Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 387

April 1, 2013: Baseball in America: Symbolism

[In honor of this week’s Opening Day, a series on some of the many AmericanStudies connections to the national pastime. Add your responses and thoughts for a weekend post that’s sure to touch ‘em all!]

On two novels that put the sport to very distinct symbolic work.
Sports in general make very good metaphors—just ask George Carlin, whose bit on baseball vs. football remains one of the great metaphorical analyses of all time. But it seems to me that in American stories and narratives, no sport has more consistently offered up metaphors for key themes and issues than baseball: from fathers and sons in Field of Dreams (1989; spoiler alert!) to relationships and love in Bull Durham (1988) and For Love of the Game (1999), good and evil in The Natural (1952) to life and death in Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), communal hope and disappointment in “Casey at the Bat”(1888) to the Civil War in Play for a Kingdom (1998), American culture and literature are full to overflowing with baseball tales that depict yet transcend the sport. (I’ve even got my personal favorite baseball and America story, for when I finally write that screenplay.)With the exception of the putrid For Love of the Game, each of the works in that paragraph (and plenty of others I didn’t mention, such as 2011’s The Art of Fielding ) has a lot to recommend it. But to my mind there are two baseball novels that stand out even among that crowded and impressive field, vying for the title not only of greatest baseball work but of the ever-elusive Great American Novel. Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973) does so self-consciously, overtly, swinging for the fences from its title on; but if David James Duncan’s The Brothers K (1992) is not quite so blatant in its ambition, both the novel’s social and historical sweep (it covers with equal breadth the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s; Vietnam, leftist radicalism, Eastern philosophy, religion, work, love, death) and its multi-layered echoes of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) make clear its own quest for the pennant. The two novels differ greatly in tone—Roth’s is, like much of his work, sarcastic and cynical; Duncan’s far more earnest and poignant—but also, and more relevantly for this week’s series, in the uses to which they put their baseball threads.On the one hand, Roth’s novel is far more centrally composed of such threads than Duncan’s—every character in The Great American Novelis connected in one way or another to the book’s fictional baseball team (the Ruppert Mundys) and league (the Patriot League), whereas in Brothers K there are long sections in which we follow characters into very distinct settings and worlds (Vietnam, India, an isolated Canadian cabin) where baseball has little if any presence. Yet on the other hand, and without spoiling the specifics too fully, Duncan uses baseball, and its symbiotic relationship to the brothers’ father in particular, as a framing element in deeper and more structural ways, so that wherever the boys go, and whatever other themes their stories involve, we see the interconnections with the sport and its defining familial and American presences. Which is to say, I don’t know if Roth’s novel would fundamentally change if it focused on basketball, or soccer, or the publishing world, or any other sphere; while Duncan’s is to my mind, despite its breadth, a baseball novel through and through.Next diamond connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Baseball stories or works you’d highlight?

March 31, 2013: March 2013 Recap

[A recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying, which in this case began March 4thafter the February recap on March 2-3.]
March 4: Popular Fiction: Cultural Work: A series on popular fiction begins with Jane Tompkins, Twilight, Oprah, and the question of how and why we analyze popular art.March 5: Popular Fiction: Christian Novels: The series continues with one of the most under-narrated yet most consistently popular genres in American literature.March 6: Popular Fiction: Small-Town Soaps: The genre that links seemingly contrasting authors Sinclair Lewis and Grace Metalious, as the series rolls on.March 7: Popular Fiction: Guilty Pleasures: Thinking about the popular fiction we’re ashamed to love—yet love and read nonetheless!March 8: Popular Fiction: Paradigm Shift: The series concludes with the complex question of how and why we disparage or value best-sellers.March 9-10: Crowd-sourced Popular Fiction: Other AmericanStudiers weigh in on the week’s posts and topics.March 11: Supreme Contexts: Marbury and Balance: A series on key 19thcentury Supreme Court decisions starts with the one that established the Court’s role and power.March 12: Supreme Courts: Georgia and Sovereignty: The series continues with the cases that illustrate both the limitations and the possibilities of how the Court can respond to national issues.March 13: Supreme Contexts: Dred Scott and Definitions: The case that represents a low point for the Court’s social role—but the height of its defining powers.March 14: Supreme Contexts: Santa Clara County and Revision: The case that reimagined both the role of American businesses and one of our landmark laws, as the series rolls on.March 15: Supreme Contexts: Plessy and Activism: The historical portion of the series concludes with a case that can and perhaps should shift our sense of “judicial activism.”March 16-17: Supreme Contexts: The Cases Before Us: My take on a few of the lessons that such historical analyses of the Court can hold for very significant contemporary cases.March 18: Spring in America: Williams and Eliot: Snowstorms be damned, a series on spring in America starts with two distinct but perhaps parallel poetic visions of the season.March 19: Spring in America: “Appalachian Spring”: The series continues with the composer and work that helped bring America and classical music together.March 20: Spring in America: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”: The song that exemplifies why simple and symbolic can work just fine for social and political protest music.March 21: Spring in America: Children’s Stories: Frog and Toad, Abdul Gasazi, and children’s stories of spring explorations, as the series rolls on.March 22: Spring in America: The Mayflower and the Maypole: The series concludes with two very different sides to the Pilgrims/Puritans, as revealed by two spring images.March 23-24: Crowd-sourced Spring: Responses and other spring thoughts from many fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours please!March 25: National Big Read Recaps, Part 1: A follow up series to my roundtable on nominations for the Even Bigger Read, starting with Mary Rowlandson’s narrative.March 26: National Big Read Recaps, Part 2: The series continues with a nomination of Letters from an American Farmer.March 27: National Big Read Recaps, Part 3: The Day of the Locust, as the Even Bigger Read series rolls on.March 28: National Big Read Recaps, Part 4: Why we should all read Invisible Man.March 29: National Big Read Recaps, Part 5: James Welch’s Fool’s Crow, another nominee for a national Big Read.March 30: National Big Read Recaps, Part 6: The series concludes with the case for Sebastian Junger’s War.Next series starts tomorrow,BenPS. Responses to any of these posts or series? Things you’d like to see on the blog? Guest post ideas? Share, please!

March 30, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 6

[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that takes us there—and back again.The roundtable’s sixth and final presenter, my Fitchburg State University colleague Irene Martyniuk, nominated Sebastian Junger’s War . Compared to any of the other five nominees, Junger’s book—a very recent bestseller, and the inspiration for an Academy Award-nominated documentary to boot—might seem the least in need of broader exposure. But Irene made a compelling case that we can and should engage much more fully with War and its subjects, on a number of different levels.For one thing, as Irene noted, you could say the same two things of the war in Afghanistan that I just did about Junger’s book: that it’s been prominently featured in our collective consciousness for a good while now; yet that we somehow manage much of the time not to engage with it nearly enough. Junger’s book, quite simply, takes us there. For another thing, as Irene argued with particular force, tens of millions of American lives have been directly impacted by that war, and will continue to be for many decades to come—and Junger’s book brings the war home with its soldiers, and forces us to better recognize and engage with this sizeable and evolving American community.There’s at least one more significant, and perhaps even more complicated, place to which Junger’s book takes us, though: to the defining role that war has, in our contemporary moment, in our enduring national identity, and, perhaps, in our human consciousness.  As Irene put it, a hard but seemingly clear truth, and one from which Junger does not flinch, is that we are drawn to war, that it speaks to us somehow. I’m not claiming that’s true for all individuals, as that’d be a serious injustice to some of the best individuals I know. But collectively? We’ve got a deadly serious obsession with war, I’d say—and Junger’s book can help us admit that we’ve got a problem.March recap tomorrow,BenPS. So last chance for now: thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?

March 29, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 5

[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that disorients, devastates, and entirely delivers.The roundtable’s fifth presenter, Jim Donahue of SUNY Potsdam, nominated James Welch’s Fool’s Crow . If Invisible Man is a famous American novel that (I believe) few Americans have actually read, Fool’s Crow is an almost criminally unknown novel that, Jim compellingly argued, we should all read. For one thing, Jim reminded us, the novel dramatizes the events surrounding one of the most under-remembered (including, I’m ashamed to admit, by me) crucial American events: the 1870 Marias River Massacre. But even beyond such vital historical contexts, Fool’s Crow’s unique form produces two distinct and equally important effects on its readers.I’ve written in this space about Karl Jacoby’s amazing Shadows at Dawn, and specifically about Jacoby’s multi-vocal and –perspectival structure. Welch’s novel is similarly structured, moving through sections focalized entirely through the voice, perspective, and worldview of both Blackfoot and European American characters. Yet while Jacoby’s work of nonfiction has its historian “narrator” to guide readers through those sections, Welch throws us into each perspective with no guidance—leaving non-English words untranslated, introducing specific and uncontextualized place and character names, and so on. For non-native (perhaps even non-Blackfoot) readers, the effect is profoundly disorienting, forcing us to do what Jim called the “cognitive work” of trying to understand this distinct perspective.So on the one hand, to echo the end of yesterday’s post, Welch’s novel would fall squarely onto the “challenging” end of the spectrum. Yet on the other, as Jim argued and as I would agree, Fool’s Crow is one of the most beautifully written novels of the last few decades (and then some). And when it comes to considering works for a National Big Read, it’s difficult to overstate how important such aesthetic power could be—after all, if we want to introduce Americans to historical significance and cultural diversity we could give them Jacoby’s book (and that’d be great); but if we want to demonstrate the value and pleasure of reading itself, what it can do to us, I don’t know of any books that would hit us more than Fool’s Crow.Final nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?

March 28, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 4

[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that would bring greater visibility to profoundly American histories and identities.The roundtable’s fourth presenter, Kelley Wagers of Penn State Worthington Scranton, nominated Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . I don’t imagine I need to say much to introduce Ellison’s novel, which it’s fair to say is one of the most acclaimed and famous works of 20thcentury American literature. But of course acclaim and fame don’t necessarily equate to actual awareness and engagement, and Kelley made a compelling case for how a broad national reading of Ellison’s novel would bring greater visibility to some American stories that deserve and need it.Kelley focused on two distinct but interconnected such stories: the histories with which the novel engages; and the identity to which its narrator connects. On the former, Invisible Man has often been described as its title character’s metaphorical journey through many of the complex and crucial stages of African American history, and Kelley argued not only for the broad relevance of such histories, but for how the novel thus engages with the balance between individual and national histories to which we all connect. And on the latter, she noted that the African American men represented at length in existing Big Read selections are almost all accused criminals, making Ellison’s protagonist’s far different experiences and identity that much more worth our attention.I would agree with both of those emphases of Kelley’s, and would extend the latter point even further. In the panel’s discussion portion we talked a lot about the balance between accessibility and difficulty, between works that engage and works that challenge, and I can see good arguments on both ends of the spectrum for sure. But if we compare The Invisible Man to (for example) Mark Twain’s Jim or Harper Lee’s Tom Robinson, there’s one way in which I would definitely argue for Ellison’s character: his final line, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?,” challenges all Americans to consider what connects us, not just as members of a national fabric but as individuals with a great deal of (often invisible) common threads. Invisible Man might help us see the pattern.Next nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?

March 27, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 3

[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that speaks to much of our contemporary moment—and a broad American audience.The roundtable’s third presenter, Jeff Renye of Temple and La Salle Universities, nominated Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust . West’s tragically brief career produced (among a few other works) two particularly unique and striking novels, Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts ; both have plenty to recommend them and deserve more of a place in our collective consciousness, but Jeff argued convincingly for a couple particularly significant and salient components to Locust.For one thing, Locust remains, more than 70 years after its publication, perhaps the best and certainly one of the most complex and challenging representations of that defining American cultural presence and influence, Hollywood. West takes seriously the attractive as well as the destructive qualities to that place of dreams, and his depiction of it has yet to be surpassed. Yet as Jeff noted, West is fully aware of the even bigger dream—the American Dream—to which Hollywood, journeying to the West, and many other concurrent narratives can be connected, and there are likewise few novels that deal with the dark underbelly of the Dream (sometimes called the American Nightmare) better than Locust.Jeff also discussed at length some of the more practical questions that underlie my Even Bigger Read concept, however, and so I want to make sure to mention that part of his presentation as well. To paraphrase his point: it’s all well and good for interested academic scholars to talk about what books we’d like everyone to read, but it’s quite another matter to think actively about how we connect to our fellow Americans, particularly those for whom reading—and even literacy—is far more of a complicated challenge than a job requirement. At the very least, we need to think about books that will speak to broad American audiences—and Jeff made a great case that West’s novel can and would do so.Next nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?

March 26, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 2

[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that raises, and embodies, some defining national questions.The roundtable’s second presenter, Diana Polley of Southern New Hampshire University, nominated J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer . As Diana noted, Crèvecoeur’s book, which while generally treated as non-fiction could also be described (as she nicely put it) as the first American novel, represents in any case one of the first post-Revolutionary attempts to address—and still to date one of the most extended and explicit engagements with—the evolving and crucial question of what “American” means and entails.Diana did a great job making the case for why it is precisely Crèvecoeur’s emphasis on questions, rather than any particular answer (of his or of ours in analyzing his work), that makes his book one all Americans should read. For one thing, those questions allow him to consider virtually every significant issue of the era (most of which remain salient today); for another, his opening question, “What then is the American, this new man?” is just as open and potent in 2013 as it was in 1782; and for yet another, thinking of American identity as a series of questions highlights as well the fraught, contested, and potentially mythic nature of our national community.Diana likewise mentioned how much Crèvecoeur’s own life and identity highlight such American questions, and I wanted to drive home that level to the book’s appeal. As she noted, it’s possible to describe Crèvecoeuras largely foreign to America—he was born and died in France, and by the time he published the book he was living in London. But if do categorize him as an international visitor to the U.S., we’d have to do the same for one of the Revolution’s most influential voices: Thomas Paine, who was born in England and spent his final years in France. Which is to say, Revolutionary America wasn’t just international because of Lafayette, and transnational AmericanStudies goes as far back as America does. Crèvecoeur can help us think about all of that.Next nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?

March 25, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 1

[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some quick further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that would help us think about some of the worst and best of where we started.The roundtable’s first presenter, Frank Hillson of the University of Delaware, nominated Mary Rowlandson’s personal narrative (originally titled The Sovereignty and Goodness of God). As Frank noted, the book was perhaps America’s first best-seller, returned in full force in the Revolutionary moment and has been in print ever sense, and helped originate one of the nation’s (and perhaps world’s) most defining and persistent literary genres, the captivity narrative.Frank focused in his talk (I was a harsh taskmaster and limited each speaker to about 8 minutes, and I know each has plenty more to say of course) on one of the captivity narrative’s principal features, the creation of a savage “other” against whom the captive must struggle; as he noted, reading Rowlandson thus introduces us to some of the ways in which European Americans have consistently created and defined themselves against such cultural “others” since the first post-contact decades. Certainly that’d be a vital takeaway for all American readers.Yet there would be more inspiring potential lessons as well, takeaways that Frank likewise mentioned but one of which I wanted to reiterate here (and that I also discussed in this earlier post). Despite her originating and to some degree overarching emphases on cultural division and hostility, Rowlandson cannot help but document the many cross-cultural kindnesses and, to my mind even more importantly, social and economic relationships that develop between her and many of the Wampanoags. While early (and general) American history did not go in those unifying and inspiring directions nearly frequently enough, they were nonetheless part of our originating moments and community—and ones that we would do well to remember. Rowlandson can help us do that too.Next nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?

March 23-24, 2013: Crowd-sourced Spring

[As spring gets ready to spring, this week’s series has focused on the season in American culture. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and spring connections of fellow AmericanStudiers. Add your bloomin’ thoughts, please!]
Jeff Renye follows up Monday’s post, writing, “In his essay ‘Uncle Tom's Shantih,’ which can be found in the collection Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry (2003), the American poet Anthony Hecht focuses on the first 18 lines of The Waste Land. Through a contextualization of those first lines, Hecht's excellent close-reading shows how important Eliot's allusions are to an introduction and set up of the themes of exploitation, sexual and otherwise, that play out in many other parts of the poem before those repeated words of hope that are uttered in the poem's final line.”Steve Railton highlights another great spring poem, Emily Dickinson’s “A little Madness in the Spring.”On Twitter, Daniel Cavicchi writes, “I reflect on this poemannually at the start of April.”Irene Martyniuk responds to Tuesday’s post, writing, “So not American but so wonderfully Modernist and a piece of music I and others still enjoy--Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. It was, of course, created as a ballet for the 1913 Paris season of the Ballets Russes under Diaghilev and choreographed by Nijinsky. Even better, there were riots on the opening night because the style was so different. I think I like the music because it is based on pagan Slavic folk songs, which played in my house a lot growing up. Anyway, the collaboration here is so fabulously Modernist that it hurts.”Virginia Clemm Poe follows up Wednesday’s post, writing, “While this is not as thoughtful as the songs of protest, the images of spring are just as beautiful in Big Fish. Burton tied the flashbacks of the father's youth (and the eventual future of the son's acceptance of the folkloric tradition) in the spring. This made the entire film (having never read the book) feel youthful, resilient and visually appealing. Specifically the proposal scene with the glowing daffodils. Which I have to keep running in my head with the never-ending supply of snow... at least it will grow daffodils all over my front yard!”Monica Jackson follows up Thursday’s post, writing, “Frog and Toad....I've never read them, but for some reason they remind me of characters from The Wind in the Willows . I lived in England as a kid and loved those stories, mainly because my school always took us on field trips to watch plays and that was one of them.”And Rob Gosselin adds that “All children have a special relationship with fiction. They take it to heart at a depth that some people grow out of. Grown-ups who keep the magic eventually become English majors. Or writers. … The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. Mr. Pine's Purple House by Leonard P. Kessler. These were two of my favorites.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

March 22, 2013: Spring in America: The Mayflower and the Maypole

[As spring gets ready to spring, a series on the season in American culture. Add your vernal associations and responses for a blooming weekend post!]

On two contrasting images and narratives of spring for America’s earliest English arrivals.Sylvia Plath’s sonnet ”Mayflower,”another Plath poem that should be more widely known than it is, captures quite eloquently, through an extended metaphor connecting the ship to an actual flowering plant, the quality I most admire in the Pilgrims: their perseverance, in the face of some of the most daunting circumstances (including but in no way limited to Cape Cod in December!) to have faced any fledgling American community. As Plath indicates, their faith (particularly in the concept of Providence) provided one critical element to that perseverance; as I’ve written elsewhere in this space, Tisquantum (or Squanto) provided another. But in any case, I agree wholeheartedly with Plath that, like the may flower after which they named their ship, the Pilgrims embodied “how best beauty’s born of hardihood.”
 That flower, as Plath envisions it at least, was the bud of the hawthorn plant—and, not quite coincidentally, it is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (who was throughout his life and career hugely interested in his Puritan ancestors) which provides our clearest illustration of a very different side to May for that fledgling New England community. As fictionalized in Hawthorne’s “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1836)—and as documented in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation—one of the earliest splinter groups from the Puritan communities was that led by Thomas Morton, the man who came to be known as “the pagan Pilgrim” for his embrace of a far livelier and more celebratory set of practices. Those celebrations were exemplified by the May-Pole that Morton and his followers erected in their town of Merry-Mount (Mt. Wollaston), and it was perhaps the appropriation of this be-flowered “pagan” symbol that led to the full condemnations of Morton and his community by Bradford and his fellow orthodox Puritans.
 So two images of spring: as a beautiful, hard-earned reward for enduring the winter; or as a time of excess and luxury, of plenty and its resulting vices. And two corresponding images of the Puritans: as a persistent and hardy community, blossoming into American fullness after making it through their first and hardest winter; or as an overly dour and intolerant bunch, suspicious of any deviation from their norms and most especially of anyone, anywhere, having a good time. The truth? As so often on this blog, all of the above, or more exactly a combination of them all that hopefully leads us toward something more and different and stronger. Spring, like any season and experience, can indeed bring out the worst in us (whether we see that worst as carnival or condemnation); but it can also allow us to wonder at the best, of who we are and of the world we live in. There’s value, I believe, in engaging with each and all of those sides.
 Crowd-sourced post this weekend,Ben
 PS. So how would you engage with the season? Thoughts on this or any of the week’s posts? Other takes on spring in America?