The Superficiality of Art

An academic fashion of recent years has been to understand and theorize what might be called a de-substantialized aesthetics: art that isn't about something but reflects (on) its own form of contentless expression. Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics has made the rounds among grad students trying to wrap their heads around this project. More generally, the "return to form," or the New Formalism, in literary and visual studies has inspired many a dissertation on late modernism, abstract art, the cinema of Antonioni, and the work of Beckett, among other topics. It may or may not be a coincidence that grad students who revel in the New Formalism also tend to be the same hipsters who listen to the notable musical expression of a contentless art, post-rock.

For all of the New Formalism's intellectual cachet, it was difficult for me to find a single source that 1) advanced a coherent point about de-substantialized aesthetics, and 2) actually used the theory to interpret literary and visual texts in a way that was persuasive in its own right. Fortunately, it took just one well-crafted passage from Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips's Intimacies to change all that. The book presents itself as a dialogue between the authors on their respective theoretical engagements with psychoanalysis. Really, though, Intimacies is three parts (i.e., chapters) Bersani and one part Phillips, and it is in Bersani's first chapter that this insightful observation appears:

We might take [Henry James's character John Marcher, from The Beast in the Jungle] to be an emblem of art. Writers, painters, filmmakers frequently move in their late work not toward a greater density of meaning and texture, but rather toward a kind of concentrated monotony that designates a certain negativizing effect inherent in the aesthetic. I'm thinking -- to mention just a few examples at random -- of Turner's nearly monochromatic late seascapes, the almost imperceptible variations within the dark coloring of the walls in the Rothko Chapel, the willed thinness of Beckett's last fictions (especially Westward Ho), the nearly subjectless banality of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, the relentless reduction of variegated actual behavior to abstract laws of behavior in Proust's La Fugitive, the erasure of abstraction itself in Mallarmé's obsessively present page blanche, and of course the at times staggering thinness of meaning in James's late novels. (25)

Bersani's examples are illustrative, even if you've never seen or read them yourself. Using descriptors like "thin," "nearly monochromatic," and "banal," Bersani gives us an idea of how "concentrated monotony" (and note the multi-sensory meanings of "monotone") advances a de-substantialized aesthetics. In a word, the depthlessness of these works invites the reader or spectator to dwell in the realm of the aesthetic as such.

Consonant with Bersani's exploration of the "shattering" of the ego in gay sex, his proposal in Intimacies is that the superficiality of art negates humans' need to find (deep) meaning in texts. Focusing only on the superficial -- that which is apparent, rather than what we assume to be "actual" or "substantial" -- brackets the ego's desire to appropriate meaning for (self-)understanding. Instead, the superficiality of art says, "Forget the referent (there is no referent) and give yourself over to the object of art itself."

Bersani's thesis compels one to explore the individual artists he names in the passage. Of these, I found the work of English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) to be the most surprising, not least because he's the earliest figure cited in the passage. Conventionally thought of as a Romantic landscapist, Turner's "late seascapes" are wondrously abstract. Turner's colors assume what I can only describe, synaesthesially, as their own kind of texture.

Landscape with Water (c. 1840-5) concentrates color on one side of the canvas to create the effect of density. Nonetheless, the figure on the left remains obscure, and the haze of colors makes it difficult to discern where water, land, and air begin or end.

Seascape with Storm Coming On (c 1840) is even more abstract, but we can still see Turner concentrating color on part of the canvas to give weight to his vision. Notably, the darkness which lies at the center of the painting doesn't represent something "real"; on the contrary, it acts as a kind of blank focus around which the lighter hues swirl and revolve.

Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands (c. 1840-5) operates in a similar way to Seascape with Storm. The difference is that its blank focal point is the beaming whiteness in the center of the canvas. That whiteness conceals the "actual" sunrise the painting purports to represent, but the effect of its luminosity is to warm the canvas's other colors, softening the browns and blues in a shower of light.

If Turner's late seascapes are emblems of a de-substantialized aesthetics, then Bersani's genealogy can serve as a productive starting point for scholars who wish to work on this topic in a serious and meaningful way. With Bersani, one gets the impression that art is something more than just an academic "object of study" -- it's a wholly engrossing, all-consuming experience of being (or non-being). Badiou and the majority of New Formalists in the academy strike me in the opposite way: they wish to talk theoretically about art, but they evince very little taste for it. "Taste" not in the sense of highbrow vs. lowbrow but in the sense of not seeming to like art, or the experience of art, all that much. Badiou and the New Formalists remain wholly cerebral consumers of art, and in that regard they can never fully give themselves over to its ego-shattering superficiality.

Still Reading Milton after All These Years

I continue to be impressed by Stanley Fish's commitment to Milton studies, even as his academic star-power takes him to the heights of institutional authority and public intellectualism (via his very popular New York Times blog "Think Again"). His reflections on a quatercentenary Milton conference over the summer manage to make a highly specialized academic field accessible to lay readers interested in understanding what all the fuss is about (and why they should care). The piece is also a fine condensation of the central argument of Fish's definitive tome on over forty years of Milton scholarship, How Milton Works (2001).

More recently, Fish wrote on a new prose translation of Milton's Paradise Lost, by the Canadian Miltonist Dennis Danielson. Through line-by-line comparisons of Milton's poetry and Danielson's prose, Fish suggests that the inquiring, interpretively rich poetic voice of Milton is replaced by Danielson's (necessarily) reductive, interpretively blunt prose voice. Without dismissing Danielson's efforts as a fellow Miltonist, Fish makes clear that this new Paradise Lost is best read as an interpretation of the epic poem rather than as a substitute for it. And indeed much can be gleaned from Danielson's work, from a pedagogical point of view:

The edition is a parallel one — Milton’s original on the left hand page and Danielson’s prose rendering on the right. This means that you can ask students to take a passage and compare the effects and meanings produced by the two texts. You can ask students to compose their own translations and explain or defend the choices they made. You can ask students to look at prose translations in another language and think about the difference, if there is one, between translating into a foreign tongue and translating into a more user-friendly version of English. You can ask students to speculate on the nature of translation and on the relationship between translation and the perennial debate about whether there are linguistic universals.

In other words, teachers can subject Danielson's interpretation to a classroom interpretive inquiry of their own -- in which case it should be made clear that students are reading Danielson reading Milton. Perhaps such an effort would be best suited for a graduate seminar, or a practicum on Milton's language and various editions of Paradise Lost.

Like his literary hero, though, Fish is a brilliant wordsmith, and there's a hint in the piece that Fish would prefer to go to the source itself (Milton's poetry) for interpretive exercise. Note that the piece is titled "'Paradise Lost' in Translation," which is at once a literal rendering of what Danielson has done here -- translating the poem into prose -- as well as a figurative play on the word "lost": "paradise" (the interpretive "paradise" of the infinite potential of asking questions through Milton's poetry) being "lost" through Danielson's translation.

On Misplaced Hatred

[This is a response I wrote to Audre Lorde's "Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices," a poem assigned in the online course my friend Alexis Gumbs is teaching: "To Be a Problem: Outcast Subjectivity and Black Literary Production." In conjunction with this post, please read Alexis's comments on sexual violence against black women, "To Be Game."]

The language of this poem is extraordinary. It raises the voices of the dead, so to speak (thank you, Sharon Holland), to create an impression of mourning that's at once singularly personal yet all-too-familiar to victims of sexual violence. I can understand why Lorde might have revised this poem upon hearing it performed: this impression of mourning is as much aural as it is visual, and it's important to try reading parts of "Need" out loud to dwell in its beautiful sadness.

I was particularly affected by Pat's words on p. 11:

What terror embroidered my face
onto your hatred
what ancient unchallenged enemy
took on my sweet brown flesh
within your eyes
came armed against you
with only my laugther my hopeful art
my hair catching the late sunlight
my small son eager to see his mama work?
...

I need you. For what?
Was there no better place
to dig for your manhood except in my woman's bone?

On the same page Bobbie says: "We have a grave need for each other / but your eyes are thirsty / for vengeance / dressed in the easiest blood / and I am closest."

These verses speak back to those perpetrators of sexual violence who refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Men must be confronted with the bruised, battered, bloodied flesh that is the outcome of their sexual aggression. In a sense, they must "own" that aggression by bearing witness to its horrible consequences.

At the same time, Pat and Bobbie acknowledge the psychic wounds that fuel the illogic of sexual violence against black women. The idea of "misplaced hatred" (12) resonates throughout Lorde's poem. An "ancient...enemy" is projected onto the black woman's body, and violence is done to that body out of fear, anxiety, self-loathing, and "terror."

Who or what is that ancient enemy? It's not just racism Lorde is speaking of here: it's a radical dehumanization, through racism but also through heteronormative patriarchy and capitalism (which breeds male insecurity and compensatory measures to escape "lack"), of the social and psychic life of black people. This is a problem of black people's oppression tout court as it's tragically played out in the sexual dehumanization of the black female body.

There's a "grave," or urgent, need for black men to realize this problem and to join their sisters in resisting racist-sexist structures of capitalist domination. But that collaboration recedes from the horizon when intergender need is literally taken to the grave -- when black women aren't fellow strugglers and insurgents but are the objects of putatively male needs: sexual gratification, domestic control, and violent, phallic sublimation.

Lorde's troping on the idea of "need" is tragic and visionary. It captures a powerful social dynamic -- a problem of racial, gender, and class politics as they inhere in rape-murder -- and provokes us to ask other questions. What happens when we say -- to lovers, friends, comrades, companions -- "I need you"? Do we really mean it? In what ways do we mean it? On what, or whose, terms?

Or do you say

...you need me you need me you need me
a broken drum
calling me Black goddess Black hope Black
strength Black mother
yet you touch me
and I die in the alleys of Boston...

Death of a Pugilist

Of the several amusing stories about the life of Norman Mailer, the confrontational don of postwar American letters, in the BBC's obituary for him, I found these to be notable:

Mailer's obsession with masculinity and violence often got him into trouble. He once beat up a sailor on a Manhattan street because he believed that the man had questioned the sexuality of his dog.

In 1971, he head-butted his fellow writer Gore Vidal before a television chat-show after Vidal had written that "there has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression".

In addition to being a respected novelist and biographer, Mailer was a boxer, womanizer, social commentator, and newspaper man (he co-founded The Village Voice). His was the voice of the insurgent American male who saw his "status" as a man socially and culturally diminished in the years following the war.

Critics usually point to his influence on literary contemporaries such as Philip Roth and John Updike. But it seems to me Mailer's shadow is also cast over the work of filmmakers Woody Allen and Terence Malick (notably The Thin Red Line), as well as the "ethnic" writers Ishmael Reed and Frank Chin (in his public dispute with Maxine Hong Kingston). There's also Mailer's contribution to hipster culture, "The White Negro" (1956; reprinted in Advertisements for Myself in 1959). From the beatniks to the Beastie Boys, Mailer influenced generations of disaffected white youth who found soulful expression in cool "black" pose.

Norman Mailer was a figure who, although his books may have fallen out of favor in recent decades, embodied the voice of the modern American man in all his contradictions: bullish yet victimized (by women), brash yet fundamentally insecure.

Erotic/Oblique

Read Bruce Chatwin's essay on English artist Howard Hodgkin (from the collection What Am I Doing Here) and discovered this kernel of insight at the end:

...Howard's pictures have always been, more or less, erotic -- and the more erotic for being inexplicit. He seems incapable of starting a picture without an emotionally charged subject, though his next step is to make it obscure, or at least oblique. Yet is not all erotic art -- as opposed to the merely pornographic -- oblique? Descriptions of the sexual act are as boring as descriptions of landscape seen from the air -- and as flat: whereas Flaubert's description of Emma Bovary's room in a hotel de passe in Rouen, before and after, but not during the sexual act, is surely the most erotic passage in modern literature.

My friend Lindsey and I had a conversation about erotic art in relation to her reading of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, which she found decidedly non-erotic. Something about repetition, ritual, and the banality of it all -- Sade's directness.

If memory serves me, I think Lindsey did, in fact, mention Flaubert as a literary erotist (to cite the first English translation of Bataille's term -- erotism, not eroticism), capturing in Madame Bovary the peripheral lines of desire that tease our fascination with Emma. Flaubert, then, and not Lawrence, does this to us.

Obliquity and erotism: pulsion, torsion, and the unknowable object of drive. Attention to detail. The sensuousness of form.

I wish, in Chatwin's brilliantly meandering final passage, he had written, "whereas Flaubert's description of Emma Bovary's room in Rouen, before and after, is surely the most erotic passage in modern literature." The "r"s rolling together, a pause to note the obliquity of erotism ("before and after"), and the brave concluding statement of fact. No need to say, much less italicize, during -- we know what's come in between before and after.

Ishmael Reed on PBR

From Reed's otherwise mediocre novel Reckless Eyeballing (1986):

He couldn't understand why Paul sneered at Pabst. If you ever examined the can or bottle closely you could see the reproduction of the medals the beer had received in international competitions with other beers.

To Have and Have Not

Three passages from Ernest Hemingway's 1937 novel To Have and Have Not: potent examples of how literature can appeal to visceral experience, to the body's being-in-the-world, and of how language, crafted just so, can move us in powerful ways.

1. Hemingway describes Harry Morgan leaving his wife, and her bed, for the last time:

She watched him go out of the house, tall, wide-shouldered, flat-backed, his hips narrow, moving, still, she thought, like some kind of animal, easy and swift and not old yet, he moves so light and smooth-like, she thought, and when he got in the car she saw him blonde, with the sunburned hair, his face with the broad mongol cheek bones, and the narrow eyes, the nose broken at the bridge, the wide mouth and the round jaw, and getting in the car he grinned at her and she began to cry. "His goddamn face," she thought. "Everytime I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry." (128)

The cadence of Harry's footsteps is matched by the cadence of Hemingway's prose, ambling, patient, "moving, still..." When Harry grins, and his eyes meet hers, the sentence stops to devastating effect: still, now, Marie is brought to tears by his quiet strength.

2. Helen Gordon gives her husband Richard a tongue-lashing during a lover's spat:

Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer. (185-86)

Repetition and description, to have and have not, a game of adding detail and subtracting sentiment. With that devastating final insult: "You writer."

3. An anonymous "sixty-year-old grain broker" endures a sleepless night worrying that his tax-evading past has finally caught up with him. During the Great Depression, he was thankfully not one of those "have-nots"; their fate he imagines like so:

Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. (237-38)

Damning irony, again pointed up by way of Hemingway's style: the measured repetition of "some" in the first three clauses giving way to a prolonged, wandering discourse on "those" (repeated twice) quintessentially American instruments of dream-brokering. To have and have not.

Hemingway wants you to feel his writing in your bones. He wants you to experience his words.

Special thanks to Ursula Grisham, fellow CSI enthusiast and Dartmouth (soon-to-be) grad, for letting me borrow her copy during the two months we lived together in Lima.

The Midwich Cuckoos, or, A Confusion of Thoughts on Reproduction, Evolution, and Reading

I just finished reading a great science fiction book, John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. Originally published in 1957, the novel was later adapted into the movie Village of the Damned (1960). It tells the story of how a small, sleepy village in England is "invaded" by unwanted "Children," beings who have an enormous capacity for learning and who are intent on dominating their bewildered hosts.

The Children are, we might say, forcibly born to the village's women -- the story begins with a mysterious "Dayout" in which the lives of Midwich's inhabitants are brought to a halt, an invisible forcefield is set up around the village, and the women become pregnant overnight. Wyndham was no feminist, but there are kernels of a radical critique of reproduction (heterosexual or otherwise) in the way he explores the community's reaction to the mass insemination. Mrs. Zellaby notes to her husband, "It's all very well for a man. He doesn't have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he's always on the outside. He can never know what it's like, even in a normal way -- so what sort of an idea can he have of this? -- Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? -- As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator..." (71-72). Mrs. Zellaby's pregnancy was forced upon her, to be sure, and yet the language here is slippery enough, I think, to suggest that she's touching on a more common sentiment, or malaise, or dread, that might be characteristic of "carrying child."

Once the Children are born, the villagers soon realize that they can't escape them -- that these beings exert a pull on them that doesn't allow them to leave Midwich. When people try to leave town by car or foot, there's a point at which they are compelled to turn around and come back to the Children. Even more sinister is the fact that any harm done to the Children, whether intentional or not, is redoubled and thrown back at those who committed the harm. Early in the story, one Mrs. Welt accidentally pricks her baby with a pin. Soon after, "the baby had just looked steadily at her with its golden eyes, and made her start jabbing the pin into herself" (83).

This deliciously sadistic pulsion defines the novel's narrative arc. It also helps explain Wyndham's choice of titles. In one of Mr. Zellaby's many discourses on the Children, he claims that they bear some resemblance to the apparently vicious nature of newly hatched cuckoo birds: "Now, the important thing about the cuckoo is not how the egg got into the nest, nor why that nest was chosen; the real matter for concern comes after it has been hatched -- what, in fact, it will attempt to do next. And that, whatever it may be, will be motivated by its instinct for survival, an instinct characterized chiefly by utter ruthlessness" (89). And indeed once the villagers accept their lot as trapped hosts for these Children, the question becomes, How to get rid of them? This question allows Wyndham to delve into matters of evolutionary theory: he's interested in imagining what humans might resort to when confronted with beings that are paradoxically more advanced (they are highly intelligent creatures) and less mature (they are nonetheless "children") than they are.



I picked up this book from my hostel in Huaráz. I began reading it there and finished it here, a month later, in Lima. I'm writing about it in this blog to register some of the themes (reproduction, evolution) that piqued my interest as a reader. But just what kind of reader am I? Under what circumstances do I read? Why this book, in Peru, over the Easter weekend, and not another? Are the comments above of an academic nature, or are they things someone who reads The Midwich Cuckoos for "fun," while backpacking, might reflect on as well? Who "owned" this British edition of the book (a handsome trade paperback whose cover features the haunting stare of a baby set above the gray bar that signals it to be part of the Penguin Classics series) before leaving it at the Benkiwasi hostel? Did he or she retrieve it from some other traveler, from some other hostel or book exchange, in South America? Is English even the first language of this imaginary traveler? And what will happen to this book now? Who will read it next as I leave it somewhere in Lima, sometime next week, when I pack up my things and return to my "grad student" life back in the States?

Reading and experience, reproduction and evolution, dry British humor and quiet British terror. The other day, a fellow traveler from Seattle, Emily Jump, and I had a wonderful conversation over Mediterranean food about reading both within and outside academic contexts. We talked about the pleasures of reading for "fun" -- that is, reading for experience, reading as an exercise of the imagination, and not reading as a means of reducing literature to hyper-specialized academic prose. But Emily also took care to recognize that we possess the education and wherewithal ($) to "enjoy" literature of a certain type. Which is to say that even our leisurely enjoyment of literature is always already conditioned by a certain educational background and a certain privileged interest in reading as a practice. And so ultimately we, Emily and I, move between the desire to read beyond what we already know and the acknowledgment that our reading practices will always bear the trace of a certain privileged "appreciation" of what literature can do -- how reading books can take us beyond what we already know.

A classic double-bind? Not necessarily so. I, for one, have come to appreciate deeply the possibility of reading with an eye toward experience and understanding rather than as a means of confirming what I think I already know. Yes, Emily and I are both highly educated people. We enjoy good books. We read some books that academics read. But we resist (and here she's got a head start on me) processing what we read through a self-defined "intellectual" lens -- reducing what we read to a preconstituted "theory." We don't (like to) read as professionals, in other words. Or, at least in my case, being an academic isn't mutually exclusive (I hope!) with one's appreciation for experiential reading. The issue I have with the academy is that most professional literary critics will never admit to the inherent hermeticism of their profession (though they like to claim that all other professions are hyper-specialized).

So there's a profound difference, a valuable difference, between ways of reading among highly educated subjects. Where acknowledging one's position of privilege becomes important is precisely at the point where it's most tempting to judge the way "other people" read. These "others" could include educated people who critique academic professionalism, but they more often encompass the wide swath of readers who don't read books, or who read romances and crime fiction exclusively, or who (worst of all, in some circles) read "middlebrow" books usually associated with sentimental femininity and (therefore?) a complete lack of "taste." While attesting to her own tastes (for good books that a college graduate like her can appreciate), Emily took care to point out that her preferences didn't at all imply judgment of what other people read. People read for different reasons, and these reasons are conditioned by factors such as educational background, disposible income, access to literary resources, and so forth. Thus, to dismiss or even condemn (see certain critics' shrill responses to Oprah's Book Club) certain forms of reading on the grounds of taste confuses a personal "choice" for the divergent and variable social conditions of reading.

Small wonder that Emily has been my best dissertation-interlocutor (even considering the brevity of our conversation over late-lunch!) during my time in Peru. After giving her a layman's rundown of my topic, Emily basically said, "So you're arguing that black pulp fiction made (the practice of) reading a book interesting, worthwhile, and affordable for a community of traditionally overlooked readers." The ethical and political implication of which is: we bracket judging the content of these books in order to understand that their popularity suggests profound truths about racial and economic inequality in the United States.

Emily stated her interpretation of my "point" in such a clear and efficient way that I felt embarrassed revealing how long it's been taking me to finish writing my dissertation. What good reason did I have for taking so much time when the elements of my thinking were so easily communicated over kebabs that afternoon in Parque Kennedy? Was my block a matter of laziness, confusion, needing to read more, needing to research more, or simply being unable to write "academically" about books, people, and themes of the "street," those arguably at the furthest remove from the ivory tower?

One thing I do know is that my craving for new experiences, experiences beyond what I think I already know, is incentive enough for me to commit to finishing my doctoral degree by March of next year. The question remains whether and how I will manage to write the Experience of black pulp fiction in an academic dissertation.