A Nameless Dread

This week I finished Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. It features a rich wall street executive losing his mind and killing numerous people in vicious and sexual manners. It is not for those with weak stomachs to say the least. Some passages seriously made me feel disturbed like some sort of sympathy pain, except sympathy psychosis.

I am a bit lost after reading it. I get that it is a bit of satire about the superficial lives of the rich, with quotes like, "There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust." But on some level I still feel that Ellis has some pity for the main character, Patrick Bateman. You can't write 300 pages about the inner monologue of a character without identifying with that character on some level, which makes the satirical elements a bit problematic. There are also long passages where Bateman describes what everybody is wearing, focusing primarily on designer names, which, while incredibly tedious to read, serves to highlight how these characters only care about the surface. But, to write these passages, Ellis had to know a great deal about designer clothing, and this means he has to operate in that circle to some degree.

Another issue with the book is that there is a lot of homophobia and misogyny. This is further puzzling since Ellis himself is bisexual, and leans mostly towards homosexuality from what I've read about him. And one might argue that this is a continuation of the satire, mocking the hypermasculinity of these wall street types. But at some point you cannot hide behind satire anymore. At some point, you're producing so much homophobia and misogyny, that it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that you don't harbor some of those sentiments yourself.

My name is Nathaniel, and I have read Sparknotes

Sparknotes is a website where sports medicine majors go to read short summaries of literature and character analyses so they can plagiarize the site in hopes of getting a C from a lazy teacher's assistant or something of the sort. All of my academia friends speak of websites like sparknotes with vile hatred, and I can understand since their whole purpose is to make it possible for lazy students to not have to dig on their own through stories.

However, I read it frequently for a lot of my readings in many classes. Not as a replacement for reading the actual work, but as kindling to start my criticism. The problem for me is I don't really know how to do criticism. I am a kid hammering on a piano with no training. I'm no dummy, so I can sometimes find something melodic and go with it, but it's amateur at best. So sparknotes is like Fisher Price my-first-literary-criticism.

I bring this up because, after reading Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," I was madly in love with the story, but wasn't able to articulate exactly what was going on under the surface of the story. I sensed religious tones, regionalism, and characters that were more complex than "hero" and "villain," but I just couldn't figure it out. The Misfit and the grandmother's dialogue with each other at the end intrigued me, but I didn't know why.

So I went to sparknotes, and read up on it. And what I read about The Misfit was the most interesting because I completely disagreed with sparknotes.

"He has carefully considered his actions in life and examined his experiences to find lessons within them. He has even renamed himself because of one of these lessons, believing that his punishment didn’t fit his crime. Because the Misfit has questioned himself and his life so closely, he reveals a self-awareness that the grandmother lacks...The Misfit’s philosophies may be depraved, but they are consistent. Unlike the grandmother, whose moral code falls apart the moment it’s challenged, the Misfit has a steady view of life and acts according to what he believes is right."

I think they miss the mark saying that The Misfit is consistent. While he is more analytical than the grandmother and her family, there is something within him that isn't satisfied with his philosophy. His cool amoral attitude is challenged by the grandmother, and he cracks. When she talks to him about Jesus, The Misfit, who establishes himself as not one of the faithful, becomes upset about his lack of certainty.

"I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there," he said, hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack...

The Misfit obviously isn't so sure about his philosophy of "no pleasure but meanness." When he kills the grandmother immediately after, it seems like a different sort of murder for him. It isn't part of his iconoclastic revenge against society, killing these people that he felt were part of the system that punished him unfairly. He killed the grandmother because she recognized him. She knew who he was, not just him being The Misfit, but who he was to the core of his being, and it scared him.

So, I highly recommend visiting Sparknotes. And then tearing their crappy criticism apart with your own observations about the text.

An Adonis is Upon Us

A lot of focus in not only my literature classes, but in many of my humanities classes, is put on how women and femininity are treated in society, and with good reason. Still, I feel compelled to talk about how masculinity gets portrayed. Not because I want to steal the spotlight away from women, but because I think that patriarchy hurts men too by defining what it means to be a man. Then men go chasing this unrealistic ideal and all sorts of misery comes out of this pointless pursuit.

I feel that Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" is ripe for this sort of analysis. Willy Loman is obsessed with performative masculinity. He lies about his reputation, his commission, and his own stature. He mocks his neighbor and his neighbor's son, saying "Between him and his son Bernard they can't hammer a nail!" and "A man who can't handle tools is not a man. You're disgusting."

Willy is old and tired and has never been all that successful. By America's standard of masculinity, he isn't much, which is one of the great tragedies about Willy Loman, he has bought into the lie that is unattainable to all despite being the sort of person that should criticize the mold that patriarchy wants its men to fit into. He calls his sons "Adonises," and attributes business savvy to them that they cannot live up to either.

In the end, the irony is that for all Willy's male posturing, he's just pathetic.

Booker T. Washington Was an Uncle Tom

Last quarter we read an excerpt of W.E.B. DuBois' book "The Souls of Black Folk." We read some of his sharp criticism of Booker T. Washington, specifically Washington's "Atlanta Compromise." This quarter Booker T. makes another appearance in the first chapter of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." The narrator says in the second paragraph, "they were told they were free...in everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand." That last part is a direct quote of Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech where he essentially told his fellow southern african-americans to stay in the south and help white people rebuild it. He advocated separate but equal segregationist policy, and white southerners loved him for it. This is why I call Booker T. Washington an Uncle Tom, he was an assimilationist that capitulated to the racist demands of the southern whites of his time.

Ralph Ellison's protagonist is raised in a family that upholds Washington's values, though the protagonist's grandfather seems to realize on his deathbed that this lifestyle is harmful to him and his people. Despite the grandfather's warnings, the protagonist lives the life of submission that whites demand blacks live in a white society. He is commended for his behavior, because his behavior maintains the inequity of power in the times of Jim Crow. The protagonist seems to go so far as to experience Stockholm Syndrome when he says, "I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks..." He feels guilt when a naked white woman is revealed at the Battle Royal because in the time of Emmett Till, even looking the wrong way at a white woman can be a death sentence.

This is the life of a black person in Jim Crow south. It is one of internalized racism, de facto and de jure societal racism, and constant fear. When the protagonist simply implies that "social equality" is a worthy goal as an abstract concept, the crowd of white men clamps down on him. "We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times" one of them tells him.

But perhaps the most troubling part of our reading was when the protagonist is involved in the boxing match, and is the last of two men standing. When he asks the other man to take the fall, even promising him all of the pay, so that they can get this stupid brutal skeptical over with, the other guy refuses. "For them?" he asks. "For me, sonofabitch!"

I may have been reading too much into this, but it seemed like a metaphor for the internalized conflict within the black community. The ways that America's power brokers have fomented strife within the lower classes so that they don't realize that their true enemy is the bourgeois and the capitalists. The white folks force these black men to fight one another for their amusement. And while some participate out of fear, and some have bought into the pride and machismo of winning, even though you never really win anything. The game is rigged.

Render Muttons

Non-representational art is a conundrum for me. On one hand I would like to dismiss it because I'm a philosophy major and it is my job to seek out the rational and logical purpose of a thing. However, I also like my red plaid shirt, and the cover of Joy Division's album "Unknown Pleasures," and I hate houndstooth jackets on women. All of these are non-representational patterns and images, there is no narrative or character or moral, they just are abstract shapes for the most part. So I cannot say that non-representational art doesn't have validity and doesn't illicit an emotional response.

And after ending my blog for the last literature class with an exploration of the death of the author, it wouldn't be intellectually honest to say that my inability to discern Stein's authorial intent with Tender Buttons means it has no value. I shouldn't even allow my grudge against her for being a fascist color my opinion of her writing since authors don't matter.

But man, I just can't get into Tender Buttons. For a split second I thought I was going to like her, when I heard the title. I thought of a mother buttoning her child's jacket on a cold day. It gave me this nice comforting feeling of maternal bonds and I thought that I might be able to get other such interesting images out of her work.

I'm reminded of the movie Donnie Darko, when Drew Barrymore's character tells her class about a linguist that said that "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase in the english language. The point being that the aesthetic sound is pleasing despite the semantic meaning being dull or even possibly negative if you think of musky basements. That scene was always perplexing to me because I could not figure out why "cellar door" was all that pleasant a sound. I also cannot figure out why Gertrude Stein's poetry is arranged in aesthetic terms instead of semantically.

And here is the paradox because I enjoy the idea of the death of the author. Screw all your context, the text is all that matters. However, when it comes to "cellar door" and "The time to show a message is when too late..." they are meaningless to me without context. I do not give a damn about "cellar door" as a phrase in and of itself. But throw some Polish Jews in 1939, hiding in the cellar, and they can see the uniform of a Nazi through a hole in the cellar door, well now I care quite a bit about a cellar door.

Death of The Author 2: Death Harder

"For Reuben and Charles have married two girls,
But Billy has married a boy.
The girls he had tried on every side,
But none he could get to agree;
All was in vain, he went home again,
And since that he's married to Natty."

-Excerpt of poem authored by Abraham Lincoln

Our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln, had a friend named Joshua Fry Speed. The two were very close friends, even sharing a bed for four years, though this wasn't a social taboo like it might be today. There are many historians that point to evidence that Abraham Lincoln was actually homosexual. The Log-Cabin Republicans, a group of gay republicans, take their name from the belief that Lincoln was gay. There are many historians that disagree though. They point to the obvious fact that Lincoln had children with wife Mary Todd Lincoln, though Lincoln certainly wouldn't be the first gay man to reproduce with a woman. Additionally, the poem quoted above has allusions to a man marrying another man instead of a woman.

What could this possibly have to do with disregarding authorial intent? When we discuss historical context and the life of the author, we pretend that we are quite sure of what actually occurred and what was actually meant by the piece. However, we have a historical figure in Lincoln that has likely been examined by scholars far more than any of the authors we come across in an American literature class, and there is still much we aren't sure about. If we can't figure out things about a famous President, what makes us so sure that Dunbar didn't recognize that women also wear masks, and wrote his poem to befit women and african-americans?

Even if we could resurrect one of these authors and ask them very specific questions about their work, that doesn't mean we have the final answer on that work. We learned about psychoanalytic critical theory in Professor Cassel's class, a critical lens where we consider the effect sub-conscious thoughts have on a piece of literature. The fact remains that these authors themselves might not even know what the piece is about!

Batman, of all things, is a great example of this. When Bob Kane created Batman in the late 1930s, did he realize the psychologically disturbed themes present in Bruce Wayne/The Batman? The Jungian duality (Hey, Batman Wears The Mask!) of a leisure class slacker by day, and a serious "Dark Knight" by evening? Likely not. We can now look at Batman and see that he is a bit of a fascist. He is a vigilante that takes the justice system out of the people's hands and places it in his own. He, being a wealthy billionaire, uses his wealth to enforce justice as he sees fit. He's a plutocrat. This is very much like Plato's ideal Republic, which is hierarchial, and very much not a democracy. Bob Kane wasn't thinking that deeply when he put the cowl and cape on Master Bruce, but these themes of vigilantism and corrupt bureaucracy existed in the sub-conscious of society, and I believe Bob Kane tapped into it unbeknownst to himself.

The beauty of this lens to me is that it can turn almost anything into something exciting. Keeping with Batman, when I was a young boy I found the movies and cartoon and comics to be wonderful. I just liked the action and the courageous hero fighting evil. Then, when I grew up a bit and discovered that life is far more complicated than good versus evil and heroes swooping in to save the day, I dismissed Batman as childish and boring. Now, I can reexamine it in the context of not just Bob Kane's desire for an action hero with a limitless bank account, but in the context of culture and society and politics and psychology. It breathes new life into spent pages.

Death of the Author (Part 1)

"One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder"

-W.E.B. DuBois "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903)

It is totally not cheating to break this up into multiple parts. It's going to be a long examination of an esoteric concept that I'm admittedly not extremely familiar with and am only beginning to explore. Plus if anybody is masochistic enough to read my pretentious ramblings, it would be kind of me to alleviate their misery by serializing it.

I was reminded of this topic in class on Thursday when we read and analyzed Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear The Mask." Most of the class, including myself, concluded that the poem was about the duality of the African-American experience. Having their own culture, but assimilating to white culture when around white people in public. I believe it was Martin that put forth the suggestion that this poem could be about women. Professor Cassel didn't seem all that convinced and we moved on.

However, I feel that Martin had a great point. It could be about women. In fact, the that is why the DuBois quote above, which is very much like the Dunbar poem, has always appealed to me: It is a universal experience. DuBois has zero ambiguity in his writings, making it clear that he is speaking of the African-American experience, but it still works for all sorts of experiences.

As an example, when I was writing a paper on Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel "Persepolis" for my Women in Religion class last fall, I began noticing how DuBois' quote applied to this story of a Persian woman living in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Other side of the world, around seven decades after DuBois wrote "The Souls of Black Folk", but it still applied. Satrapi loves her home country of Iran, but could not reconcile this love with the oppressive religious regime, especially the misogyny of that regime. Satrapi knew her twoness. Not African and American, but Iranian and liberated woman. It turns out that this concept is within all of us. If you don't think so, next time you see your grandmother, tell her in detail how you feel about your first sexual experience.

Sociologists even have terms for this. "Front-stage self" and "Backstage self." We act differently in public as we do at home. We talk differently to our sweet Aunt Betty than we do when we've had a few drinks with our friends. We all wear masks.

So, what does all of this have to do with "Death of the Author"? Well, all of this begins to illustrate why we don't have to take into consideration authorial intent. We can ignore it completely. We can put our fingers in our ears at the moment that somebody starts discussing "historical context." Or as the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text."

I'll explain this all in more depth in my next thrilling installment. I'm being facetious because only the biggest philosophy/literature nerds on earth could possibly care about this sort of crap, but hey...I promise that my next post will feature a gay Abraham Lincoln. That's fun, right?