On having an earthquake and making a narrative noise

I’ve been taking guilty pleasure recently in a book called A High Wind in Jamaica. Guilty, in part, because I heard about it on NPR and I harbor some ridiculous lit-geek illusion that I should discover great works of forgotten literature intrepidly on my own. Or maybe because of how insufferable some of the scholars on NPR can sound--I suspect some combination of the two. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by Andrew Sean Greer’s great little review of Richard Hughes’ novel. Perhaps because I was sympathetic to Greer’s self-described malaise with literature recently, his feeling that the very act of reading a novel had slowly become joyless because of his constant need to engage it through a lens of academic inquiry. He talked about how he longed to return to the days of enjoying a book so much that he had to steal hours to keep reading it deep into the night, hiding under a blanket with a flashlight in bed. Or perhaps because I just knew I’d dig any novel that features angry little girls who scare the hell out of pirates. Whatever the case, I tossed aside the grumpy Adorno section of my dissertation that I was footnoting and drove immediately over to my local chain book-store (limited choices where I’m at) and bought a copy. I laughed out loud (much to the clerk’s concern) even before opening the New York Review of Books' recent reprint when I saw the cover art: a close-up from “outsider artist” Henry Darger’s The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion! Oh yes, this was going to be good. I have to say, I loved this book. Any novel that can simultaneously negotiate a dark analysis of human behavior while reveling in mysterious child-like thought processes long-forgotten to adults gets my thumbs-up. The story describes a Lord of the Flies-style of childhood becoming outside the strictures of the social. Sent from their beloved and wild Jamaica to attend school in London--a magical modern place they only know about from stories, unable to envision even what a train might look like (in a Fitzcarraldo-esque moment, they imagine something like a steamship floating on land), Emily and John and their young cohort find their boat commandeered by pirates mid-journey. But in a fun reversal, the pirates discover the task of dealing with the children rather more than they can handle. The negotiation between the pirates and the children unmasks the less-endearing sides of childhood experience. Even better, Hughes’ makes the great decision to focus not so much on the little boys, but to narrate instead through the eyes of Emily, a 10 year old girl on the cusp of entering adulthood and feeling at odds with what she’s coming to understand about the world. While living in Jamaica, Emily enjoys swimming naked and climbing trees with the boys, not diving with as much technical grace as her brother John, but “always off the higher boughs than he would”. On her wild home island, she engages in tomboy behavior much to the chagrin of her mother, who tells her that she’s “too big to bathe naked anymore,” but after a dangerous swimming episode in a jerry-rigged night-gown “decency was let go hang again: it is hardly worth being drowned for--at least, it does not at first sight appear to be.” Emily’s rejection of adult restrictions takes on a different form in the pirate boat, where the boys love to hang upside down in the rigging and stage mock battles while the other little girls insist on making dolls out of any available object--mop heads, drunken monkeys (drunken monkeys!), a large pig. Emily disdains the other girls’ behavior and focuses instead on understanding her own inner workings and the complex ways of the pirates. Hughes describes Emily’s use of narrative to negotiate the stresses of her new pirate life brilliantly: As well, she told herself, to herself, endless stories: as many as there are in The Arabian Nights, and quite as involved. But the strings of words she used to utter aloud had nothing to do with this: I mean, that when she made a sort of narrative noise (which was often), she did it for the noise’s sake: the silent, private formation of sentences and scenes, in one’s head, is far preferable for real story-telling. If you had been watching her then, unseen, you could only have told she was doing it by the dramatic expressions of her face, and her restless flexing and tossing--and if she had the slightest inkling you were there, the audible rigamarole would have started again. (No one who has private thoughts going on loudly in his own head is quite sure of their not being overheard unless he is providing something else to occupy foreign ears.) She was still on the border line: so often Child still, and nothing but Child...it needed little conjuring...Anansi and the Blackbird, Genies and golden thrones...She had never yelled so loud at Ferndale, for sheer pleasure in her voice, as now she yelled in the schooner’s cabin, caroling like a larger, fierce lark. Delightfully, the pirates don’t know what to make of her: “Neither Jonsen nor Otto were nervous men: but the din she made sometimes drove them almost distracted. It was very little use telling her to shut up: she only remembered for such a short time. In a minute she was whispering, in two she was talking, in five her voice was in full blast.” At another point in the novel, as Emily recuperates in bed from an accident on deck, she graffitis the walls and floors of the pirate captain’s cabin with her pencil, drawing creatures out of the abstract shapes she sees in the knots of wood and lamenting that she doesn’t have her paint box with her. The captain’s initial irritation with her compulsive artwork and storytelling later turns to wistful nostalgia after she departs on her way to the adult world--although her narrative skills will later bring him to serious grief. I won’t give away the climax or the details of Emily’s subsequent confrontation with the socialized world in London--her awe at the complexities of women’s clothing and her frustration with the irrational codes of civilized feminine behavior that she eventually (sadly) accepts--but I will describe one final favorite bit of the novel that takes place immediately before she departs from Jamaica: Then it came. The water in the bay began to ebb away, as if someone had pulled the plug: a foot or so of sand and coral gleamed for a moment new to the air: then back the sea rushed in miniature rollers which splashed right up to the feet of the palms. Mouthfuls of turf were torn away: and on the far side of the bay a small piece of cliff tumbled into the water: sand and twigs showered down, dew fell from the trees like diamonds: birds and beasts, their tongues at last loosened, screamed and bellowed: the ponies, though quite unalarmed, lifted up their heads and yelled. That was all: a few moments. Then silence...the naked children too continued to stand motionless beside the quiet ponies, dew on their hair and eyelashes, shine on their infantile round paunches. But as for Emily, it was too much. The earthquake went completely to her head. She began to dance, hopping laboriously from one foot on to another. John caught the infection. He turned head over heels on the damp sand, over and over in an elliptical course, till before he knew it he was in the water, and so giddy as hardly to be able to tell up from down. At that, Emily knew what she wanted to do. She scrambled on to a pony and galloped him up and down the beach, trying to bark like a dog. The Fernandez children stared, solemn but not disapproving. John, shaping a course for Cuba, was swimming as if sharks were paring his toenails. Emily rode her pony into the sea, and beat him and beat him till he swam: and so she followed John towards the reef, yapping herself hoarse. It must have been fully a hundred yards before they were spent. Then they turned for the shore, John holding on to Emily’s leg, puffing and gasping, both a little over-done, their emotion run-down. Presently John gasped: “You shouldn’t ride on your bare skin, you’ll catch ringworm.” “I don’t care if I do,” said Emily. Here, in this moment of over-the-top jouissance and pubescent sexuality marshalling all the forces of nature, Emily gets her earthquake. And I say “gets” because she refers back to this event throughout the novel as a gift, a special jewel she’s been given by nature that she returns to time and again at critical crisis moments throughout the story, as if to say, “This adult world with its silly rules and restrictions may all be terrifying and stupid and disappointing, but at least I have an earthquake!” Hughes’ prose describes her nurturing the experience in a secret child-like way--and also in an artist’s way--that’s just so gorgeous and insightful. One of the best parts of encountering this novel was recovering the same experience of literature as Greer said he’d been missing in his review: I stayed up all night relishing Emily’s earthquake as well, and just for pure pleasure’s sake.

Reading and writing the digital

In the middle of a panicked rush to prep for the start of the fall semester, I wanted to post something in response to the recent spate of blog exchanges between Levi Bryant and Ian Bogost. I haven’t been updating this blog much recently, but the discussion about how to think through a rhetorics of digital culture and also rumblings about developing a philosophical video game has compelled me to get more involved. I’ve been using theories of mass media, histories of writing technologies and computing technologies, information theory and cognitive science to think through contemporary literary aesthetics in my work. As I’ve begun teaching more in the past few years, I find that students who might not have considered themselves interested in literature respond enthusiastically to this approach and discover new avenues into literature appreciation. As I write this, I’m thinking in part about Levi’s recent post asking “How do we get students to read?” There are many ways to show students that the current way they negotiate texts is not inherently weak. Sure, they might not read the same way as previous generations, they might not enter higher education with all the skills necessary to read critically, but these are skills that they work to acquire in college. As evidenced even in the layout of this neglected blog, I enjoy using concepts such as “constraint” and “play,” computer programming fundamentals like loops and subroutines, nested media realities and transmedia narratives, and contemporary visual culture and technology studies to help students negotiate literary texts and composition skills. Contrary to the academic lament that “students today don’t care about reading or writing” (a lament which, it’s worth noting, is not unique to our moment), I find that students have ample ability to negotiate complex narrative structures, shift in and out of perspectives, problem-solve, balance multi-tiered information--all skills enhanced by aspects of “growing up digital” and all uniquely attuned to literary studies. I agree with Ian Bogost that nuanced work on new media remains somewhat lacking in academic humanities--that is, we need more theorists who have the various skills needed to bridge the gap between technological and humanities fields. On the one hand, some new media scholars take a highly celebratory and evangelical stance on the technologies they discuss. I find this to be the case in much of the video game theory I’ve read. It’s as if the effort to prove that these cultural objects are worth scholarly interest force these championing theorists to overlook an analysis of the more problematic aspects of video games, such as corporate complicity or a deeper critique of the means of production. (I enjoy and use Henry Jenkins’ work as well; however, I share similar concerns as those that Ian notes in his post). Again, in terms of the resistance that the gaming theory crowd often faces in academia, it makes sense that this focus on the positive would be one of the weaknesses of their theory. On the other hand, many traditional literary scholars tend to swerve dramatically in the opposite direction, taking a Luddite position that dismisses new media technology altogether as something not merely outside the purview of the literary, but actively detrimental to it. I think an effective literary-critical stance of new media can be informed by some skepticism and Marxist materialist criticism, especially when it acknowledges contemporary theories of immaterial production, but it also needs to do so in a way that doesn’t dismiss the object at hand. I don’t find either extreme of this debate ideal, although I should note that Bogost’s book, Persuasive Games, does succeed in achieving a higher level of critical complexity and analysis of gaming, and it also offers ideas that translate directly to the literary field. In particular, I find his concepts built around “procedural rhetorics” extremely useful. I teach American literature from the position that material shifts in media technologies are simultaneously anticipated by AND generative of formal changes in aesthetic literary production. It’s doubtful any current scholarship would argue that literature is a rarefied entity that exists as a closed system independent of its historical moment--so why this hesitation when it comes to new media technologies? Some of the arguments I’ve read against a new media approach remind me of the increasing “theory backlash” that was partially codified by the publication of Theory’s Empire a few years ago, an anthology which at times appeared to take a strange step backwards. Instead of a call for new modes of critical analysis, many of the established scholars in the collection appeared to return to a basic humanism and literary formalism, as if to argue these approaches had always been somehow superior to semiotics-based linguistic post-structuralist and postmodern theory. I agree that the application of theory can cause the literary work to get lost in the process, but why not a step forward instead to think through the technological and the material to complicate and respond to the semiotic moment in theory? As a discipline, literary studies has been experiencing a bit of an academic identity crisis in recent years, and it’s in part because of some of the issues Bogost outlines in his post. Namely, why isn’t there more support and enthusiasm for theorists who can subtly integrate technology, new media studies and the literary? I don’t understand arguments that suggest embracing digital culture in an English curriculum spreads us out too thin. Didn’t similar debates take place around the inclusion of Continental theory and identity politics in the 70s and 80s, or film theory and visual culture in the 80s and 90s? Of course, this isn’t to say that efforts aren’t being made. In fact, many institutions have begun to treat digital culture studies as a field in its own right. For example, a series of recent Mellon Grants specifically for “digital humanities” have been offered to encourage and support such efforts. Yet I find myself constantly up against a level of resistance to my own work and to the work of fellow scholars who are actively trying to bridge the gap between new media and literary theory. Haven’t these new technologies and their concurrent modes of thought already made a recognizable impact on literature as a whole? If literary studies is experiencing a crisis, isn’t that further proof that these topics are worth exploring as a new field of critical inquiry? To dismiss the current technological moment is to deny what can be most exciting about literature and the activity of writing for students. What I see with my students is not that they’re not reading or writing, but that they are doing quite a lot of it via complex new modes of textual expression. Can a student Twitter a detailed argument in 140 characters or less? Probably not. But the creativity used to negotiate new modes of writing is something every student understands, whether it’s a Twitter post or a thesis-driven college term paper.

acclimatizing

I discussed the OuLiPo, Burroughs and flarf with my lit students this week, putting the Lacanian lie to the idea of transparency in language, unpacking the beauty of constraint, juxtaposition and association. Also, students in my writing classes are about to read a chunk of Naomi Klein's No Logo (we'll see how that goes--color me shocked to learn that first-year students think anything written pre-2006 is "dated". Is a discussion of Tommy Hilfiger marketing campaigns really dated?). I'm also chairing an independent study, heading the writing program (with all its related bureaucratic fracas of assessments and proficiencies and learning outcomes) and directing the writing center. Oh, and finishing the dissertation. Right. Although, I do manage to get zen during my drive home from campus: the natural landscape is more beautiful than I expected, with huge trees, complicated southern foliage and lingering sunsets. Yet the stark socio-economic divide in this area is grim. I've never seen shanty towns and abject poverty like the poverty on the outskirts of town here. One of the great local ironies: the megamall requires the urban haute bourgeois to drive through some of the most depressed neighborhoods to get to a Macy's and an Orange Julius. Because of this unpleasant commute, the mall is slowly going bankrupt, only to be replaced store-for-store by an identical mall on the 'good' side of town. Talk about vampiric capitalism. I sense that many students on campus want to be more politically engaged and are eager to address these tensions in the community, but I can only watch and listen right now.

parse this

Love is metaphor; desire, metonymy.

sexy Turing test

I could never tell if you were in there. How could you say all those things and not be in there? Just a sexy Turing test, I guess.

"...lonely voles emerged from their funk"

I love any science reporting with assonance like that. I aspire to such prose stylings. Really, aren't we all lonely voles emerging from our funks? Oh, to be furry and round! Depressive rodent, triumphantly self-contained! Plath would dig lonely voles. Today, one of my first-year students wrote a brilliant paper using Sontag and Berger to discuss photography's disruption of time and the ambiguity of images. And then, in my lit class, we talked Emily Dickinson and the radical disjunction between lived experience, hand-written dashes, notes pinned to oven-warm bread, and printed text. I warned them all: language rolls through us, kids. A freight train with no engine or caboose. Give it up now. They didn't listen.

the dictionary

Langue et parole. The OuLiPo would approve. "Abominable snooow-man" is my favorite.