Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 434
October 21, 2011
October 21, 2011: Out of His Hands [Repeat]
[I've decided to dedicate this week on the blog to American authors for whom I think our most prominent narratives are especially over-simplified and even inaccurate. This repeat post is the fifth and last in that series.]
Finding an audience, being read and remembered, is of course a central if not the central goal of all of us who write or seek to share our voices with the world in any medium, but it can without question be a double-edged sword in all sorts of ways. Steven King, for example, has written extensively about the experience of being defined so fully as a horror writer that it becomes hugely difficult to publish (and even to a degree write) anything else. A heightened sense of audience expectations based on the success of his first novel, Invisible Man (1952), seems to have crippled Ralph Ellison's ability to finish any of his subsequent novels (which were all published only after he had died). But those audience-driven problems at least arose during the writers' lives, making it possible (if certainly not easy) for them to respond, to write out of those boxes, to find new audiences or challenge their existing ones, or even, of course, to ignore audience demands or responses (as much as any writer can).Infinitely—eternally, even—more difficult is when a sizeable and multi-generational audience latches onto a particular, not necessarily representative text and uses it to define the writer's whole career and perspective after the writer has passed away. This is a potential problem for any writer whose works are (or, more exactly for this problem, one of whose works is) frequently anthologized—and if that writer was also a preacher, and thus produced literally tens of thousands of sermons among his many other written works, the danger of one of those sermons being turned into his anthologized, career-defining work is both greater and significantly more unfair. And that's precisely what has happened with Jonathan Edwards, perhaps America's greatest theological philosopher and writer, one of the 18th century's leading intellectuals, and a principal influence on the First Great Awakening, the nation's most widespread and democratic religious movement. Yet for generations of American schoolchildren—and since those schoolchildren tend to grow up to be adults, for generations of Americans period—Edwards has meant one thing and one thing only: the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), a fire-and-brimstone, extremely dramatic, old-school Puritanical text that Edwards delivered in Enfield, Connecticut in the midst of the First Great Awakening.
"Sinners" certainly captures a particular and powerful side of Edwards the preacher, and illustrates without question why he was able to produce such significant fervor and conversion rates during the Great Awakening. But it's likely that any number of fellow preachers, in that era and in American history more generally, could have and did deliver very similar sermons, some week in and week out. It is instead in both the breadth and the quality of his interests and ideas and writings, as well as his wide range of forward-thinking opinions (on issues such as women's rights and roles in the church, Native Americans, and scientific discoveries), that Edwards outstrips any other American theologian and would greatly enrich modern audiences' perspectives on faith, spirituality, and the church in America's history and identity. Edwards at his best (which was most of the time) combined the theological rigor of the Puritans with many of the Enlightenment's most important advances, including those aforementioned opinions but also an abiding interest in aesthetics and a willingness to recognize the role of personal emotion and perspectives (what Edwards sometimes called "the affections") in determining the shape and course of one's faith. Even his tragically early death at the age of 54 was the result of his impressive openness and desire to lead his fellow citizens into better paths—having just taken over the Presidency of Princeton College from his son-in-law Aaron Burr (the father to the future Founding Father and Vice President of the same name), Edwards decided to demonstrate the need for a new medical innovation, smallpox inoculations, by getting one himself, but died from the resulting infection.Edwards' literary future and identity are of course out of his hands, as all of ours will one day be (and if I had to accept that gaining a multi-century audience would mean that they'd only be reading one blog post, well, I might take that deal). But on the other hand, they remain very much in our collective hands, and the more we can try to reconnect with the much richer and more impressive works and career and man behind "Sinners," the closer we can get to inhabiting the kind of America for which Edwards consistently worked. More tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) The full text of "Sinners": http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4yMTo0Ny53amVv
2) A comprehensive collection of Edwards' writings at Yale's Jonathan Edwards Center; just the list alone illustrates his breadth and depth: http://edwards.yale.edu/research/browse
3) OPEN: Any other writers who are unfairly linked to or defined by one text?
Finding an audience, being read and remembered, is of course a central if not the central goal of all of us who write or seek to share our voices with the world in any medium, but it can without question be a double-edged sword in all sorts of ways. Steven King, for example, has written extensively about the experience of being defined so fully as a horror writer that it becomes hugely difficult to publish (and even to a degree write) anything else. A heightened sense of audience expectations based on the success of his first novel, Invisible Man (1952), seems to have crippled Ralph Ellison's ability to finish any of his subsequent novels (which were all published only after he had died). But those audience-driven problems at least arose during the writers' lives, making it possible (if certainly not easy) for them to respond, to write out of those boxes, to find new audiences or challenge their existing ones, or even, of course, to ignore audience demands or responses (as much as any writer can).Infinitely—eternally, even—more difficult is when a sizeable and multi-generational audience latches onto a particular, not necessarily representative text and uses it to define the writer's whole career and perspective after the writer has passed away. This is a potential problem for any writer whose works are (or, more exactly for this problem, one of whose works is) frequently anthologized—and if that writer was also a preacher, and thus produced literally tens of thousands of sermons among his many other written works, the danger of one of those sermons being turned into his anthologized, career-defining work is both greater and significantly more unfair. And that's precisely what has happened with Jonathan Edwards, perhaps America's greatest theological philosopher and writer, one of the 18th century's leading intellectuals, and a principal influence on the First Great Awakening, the nation's most widespread and democratic religious movement. Yet for generations of American schoolchildren—and since those schoolchildren tend to grow up to be adults, for generations of Americans period—Edwards has meant one thing and one thing only: the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), a fire-and-brimstone, extremely dramatic, old-school Puritanical text that Edwards delivered in Enfield, Connecticut in the midst of the First Great Awakening.
"Sinners" certainly captures a particular and powerful side of Edwards the preacher, and illustrates without question why he was able to produce such significant fervor and conversion rates during the Great Awakening. But it's likely that any number of fellow preachers, in that era and in American history more generally, could have and did deliver very similar sermons, some week in and week out. It is instead in both the breadth and the quality of his interests and ideas and writings, as well as his wide range of forward-thinking opinions (on issues such as women's rights and roles in the church, Native Americans, and scientific discoveries), that Edwards outstrips any other American theologian and would greatly enrich modern audiences' perspectives on faith, spirituality, and the church in America's history and identity. Edwards at his best (which was most of the time) combined the theological rigor of the Puritans with many of the Enlightenment's most important advances, including those aforementioned opinions but also an abiding interest in aesthetics and a willingness to recognize the role of personal emotion and perspectives (what Edwards sometimes called "the affections") in determining the shape and course of one's faith. Even his tragically early death at the age of 54 was the result of his impressive openness and desire to lead his fellow citizens into better paths—having just taken over the Presidency of Princeton College from his son-in-law Aaron Burr (the father to the future Founding Father and Vice President of the same name), Edwards decided to demonstrate the need for a new medical innovation, smallpox inoculations, by getting one himself, but died from the resulting infection.Edwards' literary future and identity are of course out of his hands, as all of ours will one day be (and if I had to accept that gaining a multi-century audience would mean that they'd only be reading one blog post, well, I might take that deal). But on the other hand, they remain very much in our collective hands, and the more we can try to reconnect with the much richer and more impressive works and career and man behind "Sinners," the closer we can get to inhabiting the kind of America for which Edwards consistently worked. More tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) The full text of "Sinners": http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4yMTo0Ny53amVv
2) A comprehensive collection of Edwards' writings at Yale's Jonathan Edwards Center; just the list alone illustrates his breadth and depth: http://edwards.yale.edu/research/browse
3) OPEN: Any other writers who are unfairly linked to or defined by one text?
October 20, 2011
October 20, 2011: The Wright Readings
[I've decided to dedicate this week on the blog to American authors for whom I think our most prominent narratives are especially over-simplified and even inaccurate. This is the fourth in that series.]
Neither the specifics of the American literary canon nor the broader trends of literary history are really this cut-and-dry, but nonetheless it's not entirely inaccurate to say that one of the reasons behind Ernest Hemingway's late 20th-century removal from many syllabi and narratives of modernist American literature has been the rediscovery of and new emphasis on Zora Neale Hurston, and in particular her Depression-era novel of the rural Southern African American experience, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Moreover, along with that new emphasis on Hurston's novel—of which I'm definitely a fan, and on which more in a future post—has come a concurrent new focus on a controversial review of Their Eyes (alongside another, largely forgotten novel, Waters Turpin's These Low Grounds) by Hurston's fellow African American writer and novelist Richard Wright. In the review, sections of which are linked below, Wright directly accuses Hurston of employing a "minstrel technique" in order to "make the 'white folks' laugh," and of creating a text which in its "sensory sweep … carries no theme, no message, no thought."Wright's interpretation of Hurston's novel is not without its merits, and his points about the differences between intended or imagined white and African American audiences, while overly simplistic, certainly represent the kind of complex and challenging issue with which Harlem Renaissance writers like Hurston (and contemporaries like Wright himself) continually had to engage. But his word choices and tone in the review are, to be blunt, unnecessarily derogatory and hostile; while I don't see much evidence for the arguments that gender played into his dismissals in any central way (he wasn't much kinder to Turpin's book, although he did indeed go further in his language toward Hurston), there's no doubt in my mind that he went too far, and that the late 20th century scholarly narratives which have critiqued Wright for this review are likewise not without merit. Yet any narrative about Wright that focuses on this review most definitely misses a pretty impressive forest for this single tree—that'd be the case even if Wright's reviews or his journalistic writings in general were central to his career and work, but instead it's in two other genres that Wright did his best and most powerful and lasting work: his first and best novel, Native Son (1940); and his first (of what would eventually become a two-part) autobiography, Black Boy (1945). No AmericanStudier can or should fail to include those two books in his or her readings into American culture, identity, history, and community.
There are many ways I could try to make the case for reading these two works—individually, but even more, to my mind, as a complementary pair—but I think the best argument actually, and somewhat ironically, blurs the line between African American and white audiences or responses on which Wright's review of Hurston depended. On one crucial level, a linked reading of Native Son and Black Boy would represent one of American literature's most sustained and powerful depictions of a very specific racial, regional, and historical identity: young black men born into the Jim Crow South, shifting with the Great Migration to the North's booming urban centers, and trying to figure out who and what they are in both places and in American history and identity more generally. Yet on another, just as significant level, both books engage with a host of themes and identities that transcend any particular racial or regional community, and lie instead at the very heart of the American experience; to highlight only one, both Bigger Thomas in Native Son and Wright himself in Black Boy struggle continually with the question of whether their heritage, their family background and legacy, the way they are perceived by others, and other external elements of their identity will fully influence, even drown out, their internal voices and perspectives, their powerful sense that they are different from those around them and can and should find a life and fate all their own. It's impossible to entirely separate that theme from race and region, of course—but so too is it impossible to define these characters and texts are limited or circumscribed by the specifics of such cultural and historical details. Pardon the pun, but these books, like Wright's works overall, are bigger than that.More tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) Excerpts from Wright's review of Hurston's novel: http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam358/wrightrev.html
2) Some interesting resources on Wright, including his less-read poetic works: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/r_wright/r_wright.htm
3) OPEN: Last chance to nominate an author who should be re-read—tomorrow's focus is still up for grabs!
Neither the specifics of the American literary canon nor the broader trends of literary history are really this cut-and-dry, but nonetheless it's not entirely inaccurate to say that one of the reasons behind Ernest Hemingway's late 20th-century removal from many syllabi and narratives of modernist American literature has been the rediscovery of and new emphasis on Zora Neale Hurston, and in particular her Depression-era novel of the rural Southern African American experience, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Moreover, along with that new emphasis on Hurston's novel—of which I'm definitely a fan, and on which more in a future post—has come a concurrent new focus on a controversial review of Their Eyes (alongside another, largely forgotten novel, Waters Turpin's These Low Grounds) by Hurston's fellow African American writer and novelist Richard Wright. In the review, sections of which are linked below, Wright directly accuses Hurston of employing a "minstrel technique" in order to "make the 'white folks' laugh," and of creating a text which in its "sensory sweep … carries no theme, no message, no thought."Wright's interpretation of Hurston's novel is not without its merits, and his points about the differences between intended or imagined white and African American audiences, while overly simplistic, certainly represent the kind of complex and challenging issue with which Harlem Renaissance writers like Hurston (and contemporaries like Wright himself) continually had to engage. But his word choices and tone in the review are, to be blunt, unnecessarily derogatory and hostile; while I don't see much evidence for the arguments that gender played into his dismissals in any central way (he wasn't much kinder to Turpin's book, although he did indeed go further in his language toward Hurston), there's no doubt in my mind that he went too far, and that the late 20th century scholarly narratives which have critiqued Wright for this review are likewise not without merit. Yet any narrative about Wright that focuses on this review most definitely misses a pretty impressive forest for this single tree—that'd be the case even if Wright's reviews or his journalistic writings in general were central to his career and work, but instead it's in two other genres that Wright did his best and most powerful and lasting work: his first and best novel, Native Son (1940); and his first (of what would eventually become a two-part) autobiography, Black Boy (1945). No AmericanStudier can or should fail to include those two books in his or her readings into American culture, identity, history, and community.
There are many ways I could try to make the case for reading these two works—individually, but even more, to my mind, as a complementary pair—but I think the best argument actually, and somewhat ironically, blurs the line between African American and white audiences or responses on which Wright's review of Hurston depended. On one crucial level, a linked reading of Native Son and Black Boy would represent one of American literature's most sustained and powerful depictions of a very specific racial, regional, and historical identity: young black men born into the Jim Crow South, shifting with the Great Migration to the North's booming urban centers, and trying to figure out who and what they are in both places and in American history and identity more generally. Yet on another, just as significant level, both books engage with a host of themes and identities that transcend any particular racial or regional community, and lie instead at the very heart of the American experience; to highlight only one, both Bigger Thomas in Native Son and Wright himself in Black Boy struggle continually with the question of whether their heritage, their family background and legacy, the way they are perceived by others, and other external elements of their identity will fully influence, even drown out, their internal voices and perspectives, their powerful sense that they are different from those around them and can and should find a life and fate all their own. It's impossible to entirely separate that theme from race and region, of course—but so too is it impossible to define these characters and texts are limited or circumscribed by the specifics of such cultural and historical details. Pardon the pun, but these books, like Wright's works overall, are bigger than that.More tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) Excerpts from Wright's review of Hurston's novel: http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam358/wrightrev.html
2) Some interesting resources on Wright, including his less-read poetic works: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/r_wright/r_wright.htm
3) OPEN: Last chance to nominate an author who should be re-read—tomorrow's focus is still up for grabs!
October 19, 2011
October 19, 2011: The Importance of Reading Ernest
[I've decided to dedicate this week on the blog to American authors for whom I think our most prominent narratives are especially over-simplified and even inaccurate. This is the third in that series.]
Not to get all Dickensian on you, but: Ernest Hemingway was an asshole. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the blog post I am going to write. If the case of Sylvia Plath about which I wrote on Monday represents one set of potential and potent downsides to an emphasis on author's identity and biography, the case of Hemingway definitely represents another: an identity and biography that are both so strongly antagonistic to many people (in this case, especially, more or less all women) and seem so closely tied to elements of the writing (in this case, the at best less well-developed and stereotypical and at worst downright misogynistic female characters that populate many of Hemingway's works) that it feels impossible not to focus on them and can feel equally difficult to make a case for the author's value (or at least feels as if such a case has to start by noting the indefensible elements). And while I'm about to make the case instead that Hemingway deserves a re-reading free of such biographical biases, the fact remains, just to be as repetitive at the outset as was the narrator of A Christmas Carol, that Hemingway was (as far as I can tell) as asshole-y as a doornail.We don't need (and I don't want) our authors to be saints, though, and whatever Hemingway's personal flaws, there are at least a couple of (to my mind) indisputable and hugely significant reasons to read him, both in general and in our 21st century moment in particular. For one thing, it's difficult to overstate how much his style revolutionized the writing of fiction in America; at the same time that his fellow American modernists like Stein and Faulkner were producing some of the most dense and layered fiction ever written, Hemingway went the other way, exemplifying his "iceberg" philosophy (writing about only the tip that protrudes above the water, and forcing the reader to imagine the rest) with a style and stories that are as impressive in what they don't say as in what they do. No single story better captures that style than "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927), a text in which virtually every element through which a reader might expect to be guided—including even character names or dialogue cues like "he said"—is withheld, resulting (in my experiences, not only as reader but in teaching the story to both first-year writing and American lit students) in a disorienting and uncomfortable but also powerfully active and invested reader response. And despite the story being published in a collection entitled Men Without Women, I would argue that both its style and the largely unmediated voices and perspectives Hemingway constructs for its male and female main characters do not privilege or undermine either gender in any stable, static, or overt way.
Gender relationships and identities are only one significant human theme, though, and the even more meaningful reason to re-read Hemingway is how amazingly well he writes about a whole range of other, equally salient, deeply AmericanStudies such themes: war and violence, sport and leisure, nature and identity, the holds the past can have on us and the ways and moments we can try to break free of it, and many more. For my money Hemingway's best work is the final short story in his debut collection, In Our Time (1925)—the whole collection is amazingly strong, both in introducing his voice and style and in framing many of those central themes on which his body of work would consistently focus; but while most of the stories do so through a World War I-specific lens, the final story, "Big Two-Hearted River," follows its veteran protagonist Nick Adams back to the States and out on a fishing and camping trip into the Michigan wilderness. The story doesn't entirely avoid the kinds of pastoral idealizations of nature about which I blogged here—I once met a Japanese scholar of American literature who was so won over by those elements of the story that one of his greatest goals upon coming to America for the first time was to go fishing in the Virginia mountains—but it balances them with deeply realistic descriptions and moments. And it provides one of the very best illustrations of the potency of the iceberg style—Hemingway in this story writes almost nothing about Nick's war experiences and wounds (literal and figurative), yet for this reader at least the story unquestionably connects to, amplifies and yet shifts, and ultimately transcends them all the same. Quite simply, you can't tell the story of American literature or American identity in the first half of the 20th century without Hemingway. Sure, he might be kind of like that boorish uncle who is guaranteed to piss everybody at the family reunion off before it's over—but the family picture wouldn't look complete, nor nearly as good, without him. More re-reading recommendations tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) The full text of "Hills": http://www.gummyprint.com/blog/archives/hills-like-white-elephants-complete-story/
2) The full text of "Big": http://producer.csi.edu/cdraney/2010/278/resources/hemingway-two-hearted-river.pdf
3) OPEN: Any authors (or artists in any medium) for whom you think we should get past the bio and get back to the works?
Not to get all Dickensian on you, but: Ernest Hemingway was an asshole. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the blog post I am going to write. If the case of Sylvia Plath about which I wrote on Monday represents one set of potential and potent downsides to an emphasis on author's identity and biography, the case of Hemingway definitely represents another: an identity and biography that are both so strongly antagonistic to many people (in this case, especially, more or less all women) and seem so closely tied to elements of the writing (in this case, the at best less well-developed and stereotypical and at worst downright misogynistic female characters that populate many of Hemingway's works) that it feels impossible not to focus on them and can feel equally difficult to make a case for the author's value (or at least feels as if such a case has to start by noting the indefensible elements). And while I'm about to make the case instead that Hemingway deserves a re-reading free of such biographical biases, the fact remains, just to be as repetitive at the outset as was the narrator of A Christmas Carol, that Hemingway was (as far as I can tell) as asshole-y as a doornail.We don't need (and I don't want) our authors to be saints, though, and whatever Hemingway's personal flaws, there are at least a couple of (to my mind) indisputable and hugely significant reasons to read him, both in general and in our 21st century moment in particular. For one thing, it's difficult to overstate how much his style revolutionized the writing of fiction in America; at the same time that his fellow American modernists like Stein and Faulkner were producing some of the most dense and layered fiction ever written, Hemingway went the other way, exemplifying his "iceberg" philosophy (writing about only the tip that protrudes above the water, and forcing the reader to imagine the rest) with a style and stories that are as impressive in what they don't say as in what they do. No single story better captures that style than "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927), a text in which virtually every element through which a reader might expect to be guided—including even character names or dialogue cues like "he said"—is withheld, resulting (in my experiences, not only as reader but in teaching the story to both first-year writing and American lit students) in a disorienting and uncomfortable but also powerfully active and invested reader response. And despite the story being published in a collection entitled Men Without Women, I would argue that both its style and the largely unmediated voices and perspectives Hemingway constructs for its male and female main characters do not privilege or undermine either gender in any stable, static, or overt way.
Gender relationships and identities are only one significant human theme, though, and the even more meaningful reason to re-read Hemingway is how amazingly well he writes about a whole range of other, equally salient, deeply AmericanStudies such themes: war and violence, sport and leisure, nature and identity, the holds the past can have on us and the ways and moments we can try to break free of it, and many more. For my money Hemingway's best work is the final short story in his debut collection, In Our Time (1925)—the whole collection is amazingly strong, both in introducing his voice and style and in framing many of those central themes on which his body of work would consistently focus; but while most of the stories do so through a World War I-specific lens, the final story, "Big Two-Hearted River," follows its veteran protagonist Nick Adams back to the States and out on a fishing and camping trip into the Michigan wilderness. The story doesn't entirely avoid the kinds of pastoral idealizations of nature about which I blogged here—I once met a Japanese scholar of American literature who was so won over by those elements of the story that one of his greatest goals upon coming to America for the first time was to go fishing in the Virginia mountains—but it balances them with deeply realistic descriptions and moments. And it provides one of the very best illustrations of the potency of the iceberg style—Hemingway in this story writes almost nothing about Nick's war experiences and wounds (literal and figurative), yet for this reader at least the story unquestionably connects to, amplifies and yet shifts, and ultimately transcends them all the same. Quite simply, you can't tell the story of American literature or American identity in the first half of the 20th century without Hemingway. Sure, he might be kind of like that boorish uncle who is guaranteed to piss everybody at the family reunion off before it's over—but the family picture wouldn't look complete, nor nearly as good, without him. More re-reading recommendations tomorrow,
BenPS. Three links to start with:
1) The full text of "Hills": http://www.gummyprint.com/blog/archives/hills-like-white-elephants-complete-story/
2) The full text of "Big": http://producer.csi.edu/cdraney/2010/278/resources/hemingway-two-hearted-river.pdf
3) OPEN: Any authors (or artists in any medium) for whom you think we should get past the bio and get back to the works?
October 18, 2011
October 18, 2011: Uncle Re-read
[I've decided to dedicate this week on the blog to American authors for whom I think our most prominent narratives are especially over-simplified and even inaccurate. This is the second in that series.]
There are few ways in which I would claim to have had any opportunities that my boys don't have—the opposite is far more frequently the case, which of course is precisely as it should be—but one complex and interesting such opportunity is that I had the chance to see the Walt Disney film Song of the South (1946) as a kid. I confess to not knowing the details of where or when I saw it with my Dad, but I'm sure it was in a theatrical re-release, as the film has to my knowledge never been released on home video in any format. I don't think that's any great loss to America's youth or film cultures, but on the other hand as you would expect I'm not a big fan of suppressing or censoring any American text (short of perhaps something as over-the-top as Faces of Death, a film which apparently contains unedited footage of actual people's deaths); certainly I would hope that if and when any kids do get to see it, they have the benefit (as I did, and as my boys would) of a parent who's able to frame some of the contexts (of race, region, and slavery) into which the film fits, but it does also contain some funny and impressive (and I believe largely non-controversial) animated versions of Brer Rabbit stories, and a few (perhaps more controversial, but not any worse than Peter Pan's "What Makes the Red Man Red?") catchy tunes.Song was based pretty closely on Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1881), the first in the series of books that late 19th-century Southern journalist and folklorist Joel Chandler Harris wrote about that title character and his "legends of the old plantation." I've only read the first two books in that series, Uncle and its 1883 sequel Nights with Uncle Remus—I wrote about them, in an extended version of what I'll say in this post, as part of the "race question" question in my dissertation/first book—and certainly in some key ways found them as objectionable as the worst elements of Song of the South and as (I believe) the images conjured up by the name Uncle Remus in our collective consciousness. Uncle's version of that title character embodies in multiple ways some of the most ideologically and socially disgusting characteristics of the plantation tradition: a former slave who wishes only to return to and recapture the world of slavery, who (in the Reconstruction-focused "Sayings" portion of the book in particular) full-throatedly rejects the potential advancements of the Reconstruction era (freedom, education, opportunities outside of the plantation world, etc.), and who seeks to influence his young post-bellum white audience through these beliefs. And through one particularly unhappy choice Nights extends and amplifies those qualities, moving the setting and characters back to the antebellum era, and thus making clear the mythologized reasons for Remus's preference for the world of slavery and all of its benefits for himself, his wife, and his fellow slaves.
I don't want to elide any of those aspects of Harris's books—and I don't believe it's possible to read the books and fail to engage with those elements, although having encountered lots of readers who got through all of Gone with the Wind (1936) with no sense of the overarching racism of its second half's settings and plotlines I suppose anything's possible—but I would nonetheless also note some of the much more complex and even progressive qualities of Harris's work in these texts. In my book's analyses I linked those qualities to the interconnected concepts of "voice" and "dialogue" on at least three levels: the ways in which Uncle Remus's "Brer Rabbit" stories themselves create a set of voices that seem, at least times, quite clearly allegorical for some of the less happy and idyllic sides to the world of slavery; the ways in which both books, and especially Nights, create an evolving and at times quite powerful and inspiring dialogue between Remus and the young white boy who is his audience and (I would argue) student; and the presence in Nights of three other slave voices in Remus's cabin, each with his or her own identity and perspective (including on slavery itself), creating an exemplary, powerfully African American dialogic space from which the boy likewise can and does learn. Obviously those are interpretative points, and it's possible to read Harris's books quite differently—but at the least that'd mean reading them for yourself and figuring out where you come down on these questions.That is, I suppose, the Reading Rainbow-esque theme of this whole week (although hopefully with variations and specifics that'll make each post compelling in its own right): read the books! Another LeVar Burton-inspired entry tomorrow,
BenPS. Four links to start with:
1) Three songs (with a bit of context) from Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3fFXIUXZ-M
2) Full text of Uncle Remus: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2306/pg2306.html
3) Full text of Nights: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26429/26429-h/26429-h.htm
4) OPEN: I'll ask again, any authors we should re-read (and on whom maybe I should focus this week)?
There are few ways in which I would claim to have had any opportunities that my boys don't have—the opposite is far more frequently the case, which of course is precisely as it should be—but one complex and interesting such opportunity is that I had the chance to see the Walt Disney film Song of the South (1946) as a kid. I confess to not knowing the details of where or when I saw it with my Dad, but I'm sure it was in a theatrical re-release, as the film has to my knowledge never been released on home video in any format. I don't think that's any great loss to America's youth or film cultures, but on the other hand as you would expect I'm not a big fan of suppressing or censoring any American text (short of perhaps something as over-the-top as Faces of Death, a film which apparently contains unedited footage of actual people's deaths); certainly I would hope that if and when any kids do get to see it, they have the benefit (as I did, and as my boys would) of a parent who's able to frame some of the contexts (of race, region, and slavery) into which the film fits, but it does also contain some funny and impressive (and I believe largely non-controversial) animated versions of Brer Rabbit stories, and a few (perhaps more controversial, but not any worse than Peter Pan's "What Makes the Red Man Red?") catchy tunes.Song was based pretty closely on Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1881), the first in the series of books that late 19th-century Southern journalist and folklorist Joel Chandler Harris wrote about that title character and his "legends of the old plantation." I've only read the first two books in that series, Uncle and its 1883 sequel Nights with Uncle Remus—I wrote about them, in an extended version of what I'll say in this post, as part of the "race question" question in my dissertation/first book—and certainly in some key ways found them as objectionable as the worst elements of Song of the South and as (I believe) the images conjured up by the name Uncle Remus in our collective consciousness. Uncle's version of that title character embodies in multiple ways some of the most ideologically and socially disgusting characteristics of the plantation tradition: a former slave who wishes only to return to and recapture the world of slavery, who (in the Reconstruction-focused "Sayings" portion of the book in particular) full-throatedly rejects the potential advancements of the Reconstruction era (freedom, education, opportunities outside of the plantation world, etc.), and who seeks to influence his young post-bellum white audience through these beliefs. And through one particularly unhappy choice Nights extends and amplifies those qualities, moving the setting and characters back to the antebellum era, and thus making clear the mythologized reasons for Remus's preference for the world of slavery and all of its benefits for himself, his wife, and his fellow slaves.
I don't want to elide any of those aspects of Harris's books—and I don't believe it's possible to read the books and fail to engage with those elements, although having encountered lots of readers who got through all of Gone with the Wind (1936) with no sense of the overarching racism of its second half's settings and plotlines I suppose anything's possible—but I would nonetheless also note some of the much more complex and even progressive qualities of Harris's work in these texts. In my book's analyses I linked those qualities to the interconnected concepts of "voice" and "dialogue" on at least three levels: the ways in which Uncle Remus's "Brer Rabbit" stories themselves create a set of voices that seem, at least times, quite clearly allegorical for some of the less happy and idyllic sides to the world of slavery; the ways in which both books, and especially Nights, create an evolving and at times quite powerful and inspiring dialogue between Remus and the young white boy who is his audience and (I would argue) student; and the presence in Nights of three other slave voices in Remus's cabin, each with his or her own identity and perspective (including on slavery itself), creating an exemplary, powerfully African American dialogic space from which the boy likewise can and does learn. Obviously those are interpretative points, and it's possible to read Harris's books quite differently—but at the least that'd mean reading them for yourself and figuring out where you come down on these questions.That is, I suppose, the Reading Rainbow-esque theme of this whole week (although hopefully with variations and specifics that'll make each post compelling in its own right): read the books! Another LeVar Burton-inspired entry tomorrow,
BenPS. Four links to start with:
1) Three songs (with a bit of context) from Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3fFXIUXZ-M
2) Full text of Uncle Remus: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2306/pg2306.html
3) Full text of Nights: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26429/26429-h/26429-h.htm
4) OPEN: I'll ask again, any authors we should re-read (and on whom maybe I should focus this week)?
October 17, 2011
October 17, 2011: Finding the Right Plath
On Tuesday my Major American Authors of the 20th Century class begins its two weeks with our fourth author (and second poet after Langston Hughes) of the semester, Sylvia Plath. This'll be the third time I've spent these couple weeks with Plath in a section of this course; I also spent two weeks with her novel The Bell-Jar (1963) in a post-1950 American novel class. As I wrote in the opening paragraph of this post (in which I promised a follow-up on Plath—better late than never!), each time I've had the chance to read and study Plath's work in these settings, I've found more—more depth and complexity, but also, and most importantly for my point here, more breadth and variety—in her writing. That might seem to be logical enough, given the benefits of in-depth study of any author, but I believe that my experiences with Plath, and the knowledge and perspective I've gained through them, actually and very significantly reveal two ways in which widely accepted, oversimplifying narratives can hinder our analysis and understanding if we're not careful.
For one thing, there's Plath's biography, and more exactly the most famous detail from that biography: her suicide. It is indeed the case that Plath committed suicide at the age of 30, in February, 1963 by turning on her gas stove and sticking her head inside; it's also the case, as both her confessional and heavily autobiographical poem "Lady Lazarus" and similarly autobiographical work in The Bell-Jar illustrate, that Plath had attempted suicide almost exactly a decade earlier, at the age of 20. So it's entirely understandable that the narratives about Plath's suicide—which are, to be clear, also the most prominent narratives about her writing—treat it as a final, unsurprising moment in a consistent psychological and emotional pattern. And that may indeed be a fair assessment, but I'm pretty sure that very few AmericanStudiers or readers of Plath's works know the details of her life at the time of her suicide: Plath had moved to England to live with her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes, but in late 1962 Hughes left her and their two small children for another woman; the winter of 1962-1963 was one of the coldest ever recorded in London, and Plath could not afford to pay for consistent heat in her flat so she and her children were likely damn near frozen by February; her kids were also apparently suffering from the flu and had been for some time; and Plath was trying to write between roughly four and eight every morning, because it was the only time that was genuinely hers and because she needed to publish to earn enough to support her children. These facts do not necessarily elide the long-term psychological causes, nor do they answer the question (as noted in the bio at the first link) of whether Plath hoped or planned to be discovered and saved. But knowledge of them does, I hope, make it impossible to treat Plath's suicide as just the act of a crazy or self-centered and –pitying person.And for another thing, there are the poems. The Collected Poems, compiled by Hughes over the two decades after Plath's death and published in one volume in late 1981, is most impressive for both the sheer number of poems it includes (224, all written between 1956 and 1962; and another fifty drawn from the many more she wrote prior to 1956) and for the variety and breadth of those poems (even those from the same year, and often from within a day or two of one another, are generally strikingly distinct in structure, style, imagery, and theme). I could point to a particular poem or two to make my case, but thanks to the magic of the web I don't have to—just go to the "Browse Inside" version of the book at the second link and sample a few pages from anywhere in the volume (other than the eleven pages devoted to Plath's longest single poem, "Three Women"). The poems of Plath's that get anthologized and taught most frequently (including by me in my second-half American lit survey) are "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," both produced in her final months of writing and collected in the posthumous Ariel (1966); each is well worth reading and analyzing, but that standard pairing and focus are in some ways hugely limiting to our sense of Plath, both as a poet (both poems over-use Nazi/Holocaust imagery) and as a person (both lend credence to the whole "depressed and fixated on death" narrative). To me, what the Collected Poems proves is that Plath was a prodigious talent, one of 20th century America's most versatile and best poets—that is of course an opinion, but it's a much better-supported one thanks to the book; and those narratives that seek to dismiss her talent, just like those that seek to oversimplify her suicide, had at least better be prepared to engage with the evidence.
That, ultimately, is the only broad point I'm trying to make here, but it's a pretty key one. Sweeping narratives aren't necessarily a problem, and perhaps are inevitable—I'm guilty of constructing plenty of 'em I know—, but far too often they exist in spite of, rather than in conversation with, the available evidence. So at least we AmericanStudiers owe it our subjects, our audiences, and ourselves to read and engage with that evidence as best we can before we deploy, endorse, or even revise the narratives. More tomorrow,Ben
PS. Three links to start with:1) A pretty detailed bio of Plath, by the author of one of the best biographical works on her: http://www.sylviaplath.info/biography.html
2) The Harper Collins "Browse Inside" feature: http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061558894
3) OPEN: Any authors or artists about whom our narratives are too simplistic?
For one thing, there's Plath's biography, and more exactly the most famous detail from that biography: her suicide. It is indeed the case that Plath committed suicide at the age of 30, in February, 1963 by turning on her gas stove and sticking her head inside; it's also the case, as both her confessional and heavily autobiographical poem "Lady Lazarus" and similarly autobiographical work in The Bell-Jar illustrate, that Plath had attempted suicide almost exactly a decade earlier, at the age of 20. So it's entirely understandable that the narratives about Plath's suicide—which are, to be clear, also the most prominent narratives about her writing—treat it as a final, unsurprising moment in a consistent psychological and emotional pattern. And that may indeed be a fair assessment, but I'm pretty sure that very few AmericanStudiers or readers of Plath's works know the details of her life at the time of her suicide: Plath had moved to England to live with her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes, but in late 1962 Hughes left her and their two small children for another woman; the winter of 1962-1963 was one of the coldest ever recorded in London, and Plath could not afford to pay for consistent heat in her flat so she and her children were likely damn near frozen by February; her kids were also apparently suffering from the flu and had been for some time; and Plath was trying to write between roughly four and eight every morning, because it was the only time that was genuinely hers and because she needed to publish to earn enough to support her children. These facts do not necessarily elide the long-term psychological causes, nor do they answer the question (as noted in the bio at the first link) of whether Plath hoped or planned to be discovered and saved. But knowledge of them does, I hope, make it impossible to treat Plath's suicide as just the act of a crazy or self-centered and –pitying person.And for another thing, there are the poems. The Collected Poems, compiled by Hughes over the two decades after Plath's death and published in one volume in late 1981, is most impressive for both the sheer number of poems it includes (224, all written between 1956 and 1962; and another fifty drawn from the many more she wrote prior to 1956) and for the variety and breadth of those poems (even those from the same year, and often from within a day or two of one another, are generally strikingly distinct in structure, style, imagery, and theme). I could point to a particular poem or two to make my case, but thanks to the magic of the web I don't have to—just go to the "Browse Inside" version of the book at the second link and sample a few pages from anywhere in the volume (other than the eleven pages devoted to Plath's longest single poem, "Three Women"). The poems of Plath's that get anthologized and taught most frequently (including by me in my second-half American lit survey) are "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," both produced in her final months of writing and collected in the posthumous Ariel (1966); each is well worth reading and analyzing, but that standard pairing and focus are in some ways hugely limiting to our sense of Plath, both as a poet (both poems over-use Nazi/Holocaust imagery) and as a person (both lend credence to the whole "depressed and fixated on death" narrative). To me, what the Collected Poems proves is that Plath was a prodigious talent, one of 20th century America's most versatile and best poets—that is of course an opinion, but it's a much better-supported one thanks to the book; and those narratives that seek to dismiss her talent, just like those that seek to oversimplify her suicide, had at least better be prepared to engage with the evidence.
That, ultimately, is the only broad point I'm trying to make here, but it's a pretty key one. Sweeping narratives aren't necessarily a problem, and perhaps are inevitable—I'm guilty of constructing plenty of 'em I know—, but far too often they exist in spite of, rather than in conversation with, the available evidence. So at least we AmericanStudiers owe it our subjects, our audiences, and ourselves to read and engage with that evidence as best we can before we deploy, endorse, or even revise the narratives. More tomorrow,Ben
PS. Three links to start with:1) A pretty detailed bio of Plath, by the author of one of the best biographical works on her: http://www.sylviaplath.info/biography.html
2) The Harper Collins "Browse Inside" feature: http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061558894
3) OPEN: Any authors or artists about whom our narratives are too simplistic?
October 15, 2011
October 15-16, 2011: Information, Please
As I've mentioned in earlier posts, one of my main ongoing gigs these days is as a scholar-advisor to the American Writers Museum, and specifically to the museum's NEH proposal for a traveling exhibition; that means that one of my main jobs for the next month or so is to produce a revised narrative for that proposal and exhibition, which are now focused on contemporary/21st century immigrant American writers. Of course I have some ideas about writers on whom we could focus, and I've been able to recruit a number of exceptional scholars who are likely to have even better and more interesting such ideas. But since I believe writing and thinking go best, especially at the early stages, when they're as communal as possible, and since my readers here are clearly among the most discerning AmericanStudiers out there, I wanted to ask for your input as well.
So I ask you: are there contemporary (read: 1990s to the present) immigrant writers—which doesn't have to mean first generation necessarily, but probably first or second generation, meaning either the writer or his or her parents immigrated; although somebody whose immigrant roots go back further but who writes about questions of immigration and identity in central ways could work too—you think are worth our collective awareness, attention, response? I'd love to hear your thoughts on folks whose works or styles, themes or voices, or for other reasons stand out for you, and would be great possible focal points for this traveling exhibition and the audiences we hope to bring to it (in at least a handful of cities around the country, from mainstays like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to newer urban hubs like Austin and Miami). Feel free to mention writers in comments here, or if you'd prefer you can email me suggestions at brailton@fitchburgstate.edu. I promise we'll seriously consider any and all suggestions! Thanks, more next week,
Ben
So I ask you: are there contemporary (read: 1990s to the present) immigrant writers—which doesn't have to mean first generation necessarily, but probably first or second generation, meaning either the writer or his or her parents immigrated; although somebody whose immigrant roots go back further but who writes about questions of immigration and identity in central ways could work too—you think are worth our collective awareness, attention, response? I'd love to hear your thoughts on folks whose works or styles, themes or voices, or for other reasons stand out for you, and would be great possible focal points for this traveling exhibition and the audiences we hope to bring to it (in at least a handful of cities around the country, from mainstays like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to newer urban hubs like Austin and Miami). Feel free to mention writers in comments here, or if you'd prefer you can email me suggestions at brailton@fitchburgstate.edu. I promise we'll seriously consider any and all suggestions! Thanks, more next week,
Ben
October 14, 2011
October 14, 2011: Gilded Age Addendum
In calling the robber baron image and the Gospel of Wealth concept the two most prominent narratives attached to Gilded Age magnates, I left out a third, equally significant such narrative: the self-made man. While the narrative had been present in American culture since at least Ben Franklin's self-definitions and national image, and had gained a great deal of steam with the narratives about both Andrew Jackson and Abe Lincoln in the mid-19th century, there's no question that it was in the Gilded Age that its status as one of our defining American narratives was truly cemented; that cementing was due in significant measure to the phenomenally popular novels of Horatio Alger, whose nearly identical protagonists were all variations of the self-made man narrative, but likewise found consistent validation in the accounts (both autobiographical and from outside views/stories) of the self-making through which the Gilded Age magnates had risen to their high status.
There's a lot of AmericanStudies work to be done (and that has been done) on the self-made man narrative, but I mention it here because of one of its principal roles: in making extreme wealth palatable, and even attractive and noble, to the mass of Americans who do not and are likely never going to possess it. It often mystifies me how a reprehensible, sleazy, multiple-bankruptcy-suffering fool like Donald Trump can become an icon and idol; but my mystification is due in part to my knowledge of how Trump gained the vast majority of his fortune: the way many of the wealthiest Americans (such as current presidential candidate Mitt Romney) do, by inheriting it. The national narratives about men like Trump and Romney, on the other hand, emphasize their resumes, their business savvy, their self-making—thus making these obscenely wealthy figures into both impressive models and, at least implicitly, examples that could be followed in our own paths to obscene wealth.Journalist and political writer Thomas Frank famously asked, in regard to the question of why working class Americans so often seem to vote against their own self-interest and in favor of the interests of the wealthy, What's the Matter with Kansas? I read today a daily email from the TeaParty.org official site—a New England ASA email account receives those daily emails, and the AmericanStudier in me is obligated to read them, even at the risk of nausea and vomiting—in which that ostensibly working-class, populist organization similarly went to great lengths to defend the nation's richest 1% against the Occupy Wall Street movement. My first reaction in reading the email was quite similar to Frank's; my second was to remember the big money groups and individuals (like the Koch Brothers) that have funded many of the Tea Party's efforts. But my third was to recall the role of the self-made man narrative in the Gilded Age, and down to our contemporary moment—to make us admire and aspire to be precisely those Americans who are, in many ways, making the national dreams of financial success or even stability more difficult for many of their fellow countrymen to attain.
More this weekend,Ben
PS. Three links to start with:1) The Gilded Age's only two-term president, Grover Cleveland, does his part to build the self-made man narrative: http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/magic/news/cleveland.html
2) Info on Frank's book: http://tcfrank.com/books/whats-the-matter-with-kansas/
3) OPEN: What do you think?
There's a lot of AmericanStudies work to be done (and that has been done) on the self-made man narrative, but I mention it here because of one of its principal roles: in making extreme wealth palatable, and even attractive and noble, to the mass of Americans who do not and are likely never going to possess it. It often mystifies me how a reprehensible, sleazy, multiple-bankruptcy-suffering fool like Donald Trump can become an icon and idol; but my mystification is due in part to my knowledge of how Trump gained the vast majority of his fortune: the way many of the wealthiest Americans (such as current presidential candidate Mitt Romney) do, by inheriting it. The national narratives about men like Trump and Romney, on the other hand, emphasize their resumes, their business savvy, their self-making—thus making these obscenely wealthy figures into both impressive models and, at least implicitly, examples that could be followed in our own paths to obscene wealth.Journalist and political writer Thomas Frank famously asked, in regard to the question of why working class Americans so often seem to vote against their own self-interest and in favor of the interests of the wealthy, What's the Matter with Kansas? I read today a daily email from the TeaParty.org official site—a New England ASA email account receives those daily emails, and the AmericanStudier in me is obligated to read them, even at the risk of nausea and vomiting—in which that ostensibly working-class, populist organization similarly went to great lengths to defend the nation's richest 1% against the Occupy Wall Street movement. My first reaction in reading the email was quite similar to Frank's; my second was to remember the big money groups and individuals (like the Koch Brothers) that have funded many of the Tea Party's efforts. But my third was to recall the role of the self-made man narrative in the Gilded Age, and down to our contemporary moment—to make us admire and aspire to be precisely those Americans who are, in many ways, making the national dreams of financial success or even stability more difficult for many of their fellow countrymen to attain.
More this weekend,Ben
PS. Three links to start with:1) The Gilded Age's only two-term president, Grover Cleveland, does his part to build the self-made man narrative: http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/magic/news/cleveland.html
2) Info on Frank's book: http://tcfrank.com/books/whats-the-matter-with-kansas/
3) OPEN: What do you think?
October 13, 2011
October 13, 2011: Gospel Musings
The obscenely wealthy magnates whose industries, fortunes, and identities so dominated and defined the Gilded Age in America may have come to be known as robber barons—particularly after the publication of journalist and historian Matthew Josephson's 1934 The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists—but in their own era, and with a great deal of help from their own narrative- and myth-making efforts, men like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt were consistently linked to a much more positive phrase: the Gospel of Wealth. Carnegie himself first coined the phrase in his 1889 North American Review article "Wealth" (linked below), and his culminating paragraph there still serves as the concept's most succinct definition: the opening image of the "millionaire" as "a trustee for the poor, entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself"; and the closing critique of those wealthy Americans who choose not to use their wealth charitably: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."
Certainly we AmericanStudiers have to be very careful about accepting any narrative produced directly by those most implicated by it; but as with so many of the topics about which I've written here, the truths of this historical community and period likely lie in some complex combination of these different images. That is, there's very little question that the fortunes of these Gilded Age magnates were indeed achieved with the help of a variety of shady means for which the term "robbery" does not feel inappropriate—a process that in many ways began with the eight year reign of one of our nation's most corrupt presidential administrations, that of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877); was facilitated by one of the most suspect Supreme Court decisions of all time (1886's Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, in which the majority ruled that corporations were "people" and so protected by the 14th Amendment); and remained almost entirely unchecked until Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive movement's early 20th century trust-busting efforts. Yet there's also no question that many of these magnates did indeed use at least a good bit of their extreme wealth for a variety of very worthy causes: founding universities (Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt, Stanford), starting libraries (a favorite activity of Carnegie's in particular), endowing grants and aid programs of all kinds (central to Rockefeller's legacy), and so on. None of them died poor, nor did they leave their descendents bereft; but, to honor Carnegie's terms, it's fair to say that they didn't necessarily die "thus rich" either.When it comes to our contemporary, 21st century beneficiaries of what many commentators have described as a new Gilded Age (see link two for an example), the dividing line seems a bit clearer. The Wall Street uber-rich and the CEOs with billion-dollar bonuses and golden parachutes seem often to revel in the robber baron image and to reject the slightest intimation that they should be doing anything with their money other than, well, taking baths in it; the group of Wall Streeters drinking champagne and laughing on a balcony above the Occupy Wall St. marchers earlier this month would exemplify this side to our modern Gilded Age. On the other hand there's the case of Bill Gates, one of the richest people in human history and yet someone whose philanthropic and charitable efforts and organizations seem almost literally boundless; Oprah Winfrey would be another prominent current example of a strikingly wealthy American who at the same time very publicly embodies a Gospel of Wealth philosophy. And then, in a significantly grayer area that reveals the complexities behind any such black-and-white division, would be the impetus for this post, Steve Jobs: Jobs famously limited his own opportunities for extreme wealth, taking only a $1 salary for his last few years with Apple (although he certainly didn't have to go begging); yet he also did not, at least in any public or prominent way, use his or his company's wealth for philanthropic purposes (although as I wrote yesterday the company itself performed significant social roles to be sure).
The point, as ever here, is multiple and ambiguous. Extreme wealth, and especially the resulting and inevitable gaps and inequalities it brings with it, is, to this AmericanStudier's mind, a very dangerous and destructive force in our society. But since no individual can change such a force, it's certainly better for the wealthy to practice, as fully and genuinely as possible, something like the Gospel of Wealth, right? Or does the Gospel serve more to mask their own continued enrichment, as an opiate for the masses of sorts? Is the Jobs version—of working to create a company that in some key ways enriches society, and limiting his own paychecks at the same time, but not necessarily doing charitable work per se—preferable? Inquiring, AmericanStudying minds want to know what you think! More tomorrow,Ben
PS. Three links to start with:1) The Carnegie "Gospel" essay: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Carnegie.html
2) An article by economist Brad DeLong linking the robber baron image to our contemporary wealth inequalities: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/econ_articles/carnegie/delong_moscow_paper2.html
3) OPEN: What do you think?
Certainly we AmericanStudiers have to be very careful about accepting any narrative produced directly by those most implicated by it; but as with so many of the topics about which I've written here, the truths of this historical community and period likely lie in some complex combination of these different images. That is, there's very little question that the fortunes of these Gilded Age magnates were indeed achieved with the help of a variety of shady means for which the term "robbery" does not feel inappropriate—a process that in many ways began with the eight year reign of one of our nation's most corrupt presidential administrations, that of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877); was facilitated by one of the most suspect Supreme Court decisions of all time (1886's Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, in which the majority ruled that corporations were "people" and so protected by the 14th Amendment); and remained almost entirely unchecked until Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive movement's early 20th century trust-busting efforts. Yet there's also no question that many of these magnates did indeed use at least a good bit of their extreme wealth for a variety of very worthy causes: founding universities (Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt, Stanford), starting libraries (a favorite activity of Carnegie's in particular), endowing grants and aid programs of all kinds (central to Rockefeller's legacy), and so on. None of them died poor, nor did they leave their descendents bereft; but, to honor Carnegie's terms, it's fair to say that they didn't necessarily die "thus rich" either.When it comes to our contemporary, 21st century beneficiaries of what many commentators have described as a new Gilded Age (see link two for an example), the dividing line seems a bit clearer. The Wall Street uber-rich and the CEOs with billion-dollar bonuses and golden parachutes seem often to revel in the robber baron image and to reject the slightest intimation that they should be doing anything with their money other than, well, taking baths in it; the group of Wall Streeters drinking champagne and laughing on a balcony above the Occupy Wall St. marchers earlier this month would exemplify this side to our modern Gilded Age. On the other hand there's the case of Bill Gates, one of the richest people in human history and yet someone whose philanthropic and charitable efforts and organizations seem almost literally boundless; Oprah Winfrey would be another prominent current example of a strikingly wealthy American who at the same time very publicly embodies a Gospel of Wealth philosophy. And then, in a significantly grayer area that reveals the complexities behind any such black-and-white division, would be the impetus for this post, Steve Jobs: Jobs famously limited his own opportunities for extreme wealth, taking only a $1 salary for his last few years with Apple (although he certainly didn't have to go begging); yet he also did not, at least in any public or prominent way, use his or his company's wealth for philanthropic purposes (although as I wrote yesterday the company itself performed significant social roles to be sure).
The point, as ever here, is multiple and ambiguous. Extreme wealth, and especially the resulting and inevitable gaps and inequalities it brings with it, is, to this AmericanStudier's mind, a very dangerous and destructive force in our society. But since no individual can change such a force, it's certainly better for the wealthy to practice, as fully and genuinely as possible, something like the Gospel of Wealth, right? Or does the Gospel serve more to mask their own continued enrichment, as an opiate for the masses of sorts? Is the Jobs version—of working to create a company that in some key ways enriches society, and limiting his own paychecks at the same time, but not necessarily doing charitable work per se—preferable? Inquiring, AmericanStudying minds want to know what you think! More tomorrow,Ben
PS. Three links to start with:1) The Carnegie "Gospel" essay: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Carnegie.html
2) An article by economist Brad DeLong linking the robber baron image to our contemporary wealth inequalities: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/econ_articles/carnegie/delong_moscow_paper2.html
3) OPEN: What do you think?
October 12, 2011
October 12, 2011: The Messy, Troubling, Democratizing Machine
It's not at all hyperbolic to note that one of the founding AmericanStudies questions and themes is the complex, conflicted opposition and yet interrelationship between nature and technology in our national identity and culture. After all, by almost any reckoning Leo Marx was one of the founding and most significant early AmericanStudiers, and Marx's masterpiece was his 1964 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. As Marx noted, many of our defining national ideals and narratives, from Jefferson's yeoman farmer and mythologized heroes like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett down to the genre of the Western and the creation of the National Park System, emphasized the positive qualities and influences of a pastoral, natural world and space, one outside of our cities and (as Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn would have put it) civilizin' forces. Yet at the same time, as Marx likewise argued, every stage of our national development has been heavily influenced, if not owes its existence to, technological developments: from the printing press in the Revolutionary era to the railroad in the 19th century's national moves westward, and up to the crucial early 20th century unifying possibilities created by (among other innovations) the automobile, radio, telephone, and air travel.
Despite those necessary and even critical technological contributions, though, Marx rightly noted a criticism thread of anti-technological critique among many of our most prominent national narratives and voices, a sense that our American garden was continually being invaded and corrupted (if not destroyed) by these machines. No single voice or text captures that perspective better than Henry David Thoreau's Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854), and no moment within that text better exemplifies Thoreau's critique of technology than his Chapter IV ("Sounds") discussion of the Fitchburg railroad line's invasion of his Walden world and of the ideal American identity and culture he has moved there in an effort to find and narrate. "The whistle of the locomotive," he writes, "penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard." And while he recognizes the realities of transportation and commerce that the railroad represents and has in fact made possible, he nonetheless focuses in the section on the gap he sees between the heroic images of the trains and their much bleaker realities—"If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied!"—and on the negative cultural influences of this new technology: "To do things 'railroad fashion' is now the byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track."No one who has (for example) both walked in the woods and been stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on 95 can fail to hear and sympathize with Thoreau's perspective here; no one who has seen (for another example) large numbers of people in the stands at a baseball game focused not on the game nor on each other but instead on their phones and devices doesn't share this sense of the dangers or downsides of technological progress. Yet Thoreau also admits, in one of the passage's only genuinely positive lines, how many of his neighbors have been able to travel to Boston on the railroad who otherwise (he believes) would never have made the journey; and the simple reality of technological development in America is that, whatever its other effects and meanings, it has consistently served as a vehicle for democratization, for opening up our nation's worlds and possibilities to a greater number of our fellow citizens. Nature can and should be democratically accessible and meaningful too, of course; that was Olmstead's explicit goal in creating Central Park, after all, and was likewise a key goal of the National Park movement. Yet nature's benefits, real and vital as they are, are also at their heart individual and spiritual (broadly defined); while technology, despite those dangers and downsides, offers communal and social opportunities that we must be careful not to elide or understate. Thoreau's life and choices offered him the chance to spend a year in Walden, to travel to Fitchburg on foot, and so on; but for most of his fellow Americans, then and now, the opportunities afforded them by technological advancements were much more vital to their own lives and needs, their goals and families, their success and dreams. And we can always still take the inexpensive commuter rail out to Concord and then walk to Walden Pond as well!
I'm thinking about these questions today as the first of two ways in which I'll try to link Steve Jobs to AmericanStudies conversations. After all, whatever else Jobs did and meant, he consistently and with great innovation brought some of our newest technologies—the personal computer, the internet, digital music, the cell phone—to his fellow Americans and around the world; even Pixar's use of computer technologies and animation in the service of profoundly powerful filmmaking and storytelling can be described in that way. Jobs' commencement speech advice to all his fellow men and women to follow their hearts might well lead many individuals into the woods—but it might lead at least as many to their IPods and computers, their cars and phones. And that's as American a choice as it gets. More tomorrow, the second part of these AmericanStudies responses to Jobs,Ben
PS. Three links to start with:1) Google books version of 35th anniversary edition of Marx's book: http://books.google.com/books?id=aJ3SfJyseSoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
2) E-text of Walden's Chapter IV: http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden04.html
3) OPEN: What do you think?
Despite those necessary and even critical technological contributions, though, Marx rightly noted a criticism thread of anti-technological critique among many of our most prominent national narratives and voices, a sense that our American garden was continually being invaded and corrupted (if not destroyed) by these machines. No single voice or text captures that perspective better than Henry David Thoreau's Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854), and no moment within that text better exemplifies Thoreau's critique of technology than his Chapter IV ("Sounds") discussion of the Fitchburg railroad line's invasion of his Walden world and of the ideal American identity and culture he has moved there in an effort to find and narrate. "The whistle of the locomotive," he writes, "penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard." And while he recognizes the realities of transportation and commerce that the railroad represents and has in fact made possible, he nonetheless focuses in the section on the gap he sees between the heroic images of the trains and their much bleaker realities—"If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied!"—and on the negative cultural influences of this new technology: "To do things 'railroad fashion' is now the byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track."No one who has (for example) both walked in the woods and been stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on 95 can fail to hear and sympathize with Thoreau's perspective here; no one who has seen (for another example) large numbers of people in the stands at a baseball game focused not on the game nor on each other but instead on their phones and devices doesn't share this sense of the dangers or downsides of technological progress. Yet Thoreau also admits, in one of the passage's only genuinely positive lines, how many of his neighbors have been able to travel to Boston on the railroad who otherwise (he believes) would never have made the journey; and the simple reality of technological development in America is that, whatever its other effects and meanings, it has consistently served as a vehicle for democratization, for opening up our nation's worlds and possibilities to a greater number of our fellow citizens. Nature can and should be democratically accessible and meaningful too, of course; that was Olmstead's explicit goal in creating Central Park, after all, and was likewise a key goal of the National Park movement. Yet nature's benefits, real and vital as they are, are also at their heart individual and spiritual (broadly defined); while technology, despite those dangers and downsides, offers communal and social opportunities that we must be careful not to elide or understate. Thoreau's life and choices offered him the chance to spend a year in Walden, to travel to Fitchburg on foot, and so on; but for most of his fellow Americans, then and now, the opportunities afforded them by technological advancements were much more vital to their own lives and needs, their goals and families, their success and dreams. And we can always still take the inexpensive commuter rail out to Concord and then walk to Walden Pond as well!
I'm thinking about these questions today as the first of two ways in which I'll try to link Steve Jobs to AmericanStudies conversations. After all, whatever else Jobs did and meant, he consistently and with great innovation brought some of our newest technologies—the personal computer, the internet, digital music, the cell phone—to his fellow Americans and around the world; even Pixar's use of computer technologies and animation in the service of profoundly powerful filmmaking and storytelling can be described in that way. Jobs' commencement speech advice to all his fellow men and women to follow their hearts might well lead many individuals into the woods—but it might lead at least as many to their IPods and computers, their cars and phones. And that's as American a choice as it gets. More tomorrow, the second part of these AmericanStudies responses to Jobs,Ben
PS. Three links to start with:1) Google books version of 35th anniversary edition of Marx's book: http://books.google.com/books?id=aJ3SfJyseSoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
2) E-text of Walden's Chapter IV: http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden04.html
3) OPEN: What do you think?
October 11, 2011
October 11, 2011: Remembering An Iconoclastic Genius
I've had a request to write a post on or related to or inspired by Steve Jobs, and am still figuring out what I want to do with that but should have it done for one of the next few days. But just as I was thinking about Jobs, I came upon a story about another, and I guess I would say even more impressive and pioneering, American who passed away this past week: Derrick Bell. I emphasize the "more impressive and pioneering" point not to tear down Jobs in any way, but rather because, I am ashamed to admit, I knew nearly nothing about Professor Bell; perhaps I had come across his name at one point or another, but certainly without the kind of emphasis that this amazing life clearly deserves. Check out these biographies (or at least the first and fullest of 'em) and an obituary, and I'll be here on the other side:
--A couple different biographies of Bell: http://www.answers.com/topic/derrick-bell?cat=biz-fin--The New York Times obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/us/derrick-bell-pioneering-harvard-law-professor-dies-at-80.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1318209858-b9X+JpSoMSSH3C9tHJ8mmg
I'm not sure I've encountered a more consistently exemplary and significant American life, and it makes me sad that his passing garnered no national attention. I understand full well how many more people were directly impacted by Jobs' life and work, a subject that will be part of my in-development take on the man; I likewise understand why some of Bell's most significant impacts could be seen as more explicitly focused on (if not limited to) scholarly conversations and communities. But on the other hand, Jobs' choices, whatever else their impacts and meanings, were always made in service of business, of marketing, of profit—whereas Bell was a man who, as the bios and obituary note, quit one of the most sought-after and high-paying (as these things go) scholarly jobs out of a sense of social and ethical obligation. Jobs' oft-repeated commencement address advice about only following the dictates of your heart, while certainly worth heeding, is a lot less complicated to take when it's coming from somebody whose choices made his company and himself enormously successful; but when we apply it to a man whose choices cost him a great deal, in every sense, the advice becomes significantly more complex and, perhaps, more inspiring as well.But leaving all of that aside, Bell's life still exemplifies what I could call the two most salient American trends of the second half of the 20th (and still the early 21st) century. For one thing, he spent his life as a pioneer in integrating American society—from his very young, single-handed integration of an Alabama church, as retold at the start of the first biography's narrative, through his lifelong efforts to integrate the faculty and tenure process at Harvard, and in many other ways besides, Bell not only advocated for but in his life and choices embodied the integration of a wide variety of our national and local communities. But at the same time, and despite his consistent arguments for persistent discrimination and racism in American society, Bell's ideas and ideals reflect a sense of America that includes, from its points of origin on to its present conflicts and possibilities, all races and communities—a vision of a nation that, however much it has tried to deny and exclude many citizens, has instead been fundamentally defined by their presences and perspectives, by both the darkest and yet most potentially inspiring sides of our histories and identities. That is, precisely by working so fully for integration, among his many other lifelong efforts, Bell made plain how fully our nation has always been, in hesitant and partial and incomplete and evolving but still crucial ways, inseparably integrated.
Obviously there's no limit to how many people we remember, either in their passings or in their lives, and I'll have more to say about the significance of Steve Jobs' life and legacy soon. But to my mind the most impressive and inspiring famous American whom we lost last week was Derrick Bell—and the most tragic aspect of his loss is just how little most of us (myself included) knew about him. More tomorrow,Ben
PS. The links are already above, so here I'll just ask, as usual, what do you think?
--A couple different biographies of Bell: http://www.answers.com/topic/derrick-bell?cat=biz-fin--The New York Times obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/us/derrick-bell-pioneering-harvard-law-professor-dies-at-80.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1318209858-b9X+JpSoMSSH3C9tHJ8mmg
I'm not sure I've encountered a more consistently exemplary and significant American life, and it makes me sad that his passing garnered no national attention. I understand full well how many more people were directly impacted by Jobs' life and work, a subject that will be part of my in-development take on the man; I likewise understand why some of Bell's most significant impacts could be seen as more explicitly focused on (if not limited to) scholarly conversations and communities. But on the other hand, Jobs' choices, whatever else their impacts and meanings, were always made in service of business, of marketing, of profit—whereas Bell was a man who, as the bios and obituary note, quit one of the most sought-after and high-paying (as these things go) scholarly jobs out of a sense of social and ethical obligation. Jobs' oft-repeated commencement address advice about only following the dictates of your heart, while certainly worth heeding, is a lot less complicated to take when it's coming from somebody whose choices made his company and himself enormously successful; but when we apply it to a man whose choices cost him a great deal, in every sense, the advice becomes significantly more complex and, perhaps, more inspiring as well.But leaving all of that aside, Bell's life still exemplifies what I could call the two most salient American trends of the second half of the 20th (and still the early 21st) century. For one thing, he spent his life as a pioneer in integrating American society—from his very young, single-handed integration of an Alabama church, as retold at the start of the first biography's narrative, through his lifelong efforts to integrate the faculty and tenure process at Harvard, and in many other ways besides, Bell not only advocated for but in his life and choices embodied the integration of a wide variety of our national and local communities. But at the same time, and despite his consistent arguments for persistent discrimination and racism in American society, Bell's ideas and ideals reflect a sense of America that includes, from its points of origin on to its present conflicts and possibilities, all races and communities—a vision of a nation that, however much it has tried to deny and exclude many citizens, has instead been fundamentally defined by their presences and perspectives, by both the darkest and yet most potentially inspiring sides of our histories and identities. That is, precisely by working so fully for integration, among his many other lifelong efforts, Bell made plain how fully our nation has always been, in hesitant and partial and incomplete and evolving but still crucial ways, inseparably integrated.
Obviously there's no limit to how many people we remember, either in their passings or in their lives, and I'll have more to say about the significance of Steve Jobs' life and legacy soon. But to my mind the most impressive and inspiring famous American whom we lost last week was Derrick Bell—and the most tragic aspect of his loss is just how little most of us (myself included) knew about him. More tomorrow,Ben
PS. The links are already above, so here I'll just ask, as usual, what do you think?
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