman in his role as a Fulbright scholar reframed, in turn, his reading of Moby-Dick, a novel which he claimed for the canon not because of Ishmael’s Emersonian self-reliance, as William Spanos and others have asserted in their readings of American Renaissance, but for how an embodied love united Moby-Dick’s minor and marginalized characters. 6 “More than ever before,” Matthiessen wrote, “I was moved by the scene where little Flask, the third mate, has mounted upon the shoulders of his harpooner, the massive Negro Daggoo, in order to see farther over the ocean’s surface. Melville reflects how ‘the bearer looked nobler than the rider.’ Such reflection on the lack of any superiority owing to a race’s whiteness is peculiarly moving today when so many of the possibilities for any real democracy, both at home and in our relations abroad, depend upon the continual reaffirmation of that self evident truth” (Heart 36). The “peculiarly moving” quality of the scene inheres in Matthiessen’s reading of bodies touching - “little Flask” mounted upon the shoulders of the “massive Daggoo” - and touch, in turn, enables a “real” democratic conjoining between distinct races, ethnicities, and nationalities. “Whitman helped me begin to trust the body,” Matthiessen confessed to his students and colleagues at the start of his keynote lecture at the Salzburg Seminar (23). This was more than just an idle confession. Matthiessen also elided his critical readings with his self-conduct as a teacher, amorously aestheticizing the contact between his body and his students’ bodies in the practice of reading. Like Melville’s motley crew of harpooners in Moby-Dick, merrily squeezing one another’s hands as they extract sperm from the entrails of 5 F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford UP, 1941) 524-6. 6 William Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 30-35. Fulbright Love 145 a dead whale, Matthiessen proffered the body as a superior medium for intimate, empathic, and non-semantic communication. “We had no language in common,” he wrote after teaching a seminar in Bratislava, “and though only a fraction of a conversation can filter through an interpreter, you can have the curious sense - since you have so much more time to study the other person’s eyes and mouth and gestures - that you are establishing a close relationship after all” (151). Here, only the close study of another’s eyes, mouth, and gestures - a study conducted while simultaneously reading and discussing American literary texts in two separate languages - can overcome the “sensual hardness” (7) that, according to Matthiessen, has precluded American “men of good will” from establishing “any real relationship” with “the people surrounding them” (8). But the communicative and communal powers of the body are hardly limited to the moments that risk being lost in translation. Once Matthiessen arrives in Prague, his narration of his teaching experiences linger on the embodied intimacies of reading. The Dean of Charles University’s Philosophy Faculty and concentration camp refuge, Jan Kozak, “has a face both sensitive and shrewd” that Matthiessen cannot help but fixate on it during his faculty orientation (Heart 93); and Kozak’s “slightness of frame” - his vulnerable exterior - is made all the more vulnerable by Matthiessen when he recounts how Kozak “kept his spirit alive” by piecing poems together “from the torn sheets of a book that the Nazis had sent to the camp as toilet paper” (109). When one of his students, upon reading Leaves of Grass, speaks passionately of the American doctrine of self-reliance, Matthiessen notes a “light […] strong on his face” as the illumination provided by his textual interpretation lights up his visage (111). Later, Matthiessen watches as his star pupil Jarka’s “big, seemingly tireless body” (114) pours over The Cambridge History of American Literature (1907-21); another student offers a “broad mouthed generous smile” (136) as he gazes at Matthiessen over a copy of Moby-Dick; and yet a third raises a pair of “sensitive friendly eyes” (159) to bond over a mutual act of literary interpretation. All of these scenes however pale before the climactic scene of transnational mingling, which takes place on October 4, 1947 on St. Francis Day - Matthiessen’s name day, he notes in his journal. After his students serenade him over and over again with the abolitionist song “John Brown’s Body,” “four of them grabbed my shoulders and feet, tossed me in the air, and bounced me, gently, on the floor. After this all the men shook hands with me, I was kissed by the girls, and felt that I was really in” (98). As the pinnacle of Matthiessen’s pedagogy, it seems fitting that Matthiessen’s body - the body of the scholar here to rescue Eastern European civilization from the damage done to it by World War II - presents itself as the site of adhesion. Matthiessen finds himself grabbed, tossed, bounced, kissed, and fully embraced to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” a performance so distinctly embodied that it would seem anathema to critical discourse. And yet the relationality that 146 m erve e mre Matthiessen institutes through his own body and its non-semantic, intersubjective attunements is nothing if not a product of critical reflexivity, albeit a very different model of criticism than one we are accustomed to seeing today. That Whitman’s poetry of physical adhesion should inspire Matthiessen to attend to his own body and its non-semantic, intersubjective attunements makes a great deal of sense - after all, that’s precisely how Whitman once imagined communicating the “adhesiveness or love … making the races comrades, and fraternizing all” in Democratic Vistas. What requires some more creative critical maneuvering, however, is Matthiessen’s attempt to make the poetry of T.S. Eliot or the art-novels of Henry James amendable to the same affective reading practices, when such works seem to assert their autonomy from the preoccupations of social reality so adamantly. Matthiessen’s reading of first James, and later Eliot, strives to recast high modernism’s emphasis on aesthetic autonomy as a humanist discourse, a counterintuitive reframing of New Critical dogma that begins with Matthiessen’s lecture on The Portrait of a Lady at the Salzburg Seminar. In a reflexively emotive moment of critical address, Matthiessen divulges to his audience that James’s “peculiar poignancy had never been more affecting than when reading The Portrait of a Lady in a Europe so different from the undisturbed world of [James’s] prime”; a poignancy that inhered in “the release that James can give today” (45). According to Matthiessen, the temporal dimension of such poignancy - the cathartic distance between James’s “prime” and “today” - was what had “impelled several young American soldiers … to turn to [James] while they were in the army” (45). “They had felt a great need, during the unrelenting outwardness of those years,” Matthiessen speculated, “for [James’s] kind of inwardness, for his kind of order as a bulwark against disorder”; James’s writings had offered “not an escape” into the impersonality of the aesthetic, but a “renewed sense of dignity of the human spirit” through the beauty of a self-consciously crafted interiority (46). Reading Henry James in the trenches - it’s an uncanny wartime image, and one cannot help but wonder if Matthiessen is telling the truth, or if the anecdote sets up an especially canny strategy for justifying James’s place in this version of the American canon. The obvious counterpart to Matthiessen’s stylistic critique of Margaret Mitchell and her cohort of crude sensationalists, James’s attentiveness to style offers an affective and reparative antidote to the war’s devastation of the human spirit. Formal refinement stands as a “bulwark against disorder”; a battlefield metaphor deployed here as the last line of defense against the emotional and intersubjective violence perpetrated by a lack of attention to cultural distinction. What James’s aesthetic offers the Fulbright Scholar is not a rabbit hole into the autotelic bliss of the art-novel, but a “renewed sense of dignity” in the relation between one’s feeling self and the structures of social order. In a conference presentation entitled “Das Menschenbild der neuen amerikanischen Literatur” (“The Concept of the Human in New American Literature”) that he gave at the Austrian International College at Alpbach toward the end of his trip, Matthiessen claimed that Eliot could be read in much Fulbright Love 147 the same way - or at least, the later Eliot; the Eliot of “Four Quartets,” whose turn to a proto-confessional poetic mode towards the end of his life paralleled Matthiessen’s deliberate distancing of himself from New Criticism during his year spent in Eastern Europe universities. In his paper, Matthiessen read aloud to the students and colleagues gathered an excerpt from the climactic fourth movement of “Little Gidding,” Eliot’s final quartet and a poem of international pilgrimage, which he prefaced with the important historical detail that it was “written against the background of the air raids” (56): “The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre - To be redeemed from fire by fire. Who then devised the torment? Love.” The “agonizing nature of love,” Matthiessen informed his rapt audience, had emerged for both him and Eliot from the war’s “fire of destruction” and the “fire of purification” that followed it; a purification not only thematized by Eliot, but also stylistically enacted by the regularly rhymed stanzas, which “double throughout” the poem the love they trumpet. The “essentially critical nature of American literature,” he proclaimed to his listeners at Alpbach, did not inhere in the mythical intricacies of “The Waste Land” - the cornerstone of New Criticism’s high modernist cosmopolitanism - but in Eliot’s blazing evocation of love in “Little Gidding.” Only doubling down on love, Matthiessen concluded, would clarify, or distill, the central tenet of American literature to the Austrians: an audience Matthiessen believed had been led astray by the crude fashionings of American reportage; an audience “whose Nazi government during the war made much use of Upton Sinclair to demonstrate to the corruption of American society” over its warm fraternity (57). As taught by Matthiessen, a critic determined to perform his own passionate declarations of feeling, Eliot’s formal purification of love in his later poetry gave readers access to the “sense of life that comes through expert expression” (58) - a sense of life offered by the Fulbright Scholar as an act of love. Matthiessen could thus use love to connect his (and Eliot’s and James’s) notions of craft to a political institution of literary-critical pedagogy. Today nothing seems more conventionally canonical than the authors or texts Matthiessen cobbled together on his Fulbright tour of Eastern Europe, using the criterion of love to restock USIS libraries with Melville and James’s novels, organize syllabi, and encourage American studies research programs among his students and contacts. But at the time, nothing seemed more unnatural to Matthiessen’s peers - even scholars similarly committed to promoting love between nations, like Spiller and Kazin - than the formally inchoate body of works he had chosen to unite and circulate under the banner of American literature. A perplexed Kazin tried to, but could not, make sense of Matthiessen’s syllabus and lectures in his journal. “I knew from Matty’s 148 m erve e mre book on Eliot and especially his grand work American Renaissance,” Kazin wrote, “how much he saw writing in terms of the artist’s ‘craft’ - a tradition linking James, Eliot, Hawthorne, really connected by the highly selective tradition rising out of poetry Eliot had founded, and which certainly did not apply to loose novels like Moby-Dick” (85). Love, as Matthiessen conceived of it - a state of connectivity that could unite literary themes and aesthetic forms with his embodied pedagogical practice - exceeded craft. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that love mobilized craft to help secure its particular configuration of affective energies - reciprocity, liveliness, social belonging. In turn, the legacy of making love that was so indelibly imprinted onto the Fulbright program and its early institution of American studies abroad would quickly assert itself as the central preoccupation of many generation of Fulbright scholars to come. Works Cited Berlant, Lauren. “A Properly Political Concept of Love: Three Approaches in Ten Pages.” Cultural Anthropology 26. 4 (2011): 683-691. Hardt, Michael. “For Love or Money.” Cultural Anthropology 26. 4 (2011): 676-682. Kazin, Alfred. A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP, 1941. ---. From the Heart of Europe- New York: Oxford UP, 1948. Spanos, William. The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Spiller, Robert. “American Studies Abroad: Culture and Foreign Policy.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 366.1 (July 1966): 1-16. P hiliPP l öffler Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory I. Identity Fiction in US Literary History Terminologies and concepts matter. “Postmodernism,” “Realism,” “The Elizabethan Sonnet,” or even ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-Poetry’ are categories designed not only to specify particular types of literature (their styles and subject matter) but also to relate them to overarching social and political formations. Within post-1945 literature in the US, for example, the experimental fiction of Thomas Pynchon and John Barth has been read as an artistic reaction to the consensus ideology of the Cold War decades; the ethno-racial novels of Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko have been viewed as expressions of a post-Civil Rights ethnic pluralism; and some readers have understood Tom Wolfe’s “Manifesto of the New Social Novel” as a perceptive anticipation of the stock market crash of 1987. Placing literary styles in social worlds is not a new phenomenon. The institutional history of literary studies as a whole could be explained as the sequence of attempts to authorize particular models of how the literary relates to the social-political. The logic of these models may thus in part explain the practice of reading within twenties-century academic literary studies. This essay seeks to inquire into the nature of academic reading by showing how conceptual tropes connect with and promote the authority of distinct professional practices. 1 To illustrate my argument, I delineate the creation of one specific category that twentieth century critics have referred to - both affirmatively and pejoratively - as identity fiction, literature that is nowadays associated with such works as N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1969), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), Toni Morrison’s Song of 1 The term practice is understood in its broadest socio-institutional sense as an incorporated form of disciplinary identity: an implied sense of what it takes to qualify as a member of a particular reading community and a set of skills used to objectify membership status. In other words, this essay is focused not primarily on what labels, such as “postmodernist poetry,” “second-wave literary feminism,” or “Victorian novel” could mean, but on how they come into existence, on how they gain authority, and on how they become instrumental in maintaining and defending professional reading standards. For a number of prominent theoretical discussions of the term “practice” see, for example, Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979); Theodore Schatzki, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. (University Park: Penn State UP, 2002); Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory 5.2 (Summer 2002): 243-263. 150 P hiliPP l öffler Solomon (1977), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), or Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993). Historically, these novels rose to prominence as key texts in the “high cultural pluralist” orbit of the postwar “program era,” where they have been received benevolently as pluralist or multiculturalist expressions of a post-Civil Rights moment of political liberation. 2 Most of these novels have received a number of prestigious literature prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize (Morrison and Walker) and the Nobel Prize (Morrison), while they have also fared very well on the commercial book markets, as their impressive sales numbers and their rankings on representative bestseller lists confirm. 3 The majority of these texts are concerned with characters who belong to minority communities and whose central preoccupation it is to define and defend who they are; they introduce readers to their ancestral cultures, often from autobiographical narrative viewpoints; in short, identity fiction is an umbrella term for literature that is interested in the specificity of culture, as it were, and in the question why the idea of a so-called culture is worth protecting or at least worth acknowledging - often against the constraints of other, more dominant cultural or social-political formation, such as the nation-state, traditional family-hierarchies, and corresponding gender stereotypes and their implied political norms. The notion that the specificity of literature has to do with the uniqueness of the culture from which it originates and which it reflects is of course not new. The idea started to attract attention as part of the expressive nationalism that influenced both European and American Romanticism - prominent examples include Herder’s conception of Völker, Hegel’s philosophy of art, or, a little later, the Transcendentalist conception of the poet as a mediator of a true (national) self. 4 These ideas where appropriated and re-defined strategically at certain moments in US literary history. We may think of the Harlem Renaissance writers and the New Negro Movement during the 1920s 2 See Mark McGurl’s influential discussion of “high cultural pluralism” in his The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2009) 58-65. For good overviews on multiculturalism in the US see Amy Gutman, ed., Multiculturalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (New York: Oxford UP, 2009). 3 For an instructive discussion of middleclass literary markets in the US see Beth Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Readers in eth Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011). 4 See, for example, Johann Gottfried Herder, “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit.” 1774. Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774-1787. Ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994) 9-108; Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. 1830. Vol. 3. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986); Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”. 1844. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Mary Oliver (New York: The Modern Library, 2000) 287- 306. The most comprehensive discussion of that tradition is offered in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989). See especially pages 355-391. A collection of important American contributions to the topic is offered in Richard Ruland, ed., The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature from Bradford to Whitman (New York: Dutton, 1976). Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 151 and, a few decades later, the artists and intellectuals engaged in the Black Nationalist movements during the 1960s and 1970s. 5 Despite this long and powerful tradition, however, identity fiction did not attain critical authority as a genre before the 1960s, and its commercial breakthrough occurred even later, during the 1980s and early 1990s. It seems persuasive to read the rise of identity fiction as an aesthetically filtered response to the political upheavals that took place during the 1960s and early 1970s. This social-expressionist explanation becomes even more persuasive, however, in conjunction with a second, intra-academic perspective: What helped to promote additionally the success story of identity-centered literatures was the emergence of what we may call ‘reading for difference,’ a new type of interpretive practice that came about with the advent of deconstruction in America and its academic standardization in English Departments during the 1980s and 1990s. Deconstruction and related reader-centered theory paradigms helped to establish a well-respected theory arsenal that seemed ideally applicable to political claims for minority representation and the acknowledgement of cultural difference. While claims for minority representation became increasingly powerful during the postwar decades, they had little appeal to people other than those interested in the political nature of these claims. The academic institutionalization of difference as a distinct reading goal translated the political program of postwar identity debates into critically authoritative theory options within the high cultural spheres of the university. To be sure, the rise of identity fiction during the postwar decades coincided historically and also reflected US social history in the 1960s; identitarian fictions became part of a critically powerful and coherent genre, however, mostly as a consequence of the rise of literary theory in US academic reading cultures. And the consecration of these literatures at the academy, in turn, boosted the persuasiveness of their political appeals. II. Identitarian Paradoxes Traditional views on American postwar culture favor reading the production of postwar literature as expressive responses to the general political atmosphere of the time. These views share the belief that the political liberation of America, reflected for example by the G.I. Bill in 1944, Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act in 1964, or the Higher Education Act in 1965, produced corresponding literary or cultural responses in the form of so-called minority literatures, the parallel rise of feminism, and queer literature after and before Stone Wall. This is a story of progress included in many of the ASA presidential addresses since at least the early 1980s. The same belief has informed the editorial policies of the Heath and Norton Anthologies; 5 A popular account of this trajectory can be found in Nathan Huggins’ seminal Harlem Renaissance (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1971). An updated scholarly debate about the forms of Black Nationalism is included in Manning Marable ed., The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies (Boulder, CO, and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005). 152 P hiliPP l öffler it provides for the underlying script of The Portable 1960s Reader, edited by Ann Charters; and there are a number of prominent monographs, such as Daniel Belgrad’s The Culture of Spontaneity, that employ similar arguments to insist on the social-political nature of literary conceptual progress. The idea that conjoins these different examples is that the events of the 1960s were transmitted somehow coherently into corresponding literary styles and movements. However persuasive such causal explanations of literary change seem, they also perpetuate a universalistic model of historical progress that reduces the peculiarities of American literary culture in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to a mere reproduction of a larger historical movement that critics still associate with the political shiftsin the wake of the Civil Rights movement. This claim that there must be a necessary rather than only coincidental connection between literary production and social history has remained popular ever since, despite the fact that it produces viewpoints that are barely empirically provable. A brief anecdote will suffice to illustrate the continued relevance of this idea and its paradoxical logic. When Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Terry Tempest Williams, and other intellectuals and writers were arrested in Washington, D.C. in 2003 after protesting the invasion of Iraq - they overran a police line - it seemed only logical to some news commentators that their joint agenda must have been the plausible result or at least an expression of their prior literary careers. The reasons why this connection seemed very likely was that these women’s careers had also always been considered proactivist in their own individual ways, and for the press this meant simply minority-sensitive and hence subversive in a very crude, unspecified way. This sense of group coherence was construed on the basis of the writers’ shared opposition against American foreign politics, an opposition, however, that had nothing to do with the particularity of their work as ethnic or feminist writers. In fact, the identity-specific differences of their individual works did not matter at all, as Alice Walker herself claimed in an interview with Democracy Now: I was with other women who believe that the women and children of Iraq are just as dear as the women and children in our families, and that, in fact, we are one family. And so it would have felt to me that we were going over to actually bomb ourselves. 6 The problem that readers might find here is not the fact that Walker abandons her commitment to cultural particularity and difference in favor of the vision of one world family, although this move alone seems illogical and politically dubious - being an African-American middle-class woman in the US with a respectable literary reputation is everything but the same as being a woman in Iraq sheltering against US military air raids. The more disturbing aspect concerns the retroactive assumption - conveyed through several news channels and activist media platforms - that being African-American, 6 http: / / www.democracynow.org/ 2003/ 3/ 10/ alice_walker_maxine_hong_kingston_ medea. Website last accessed September 6, 2015. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 153 queer, or feminist would naturally entail the same political stance towards American foreign politics. If this claim were true, we would have to assume that membership of culturally and socially disenfranchised communities - for example, African-Americans or homosexuals - creates inevitable bonds and political alliances in areas that have nothing at all to do with the commitments that group membership in these communities requires. The anecdote used here to illustrate the analogy between politics and literature matches the invention of identity fiction as a genre category in at least two respects: in the suggested belief in a historical necessity and in its consequent projection of group coherence among the individual writers. There is a sense that these writers - ethnic writers, feminist writers, and queer writers - share something despite the fact that they share relatively little, if anything at all. The notion that their literature addresses the same kind of problem requires the belief that the experience of being Asian-American at the West Coast - as in the case of Maxine Hong Kingston - is the same as or at least is somehow comparable to being African-American and growing up in Ohio - as in the case of Toni Morrison. While this seems quite hard to imagine, the mechanisms that allow for such moments of imagined solidarity are supported vigorously by many proponents of identity fiction. In a well-known interview with Shelly Fisher-Fishkin, Maxine Hong Kinston contends that she finds it so “freeing” not to be “constrained by just one ethnic group or one gender” and that reading Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams makes her “feel that I can now write as a man, I can write as a black person, as a white person; I don’t have to be restricted by time and physicality.” 7 The claim that as an Asian-American writer “I can write as a black person” is, to be sure, thought-provoking and exciting. But the vision of an identitarian choice it proposes can hardly be logically and politically defended. The commitment to an individual subject position, for example, as an ethnic writer, as a feminist, or as a vegetarian, becomes meaningful only by acknowledging that any other standpoint can at the same time never be just as valuable as one’s own. 8 The point of The Woman Warrior (1976), for example, is precisely that Kingston’s feminist program - her creation of a “strong woman persona” 9 - is inspired by her experience of growing up in California in a typically Chinese-American immigrant family with a laundry shop. The novel-memoir’s message is that growing up in this particular family and under these particular circumstances was crucial for the protagonist’s developing of an individualized sense of self-hood and identity. The snippets of Chinese history and the history of the Kingston family that are offered throughout the book are crucial in that they delineate a unique form of cultural life in the US. These memories and anecdotes have a specific function within this book, 7 Shelley Fisher-Fishkin, “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” American Literary History 3.4 (Winter 1991), 789. 8 This point is fleshed out in great detail in K. Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005). See in particular Chapter 4, “The Trouble with Culture,” 114-153. 9 Fisher-Fishkin, “Interview,” 784. 154 P hiliPP l öffler and they cannot easily be replaced by any other history. This sense of particularity is also what the protagonist in Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey (1990), Wittman Ah Sing, grapples with, as he muses: “So what do we have in the way of a culture besides Chinese hand laundries? You might make a joke on that - something about ‘What’s the difference between Chinese hand laundry and a French laundry? ’ Where’s our Jazz? Where’s our Blues? Where is our ain’t-taking-no-shit-from-nobody street strutting language.” 10 Novels such as Tripmaster Monkey (and other identitarian fictions) seek to define and even protect moments of cultural difference to maintain the integrity of the identitarian self. As a consequence of this ambition, these novels often convey a sense of intimacy that is very much determined by time and physicality, that is, by feeling, smelling, and touching, by bodily sensations in general. Readers experience the physicality of identitarian belonging and origin in descriptions of specific places and buildings, of food flavors and regional cuisine recipes, and - prominently in the post-slavery historical novel - of psychological and physical injuries and the resulting wounds. The specificity of time and space is central to these books, which, paradoxically, is also what challenges traditional explanations of why identity fiction has become successful as a literary genre. The larger political thesis associated with the rise of identity fiction - that the genre emerged mainly in response to the political 1960s - is plausible only if one downplays the genre’s central preoccupation, its commitment to particularity, such as ethnic origin, the originality of home, particular sexual preferences, and gender scripts. The more general consequence would then be - at least from a theoretical point of view - that insisting on the specificity of one’s ethnic background (for example, “I am African-American”) is just as useful as insisting on one’s culinary preferences (for example, “I am vegetarian”). What would remain is a very abstract and non-specific notion of difference, bereft of distinct ethical and political valences. III. The Rise of Literary Theory A viable starting point for thinking about an alternative explanation for the rise of identity fiction is Kenneth Warren’s What was African American Literature? (2011). Warren has suggested that the legal and political imperatives determined by the Jim Crow era created the “collective Project we recognize as African American literature” and that with the demise of Jim Crow - and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement - occurred the erosion of African-American literature as a historically coherent project. 11 African-American literature - and other minority literatures - have of course not been eroded with the beginnings of the Civil Rights era. Warren’s book may be too deliberately provocative about this point. And yet his claim is 10 Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 27. 11 Kenneth Warren, What was African-American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011), 7. Warren’s book is discussed at length in a PMLA forum on What was African- American Literature. See PMLA 128.2 (Spring 2013): 386-408. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 155 important in as much as it alerts attention to a significant, yet often disregarded institutional shift in the organization of ethnic literatures since the 1960s. African-American and other minority literatures were transposed onto a level of theoretical debate at the University during the 1960s and 1970s, where to stake claim to a particular identity gradually became part of a struggle for symbolic scholarly capital, rather than social or political recognition. In other words, Warren’s book is helpful for showing how the social and legal constraints produced and maintained during the Jim Crow era were appropriated and re-described as hallmarks of pluralism within the diversity-sensitive English Departments of the post-Civil Rights university. Particular scholarly standpoints may of course also be at the same time political standpoints - we may only think of Marxist literary criticism. Yet with the rise of the postwar university, the mechanisms needed to secure the connection between “the culture of the school,” 12 on the one hand, and national political culture, on the other, attained increased authority from within the disciplinary confines of academic English Studies itself. More specifically, what secured this connection between the school and national politics was a host of professional reading practices whose practitioners - English professors and other university-affiliated critics - reproduced the logic of academic study much rather than the struggle for political liberation. Following this historical trajectory, we may explain the emergence of identity fiction as a stable generic category in the context of literary theoretical debates that occurred in the US during the 1960s and 1970s. The rise and pluralization of literary theory in the US was a mostly university-based development evolving in part as a reaction against the hegemony of the New Critics and in part as a continuation of continental critical theory that began to shape US academic landscapes in the 1960s. An iconic event illustrating the dynamics of this shift is the international Humanities conference that took place under the title “Critical Languages and the Science of Man” at the newly founded Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University in October 1966. The conference - featuring a congregation of European philosopher’s and anthropologists that included Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan, Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida - produced a clash of academic cultures that would prove to shape the theory worlds in the US and Europe in decisive ways. Derrida, who presented his seminal paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” later said that “what is now called ‘theory’ in this country may have an essential link with what is said to have happened there in 1966.” 13 Even if Derrida’s claim overstates the importance of academic debates, the Johns Hopkins moment was a game-changing event in that it established a gateway for French continental philosophy into the US academic system. The invention of theory, its early consecration at such universities as Johns Hopkins and Yale and the subsequent founding 12 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 37. 13 Quoted in Richard Macksey ed., The Strcuturalist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), x. 156 P hiliPP l öffler of prominent theory journals such as New Literary History (1969), Diacritics (1971), Critical Inquiry (1974), Semiotexte (1974), Glyph (1978), or Representations (1983) led to the proliferation of new literary-theoretical terms and concepts - “difference,” “play,” “intertextuality,” “palimpsest” - that had immediate authority within the US academic system. These terms combined avant-garde prestige with a sense that traditional, new critical modes of reading were exhausted. As Jonathan Arac recalls, reflecting on his early attraction to New Literary History as a new platform for critical theory: A big part of what “theory” meant in New Literary History, and more broadly in conversations that the journal helped foster and that burgeoned in the seventies and continued into the eighties, was the possibility of thinking in ways that would necessarily interest colleagues in different fields of specialization. Each issue, and the sequence of issues, of New Literary History modeled the sort of ongoing exchange among very diverse interests and perspectives, brought together by common puzzles and hopes, that made so memorable the spontaneously organized and voluntarily sustained “theory discussion groups” that for some twenty years formed so characteristic and important a part of the American literary academy. 14 Moreover, these journals served the “need of evaluation,” 15 according to Jeffrey Williams, that the expanding postwar university system created and they helped to maintain the integrity of research universities as semi-autonomous educational institutions. 16 As another consequence of the theory boom in postwar Humanities Departments during the 1970s and 1980s: theory did not only develop into a field of its own, but the critical jargon it fostered also became a vital element in the academic legitimization of African-American studies, of Queer Studies, of Women’s Studies, or Postcolonial Studies, while it also reaffirmed their presumed political programs as oppositional and/ or interventionist movements. The academic texts produced in these contexts looked similar, seeking to account for both the current state of theory and the significance of the historical moment. Henry Louis Gates’ “Signifying Monkey” is a striking example to illustrate the assumed reciprocity of academic discourse and political world: 14 Jonathan Arac, “Reckoning with New Literary History,” New Literary History 40.4, Tribute to Ralph Cohen (Autumn 2009), 707. 15 Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Rise of the Theory Journal,” New Literary History 40.4, Tribute to Ralph Cohen (Autumn 2009), 694. 16 As Williams explains: “The theory journal exemplified both the openness and closedness of the American university. For its part, theory spurred myriad new versions of critical work, at the same time that it made literature more apt for research. Theory was productive, and also incorporative, bringing new cohorts, from feminists to Marxists to semioticians, into literary studies. It was a strength of the American university of the time that it abetted and held contradictory forces - the general and the specialized, the public and the private, the political and the technical, opposition and accommodation - in productive tension. That tension informed the theory journal, which absorbed radical politics as well as hermeneutics and the ruminations of the seminar room. At the same time that some versions of theory turned a merciless critical eye on the state, theory affirmed the freedom of thought of American higher education. The theory journal celebrated, perhaps more than anything, innovation” (“Theory Journal,” 695). Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 157 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey - he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language - is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasm itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. 17 The passage highlights in exemplary fashion the way that Gates appropriates and strategically redeploys the idea of ethnic marginality. Marginality is presented both as a social problem that really defines life in the African- American community and thus requires political attention and as a theoretical problem that requires scholarly attention, and the argument Gates makes suggests that both sides are logically connected. The plight of racial segregation is turned into a thought-provoking move on the field of literary theory. 18 The success of Gates’ “Signifying Monkey” had to do with his critical-political bilingualism, that is, his ability to satisfy high theory aficionados without giving up his commitment as a politically engaged African-American. His essay was both politically and theoretically challenging and did not compromise either of the two sides. An almost identical sense of reciprocity - politics on the one hand, discourse on the other - has inspired the academic invention of several other minority literatures - prominently postcolonial literature and criticism - that all in their own ways explore the limits of subjectpositioning on the basis of terms, such as difference, hybridity, subalterity, or the abject. Of course Derrida’s idea of play or difference could not be further apart from Gates’ idea of difference and marginality, or Gayatry Spivak’s concept of subalterity. In most cases, the application of Derridian and Foucauldean vocabularies has produced the opposite of what deconstruction and poststructuralism were originally intended to be about: unresolved ambiguity and textual difference as a problem of literary interpretation and hermeneutics in general rather than ultimate interpretive goals. The linearity and teleology of reading demanded by traditional hermeneutical standards was thus reproduced in the allegorization of textual difference as a rather homogenous political message about cultural pluralism that everybody could agree with. This sense of agreement gradually replaced the sense of difference and openness and instead promoted an increasingly attractive theory world where food preferences became ultimately synonymous with the individuality of ethnic belonging, where difference in its originally Derridean sense had turned into institutionalized moments of sameness and coherence. 17 Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” Critical Inquiry 9.4 (June 1983), 686. 18 One may also wonder whether Gates’ essay would have been published in Critical Inquiry in 1983 as a straightforward political manifesto - we may think of Amiri Baraka’s “Revolutionary Theater” as a counter example - had it not also been equipped so carefully with high-end literary theory. 158 P hiliPP l öffler IV. The Logic of Practice Tracing the emergence of identify fiction along the political liberation of America in the Civil Rights era creates inevitable contradictions. An alternative would therefore be to discuss the rise of identity fiction as reflecting a shift in the logic of academic practice that occurred parallel but not necessarily in response to the post-Civil Rights era. If the coherence suggested by identity as a conceptual category is the result of a particular scholarly reading habit, the goal must be to clarify why and on what grounds this category could become meaningful and influential. This requires replacing the universalist perspective proposed by social-political historiography with a field-specific perspective that combines science-historical models of conceptual change with theories typically identified with the so called “practice turn” in the social sciences. 19 In that sense, we could read events, such as the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966, or the “rise of the theory journal” (Williams) as institutionally specific moments of conceptual change, conditioning the production of new “puzzle solving strategies” in Thomas Kuhn’s sense of the term, methods of scientific sense-making created to account for a specific understanding of academic practice. 20 The literary history of the postwar period may thus be described accordingly as the product of a system of competing reading and writing rules that define the structures of the field and the work of its practitioners - by authorizing new scholarly moves when necessary and by making other moves obsolete. Most importantly, these rules are field-specific. Their authority reflects academic fashions and scientific rituals rather than the centrality of particular historical events. A powerful example would be the institutional history of US literature departments in the postwar decades and their collective grappling with and eventual turn away from the reading paradigms set by the New Criticism. The term practice, then, helps to describe a habitualized and incorporated understanding of performance that enables literary critics to position themselves within their community as well as to talk about and thus authorize 19 Andreas Reckwitz usefully distinguishes “practice theories” from classical theories of social (inter)action with their mentalist or materialist basis, defining “practice” (Praktik) as “a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz “Social Practices,” 249). 20 Kuhn explains that scientific communities perform irrational and non-linear techniques of adaptation. They automatically develop and habitualize the use of new analytical tools in response to a situation in which common puzzle-solving vocabularies cease to work successfully “[…], the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity. As one might expect, that insecurity is generated by the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should.” Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 67-68. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 159 their work. Practice, in this sense, is neither the enactment of a pure idea, that is, an intentional move nor a mere reaction triggered by the externality of political or social environments. As Bourdieu put it in the Logic of Practice: Just as a mature artistic style is not contained, like a seed, in an original inspiration but is continuously defined and redefined in the dialectic between the objectifying intention and the already objectified intention, so too the unity of meaning which, after the event, may seem to have preceded the acts and works announcing the final significance, retrospectively transforming the various stages of the temporal series into mere preparatory sketches, is constituted through the confrontation between questions that only exist in and for a mind armed with a particular type of schemes and the solutions obtained through application of these very schemes. 21 The crucial point of this passage concerns what Bourdieu labels “questions” - which is what Kuhn calls “puzzles.” Practices are developed to cope with a cluster of questions that is meaningful only to experts - they “only exist for a mind armed with a particular type of schemes.” Specialists have acquired an internalized sense of their professional identity that automatically guides them to apply schemes successfully, that is, in accordance with the field’s internal demands and regulations. If we expand on the metaphor of a sports game and the relevant playing field, the literary critic could be viewed as a player who reacts intuitively to the entirety of a game situation. For example: when the shortstop of a baseball team induces a double play, he usually does not think about the individual components his fielding procedure requires, he does not ponder heavy metaphysical questions before stepping on second base and then firing the ball over to first. The shortstop activates a series of physical reactions that are ideally suited to handling the game situation as a whole. Moreover, the reactions of the baseball player make only sense within the limits of the baseball field. No one is interested in the fielding skills of a shortstop outside the realm of baseball. Such internalized rules and the possibility of their immediate application are just as central to the business of literary criticism and the methods used to maintain the integrity of the field. For example, many scholars would agree that Toni Morrison is a good choice for a class on contemporary American literature, yet they would feel less inclined to include Stephen King on their reading lists. Few academics in the contemporary English Department would interpret the meaning of a literary text as the expression of the author’s intention, whereas a good deal of criticism featured in daily newspapers judges literary works on account of exactly that connection. And while theory-minded PhD-students may deem it necessary to explore the primitivist discourse in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the general public may simply enjoy the novel’s authentic exotic setting. There are no definite rulebooks that literary scholars could consult comparable to little kids as they learn to play soccer or baseball. Yet there are a number of institutional procedures that may be read as fulfilling the same 21 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Social Practice (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge UP, 1977), 55. 160 P hiliPP l öffler function as a baseball rulebook, mechanisms that standardize preferred reading practices, while at the same time excluding others. On a very basic level, these distinctions are established in undergraduate methodology classes and introductory lectures dealing with the history of criticism and the evolution of the field as a whole. Students learn about the “intentional fallacy,” the “death of the author,” or “subaltern identity” not only because these are relevant concepts within the academic study of literature, but also because these concepts solidify a particular history of theory as the backbone of the discipline in general. There are also larger mechanisms, however, that define and structure the field in as much as they create exemplary moments of institutional self-legitimation. In his seminal essay “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Intellectual History of the Movement,” (1979) Gene Wise uses a theatrical metaphor to describe these processes of self-legitimization. He borrows Kuhn’s notion of paradigm not just to describe a field-specific pattern of thoughts; he speaks of “paradigm dramas” in particular to illustrate “more fundamentally, an actual instance of that pattern of thinking in action.” 22 Using Wise’s understanding of drama, one could interpret Sacvan Bercovitch’s appointment as the chief editor of The Cambridge History of American Literature as one amongst several other notable institutional events that helped to turn identity into the major conceptual category in contemporary literary criticism. In 1986, Bercovitch’s reminder that we acknowledge the “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History” 23 was still considered a visionary intervention, addressing a community of Americanists that had long been deeply entrenched in an academic field dominated by Matthiessen’s holistic notion of literary Americaness. Today, the paradigm shift proclaimed in “The Problem of Ideology” is well established: literature departments have diversity committees now to endorse the representation of cultural minorities; there are genderand ethnicity-specific teaching positions, revised academic curricula, and new literary anthologies. Historically, however, the example of Bercovitch remains central for understanding how the introduction and subsequent institutionalization of new reading “schemes” and “puzzle solving strategies” has generated the possibility of advertizing identity as an important label - even if the actual literature that this label helped to classify had little more in common than an overly abstract understanding of cultural difference. The Cambridge History project assembled a host of promising English professors under the auspices of Bercovitch, all institutionally trained in the late 1970s and early 1980s and thus equipped with the latest trends offered in the Anglo-American and continental theory world. All of them had internalized the lesson that the dominance of the New Critics had to be broken and they were simultaneously aware that the hegemony of the American 22 Gene Wise, “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Intellectual History of the Movement.” American Quarterly 31.3 (1979): 297. 23 Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History.” Critical Inquiry 12. 4 (1986): 631-653. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 161 nation-state needed to be challenged in the name of sub-national ethnic and religious minorities. As Janice Radway claimed a few years later in her address (and now variously anthologized text) as president of the American Studies Association at the ASA convention in Seattle in 1998: “America is not a unified, homogenous thing” 24 - and she proposes an alternative view in which the idea of America as a homogenous, coherent entity can be replaced by a hybrid space of de-centered, constantly shifting identities. This new view “suggests that […] territories and geographies need to be reconceived as spatially situated and intricately intertwined networks of social relationships that tie specific locales to particular histories.” 25 Radway’s address has become important because it functions as a retroactive consecration of three decades of revisionist literary criticism and theory and as a visionary plea for the future restructuring of the American Studies community from a transnational perspective. “What’s in a Name? ” provides an implicit affirmation of a particular institutional history in which the recent transnationalisms of the American Studies community could be read as the logical and historically necessary continuation of a left-leaning critical tradition that emerged in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. Radway alerts us to the fact that the revisionist interventions of the 1970s and 1980s have now legitimately become a discursive and institutional reality. As a key player in the field, her institutional authority helped to affirm identity as a theoretically challenging category in cultural and literary studies and as the necessary starting point for an academic political intervention, a very efficient puzzle-solving tool in the best sense of the term. V. Conclusion Academic puzzle-solving strategies, such as reading habits, remain fieldspecific in most of the cases. And yet it is a fact that N.Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston and many other identity writers have gained recognition by large numbers of people outside the university. They have received prizes whose cultural prestige notably evades the institutional arena of the academy, and the enormous sales figures of books, like Beloved, The Color Purple, House made of Dawn, and so many more depend primarily on the influence of an expanding middleclass readership, and not on departmental reading lists, syllabi, or course programs. 26 Is this a 24 Janice Radway, “What’s in a Name? ,” The Futures of American Studies, eds. Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham: Duke UP, 2002) 54. 25 Radway, “What’s in a Name? ,” 58. 26 In most prominent cases, such as the New York Times Book Review or the London Review of Books, sales figures cannot be accurately deduced from the featured best-seller lists. These lists, in the case of the New York Times, for example, are based on “sales of both print books and e-books” that “are reported confidentially to The New York Times.” See http: / / www.nytimes.com/ best-sellers-books/ . Other newspapers adhere to a similar policy, in order to protect authors and to avoid compromising the system itself. Based on the huge number of bookstores and other book retailers that bestseller lists 162 P hiliPP l öffler contradiction? The academic reception of many identity fictions is grounded in a set of rather complicated arguments about the legacies of postmodernism, while their non-academic reception depends on the rise of a rather broad and decidedly non-academic middle-class audience. This may seem like a contradiction at first sight, but the novels in question in fact accommodate both reader communities. The typical middle-class Oprah audience reads Toni Morrison, for example, as the result of an acquired taste standard which is defined by the seeming moral responsibility to keep oneself updated about one’s own problematic national history and the artistic excellence represented by the Nobel prize (or any other prestigious award). Both aspects are combined in public figures like Oprah, who navigate easily between daytime television and the higher spheres of culture that seems to be expressed by the structural and thematic difficulties of Morrison’s texts. 27 Likewise, Morrison is aware of the intricacies of her novels. She knows that a serious engagement of her work requires a border crossing from a typically non-academic Oprah context and day-time television to a heavily theory induced readership in English Departments. This necessity of border-crossing became conspicuous prominently as Morrison invited Oprah Winfrey and a group of selected guests to Princeton to discuss Paradise, a book that within the regular Oprah frame had not produced the expected results: it was not life changing, it was no revelation. Instead people claimed that the book was hardly accessible, and that they did not get it. The Princeton episode, then, is structured around a moment of initiation, whose power consists precisely in the denial of ultimate meaning and truth. Morrison insists on the ambiguity of Paradise - she is unclear about many aspects, such as the narrative structure, the non-identity of the colored woman mentioned at the beginning, or the underlying structure of the exodus narrative. And in that way she forces her audience into reading for difference, for ambiguity, and openness. Her insisting on a reading for difference thus conjoins two very different reader communities are based on, however, it is safe to speak of “large” or “enormous” sales as soon as a book appears in the New York Times Book Review or Publishers’ Weekly. Moreover, the economic success of a book is determined not by its sales prior to a list appearance but by the marketing machinery set off after it appeared as a bestseller, as Laura J. Miller explains: “Currently, once a book makes the Times list, the achievement is trumpeted in all further promotional material, the book is sought out by readers who habitually read best-seller lists, and it is given special treatment by retailers.” Laura J. Miller, “The Best-Seller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction,” Book History Vol.3, ed. Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose (University Park: Penn State UP: 2000), 295. 27 For an instructive discussion of Morrison’s therapeutic value in contemporary American reader communities, see Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011), 43- 70. For the competing Morrison audiences, see Michael Perry, “Resisting Paradise: Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey,” The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, ed. Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jamie Harker (Albany: State U of New York P, 2008) 119-140. See also Günter Leypoldt’s essay in this volume. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 163 and corresponding uses of literature: the hermeneutical resistance in the world of Oprah is presented as the ticket into the major leagues of reading in Morrison’s Princeton world. Even though academic reading branches out into other fields of cultural production, the reason why the label identity fiction works as a genre description has as much do with external projections of authenticity and epistemological desire, that is, the wish to really know what a text means, as it has with the uses of these text within academic contexts of reading. 28 Understood as an overarching genre label, identity fiction hinges on an institutionally sanctioned practice of reading; identity fiction make sense, because scholars in the literary studies world are familiar with and correctly apply the relevant puzzle-solving strategies. They know when and how to use terms and phrases, such as “hybridity,” “subversion of traditional modes of signification”, or “liminal space of subaltern identity”. At the same time, this sense of coherence has relatively little to do with the ideal meaning of the individual novels that scholars read, even though the question of meaning remains an important theoretical problem. Scholars do not have to be willing to engage in a discussion of what Beloved truly means or what The House on Mango Street’s real message is to produce a convincing, innovative reading of these texts. Reading practices are reflections of a discipline’s relative state of self-administration; they provide no indication of how close scholars are to the best reading possible, and they also never only represent a general political climate or social system. One might still wonder whether it was really only a peculiar coincidence that the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and Derrida came to Johns Hopkins in 1966. Can one legitimately keep theory production and social history distinct from one another? In order to account for the simultaneity of both developments, the upheavals in US social history during the 1960s, on the one hand, and the formation of identity fiction, on the other, it seems useful to acknowledge their historical proximity, the fact that there is a very conspicuous temporal overlapping between the two fields. Precisely because this proximity seems so seductive it is also necessary to focus attention on the fact that - despite this historical proximity - the turns in social history will never exactly reproduce the turns in the history of reading. 29 The history of reading and the history of social politics are distinct from one another because they follow different rules of practice. And yet these histories seem 28 The reciprocity between a form-centered hermeneutics of literature and an institutional history of different reading contexts is explained with great clarity in the “Introduction” to Stanley Fish’s Is there a Text in this Class? . See Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980) 1-19. 29 As Amy Hungerford has argued for the appropriation of 1989 as a condition for the final success of identity literature and as a period marker: “Political watersheds are one thing, but cultural or aesthetic ones quite another, and it was not immediately clear - nor was it clear now - that, to borrow a turn of phrase from Virginia Woolf, literature changed, even if the world did, on 9 November 1989.[…] On the American scene, pluralism defined the moment; in the international scene, sectarianism; in both cases, identities seemed to be at stake. But if, in Bosnia, your identity could get you 164 P hiliPP l öffler to be connected so intimately because different types of practices may occur - and in fact often do occur - in socially, politically, and institutionally adjacent fields. Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Arac, Jonathan. “Reckoning with New Literary History,” New Literary History 40.4, Tribute to Ralph Cohen (Autumn 2009): 703-711. Aubry, Timothy. Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. Bercovitch, Sacvan. “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History.” Critical Inquiry 12. 4 (1986): 631-653. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Social Practice. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge UP, 1977. Driscoll, Beth. The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Readers in the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet”. 1844. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Mary Oliver. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. 287-306. Fish, Stanley. Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley. “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston.” American Literary History 3.4 (Winter 1991): 782-791. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” Critical Inquiry 9.4 (June 1983): 685-723. Giddens, Anthony. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Gutman Amy, ed. Multiculturalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. 1830. Vol. 3. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit”. 1774. Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774-1787. Ed. Jürgen Brummack und Martin Bollacher. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994. 9-108. Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Hungerford, Amy. “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary”. American Literary History 20.1-2 (Spring/ Summer 2008): 410-419. Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster Monkey. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964. Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Macksey, Richard, ed. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. killed, in America it seemed, your identity could get you published.” Amy Hungerford, “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary,” American Literary History 20.1-2 (Spring/ Summer 2008): 410. Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory 165 Marable, Manning, ed. The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies. Boulder, CO, and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era. Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Miller, Laura J. “The Best-Seller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction.” Book History Vol.3, ed. Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose. University Park: Penn State UP, 2000: 295-304. Perry, Michael. “Resisting Paradise: Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey.” The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, ed. Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jamie Harker. Albany: State U of New York P, 2008: 119-140. PMLA Forum: What was African-American Literature? . PMLA 128.2 (Spring 2013): 386-408. Radway, Janice. “What’s in a Name? ,” The Futures of American Studies. Ed. Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 45-75. Reckwitz, Andreas. “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing.” European Journal of Social Theory 5.2 (Summer 2002): 243-263. Ruland, Richard, ed. The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature from Bradford to Whitman. New York: Dutton, 1976. Schatzki, Theodore. The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park: Penn State UP, 2002. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. Warren, Kenneth. What was African-American Literature? . Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011. Wise, Gene. “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Intellectual History of the Movement.” American Quarterly 31.3 (1979): 293-337. Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Rise of the Theory Journal.” New Literary History 40.4, Tribute to Ralph Cohen (Autumn 2009): 683-702. A my l. b lAir “Tasting and Testing Books”: Good Housekeeping’s Literary Canon for the 1920s and 1930s In its February 1926 issue, Good Housekeeping magazine introduced a “new service” for its approximately one million readers: a books column, “Tasting and Testing Books.” 1 Beloved by its audience as a magazine supporting homemaking through rigorous consumer protections like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and the Good Housekeeping Research Institute, which comprised the Model Kitchen, Testing Station for Household Devices, and Domestic Science Laboratory, Good Housekeeping would now bring its expertise to bear in assisting readers with the difficult process of choosing which books to read, which books to buy, and which books to avoid. The column’s author, Emily Newell Blair, would go on to produce nearly eighty reading advice columns for the magazine between 1926 and 1933, a period which coincided with Good Housekeeping’s intensive promotion of its “guarantee” of advertised products and its increase in circulation to over 2 million copies. Given this confluence, we can approach Blair’s columns as artifacts at the crossroads of a number of different cultural dynamics in the United States in the 1920s and early 1930s: the rise of a consumerist orientation with regard to both material and cultural “goods”; the “revolt” of some self-proclaimed intellectuals and the self-conscious cultural outreach projects of others; and the waxing and waning fortunes of the American economy, culminating of course with the crash of the stock market in 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression into the 1930s. I believe that Blair’s columns must be read in the frame of the “money-back guarantee” mindset that the magazine attempted to inculcate in its readers, and that this consumer-first philosophy aided Blair in rejecting the canons of proper reading that were promulgated by vocal intellectuals and cultural arbiters, and that weighed on both Blair and her readers. Blair’s distinctively non-academic criteria force us to re-evaluate the amount of influence we have attributed to both academic and quasi-academic literary gatekeepers on the reading practices of “non-professional” readers - or even the degree to which such readers cared about whether or not their 1 Good Housekeeping had reached a circulation of 300,000 by the time of its purchase by the Hearst Publishing Company in 1911, and was on its way to a circulation of 2.5 million by the mid-1940s. Mary Ellen Zuckerman, A History of Popular Woman’s Magazines in the United States, 1792-1995 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 12. In 1927, a large, two-page spread advertisement for the magazine placed in the New York Times announced a circulation of 1,695,000 for the upcoming September issue (“The Part that Faith Plays in Advertising,” New York Times August 29, 1927, p. 10-11). 168 A my l. b lAir reading practices could be considered “unsophisticated” by the mid-1920s. And finally, I read Blair’s pragmatic embrace of individual vagaries of taste as a part and parcel of the culture of the middlebrow as it emerged during the Progressive Era. In this way, Blair works to make her readers meet what Jaime Harker has described as a “progressive strand of women’s middlebrow authorship” in which authors offered “narratives that would help [readers] to understand modern life.” 2 The middlebrow was useful culture, and that utility could be parsed as pleasure, profit, cultural or social capital, or what you will. Even a degree of excess - of pleasure, of pain, of pleasurable pain - could be limned under the auspices of utility, if the indulgence in excess was a cathartic departure that “refreshed” one for the return to a more moderate mode of being. The anecdote Blair offers in her inaugural column introduces the impetus and plan for the series, beginning with a description of recent events in her local Joplin, Missouri woman’s study club: Last spring, at the final meeting of our Study club, each member was asked to suggest something that might improve our club, make it more helpful and more pleasurable […]. In fact, only one suggestion for any improvement was made. That came from Charlotte Lennon. ‘Our current events,’ she said, ‘have been so interesting this year that I’m wondering if we cannot add something to our program that will give us the same information about books - stimulate our curiosity, you know, so that we’ll want to read something besides the Best Sellers; help us to pick the best books out of the yearly output that so overwhelms me with its quantity that I can’t find quality - not just fiction or books at the Carnegie Library, but the unusual ones, the more worth while and less popular. I try to keep up with at least one review, but it is not very satisfactory, for I don’t know the reviewers and whether we like the same things. I’m often disappointed in the books it recommends.’ ‘What you need is a taster,’ I interrupted, laughing. ‘That’s it exactly,’ she answered, ‘and you, Emily, ought to be our taster. You’re always reading. Think up some way you can tell us the books we’ll like, the books we ought to read, and what we ought to know about the new books.’ 3 Thus Blair’s charge: to tell her readers first, what they’ll like; second, what they ought to read; and third, what they ought to know about the new books. These three questions delineate nicely the dilemmas presumably facing readers at this moment, which also marked the beginning of the era of academic literary study. How was one to enjoy books, to read the “right” books, and to understand them properly? And exactly how essential was it to be able to do the last two - the notion of “best” books to read and best ways to read them being predicated on the presence, somewhere out there, of professional readers who passed judgment on the reading practices of others. Blair’s answers to these questions over the seven years of her service in Good Housekeeping are at times iconoclastic, are not at all cowed by “intellectual” condemnation of popular reading, and offer a glimpse into the popular reading that was 2 Jaime Harker, America The Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 20. 3 Emily Newell Blair, “Tasting and Testing Books” (Good Housekeeping February 1926), 45. Cited from here on as GH Month/ Year, Page number. “Tasting and Testing Books” 169 going on behind the backs of realists and academic literati. It also suggests that as much as the critics were unimpressed with the tastes and abilities of “everyday” readers, so were those readers unimpressed by those would-be cultural gurus - even the popularizers at the Book-of-the-Month-Club could not escape Blair’s disparagement. Blair’s columns rendered the production of books and the performance of criticism likewise consumer service professions; she “outed” professional critics as people primarily concerned with job security, and punctured the inflated notions of “right” reading that underwrote both “highbrow” reviews and middle-class cultural mediators alike. Recall that Blair is first asked to write about “What books we’ll like.” The “We” is at first her friends in Joplin Missouri, but becomes by extension her Good Housekeeping audience. This request suggests that Blair’s taste might be identical to that of her readers. It also validates the already-formed tastes of her readers - no anxiety about “acquired tastes” here. The “we” suggests that Blair’s readers share a group identity - they are a “reading formation,” in Tony Bennett and Janet Wollacott’s sense, in which a reading formation is the product of definite social and ideological relations of reading composed, in the main, of those apparatuses - schools, the press, critical reviews, fanzines within and between which the socially dominant forms for the superintendence of meaning are both constructed and contested. 4 This definition of reading formation is particularly resonant in this context because it acknowledges the superintending function of a range of contextual influences - the institutional, as in schools and press, and the purportedly counter-institutional, or populist, such as fanzines. In the case of Good Housekeeping, the magazine’s attempt to position itself as both sympathetic peer and expert echoes Blair’s position as the expert voice within the group. Her repeated use of “we” groups Blair with her readers, or at least indicates that if she is not identical to them, she will know what they like - better than critics who her study group friend Charlotte Lennon does not know. Blair was a little like her readers - we think we can know this because she was presumably a member of a study club located in a town in the geographic center-South of the United States - but she was also quite a bit unlike them. For one thing, she had a bully pulpit in one of the largest-circulation women’s monthlies of the time, though her autobiography mentions the magazine only once in passing, and never mentions the books columns. The autobiography focuses largely on Blair’s political ventures, and is written in the vein of “Mrs. Blair Goes to Washington.” In discussing her methods for getting women interested in working for the Democratic Party, in the early days of her first involvement with them, Blair writes: 4 Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), 64-5. 170 A my l. b lAir Little I might know about national politics, but I knew a lot about women, and one thing I knew was that women might follow men directly, but they were not going to be delivered as so many bobheads by an agent of the men. But if I could make them see me as one who could lead them according to tactics they were familiar with, they might treat me as their leader. 5 Blair leads by being like the people she wants to follow her - very much like the editors of Good Housekeeping magazine, who pride themselves on having gained the “faith” of their readers through their Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. As an advertisement spread over two full pages of the New York Times claimed in September, 1927, the magazine had “developed that essential of a great publication - character.” This character would lead to consumer faith, as “Faith in buying is based on the fact that most of us have a distinct sense of confidence in familiar things - things we are used to.” 6 Women were used to Good Housekeeping, and Blair’s female audiences were used to her tactics, both in party organizing and in book recommendations. Blair was a relative unknown, though the daughter of a prominent Missouri family, when she earned a certain notoriety as the author of the short story “Letters from a Contented Wife” in the December, 1910 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, a general-interest periodical that targeted a largely male (and largely urbane, bachelor) audience. This piece, which to the 21stcentury reader seems facetiously titled, is written as a series of letters from a wife to her absent husband. Letters date from the honeymoon phase, the moment of new motherhood, the 10-year anniversary, and the 20-year anniversary. Most of the passages sound too self-abnegating to be read as earnest from the woman who was to become a major Democratic party operative, as does this opening from the letter dated six months after marriage: I have been quite busy since you left, making a catalogue list of our library. I am so proud of our books, as well as of the excellent taste displayed in their selection. I have catalogued all your marked articles on political subjects, too, so you can find them readily. And to think that I shall always be doing such things for you! That we are to have a whole life long of it - I discovering all these little things that mean completeness, you doing all the big things that really count - always together, you and I! 7 This letter reads like it could be a letter from George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke to her ill-matched spouse Edward Causabon - and all well-read audiences would know how that particular pairing turned out. But Blair apparently did not mean her title of “contented wife” ironically, if one is to believe her account in her autobiography. Rather than an indictment of a husband who subordinates his wife’s talents to his own pedantry, Blair apparently meant this account as a corrective to what she saw as an unfortunate trend towards pieces about unhappy and unequal unions: 5 Emily Newell Blair, Bridging Two Eras: The Autobiography of Emily Newell Blair, 1877-1951. Ed. Virginia Jeans Laas. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press), 231. 6 “The Part that Faith Plays in Advertising,” 11. 7 Emily Newell Blair, “Letters of a Contented Wife,” Cosmopolitan Magazine (December 1910): 130. “Tasting and Testing Books” 171 I had been reading an article in the Cosmopolitan called “Confessions of a Rebellious Wife.” “I’m tired of reading about these unhappy wives,” I said to my husband. “Why doesn’t someone write about the contented ones? ” “Why don’t you? ” “Nonsense, I can’t write.” “But you could. Your letters show it,” I Laughed. “Every husband thinks that about his wife.” “No,” he insisted. “The last time I was in New York I read an extract from one of your letters to clinch some point in the conversation, and everyone commented on the way you put it. We can be discussing something, you and I, for hours. I go away and your first letter puts it more clearly than all our conversations made it. You could do it if you tried.” 8 Blair’s conversational habits with her husband clearly form the template for her contented wife’s letters. She writes out the complex negotiations that her narrator must undertake to remain contented, and models a kind of cognitive behavioral therapeutics of marital relationships. When discussing a fight during year six of the marriage, the wife writes, “We are each trying to make the other happy in our own peculiar way. I try to make you happy by doing to you as I would like to be done by, and you do the same to me. You let me alone when I’m worried because you prefer to be let alone yourself. Well, I don’t, but now that I’ve learned your intentions I am perfectly satisfied. At least if I’m not I will learn to be - so there.” 9 The contented wife insists that her husband refrains from buying furs for her so they can save the money to spend on their house, or just to have as a financial cushion: “Possessions have no charm as compared with the power of money. The ability capital well invested gives to hold a position in the community, to control circumstances, and to shape affairs is so much more than the ability to buy.” 10 This contented wife, unlike the “rebellious wife” of the initial piece, has an opportunity to travel without her children, and appreciates them all the more for having had a break from motherhood. She also engages in prolonged political conversation with her husband via her letters (as in a long meditation on the relative risks and benefits of “class legislation” in a letter from the midpoint of the piece). Directly after such a disquisition, though, the contented wife has this to say about the long marriage versus the new engagement: Of course my [newly-engaged young friend] thinks that they will never find less to say to each other. If we find less to say to each other she supposes that we find each other dull and that we are tired of each other. She grasps nothing of the heights and depths and breadths of marriage that have nothing to do with talk or opinions. 11 The contented wife is a corrective to the rebellious wife who laments the passing of the first flames of passion and the period of marriage in which spouses are the center of each others’ lives, the wife who resents being set 8 Blair, Bridging Two Eras, 140. 9 Blair, “Letters,” 134. 10 Ibid., 135. 11 Ibid., 137. 172 A my l. b lAir aside has her new husband goes abroad to pursue his business ventures. One could indeed imagine this contented wife with Emily Newell Blair’s political career in some sequel, as she stumbles upon political prominence by being the most inoffensive woman in the right place at the right time. After writing about the “contented wife,” Blair became a sought-after writer in generalinterest magazines. She then became the editor of the suffrage movement journal, The Missouri Woman, in 1913. In the mid-1910s Blair organized more than 2,000 Democratic Women’s Clubs around the country to encouraging newly-enfranchised women to vote in significant, game-changing blocs (instead of as second-votes for their husbands’ preferred candidates), and built regional training programs for women party workers. She first served as secretary (1922-1926) and then later as president (1928-1929) of the Woman’s National Democratic Club, and was the club’s principal founder. She was the first woman to attain a prominent position in Democratic party politics, serving as the national vice chairperson of the Democratic Party, first elected in 1922 then reelected from 1924 to 1928. She was active in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1932 Presidential campaign, helping secure him his party’s nomination, and during the campaign she was one of four women sent by the DNC on speaking tours across the country. While Blair’s roles were in every way exceptional, she made a career out of being relatable - being able to understand and translate the desires and attitudes of middle-class American women. Again, she was able to lead because of her simultaneous exceptionalism and typicality. I saw that I had an opportunity - it was nothing more than that - to show eligibility for leadership. But the women must know me, they must have evidence of my ability to accomplish things. To show them such evidence, I discovered, was like raising myself by my own bootstraps. 12 In the Good Housekeeping columns, Blair often concedes and alludes to her own exceptionalism - her secretary and her assistant make frequent cameo appearances, and Blair mentions her speaking tours with some regularity. Blair worked around any difficulties posed by this gap by insisting in nearly every column that the individual preferences of each reader were the sole determining factors in whether a book recommendation would be successful. A common opening gambit is for her to identify a particular person, to describe that person and their request to her, and to then tailor her advice to that “type.” She then assiduously cautions her readers not to read against type, or at least not to complain about dissatisfaction with their reading if they do. After a lengthy summary description of Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, for example, she writes: Now, having heard what the story is about and what it means, the question is up to the reader, ‘Is it your book? ’ Do you want to know what Judith wanted from the world and see her disillusionment? Do you enjoy the companionship of young and innocent and slightly stupid girls? Will the pleasure of viewing her child 12 Blair, Bridging Two Eras, 231. “Tasting and Testing Books” 173 world through rose-colored glasses make up to you for the pain of seeing her break them and throw them away? Will you endure the murkiness produced by these implications for the sake of the beauty unobscured? If you cannot answer these questions in the affirmative, then the book is not for you. If you can, it will probably give you, as it did to the critics, extraordinary pleasure. But I beg of you, do not answer these questions ‘No,’ then read it and complain because you do. Or worse, never answer these questions at all, read it, and feel that a ‘bad book’ was imposed on you. 13 Not a single column fails to mention the individual nature of tastes and reception, and the imperative that each of Blair’s readers takes into account his or her own personality when choosing to begin a book. Sometimes she even goes so far as to undermine her recommendations, particularly when they have been predicated largely on her own responses to texts: After all, the reader - and here is the rub - must bring himself as well as the writer to his reading of the book. Here I have introduced these books as this one reader found them. But my readers, all too unfortunately, I do not know. What they make of these acquaintances, if they follow them up, rests with them. How I wish I could know not only how many like what I like, and hate what I hate, but also - and this knowledge would be equally valuable - how many hate what I like and like what I hate! Please, some of you, write and tell me. 14 (GH January 1928, 141) This focus on individual tastes notwithstanding, Blair frequently tended to make her representative advisee an attractive, aspirational “type.” Good Housekeeping is filled, after all, with aspirational ideals in its omnipresent advertising copy; it would be easy for such readerly expectations to color reception of the editorial copy. In June 1928, for example, Blair introduces us to her friend Minnie Fisher Cunningham, who is working to be nominated to the U. S. Senate from Texas. First Blair cites a letter from Cunningham: “Being a candidate, I find, means being a very busy woman. I’ll not have much time for reading while I’m campaigning about my big state of Texas, so that everything I read must count. Tell me what to carry with me in my little car as I go from speech to speech and county to county.” 15 Blair’s description of Cunningham, her “courageous” friend, is inspiring. She is “an executor and administrator of high order,” who wants everything she reads and does to “increase her value.” But she is not narrow-minded; she is, rather, “A brilliant student of politics,” “witty as well as wise,” “sweet and tender-hearted,” “honest and clear-minded.” “She knows that it is not only knowledge of facts that increases value, but also understanding and sympathy, so that a book which increases her stock of one or exercise of the other may be said, in her definition, to ‘count.’” A probable description? No, of course not, but an ideal one - and one that fits the aspirational profile of Good Housekeeping readers, who are coached by the advertisements in the column’s margins to want to be witty, wise, honest, brilliant, and effortless homemakers. Anyone who 13 GH January 1928, 138. 14 GH January 1928, 141. 15 GH June 1928, 51. 174 A my l. b lAir wants to see herself as the spiritual equivalent to Minnie Cunningham could read the books earmarked for that inspiring woman, and feel both identified and improved. A description that is more likely to already fit a larger number of the Good Housekeeping audience comes the next month, in the form of the reader letter that Blair uses to frame her July column. Blair identifies a correspondent who was writing in response to her column from February of that year, on “Books of Escape,” in which she had validated detective fiction, adventure stories, and romances as books that could be read to “escape from a number of things, the drudgery of the daily grind, the tediousness of familiar things, the boresomeness of the intimate - even the irksomeness of landscape and the thrust of our own desires and repressions.” In this February column, Blair had argued that adventure books, in particular, helped one escape the quotidian but also rendered one more satisfied with a more mundane existence than the adventurers: “[The books do] this by painting for us the opposite of all these things, all these conditions, and painting them in such a way that while we are amused, entertained, we never once desire to discover these opposites for ourselves. We return to the old things refreshed, satisfied, and content.” 16 Blair validated this kind of reading over and against “the intellectuals: ” “And how the intellectuals groan, how they scorn this Babbittry! ‘After all,’ said one of them to me, ‘it is the ones who never have any trouble who talk that way. Those who do, want to study about it, think about it, come to some conclusion.’ Be that as it may, there is much to be said for these books that make the reader forget - books in which he can lose himself. Some people may always want this kind. It is a certainty there are times when everyone does.” 17 Blair closed her February column by reiterating the importance of an individual’s eclectic taste, and encouraged her readers, as she did every month, to write to her and tell her what kinds of escape worked for them. In response, Blair received a letter that turned her notion of “escape” on its head. “Not to escape life but to extend life, that is why I read. I want books to take me places and give me experiences that I can never hope to enjoy.” The reader describes her domestic situation: I live on a ranch in Oklahoma in an ugly, tiny, four-room house. I look out upon acres of plowed dirt or unshaded grain. My life is narrow. My day’s a routine. Love has never come to me. I am just a plain old woman. But let me find the right book and I become a fairy princess, a queen of this world, or a woman longed for and lost, living in palaces, sailing the seas, or heaven knows what. 18 Blair validates this reader’s desires for escape and for identification - she identifies herself as a fellow “make-believer” who loves “books of identification, books in which I can live scenes and feel emotions that I never shall experience in life.” 19 Blair’s recommendations, though, veer far from the “fairy princess” desires expressed by her correspondent. She writes at length about 16 GH February 1928, 201. 17 Ibid. 18 GH July 1928, 102. 19 Ibid. “Tasting and Testing Books” 175 a biography of Henry Hudson that found her so identifying with Hudson that she “recoiled” from the acquittal of the mutineers on his ship. She recommends a highly-wrought fictionalized biography of the Haitian revolutionary Jean-Christophe, because while “there may be readers who will shrink from Black Majesty because of its subject…among them will not be my correspondent, searching for a broader outlook on life.” 20 Blair recommends a novel of a love triangle surrounding an American-born French widow in France (The French Wife by Dorothy Graham); she recommends a romance about the Crusades; she recommends two books she actually found to be “disappointing” but not without the capacity to “widen horizons” 21 (one about a New York family that falls out of prominence and enters the working round - Blair finds the characters more like “prototypes” than legitimate personalities - another that fails not in terms of characterization, but in terms of plot: “why create a mermaid from fairyland and sacrifice her to the gods of this world? ”); 22 Blair recommends a book with a series of micro-biographies in a psychoanalytic strain, and, finally, a nonfiction essay that glorifies the business world (with which she disagrees, but which she thinks raises an interesting topic). In other words, Blair reveals a pretty tin ear when it comes to understanding her correspondent’s needs. Why tell someone who wants to imagine herself as a “fairy princess” that she might want to read a novel with a disappointing ending, in which a figural “mermaid” is destroyed, even with the rationale that it is yet “a book to widen horizons, if only those of understanding of human limitations.” 23 I doubt not that the isolated Oklahoma correspondent is well aware of human limitations - she wants to try to reach her experience beyond thinking about human limitations and, presumably, to transcendence, to idealism. The most hamfisted recommendation in the column is of a domestic novel about a family from Iowa, The Bonney Family - which Blair acknowledges is not far from Oklahoma but contends nevertheless that “identification with them would for [the Oklahoma rancher] - as for me, I doubt not - widen horizons, for to live deeply, intensely in a family circle, to suffer for and with them, to share and to demand, renounce and claim, is to know the whole scheme of life in a microcosm; and to know this whole scheme, even from a replica, a model, surely widens the horizon for one who has been looking at only one spot on it.” 24 Well, perhaps. But even if this is a beautifully-rendered story of a family in the middle of cornfields, it is still a story about a family living in the middle of cornfields. The urbane, if middle-western, Emily Blair might be interested in reading about them as she takes trains that fly through the long stretches of prairie and field on her way to retreats in the east or the mid-Atlantic, but the Oklahoma rancher? 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 172. 24 Ibid., 168. 176 A my l. b lAir What is she to get from “every-day people doing every-day things? ” 25 And then, Blair offers a particularly tone-deaf justification for the recommendation: “Mrs. Bonney is the loveliest mother I have ever found in fiction, loving with the wisdom and wise with the love that too many mothers vainly long to have, and yet not too good to be true. How identification with her would enrich the life of my childless correspondent! ” Perhaps, and perhaps not. This correspondent does not seem to want to spend her imaginative life as an unassuming minister’s wife in farm country, even one full of homespun wisdom and preternatural maternal grace. She wants to imagine herself a queen. She wants to live in mental palaces. She wants to spend her escapist literary moments being fought over by knights. Is Blair simply ignoring these desires for escapist flight? Or, does her cluster of recommendations here belie a discomfort with certain forms of individual tastes despite the rhetoric of ecumenicalism she employs elsewhere in the columns? Is Blair actually uncomfortable with her Oklahoma correspondent’s desires for fantastical identification, for a pursuit of fantasy that is more than just escape, is “extension” - but not in the sense of “horizon-widening,” but rather self-insertion? Is this a moment where Blair is working to re-educate her readers in more appropriate “horizon-enlarging” reading practices? The books she advocates - for Henry Hudson, for Jean-Christophe, for a sophisticated expatriate, for a Crusader - are educational, but they are also books that allow entrée into emotional identifications. Indeed, it is this element of many of these books that made other more “intellectual” or professional critics scorn them. These not-so-rigorous dramatic biographies are perfect for Blair’s purposes, if not for the intellectual critics, or for her Oklahoma reader. This is but one example of a consistent middle ground achieved in Blair’s columns between her reader’s needs for particular forms of pleasure and the sense she has - while not aligned with academic readers, still well-defined and idiosyncratic - of the types of reading her audience should, or probably would like to, pursue. And this observation leads us back to the inaugural column’s tripartite charge to Blair, the second part of which specifies that Blair should tell her readers “What books we ought to read.” This suggests that there are books out there that need to be read by Blair’s readers, perhaps but not necessarily regardless of personal preference, because they hold some cultural importance. Such a request supposes that there can be some sort of imperative to reading books - what is it? Is it social? The previouslyinvoked Study Club setting, with its “good fellowship,” seems to suggest that there is an element of desirable social capital in reading books. In her January 1928 column, Blair acknowledges again this impetus to reading - to validate it in some and to discourage it in others. She acknowledges that there are two types of readers; the kinds who love to read and the kinds who feel overwhelmed by the task of reading. 25 Ibid. “Tasting and Testing Books” 177 For this first group I have my little list, a short one but, I hope, a good one, for it is the fruitage of much reading of many volumes, much selection, and much elimination. And for this second group I have a bit of advice: ‘Don’t. Don’t keep up.’ Pick out just one or two of these books as they appeal to you. Read them as slowly as you will or lay them down unfinished. For as one who loves reading I simply can not bear that, even in order to ‘keep up,’ it shall become a burden, that, even in order to take part in tea-table conversation, one should be wearied in the endeavor. 26 Blair wants you to feel good about reading, however much you are able to read, and she repeatedly discourages any of her readers from feeling the external pressures to “keep up.” Is that “ought” indicative of some quest for cultural capital, then? In my book Reading Up, which takes a similar look at ten years of reading advice columns in the Ladies’ Home Journal magazine, I answer this question with a definite yes. In those columns, Hamilton Wright Mabie offered his readers a strategy for reading works of high literary realism, by Howells, James, Wharton, and others, as if they were the comfortable but less culturally-elite works of literary romance and sentiment that he presumed they preferred to read (and that he sometimes confessed to preferring as well). Mabie encouraged his Ladies’ Home Journal readers from 1902-1912 to embrace works of high realism alongside the more genteel, “Romantic” offerings of the day, who validated their desires to read as a means of upward social and economic mobility, and who ultimately acted as a guide to class “passing” - but with the caveat that one really should read the books! Mabie made “high realism” palatable for a mass audience - in the 1920s and 1930s, would Blair attempt the same for literary modernism? Blair does occasionally refer to “the critics” and their literary preferences, but she does so not with an air of deference (either grudging or sincere); she is rather scornful of the critics, and their motives for preferring certain texts and styles over others. In the midst of a column recommending books for her sophisticated friend, Good Housekeeping contributing author, and political spouse Frances Parkinson Keyes, Blair mentions Rebecca West’s book of essays, The Strange Necessity, which Blair describes as a window-shopping trip through literature. “Miss West wanders out of a little bookshop in Paris up and down, one might say, the street of literature, stopping for a little time here before Marcel Proust and there before James Joyce, those two incomprehensibles whom the literary critics tell us to our utter scorn and abhorrence are the greatest writers of our time; scorn, because we do not understand them; and abhorrence, because they so greatly shock us in our tenderest sensibilities.” 27 West is, for Blair, a flaneurse on the one hand, and on the other (remember the Good Housekeeping test kitchen! ) a scientific investigator of the world of high criticism, analyzing both texts and critical biases while keeping her own critical distance. The takeaway for the general reader may not be a detailed exegesis of any particular text, or the ability or desire to 26 GH January 1928, 51. 27 GH May 1929, 176. 178 A my l. b lAir perform such exegesis for his or herself, but will be rather “certain ideas” against which “when one mentions, for instance, sentimentality or art,” one might “measure” one’s own response. Or, not. Because even Blair admits that “it is not an easy book, nor one for everyone to read…But Mrs. Keyes, I know, will want to read and ponder it.” 28 Blair’s critique of academic literary culture continues as she acknowledges that Keyes will want to read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, not just because Hugh Walpole called Woolf the “co-queen of British Letters” along with Rebecca West, but also because Woolf is the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, whose writings are “beloved of club-paper writers.” In other words, she has middlebrow aspirational roots. But Woolf’s stylistic experiments make her works challenging to those same club ladies, even as they make her “beloved of critics, since she furnished them their ‘racket,’ the material for their jobs.” Blair continues, casting serious aspersions as she goes: Not that any critic ever condescends to inform his reader authoritatively just what it is all about. But each has his own opinion of Orlando. Professor Canby says it is the esthetic history of English belles-lettres, showing the literary mind of England in all its modes from the time of Elizabeth until today. Rebecca West says it is an ‘account of human experience during that period which historians call modern history: the last few hundred years, which are near enough for us to recognize their parentage of us.’ My own guess is that Mrs. Woolf has imagined in Orlando a human being independent of time in order to show that in each individual there are a number of selves all built up, ‘one on top of another, as plates are piled up in a waiter’s hand,’ all of these selves handed down to the individual biologically through the germ plasm which contains all the grandparents to the uttermost generations. 29 Blair goes on to explain “just what it’s all about” through a pretty thorough plot summary that lists all of Orlando’s manifestations. By offering a variety of interpretive glosses on the novel, and then terming her own take on it a “guess,” Blair underscores the spirit behind her reading - that no reader should feel absolutely beholden to any one “expert opinion” on the meaning of this modernist text. Each individual reader’s imagination is brought into play, individually, when thinking about Orlando - and this dynamic is not at all unlike the kind of reader-author interaction that occurs in any other book, which some may like and others may dislike, despite the reverence with which critics like Canby treat this particular text. Notice too that the critical take Blair cites as Canby’s is indulgently metafictional - Orlando is about esthetic history? What use is that to her audience, who views Canby and his ilk as simply trumpeting books that will “furnish[] them their ‘racket,’ the material for their jobs.” I’m less interested for my purposes in arguing with Blair’s assessment of “the intellectuals” than in noting that sometimes it seems to match up with our 21st century take on who would comprise such a group and how they “actually” felt about lay readers, and sometimes diverges wildly. Chip 28 Ibid. 29 GH May 1929, 178. “Tasting and Testing Books” 179 Rhodes has argued in Structures of the Jazz Age, “[Harold] Stearns and the intellectuals for whom he spoke were suspicious of an intellectual who sullied himself or herself with public engagement.” 30 Thomas Bender describes modernist intellectual discourse in the 1920s as hermetic, a closed loop among intellectuals that never worked its way out into the public discourse. “Disciplinary peers, not a diverse urban public, became the only legitimate evaluators of intellectual work” in the twenties, Bender writes. 31 It is a general critical consensus that Canby’s role was as a popularizer of reading, attempting outreach (problematic as that notion is) through his various book recommendation projects. But Blair lumps Canby in with the lot when she evokes him as one of those trying to “keep up the racket.” Blair’s discussion of Orlando works to empower her readers to pick up the novel, to interpret it on their own (because if there is no critical consensus, by extension, there must not be a “right” or a “wrong” answer to the meaning of the text), or to choose not to read it if it, like any of the other books Blair has discussed, does not seem like the type of text she would be interested in. The reader might also find she does not like Orlando - and that is a completely acceptable response. The perspective afforded by Blair’s comment that professional criticism is not mystical, but is simply labor - the intellectual’s need to keep up the “racket” - brings intellectual work to the level of any other manual or mental labor, which is undertaken, after all, for financial gain. The explicit consumerist message of Good Housekeeping thus bleeds into Blair’s columns not only in the attitude towards books as commodities that might suit or disappoint depending on consumer’s needs, but also in the way that Blair throws back the veil on the intellectual labor of classifying and analyzing books. Her original interlocutors in her Joplin book club were already unimpressed by the intellectual approach to books; if we conjecture that Charlotte Lennon’s frustration with reviews refers to the champions of high modernism, like the critics at the Little Review (which was famously subtitled, “making no compromise with the public taste”) or the Transatlantic Review, we need hardly be surprised at her reluctance. But she even says that she wants to stay away from “Best Sellers” on one hand, and the “Carnegie Library” books on the other. It seems that none of these possible literary canons - not the radical modernist, not the highbrow academic canon, and not the popular bestseller list - is suitable for this reader. In his recent revisioning of the literary landscape of the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, Gordon Hutner explains that the now-canonical vision of the 1920s and 1930s as the ferment of literary modernism is far from the actual, lived literary life of the 1920s and 1930s in America. He looks at the bestseller lists to offer an alternate canon of novelists such as Booth Tarkington, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Zona Gale, among others, reading these writers as continuing the tradition of Howellsian realism into the 1920s and 1930s. These 30 Chip Rhodes, Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and Racial Disclosures in American Modernism (London: Verso, 1998), 24. 31 Thomas Bender, The Intellectual and the Public Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 180 A my l. b lAir texts were the darlings of the newly-codified and credentialed phalanx of Ivy League literary critic-celebrities like Columbia’s Carl Van Doren and Yale’s Henry Seidel Canby and the popular canonizers at the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild, whose selections frequently became best-sellers and whose word about middle-class tastes we have come to take for granted; not just Hutner, but Joan Shelley Rubin, Janice Radway, and many others including myself have thought them the closely-followed purveyors of fiction for the middle-class reader. But in looking at Emily Blair’s columns I am finding that even this group was, to her mind, frequently unresponsive to the needs of her audience; she would group them with even the most dismissive of “intellectual” critics. In her August 1928 column, Blair looks for something to recommend out of the category of “books which have brought pleasure to the critics, books of the Literary Guild or of the Book-of-the-Month Club, but which may not fill my needs.” I’ll cite at length her process, as she narrates it for the column: Into [this group], on this occasion, went Thomas Beer’s The Road to Heaven, so admired by the sophisticates but which would, my reading disclosed, in spite of its undeniable art, seem to the respectable frank to the point of brutality; Howard W. Odom’s Rainbow Round My Shoulder, an undeniable document of negro life, absolutely hypnotic in its power to convince and hold, but repulsive in the savagery it records; Princess Marthe Bibesco’s Catherine-Paris, Balzackian in its scope and thoroughness, exquisite in its irony, charming in its characterization, altogether a beautiful book, yet depicting manners and situations shocking to the sensibilities of the Anglo-Saxon; and finally Rose Macaulay’s Daisy and Daphne, which will be a veritable joy to those who can laugh at themselves. 32 Blair critiques the critics here - and it is this second order of evaluation and gatekeeping that perhaps most intrigues me about her columns. Blair finds the Book-of-the-Month Club too abstruse - too edgy - too far out there for particular portions of the audience of Good Housekeeping. Given the significant circulation of this magazine, Blair’s influence in critiquing the club’s choices cannot be ignored. At the very least we must concede that there was considerable conflict between different ranks of cultural gatekeepers; Canby and the Book-of-the-Month Club were not as “popular,” perhaps, as we have all thought. This may be because of these critics’ rhetorics of improvement. Improvement was an acknowledged goal of Blair’s columns, but it was far from the most important goal. Recall the third charge from the inaugural column: Blair is to tell her readers “what we ought to know about the new books.” 33 This request implies that there is information about new books which is valuable whether or not Blair’s readers actually read said books. What Blair seems to be performing for her readers in this August column - a process she will repeat regularly throughout her tenure at Good Housekeeping - is just what Charlotte asked for - she is telling them what they ought to know about these new books. They don’t need to have read the books, but 32 GH August 1928, 181 33 Ibid. “Tasting and Testing Books” 181 with this helpful overview, they will be able to participate, perhaps, in social conversation about these books, will be able to talk about why they have not in fact chosen to read them. Blair insists that among the books celebrated by critics - or that “gave critics pleasure” - there are books, “some of them good books, perhaps great literature, but not for popular taste or consumption.” 34 These are books that will never fit the needs of the Good Housekeeping reader, in the same way that certain products will never fit her needs. But, Blair dutifully summarizes these texts, and discusses on occasion how a reader might deal with reading something that might not usually be her cup of tea, but which is required reading in her study club, or in her social circle. Longer columns devoted to “serious reading” typically appeared in the winter months, as does the January 1929 column entitled “If you Read to Learn, Emily Newell Blair Suggests Books that will be Useful to You.” Blair opens, as always, by describing the target audiences for her column, as discerned by her from the letters that cross her desk daily. A laundry list of different identifications and differing definitions of “education” naturally lead to different types of recommendations. Blair notes that some want “simple literacy,” and recommends dictionaries, grammars, and composition manuals; some want “to converse interestingly, to understand the references to books and characters in books, to characters and events in history, to pictures, to inventions.” For these readers Blair recommends a course of reading the encyclopedia. Those who want a list of books that will “equal a college education,” Blair directs to Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf of Books and the ALA classics series. She does comment on those that “I should prefer to know how many of those sold had been read. For the trouble with sets of books like this is that it is so much easier to buy them, and even to pay for them, irritating as the monthly payment plan is, than to continue faithfully, day in and day out, to stick to their pages.” 35 None of these series would satisfy the reader who wanted to have a course of literary appreciation, though, and Blair is ready to offer several titles that will help a reader to a judgment of literature that focuses “not [on] its effect on the reviewer as my reviews in Good Housekeeping are done, but according to the canons of literature, as to whether the author succeeds in doing what he sets out to do, and a criticism of the methods he employs to this end.” 36 The decision to follow a course of study, to enter into the mode of criticism that is author-centric rather than reader-centric, is thus actually presented as a reader-centric choice - a reader may decide that the study of a canon is important, and then may learn how to perform such a thing, may with practice gain the “mastery” that allows one to “think for oneself, to raise standards for oneself.” But Blair distinctly countervenes the notion that one may acquire taste. 34 Ibid. 35 GH January 1929, 180. 36 Ibid., 183. 182 A my l. b lAir […] so often my correspondents seem to think that culture is something they can don like a garment. They have only to read certain books, see certain pictures, hear certain music, and accept the opinions of others with regard to them, and they will be considered cultured. But culture is not so easily come by. It is true that the reading of books, the seeing of pictures, and the hearing of music may help one to it, but only as they exercise one’s thought, one’s discrimination, one’s tastes. They are to the acquirement of culture what the exercise of the muscles is to the acquirement of a fine physique. Culture is that attitude of mind, that inner sense of rightness, that appreciation of beauty, that sense of values and many more things that may result from the reading and seeing and hearing. But they will result only if and when the reader and the seer and hearer is frank and honest about his own reactions. So long as he is willing to accept the reports of others as to what he should think and feel, he will be merely educated. Only when he is able to report that he actually feels these reactions may he lay claim to culture. 37 Blair draws an analogy between acquiring taste and acquiring virtue - saying that she uses the phrase “acquire virtue…in the sense in which the Christian saints did when they ‘acquired’ virtue.” suggesting that the process is mysterious. Of course, she has been asked to offer titles to help in this process, and help she does, with a long list of books like C. Alphonso Smith’s What Can Literature Do For Me, Frank Mott’s Rewards of Reading, Llewelyn Jones’s How To Criticize Books, and British popularizer Arnold Bennett’s Literary Taste and How to Form It. But Blair’s hedging about culture and taste in the midst of these recommendations evacuates the books of some of their efficacy - they will not, from simply being read, produce the enculturation effect - and her reader need not think that reading any of them will result in an appearance of culture. I can think of no better analogy for these texts, as Blair offers them, than the product advertised in the margins of this column: The Battle Creek Health Builder. Like Charles W. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf of Books, the “Health Builder” promises benefits - in this case, not erudition but slimness - in fifteen minutes a day. Like Eliot’s shelf, the claims are spurious - and Blair stops well short of promising that the quick fix will help her readers acquire particular tastes. You can buy it, but will you read it? And will reading it actually do any good? Here again, one senses Blair butting up against one of the paradoxes of her columns: the impetus to offer advice, with the inclination to say that advice is really ineffectual if the reader’s individual contribution is not significant. Blair does not guarantee anything to the passive reader, but she also will not condemn that reader’s practice as so many of her contemporaries would because that is not her prerogative as a “taster and tester of books.” If one wishes to learn, Blair will help you. If one does not care about knowing why critics like certain books, or about how to read an aesthetic appreciation of Woolf, or if one simply does not have the chance or inclination to form these habits, if one wishes to be guided, if one is, like Blair’s “childhood ideal” Emily Blakeney (October 1929) a “tired woman” who wants to read something easy, Blair will not judge you. She may not fully cater to your 37 Ibid., 43. “Tasting and Testing Books” 183 requests, as was the case with the writer from Oklahoma, but she will offer a curated list of books for your consideration, and will validate your assessment of their utility - be that assessment “cultured” or not. Works Cited Anonymous. “The Part that Faith Plays in Advertising,” New York Times August 29, 1927, p.10-11. Bender, Thomas. The Intellectual and the Public Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Bennett, Tony and Janet Woollacott. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987. Blair, Emily Newell. “Tasting and Testing Books”. Good Housekeeping (February 1926). ---.“Letters of a Contented Wife”. Cosmopolitan Magazine (December 1910): 130. ---. Bridging Two Eras: The Autobiography of Emily Newell Blair, 1877-1951. Ed. Virginia Jeans Laas. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1999. Harker, Jaime. America The Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progresivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2007. Rhodes, Chip. Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and Racial Disclosures in American Modernism. London: Verso, 1998. Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. A History of Popular Woman’s Magazines in the United States, 1792-1995. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1998. c hristA b uschendorf Reading Shakespeare Matters: Symbolic Struggles over Literary Taste among Black Intellectuals “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.” W. E. B. Du Bois’s well-known statement from his famous collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) conveys a double message. At a time when under Jim Crow laws and the frequent rule of lynch law the black population was under attack, and when Du Bois’s rival, the dominant black leader and educator Booker T. Washington, supported by white elites, argued against higher education and university training for blacks, the assertion that Shakespeare would not mind the company of an African American or, in other words, that the most highly renowned author of the English language was appropriate reading for blacks was meant to provoke a white audience eager to “keep the Negro in his place.” At the same time, Du Bois assured his fellow black citizens that they were entitled to any of the intellectual treasures of the Western canon, be it Shakespeare or the giants of ancient philosophy: “I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension” (52). In contrast to Booker T. Washington’s educational concept of skilled trade, Du Bois favored the full range of academic training at the highest institutional level. As a sociologist, Du Bois was well aware of the fact that in order to fight racism one had to struggle against the common stereotypical images that denied blacks intelligence and creativity. To him, the significance of claiming canonical writers of the Western tradition, thereby incorporating consecrated cultural capital, lay in crossing the very color-line that deeply divided American social space into “two worlds within and without the Veil” (1). And thus it was with a strong sense of self-assurance that Du Bois stated: “So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil” (52). Of course, African Americans have tried to resist the symbolic violence exerted by whites as long as they have been displaced, enslaved or disrespected in America. We may think of the battles of various individuals, for example, the learned poet Phillis Wheatley, who was famously forced to prove her erudition before a committee of astounded white male Boston citizens; we may also recall numerous collective counter-efforts to develop literacy and learning in black communities such as establishing black literary societies in the early nineteenth century (Belt-Beyan). In the following, I will limit my investigation to tracing changes of literary taste by looking at African American 186 c hristA b uschendorf writers’ appropriations of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. 1 I will relate these changes to both the socialization of the authors and to institutional transformations that played a role in canon formations and debates. This approach is based on the insight - inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s relational concept of the field of cultural production - that the “issue of ‘difference’ is not abstracted from social relations; it is a product of them,” and that “[w]e need to return the social to the literary when we explore how authors establish intertextual relationships with their predecessors as part of the strategy of revisionist striving for canonicity” (Rushdy 10). With Richard Wright and Maya Angelou I have chosen two authors who struggled with severe obstacles on their way to becoming outstanding black intellectuals against the odds, as both grew up in Jim Crow South. Gloria Naylor’s adaptations of Shakespearean female characters in Mama Day (1988) and John Edgar Wideman’s staging of The Tempest by black schoolchildren in his novel Philadelphia Fire (1990) represent a younger generation’s artistic freedom in negotiating the white canon. Finally, I will briefly discuss the satire Japanese by Spring (1993) by Ishmael Reed, which reflects upon the decisive institutional changes that occurred with the integration of African American history in school curricula in the late sixties and the establishment of Black Studies programs at renowned universities in the early seventies. These five writers appropriate Shakespeare in very different ways that will highlight some of the specific difficulties African American intellectuals encounter in accumulating cultural capital and cultivating a literary taste that answers to their political needs and demands. As to Du Bois, though, I would like to add that ten years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, he created a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk based on African and African American traditions and exclusively performed by literally hundreds of black actors, singers, and dancers. Du Bois “wrote and staged an historic pageant of the history of the Negro race, calling it ‘The Star of Ethiopia’” (Du Bois, Dusk 136). As he writes in his first autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940), he “believed that the pageant, with masses of costumed colored folk and a dramatic theme carried out chiefly by movement, dancing and music, could be made effective” (136). Although the concept of the pageant may not convince us aesthetically, it was programmatically important and certainly impressive as to sheer numbers. It was performed for the first time in New York in 1913 with a cast of three hundred and fifty before an audience of thirty thousand. To Du Bois, art at its best was political (Du Bois, Criteria), and at the time, the pageant was a popular genre of political struggle (Colbert). When in 1913 Du Bois commented on his grand project in The Crisis, he casually alluded to Hamlet’s statement “The play’s the thing” 1 For a much broader historical perspective on African American reception of Shakespeare, see the volume of essays Weyward Macbeth, ed. by Newstok and Thompson, dealing with the reception of Macbeth from the minstrel show beginnings in the nineteenth century to adaptations on stage and in various media up to the present. Reading Shakespeare Matters 187 (Hamlet act II, scene 2): “The Pageant is the thing. This is what the people want and long for. This is the gown and paraphernalia in which the message of education and reasonable race pride can deck itself” (Du Bois, Star 92). As an effort to display the rich tradition of African and African American cultural history and make blacks proud of their heritage, The Star of Ethiopia anticipated the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, a movement that consciously engaged in creating the image of the New Negro as an American with African roots and at the same time as an intellectual and artist who is just as familiar with the Western canon and aesthetics. But the image of the New Negro was contested both by white patrons some of whom would urge the black writers they supported to come up in subject matter and style to the exoticism and primitivism they expected from them and within the group of black intellectuals who waged fights (some of them over Shakespeare) 2 for adequate cultural representations among themselves. 3 Richard Wright: Native Son as Othello In his youth, Du Bois was shielded from Jim Crow discrimination by growing up in a small town in Massachusetts where he was supported in his insatiable desire for learning both morally by his mother and financially by white townspeople. The latter only disappointed him when they decided that his wish to study at Harvard was too ambitious even for so highly gifted a black student and instead sent him south to Fisk University, a black institution of higher learning, where from their point of view he belonged. The detour Du Bois was forced to take before later entering Harvard University confronted him with “discrimination in ways of which I had never dreamed; […] the public disdain and even insult in race contact on the street continually took my breath; I came in contact for the first time with a sort of violence that I had never realized in New England” (Du Bois, Dusk 15). 2 See, for example, Walkowitz. 3 See Hutchinson’s seminal study on what he calls the “interracial dynamics” of the Harlem Renaissance, in which he criticizes the binary model of white and black literatures and cultures as an inadequate simplification that is difficult to eradicate. Since this kind of dualism along racial lines is indeed still highly relevant in today’s cultural battles (and admittedly underlies the majority of arguments referred to in this article), I would like to give an example of Hutchinson’s corrective view: “Like recent critics, New Negroes tended to accuse their antagonists of being enthralled to white values and predilections. In fact, white critics criticized black writers for being enthralled to white values - usually some other white person’s white values. (The tendency continues today.) This charge of enthrallment to the cultural imperialists could work from a variety of positions. If the black writer emphasized black difference, he might be accused of playing to white stereotypes of the exotic primitive; if she emphasized cultural Americanness or wrote a novel of black bourgeois manners, she might be criticized for failing to see that the ‘Negro experience’ requires a transformation of novelistic form. When white critics adopted these techniques of criticism, they were expressing, of course, their own sense of what black literature should or at least should not be (thus extending their hegemony? )” (21). 188 c hristA b uschendorf Unlike Du Bois, Richard Wright suffered throughout his childhood from growing up under Jim Crow. As Ralph Ellison notes in his essay “Remembering Richard Wright,” “very little attention has been given to the role played by geography in shaping the fate of Afro-Americans” (Ellison 198). While Wright felt the same poignant hunger for books as did Du Bois and Ellison, free access to learning was largely denied to him. In his autobiography Black Boy (1945), Wright emphasizes that he had to fight for literacy in a way reminiscent of the conditions under slavery. Moreover, he stresses that he experienced resistance even from inside his own family. For example, he was forced to read clandestinely, because of his grandmother’s strong religious prejudice against fiction and, more generally, because his family feared that the boy who loved to explore realms of the mind might also transgress the strict social boundaries set for the black population under Jim Crow. 4 James Baldwin very lucidly describes this kind of fear of black parents and its effects on their children in The Fire Next Time: The child “must be ‘good’ not only in order to please his parents […]; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into the child’s consciousness through his parents’ tone of voice […]; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his father’s or mother’s voice when he has strayed beyond some particular boundary” (26). It is interesting to note that Bourdieu uses this passage to illustrate the mechanisms of symbolic violence and its long-term consequences. To him, the behavior of black parents is an example of the “practical recognition through which the dominated, often unwittingly, contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting, in advance, the limits imposed on them,” which then “often takes the form of bodily emotion (shame, timidity, anxiety, guilt)” (Bourdieu, Meditations 169). According to Bourdieu, symbolic domination is the more powerful because its force is not perceived consciously but is exerted “in the obscurity of the dispositions of habitus” (170). Wright’s autobiography relates several episodes that reflect his family’s anxiety vis-à-vis his explorative energy. Apart from the impediments erected by family members, resistance against Wright’s aspirations is also offered by individual whites as well as by Jim Crow laws that, for example, do not permit him to borrow books from the public library so that he has to resort to the trick of donning the mask of an illiterate black man who takes out books for his white employer. Among the books Wright wants to read are those 4 Due to the logic of his narrative, Wright emphasizes the obstacles he has to overcome rather than the encouragement he received. Yet it is probably crucial to his intellectual development that his mother, who before her marriage had been a teacher (a fact, Wright does not mention in his autobiography), supports his intellectual curiosity and teaches him to read (cf. Black Boy 23 and 24). As Stephan Kuhl, also drawing upon Bourdieu’s concepts, points out, “there was inscribed into the structure of Wright’s family, through his mother’s scholastic profession, a certain degree of cultural capital. [...] This motherly encouragement in the acquisition of cultural, linguistic, literary capital existed within the family structure of Wright’s childhood in tension with the urgencies derived from the family’s great economic poverty, urgencies that tended to impose limits on Wright’s acquisition of this capital” (Kuhl 7-8). Reading Shakespeare Matters 189 by H. M. Mencken, whose notorious bon mot of the South as “the Sahara of the Bozart” is indicative of his severe criticism of the parochial mind of the southern States. The fact that Mencken’s criticism is the kind of knowledge southern whites tried to withhold from blacks greatly enhances the anxiety of the librarian who must make sure that the black “boy” who borrows the books will not read them. Wright, as we know, succeeds against the odds. But in doing so, he “recalls the image of the alienated artist-intellectual who is both proud and ashamed of his or her humble origins” (Leypoldt 853); in other words, he developed a cleft habitus, as Bourdieu defined it on the basis of his own experience (Bourdieu, Sketch 100). Wright certainly never forgot his own strenuous struggle for literacy and the stony path toward recognition as a black intellectual. But in terms of his literary models, there is no question that he did not accept artificial divisions in the world of literature. “He was constantly reading the great masters, just as he read the philosophers, the political theorists, the social and literary critics. He did not limit himself in the manner that many Negro writers currently limit themselves. […] He felt this [literature] to be one of the few areas in which Negroes could be as free and as equal as their minds and talents would allow” (Ellison 283). It is not surprising then that Wright should have made use of Shakespeare in his fiction. As Keneth Kinnamon convincingly argued as early as 1969, one of the crucial scenes in Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) draws on Shakespeare’s Othello: “Stated bluntly, Bigger Thomas is Othello to Mary Dalton’s Desdemona.” Kinnamon sees “the closest similarity to the play […] in the death scene, in which the racial-sexual theme reaches its moment of greatest intensity. Like Othello, Bigger kisses ere he kills. The murder in both the play and the novel is effected by smothering the victim in her bed. In each case, too, an older woman, Emilia or Mrs. Dalton, hovers on the periphery of the action” (359). While there is no verbal allusion to Shakespeare’s play and the effect of the parallels may just “induce a certain emotional resonance” (359), as Kinnamon puts it, it is yet significant that in “writing his American tragedy of race and sex, Wright turned to the greatest English work” (359) dealing with a similar constellation and staging the very blatant physical violence for which Wright - in contrast to Shakespeare - has often been criticized. 5 Maya Angelou: “To Be or Not to Be” at Graduation By 1969, when Maya Angelou published the first volume of her autobiography, the civil rights movement had insisted much more militantly than the Harlem Renaissance that Black was beautiful. The title of Angelou’s memoir pays homage to the black literary tradition by quoting Paul Laurence 5 See also Andreas, who interprets Wright’s Shakespeare adaption in the context of the rich history of African American appropriations of Othello, a play which Paul Robeson, the celebrated actor of Othello, had called “a tragedy of racial conflict, a tragedy of honor, rather than jealousy” (qtd. in Andreas 39) and which, according to Andreas, stages the ‘“master trope’ of white racism” (43). 190 c hristA b uschendorf Dunbar’s poem I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. 6 But the time frame of the narrative is the decade of the 1930s, when Angelou grew up in the South. The most important moral influence of Angelou’s youth was her grandmother, who courageously defied the hatred, abuse, and racism the family encountered in their daily lives from people of the white part of town. But while the grandmother is an admirably upright individual and a shrewd business woman steering her grocery store in Stamps, Arkansas, through the crisis of the Great Depression, Mrs. Henderson cannot offer her grandchild any intellectual guidance. When after a traumatic experience of having been raped by her mother’s boy friend, Maya returns to Stamps, she no longer communicates by speech except with her brother. Her grandmother decides to ask her friend, Mrs. Flowers, for help. Mrs. Flowers is a highly respected lady of the town’s black bourgeoisie who like Du Bois reads the classics as an enrichment of her life to which she feels entitled. She induces Maya to speak again by reading to her the beginning of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, a text Maya had read before but had never heard spoken. Mrs. Flowers appropriates Dickens to the African American cultural practices of singing and preaching: “She was nearly singing. I wanted to look at the pages. Were they the same I had read? Or were there notes, music, lined on the pages, as in a hymn book? Her sounds began cascading gently. I knew from listening to a thousand preachers that she was nearing the end of her reading” (97). In this crucial episode, reading is turned into an oral practice and thus contributes to the process of healing the psychological wounds of the past. In yet another pivotal episode, Maya’s graduation ceremony, Angelou juxtaposes white and black literature. Angelou describes at length the anticipatory joy and excitement in the days before graduation. To Maya, her diploma signifies the visible reward for past intellectual endeavors as well as a token of promise for a better life built on incorporated cultural capital. However, she and her class mates are beaten down by crude symbolic violence exerted by the white guest speaker who in his commencement address limits the male students’ professional expectations to becoming great athletes while ignoring the female graduates altogether. Maya understands that the white man had devalued her learning and her diploma: “The accomplishment was nothing. […] [L]earning and spelling decasyllabic words, memorizing the whole of The Rape of Lucrece - it was for nothing. We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous” (175-176). The hero of the ceremony becomes Maya’s classmate Henry Reed giving his valedictory address, for which he had chosen the famous first line from Hamlet’s monologue “To Be or Not to Be” whose meaning he appropriated to the lives of his black fellow students. At first, Maya is desperate: “Hadn’t he heard the whitefolks? We couldn’t be, so the question was a waste of time. […] I feared to look at him. Hadn’t he 6 Cf. the first and last line of Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” Collected Poems 102. Angelou’s uncritical reference to Dunbar was controversial, because in the words of Ralph Ellison “he used styles of dialect humor transfused into literature from the white stereotype of the Negro minstrel tradition” (Ellison 280). Reading Shakespeare Matters 191 got the message? There was no ‘nobler in the mind’ for Negroes because the world didn’t think we had minds, and they let us know it” (177). Maya translates the alternative “to be or not to be” into the black experience: “To be a man, a doer, a builder, a leader, or to be a tool, an unfunny joke, a crusher of funky toadstools. I marvelled that Henry could go through with the speech as if we had a choice” (178). Yet, Henry saves the situation. When he is finished he turns to his classmates and prompts them to join him in intoning: “Lift ev’ry voice and sing / Till earth and heaven ring / Ring with the harmonies of Liberty […] It was the poem written by James Weldon Johnson. It was the music composed by J. Rosamond Johnson. It was the Negro national anthem” (178). The distressing situation causes Maya to hear the message “really for the first time” (179): “We have come over a way that with tears / has been watered, / we have come, treading our path through / the blood of the slaughtered.” The students are not ashamed of the tears they shed, and Maya’s rendering of the graduation ceremony ends on a note of regained pride. “We were on top again. As always, again. We survived. […] I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940; I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race” (178-79). While Angelou pays homage to Shakespeare and other white canonical writers throughout this first volume of her autobiography, it is only black poets who are able to evoke feelings of pride and self-respect. This distinction between intellectual and emotive encouragement marks the autobiography’s position within African American literary history. It belongs to a phase of transition in which the relation between white and black literature shifts towards an emphasis on the Black tradition. In the heated canon debates of the 1960s and early 1970s, Angelou belongs to the moderate voices. However, even one of the most fervent representatives of the Black Aesthetic Movement, Amiri Baraka, then Leroi Jones, used the strategy of rewriting Shakespeare in his two revisions of Othello, Dutchman and the companion piece in the original 1964 edition, The Slave. Not surprisingly, “Dutchman may well represent the ultimate African American revision of Othello” (Andreas 50), since Baraka’s deconstruction radically reverses the Shakespearean constellation: “Lula - the white woman - has become the aggressor in a war openly declared and waged between the races, and Clay is her black victim” (ibid.). Gloria Naylor: Miranda’s Island In the next generation, Gloria Naylor is the most prominent African American writer who integrates both strands, the black cultural tradition as well as the Western canon, especially Shakespeare, in her novels. Yet unlike Angelou she rarely juxtaposes representatives of the two traditions in her texts. 7 There 7 To be precise, when Naylor does juxtapose white and black writers, it does not seem to have any deeper significance. For example, Cocoa, an educated young woman in Mama Day, thinks during a meeting with her future husband George that she “hadn’t read any fiction more recent than Ernest Hemingway and Ralph Ellison, remembering with 192 c hristA b uschendorf is no weighing up of their respective relevance for Black education or Black identity. Instead she uses intertextual references to Shakespeare’s plays to directly characterize and shape her (mainly female) protagonists, in a way that always reverts the dramatist. Naylor’s rewriting of The Tempest in her novel Mama Day is the best example of her innovative approach. The protagonist’s double name, Miranda and Mama Day, is programmatic. Naylor turns the docile daughter of the great sovereign and magician Prospero into a matriarchal ruler of the Southern island of Willow Springs. As Peter Erickson argued in his seminal article, Mama Day’s magical powers differ significantly from Prospero’s. For example, she accepts the limits of her magic vis-à-vis the mighty forces of nature and therefore tries to cooperate with rather than dominate over nature. 8 In contrast to Prospero who is master over the dispossessed and enslaved Caliban, she traces her lineage back to “African-born” (5) Sapphira, a slave and “a true conjure woman” (3) who is said to have killed her master, the father of her seven sons. There are several more allusions to Shakespeare in Mama Day. There is, for example, the motif of the destructive storm as yet another reference to The Tempest; and there is Ophelia alias Cocoa - the granddaughter of Miranda’s sister Ophelia who committed suicide by drowning - who loves King Lear and presents a copy of this play to the man she loves. But although Naylor renders homage to Shakespeare by providing a strong presence and recognition of the acknowledged master of the Western canon, she at the same time insists on difference and critique. The strength of the women she creates is based on their deviation from Shakespearian female characters whose names they bear. But rather than turning them into invincible heroines, Naylor exposes their vulnerability in their struggle against male domination, and it is for this reason that her black Miranda and her black Ophelia are the more convincing human beings. John Edgar Wideman: Caliban in West Philly An important effect of the battles African Americans intellectuals fought in the era of the civil rights movement on behalf of their own cultural tradition is the institutionalization of Black Studies at prominent American Universities, for example, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. Such institutions changed not only academia, the book market and the literary field in the United States, not to speak of the sub-field of African American literature, but it also modified the canon debates - and the kind of reading appropriated or discussed by African American authors. a sinking heart the worn copy of King Lear I could have been spending my evening with” (60). Here, reading canonical writers, be they white or black, is preferable to a boring conversation. 8 See also Gary Storhoff’s Jungian interpretation of Mama Day. Reading Shakespeare Matters 193 The novelist John Edgar Wideman was among the first students in the African American Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. 9 In his novel Philadelphia Fire, Wideman creates an African American intellectual as narrator, a thinly disguised persona of himself, who in turn creates a persona called Cudjoe after the famous Jamaican Maroon leader: “Why this Cudjoe, then? This airy other floating into the shape of my story. Why am I him when I tell certain parts? Why am I hiding from myself? Is he mirror or black hole? ” (122). The novel focuses on the horrific bombing of the Afrocentric cult Move by Philadelphia police in 1985. However, I will focus on another event that according to the narrator is essential to the narrative: “Black kids doing Shakespeare” (134). “This is the central event. I assure you. I repeat. Whatever my assurance is worth. Being the fabulator. This is the central event, this production of The Tempest staged by Cadjoe in the late 1960s, outdoors, in a park in West Philly. […] The Tempest sits dead center, the storm in the eye of the storm, figure within a figure, play within play, it is the bounty and hub of all else written about the fire […]” (132). Ironically, a tempest, which hits Philadelphia on the weekend the play was scheduled, prevents its performance. And yet, the play is a reality: the children learn their lines by heart and rehearse the play, and in the process Cudjoe reflects extensively on the function of this production and anticipates the performance: “That was Shakespeare youall just saw performed. And we did it. Blank verse and fustian, shawns and bombards, the King’s English. Tripping lightly off their tongues. So look upon these heroes. Don’t ever forget them. They wave madly. Want your approval … Our children. And their children after. But never the same again” (132). Cudjoe, the teacher of inner city black children, wants to prove that his students are capable of performing Shakespeare although he himself expresses doubts in the beginning: “Black kids doing Shakespeare. How impossible it seemed. Farfetched. Maybe not even a good idea, even if I could pull it off” (134). Notwithstanding his skepticism, the idea takes hold of Cudjoe: “The play was the thing” (132). Wideman’s reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet brings to mind the goal Hamlet pursued with the performance of the play: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (Hamlet, act II, scene 2). In analogy, The Tempest then provides the opportunity to criticize Prospero and the ideology of colonization he represents. In Wideman’s novel, it is Caliban, who expresses the critique of Prospero in a dialogue between himself and Miranda imagined by Cudjoe. The latter’s African American vernacular connects Shakespeare’s “Abhorrèd slave” Caliban (The Tempest act I, scene 2; qtd. in Wideman 139) with Cudjoe and his students in Philadelphia’s ghetto: “So I ain’t playing the dozens but that lying ass wanna be patriarch Prospero who claims to be your daddy and wants to be mine, he’s capable of anything. Incest, miscegenation, genocide, infanticide, suicide, all the same to him. To him it’s just a matter of staying on top, holding on to what he’s got. Power” (142). 9 See Griffin on the importance of the University of Pennsylvania and its Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, especially under the tenure of Houston Baker, for the institutionalization of black literature. 194 c hristA b uschendorf Thus Wideman seems to argue that “a politically progressive reading will consist of exposing the hegemonic values of canonical works” (Guillory 21). Wideman’s narrator wants to make his students understand the historical context in order to be able to question the presuppositions of Shakespeare’s text and moreover, to start questioning the power structures in their own society: “And one of my jobs as model and teacher is to unteach you, help you separate the good from the bad from the ugly” (131). In “unteaching” them, Cadjoe uses references to popular culture (as in this case to the famous 1966 Spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and states his message in colloquial phrases with which his students are familiar: “Play got to end the way it always does. Prospero still the boss. […] Having the last laugh” (144). To “unteach” his students also means to humanize Caliban: “Unbeast him” (140). Miranda tries to ‘unbeast’ Caliban by her attempt “to bring forth speech from the beast,” when he “would gabble like / A thing most brutish”, but she fails, as she argues, because “thy vile race, / Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with” (The Tempest act 1, scene 2; qtd. in Wideman 139-140). Cudjoe translates Miranda’s allusive words into the following unambiguous chiasmus: “She offered the word, Caliban desired flesh” (140). In the novel, it is not Miranda but Cudjoe who “unbeasts” Caliban by explaining Miranda’s perspective as induced by patriarchy that is much older than Shakespeare, in fact, can be traced back to Genesis. “Are you following me, children? The dangerousness of this [Miranda’s] speech about speech shoved in a woman’s mouth. It’s informed by a theme older than Willy or Willy’s time. […] The Garden where three’s a crowd” (140). Miranda, Cudjoe claims, is a victim of the same power that dominates Caliban, albeit the violence exerted upon her is not physical but symbolic. “She wants to share. But she can’t. She’s a prisoner, too. Hostage of what her father has taught her” (141). To recognize power structures in the past and to transpose them to the present is one of the decisive lessons Cudjoe hopes The Tempest will teach his students. As he explains to them, “It’s your history too in the word. […] Blue. As in melancholia” (130). After all, Caliban is the students’ “number-one great great great greater than god grandfather” (131). But Shakespeare set him free “with one stroke of the pen” (131). “Say free at last. Free at last” (131). Offering the hope of freedom, the play provides yet another prospect, namely to alleviate the effects of the blues. At the end of his appeal to the students to support the theater project, Cudjoe once more skillfully links their history and present to The Tempest: “We been in the storm too long, chillun. We gone crank up the volume, crank up the volume, to a mighty tempest and blow the blues away” (131). 10 Another lesson of playing Shakespeare in Philadelphia Fire rests on the logic of practice. “Doing it. That’s the point” (133). By mastering an alien language in which they express untried states of mind and emotions, the students do not only accumulate linguistic capital, but they enter unfamiliar territory, make new experiences, undergo significant changes and thus will 10 For further connections between Shakespeare and African American music, see Lanier (2005), whose article begins with the section entitled: “Shakespeare Sings the Blues.” Reading Shakespeare Matters 195 be “never the same again” (132). To Wideman, the Shakespearean play within the plot is not primarily about upward educational and thus social mobility. Nor is it merely about the recognition of whites vis-à-vis blacks on the basis of the latter’s familiarity with the icon of the Western canon. Rather, it is about the more important opportunity of the deeper, existential change that may occur when children experience the linguistic and intellectual realm of The Tempest, appropriate it for their own purposes and grow in the process. This is why “the fabulator” emphasizes that the constellation “[t]enand eleven-year-old black kids. Shakespeare” (125) is essential to the narrative. Its explosive force may in the end be stronger than the bombing of Move: “I think it’s a great idea. Real guerrilla theater. Better than a bomb. Black kids in the park doing Shakespeare will blow people’s minds” (143). Wideman’s approach is then didactic and at the same time more radical than the examples discussed above, because in his novel appropriating Shakespeare is not about the accumulation of cultural capital of black intellectuals, but - at least on the level of plot - is meant to benefit black ghetto children who are economically and culturally impoverished. Read with Bourdieu, the teacher Cudjoe by having black kids “do” Shakespeare provides a counter-training which may lead to a change of habitus. Ishmael Reed: Othello on Campus Ishmael Reed’s novel Japanese by Spring (1993) is a satire of university politics and academic struggles over ideologies. The protagonist Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt III notoriously jumps on bandwagons. As a member of a family with a long military tradition, he attended the Air Force Academy, but when “he had tried to organize a Black Panther chapter among the few black cadets who were enrolled” (4), he was expelled. “In the 1960s, he was a TA with a huge Afro and addicted to blackness” (14). He wrote his PhD dissertation on a 1920s poet, Nathan Brown; yet he later produced a best-seller under the title of Blacks, America’s Misfortune (14) and “had achieved notoriety for his magazine article in the New York Exegesis, denouncing affirmative action” (6). By 1990, he teaches English and literature at Jack London College, and desperately tries to get tenure. “Though there were a few guys still wearing those nationalist pillbox hats, and ‘Black is Back,’ or ‘Black is the future” sweaters, dreadlocks, the defining ideology of the eighties was feminism. Puttbutt was still a feminist. Memorized every mediocre line by Zora Neale Hurston. Could recite Sylvia Plath from memory. Could toss around terms like phallocentricity. […] But now their power was waning […]. Some of those in the Department of Humanity who were to vote on his tenure were feminists and so he still had to be friends with them in case he needed their vote” (10-11). For the time being, he is a neoconservative, but looking ahead and suspecting that “the Asian thing was going to fly” (49), he enthusiastically takes Japanese lessons on the basis of the textbook Japanese by Spring. His foresight is being rewarded, when Jack London College is taken over by 196 c hristA b uschendorf Japanese, Puttbutt’s Japanese teacher is put in charge of restructuring the humanities departments and reforming their curricula and asks Puttbutt for assistance. Just before this overhaul, Puttbutt had been denied tenure; thus his change of luck gives him a chance for revenge. Reed uses this situation for an extended debate on Shakespeare’s Othello. At first, Puttbutt is surprised when he learns that he had not received tenure because the Miltonians headed by his adversary Professor Crabtree had taken offense at “the article he had written many years ago in which he said that Shakespeare’s Othello was racist. He’d forgotten all about it. It was his master’s thesis. Written when he was in his Black Power period. Nobody discussed racism any more. Racism was something blacks had made up in order to make whites feel guilty, so the line went. Puttbutt had learned the argument well. He used it. Published articles about how blacks couldn’t seem to get it together. The New York Exegesis even considered him for a seat on its editorial board” (94). When under the new presidency Crabtree gets into trouble for poor academic performance in the past and approaches Puttbutt as a supplicant, the latter turns the tables on him and confronts him with his instrumental role in denying him tenure. A heated debate about Othello and racism ensues. Crabtree’s critique of his “thesis that race relations in this country haven’t changed since Shakespeare’s time” as “preposterous,” tempts Puttbutt to defend his paper. He claims that Shakespeare turns Othello into “a primitive” (96), “a noble savage” (98), a statement he confirms by quoting from the play. He also maintains that “Shakespeare believed that the only uncorrupted interracial relationship can be that between a white man and a colored woman” (97). Crabtree accuses him of “projecting” (97) and extends his indictment to black people in general: “You blacks are always complaining about racism. Racism this and racism that. You use racism to explain away your failure. All of this talk about racism on the campus of Jack London. I’ve been teaching here for thirty years and have never found a single instance. Do you hear? A single instance. And now you have to reach back and drag Shakespeare into it. Is there no end to your people’s paranoia? ” While Crabtree is speaking, Puttbutt looks out of the window and watches students of a white fraternity in blackface perform a ritual they call the “Annual Slave Day”: “One large white boy had put on the mammy attire. Head rag. Red and white polka-dot dress. Huge pillow for breasts. The ‘slaves’ were being auctioned off to the older brothers” (97). Racism on campus is a reality that Crabtree will continue to ignore. In Japanese by Spring, Reed parodies the changing race politics and likewise makes fun of the notorious power struggles among humanities departments, many of which are polarized by canon revisions. The contingency of such revisions is expressed in the following passage, when the new president comments on the Western canon from an Asian perspective and ridicules “such dubious claims that Europe is the birthplace of science, religion, technology, and philosophy. I’ve been reading this so-called philosopher, Plato. All about such foolishness as to whether the soul has immortality. What nonsense. Hegel and the rest are full of such nonsense also. This ignorant man maintained that the Chinese had no philosophy. What rubbish. No wonder Reading Shakespeare Matters 197 the Americans can’t make a decent automobile. Their intellectuals spend all of their time on the fuzzy and useless Greeks and German idealists. If one were to apply the empirical razor to all of these so-called theories, the entire course of Western philosophy could be covered in one week. Also I am considering dropping the inordinate number of courses devoted to the work of John Milton. My staff has checked his character background. He spent some time in jail, you know. We do not think it appropriate to include courses about an ex-convict in our catalog” (90f.). In the mode of a satire, Reed deconstructs the Western canon as a biased product of Eurocentrism and, more generally, uncovers the global political and economic battles behind canon debates. Finally, Reed lays bare the mechanisms of self-interest underlying the academic power games over the control of cultural capital, which after all can be transformed into economic, social or even symbolic capital. Conclusion These case studies of Shakespeare’s use in twentieth-century African American literature demonstrate what from a sociological perspective is a truism: The acquisition of literary taste in the black writer’s intellectual socialization as well as the subsequent canon debates are part of a necessarily relational process that is always already referring to the white dominant culture. As Bourdieu has shown in Distinction, (literary) taste is never the product of an exclusively individual, subjective choice; it is also dependent on the position the social agent occupies in the field and the types of (cultural) capital he or she has been able to accumulate. In addition, it depends on the power of definition one’s group may exert in the cultural field. Since the field of cultural production is only relatively autonomous, it changes according to forces at play in the field of power. Consequently, with regard to canon formation we may assume, in John Guillory’s words, “a homology between the process of exclusion, by which socially defined minorities are excluded from the exercise of power or from political representation, and the process of selection, by which certain works are designated canonical, others noncanonical” (6). Thus, literary taste as a function of the relation between the dominant white and the dominated black culture changes according to the degree of recognition granted to African Americans or the degree of resistance African Americans mobilize against misrecognition. At the beginning of the 20th century, Du Bois thought it necessary to make the point that African Americans were entitled to and thus should strive for the symbolic capital of a literary taste defined by the white dominant class as legitimate. Richard Wright, born in 1908, and Maya Angelou, born in 1928, represent different generations of writers who yet both suffer from exclusion and discrimination. The poverty of Wright’s family deprives him from regular access to schooling; his mostly self-educated reading guides him toward the white canon that was to shape his intellectual makeup throughout his life. In contrast, Angelou profits from her grandmother’s relatively affluent 198 c hristA b uschendorf situation and social status as well as from regularly attending school. Yet her experience at graduation is a clear manifestation of Bourdieu’s argument that it is above all the institution of the school itself that is responsible for the reproduction of the social order (cf. Guillory 58). In addition, Angelou experiences the political struggles of the civil rights movement that result not only in legal concessions but subsequently lead to the formation of a black literary canon that is reflected in her work. In the 1980s and 1990s, Wideman’s and Naylor’s differentiated, critical appropriations of Shakespeare and Reed’s satirical fictional meta-discourse are an outcome of the institutionalization of Black Studies. The latter has significantly increased the autonomy of the subfield of African American literary production, and it is this enhanced autonomy that has since then led to a greater recognition of black intellectuals, which in turn authorizes them to level the binary conception of the relation between the Western and the African American literary canon. 11 Within the Western canon, Shakespeare represents the epitome of consecrated authors in the English language. His undisputed position allows for a particularly broad variety in coming to terms with this towering canonical figure. When you claim him, there is no doubt about his ultimate legitimacy; 12 when you repudiate him, you can be certain that you disallow the whole Western tradition; and when you acknowledge him by rewriting, his prominence and popularity guarantee that the slightest reference as well as the most radical revision will be recognized - and enjoyed. Works Cited Andreas, James R. “Othello’s African American Progeny.” South Atlantic Review 57.4 (November 1992): 39-57. Print. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Vintage, 1984. Print. Belt-Beyan, Phyllis M. The Emergence of African American Literacy Traditions: Family and Community Efforts in the Nineteenth Century. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984. Print. ---. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. Print. ---. Sketch for Self-Analysis. London: Polity, 2004. Print. Burt, Richard. “Slammin’ Shakespeare In Acc(id)endts Yet Unknown: Liveness, Cinem(edi)a, and Racial Dis-integration.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.2 (Summer 2002): 201-226. Print. Colbert, Soyica Diggs. The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Du Bois, W. E. B. “Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290-297. Print. 11 For today’s canon debates in black popular culture, see, for example, Burt; Lanier 2002. 12 The claim of authors of the Western status whose position is less firm necessarily generates disputes, because, as Hutchinson pointed out, in the Harlem Renaissance “[D]ifferent white authors stood in for different positions on the literary field” (20). Reading Shakespeare Matters 199 ---. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. 1940. The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. ---. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. ---. “The Star of Ethiopia,” The Crisis (October 1913): 91-92. Print. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Ed. Joanne M. Braxton. Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P, 1993. Print. Ellison, Ralph. Going to the Territory. New York: Vintage, 1987. Print. Erickson, Peter. Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves. U of California P, 1991. Print. ---. “‘Shakespeare’s Black? ’: The Role of Shakespeare in Naylor’s Novels.” Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K.A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993, 231-248. Print. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Thirty Years of Black American Literature and Literary Studies. A Review.” Journal of Black Studies 35.2 (November 2004): 165-174. Print. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1993. Print. Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, Mass., London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1995. Print. Kinnamon, Keneth. “Richard Wright’s Use of ‘Othello’ in ‘Native Son.’” CLA Journal 12.4 (1969): 358-359. Print. Kuhl, Stephan. “Richard Wright’s Urgent Scholasticism: On the Necessary Social Conditions for ‘Signifying’ and Intertextuality.” Paper at Conference “Creating, Shaping, Signifying,” February 5-7, 2015, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Lanier, Douglas. “Minstrelsy, Jazz, Rap: Shakespeare, African American Music, and Cultural Legitimation.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1.1 (2005): 1-14, http: / / www.borrowers.uga.edu/ cocoon/ borrowers/ about. ---. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print. Leypoldt, Günter. “‘The Fall into Institutionality’: Literary Culture in the Program Era.” American Literary History 23.4 (2011): 844-859. Print. Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print. Newstok, Scott L. and Ayanna Thompson, eds. Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print. Reed, Ishmael. Japanese by Spring. New York: Penguin, 1996. Print. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Sociological Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. Storhoff, Gary. “Gloria Naylor’s Revision of The Tempest.” African American Review 29.1 (1995): 35-43. Print. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. “Shakespeare in Harlem: The Norton Anthology, ‘Propaganda,’ Langston Hughes.” Modern Language Quarterly 60.4 (December 1999): 495-519. Print. Wideman, John Edgar. Philadelphia Fire. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print. Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger). Later Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991. Print. P Aul b. A rmstronG How Historical is Reading? What Literary Studies Can Learn from Neuroscience (and Vice Versa) It is a commonplace of our contextualist age that reading is radically historical and that it is consequently a mistake to make inferences about how readers in the past processed texts on the basis of our lived experiences as readers today. 1 Eminent book historian Robert Darnton complains, for example, that many reader-response theorists “seem to assume that texts have always worked on the sensibilities of readers in the same way. But a seventeenthcentury London burgher inhabited a different mental universe from that of a twentieth-century American professor. Reading itself has changed over time.” 2 On this view, phenomenological descriptions of the reading experience are fundamentally flawed because they are ahistorical, universal, and essentialistic. Contemporary neuroscientific research suggests, however, that there are fundamental continuities in how the brain reads that extend across the several thousand year span during which our species has interpreted written texts. According to Stanislas Dehaene, the preeminent neuroscientist of reading, the key fact is that “we take delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African savanna.” 3 As he observes, “Time was simply too short for evolution to design specialized reading units” (5). The brain is historical, by this account, because it is a product of evolution, but the emergence of reading in Mesopotamia roughly 6,000 years ago is too recent and too rapid to have been caused by genetic transformations of the brain through Darwinian natural selection. 4 Neuroscientifically considered, this is the crucial mystery that the history of reading must explain. The basic anatomical features and fundamental processes of the brain have not changed significantly between our origins 1 For a critical analysis of this consensus, see my essay “In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age,” New Literary History 42 (2011): 87-113. 2 Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books? ” (1982) in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleary (New York: Routledge, 2006), 20. 3 Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009), 4. 4 Historian Steven Roger Fischer plausibly argues that “Reading in its true form emerged when one started to interpret a sign for its sound value alone within a standardized system of limited signs,” and he claims that the “sign became sound - freed from its systemexternal referent [as in pictographic representation] - in Mesopotamia between 6,000 and 5,700 years ago” (Fischer, A History of Reading [London: Reaktion Books, 2003], 3). 202 P Aul b. A rmstronG in Africa, 17th century London, and the 21st century English Department. Instead, its long-enduring natural capacities must have adapted themselves to the unnatural act of reading written signs. Empirical findings in contemporary cognitive science suggest that phenomenological descriptions of the reading experience are correlated to these long-term neuronal processes. Such models of reading are consequently not irrelevant or mistaken as the historicist debunkings claim. Rather (and importantly), the correlations between neurobiological and phenomenological accounts of reading help to clarify the connections between how we process texts today and how our forebears construed them - connections that demonstrate how meaning-now is related to meaning-then, a crucial (but too often neglected) dimension of reading’s historicity. Neuroscientists have recently discovered the usefulness of phenomenological descriptions of the lived experience of time, embodiment, and intersubjectivity because these provide behavioral models that correlate in mutually illuminating ways with what contemporary imaging techniques reveal about neuronal processes in the brain. 5 These correlations do not explain the so-called “hard problem” of how consciousness emerges from chemical and electrical processes at the cellular level. 6 But they do provide insights that can benefit both science and the humanities about questions of fundamental interest to both - such as, for example, the historicity of the cognitive processes involved in reading written texts. 7 The brain is a contradictory organ with strictly defined, genetically inscribed features and a surprisingly expansive but not unlimited capacity to acquire new functions - a capacity for change that must always take those constraints into account but can do so in ways that show they are often not ultimately determining. Contemporary brain-imaging technologies have mapped the anatomy of the cortex with increasing accuracy and have identified a variety of areas that are hard-wired for particular functions that are lost or impaired if they are damaged. Different regions of the rear visual cortex, for example, respond to orientation, motion, and color; the hippocampus plays a key role in memory-formation; the amygdala is linked to emotions involved in “fear and flight” responses, and the structure of the pre-motor cortex correlates sub-section to sub-section with the various body-parts it 5 For example, see Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Jean Petitot et al. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999); Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007). 6 The classic analysis of these issues is Thomas Nagel’s essay, “What is It Like to be a Bat? ” Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 435-50. Also see Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview P, 2011), 303-6. 7 For a more extensive exploration of what neuroscience and the humanities can learn from each other about the aesthetic experience, see my book How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013). How Historical is Reading? 203 controls. 8 Although neuroscience has become skeptical of the claim of “universal grammar” that posits a “mental organ” for language, it has also long been known that particular regions of the brain (Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) are linked to syntactical and semantic functions that go haywire if they are damaged. 9 Patients with lesions to Broca’s area can understand meaning but cannot form coherent sentences (a syntactical disturbance), whereas patients with damage to Wernicke’s area formulate fluent, grammatical, but meaningless sentences (a semantic deficiency). In these and other ways, there are often demonstrable connections between a cognitive function and a particular inherited structure of the brain, but how a particular cortical area reacts may change as it is used. For example, MIT neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher has identified an area of the visual cortex dedicated to face recognition - a hard-wired anatomical feature that, if damaged, can result in “prosopagnosia,” an inability to identify faces. 10 One patient with a lesion in this area did not recognize his father at his bedside but immediately identified his voice from the next room. Well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks, himself afflicted with this disability, reports that babies at six months recognize and respond to a broad spectrum of faces, including other species like monkeys, but that the response diminishes over time to kinds of faces to which the infant is not exposed (monkey-faces cease to elicit a response unless this is repeatedly reinforced). As is the case with the visual cortex in general, our face-recognition cells “need experience to develop fully,” Sacks notes, and will develop differently according to how they are used: “To a Chinese baby brought up in his own ethnic environment, Caucasian faces may all, relatively speaking, ‘look the same,’ and vice versa.” 11 Further evidence of how experience fixes and limits the visual cortex is provided by a case that has understandably become notorious in the neuroscience literature. Neuroscientist R. Q. Quiroga discovered a neuron in the anterior temporal region of an epilepsy patient that fired solely in response to images of 8 See Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain. 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2007). 9 On Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, see Bear, Connors, and Paradiso, 620-25. On the debate about “universal grammar,” see Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson, “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and its Importance for Cognitive Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2009), 429-48 and the extensive accompanying “Open Peer Commentary,” 448-92. See especially Michael Tomasello, “Universal Grammar is Dead,” 470-71, but also the rebuttal by Stephen Pinker and Ray Jackenoff, “The Reality of a Universal Language Faculty,” 465-66. Evans and Levinson argue that “language is a bio-cultural hybrid” and that “a property common to languages need not have its origins in a ‘language faculty’ or innate specialization for language” (446, 439). For a thorough analysis of the ever-mounting scientific evidence against the Chomskyan model, see Stephen E. Nadeau, The Neural Architecture of Grammar (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2011). 10 See Nancy Kanwisher, Josh McDermott, and Marvin M. Chun, “The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception,” The Journal of Neuroscience 17.11 (1997): 4302-4311. 11 Oliver Sacks, “Face-Blind: Why Are Some of Us Terrible at Recognizing Faces? ” in The New Yorker (30 August 2010), 41. 204 P Aul b. A rmstronG Hollywood film and television star Jennifer Aniston. 12 The “Jennifer Aniston neuron,” as it is known in the literature, shows that brain functions are both anatomically localizable and open to experiential variation. Neuroscience is not phrenology, however, and cognition is not simply a matter of one-to-one correspondence between a stimulus and the response of a particular neuron or cortical region. Fundamental cognitive processes like vision and hearing (both crucial to reading) entail top-down, bottom-up interactions between widely distributed regions of the brain that are reciprocally connected and that get organized in a particular manner for specific tasks and can be realigned (more or less easily, depending on their physiological structure and their history) as the need and opportunity arise. The brain knows the world by forming and dissolving assemblies of neurons, establishing patterns that become habitual through repeated firing. One of the foundational principles of neuroscience is Hebb’s law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” 13 Imaging studies have found, for example, that “musicians have anatomical differences in several brain areas that are involved in motor and auditory processing” - with pianists showing thicker than normal neural connections between the hemispheres of their brains because their instruments “require precise coordination of bimanual movements.” 14 A much-publicized study of London taxi-drivers revealed a correlation between years of driving experience and the size of the posterior hippocampus, an area of the brain associated not only with memory but also with navigation in birds and other animals as well as conditioned fear (all understandably related to the challenges of negotiating London’s streets). 15 Another experimental study has shown that speakers with a command of two languages have more neuronal connections in areas of the brain associated with language-use than individuals who know only one language. These changes can occur over a limited time and then reverse themselves if the activity ceases and the second language is no longer regularly used (a finding, alas, that will not surprise anyone who learned a language as a youth but can no longer speak it). 16 Similarly, volunteers who mastered a simple juggling routine over three months of practice showed differences in scans of their motor cortex before and after their training, but these disappeared when 12 R. Q. Quiroga et al., “Invariant Visual Representation by Single Neurons in the Human Brain,” Nature 435: 7045 (2005), 1102-07. 13 Named for the neuroscientist Donald O. Hebb who proposed it in his landmark book The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory (1949; Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002). 14 T. F. Münte, “The Musician’s Brain as a Model of Neuroplasticity,” Nature Reviews/ Neuroscience, vol. 3 (June 2002), 473-78. 15 E. A. Maguire et al., “Navigation-related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (2000): 4398-4403. On the functions of the hippocampus, see Mikko P. Laakso et al., “Psychopathy and the Posterior Hippocampus,” Behavioural Brain Research 118: 2 (29 January 2001): 187-93. 16 D. W. Green et al., “Exploring Cross-Linguistic Vocabulary Effects on Brain Structures Using Voxel-Based Morphology,” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 10 (2007): 189-99. How Historical is Reading? 205 scans were done again three months after they stopped juggling. 17 Many more examples could be cited. Certain brain regions are hard-wired, then, but this wiring can also change. How the brain learns to read is a complicated process that demonstrates the brain’s paradoxical combination of fixed, inherited characteristics and its capacity to change, adapt, and develop (its “plasticity”). Reading is a relatively late development in the history of our species that could only emerge by exploiting pre-existing neurological systems. What had to occur is what Dehaene memorably calls “neuronal recycling” - the re-purposing of “a cortical territory initially devoted to a different function.” 18 Every new human being must learn to read by adapting genetically inherited circuitry to uses for which it did not originally evolve, and some of the difficulties encountered by beginning readers as well as some of the differences in how easy this learning is for readers in different languages are traceable to mis-matches between the requirements of decoding written signs and the cortical systems that must be converted to this unnatural act. Clinical and experimental evidence suggests that this conversion occurs in a region of the brain devoted to the recognition of visual forms. The first indication of a “visual word form area” (VWFA) dedicated to reading came in the late nineteenth century when a patient who suffered a minor stroke lost the ability to read while retaining the capacity to speak and recognize objects other than written words. Modern brain imaging technology has located an area of the lower left hemisphere that is activated in response to written signs (but not to spoken words, which trigger a different area). The neuroscientist whose laboratory has done the most prominent work on the VWFA, Dehaene calls this area “the brain’s letterbox” (53) and reports that it can be found in the rear visual cortex, on the underside of the brain, sandwiched between the region devoted to recognizing objects and the neurons keyed to faces. This finding is somewhat controversial because the VWFA is not homogeneous and still bears traces of other activity (as one would expect because it is “re-purposed” from other functions), but evidence of its existence and its role in word-recognition is compelling. 19 17 See Elkhonon Goldberg, The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World (New York: Oxford UP, 2009), 238-39, where he also discusses the taxi-driver and bilingualism experiments. 18 See Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 144-47. My explanation of the neuroscience of reading is deeply indebted to this fascinating book. For a concise survey of the recent research and an analysis of its implications for the teaching of reading, see George G. Hruby and Usha Goswami, “Neuroscience and Reading: A Review for Reading Education Researchers,” Reading Research Quarterly 46.2 (April/ May/ June 2011), 156-72. Also see the chapter “How the Brain Learns to Read” in How Literature Plays with the Brain, 26-53. 19 For the debate about the VWFA, see Cathy J. Price and Joseph T. Devlin,“The Myth of the Visual Word Form Area,” NeuroImage 19 (2003), 473-81; Laurent Cohen and Stanislas Dehaene, “Specialization Within the Ventral Stream: The Case for the Visual Word Form Area,” NeuroImage 22 (2004), 466-76, and Price and Devlin, “The Pro [singular, because they find only one] and Cons of Labelling a Left Occipitotemporal Region: ‘The Visual Word Form Area,’” NeuorImage 22 (2004), 477-79. 206 P Aul b. A rmstronG Brain-imaging experiments show that the VWFA is activated by all alphabetic systems, by Chinese as well as Roman characters, and by both the Kanji and Kana scripts used by Japanese. 20 These experiments reveal the niche in the architecture of the brain that has been redirected to a specific cultural activity that arose too quickly for biological evolution to produce with genetic changes, and this is powerful evidence for the mutual accommodation of nature and culture assumed by the hypothesis of “neuronal recycling.” The universality of the niche across cultures with different alphabets is evidence of the restrictions of pre-given cortical structures, even as the conversion of a particular region of visual recognition neurons to an unnatural, learned, culturally variable activity shows the plasticity and adaptability of the brain. The selection of this area of the brain for “recycling” is not accidental but seems to have been a consequence of its role in invariant visual object recognition. The ability to identify the same object, place, or person under different conditions - changes in lighting, distance, orientation, and so forth - is absolutely necessary for human survival. The ability to recognize a visual form invariantly under changing conditions is crucial not only for perceiving objects in the external world but also for identifying words rendered in different shapes: written in upperor lower-case, in different fonts, and even in cursive script (within limits, of course, that my own penmanship constantly tests). It is a defining feature of reading that we are able to recognize the same word “radio” even when it is written as “RADIO” or even “RaDiO,” and this ability is an example of the invariant visual perception of objects. 21 The capacity of neurons in the visual word form area to ignore variations in case and recognize the self-identical word written in different shapes is evidence that cortical functions which originally evolved for invariant visual object recognition have been adapted to the artificial, culturally specific purposes of reading conventional graphic signs. Somewhat speculative but highly suggestive evidence about recurrent preferred shapes across different alphabetic systems further demonstrates the deep neurological link between reading and invariant object recognition. Some of these constraints are attributable to the physiology of vision and the capacity of the retina to register shapes. Others, however, seem to suggest that writing systems developed by drawing on visual markers of object invariance to which the brain had become accustomed long before the 20 For example, see L. H. Tan et al., “Brain Activation in the Processing of Chinese Characters and Words: A Functional MRI Study,” Human Brain Mapping 10: 1 (2000), 16-27, and K. Nakamura et al., “Participation of the Left Posterior Inferior Temporal Cortex in Writing and Recall of Kanji Orthography: A Functional MRI Study,” Brain 123 (Pt 5), 954-67. Also see Dehaene’s summary of these experiments in Reading in the Brain, 97-100. 21 See T. A. Polk and M. J. Farah, “Functional MRI Evidence for an Abstract, Not Perceptual, Word-Form Area,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 131: 1 (2002), 65-72. Polk and Farah’s brain-imaging experiment showed practically indistinguishable amounts of neuronal activity in the VWFA when reading words written all upperor all lower-case and in a mix of letters, and oddly written words like HoTeL or ElEpHaNt triggered the same activity as normally written words. How Historical is Reading? 207 advent of reading. According to evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi, visual signs in writing systems “have been culturally selected to match the kinds of conglomeration of contours found in natural scenes because that is what we have evolved to be good at visually processing.” 22 Through a statistical analysis of images of naturally occurring shapes, Changizi found that objects often form Tor L-like patterns when they are viewed together - whether placed next to or in front of each other, partially blocking one’s vision of them. Sometimes, but more rarely, an X-shape occurs, as when one branch of a tree crosses another. Three lines forming a triangle seldom occur in a natural scene. According to Changizi, the frequency with which these shapes occur in nature is, surprisingly and strikingly, closely comparable to the distribution of similar shapes found in the world’s written symbolsystems. That is, across the seemingly very different systems of alphabetic signs in use around the world, Tand L-shapes are more common than X’s, and triangular forms rarely occur. This is not accidental, he postulates, but evidence that written signs were developed that the visual brain could easily recognize because they resembled natural forms to which it was accustomed. If Changizi is correct, the visual features shared across the world’s alphabets are based neurologically on patterns coded in the brain as a result of the long evolution of its capacities for invariant object recognition. These findings suggest that the arbitrariness of the alphabetic sign famously posited by Saussure is limited by the visual geometry of familiar natural shapes which the brain is pre-programmed to recognize. The variety of the world’s alphabets testifies to the cultural contingency of the sign (any particular written code is no more necessary than any other), but their geometric similarities are evidence of the brain’s pre-inscribed capacities for invariant visual object recognition. The sign is arbitrary and can vary because the brain is plastic and adaptable, but its variations are limited because this plasticity is constrained. Reading is historical, but it changes on different time-scales. The properties of the visual cortex involved in the construal of written signs are a product first of all of the long evolutionary history of the human brain’s development that produced its particular features and abilities different from (and similar to) other mammals whose origins we share. A shorter but still considerable period was then required for these cortical structures and processes to be re-purposed through the “neuronal recycling” that allowed reading to emerge - a reorientation of cortical functionalities that must be repeated again and again as this enduring cultural capacity is handed down through education from generation to generation (reading is an unnatural act, and not everyone learns how to do it, and some brains have more trouble with it than others do). On the smallest temporal scale are the individual variations that may occur in the wiring of readers with different personal histories (including their habitual hermeneutic practices as members of distinctive 22 Mark Changizi et al., “The Structures of Letters and Symbols Throughout Human History are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes,” American Naturalist 167.5 (May 2006), E117. For a further discussion of Changizi’s work, see Dehaene 176-79. 208 P Aul b. A rmstronG interpretive communities). If reading practices change historically during the relatively brief (from an evolutionary standpoint) period after literacy was introduced, these are instances of the short-term neuronal developments caused by repeated cortical activity that is responsible for the variations that can occur in the brains of taxi-drivers, pianists, or fans of Jennifer Aniston. 23 Walter Ong may be right that “more than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” but this fundamental change occurred several thousand years ago when visual capacities for invariant object-recognition came to be “recycled” for the purposes of reading. 24 This change re-purposed but did not biologically alter the meaning-making processes of the brain. Subsequent changes in the technology of textual reproduction, from print to the internet, and in the extension of literacy beyond the privileged few to a mass public readership may have had profound social, political, and cultural implications, but the basic cortical and neuronal processes underlying these developments have not changed. The three primary characteristics of the reading experience identified by phenomenological theorists are broadly consistent with neurological processes that have remained pretty much the same since the human species evolved: 1. Reading is a to-and-fro process of building consistent patterns and filling in textual indeterminacies; 2. Reading is an anticipatory and retrospective activity of projecting and modifying expectations; 3. Reading is an intersubjective doubling of my thought-processes with the intentionality embedded in the text. 25 These aspects of the reading experience are all likely to be common to 17th as well as 21st century readers because they are based on structures and functions of the brain that go back to the African savanna and that we share with species that preceded us. On the first point: One of the curiosities of contemporary neuroscience is that it has rediscovered the hermeneutic circle. 26 Visual experience is fundamentally hermeneutic, for example, because it entails both selection and 23 Criticizing the radical historicism of cultural studies of vision and visuality, Philip J. Ethington similarly argues for distinguishing on neuroscientific grounds between different historical time-scales in his interesting essay “Sociovisual Perspective: Vision and the Forms of the Human Past” in A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Humanities- Neuroscience Divide, ed. Barbara Maria Stafford (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011), 123-52. 24 Walter Ong, “Orality and Literacy: Writing Restructures Consciousness” (1997) in The Book History Reader, 134. 25 See Wolfgang Iser,“The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974), 274-94, and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978). For a concise summary of phenomenology’s theories of interpretation and aesthetic experience, see my article “Phenomenology” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), 562-66. 26 See the chapter entitled “The Neuroscience of the Hermeneutic Circle” in How Literature Plays with the Brain, 54-90. How Historical is Reading? 209 combination. Inputs from the external world are filtered and differentiated according to the variable sensitivities of the receptors on the retina (rods and cones) and of the pathways transporting them (largeand small-ganglion cells that lead to the optic nerve). These separate, distinctive signals are then structured into coherent patterns by the reciprocal interactions among visual systems within the cortex. There are as many neuronal connections returning from the rear visual cortex to the forward areas of visual processing as there are leading back from the retina. Because of the interactions produced by these reciprocal connections, the brain makes it possible for us to see by combining parts into meaningful wholes which in turn give meaning to the parts. Despite centuries of visual metaphors of knowledge that depict the mind as a “mirror,” the sensation that we have that we are watching a full-color picture that corresponds point-by-point with the external world is an illusion - a complex illusion that the brain constructs so efficiently that we rarely notice the hermeneutic machinery that produces it. As neuroscientist of vision Semir Zeki explains, “The brain is . . . only interested in the constant, nonchanging, permanent and characteristic properties of objects and surfaces, those characteristics which enable it to categorise objects” even if (or precisely because) “the information reaching it from the external world is never constant.” 27 The regularities we recognize in the irregular details reaching us through our various sensory systems enable the hermeneutic construction of patterns (or “categories”) that create meaningful relations between parts and wholes, and these gestalts are useful navigational tools. Neuroscientists of vision are particularly intrigued by the perceptual shifts that can occur with those ambiguous figures that first seem like a duck but that may change into a rabbit, or an urn that may transform into two faces, because they make visible the brain’s quest for pattern and its capacity to reconfigure part-whole relations. When the information at the brain’s disposal is incomplete, it will often fill in what is absent consistent with the pattern it perceives, as in the case of the well-known “Kanizsa triangle” which, as Zeki notes, “the brain tries to make sense of . . . by ‘finishing it off’ in the most plausible way, and interprets the pattern of luminances . . . as a triangle.” 28 When phenomenologists describe reading as an experience of building consistency and filling in indeterminacies, these constructive activities have deep foundations in the neuroscience of perception. Turning to the second point, consistency-building in reading as in life is a temporal process of projecting expectations about pattern that will then be modified, refined, and overturned as experience unfolds. 29 Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela has shown that Edmund Husserl’s complex, nuanced description of the “retentional” and “protentional” horizons of the ever-passing moment is correlated neurologically to how neurons fire (how 27 Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 5. 28 Semir Zeki, “The Neurology of Ambiguity,” Consciousness and Cognition, 13 (2004): 181. 29 See the chapter entitled “The Temporality of Reading and the Decentered Brain” in How Literature Plays with the Brain, 91-130. 210 P Aul b. A rmstronG they generate “action potentials”) and to how neuronal assemblies form and dissolve. 30 The metaphor “horizon” suggests the paradoxical boundedness of the present and its connectedness to the past and future. Like a “horizon,” the present offers a perspective that is limited in its view, but that points beyond its boundaries - to what we expect (across the “protentional horizon”) based on what has been (the “retentional horizon”). A melody, for example, is not an objective entity but a horizonal figure that we can perceive only because the present moment paradoxically includes the immediate past and future. Rhythm similarly only exists in and across time. Reading likewise is a temporal phenomenon characterized by the creation and dissolution of patterns as we make our way through a text - “a continual interplay between modified expectations and transformed memories,” as Wolfgang Iser explains (Act of Reading, 111). Neuronal assemblies come and go, in a cycle of excitation and relaxation that exhibits a particular periodicity. This rhythm is a natural property not only of single neurons but also of collections of brain-cells, and it is the neural correlate of our consciousness of time passing. This sense of time passing is the lived experience of history, but it is based in turn on electro-chemical processes that have long endured not only in humans but in all species with neurons that generate action-potentials. The emerging consensus in neuroscience is that the temporality of brain rhythms is probably the key to understanding how the brain builds consistency - what neuroscientists call the “binding problem,” how different regions of the brain coordinate their activities. As Varela explains, “for every cognitive act, there is a singular specific cell assembly that underlies its emergence and cognition” (274). In these assemblies, “brain regions are . . . interconnected in a reciprocal fashion” with populations of neurons exchanging charges back and forth and generating oscillating brain-waves that coordinate their interactions (273-74). When we listen to music at a concert or watch a music video, for example, regions of the brain interact from the far corners of the cortex - auditory neurons in the mid-brain, motor and sensory areas across the central sulcus as we tap our feet or recall playing an instrument, the visual cortex as we coordinate what we see and what we hear, and areas of the cerebellum and the amygdala as we respond emotionally. As Varela explains, the synchronization coordinating a population of neurons is “dynamically unstable and will constantly and successively give rise to new assemblies,” and “the fact that an assembly of coupled oscillators attains a transient synchrony and that it takes a certain time to do so is the explicit correlate of the origin of nowness” (283). After an assembly is synchronized through a wave-like pattern of oscillatory excitation, it relaxes and 30 See Francisco J. Varela, “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness” in Naturalizing Phenomenology, 266-314, and Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. J. S. Churchill (1905-10; Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964). How Historical is Reading? 211 must form again - or be replaced by another assembly. This pattern of phases corresponds neurologically to the horizonality of the passing moment as we read, listen to music, or zone in and out during a lecture. The third phenomenological dimension of reading - the doubling of my consciousness with the thoughts, emotions, and attitudes held ready by the text - enacts what Merleau-Ponty memorably calls “the paradox of the alter ego.” 31 Relations with others are paradoxical, he argues, because they are simultaneously both intersubjective and solipsistic. “The social is already there when we come to know and judge it,” he explains, because the intersubjectivity of experience is primordially given with our perception of a common world. And yet, Merleau-Ponty continues, “there is . . . a solipsism rooted in living experience and quite insurmountable” because I am destined never to experience the presence of another person to herself. 32 Reading is similarly paradoxical. It is, on the one hand, a solitary experience in which one does not directly encounter one’s interlocutor. And yet, on the other hand, this private experience allows us to feel and know from the inside the presence of others to themselves and to see the world through another’s perspective as we ordinarily cannot in real life. Neuroscience has proposed three ways of explaining the paradox of the alter ego, and the emerging consensus is that all three probably work in combination in the brain’s complicated, messy interactions with the social world. 33 The first approach, known as “theory of mind” (ToM) or “theory theory” (TT), focuses on our capacity to attribute mental states to others - to engage in “mind reading” through which we theorize about the beliefs, desires, and intentions of others that we recognize may differ from our own. The second approach, “simulation theory” (ST), argues that we do not need “theories” to understand the simple, everyday behavior of others but that we instead automatically run “simulation routines” that put ourselves in their shoes by using our own thoughts and feelings as a model for what they must be experiencing. Critics of ST claim it begs the question of how the simulator senses what is going on in the other person, but an answer may be provided by a third approach that was proposed by a team of neuroscientists in Parma led by Giacomo Rizzolatti who discovered “mirror neurons” (MN’s) in the motor cortex of the macaque monkey. 34 These neurons fired not only when the animal performed a specific action but also when it observed the same action by another monkey or an experimenter - not only when the monkey grasped a piece of food, for example, but also when the experimenter did the same thing (the perhaps apocryphal story is that MN’s were first discovered when 31 See the chapter entitled “The Social Brain and the Paradox of the Alter Ego” in How Literature Plays with the Brain, 131-74. 32 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (1945; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 362, 358. 33 A good summary of these debates can be found in Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), 206-8. 34 See Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain - How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008). 212 P Aul b. A rmstronG an experimenter eating an ice-cream cone sauntered through the lab and detectors wired to the monkeys’ motor cortices started going crazy). This finding has led to an explosion of experimentation to determine whether similar “mirroring” mechanisms at the neuronal level might underlie such key social behaviors as imitation, learning, and communication. One especially intriguing property of some mirror neurons is that they respond to the observation not only of actions but also of objects on which these actions have been and can be performed. “Canonical neurons,” as they are called, fire both when a monkey observes an experimenter grasping a cup, for example, and when it simply sees the cup. Parma neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese reports that “brain imaging experiments in humans have shown that observation of manipulable objects like tools, fruits, vegetables, clothes, and even sexual organs leads to activation” of cortical areas “involved in the control of action” relevant to those objects. 35 Because of the workings of canonical mirror neurons, we may feel indirect but nevertheless bodily resonances with others through a whole range of artifacts, from tools to works of art (including books) that are part of the human motor repertoire. For example, brain-imaging experiments have shown that the experience of viewing pictures of classical sculptures invoked “motor resonance congruent with the implied movements portrayed in the sculptures.” 36 Other experiments have shown that reading action words provokes activity in cortical areas related to the same kinds of physical movement. When we read the verbs “throwing” or “kicking,” for example, the cortical areas associated with those actions also fire. These responses are so specific to our bodily habits that leftand right-handed subjects register responses to action verbs in opposite hemispheres of their brains. 37 Language is symbolic action, and sentences are manipulable artifacts that bear traces of human agency and may trigger our canonical mirror neurons in response. Pioneering phenomenological aesthetician Roman Ingarden argues that the meaning-units in sentences are characterized by “derived intentionality” - “a borrowed intentionality, one that is conferred on them by acts of consciousness” that they are no longer in direct contact with (the writer is not present and may even be dead) but that nevertheless still inhabit them. 38 35 David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion, and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2007), 11(5): 200. Freedberg is a Columbia art historian with whom Gallese has collaborated to explore the aesthetic implications of canonical neurons. 36 Cinzia Di Dio and Vittorio Gallese, “Neuroaesthetics: A Review,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology (2009), 19: 683. They discuss Cinzia Di Dio et al., “The Golden Beauty: Brain Response to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures,” PloS ONE (2007), 11: e1201. 37 See Olaf Hauk and Friedman Pulvermüller, “Neurophysiological Distinction of Action Words in the Fronto-Central Cortex,” Human Brain Mapping (2004), 21: 191-201; Véronique Boulenger et al., “Cross-Talk Between Language Processes and Overt Motor Behavior in the First 200 msec of Processing,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2006), 18: 10, 1607- 15; and Roel W. Willems et al., “Body-Specific Representations of Action Verbs: Neural Evidence from Rightand Left-Handers,” Psychological Science 21.1 (2010): 67-74. 38 Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz (1931; Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1973), 125-26. How Historical is Reading? 213 This derived intentionality, originated by the meaning-creating activity of the writer, needs the activity of the reader to be once again animated and filled out. The act of reading responds to the inert marks on the page as traces of activity that can be re-vivified, and the neurobiological correlates of this miracle are the mirroring functions that the experiments linking language and motor action have identified. Experiments have shown that mirroring processes are evident not only in the motor cortex but across the brain, in regions associated (for example) with emotion, pain, and disgust. 39 The brain’s capacity to resonate in these ways to direct and indirect evidence of the behavior of others is primordial and long-enduring (the evolutionary roots of the disgust response are probably the need to identify and avoid rotten food). If reading allows us to reach across history to worlds long gone but preserved in the traces they have left behind, this trans-historical merger of horizons is made possible by the neurobiology of the brain. It is consequently a mistake to regard reading as so radically historical that the experience of a 17th century London burgher would have little or nothing in common with that of a 21st century English professor. Texts would indeed work on their sensibilities in much the same way because the same neurological processes would be set in motion then as now when the brain reads. Following Hebb’s law (“neurons that fire together, wire together”), different experiences with texts, people, and other cultural and natural objects would of course establish different proclivities for pattern-formation from one age to another, and these differences in turn make it possible for perceivers to find pleasure and meaning in radically opposite aesthetic phenomena - in experiences of harmony, balance, and symmetry, for example, as opposed to dissonances, disjunctions, and disruptions. But these differences too are a manifestation of longstanding, fundamental, even universal neurological processes. The brain is a peculiar, at times paradoxical, but eminently functional combination of constancy and flexibility, stability and openness to change, fixed constraints and plasticity, and these contradictory, paradoxical qualities are reflected in the workings of literature and aesthetic experience across history and cultures. The brain’s contradictions make us historical beings, but our histories work out neurobiological oppositions that are basic to the life of our species (and not unique to our species alone). Literature plays with the brain through experiences of harmony and dissonance that set in motion and help to negotiate oppositions that are fundamental to the neurobiology of mental functioning - basic tensions in the operation of the brain between the drive for pattern, synthesis, and constancy versus the need for flexibility, adaptability, and openness to change. 40 The brain’s ability to play in a to-and-fro manner between competing imperatives and mutually exclusive possibilities is a consequence of its structure as a de-centered, parallel-processing network consisting of reciprocal top-down, bottom-up connections among its interacting parts. Experiences of harmony 39 For a comprehensive survey of this research, see Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 40 See How Literature Plays with the Brain, especially 12-24 and 43-53. 214 P Aul b. A rmstronG and dissonance of the sort typically associated with art facilitate the brain’s ability to form and dissolve assemblies of neurons, establishing the patterns that through repeated firing become our habitual ways of engaging the world, while also combating their tendency to rigidify and promoting the possibility of new cortical connections. The claim that art is associated with play, harmony, and dissonance is not of course surprising. There is a long tradition going back at least to Kant and continuing up to the present day that views “play” as integral to the aesthetic experience, and an opposition between viewing either harmony or dissonance as the distinguishing feature of art is pervasive in the history of aesthetics. This is not accidental, I would argue, given the centrality of play, harmony, and dissonance to the functioning of the brain. What would be disconcerting would be if the way the brain worked did not match up with the reports that readers, critics, and theorists have offered over the years about what happens when they experience literature and art. The fact that these accounts keep returning to “play” as a central feature of the aesthetic experience - but that they diverge drastically in the sorts of to-and-fro interactions they find promoted by art (culminating in unity, synthesis, and balance or provoking defamiliarization through disruption and transgression) - this is a fact about human experience to which the history of aesthetics testifies, and it is a fact that neuroscientific accounts of the brain help to explain. We have the kind of brain that thrives by playing with harmony and dissonance, and the experiences that have so widely and typically been reported about encounters with art and literature are correlated in interesting ways with basic neuronal and cortical processes. Neuroscience can provide useful instruction to literary studies about the neurobiological processes underlying these aesthetic phenomena. The empirical findings from the laboratory will not replace the intuition and imagination necessary for literary interpretation, and the so-called “hard problem” of how experience (aesthetic and otherwise) emerges from neuronal activity resists reduction and the dream of “consilience.” 41 But sometimes scientific research can falsify or at least modulate the claims of literary and aesthetic theory. For example, the linguistic sign is indeed arbitrary, contingent for its meaning on variable alphabetic and phonetic conventions, but these differences are constrained by certain apparently universal constraints that have to do with constant properties of the visual and auditory systems. 42 This 41 The classic statements advocating neural reductionism and “consilience” are Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994) and Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1998). For a critique of their claims, see the “Epilogue” of How Literature Plays with the Brain, especially 176-80. On the intractability of the “hard problem,” see Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012). 42 In addition to Changizi’s research on the visual properties of signs (cited above), experiments on the auditory system have shown that speakers from very different languages typically associate a curved, rounded blob with the sound “bouba” and a sharply angled shape with “kiki” (see V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A How Historical is Reading? 215 central dogma of contemporary theory is confirmed, with modifications, by the findings of science. Relativistic claims about the unbridgeable historical divide between the “mental universes” of different eras or cultures are not consistent with the neurobiology of reading, however, and should not be taken seriously. Interesting and difficult questions remain about what is constant and what can vary as the brain’s plasticity adapts to changing experiences, but these are modifications of longstanding, evolutionarily stable processes of reception that are illuminated by theories of reader response often erroneously dismissed as “universal” and “essentialistic.” Science cannot answer all the questions humanists ask, but it can show that some answers are wrong and some theories more probable than others. What can neuroscience learn from literary studies? Interest in “neuroaesthetics” has exploded in recent years, but neuroscientists working in this field have all too rarely called on the expertise of humanists as is otherwise customary in science when investigators’ interests cross into unfamiliar domains and specialists in those areas are enlisted as collaborators. 43 Elementary, avoidable errors often result. One common mistake is the assumption that aesthetic experience can be localized in the brain, on the model of, say, face-recognition or motor-control - a hypothesis popularized by the pioneer of neuroaesthetics Semir Zeki, who purports to explain artistic beauty as a response of the “reward system” in the frontal cortex (a muchwatched video shows him pointing to a patch of color on an fMRI image and pronouncing that it is the location of beauty in the brain). 44 Aesthetic experiences set in motion far-reaching to-and-fro interactions across the cortex and between the brain and the body that are not localizable in any single region of neural anatomy. This suggests a second fallacy - the mistake of assuming that distinctive features can be found to demarcate art from non-art or literary from non-literary works. 45 Such demarcations are dubious on aesthetic grounds, but they are also scientifically questionable given the characteristics of the brain as a reciprocally interacting collection of functionally specific but malleable regions that respond similarly to art and to life. It is impossible to differentiate cleanly and definitively aesthetic from non-aesthetic experiences or to separate out processes of the brain that are unique to art. Aesthetic Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human [New York: Norton, 2011], 108-9). 43 In addition to the collaboration between Freedberg and Gallese, an important exception is G. Gabrielle Starr, who works with neuroscientist Edward A. Vessel on the “default mode network.” See her book, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2013) and their article, “The Brain on Art: Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Mode Network,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 66 (2012): 6. 44 Semir Zeki, Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 17, and H. Kawabata and S. Zeki, “Neural Correlates of Beauty,” Journal of Neurophysiology 91 (2004): 1699-1705. Zeki’s TEDx talk “The Neurobiology of Beauty” (1 July 2012) has been viewed more than 11,000 times on YouTube (www.youtube.com/ watch? v=NlzanAw0RP4; accessed 13 January 2015). 45 See the chapter “The Variability and Limits of Value” in my book Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990), 109-33. 216 P Aul b. A rmstronG experiences may feel “special,” but the neuronal interactions that give rise to them typically involve many if not all of the ordinary neurobiological processes regularly activated in everyday life (we read Shakespeare, after all, with the same cortical functions and anatomy that supported hunting and gathering on the African savannah). Play, harmony, and dissonance are not exclusively aesthetic phenomena, for example, and they set in motion a wide range of cortical, neuronal processes that are not unique to art. For these and many other reasons, neuroscience can never hope to provide a full and adequate account of art. But aesthetic experiences can provide key insights into the workings of the brain because they exemplify the play of its complex, reciprocal, to-and-fro processes of pattern formation. Science cannot explain art, but art and the humanities are potentially invaluable resources for neuroscience - if, that is, the members of the so-called “two cultures” can learn to talk to each other. Works Cited Armstrong, Paul B. Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990. ---. How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. ---. “In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age”. New Literary History 42 (2011): 87-113. Bear, Mark F., Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso. Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2007. Boulenger, Véronique et al. “Cross-Talk Between Language Processes and Overt Motor Behavior in the First 200 msec of Processing.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2006) 18(10): 1607-15. Changizi, Mark et al. “The Structures of Letters and Symbols Throughout Human History are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes”. American Naturalist 167: 5 (May 2006): E117-E139. Cohen, Laurent and Stanislas Dehaene. “Specialization Within the Ventral Stream: The Case for the Visual Word Form Area,” NeuroImage 22 (2004): 466-76. Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention New York: Viking, 2009. Di Dio, Cinzia et al. “The Golden Beauty: Brain Response to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures”. PloS ONE (2007), 11: e1201. Di Dio, Cinzia and Vittorio Gallese. “Neuroaesthetics: A Review”. Current Opinion in Neurobiology (2009), 19: 683. Ethington, Philip J. “Sociovisual Perspective: Vision and the Forms of the Human Past”. A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Humanities-Neuroscience Divide. Ed. Barbara Maria Stafford. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011, 123-52. Evans, Nicholas and Stephen C. Levinson. “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and its Importance for Cognitive Science”. 429-48. ---.“Open Peer Commentary”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2009): 448-92. How Historical is Reading? 217 Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleary, eds. The Book History Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. Fischer, Roger. A History of Reading. London: Reaktion Books, 2003. Freedberg, David and Vittorio Gallese.“Motion, Emotion, and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11(5) (2007): 197-203. Gallagher, Shaun and Dan Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. New York: Routledge, 2008. Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005. Green, D. W. et al. “Exploring Cross-Linguistic Vocabulary Effects on Brain Structures Using Voxel-Based Morphology”. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 10 (2007): 189-99. Goldberg, Elkhonon. The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Groden, Michael and Martin Kreiswirth, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Hauk, Olaf and Friedman Pulvermüller. “Neurophysiological Distinction of Action Words in the Fronto-Central Cortex”. Human Brain Mapping (2004), 21: 191-201. Hebb, Donald O. The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. 1949. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Hruby, George G. and Usha Goswami. “Neuroscience and Reading: A Review for Reading Education Researchers”. Reading Research Quarterly 46.2 (April/ May/ June 2011): 156-72. Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Translated by J. S. Churchill. 1905-10. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964. Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art. Translated by George G. Grabowicz, 1931. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1973. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. ---. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Kanwisher, Nancy, Josh McDermott, and Marvin M. Chun. “The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception”. The Journal of Neuroscience 17.11 (1997): 4302-4311. Kawabata, Hideaki and Semir Zeki. “Neural Correlates of Beauty”. Journal of Neurophysiology 91 (2004): 1699-1705. Kim, Jaegwon. Philosophy of Mind, 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview P, 2011. Laakso, Mikko P. et al. “Psychopathy and the Posterior Hippocampus”. Behavioural Brain Research 118: 2 (29 January 2001): 187-93. Maguire, E. A. et al. “Navigation-related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (2000): 4398-4403. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. 1945. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Münte, Thomas F. “The Musician’s Brain as a Model of Neuroplasticity”. Nature Reviews/ Neuroscience, vol. 3 (June 2002): 473-78. Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. ---. “What is It Like to be a Bat? ” Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435-50. Nadeau, Stephen E. The Neural Architecture of Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 218 P Aul b. A rmstronG Nakamura, K. et al. “Participation of the Left Posterior Inferior Temporal Cortex in Writing and Recall of Kanji Orthography: A Functional MRI Study”. Brain 123 (Pt 5): 954-67. Quiroga, R. Quian et al. “Invariant Visual Representation by Single Neurons in the Human Brain”. Nature 435: 7045 (2005): 1102-07. Petitot, Jean et al. Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Polk, Thad A. and M. J. Farah, “Functional MRI Evidence for an Abstract, Not Perceptual, Word-Form Area”. Journal of Experimental Psychology 131: 1 (2002), 65-72. Price, Cathy J. and Joseph T. Devlin,“The Myth of the Visual Word Form Area”. NeuroImage 19 (2003): 473-81 ---. “The Pro and Cons of Labelling a Left Occipitotemporal Region: ‘The Visual Word Form Area,’” NeuorImage 22 (2004), 477-79. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. New York: Norton, 2011. Rizzolatti, Giacomo and Corrado Sinigaglia. Mirrors in the Brain - How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. Translated by Frances Anderson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Sacks, Oliver. “Face-Blind: Why Are Some of Us Terrible at Recognizing Faces? ” The New Yorker (30 August 2010): 36-43. Starr, Gabrielle. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Starr, Gabrielle and Edward A. Vessel. “The Brain on Art: Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Mode Network”. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6: 66 (2012). Tan, Li Hai et al. “Brain Activation in the Processing of Chinese Characters and Words: A Functional MRI Study”. Human Brain Mapping 10: 1 (2000), 16-27. Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Willems, Roel W. et al. “Body-Specific Representations of Action Verbs: Neural Evidence from Rightand Left-Handers”. Psychological Science 21.1 (2010): 67-74. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage, 1998. Zeki, Semir. Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. ---. “The Neurology of Ambiguity”. Consciousness and Cognition 13 (2004): 173-196. ---. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. d ustin b reitenWischer Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience (and the Case of Sylvia Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist”) I. The In-Between One of the most essential and intriguing questions in the field of literary studies is what happens in the act of reading? A prominent angle from which to tackle this question treats the respective text first and foremost as a source of aesthetic experience, meaning that the text’s basic function is to afford the reader aesthetic pleasure. Over the course of the past fifty years, reception aesthetics and literary hermeneutics (from Peter Szondi and Paul Ricoeur to the thinkers of the so-called Constance School) have taught us that the act of reading, may it be academically or leisurely motivated, is characterized by a complex and dynamic dialogue between text and reader. 1 The reader is not understood as merely being exposed to a text, but text and reader are thought of as always already being with each other. As attempts to overthrow the rigorous regime of what is most commonly known as Werkästhetik (aesthetics of the work of art) and to free the aesthetic object and its recipient from the misguided pressure of uncovering and revealing an inherent Truth, both 1 As Winfried Fluck argues: “The cultural history of literary texts is the history of their varying uses in the act of reception. Literary history and the history of reception thus cannot be separated” (“Why We Need Fiction: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsgeschichte.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Eds. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz [Heidelberg: Winter, 2009] 365-84; 383). For further introduction, see Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989); Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984); Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretation. Ed. Don Ihde. Transl. Willis Domingo et al. (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988); Peter Szondi, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics. Transl. Martha Woodmannsee (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). With regards to the phenomenon of aesthetic and readerly pleasure, and in addition to the traditions of reception aesthetics and literary hermeneutics, see also Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Transl. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). For a concise comparison between the reception-theoretical models of Barthes and Iser (in German), see Doris Pany, Wirkungsästhetische Modelle: Wolfgang Iser und Roland Barthes im Vergleich (Erlangen and Jena: Palm & Enke, 2000). 220 d ustin b reitenWischer theoretical rationales have understood work and recipient to be in a spontaneous and inherently open relationship with each other (and thereby with themselves and their quest for self-understanding). What is more, in these assumptions about the text-reader relationship neither work nor recipient could any longer be understood as holding fast to the idea of having a stable background in front of which they could act upon the respective other, meaning that work and recipient are not simply opposing each other. To the contrary, they are luring and are curiously intertwined with each other. Work and recipient were henceforth understood to activate a state of aesthetic experience in which worlds are not represented and apprehended, but in which worlds conflate. Understood as such, the recipient is not tied to an observing outside position in front of the respective work. She rather unconsciously renounces parts of her immediate environment to performatively engage in the playful world, which opens up between her and the work. In “Representation: A Performative Act,” Wolfgang Iser therefore argues that “the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform [her] role must use [her] thoughts, [her] feelings, and even [her] body as an analogue for representing something [she] is not.” 2 As readers (i.e. performers of our act of reading) we are always “both ourselves and someone else.” 3 In the final part of this essay I will turn to the act of reading poetry, for it is in the latter where the “analogous” is most often turned into an immediate ‘acting out,’ or, as Heinz Schlaffer convincingly argues, appropriation of a poem’s subjective agency. 4 Poetry therefore provides an extraordinary understanding of what it means to be reading in-between. Reading, as I understand it here, is more than just a text-based practice of reception, but the raison d’ être of perception as such, i.e. a general mode of sensemaking that treats the aesthetic as a paradigmatic play-space. 5 At this point, allow me to adjust and specify the opening question: What is taking place between the text and the reader? In his essay “Fictionalizing,” Iser basically condenses his aforementioned argument by claiming that the reader is caught in an “in-between state,” 6 which Winfried Fluck qualifies as a venue for “an interplay between its constituents.” 7 Yet, I argue that Iser’s concurrent ‘both … and’ structure of aesthetic experience is not only declaring a particular state, but that it eventually opens up a space which can be conceived of as the dematerialized appearance of the physical space between the place of reception and the appearance of the work (the “gap between text 2 Wolfgang Iser, “Representation: A Performative Act.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 244. 3 Wolfgang Iser, “Representation” 244. 4 Heinz Schlaffer, “Die Aneignung von Gedichten: Grammatisches, rhetorisches und pragmatisches Ich in der Lyrik.” Poetica 27, 1-2 (1996): 38-57. 5 Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Bildkunst und Wortkunst.” Was ist ein Bild? Ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: Fink, 2001) 90-104; 95ff. 6 Wolfgang Iser, “Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fiction.” New Literary History 21.4 (Fall 1990): 939-55; 953 [emph. D.B.]. 7 Winfried Fluck, “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory.” New Literary History 31.1 (Winter 2000): 175-210; 181. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 221 and reader,” as Rita Felski calls it) 8 into an imaginary and nondescript third space. Hence, what is taking place between text and reader is the occurrence of a space in-between, in and through which the material, or, corporeal textreader binary dissolves into a unified imaginary and ultimately performative universe, thereby drawing on but moving beyond Iser’s metaphorical definition of the in-between. 9 The alteration from imaginative state to imaginary space thus allows us to understand the in-between not only as an internal(ized) matrix of the eventfulness of our aesthetic experience (to feel as if we were part of the fictional universe), but as the result of a conjoint effort of us and the text that revokes the dynamics of a Cartesian subject-object dichotomy and that, accordingly, turns the act of reading into an intersubjective event. As I said, even though the in-between is effectively an imaginary space, it fundamentally exceeds the level of the metaphorical. Albeit the fact the in-between might be invisible and in certain ways ungraspable, by using not only our imagination but also our body as an “analogue,” our very bodily reactions to a particular text (shivering, sweating, screaming, etc.) are not simply real world responses to a fictive occurrence. Instead they are original, ‘act-specific’ occurrences that do not react to but activate the text within the spatial confines of the in-between. By definition, the in-between marks a space between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ between the diegetic world we turn to and the background world we rely on. 10 Quite literally, aesthetic experience thus opens up a space between the aesthetic object and the recipient, a space, which is, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, without boundaries of its own, which takes on and receives itself, its form, from the outside, which is not its outside (this would imply that it has a form) but whose form is the outside of the identity, not just of an other (for that would reduce the in-between to the role of object, not of space) but of others, whose relations of positivity define, by default, the space that is constituted as in-between. 11 In the in-between, as I understand it, hierarchies are dissolved: everything is equally near and far, attached and removed, physical and mental, captured and lost. In hermeneutical terms, the in-between serves as the self-representation of the metaphorical horizon as an unreachable site. This is indeed the anthropological dimension of the in-between. The in-between is based on, what Laura Bieger has argued with regards to narrativity, a certain anthropological need for “place-making” as a result of human’s “space-boundedness,” 8 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 28. 9 I develop this theory in greater scope in my forthcoming book Das Dazwischen ästhetischer Erfahrung (Paderborn: Fink) [forthcoming]. 10 In many ways, the simultaneous ‘here and there’ of in-between of aesthetic experience characterizes a space with significant heterotopic qualities. For the conflation of Foucault’s seminal theory of space in his short essay “Of Other Spaces” (Diacritics 16 [Spring 1986]: 22-27) and a Constance School-based theory of aesthetic reception, see Laura Bieger, Ästhetik der Immersion: Raum-Erleben zwischen Welt und Bild. Las Vegas, Washington und die White City (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007). 11 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT P, 2001) 91 [emph. E.G.]. 222 d ustin b reitenWischer which is ultimately tied to “the impossibility of understanding the meaning of one’s death.” 12 Along these lines, the in-between is thus an extraordinary space, as it allows the reader to understand her existential “impossibility of understanding.” Pragmatically speaking, the in-between is the space where “the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturbing,” where “a being [is] wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive” (Dewey, Art as Experience 18). Thereby, the in-between allows the one who is in it to turn to herself. Or, again in Dewey’s words: “We are, as it were, introduced into a world beyond this world which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live in our ordinary experiences. We are carried out beyond ourselves to find ourselves” (Art as Experience 195). 13 In line with this idea of productive self-extension, the thought of an imaginary in-between space of aesthetic experience could also be understood as the possibility of a contesting sphere of opposing visions, sentiments, and interpretations. For it is within a variety of sociocultural and socio-institutional dialogues where other, non-artistic forms of ‘in-betweenness’ are at stake. Hence, my impulse to move beyond an understanding of the in-between as a state one is caught in to it being a space one co-produces (in alliance with the aesthetic object) is not merely based on an effort to foreground the limitations of the metaphorical but to interlink the moment of aesthetic experience with (often non-aesthetic) questions of subjectivity and cultural (dis-) positions. Here, we might want to think of such lucid elaborations as Homi Bhabha’s theory of transand intercultural ‘in-between’ spaces. With regards to matters of sociocultural subject categories, Bhabha argues that it is crucial to “focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences,” that is, “’in-between’ spaces [that] provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood.” 14 In Bhabha’s case, the in-between 12 Laura Bieger, “No Place Like Home; or, Dwelling in Narrative.” New Literary History 46.1 (Winter 2015): 17-39; 19. 13 At a later point, I will return to a similar thought in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2006). 14 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) In a similar vein, ‘in-betweenness’ may also be understood as a space of cultural and linguistic translation, and thus as an enabling sphere for a variety of artistic, historical, and sociopolitical practices of intersubjective communication. See for example Silviano Santiago, The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture. Ed. Ana Lúcia Gazzola (Durham: Duke UP, 1991) esp. 25-38. Furthermore and with regards to both religious and aesthetic experiences, the in-between is at times taken to be a “threshold” or “liminal space,” i.e. a quasi-metaphorical site of imaginary, performative, and miraculous self-expansion. See for example Thomas Moore, “Neither Here Nor There.” Parabola 25.1 (2000): 34; Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Transl. Saskya Iris Jain (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). Even though aesthetic and religious experiences may not always produce radical changes in the multitude of one’s own life-worlds, I argue that the appearance of an imaginary in-betweenness can provide us with a testing ground for the intersubjective performance of difference, otherness, and (sociocultural) hybridity. It offers the subject of that experience the opportunity - be it inside or outside the academic discourse - to stage and engage in the intricate relationship between her aesthetic and non-aesthetic life-worlds. In other words, the experience’s ‘in-between’ can very well be understood Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 223 is thus a (often imaginary) site for “the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 4). Unmistakably, Bhabha’s ‘in-between of cultural difference’ - as many other representations of (non-)aesthetic in-betweenness - is far removed from the interests of a Constance-based reception theory. That being said, those theories may nonetheless be curiously interrelated with such reception-centered theories of aesthetic pleasure. If we consider the in-between of aesthetic experience to be a space, in which certain subject positions can be tested, accepted or disregarded, we may want to understand even the most intimate moment of aesthetic pleasure (like the act of reading) as an act that informs and, at times, even transforms the sociocultural environment attached it. 15 Therefore, I briefly wanted to stress the intricate relation between the aesthetics of the in-between (f.e. in Bhabha’s “articulation of cultural difference”) and the inbetween of aesthetic experience (as an imaginary stage area of such difference), for it not only allows for a curious trans-academic dialogue, but it also underscores the necessity to take Iser’s word quite literally and treat the in-between as an imaginary space. By doing so, we might not only see that spaces of cultural hybridity take on aesthetic form but that they are in many ways in accordance with the desire for imaginary self-extension and self-difference (“being both ourselves and someone else”) produced in the in-between of aesthetic experience. And if we consider the satisfaction of these desires to be one of the significant sociocultural and sociopolitical functions of reading - both academically and leisurely motivated - we may even argue that the function of reading correlates with the consequences and the architecture of its experience, i.e. with the event and performance of being in-between. As to the various socio-institutional theories, meanings and implications of reading, I want to suggest that the in-between space of aesthetic experience functions as a leveling sphere, in which the aesthetic is not merely exposed to formalistic value judgments. Instead, we may want to consider the idea that an intimate intersubjective act can most promisingly be expanded as a communicative space of transmission or translation, as it caters to the associative assemblage of a text’s functional multitude. Thereby, the aesthetic is not disabling a text’s non-aesthetic functions, but it is enabling the latter to gain a (potentially heterogeneous) gestalt in the safe realm of its imaginary space. 15 Along the lines of a reception-based understanding of reading, Gabriele Schwab’s studies The Mirror and the Killer-Queen and Subjects Without Selves respectively help to bridge some of the gaps between an individual (aesthetic) response and its culturally hybrid ramifications, as she explores a psychoanalytical expansion of Iser’s (and, for that matter, Hans Robert Jauss’) reception aesthetics by way of arguing that the reader is caught in a “transitional space” of (sociocultural) transference. Schwab thereby claims that the readerly subject is enabled to repeatedly encounter herself through extending herself imaginarily into the ‘Other’ of the fictional universe. But even though Schwab considers a spatial dimension in Iser’s reception theory, her own studies do not either move beyond the metaphorical. Gabriele Schwab, The Mirror and the Killer- Queen: Otherness in Literary Language (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996) esp. 1-46. With regards to the “transitional space” of literature, see Gabriele Schwab, Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994). 224 d ustin b reitenWischer into a social practice within the shielded sphere of such an in-between space, that is, a sphere of cultural and critical interest and inquiry. What is more, the in-between can even serve as a domain, in which fundamental questions of how and what we read are raised, and in which possible answers can be safely explored. If we take the concern of this present volume we thus may want to think of each individual reading experience as the premise of and the point of departure for various public and academic debates. Yet at this point, it is crucial to reiterate that I understand the in-between as an imaginary space that produces and contains a self-associative matrix, i.e. a dynamic and meandering structure that is ultimately and necessarily able to reflect and act upon itself as its own rendering. The in-between produces a dialogical setting, which allows the reader to extraordinarily engage with herself and her world at the same time. 16 II. Self-Representation Even though the in-between cannot be completely deduced from the material presence of the aesthetic object (i.e. its appearance), it seems to be always already present in the aesthetic object. 17 To be more precise, I argue that the 16 Here, I concur with Hans-Georg Gadamer who compares the structure of experience with the intersubjective disposition of an I and a you noting that in the best case this intersubjective model works by way of constantly drawing on an inherent openness whereby the I-you-interaction enables the respective other to formulate and thereby understand the yet unknown (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 238ff.). Understood this way, experience as openness enables a space for future experiencing, turning intersubjectivity into a mode of understanding human experience. In “Von der zerstörerischen Kraft des Dritten,” Axel Honneth criticizes Gadamer’s understanding of experience by claiming that the latter’s model is too private and intimate to stand in for most societal modes of intersubjectivity and their respective production of recognition. In contrast, Honneth argues in favor of a third position that he sees apparently missing in Gadamer’s model. For Honneth, this third position is significantly non-biased and as such the adequate enabler for moral and ethical reflection of one’s own position and experience. And where could we locate such a third figure? Honneth writes: “Such a perspective does not intrude into the I-you-relationship from the outside but it always already constitutes one of two standpoints whose respective comparison allows a reflection of the joined behavior” (Axel Honneth, “Von der zerstörerischen Kraft des Dritten: Gadamer und die Intersubjektivitätslehre Heideggers.” Unsichtbarkeit: Stationen einer Theorie der Intersubjektivität [Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 2003] 49-70; 69 [transl. D.B.]). The third position thus appears from within as an in-between actor that most literally takes place. Yet, I argue that Gadamer essentially knows of this third position, but instead of having I and you relate to it as a non-identical other, he lets this third party happen, as he turns intersubjectivity into a process of reciprocal intention. 17 My understanding of the term “appearance” (or “appearing”) stems from Martin Seel’s Aesthetics of Appearing, in which the author argues that “appearing” is the basic mode of being for aesthetic objects. It is not primarily through semblance or representation that aesthetic objects become meaningful for us but through their spontaneous, extraordinary and genuine ways of appearing. Cf. Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing. Transl. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) esp. 19-103. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 225 aesthetic object is by definition also the representation of (its own) in-betweenness. That is to say that in the act of reading the in-between persistently receives formal offers from the text as a performer of its inherent in-betweenness. Yet these offers can only materialize in the act of reading itself, which, in turn, leads Iser to the assumption that the reader is confronted with “the task of visualizing the many possible shapes of the identifiable world, so that inevitably the world repeated in the text begins to undergo changes.” 18 As I understand it, we are presented with the ungraspable and ever-changing appearance of an in-between space, an appearance that is, of course, also fundamentally tied to the fact that in the acts of reading a novel, watching a film, or looking at a painting we constantly move in and out of our imaginary in-between (for example when the phone rings, a theater door is thrown open, or a grade school class runs by). Since we are always surrounded by our environment and thereby exposed to a vast amount of unforeseen (and essentially non-artistic) acts and impressions, we need to repeatedly produce the in-between anew to then being ever-newly equipped with non-identical images and the memory of our past experiences. 19 What is more, the temporal progress of the act of reading - reading word after word, line after line, page after page - thus translates into the non-linear dynamic of the production of the in-between space. 20 Understood as such, this in-between space is not a succession of different spaces opening onto each other. It rather seems to be an amorphic space marked by radical elusiveness and sudden alterations, and which is analogous to the prereflective space between the written word and the materializing image. At this point, the literary text must not merely be understood as a given aesthetic object or a bleak source of aesthetic pleasure but as a proactive agent with whom the reader comradely spatializes and stages the modes in which the text will be experienced. Hence, I argue that (1) the aesthetic object is constituted in and through experience, (2) experience (as the intersubjective 18 Wolfgang Iser, “The Play of the Text.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 249-61; 250. 19 This argument is very much in line with Karl Heinz Bohrer’s theory of aesthetic suddenness (Plötzlichkeit) as the appearance of aesthetic sensations in and through their autonomous realities. Bohrer ultimately argues in favor of an overwhelming aesthetic presence in which the aesthetic cannot be stored but which needs to constantly be actualized. Bohrer thereby develops a concept, which will then be broadened by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and his study The Production of Presence. Cf. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance. Transl. Ruth Crowley (New York: Columbia UP, 1994); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004). 20 I use the term “production” in close connection to Henri Lefebvre’s seminal study The Production of Space. Lefebvre argues that space is always already the complex product of cultural and social interactions, thereby developing a triad in which space unfolds as being conceived (f.e. in architectural blueprints), perceived (in streets, houses, trains, etc.), and lived (in symbols, rituals, actions). According to Lefebvre, space is produced in the interplay of the three modes to eventually materialize in (social) practices. Cf. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) esp. 31-67. 226 d ustin b reitenWischer occurrence of the text-reader interaction) produces its own space, and (3) the aesthetic object constantly makes formal offers to that space, thereby actively shaping the appearance of experience as such. This means that the in-between does not only mark a specific entry point for the interpretation of a particular object. It also demarcates a sphere of aesthetic self-awareness in and through the relationship of experience and object. In short, the inbetween space of aesthetic experience is not only the space for the dynamics of that experience, but also the appearance of the experience’s own rendering. III. Interpretation The act of reading affords the reader aesthetic pleasure, thereby opening an imaginary space in-between in whose dynamic of intersubjective self-positioning reader and text engage in their interpretative dialogue. Understood as such, interpretation is not merely the act of figuring out what a specific work of literature says; it allows for the self-referential production of a text’s own enabling aesthetic play-space: Interpretation is fundamentally a matter of mediation, translation, even transduction; it is what allows texts to move across temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries, as they are slotted into new and ever changing frames. Interpretation is also indirect, reflective, and double-voiced, binding the words of the critic to those of a text. It involves both critique and imagination, faithfulness to the past and a bold reconfiguration of old schemes. 21 Interpretation is the practice of affording a text with an interest. And to be inter-ested is to literally be in-between. Based on a reception theory of aesthetic ‘in-betweenness,’ I furthermore argue that any interpretation ipso facto needs to scour a text for its in-between spaces to have the recipient sink into them as if there was no outside to them, and to venture in unknown modes and practices of individual and cultural difference. As an admittedly formalist argument, this means that literary texts (as all other aesthetic objects) do not only afford their recipients an experience of in-betweeness, but that literary texts are able to articulate, stage, perform, and most playfully represent inbetween spaces as sites of hermeneutic and interpretative openness. What might sound like a theory of aesthetic mirroring in fact radically testifies to the core potentiality of the literary work and the prereflective and thereby indeterminate nature of what Iser has called a text’s “blanks.” 22 When turning from the merely metaphorical to the spatial, we ought to not understand the text’s matrix of intrinsic in-betweenness as the actual representation of intradiegetic in-between places, in-between characters, in-between narratives, etc. Rather, to scour a text for its in-between spaces means to experientially ‘enter’ a text by way of being actively associative, i.e. to not only comprehend and actualize the assemblage of aesthetic, structural 21 Rita Felski, “Introduction.” New Literary History 45.2 (Spring 2014): v-xi; vii. 22 Wolfgang Iser, Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997) 217ff. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 227 and narrative associations, but to outrightly perform the ontic presence of the associative as such. The act of reading is to actively represent (as in the performative meaning of the German darstellen) the ‘network of associations.’ Yet here, the questions arise: (1) How can we talk about the formal features, i.e. the ‘architecture,’ of the specific space of our experience, and (2) how does the text’s inherent in-betweenness productively relate to it? What complicates straight answers to these questions is the fact that the space in-between is utterly prereflective. The reader co-produces it, but she cannot grasp it. She can move through it, but she cannot all-encompassingly come to terms with it. She cannot store it. 23 As we are always already ‘being with’ the text, we are not merely ‘using’ it to uncover a fictive world and elucidate our judgments about it. Or, as Rita Felski puts it, “while we cannot help but impose ourselves on literary texts, we are also, inevitably, exposed to them.” 24 And even though “[t]he ethos of academic reading diverges significantly from lay reading,” 25 both reading practices treat the literary text as an extraordinary medium of communication, thus providing concentrated insights into the aforementioned network of associations. In either reading mode, the reader engages in this network, searching for in-between spaces in which to tie and secure more connections. Within these spaces and through these connections the reader leaves traces in the text. In a way, it becomes her text and hers to (re-)account for. That is to say that with regards to the tradition of reception aesthetics and literary hermeneutics, we are no longer looking for “the figure in the carpet.” We are knitting it into the fabric. Hence, the reader understands herself to be in proactive relationship with the text. She does not withdraw meaning from a text but co-produces it in her individual and ephemeral space in-between. Or, as Cyrus Hamlin puts it: The reader is thus made aware not only of what [she] understands by reading the text and how the text as discourse communicates such understanding, but more important [she] recognizes the basis for understanding to be the relationship established between [herself] and the text through the act of reading. 26 Thereby, the act of reading can very well be understood as a spatial practice. Arguably, it proves to be impossible to accurately reproduce one’s acts of reading, i.e. one’s experience with a text. Yet I argue that a reception theory, which understands aesthetic experience as the production of and the indulgence into in-between spaces, allows us a more concrete visualization of the network of associations that materializes in our experience with the text. Iser 23 This again relates to Bohrer’s understanding of presence in the literary aesthetics of suddenness (see fn. 19). 24 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature 3. 25 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature 12. 26 Cyrus Hamlin, “The Conscience of Narrative: Toward a Hermeneutics of Transcendence.” New Literary History 13.2 (Winter 1982): 205-30; 206 [emph. C.H.]. 228 d ustin b reitenWischer argues that “the text is the playground,” 27 to which I would like to add that it opens a play-space in and through which it represents its own hermeneutic potential. And even though the reader cannot fully seize the in-between, for there is no outside from where to seize it, the in-between automatically provides the reader with the distance necessary for introspection and self-perception, while at the same time having her in a state of a most immediate and prereflective sensation. 28 With regards to the temporal order of the in-between we may want to think of it (as I noted earlier) as a space of radical suddenness (Bohrer) and presence (Gumbrecht). 29 It is for the sake of its spatiotemporal intensity and its individual elusiveness that the in-between can never solely be equated with the formal features of the object (the structure of the text, the design of the narrative, the language, etc.), the actual space of reception (the living-room, the library, the park), 30 or the diegetic universe of the text (the Pequod, Yoknapatawpha County, or East Egg). Only and strictly in the conjunction of the totality of the literary text and the reader’s aesthetic attitude is it possible for the experience’s imaginary in-between space to emerge. 31 27 Wolfgang Iser, “The Play of the Text” 250. 28 This paradox might be adequately explained with what Winfried Fluck calls “the double reference of fiction.” He writes: “The double reference of fiction creates an object that is never stable and identical with itself. And it is this non-identity that can be seen as an important source of aesthetic experience, because it allows us to do two things at the same time: to articulate imaginary elements and to look at them from the outside” (Winfried Fluck, “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative.” The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Literature after the Transnational Turn. Eds. Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar and Johannes Voelz. [Dartmouth: The UP of New England, 2013] 237-64; 241). 29 See fn. 20. 30 And since the in-between functions as somewhat of a fundamental-ontological ‘super concept,’ the actual space of our experience must have a more or less significant influence on the production of the experience’s in-between space. 31 Towards the end of his academic career, Wolfgang Iser had devoted a number of publications to the phenomenon of emergence. He understood his work on emergence as a logical continuity of his work on aesthetic experience and literary anthropology. “Emergence,” Iser writes, “designates the coming into being of hitherto non-existent phenomena” (Wolfgang Iser, “Modes of Emergence.” Aesthetic Transgression: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature. Eds. Thomas Claviez, Ulla Haselstein and Sieglinde Lemke [Heidelberg: Winter, 2006] 19-37; 19). Or, as Aleida Assmann writes in an essay on Iser’s theory of emergence: “Emergence as a solely future-oriented worldview must be marked by extraordinary trust in the free development beyond human will and consciousness. […] Emergence thus signifies permanent movement; the emergent is defined as that which causes the incessant change of lifeworlds” (Aleida Assmann, “Nachwort.” Wolfgang Iser. Emergenz: Nachgelassene und verstreut publizierte Essays. Ed. Alexander Schmitz [Konstanz: Konstanz UP, 2013] 309-20; 316 [transl. D.B.]). With regards to both claims one might very well argue that the in-between is somewhat of an emergent phenomenon. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 229 IV. Being In-Between; or, An Exemplary Reading of Sylvia Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” In the following, I will turn to one of Sylvia Plath’s early poems, “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” (1956), in which the author indulges in a curious celebration of her speaker’s subjectivity. 32 I want to provide an interpretation of this poem by scouring for the self-representation of its inherent in-between spaces. The poem’s first stanza reads as follows: I? I walk alone; The midnight street Spins itself from under my feet; When my eyes shut These dreaming houses all snuff out; Through a whim of mine Over gables the moon’s celestial onion Hangs high. Torn between insecurity and omnipotence the speaker opens the poem by asking “I? ”, ultimately putting herself up for dispute. “I? ”, as in “Am ‘I’ speaking? ”, “Am ‘I’ here? ”, or even “Do ‘I’ exist? ” The “I? ” must strike the reader as a curious question, for it strangely negates matters of self-abstraction as a subject at a point where such self-abstraction is pragmatically and grammatically necessary. 33 For usually, when one is called upon, but in doubt whether it is really oneself who is addressed, the reaction is “Me? ”, as in “Are you calling upon me? ” or “Do you want me to do a particular thing? ” The “I” as a subject towards the world is never in dialogue as an “I” but as a “me.” The “I” is by definition active, not reactive. The addressee is, in short, is never subject but object of an address. The proper grammatical, pragmatical, social and, ultimately, aesthetic reaction of the “I” is therefore to turn itself into a responsive “me.” It is the latter that is spoken to, expected to, looked upon. Hence, Plath’s speaker deliberately breaks with the common social structure of a dialogue by having the “I” put her allegedly prereflective core subjectivity in the place of the usually responsive “me.” Yet I want to suggest that from the outset the speaker’s lack of self-abstraction is not solely a matter of confident self-empowerment but also already an expression of her insecure disposition towards her own poetic universe. Very much in line with what Frederick Buell writes about Plath’s Esther in her novel The Bell Jar, I argue that in her poem “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” Plath’s speaker immediately puts forth herself as her own dialectical other who 32 Sylvia Plath, “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” (1956). The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. 37-38. 33 The following paragraph roughly paraphrases and follows one of George Herbert Mead’s central arguments on self-declamation. Cf. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972) esp. 174ff. 230 d ustin b reitenWischer reveals herself as vulnerably, anxiously, and obsessively self-conscious, yet with a frightening lack of an inner, stable “self”; external events are caught in the web of an intense and ruthlessly analytic self-awareness, one which is anxiously preoccupied with an insufficiency or a vacancy where a self should be. 34 “I? / I walk alone; ” are the first two verses, the alleged loneliness of the second verse immediately referring back to the self-questioning “I? ”. It seems as if there is no need for a responsive “me” when there is nobody around. The “I” revolves around itself. Yet by way of putting herself in question as an “I” the speaker originates in a world that is venturing in existence. For in the beginning, the “I” is without a world. It is upon her as an “I” to create it: “I walk alone; / The midnight street / Spins itself from under my feet; ” It is midnight, the beginning of a new day, and the world literally opens up from underneath the speaker’s feet. Both on the level of the ontological and the poetical, the speaker’s ways of worldand self-making are extraordinarily intriguing for an understanding of what I am calling reading in-between. Ontologically, to employ one of Heidegger’s central insights, the speaker experiences that “[t]he Self, which as such has to lay the basis for itself, can never get that basis into its power; and yet, as existing, it must take over Being-a-basis.” 35 What is more, the “I” as self “is its world existingly,” 36 meaning that the world is always already by way of the self’s being. The self “has to lay the basis” but cannot possibly control that basis - the poetic paradox of all worldmaking. Yet the advantage of poetry is to call the self into coexistence with itself as a self. This is to say that, as Timothy Morton argues, “[t]o write poetry is to force the reader to coexist with fragile phrases, fragile ink, fragile paper: to experience the many physical levels of a poem’s architecture. […] [S]heer coexistence is what there is.” 37 Poetically, the speaker thereby conflates the acts of writing and reading in the practice of worldmaking. The second and third stanzas read: IMake houses shrink And trees diminish By going far; my look’s leash Dangles the puppet-people Who, unaware how they dwindle, Laugh, kiss, get drunk, Nor guess that if I choose to blink They die. 34 Frederick Buell, “Sylvia Plath’s Traditionalism.” boundary 2 5.1 (1976): 195-212; 196. 35 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 330. 36 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 416 [emph. M.H.]. 37 Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry.” New Literary History 43.2 (Spring 2012): 205-24; 222. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 231 I When in good humor, Give grass its green Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun With gold; Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold Absolute power To boycott any color and forbid any flower To be. The speaker’s way of worldmaking thus depends on subjective will (“Make houses shrink”), perspective (“And trees diminish / By going far”), moods (“When in good humor”), imagination (“sprang out of my head”), and, most of all, dialogue (“you appear”). The speaker has equipped herself with the task of bringing an aesthetic object into the world, namely herself as an unconditional “I.” It is in and through the appearance of the first person singular and her air of questioned self-examination where an in-between space most notably opens up. The conjunction of writing and reading demolishes the soliloquy. The self-declamation and the self-questioning of the “I” have been turned into the representation of utmost uncertainty and structural openness. As Gadamer writes: “To ask a question means to bring into the open. The openness of what is in question consists in the fact that the answer is not settled. It must still be undetermined, awaiting a decisive answer. The significance of questioning consists in revealing the questionability of what is questioned.” 38 In “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” the speaker is henceforth caught in an aesthetically auspicious balancing act: it is on her to empathetically experience herself in order to enter into a dialogue with herself. In a way, the poem draws a poetic line between early-20th century theories of aesthetic sympathy (Einfühlungstheorie) and mid-20th century literary and philosophical hermeneutics, for, on the one hand, it stages a subject that seems lost in practices of self-externalization (in order to authentically produce art); and, on the other, it forces its subject into a dialogue with itself as someone else (in order to produce understanding). In doing so, the reader witnesses the constitution of a poetical tension, which is aesthetically auspicious, but radically metaphorical, for it is upon her to performatively represent the part of the other in order to establish the poem’s interior dialogue. At this point, I would like to return to the beginning of this essay. As Heinz Schlaffer argues, reading poetry is a performative act because in a way one is always reading a poem out loud, meaning that one cannot browse a poem without the risk of not comprehending anything at all. 39 Schlaffer therefore claims that this mode of reading ultimately leads to the fact that whoever speaks a poem becomes its speaker. This is what he calls the appropriation of poetry. Poems are not merely read; they are taken over: “Whoever speaks or recites a poem […] affords the pronoun’s grammatical person 38 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 357. 39 Heinz Schlaffer, “Die Aneignung von Gedichten” 39ff. 232 d ustin b reitenWischer steadiness and identity through bodily presence.” 40 Much in line with Iser’s aesthetic theory of us as readers being “both ourselves and someone else at the same time,” Schlaffer argues in favor of a specific role-acquisition, which is based on ontic desire and ontological self-understanding. I would even go so far as to say that Schlaffer’s aesthetics of poetry reception radicalize Iser’s understanding of reading as role-play, for the act of appropriation infers deliberate willingness towards instantaneous possession. Plath’s poem stages this powerful and almost authoritative move by having the speaker perform (and, at the same time, ridicule) the role of an omnipotent creator. The speaker makes “houses shrink / And trees diminish”, she gives “grass its green” and “endow[s] the sun / With gold”, and she holds “Absolute power”. The “I” is putting itself into a tense and expectant relationship with itself as that “I,” thus surrounding herself with an aura of “the partially frustrated, partially satisfied will to create.” 41 Accordingly, each of the four stanzas starts with the verse “I.” Yet for the speaker to be that selfproclaimed “I” means to be utterly alone, separated and secluded from the imperfect world and all its inhabitants around it. At this point, one could read the “I” as a precursor of the speaker in Plath’s 1961 poem “Mirror.” 42 Here, the objectified I (as subjectified object) opens the poem by saying: “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. / I am not cruel, only truthful -“. Therefore, one can very well attest these poems a fissure between the figure and the texts that contain it, since the texts are themselves traces of the imagination. Torn between Plath’s overwhelming need to write and her equally overwhelming self-doubt, the poems implicitly contradict themselves, denying the possibility of their own existence. Their voice is energized by its very disablement. 43 “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” is an artist’s dialogue with its object, with herself, with the reader, with the public, with an imaginary or a significant other. Hence, the final stanza reads as follows: IKnow you appear Vivid at my side, Denying you sprang out of my head, Claiming you feel Love fiery enough to prove flesh real, Though it’s quite clear All you beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, From me. 40 Heinz Schlaffer, “Die Aneignung von Gedichten” 42 [transl. D.B.]. 41 Steven Gould Axelrod and Nan Dorsey, “The Drama of Creativity in Sylvia Plath’s Early Poems.” Pacific Coast Philology 32.1 (1997): 76-86; 78. 42 Sylvia Plath, “Mirror” (1961). The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. 173-74. 43 Steven Gould Axelrod, “The Mirror and the Shadow: Plath’s Poetic of Self-Doubt.” Contemporary Literature 26.3 (Fall 1985): 286-301; 290. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 233 Here, the “you” can be understood as a multitude of others, whereas according to the logic of the soliloquy the speaker first and foremost turns to herself and (or rather, as) the poetic universe she embodies. Due to this tilted mirroring effect and since we cannot possibly equate the speaker with the outside author the “I” is as much part of that universe as the “houses,” the “trees,” the “sun” of the first three stanzas, and, not the least, the “you” of the final stanza. Following Schlaffer, to be the speaker of a poem ultimately means to not simply be the producer and reproducer of one’s own speech act but to play an essential part in the verbalization of one’s core self. The speaker’s power to potentially “forbid” her world “to be” signifies the fragile state of imminent self-annihilation. This is stressed by the embracing rhyme of “to be” and “from me.” Being is a self-given gift, for nothing can be by the speaker, which is outside her speech (and, hence, her reach). Whereas the “you” believes to “prove flesh real”, the “I” knows that reality is always already staged reality. In a two-fold way, the speaker’s world is a mindscape: on the one hand, it is a fictive ‘as if’ world with its own aesthetic self-purpose; on the other hand, it is a potential ‘not yet’ world that distributes its dividend to the real. Both these worlds deny the legitimacy of truth (“forbid any flower / To be”) and rather embody the truthfulness of their possibilities. It is the highest principle of these worlds to be proclaimed, and it is only upon (self-) proclamation that they are possible, which amounts to the presumption of the aforementioned staged reality. *** As to the potential politics of the in-between, the discussed struggle in Plath’s poem can also more generally be understood as an extensive, i.e. space-consuming, act of longed-for recognition and/ or resistance. From this perspective, the aesthetic would not demolish the politics of the poem but instead stage its own politics as a gateway to individual, social, and cultural identification (which, of course, refers back to my earlier discussion of predominantly non-aesthetic ‘in-between’ spaces). This is to say that a theory of aesthetic in-betweenness bears the potential to not only counter anti-aesthetic sentiments but to make them obsolete. In the past thirty years, as Heinz Ickstadt argues, “particularly in American Studies, the aesthetic - mostly for political and ideological reasons - has fallen into disrepute. 44 ” Due to radical antihegemonic revisions and the (necessary) implementation of a wide range of identity studies the aesthetic has come under scrutiny to be ominously indifferent to matters of identity, difference and ideological resistance. “The aesthetic,” Ickstadt continues, “has been denounced from various positions as repressive, as immoral, as hopelessly fetishistic and ideological.” 45 In accordance with Ickstadt’s analysis, my theory of aesthetic theory and literary reception argues in favor of “aesthetics different in purpose, use, and 44 Heinz Ickstadt, “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics.” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Ed. Emory Elliot (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002) 263-78; 263. 45 Heinz Ickstadt, “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics” 264. 234 d ustin b reitenWischer function at different historical moments or for different social groups,” 46 for this allows us to exceed the in-between’s aesthetic limits by way of turning towards its sociopolitical inclusiveness. This means that we must not equate the in-between, as I presented it, with a space of cultural hegemony, in which preordained suppressions establish their full potential (race, class, gender, etc.), but rather as a play-space for an infinite amount of participatory roles and identity conceptions (i.e. the role of woman, man, lover, poet, etc.). With regards to my reading of Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist,” one would underestimate the aesthetic potential of the “I” were it merely understood as a hegemonizing apparatus, a gap, a void, or an empty signifier. As an offer to the experience’s space in-between the “I” becomes a performative display of an aesthetically forced (and forcefully produced) rift - a rift between diegetic speaker and non-diegetic reader. Hence, in the appropriation of the “I” the reader also appropriates this rift. The in-between thereby appears as a site of struggle over the poetic life-world, a site of “vivid appearance.” In turn, the speaker’s excess becomes an invasion of the poem’s non-diegetic counterpart. At this point, it becomes deliberately unclear whose “beauty” and whose “wit” is a “gift” from whom. Both poem and reader claim: “From me.” In fact, the speaker discharges a force against the anxiety of her own looming disappearance. Her turn towards the non-diegetic life-world of the reader is an expression of a dire melancholic struggle. At the same time, it is the most powerful poetic expression of her utter unknowability of herself without the mirroring, i.e. appropriating, other. The “I” cannot know itself as an “I.” The latter constantly appears as a presence, which it tries to comply with. Both modes of “I” and “I” that have been sketched here do not entirely match because they are doomed to exist in slightly separate temporal spheres - the spheres of appearing and appropriation. Yet this unresolvable aloofness marks the space in-between, which the reader’s experience desires to fill. It is at this point where also the reader is fundamentally invited to overcome the boundaries of her own identity. The speaker, on the other hand, turns from being a poetical force to an aesthetic presence. Even though she might be, in Iser’s words, “entangled” with her self-depiction, her entanglement proves to be an extraordinary entry point for the reader’s own intratextual entanglement. 47 But the reader, as it turns out, is not solely entangled in a world that opens up in front of her eyes. Rather, she is grabbed and held by the dilemmatic disposition of her non-identical appropriation. Both speaker and reader are drawn into parallel ‘to and fro’ movements between self-extension and self-recovery. However, this partially self-estranging move allows the reader to use the semblance of her self-estranging otherness in order to find out what she has experienced. The experience the reader has made immediately becomes part of her present aesthetic (and productive) ‘self-abandonment.’ Gadamer refers to this state as the moment of being outside oneself (Außersichsein), 48 in which the reader is capable to remain true to herself and also step outside herself 46 Heinz Ickstadt, “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics” 264. 47 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading 230. 48 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 122. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 235 in order to grasp the complete playfulness of a text’s excessive ‘as if’ world and its relation to the reader’s self-understanding. In fact, in Plath’s poem the reader experiences her own self in radical openness. We might, in the words of Georgiana Banita, speak of a “unique interplay between image and self-image.” 49 Being outside herself turns out to be the mode in which she, as Gadamer puts it, “acquired a new horizon within which something can become an experience.” 50 In and through these modes of poetic and aesthetic self-abandonment, the poem manages to openly turn towards an in-between space, in which the radical act of scrutinizing an undisputed deixis performatively stages the surrounding reality and the truthfulness of human subjectivity. By resiliently moving to and fro, extension and appropriation become modes of performative doubling that go well beyond the appearance of mirroring effects. The “I” does not ask the reader to face her; she rather transforms herself into becoming that very gaze. As such, the speaker is able to turn towards a reality whose center she is, while the reader places herself within this force field. But the reader daringly seeks to take over this space, provoking a strife in which the in-between vigorously appears. After all, her act of reading is inherently determined by the experience of something that is not there yet, but that comes about in her play with the text. Works Cited Assmann, Aleida. “Nachwort.” Wolfgang Iser. Emergenz: Nachgelassene und verstreut publizierte Essays. Ed. Alexander Schmitz. Konstanz: Konstanz UP, 2013. 309-20. Axelrod, Steven Gould. “The Mirror and the Shadow: Plath’s Poetic of Self-Doubt.” Contemporary Literature 26.3 (Fall 1985): 286-301. Axelrod, Steven Gould and Nan Dorsey. “The Drama of Creativity in Sylvia Plath’s Early Poems.” Pacific Coast Philology 32.1 (1997): 76-86. Banita, Georgiana. “’The Same Identical Woman’: Sylvia Plath in the Media.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 40.2 (Fall 2007): 38-60. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Transl. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Bieger, Laura. Ästhetik der Immersion: Raum-Erleben zwischen Welt und Bild. Las Vegas, Washington und die White City (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007). ---. “No Place Like Home; or, Dwelling in Narrative.” New Literary History 46.1 (Winter 2015): 17-39. Bohrer, Karl Heinz. Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance. Transl. Ruth Crowley. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Breitenwischer, Dustin. Das Dazwischen ästhetischer Erfahrung. Paderborn: Fink, [forthcoming]. Buell, Frederick. “Sylvia Plath’s Traditionalism.” boundary 2 5.1 (1976): 195-212. 49 Georgiana Banita, “’The Same Identical Woman’: Sylvia Plath in the Media.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 40.2 (Fall 2007): 38-60; 38. 50 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 348. 236 d ustin b reitenWischer Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Penguin, 2005. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. ---. “Introduction.” New Literary History 45.2 (Spring 2014): v-xi. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Transl. Saskya Iris Jain. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Fluck, Winfried. “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory.” New Literary History 31.1 (Winter 2000): 175-210. ---. “Why We Need Fiction: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsgeschichte.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Eds. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 365-84. ---. “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer“. The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Literature after the Transnational Turn. Eds. Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar and Johannes Voelz. Dartmouth: The UP of New England, 2013. 237-64. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22-27. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Bildkunst und Wortkunst.” Was ist ein Bild? Ed. Gottfried Boehm. Munich: Fink, 2001. 90-104. ---. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2006. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT P, 2001. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. Hamlin, Cyrus. “The Conscience of Narrative: Toward a Hermeneutics of Transcendence.” New Literary History 13.2 (Winter 1982): 205-30. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. Honneth, Axel. “Von der zerstörerischen Kraft des Dritten: Gadamer und die Intersubjektivitätslehre Heideggers.” Unsichtbarkeit: Stationen einer Theorie der Intersubjektivität. Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. 49-70. Ickstadt, Heinz. “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics.” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Ed. Emory Elliot. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. 263-78. Iser, Wolfgang. “Representation: A Performative Act.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 236-48. ---. “The Play of the Text.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 249-61. ---. “Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fiction.” New Literary History 21.4 (Fall 1990): 939-55. ---. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. ---. “Modes of Emergence.” Aesthetic Transgression: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature. Eds. Thomas Claviez, Ulla Haselstein and Sieglinde Lemke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2006. 19-37. Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972. Moore, Thomas. “Neither Here Nor There.” Parabola 25.1 (2000): 34. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 237 Morton, Timothy. “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry.” New Literary History 43.2 (Spring 2012): 205-24. Pany, Doris. Wirkungsästhetische Modelle: Wolfgang Iser und Roland Barthes im Vergleich. Erlangen and Jena: Palm & Enke, 2000. Plath, Sylvia. “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” (1956). The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. 37-38. ---. “Mirror” (1961). The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. 173-74. Ricoeur, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Ed. Don Ihde. Transl. Willis Domingo et al. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. Santiago, Silviano. The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture. Ed. Ana Lúcia Gazzola. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Schlaffer, Heinz. “Die Aneignung von Gedichten: Grammatisches, rhetorisches und pragmatisches Ich in der Lyrik.” Poetica 27, 1-2 (1996): 38-57. Schwab, Gabriele. Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. ---. The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Seel, Martin. Aesthetics of Appearing. Transl. John Farrell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Szondi, Peter. Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics. Transl. Martha Woodmannsee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Call for Papers for REAL Vol. 33/ 2017 Meteorologies of Modernity: Weather and Climate Discourses in the Anthropocene edited by Sarah Fekadu, Isabel Kranz, and Tobias Döring The current era of environmental transition on a planetary scale - generally termed “the Anthropocene” - calls for a reformulation and profound reconceptualization of the methods, disciplinary boundaries and premises that used to define the humanities. Though the term was first coined by the sciences in order to designate the current era in which humans emerge as a major environmental agency, recent work by historians, literary critics and philosophers has shown that the humanities can no longer ignore the Anthropocene. In fact, they are deeply involved in it. In an age when the very subject of the humanities - the human - has changed in status to a geophysical force with scale effects that are difficult to imagine let alone predict, the very distinctions between nature and culture, human and natural history are called into question. In particular, what is challenged by these ongoing developments are our capacities of imagination and representation. While we might be able to rationally grasp the fact of human influence on the earth and atmosphere, we can hardly experience ourselves in this mode of existence. Moreover, the Anthropocene marks a decisive change in our relation to time and history: the effects of global warming prompt us to rethink and broaden frameworks that are constitutively modern. More radically, one might even argue that in replacing the Holocene, the Anthropocene marks the end of modernity. The projected volume takes this historical juncture as a focal point and seeks to examine it by looking at two components central to our understanding of the Anthropocene: weather and climate. In fact, weather, with its characteristics of unpredictability and unsteadiness, can be considered the paradigm of climate discourses in a time when climate is no longer a relatively stable force. We invite essays that address the present need to think and write about climate change by historicizing climate discourses and their relation to weather from the perspectives of literary and interdisciplinary cultural studies. We especially welcome contributions that work across different periods and genres (like weather debates in the nineteenth century or the contemporary cli-fi novel), disciplines (like literary criticism versus cartography), and media (like literary and visual media), and that address a broader range of geographical contexts. The aim of our volume is to use the huge meteorological archive built throughout the centuries in literature and other media, so as to explore aesthetic, affective and metaphorical potentials of climate change. In this way, we also aim to move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and to present new theoretical or critical approaches that may come to terms with the profound representational and imaginative challenges of the Anthropocene. This collection of essays explores practices of reading and their connection to the rise of academic literary studies in the US throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The contributors to this volume shed light on the complex relation between the professionalization of reading and the question of what constitutes the values of literature. Examining a variety of distinct reading modes (distant vs. close reading, reading for form vs. reading for politics, suspicious reading vs. naive reading), this volume traces not only the consequences of professional reading, but it also demarcates the institutional spaces in which the currencies of literary value are socially ratified (e.g. the university class rooms, public lending libraries, middle-class women’s magazines, the internet). Reading Practices features essays on the institutional history of US academic literary criticism and the question of literary-historical periodization; it includes discussions of ethnically disenfranchised reader groups and investigations into the popular reading markets; the volume also looks at recent developments within the digital reading worlds and neuroscientific approaches to the act of reading.