Predicate Issue 4 by GeorgetownEGSA

PREDICATE

An Interdisciplinar y Humanities Journal

Reactions Issue 4, 2014

2014 Editorial Board Maria Vrcek, Editor Leah Barlow Anne Jefferson Katharine McCain Whitney Williams Dr. John Pfordresher, Advisor

2014 Readers Amanda Bernard Terrel Champion Stacey Church Cara Dickason Abigail Fine Matt Gorgans Hunter Jones Jen Nguyen Chris Tumminello

Production Katharine McCain Heather Stang Kate Zavack

Contents Editor’s Note

CHRISTIAN AGUIAR Self-Correction: Some Notes on Teaching Working-Class Students

HARRY BURSON ‘Close Your Eyes’: Sound, Affect, and the Trans-corporeal Ethics of Upstream Color

MIRIAM GROTTE Shifting Referents: September 11 in Visual Discourse

CARROLL CLAYTON SAVANT Resonant Connections: Robert Schumann’s Philosophical Artist and Friedrich Hölderlin’s Prophetic Poetic

KATE ZAVACK ‘Without will of her own’: Middlemarch and the Woman Question

WIL NORTON Reacting to Dereification: The Uncanny and Castration in Kubrick’s Films

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Editor’s Note For this year’s issue of Predicate, we were excited to receive a diverse group of submissions—papers that, as you will enjoy shortly, span from the eighteenth century through the present day and examine topics from an art exhibit commemorating the attacks on September 11 to a reflection on teaching writing to working-class students. I am proud to say that this year’s issue reflects the many fascinating forms a reaction can take. One of the things I have enjoyed the most in reading these pieces is how each one engages—implicitly or overtly—with how reactions work in two ways; they look toward the past while impacting and preparing for the future. Once again this year I have been graced with exceptionally helpful hands. Amidst many other responsibilities, Anne Jefferson and Whitney Williams aided in selection and review of submissions, and Kate Zavack signed on for the second year as the head of our assembly and production team. I was tremendously grateful to have their input and memory from last year. Without them we would not be able to pass on such a well-oiled machine to next year’s editor, Leah Barlow. I look forward to seeing what innovations are in store for the journal. I owe Katie McCain a huge gratitude for diligently serving double duty on both the submission and assembly teams. I would be remiss not to thank our readers and extra volunteers who eagerly assisted in a variety of roles, sometimes with very little notice, but always with care. This journal would not have been possible without insight from Amanda Bernard, Terrel Champion, Stacey Church, Cara Dickason, Abigail Fine, Matt Gorgans, Hunter Jones, Jen Nguyen, Heather Stang, and Chris Tumminello. I also wish to thank our Director of Graduate Studies, Ricardo Ortiz, and Faculty Advisor, John Pfordresher, for their support. Finally, I need to thank our wonderful contributors first for their fine work and second for their cooperation and good-humor throughout this process. We hope that you enjoy this issue of Predicate, and that you will join in the discussions begun here. Maria Vrcek Journal Editor

PREDICATE An Interdisciplinar y Humanities Journal Issue 4, 2014 Reactions

Produced by the English Graduate Student Association of Georgetown University

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Self-Correction: Some Notes on Teaching Working-Class Students CHRISTIAN AGUIAR In their influential essay “Toward a Theory of Working Class Literature,” Renny Christopher and Carolyn Whitson argue that working class literature “cannot simply fit into the status quo of literary studies.”1 In this essay, I’d like to argue, though I won’t be the first, that working class students cannot easily fit into the status quo of the literature or composition classroom, either.2 I will outline a series of resolutions that I believe can help make the English classroom, and the humanities classroom more broadly, more accessible to these students, and I will encourage those reading this article – you – to consider them too, even if you won’t be spending much time in the university classroom. I will not propose anything like a unified theory of pedagogy, preferring again to follow Christopher and Whiston by writing something “aligned with both [my] own intellectual orientation and [my] gut feelings.”3

* * * In our neighborhood, my mom was the reader. The stack of legal thrillers sitting on the nightstand next to her bed was a testament to that. So too were the constant visits from friends and neighbors who needed an eviction notice 1

Renny Christopher and Carolyn Whitson, “Toward a Theory of Working Class Literature,” Thought & Action 15 (1999): 72. 2 For more on the academy’s failures to accommodate working class students, see the edited volumes by Sherry Lee Linkon, ed., Teaching Working Class (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), and William DeGenaro, Who Says? Working-Class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); as well as the bell hooks’ extensive 3 Christopher and Whitson, “Toward a Theory,” 73.

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notice interpreted, or were struggling with their disability claim, or didn’t know what to say to debt collectors to shut them up (the proper response, for what it’s worth, was that no judge would side with a corporation over a single mother trying to raise a family on minimum wage, so tell them to go to hell). In a neighborhood of people who had often been prepared for factory work and for war but not for literacy, my mom was a scholar. It turns out that if you read enough John Grisham novels you learn that lawyers and bureaucrats aren’t better people, just better readers. * * * Joanna Brooks advocates for a “transformative literary pedagogy” in the classroom, something that sounds challenging and a bit obscure, but turns out to be disarmingly straightforward.4 The English classroom, she argues, in order to reach its full potential as a site of personal and social transformation, must pay more attention to the needs of students and less attention to the inclinations of teachers. Brooks is not unique in calling for greater attention to student needs: by my reading, a long list of foundational composition theorists – including Mina Shaughnessy (1976, 1977), David Bartholomae (1980, 1986), Robert Brooke (1987), Glynda Hull and Mike Rose (1990) – advocate for paying more attention to student needs. Where Brooks differs is in her call for specific skills-centered approach for working-class and otherwise marginalized students – those who have been systematically excluded from the discourse communities of the university and the state. This does not mean that first-year composition classes should focus on the skills necessary to read through SNAP applications and court summons, but rather that the work done in the classroom should focus on the skill sets required by the fluid, changeable post-modern economy, namely, “decoding texts by identifying their conventions and contexts, reading ‘style’ critically, and recognizing cultural boundaries”.5 For students coming from communities ravaged by the economic changes of the last fifty years, Brooks argues, an education that does no more to prepare them for the changes of the future than it did to prepare their parents 4

Joanna Brooks and Fern Cayetano, “The (dis)Location of Culture: On the Way to Literacy,” in Teaching Working Class, ed. Sherry Lee Linkon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1999), 56. 5 Brooks and Cayetano, “The (dis)Location of Culture,” 56.

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or grandparents is of no use. If such students are to take advantage of the opportunities for higher education generally denied to their elders that education must, to bring in Stuart Hall for no good reason, be made to mean something for them. Such a program of literary pedagogy would focus on the kinds of literacy skills that break down, rather than create, barriers, so that students might understand how these barriers work and how they might be put to work for them rather than against them. Nearly forty years ago, Mina Shaughnessy advised instructors of the so-called basic writing course that their task was not “protecting the academy from outsiders,” but rather making the academy a place where “outsiders” might engage with the prevailing discourse to become better producers and consumers of culture.6 As Brooks and others have argued, active engagement with this discourse poses a particular challenge for students who have little prior experience with it. David Bartholomae does great work articulating the exclusive nature of the discourse when he argues that the discourse of the university is made up of commonplaces, “culturally or institutionally authorized concept[s] or statement[s] that carr[y] with [them their] own necessary elaboration.”7 The struggle that both Bartholomae and Shaughnessy articulate is the struggle of the outsider in taking on the insider’s discourse, and while all students entering the academy must face this, it is particularly difficult for those who do not have access, in their families and communities, to people who have already learned to produce this discourse. By recognizing that struggling students – particularly, but not only, first generation students – are producing an “interlanguage”, an “idiosyncratic…approximation of the standard idiom,” composition instructors will be better equipped to help struggling students.8 Understanding this will help instructors take courses that already facilitate close and contextual reading and make them accessible and useful to students for whom, right now, such courses may seem little more than exercises in circumlocution. Recognizing where students are coming from, so to speak, may help instructors make it clear to students where they have come to, and help them

6 Mina P. Shaughnessy, “Diving in: An Introduction to Basic Writing,” College Composition and

Communication 27 (1976): 234.

7 David Bartholomae, “Inventing the University,” Journal of Basic Writing 5 (1986): 7. 8 David Bartholomae, “The Study of Error,” College Composition and Communication 31 (1980):

257.

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understand the difference. I want to offer a pledge, then, a broad commitment that I will make when entering any classroom. The first vow in this pledge is quite simple: I will work to insure that my classroom is a place where students understand what they are being asked to do. I don’t mean that instructions should always be clear in the traditional sense, though that certainly helps. Rather, I mean that I will do my best to make sure that when students are being asked to take on a new mode of speaking, writing, or being, they know that that is in fact what they are being asked to do; that we will learn to produce this new mode together; and that if we are lucky, we will discover some ways to blow it up. This is not just about helping students acclimate to a new environment: it is about making a case for how close reading can help them outside of the classroom. By making the nature of the academic discourse community, as well as its uses, clear to my students, I hope they will be better-equipped to interrogate it, challenge it, and produce it. * * * In middle school, I was taught by a woman named Mary Cabral. Once a week I went down to her classroom off of the library with Kamau, Kevin, and Ross, and we sat under fluorescent lights and completed “enrichment” projects while the rest of our classmates got the remediation they needed. We planned our own school once, complete with a bell schedule, a course catalog, and a student handbook, though of course our project never became more than a disk full of files. Mrs. Cabral was impressed, as I guess any public school teacher would be by students engaged enough in their education to try to reimagine it. Mrs. Cabral had applied to Brown University and gotten in, but there were no scholarships available to her. She and her working class parents would have had to finance an education worth significantly more than their house by themselves. So she went to Rhode Island College instead, and studied education, and taught in the schools she came up through.

* * *

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Remediation tastes a bit dirty. It suggests that students are backwards in some way and need to be brought up to the standard. Suggestive as it is of misreading and misunderstanding, “remediation” directs our attention to some absolute form to which a student might aspire. Of course, every post-modern bone in our bodies tells us that there isn’t a proper reading of anything and so there can be no misreading, either.9 For Mike Rose, Glynda Hull, and their student Robert, reading a poem becomes a place of contested meaning. What Rose sees as self-evidently a poem about a girl’s dreams of escaping poverty, Robert sees as a narrative of middle-class stability. For the “standard reader,” according to Rose and Hull, the image of a Sears catalog is meant to evoke pity. This standard reader would realize that the girl sees Sears as a symbol of wealth to aspire to, whereas they would have already understood it to be a fixture of life at the bottom end of the lower-middle-class, and so would feel some mixture of irony and pity. In directing his students towards this meaning, Rose runs up against Robert, who stubbornly refuses to see what is so obvious: “to him, there’s nothing ironic, pitiable, or humorous about [the Sears catalog].”10 Robert cannot read this poem in the same way Rose does because Robert does not share the social context of Rose and his “standard reader”. Robert is not a standard student. Robert, like many working class people, I think, does not find much irony in the ironic.11 Rose’s point is that instructors should not try to steer students towards a common or standard reading, but instead let them move towards the reading that develops from and agrees with their own experiences. This is a valuable teaching approach in general, but I think it is especially important for students like Robert that they hold on to the readings they have struggled so hard for – or against. These readings represent not just a point of intellectual richness for the student and the class as a whole, but also a point where personal identity enters academic discourse. It functions much the same for the imagined standard reader, whose 9 There can still be generalizations, though, as this sentence demonstrates. 10 Mike Rose and Glynda Hull, “This Wooden Shack-Place,” in Lives on the Boundary (New York:

Penguin, 1989), 294. 11 The exact measure of who – or what – is working class is an especially contentious and quite personal one, and so I have chosen to avoid entering into the discussion. This article will use a broad working definition that would include students whose parents identify as working class, and pays particular attention to the concerns of first-generation students, though of course not all first-generation students identify as working class. For an insightful discussion of this discussion, see the introduction to Sherry Linkon’s Teaching Working Class.

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identity allows her to grasp the irony of the Sears catalog, but as it is a non-standard reading, it is at risk of being erased or shuffled aside, as Rose had started to do before correcting himself. In order to open the classroom to students from working class backgrounds, we must consciously work against the “constant evocation of materially privileged class experience...as a universal norm.”12 While it may be the case, as Greenwald and Grant argue, that many members of the professoriate still “demonstrate lack of compassion for and ignorance of the material realities of working-class students” in their expectations and behavior, there is no reason to accept this continued ignorance as a justification for poor teaching.13 Serving a wider and more diverse student body than ever before, instructors must resist the urge to construct a unified reader or a unified perspective for their classroom. They must accept that they do not have all the answers, particularly if dealing with students whose prior experiences they are ignorant of. To get directly to the point, then, let me introduce my second pledge: I will create space for multiple discourses in my classroom by promoting an atmosphere not just of tolerance (the bare minimum) but of active engagement with new and different perspectives. This should extend to course readings and content, and not just to the names, genders, races, sexualities or classes represented in the syllabus, but to the manner in which the material is presented and the materials students are asked to produce.

* * * In my first year at Brown, everyone seemed to be protesting a run-in that resulted in a student being detained by Providence police. People threw around the world brutality a lot, and finally, in a political science class, I offered my version of brutality. My aunt’s uncle, some time when I was too young to know him, got in a fight with a man at Minerva’s Pizza, threatened to kill him, flashed a gun, then, point made, drove home. When police showed up on the sidewalk outside of his house 12 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress (New York: Routledge, 1994), 180. 13 Elizabeth A. Greenwald and Richard Grant, “Border Crossings,” in Teaching Working Class,

ed. Sherry Lee Linkon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 31.

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with guns drawn and demanded he come out, he didn’t understand much of what they were saying because he spoke Portuguese, not English. He reached for his keys, understanding at least that he’d be spending some time in jail. They killed him in his doorway, not understanding (and how could they, really, since they had learned well what to expect), that it had all been a misunderstanding. Everyone in class stared at me for a minute, I guess to make sure that I was finished oversharing, then continued to argue about how unacceptable it was for police to physically restrain someone on the sidewalk and demand their ID. As soon as I got outside I lit cigarette after cigarette, silently fuming, effectively silenced, and walked home. * * * Richard E. Miller makes a wonderful, challenging argument for the inclusion of the personal in the academic sphere. His essay, “The Nervous System”, marks a renewed attempt to “think about writing as a place where the personal and the academic, the private and the public, the individual and the institutional, are always inextricably intertwined.”14 This is in some senses a radical re-conception of what the intellectual space of the university is meant to do. David Bartholomae, for example, might have a tough time explaining how the kind of personal anecdote Miller begins his essay with – the attempted suicide of his father – might make its way into the university’s particular discourse community, especially since Miller himself seems to have trouble articulating this point. Bartholomae and others might say that Miller “has the key words but not the utterances,” that he knows what he wants to say but doesn’t quite know how to get it said in clear terms.15 This is because the vocabulary for the personal hasn’t really been developed in the university discourse community. Not yet, anyway. That the academy is often uncomfortable with the thought of personal experience bleeding onto the seminar table is clear, I think, to anyone who has spent any time in a university. Even in the humanities, even in English, where the words “only connect” are literally canonical, students are typically expected to 14 15

Richard Miller, “The Nervous System,” College English 58 (1996): 267. Bartholomae, “Inventing the University,” 19.

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make only the right kind of connections, those that lie within the defined borders of whichever discipline they find themselves in. Though asking an individual to “say smart things in a vacuum” sounds like a great idea for a game show, it’s a terrible idea for a classroom. But it is, as Gerald Graff argues, the implicit standard of the literature class (the composition class, he notes, is better at not doing this).16 The “rupture of the academy’s discourse norms” prompted by the appearance of one’s father’s attempted suicide, Miller shows, will create a “tangible sense of revulsion” in the classroom and mark one as an outsider, one who is not playing by the rules.17 There is room neither for garages nor gas fumes in English departments, unless they occur in a Cheever story, where they can be neatly bracketed. What this does, Miller argues, is create a space where “the world’s need for the writer” is privileged over the “writer’s need for the world.”18 This doesn’t seem terribly problematic at first, unless of course one is a writer in need of a world, but there are some deeply unsettling implications for our students. If we seek mainly to affirm the primacy of the writer, the knowledge-producer, what message does this send to students who have not yet gained access to the world of knowledge production? What does it say to those who can’t picture a person who has gained access to that world? If we require our students to speak only through the words of others, as the academic tradition dictates, we condemn those students who are still struggling to make their own words speak effectively in this new context to silence. When we fail to make space for personal experience in the classroom, especially the literature classroom, we demand that students who come to class to improve their literacy use only the tools of literacy which they do not have. We privilege those who derive knowledge mainly from texts over those who derive knowledge from experience.19 We ask students to construct space for themselves using only the tools that were used to wall them out. We need look no further than Audre Lord to understand what’s wrong with that.20 16 Gerald Graff, “How ‘bout That Wordsworth!” MLA Newsletter Winter (2008): 4. 17 Miller, “The Nervous System,” 277. 18 Ibid., 287. 19 A system that is particularly harsh to working class cultures that are not always based on

writing, literacy, and “rational” argumentation. Cf. Donald Lazare, “Orality, Literacy, and Standard English,” Journal of Basic Writing 10 (1991): 87–98. 20 I’m referring to Lorde’s famous essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

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One might argue that this is all a very intentional effort on behalf of an intellectual elite to exclude those who are not born into it from gaining access to its power, but I won’t make that argument here because it would be an unproductive diversion from the topic at hand. Instead, I will offer my third resolution, to create space for the personal in the classroom, so that students may learn to mold the discourse to fit their voice instead of their voice to fit the discourse. A strong division between the “commonplaces” of the university and the “commonplaces” of common places serves neither the university nor the excluded student and only reinforces the sense that to write one “must be either equal to or more powerful than those they would address.”21 This power dynamic, which Bartholomae notes is built into the very structure of academic writing, seems a leftover from the days when the academy trained only those who would be equal to or more powerful than their addressees. This is not so anymore. Rather, following Brooks, we must prepare students to “navigate parallel social and cultural exchange,” preparing them for a world of interpretation that stretches well beyond the walls of the college.22

* * * As my roommate and I walked down College Hill for Commencement, he was confident he had done everything he could do at Brown and was ready to move on. I was not. I had learned to recite the arguments of an entire discipline in words no one at home would ever understand, but I had not yet learned to express what people at home knew in words the disciplines would understand. I resented the institution that had offered me so much and now sent me back to Pawtucket for one more summer of sweating over a grill with little more than a diploma, in Latin no less, to hang on the wall of my mom’s apartment.

* * *

21 Bartholomae, “Inventing the University,” 9. 22 Brooks and Cayetano, “The (dis)Location of Culture,” 57.

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Economic justifications for education in the humanities typically revolve around the idea of the usefulness of the rhetorical skills students gain in the humanities.23 While these arguments may seem persuasive enough to parents and students who feel relatively secure in their place in the world, they may not be so persuasive for those who feel constantly the cold edge of life at their backs. Yet, the interpretive skills provided by an education in the humanities are perhaps even more critical for working-class students and students from marginalized communities than for those who aren’t. After all, the very power dynamics that marginalize people are, more often than not, masked by complex rhetorical techniques. “Students who can tell their own stories about how the truth is made,” argues Joanna Brooks, “can negotiate (and renegotiate) their own relationships to a rapidly changing world” in ways others cannot.24 It is through learning how unequal power is produced and reproduced that the victims of power inequality may begin to resist it. It’s ironic, then, that the first “literary critical lesson” such students learn is that “since time is money, there is no time to collect books during one’s fouryear transit through college.”25 Arguments for the deep usefulness of an education in the humanities will continue to be ignored, it seems, as long as marginalized students continue to feel remedial, both in the sense of needing extra effort to reach a standard or median point of intellectual and economic capability and in the sense of being transcribed onto a new medium. That is, as long as marginalized students come to campus expecting that a) they need to catch up if they are ever going to meet the new standards of life which they are already encountering as they enter the university and b) that they must adapt quickly to a new and strange space, they will continue to not have time to collect books. Though there are doubtless wide structural solutions that might help,26 I want to focus on classroom-level work. Brooks advocates “tak[ing] a few lessons from economics” and presenting humanities education to such students, not using 23 24 25 26

Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Inquiry 18 (1991): 2. Brooks and Cayetano, “The (dis)Location of Culture,” 58. Ibid., 56. Programs like Community Scholars at Georgetown and the Third World Transition Program at Brown seem directed mainly at this problem of transitioning to a new “medium” of life and helping students understand some ways to translate their experience, and this is infinitely valuable.

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the rareified language of academic discourse but rather the practical discourse of survival.27 We must present – and then provide – a “critical literacy” that

reads not only the words interests, jobs, and economy, but the networks of power that give them meaning; reads the artwork on the cover of the textbook and its price tag; reads the way the words are taught, the silences that punctuate class time, the way students pause, the way the teacher responds; reads the color of the teacher’s face, the color of the students’ faces, and the color of the faces of those who clean the classrooms at night; and negotiating and translating among all these, it makes meaning.28

Such a critical reading would provide students neither with the traditional academic tools of literary analysis (without a clear sense of how to use them outside of the academy in the working economy) nor the practical tools of a vocational course (without a clear sense of what those tools mean or what power dynamics underscore their provision), but rather both together and complete, sans parentheses. It would read not just “the artwork” but also the “price tag”; it would take into consideration the very real social realities that enter the classroom with each student as well as those realities that will confront each student after they have left the classroom. It would use the classroom as a space to critically consider these social realities and to learn how to navigate them and, where possible, to challenge and change them. This talk of classrooms recalls Geoffrey Sirc and his assertion that literary studies tend to deploy a pedagogical of “the custodial,” one that “teach[es] connoisseurship” rather than genuine engagement, the literature-classroom equivalent of Shaughnessy’s gate-guarding level-one basic writing instructors.29 Sirc’s metaphor of the classroom as a museum is especially useful here, and will

27 28 29

Brooks and Cayetano, “The (dis)Location of Culture,” 56. Ibid., 59. Geoffrey Sirc, English Composition as a Happening (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2002), 4.

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help us get to the next point. In the museum model, the professor is the guide, bringing students through the lush spaces of Georgetown or the more modest spaces of Northern Virginia Community College, selecting cultural objects and explaining how they can be interpreted and, if the museum is a bit more interactive, working through a few interpretations with the guests. The typical middle- or upper-class student is the somewhat bewildered museum guest, looking at things and understanding that he should appreciate them, and trying in earnest to appreciate them, but having mixed success. The student I am concerned with here – the student I was – is at the back of the group, bewildered by the building and the art but trying not to show it, with hidden copies of guidebooks crammed into his coat pockets so he can study them surreptitiously when he gets the chance to make a run for the restroom. I’ve hijacked Sirc’s point, which is much more concerned with the problems of the educator-as-guide than the different types of people being guided, and I’m going to let him have it back, but not before I point to two more figures: the person outside who doesn’t know what the museum is or does but thinks she might like to get in, and the board and philanthropists who don’t know who that person is or what she does. My fourth resolution, then: the classroom experience will focus on acquiring useful skills of critical interpretation that will allow students to better understand and read the institutions of power that effect their lives on a daily basis, and will do so in clear and explicit terms. This must be done explicitly, because while those somewhat bewildered museum guests will get the general idea of what Matisse means from listening to the guide’s somewhat technical language, in part because (following Bartholomae) they have already had prior experience of the discourse community that produces such technical language, this isn’t the case for the guest with the bulging pockets. To him, such discourse is still an impossibility, and even were he able to produce it through some miracle of mimicry, he would probably still not be able to recognize it or command it. By making explicit what better taste requires the astute critic to be coy about, we transcend the oppressive barriers of taste and reveal “how the circulation of capital gets translated into everyday experience.”30 We help our students to better understand the way some of the larger social, economic, and educational structures through which they have been moving work, and to understand how they have been impacted by these structures. 30

Miller, “The Nervous System,” 272.

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In other words, by being transparent about the whats, whys, and hows of English – literary interpretation and composition – we offer excluded students a clear picture of what it is they have been excluded from. In this way, and only in this way, can we begin to help our students “demystify the conditions of their own learning.”31 The first step to breaking down privilege, it would seem, is breaking down privilege. * * * I’d been teaching in a tiny town in rural South Korea for two years when I decided that I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do (teach), where I wanted to teach (community colleges, adult education centers), and what I needed to be able to teach them (more education). I applied to Georgetown, because they offered a good shot at funding and the chance to serve as a TA. Money was no longer a problem since I’d saved up a lot in Korea, given my mom my car to help her out, and made peace with the past. I thought. My friend, who grew up poor in rural Ireland, was considering a second MA, having already gotten one in English, a “scholarship boy” too.32 As we sat outside of his apartment he told me he was worried about getting another degree because he didn’t want people back home to say, “Well now, the boy’s got two M-As.” He didn’t want to be too well-educated to go home, to have his accent or his interests trained out of him, to lose touch with the knowledge of his community. I felt the same way, and so we kept drinking, too much, like always. I’m at Georgetown now studying for my MA, and he’s getting his second, and I don’t think either of us knows what all of this will mean. * * * 31 Renny Christopher, “New Working-Class Studies in Higher Education,” in New Working-Class

Studies, ed. John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 218. 32 For more on the “scholarship boy,” see Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (New York: Penguin Books, 1957) and Richard Rodriguez’s response in The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), often reprinted as the essay “The Achievement of Desire.”

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Kathleen Blake Yancey draws our attention to the way medium can influence meaning, paying special attention to “the representation of students that we as teachers invite or permit” in our classrooms.33 That teachers influence the kind of work that students create is obvious, since in so many cases we tell them what they can and cannot write, but the way even seemingly open or inviting prompts structure student responses by their very medium is much less obvious. Simply by using the word prompt, I have called to mind a certain type of assignment, probably a paper of some sort, which offers a problematic for students to respond to. No matter what I do, as long as I’m handing out something called a “prompt” and asking students to hand in a “paper,” I am dictating terms to my students. Terms are probably always dictated, in one way or another – this goes back to the discursive power dynamic Bartholomae explores in such depth. Donald Murray advises instructor to “curb the critical eye” so that students may engage with their own evolving writing, “so it will evolve into writing worth reading.”34 The critical eye comes back, then, in the end, and asserts in some sense, with however much subtlety, that some writing is worth reading and other writing isn’t. Peter Elbow reminds us “there is violence in learning” and that try as we might, we won’t dull that violence completely.35 Nancy Sommers suggests that through our comments we should “[force] students back into the chaos,” which sounds like a terrible thing to do to anyone who has made it out of the chaos, a particularly violent act of teaching but one which does, no doubt, result in improved writing.36 In each case, students are being told what and how to write, but they are at least, in Elbow’s and Sommers’s formulations, being told that they are being told how to write. Min-Zhang Lu is instructive here. She argues that to think “that linguistic codes can be taught in isolation from the production of meaning and from the 33 Kathleeen Blake Yancey, “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in

the Representation of Student Work,” College Composition and Communication 55 (2004): 739.

34 Donald M. Murray, “The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference,” College

English 41 (1979): 15. 35 Peter Elbow, “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process,” College English 45 (1983): 331. 36 Nancy Sommers, “Responding to Student Writing,” College Composition and Communication 33 (1982), 154.

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dynamic power struggle within and among discourses” is foolish.37 For students whose parents, relatives, and community members went to university, taking on the discourse of the academy seems a perfectly normal part of life, perhaps even a rite of passage, and doing so poses no risk to their sense of self or community. For others – for Robert, for example – beginning to think and work in a new discourse may mean estrangement from their prior modes of existence. It’s a heavy price to ask students to pay, particularly if we fail to make it clear to them just how heavy the price is. In making my first resolution, I drew on both Elbow and Lu, though without drawing directly on them. That’s because I wanted to save them for this final point, where I think they both point us outward, towards something other than the classroom. Lu wants us to recognize the way academic discourse can disfigure or dictate the critical perspectives of marginalized students. Elbow wants us to recognize the way prompts can disfigure or dictate the composition approaches of all students. I want us to recognize that the academy can disfigure students. It can also transform them. We must be transparent with them about what they’re signing up for, but we must also be transparent with them about what the stakes are. So, the last resolution I want to make is to keep always in my mind and in the minds of my students the undeniable fact that, important as what happens in the classroom may be, it is only the classroom, grades are just grades, literature is just literature, and out there, beyond the walls just as behind them, life is life. I want to teach with passion and I want students to make the jump that I have made – if they are ready for it, and only once they know what jump they’re making. I think it’s important to always keep before them the sense that what happens in the classroom is only of use if it allows them to do better something in the world which they find value in, to understand better something in the world which has kept them down or lifted them up, or to help deconstruct that which has kept them down or reconstruct that which has lifted them up.

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Min-Zhan Lu, “Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence,” in The Norton Book of Composition Studies, ed. Susan Miller (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 774.

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I arrived on campus after three days without e-mail and a long sleepless night in a hostel on M Street to find out that I was misplaced, lost, wrong. I asked around but no one seemed to know where I was supposed to be. I stood outside in the courtyard and chain smoked (a theme in my life, or at least in this essay) and thought about what I could do, who I could ask for help, but all I could imagine was being laughed at, rejected. Pacing in front of Dahlgren Chapel, I thought that willingly re-entering an academic space – and not just any academic space, but an elite academic space – was the stupidest thing I could possibly have done. I thought I could handle it, but now it felt like I couldn’t. I got it together, finally, by promising myself that I would be a better fighter this time, though I would fight less, and that if the time came when I needed to leave, I would. With this promise to myself in mind, I went back upstairs to the conference room and stared at Shakespeare.

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. “The Study of Error.” College Composition and Communication 31 (1980): 253–69. ———. “Inventing the University.” Journal of Basic Writing 5 (1986): 4–24. Brooks, Joanna with Fern Cayetano. “The (dis)Location of Culture: On the Way to Literacy.” In Teaching Working Class, edited by Sherry Lee Linkon, 5–-68. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1–21. Christopher, Renny and Carolyn Whitson. “Toward a Theory of Working Class Literature.” Thought & Action 15 (1999): 71–81. Christopher, Renny. “New Working-Class Studies in Higher Education.” In New Working-Class Studies, edited by John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, 209– 20. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Elbow, Peter. “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process.” College English 45 (1983): 327–39.

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Graff, Gerald. “How ‘bout That Wordsworth!” MLA Newsletter Winter (2008): 3–4. Greenwald, Elizabeth A. and Richard Grant. “Border Crossings: Working-Class Encounters in Higher Education.” In Teaching Working Class, edited by Sherry Lee Linkon, 28–38. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Hull, Glynda and Mike Rose. “’This Wooden Shack Place’: The Logic of an Unconventional Reading.” College Composition and Communication 41 (1990): 287–98. Lazare, Donald. “Orality, Literacy, and Standard Englis.” Journal of Basic Writing 10 (1991): 87–98. Lu, Min-Zhan. “Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence.” In The Norton Book of Composition Studies, edited by Susan Miller. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Lorde, Audrey. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, California: Crossing Press, 2007. Miller, Richard. “The Nervous System.” College English 58 (1996): 265–86. Murray, Donald M. “The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference.” College English 41 (1979): 13–18. Rose, Mike J. and Glynda Hull. “’This Wooden Shack-Place’: The Logic of an Unconventional Reading.” In Lives on the Boundary, Mike Rose. New York: Penguin, 1989. Shaughnessy, Mina P. “Diving in: An Introduction to Basic Writing.” College Composition and Communication 27 (1976): 234–39. ———. “Introduction to Errors and Expectations.” In The Norton Book of Composition Studies, edited by Susan Miller. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Sirc, Geoffrey. English Composition as a Happening. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2002. Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication 33 (1982): 148–55.

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Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work.” College Composition and Communication 55 (2004): 738–61.

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‘Close Your Eyes’:

Sound, Affect, and the Trans-Corporeal Ethics of Upstream Color Harry Burson

…these people that have been affected by this [organism] are now taking back ownership of the thing they’re connected to. So in the rules of the film, that’s more or less is [sic] transcendence at the end in some form of another, to be able to be in the same place as [the pigs that have the worms inside]… I mean, that’s the thing – so much of the film is nonverbal. That for me to say stuff… — Shane Carruth on Upstream Color1

Shane Carruth has developed a reputation as an elliptical filmmaker, a director who eschews clear narrative and filmic conventions to create films as inscrutable puzzles. With a slight filmography of only two films in ten years, his work is chiefly understood in terms of the cult that has developed around his 2004 debut. This film, Primer, is a low-budget work of science fiction following the existential travails of a pair of amateur inventors who unintentionally create a time machine. With a mumblecore-like aesthetic and production values, Primer is most enjoyable in its first half as a realistic meditation on the inevitable frustration involved in scientific inquiry and the inauspicious provenances of many significant discoveries. It becomes wearisome in its second half, as various deceptions, timelines, and doppelgangers are introduced and discarded in the frantic concluding montage. Readily available to watch and analyze on Netflix’s streaming service, Primer 1

Charlie Jane Anders, “Director Shane Carruth Explains the Ending of Upstream Color,” io9, April 7, 2013. http://io9.com/director-shane-carruth-explains-the-ending-of-upstream-475087719.

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attracted a scientifically minded fan base online that strove to explicate the film’s convoluted narrative with numerous charts and diagrams graphically inscribing order and rationality onto the film’s semi-coherent narrative. Primer became a logic problem to be solved through careful reasoning, and the director became a logician, a meticulous engineer of diverting riddles. This view of Carruth heavily informed the early critical reaction to his second directorial effort, Upstream Color, released nearly a decade after Primer in early 2013. A typical review from The New York Times emphasized Upstream Color ’s mysteries and ellipses, ultimately describing the film as a “puzzle” or “philosophical toy,” emphasizing a sense of rational intention that can be played with and presumably solved.2 A gushing early review published by The A.V. Club offered a slightly different take, noting the film “isn’t a puzzle movie like Carruth’s Primer,” but still averred that a satisfactory understanding of the plot would take “at least several hundred words and more likely several viewings.”3 Even after discounting the notion of the film as a mystery to be solved, the reviewer still defers to reason, assuming being unable to articulate the plot means one doesn’t fully “get” the movie. I contend that such a linear understanding of plot machinations is not necessary to experience Upstream Color. This is not to say that the film has no identifiable themes or meaning—in fact I believe it advocates a fairly coherent ecological ideology—but does so affectively, primarily through its use of sound. While the A.V. Club review praises the film for its “overwhelming” sensory stimuli, it tends to treat light and sound as merely vehicles with which to transmit the film’s plot and message.4 I believe the themes of Upstream Color are wholly imbricated in its affective use of sound, so much so that the film’s trans-corporeal ethics are affectively co nveyed and enacted on the viewer through a screenspeaker-body assemblage. In this paper, I will examine the ecological and transcorporeal themes in Upstream Color in the context of the non/human turn in recent queer theory scholarship, arguing that the film advances a coherent non/human ethics similarly voiced by various scholars in the field. I will then look at the film’s use of sound 2 Manhola Dargis, “Worms, a Botanist, and Pigs. Sounds Like a Live Story,” New

York Times, Apr. 5, 2013. Sam Adams, “Day Five at Sundance,” A.V. Club, January 22, 2013. http://www.avclub.com/ article/day-five-at-sundance-is-all-about-the-perplexing-o-91442. 4 Ibid. 3

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following Joseph G. Kickasola’s phenomenological reading, before moving on to offer a working definition of affect. Finally, I will return to this screen-speakerbody assemblage and explore the affective use of sound in Upstream Color. As I mentioned above, I don’t think a viewer needs a solid grasp of the film’s narrative to affectively experience Upstream Color, but for me to convey the film’s thematic content here, a basic description of the plot is necessary. There are two major narrative threads that weave through the movie: one following conventional human protagonists, and another depicting the life cycle of a strange organism as it passes through plants, humans, and nonhuman animals. The film begins with a character—referred to in the credits only as The Thief—harvesting small worms from a potted orchid selected for its barely perceptible patina of blue dust. A couple of teenage boys, apparently the Thief’s children or protégés, are then shown preparing and ingesting one of these worms as if it were a recreational drug. With their eyes closed, the boys go on to gracefully mirror each other’s movements, the worms having apparently created some sort of benign telepathic link between their bodies. Carruth then introduces us to the film’s main protagonist, a young blonde woman named Kris who works some vaguely defined media job. At a bar, the Thief forces her to ingest one of the worms and immediately has a sort of hypnotic control over her. Over a period of days or weeks, she compliantly heeds his murmured suggestions: ingesting only water and ice chips, transcribing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and finally handing over her life savings to the Thief. After the Thief’s departure, the worm inside of Kris grows quickly, and is grotesquely shown writhing under her skin. Another character, a pig farmer/sound collagist called The Sampler in the credits, summons Kris with speakers playing a violently loud mechanical woosh, and surgically removes the now-enormous worm, inserting it into the body of a pig. This pig is given an ear tag identifying it as “Kris” and is returned to the hog farm. Human Kris wakes from her stupor not remembering anything about it, and soon starts a relationship with Jeff (played by Carruth), who we infer has unwittingly gone through the same ordeal with the Thief and Sampler. Kris and Jeff quickly initiate a romantic relationship, and their discreet identities/ bodies seem to merge as they begin sharing child memories and the experience of empathetic corporeal pain. The consummation of their union results in their

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ostensible pig doppelgangers giving birth to a litter of piglets at the hog farm. The Sampler takes these piglets, puts them in a bag, and throws them in a river, producing in Kris and Jeff parallel feelings of panic and suffering, the cause of which they cannot place. The bodies of the piglets are shown floating down the river to rest in the roots of a tree. As they decompose, a blue cloud of gas is released into the roots of the tree, which we see is where the Thief’s worm-orchids are picked. We are thus given a complete picture of the organism’s life cycle from piglet to tree to orchid to worm to human and back to pig. Eventually, Kris and Jeff intuit their connection to the hog farm through trance-like recitations of Walden, copies of which they send to other former victims to foster a consciousness of past violence. After Kris kills the Sampler, a group of survivors convene at the farm to care for their pig counterparts and raise litters of adorable piglets. For good measure, Carruth shows us the Thief failing to find worms in the orchid pots, emphasizing that the cycle has been broken. I should note that this is just my interpretation of the film’s plot—Upstream Color’s oblique style allows for many possible explanations of causal and casual relationships. I have no doubt that Carruth would bristle at my straightforward description. My goal here was simply to provide a bit of context for two motifs that I believe are thematically crucial. First, the film challenges the idea of the body as a discrete container, as the boundaries of Kris’s corporeal self are continually challenged through entanglements with the worm, pig, and ultimately even Jeff. I use the word “entanglements” here following Karen Barad, who uses the term to name specific relations in which one’s identity is at once constituted and diffracted by an obligation to an other.5 Second, the film demonstrates how these entanglements can affect the body even when we are not aware of them, as best demonstrated by Kris and Jeff’s seemingly unexplainable feelings of panic and grief as the piglets were taken and killed. These questions of embodiment are not raised without an ideological agenda. The characters of the Thief and Sampler, through stealing and killing, are shown to be morally reprehensible. All of the troubles that afflict Kris can be traced back to these two characters’ intervening with or exploiting nature, here broadly understood as encompassing all that is nonhuman. In light of this

Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (2011): 47.

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vilification of ecological interlopers and Walden’s centrality in awakening the protagonist’s critical consciousness, one could easily argue that the film problematically reifies an Organicist conception of a virginal nature that should remain untouched by man’s impure hands.6 But I don’t want to pursue that argument here—the film’s ostensible political message is muddled and somewhat contradictory. Instead I want to explore the comparatively coherent ethics advanced by the thematic motifs mentioned above, and how these ideas dovetail with the non/human conversation happening in contemporary queer theory. As a branch of queer theory moved to investigate the construction of the “human” in the non/post/anti/human turn, specific attention was given to the boundaries of the body—specifically focusing on how the body is not an isolated unit, but is very much implicated as a part of an extensive ecological network. Advocating a queer ecological criticism, Timothy Morton writes:

Life-forms are liquid…Queer ecology requires a vocabulary envisioning this liquid life. I propose that life-forms constitute a mesh, a nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and nonliving, between organism and environment.7

In Stacey Alaimo’s discussion of trans-corporeality, she moves beyond focusing exclusively on organic life, noting how the inorganic material world (chemicals, toxins, etc.) also intra-acts with our bodies.8 She describes a trans-corporeal ethics “that turn from the disembodied values and ideals of bounded individuals toward an attention to situated, evolving practices that have far-reaching and often unforeseen consequences, species, and ecologies.”9 Alaimo’s trans-corporeal ethics build off of Barad, who in writing about entanglements argues that “the very nature of matter entails an exposure to the Other,” meaning that the notion of trans-corporeal ethics is not a “superimposing of human values onto the ontology 6 7 8 9

Timothy Morton, “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010): 279. Ibid., 275–76. Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010), 20–21. Ibid., 22.

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of the world” but is integral to the very nature of matter.10 Although Alaimo and Barad pay specific attention to the intra-action of inorganic material, I don’t believe this ethics of trans-corporeality precludes a consideration of the interrelation of the human body with the mesh of other life-forms. A trans-corporeal ethics does not imply a particular political praxis, only a recognition of the body’s constitutive interrelations with “other” matter and organisms—a rejection of thinking of the body as a discrete container. While Upstream Color’s ostensible Organicist politics are somewhat abstruse, it more coherently advances a trans-corporeal ethics as evidenced through the human protagonists’ affective bodily interrelations with other human and non/human animals. Before discussing how these trans-corporeal ethics are affectively conveyed, I must consider the materiality of Upstream Color as bodily experience of sight and sound, not an abstract collection of themes and concepts. In his perceptive essay “Leading with the Ear: Upstream Color and the Cinema of Respiration,” Joseph G. Kickasola offers a phenomenological reading of the film, focusing its aggressive use of sound to elicit a bodily response from the audience. The essay is not concerned with explicating the film thematically or politically, mostly ignoring its cryptic narrative in favor of exploring its “sensual coherence.”11 He concentrates on the first 20 minutes of the movie (ending his analysis on the scene where the Sampler summons Kris for surgery), outlining Carruth’s coherent sonic approach evidenced throughout Upstream Color. As the essay’s title indicates, Kickasola argues that Carruth’s use of sound plays a dominant role in his aesthetic strategy, what he refers to as “leading with the ear.”12 He uses this phrase throughout the the piece to gesture towards various aspects of the Carruth’s sound design, highlighting how sound structures the film; he notes that sound often precedes the visual appearance of a character or environment, serving as an emotional primer as well as a narrative and temporal bridge. 13 He argues that the film’s first piece of dialogue, “Close your eyes,” reveals Carruth’s 10 Karen Barad, “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am,” Differences 23, no. 3

(2012): 217. 11 Joseph G. Kickasola, “Leading with the Ear: Upstream Color and the Cinema of Respiration,” Film Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2013): 73. 12 Ibid., 60. 13 Ibid.

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intention for the audience “to listen for aural grounding amid a flurry of sumptuous visuals and completely bewildering narrative fragments.”14 Kickasola pays particular attention to how the sound design accentuates the characters’ bodily functions, specifically breathing and drinking, in what he calls an aesthetics of respiration.15 He methodically lists the numerous times that exhaling, gasping, coughing, vomiting, sputtering, guzzling, gorging, and breathing dominate the viewer’s sensory experience of the film. After his exhaustive description of the film’s sound design, Kickasola proceeds to the perception of sound as a multi-sensory experience. Invoking research on phenomenology and sensation, he writes, “Human sensory systems are intermingled…there are multisensory neurons attuned to stimuli in all the sensory domains of the brain. The auditory system in particular is extensively multisensory.”16 Connecting multisensory experience to our sensory perception of time, space, and materiality, he ultimately argues, “The aggregate effect of a multisensory impact through audition is a kind of whole bodily sympathy with the auditory structure, which we naturally associate with and imitate by breathing. This is foundational for the aesthetics of respiration.”17 He stresses the way our body “mimetically” responds to film’s multisensory stimulus, how our bodily flows and processes are impacted by Upstream Color’s temporal, rhythmic, and corporeal cues.18 As his suggestions for further reading make clear, Kickasola is more interested in the scientific and psychological study of phenomenology rather than culturally oriented conversations around embodiment, but I believe his discussion of “corporeal understanding” and “experiential comprehension” would be enriched by considering the humanities’ recent embrace of the term “affect.” Although affect’s definition can seem somewhat nebulous, it is ultimately a useful concept with which to approach Kickasola’s work in relation to trans-corporeal ethics and the non/human turn. Like many terms circulating in queer theory, “affect” seems designed to resist a simple, stable definition. I don’t intend to sketch a comprehensive or absolute meaning of the term here, but instead aim to outline a sort of constellation of its 14 Kickasola, “Leading with the Ear,” 62. 15 Ibid., 71. 16 Ibid., 67. 17 Ibid., 71. 18 Ibid., 72.

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usage that will provide some utility for the purposes of this paper. I want to begin with Steve Shaviro’s use of the word in his book Post-Cinematic Affect, which I believe has particular significance in an analysis of a film like Upstream Color, which had a limited theatrical run before quickly appearing on Netflix’s streaming service, similarly to Primer. In the introduction to his book, Shaviro astutely observes that traditional conceptions of filmic cinema have rapidly been replaced by digital filmmaking techniques and various new media—movies are now just as likely to be watched on a computer or phone as in the theater.19 In this landscape, he considers film and video works to be “machines for generating affect, and for capitalizing upon, or extracting value from, this affect.”20 Citing Brian Massumi, he differentiates “between affect and emotion,” arguing that “Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess their own emotions.”21 He summarizes the importance of affect, writing, “Our existence is always bound up with affective and aesthetic flows that elude cognitive definition or capture.”22 This contrasts with Sarah Ahmed’s definition, which blurs the line between emotion and affect. For her, emotions are not blockages of affective flow, but themselves “circulate between bodies and signs.”23 For my analysis of Upstream Color, I find Shaviro and Massumi’s definition to be most useful. While the film surely elicits an emotional response, I contend that its affective currents are best understood as circulating at a sensual level. After arranging my constellation of affect, I hope that the overlap between Kickasola’s phenomenological analysis and the so-called affective turn are clear. I think Chen’s attention to the materiality of affect is particularly pertinent. In comparing respiration and audition, Kickasola is sure to note that both involve a bodily interaction with the air in the environment.24 Hearing is not solely an internal act of perception; it also involves the physical flow of air molecules from sound source to the body. Additionally, Massumi’s definition as affect being synesthetic has obvious parallels in Kickasola’s scientific description of hearing 19 20 21 22

Steve Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Hants, UK: Zero Books, 2010), 1–2. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid, 4. 23 Sarah Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004), 117. 24 Kickasola, “Leading With the Ear,” 71.

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as multi-sensory. I contend that our body’s mimetic response to Upstream Color and the trans-corporeal flow of sensory information can most easily be understood and conveyed in terms of affect. Now I’d like to turn back to the thematic content of Upstream Color, examining the connection between trans-corporeal ethics and the film’s affective use of sound. As I previously alluded to, I am not interested in the political message of Upstream Color. Primarily, I don’t believe that film’s narrative is coherent enough to invite a cogent political reading, and—not to privilege the intention of the auteur—interviews with Carruth imply that he was not interested in advocating a political message.25 Additionally, the film’s most readily political message is problematic in its conservative reification of a Thoreauvian nature/ culture binary. While its politics are muddled, its ethics are coherent. In the film, our protagonists inadvertently suffer, oblivious to the nonhuman animals to which they are intimately connected. It is only through a blossoming of critical consciousness that they are able to escape the cycle of distress, convening at the farm to symbolically recognize their connection to the nonhuman world. The characters find transcendence through an acknowledgement of their specific relationships—their entanglements—with other bodies, a trans-corporeal ethics. Upstream Color’s use of sound is itself a performance of these entanglements of body and matter, as the flow of sound and air affectively conveys and duplicates this ethics of trans-corporeality. As Kickasola demonstrates, the film reaches a level of “sensual coherence” through an intentional sound design that takes advantage of our body’s mimetic sensitivity to sound. Carruth’s aggressive sound design intentionally highlights bodily processes throughout the movie, affecting our own corporeal rhythms even if we are not particularly cognizant of the film’s auditory register, and its multisensory effects. Our breathing slows and quickens as our bodies pick up on the corporeal cues of the rhythmic shifts in the score. We sympathetically tense as we hear Kris’s pained gasps. Our mouths parch as we hear Kris noisily slurp. We become agitated as the Sampler’s violent mechanical whooshing noises summon Kris to her grotesque surgery. Even as we fail to make narrative sense of the film, Carruth determines our corporeal responses, affectively “leading with the ear.” We experience the tension of our protagonist’s ignorance, and the release of their eventual revelation all through an affective sound design 25 Anders, “Director Shane Carruth Explains the Ending of Upstream Color.”

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closely accentuating the characters’ embodied selves. Appropriately, Upstream Color conveys its trans-corporeal ethics affectively, forcing the audience to become aware of how bodies can be impacted through outside currents of sight and sound as it advances this very notion. Finally, I want to come back to the idea of the screen-speaker-body assemblage in the context of the current media environment. Exerting a monomaniacal control over a film that he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in (not to mention his hand in the sound design and his composition of the score), Carruth chose to selfdistribute the film, severely limiting its theatrical release. I had the good fortune of seeing Upstream Color in a cinema, specifically the (much) smaller of the two screens at Chicago’s historic Music Box Theater. Seeing the film in such a small space undoubtedly altered my viewing experience, as an awareness of the dozen or so other people in the room forced me to consider my trans-corporeal relationships to others in addition to the screen and speakers. As I mentioned, after the film’s brief theatrical run, it quickly arrived on Netflix’s streaming service. Due to the limited access to independent theaters in large urban centers, I would hazard to guess that by now it is likely more people have experienced the film in private—on their laptop or phone—rather than in a public theater. In discussing the affective currents of the film, I took for granted a viewing experience in which the sound was a main focal point, challenging the primacy of the screen. I have serious reservations about the affective power of the screen-speaker-body assemblage when sound is subsumed by sight. I doubt whether the film can affectively convey its trans-corporeal ethics through tinny laptop speakers or inadequate ear-buds. Similarly, I am unsure if the movie’s rhythmic corporeal cues can be transmitted to a viewer who has the power to pause, fast-forward, and rewind—perhaps with an aim of solving the film’s supposed puzzle. In a discussion of bodies and their affective relations to screens and speakers, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the materiality of these machines. I believe that the viewing experience dictates the viewer’s conscious and affective response. With this in mind, it seems wholly possible that the predominant medium of Carruth’s films, Netflix streaming, has determined the reception of his movies: treating them as puzzles to be solved rather than films to be experienced.

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Works Cited Adams, Sam. 2013. “Day Five at Sundance.” A.V. Club. http://www.avclub.com/ article/day-five-at-sundance-is-all-about-the-perplexing-o-91442. Ahmed, Sarah. 2004. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22 (2 79) (June 1): 117–39. doi:10.1215/01642472-22-2_79-117. Alaimo, Stacey. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Anders, Charlie Jane. 2013. “Director Shane Carruth Explains the Ending of Upstream Color.” io9. http://io9.com/director-shane-carruth-explains the-ending-of-upstream-475087719. Barad, Karen. 2011. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19 (2): 25–53. ———. 2012. “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” Differences 23 (3) (January 11): 206–23. doi:10.1215/10407391-1892943. Carruth, Shane. 2004. Primer. United States: ThinkFilm. ———. 2013. Upstream Color. United States: ERBP. Dargis, Manohla. 2013. “Worms, a Botanist, and Pigs. Sounds Like a Love Story.” New York Times, April 5. Kickasola, JG. 2013. “Leading with the Ear: Upstream Color and the Cinema of Respiration.” Film Quarterly 66 (4): 60–74. doi:10.1525/FQ.2013.66.4.60. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke UP. Morton, Timothy. 2010. “Guest Column: Queer Ecology.” PMLA 125 (2): 273–82. Shaviro, Steven. 2010. Post-Cinematic Affect. Hants, UK: Zero Books.

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Shifting Referents:

September 11 in Visual Discourse

Miriam Grotte In gleaming gold paint, the figure in Michael Richards’s 1999 sculpture Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian (Fig. 1) stands life-sized, arms pinned to its sides and legs fused together. With its palms turned upwards, the figure offers itself up to an encircling attack of airplanes, nose-diving into his flesh, recalling the death of the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian, who was shot to death by arrows. Richards made this work in homage to the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African American pilots who fought in the then-segregated US military during World War II. Two years after he completed Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian, Richards was a resident artist in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s “World Views” program, whose studios were located on the ninety-second floor of World Trade Center Tower One. He was working there on the morning of September 11, 2001, and he died in the attacks. Viewing Richards’s sculpture after his death evokes a powerfully uncanny experience. The sculpture’s form is cast from the artist’s own body, rendered in resin and fiberglass. It stands tall Fig. 1 Michael Richards, Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian, 1999, body cast in against the planes charging towards and into him, resin and fiberglass, painted, and foretelling the circumstances of Richard’s own supported by steel shaft, with airplanes cast in resin and fiberglass, death. The image is reminiscent of a tombstone; painted, and attached by steel bolts, here, the artist is concretized in a visual metaphor Estate of the artist. for his death. To see this work now, and to know how

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Richards died, establishes new references and meaning for the sculpture specific to September 11, and our interpretation of the work inevitably and enduringly shifts. This shift in what artworks can mean or refer to in terms of their relationship to or resonance with September 11 was explored in the exhibition September 11. The exhibition was held at the contemporary art museum MoMA PS 1 in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the attacks. It was on view from September 11, 2011 through January 9, 2012 in the museum’s repurposed former school building in Long Island City, Queens. Curated by Peter Eleey, the show was a reaction to the anniversary of the event and to its enduring effects. It also reflected the curator’s sense that the attacks were “underrepresented in cultural discourse—particularly within the realm of contemporary art.”1 The exhibition was intended to provide a framework for and point of entry into addressing the intersection of September 11 and contemporary art, functioning as a form of cultural response to the dramatic events of recent history. Much of the work on display in September 11 was made years, if not decades, prior to September 11, but nevertheless contained an important resonance for the curator, or perhaps even prescience. Although Richards’s sculpture was not included in the exhibition, Eleey notes it in his catalogue essay as a paradigmatic and especially poignant example of the artistic anachronisms that can and do occur through the lens of September 11.2 Eleey’s curatorial choice to include mostly works that preexisted September 11 was controversial, but his choice gestures toward how September 11 fundamentally affected the visual field and the way people—as Americans, global citizens, or as individuals—attach meaning to an image, especially those images that conjure memories of that day. The exhibition demonstrates how, through the lens of September 11, it is possible to connect so many images, even those made outside of the event’s context, to that moment. This applies equally to overtly resonant depictions—such as those of the Twin

1 “September 11,” MoMA PS1, http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/338 2 Peter Eleey, September 11 (Long Island City: MoMA PS1, 2011), 51–55.

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Towers or people jumping or falling from buildings—and to less direct references such as a mundane image of an airplane.3 In its aims, development, and ultimate instantiation, the exhibition highlights the multiple levels of difficulty, contradiction, ambiguity, and uncertainty that are brought to the fore at the intersection of September 11 and art. At its most basic level, the exhibition provokes questions of definition and demarcation—what qualifies as “September 11 art,” and what aspects of its making, form, or meaning make it so? The curator’s decision to include primarily works with no intended connection to September 11 makes two important suggestions: first, that there is a fundamental difficulty in responding directly to the event in visual and artistic form, and second, that September 11 brought to life a new resonance for past figurations. The event became a powerful referent that could be activated and animated by anachronistic images. This study takes up each of the curator’s suggestions in turn, using the exhibition’s framework as a starting point from which to investigate these larger ideas. This paper begins by exploring artists’ apparent difficulty in responding directly to September 11 in visual discourse, and then moves on to examine several specific works included in the exhibition. This examination interrogates how these works’ meanings have shifted in order to reflect the change in a viewer’s contemporary experience. When we view certain pre–September 11 works in the post–September 11 era, there can be an eeriness or strangeness that emerges. This new experience, specific to contemporary viewership, then becomes as much a part of the work as the artist’s original marks and forms, and this paper aims to closely examine this subjective shift in reception and interpretation. Specifically, this paper considers this shift in light of the notion of punctum, borrowed from Roland Barthes’s theory of photography. It is also necessary to acknowledge the inherently imagistic and spectacular nature of the event itself, seen in the violent moving pictures that were witnessed in real time and then repeated over and over. We remember September 11 visually, through images of orange fireballs burying the towers into an electric blue sky, 3

There is a striking lineage of artworks that depict people jumping from buildings by artists like Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, and Sarah Charlesworth (whom Eleey included in September 11), as well as more contemporary works that incorporate images of individuals who jumped from the World Trade Towers on September 11. See Andrea D. Fitzpatrick, “The Movement of Vulnerability: Images of Falling and September 11,” Art Journal 66 (Winter 2007): 84–102.

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crumbling buildings, the grey ash cloud that engulfed the streets of lower Manhattan, and the pictures that suggest impending death—the planes before they hit, and people in free fall, captured mid-air by camera lenses. We must also interrogate the notion of art as response and what expectations exist for art’s political and palliative functions. Additionally, in a formal sense, these considerations bring to the fore the issues of artistic intent and authorship—if artworks that were made outside of the September 11 context experience a fundamental shift in meaning and reference because of the attacks, what implications does that have for how we read works of art in historically relative ways?

The “Missing” Art It may be unfair to characterize the contemporary art world as one that embodies a lack, or omission, in terms of response to September 11. There have been many artists who have made work that directly addresses the attack or subsequent military action—like Eric Fischl’s controversial Tumbling Woman (2002) (Fig. 2) or Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation Superficial Engagement (2006) at Gladstone Gallery in New York, to name only two. There are, without a doubt, even more artists today whose practices reflect on the event in indirect and mediated ways and whose work may not loudly announce itself as “September 11 art.” In some ways, it would be impossible for any contemporary artist to extract him or herself from the significance of September 11 and create art that is not a product of our charged historical moment. There has not been, however, a generalized push or movement among contemporary artists to address the issue head-on; in a market centered in New York City, Fig. 2 Eric Fischl, Tumbling Woman, 2002, bronze, 37 x 74 x 50 there is a hesitance to wade into in. Edition of 5 with 3 Artist Proofs. Courtesy the artist. such charged waters. Photograph by Ralph Gibson.

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There are multiple factors to consider when reflecting on the overarching silence within the contemporary art realm that Eleey perceived in response to September 11. In the catalogue for his exhibition at MoMA PS 1, Eleey writes:

Almost immediately, we wondered where the art was. We remembered Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and felt bereft that nothing like this has been made about our tragedy. As the years have worn on and it has not appeared, we have come up with a few explanations, none satisfactory. At times this lack has fanned a spark of fear that art has lost its purchase on the world, on the major issues of our time.4

Eleey outlines some of these explanations, suggesting that perhaps September 11 is too political in and of itself and is too intimately tied to the wars it was used to justify. He also considers the possibility that the audience for such work is indeterminate—is it for the world; the United States; the victims of the attacks; the victims of the subsequent wars; the victims’ families; or residents of New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC? The motivations behind an artistic response to September 11 is crucial to evaluating the effect of the work itself, and there is an inherent difficulty in parsing out how one stands, as an individual, in relation to September 11 and toward whom artistic responses ought to be directed. Eleey also underscores the difficulty that arises from September 11 being such a fundamentally imagistic event and the fact that the hijackers intended for the attacks to be witnessed and then replayed. For Eleey, violence is perpetuated through this repetitive action. The violence captured in the images of the attack make them difficult to work with or against in an artistic way, suggesting a reason why artists may be specifically hesitant to utilize images from the attack in their work. Eleey writes, “[t]he spectacularity of the violence that they represent was powerful enough that almost any images visually linked to the attacks suffer some element of this contamination…in short, they are corrupted by the very subject that they picture.”5 The ethics of using these images, and the way in which their meaning is overdetermined, complicate an artist’s free use of them. There is 4 Eleey, September 11, 46. 5 Ibid., 48.

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perhaps something even appropriative about incorporating them into a work of art—suggesting that the attack itself and subsequent media coverage could be viewed as similar to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades or Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series.6 Another difficulty of artistic response to September 11 is the issue of defining the event and demarcating its temporal boundaries. There is something about September 11 that remains unfixed in time and space. As Judith Butler notes, September 11 is consistently represented to the American public as a point of origin, a moment in which everything changed, and to question why or how the event could have occurred or what American policies could have contributed to the attack is seen as providing justification or excuses for an indefensible act of violence. Butler writes that, within this framework, “[t]here is no relevant prehistory to the events of September 11… [I]n order to sustain the affective structure in which we are, on the one hand, victimized and, on the other hand, engaged in a righteous cause of rooting out terror, we have to begin the story with the experience of the violence we suffered.”7 Because September 11 immediately became a justification for U.S. military aggression against the generic enemy of “terrorism” and continues to be used to legitimize policy, the narrative of what happened when and why was, and continues to be, manipulated. September 11 is equally as difficult to demarcate in our current moment because it continues to unfold. September 11 remains unfixed in history because the nebulous War or Terror continues, conflicts in the Middle East endure, and, domestically, we are still called upon to defend ourselves and our national values in rhetoric invoking September 11. In terms of artistic response, this points to the indeterminability of what, exactly, an artist is being called upon to process, understand, and answer to. Eleey writes, “[t]he ‘war on terror’ and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan continue in [September 11’s] name, as do the dramatic shifts in our practice of due process, surveillance, and security. Can art conclusively 6 Duchamp made his readymades by selecting an object that already existed in the world and au-

thorizing it as a work of art, such as a comb, urinal, or bicycle wheel. In some cases he made slight additions or tweaks to the object, and in others, left the object completely as it was, adding only his signature. Andy Warhol starting making paintings in his Death and Disaster series in the 1960s, in which he reproduced newspaper and tabloid images of car crashes, suicides, and accidents. 7 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Brooklyn: Verso, 2004), 6.

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memorialize or contain a continuing event?”8 Although it is not necessarily true that art is expected to “conclusively” characterize its subject, Eleey’s point that September 11 is more of an enduring condition of our world than an event fixed to a certain moment in history highlights the difficulty in artistically responding to it in a direct way.

September 11: The Exhibition Eleey’s response to the “missing” September 11 art, whatever the reasons for its scarcity, is to look backwards in time for “something that does not belong to this still unfolding catastrophe.”9 For him, this means culling a history of visual images for figurations that resonate with September 11 from outside of its context. In a review of the exhibition, Brendan S. Carroll writes, “[i]n the days, weeks and months following the attacks of September 11, 2001, benign objects or routine situations often became harbingers of doom. I would see a plane overhead and relive the passenger jets crashing into the Twin Towers.”10 While the political treatment of September 11 as a point of origin can be problematic for reasons previously discussed, Carroll underscores the sense in which September 11 did mark a fundamental shift in terms of one’s quotidian experience of everyday life and the images that comprise it. The attack became a powerful referent with which we began to associate other, unrelated images or banal activities. This complex shift in associations and meaning enacted by September 11 is what Eleey’s exhibition highlights within the realm of artistic expression. In terms of art historical analysis, however, this subjective shift in the interpretation of works of art presents a methodological difficulty. How do we reconcile this type of impact on all images of the Twin Towers, for example, that were the subject of countless works of art during their twenty-eight-year lifespan? To what extent is our reading of September 11 into these works, whether of our own volition or as encouraged by the theme of an exhibition, a justifiable interpretation 8 Eleey, September 11, 47. 9 Ibid., 50. 10 Brendan S. Carroll, “Making Sense of Trauma through Art,” Hyperallergic, October 13, 2011.

http://hyperallergic.com/38065/making-sense-of-trauma-through-art/.

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of the meaning of the works themselves? Reading or re-reading a work of art in this way is difficult to reconcile with artistic intent; of course, September 11 was not a consideration for the artists at the time of these works’ creation. Yet works of art most often endure past the moment of their making, collecting new layers of meaning as history moves forward. What is unique about the ability of September 11 to activate new references in past images is that it did so on a grand scale for a global community. For the millions of people that witnessed the attack, in real time or through televised replays, there was a communal shift in the meaning of certain images. The September 11 exhibition offers an opportunity to reflect on the viewer’s experience of works that unwittingly reference the attack and whose representations conjure up fragments of image-based memory. Take, for example, William Eggleston’s photograph Untitled (Glass in Airplane) (1965–74) from his series Los Alamos. This image, rendered in warm, saturated, and gleaming tones, depicts an easy moment of relaxation—an airplane passenger’s hand thoughtlessly caresses a drink straw while the camera guides the viewer’s eye through and past the airplane window, into a calm blue sky dotted with picturesque clouds. The glass gleams and its reflection on the tray table further enhances its jewel-like quality—this is a moment to be relished and savored, enjoyed for its pleasantness and perhaps, its luxury. While at the time of the photograph’s printing this image could have been read as an ode to a golden age of airline travel, or to the banalities of everyday American life, viewing this photograph post–September 11 can have very different associations.11 The perfect blue sky recalls the one that served as the backdrop for the attacks—a visual juxtaposition that emphasizes the unbelievable aspect of the spectacle of September 11 as it unfolded. In a less direct way, the warmth and picturesque calm that this image captures activates a premonitory dread for the viewer—there is the sense that everything is too perfect, that something will 11

It is worth noting that though the photographs included in Eggleston’s Los Alamos series, including Untitled (Glass in Airplane) were made in the 1960s and 1970s, they were not released or exhibited publically until 2003 in an exhibition at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. Eggleston explained this by saying he “had too many other things to do.” While this would be a topic for another paper, it is, at the very least, possible that some of these resonances with September 11 became visible to the artist himself. See Elisabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 10.

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soon go awry. Eleey writes, “I have always been taken with [this] iconic image of a drink on an airplane, the intimacy of the seat-back table and its optimistic window on the world.”12 The image’s optimism evokes considerations of its antithesis, something dangerous and foreboding. The photograph’s framing intensifies this feeling—the viewer occupies the same space as the passenger, entering the interior of the aircraft and becoming as vulnerable as the subject depicted. Another work included in the exhibition, Sarah Charlesworth’s 1980 mural print Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon (Fig. 3), captures a moment of a woman’s fall after she jumped from a window in a burning hotel.Printed in black and white, the tonal shift from smoky grays in the upper half of the frame to the darker black of the lower section suggests movement towards a void—the end of the fall, where death awaits. As she falls, gravity pushes her dress upward covering her upper torso and head, and leaving only her dangling feet, in sharper focus than any other details in the rest of the picture, to signal that she is a human falling object. Behind her, the architectural form of the building from which she jumped is darkened and decontextualized, though one can discern two black columns behind her that bear a striking resemblance to the Twin Towers. Charlesworth’s image directly recalls the images of those who jumped or fell from the towers as they were burning. Dwarfed by the scale of the World Trade Center and captured on film from a distance, the Fig. 3 Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified identities of the victims in the towers were Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, 1980, black and white mural similarly masked—they became not individuals, Madrid, print, 78 x 42 inches. Courtesy the Estate but visual markers of victimhood and of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone. 12

Eleey, September 11, 59–60.

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death in their final moments. Viewing Charlesworth’s image, like the images from September 11, places the observer in a helpless position of watching with no recourse to act, thus activating a discomfort with the image’s exploitative and voyeuristic qualities. In the post–September 11 era, Charlesworth’s image is forever changed—it acquires a new layer of meaning and reference that cannot be extracted from it. Eleey writes, “to consider including her photograph in this exhibition was also to realize how much it too had been changed by the attacks. It no longer belonged to itself.”13 In Jem Cohen’s short film Little Flags (Fig. 4), he captures footage of a military ticker-tape parade in lower Manhattan celebrating the end of the Gulf War in 1991. To a contemporary viewer, it can read like September 11 in reverse, starting off with crowds cheering and chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A,” waving flags and enacting a boisterous, perhaps inebriated, patriotism. At approximately the two-minute mark of the film, it cuts to a group of young men, all wearing tee shirts that read “Fuck Saddam.” Later on in the film, a man chants, “Let’s all celebrate—250,000 dead.” The film cuts to end of the parade and its aftermath, capturing somewhat dazed New Yorkers walking through the streets of a

Fig. 4 Jem Cohen, Still from Little Flags, 1991–2000, Super 8 film. Courtesy the artist.

13 Eleey, September 11, 65–66.

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now-abandoned lower Manhattan covered in pieces of white paper, some of which still float down from above. At multiple moments throughout the film, the camera lens sneaks glances of the Twin Towers, visible through openings in the city’s street grid. The visualization of the towers, the city covered in paper, and the patriotic celebration recalls the memory of office paper and dust covering the streets after the towers’ collapse, and the militaristic rallying that followed President Bush’s declaration of the War on Terror.

Deconstructing the Shift When a viewer re-reads preexisting and unrelated artworks through the lens of September 11 and experiences a fundamental shift in what, according to his or her interpretation, that image references or is indexically tied to, what exactly is happening, and why does it feel so eerily compelling? To put it another way, when looking at Charlesworth’s Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, for example, how do we account for the shift in reference when viewing it at the time of its creation in 1980 versus today? Although all artworks open themselves up to a viewer’s subjective experience and perspective, there is something widespread happening in the case of works like those Eleey selected in the context of September 11. There was a large, global community of viewers who witnessed the images of September 11, enabling a widespread shift in what memories certain images invoke. It may be possible to partly deconstruct this experience by applying the philosophy of Roland Barthes. In his theory of photography, Barthes introduces the notion of punctum, which serves as a way to parse out how a viewer reads and interprets a photographic image. The punctum is a detail determined by each individual viewer and can change over the course of time. It is that which pricks or wounds the viewer, the dominant detail that commands his or her personal attention. Barthes writes, “[a] photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”14 For Barthes, the punctum fundamentally alters the viewer’s experience of the photograph. Unlike other 14

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howe (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27.

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details embedded within the image, like a subject’s dress, the punctum is that which consumes the viewer in a visceral way. Barthes writes, “I feel that its mere presence changes my reading, that I am looking at a new photograph, marked in my eyes with a higher value.”15 Barthes contends that the punctum is simultaneously what the viewers adds to the image, or brings to it, and that which is already contained within it. He writes, “It is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.”16 If we extend Barthes’s treatment of photographic images to art in general, there is perhaps a way in which we can read September 11 as something akin to the punctum, an element that is visually already embedded in the image but activated in a new and personal way by our contemporary reading. For artworks like Eggleston’s, Charlesworth’s, and Cohen’s, the representations have stayed the same, but certain visual details, like the presence of the smoggy outlines of the Twin Towers in Cohen’s film, emerge in a new light as we view them postSeptember 11, and they prick us, bruise us, in a different way. The punctum is not fixed or defined by the artist; it is related only to the viewer’s experience and is, in a certain sense, coincidental or circumstantial, just as the resonance the artworks Eleey chose for his exhibition is with the images that comprised September 11.

Conclusion Eventually, there will be no more viewers who witnessed the events of that day in real time. These future viewers will lack this experiential reference point and will not have shifted in the same way as those who had that experience. For them, a picture of the Twin Towers may not automatically unlock the same embedded meanings that is does for us in 2014. Writing about the exhibition Here is New York, which opened in a storefront space in downtown New York in late September 2001 and featured photographs of the attack by anyone who wished to submit them, professional or amateur, Susan Sontag said, “[the exhibition visitors] had no need of captions. They had, if anything, a surfeit of understanding of what they

15 Bathes, Camera Lucinda, 42. (emphasis original). 16 Ibid., 55.

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misreadings and the misrememberings, and new ideological uses for the pictures, will make their difference.”17 Sontag points to how images of September 11 itself or those that embody a less direct relationship to the attacks like those Eleey highlighted in his exhibition, may serve an unquestionable referential function for us now because of our historical moment, but that this moment will not last forever. Sontag continued, “the photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.”18 Although Sontag was referring specifically to photography, she seems to answer some of the criticism that Eleey received for imposing a September 11 context on works that had no intended connection with the event (and creating an installation that, as Tyler Green put it, is “not fair to the artist[s] and…misleads the viewer”).19 These works have a resonance that activates our memory and enables us to engage, in an indirect, perhaps less painful way, with the images that came into being on September 11. Eleey has, perhaps unintentionally, identified a function or use that our post-September 11 community has for these artworks: they give us something from outside of that traumatic context with which to move inward and explore what has changed for us. In his essay, Eleey borrows an idea from Slavoj Žižek, which is that “there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with [violence]: the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking.”20 These less direct images, contained in a space removed from the images of violence, tap into our shared experience through alternative means, allowing us to more truly look, think, and reflect.

17 18 19

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 29. Ibid., 39. Tyler Green, “‘September 11’ at MoMA’s PS1,” Modern Art Notes, October 26, 2001. http:// blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2011/10/september-11-at-momas-ps1/ . 20 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 3–4.

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Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 2002. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Brooklyn: Verso, 2004. Carroll, Brendan S. “Making Sense of Trauma through Art.” Hyperallergic, October 13, 2011 (accessed June 14, 2013). http://hyperallergic.com/38065/making sense-of-trauma-through-art/ Eleey, Peter. September 11. Long Island City: MoMA PS1, 2011. Exhibition catalogue. Fitzpatrick, Andrea D. “The Movement of Vulnerability: Images of Falling and September 11.” Art Journal 66 (Winter 2007): 84–102. Foner, Nancy, ed. Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. New York: Penguin, 2003. Green, Tyler. “‘September 11’ at MoMA’s PS1.” Modern Art Notes, October 26, 2001 (accessed June 14, 2013). http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/ 2011/10/september-11-at-momas-ps1/ Heischman, Daniel R. “The Uncanniness of September 11th.” Journal of Religion and Health 41 (Fall 2002): 197–205. Retort. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. New York: Verso, 2005. Scott, Andrea K. “Critic’s Notebook: Speak, Memory.” The New Yorker, September 12, 2011, 8. “September 11.” MoMA PS1, (accessed June 14, 2013).http://momaps1.org/ exhibitions/view/338 Smith, Roberta. “Three Ways to Look Back, None Easy.” The New York Times, September 10, 2011, C1. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

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Sussman, Elisabeth and Thomas Weski. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Exhibition catalogue. Ĺ˝iĹžek, Slavoj. Violence. New York: Picador, 2008.

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Resonant Connections:

Robert Schumann’s Philosophical Artist and Friedrich Hölderlin’s Prophetic Poet Carroll Clayton Savant For Friedrich Hölderlin, the function of the poetic Artist is prophetic: to call attention to the absence of the fire of civilization and to prepare humanity to usher in a new beginning with its return. Poetry, for Hölderlin, is a divine “recalling” that allows self-reflection as one prepares to welcome this return of the light of civilization. The function of the poet is to allow this self-reflection to reveal itself. Martin Heidegger refers to this revelation as a way for one to step outside of oneself and recognize the self in the foreign (Other) in order to clearly understand oneself. In his lectures on Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, he investigates the function of poetry to help one understand oneself within the Other and the ability to be at home in oneself by being at home in one’s Otherness.1 The function of “The Ister,” as Heidegger notes, and, one can assume, for Hölderlin, is to allow the Artist to see his function as a prophet who has been called to usher in the new fire of civilization through this self-revelation.2 It is this philosophical view of the function of the artist in relation to his art that resonated in early nineteenthcentury Romantic composers, like Robert Schumann, and shaped not only the way they viewed musical composition, but the philosophical and poetic functions of music.

Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 55. 2 In Heidegger’s notes on Hölderlin’s poem “Remembrance,” he writes that “[t]heir word [the poet’s word] is the foretelling word in the strict sense…The poets are, if they stand in their essence, prophetic” (136). These poets, for Heidegger, are prophetic in that they reveal that which is futurally possible, based upon historical knowledge. Heidegger continues, writing that “…the ‘prophetic’ element of this poetry must be grasped in terms of the being of the poetic foretelling” (137). This suggests that prophetic poets can only exist in their poetizing of the events that are to happen.

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The correlation between Schumann, whose “…musical aesthetics had literary [and one could even posit, philosophical] roots…[,]” and Hölderlin’s philosophical poet seem fitting.3 For Schumann, music went beyond aesthetics: it served a philosophical and poetic purpose. In his collection of Aphorisms, he writes that “[m]usic speaks the most universal of languages, one by which the soul is freely, yet indefinably moved; but it is then at home.”4 Schumann’s poetics of music seem philosophically and prophetically at home with Hölderlin’s view of the function of poetry in revealing one’s inner consciousness; as Schumann writes about the ability of music to stir the soul, we hear resonances of Hölderlin’s prophetic poet, turning to the interior reflexive individual in order to stir the civilizing fires of the past. The goal of this project is to reconcile and to contest Schumann’s philosophy of music with Hölderlin’s view of the poet/artist. In this paper, I seek to investigate the relationship between poetry and philosophy, as seen in Hölderlin’s poem “The Ister,” with Schumann’s philosophy of music. By investigating Schumann’s philosophical and poetic approach to music in relation to a reading of “The Ister,” I intend to show that Schumann and Hölderlin have more in common, philosophically and artistically, than a cursory glance reveals. By investigating how Schumann’s literary and philosophical influences affected his philosophy on the function of music and the artist, I will attempt to draw explicit correlations between Schumann’s view of art with Hölderlin’s view, as seen in his poem and in his letters. Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister” opens with a call to poets, who are called forth to prepare humanity to welcome the return of the light of civilization; he writes, Now come, fire! Eager are we To see the day, And when the trial Has passed through our knees, May someone sense the forest’s cry. 3

Ulrich Tadday, “Life and literature, poetry and philosophy: Robert Schumann’s aesthetics of music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, ed. Beate Perrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39. 4 Robert Schumann, “From the Writings of Schumann,” in Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, ed. Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1984), 360, emphasis added.

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We, however, sing from the Indus Arrived from afar and From Alpheus, long have We sought what is fitting…5

The poet speaks of the Artist’s call to “seek what is fitting” in the Greek “fire” that has long expired; in the poet’s eagerness to welcome the return of the civilizing mission of the Greek’s, Hölderlin’s poet longs for this missing fire. Hölderlin refers to this missing light in his first Böhlendorff letter, from 4 December 1801, where he writes of the “…heavenly fire…[of] the Greeks.”6 When he opens “The Ister” with “Now come, fire!” he turns to the fire of the Greeks to look for the original “light” of civilization in order to reveal its absence and call on humanity to prepare for its return.7 For Hölderlin, the duty of the prophetic poet is to open humanity’s eyes to its current state and remind mankind of the glories of the past, in hopes of ushering in this new age. This is the Artistic function of poetry, for Hölderlin: to inspire man to reflect on the current state of civilization and anticipate or long for the extinguished light of the Greeks. In his 1 January 1799 letter to his brother Karl Gock, Hölderlin writes,

[m]uch has already been said about the influence of the fine arts on the cultivation of the human mind, but it always turned out to seem no serious matter…for people did not consider what art is, and especially what poetry is, in their essential natures…For in poetry’s presence, man immediately ingathers himself, and poetry gives him equanimity, not empty but living equanimity, in which all the mind’s faculties are alert.8

Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Ister,” in Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, trans. Martin Heidegger, William McNeill, and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 4. 6 Hölderlin, “Being Judgement [sic] Possibility,” in Essays and Letters, ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 207. 7 Hölderlin, “The Ister,” 4. 8 William Burford and Christopher Middleton, eds. The Poet’s Vocation: Selections from letters of Hölderlin, Rimbaud & Hart Crane (Austin: The University of Texas, n.d.), 18–19.

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It is through this alert form of consciousness that Hölderlin’s poet finds his prophetic status: to remind mankind, through poetry, of its duty to meditate in order to prepare for the return of the Greek fire that offers the promise of a new age. Terry Pinkard writes that Hölderlin “…came to believe that modernity, the new age, which he hoped would be a time of both spiritual and political renewal, required a radically new sensibility to bring about the kind of awareness of ‘unity in conflict’ that he sought to express in his poems…”9 According to Hölderlin, the sacred function of the poet is to usher in a new sensibility through his poetry. Hölderlin references this in his 12 November 1798 letter to Neuffer, saying that “[l]ivingness in poetry is what now most preoccupies my mind and senses. I feel so deeply how far I am from attaining it, and yet my whole soul is struggling to do so…O the world has scared my mind back into itself ever since my youth, and I am still suffering from this. There is…one honorable refuge for a poet who comes to grief [over the state of humanity]…: philosophy.”10 It is up to this prophetic poet to reveal this renewal, this poetic way of living, to mankind. Schumann turns to the Other in his view of the composer and the music critic. Mark Evan Bonds notes that Schumann turned to the mythical Greek world to create a new sensibility in his compositional and musicological writings. He writes that

[t]o give voice to different points of view in his reviews, and in general to represent different aspects of his own persona, Schumann invented several fictional characters: the exuberant, extroverted Florestan; the more circumspect and introverted Eusebius; and the sagacious Magister Raro, who sometimes mediates between the other two…All three characters are drawn from the fiction of Schumann’s favorite novelist, Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter…)11

Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 144. 10 Burford and Middleton, The Poet’s Vocation, 15. 11 Mark Evan Bonds, “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50:2/3 (Summer-Autumn 1997), 446.

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For Schumann, the three fictional characters serve an artistic purpose: to fight “low” music by advancing the principles of “high art” in music: essentially, to usher in a new Hölderlinian sensibility. In his Aphorisms, Schumann uses his three personas to invoke the spirit of the Greeks in order to create a philosophical musical ethos. He writes that “[l]ike a Greek god, the artist must associate in a friendly fashion with mankind and with life; but when life dares touch him, let him also disappear and leave nothing behind him save clouds.”12 Like Hölderlin, Schumann embraces the spirit of the musical artist in interacting with mankind in order to force him to reflectively ponder his current state. It is through the mythological personas that Schumann actively pursues this prophetic function of music. Schumann approaches his musicological criticism from a similar means, using the three fictional personas of Florestan, Eusebius, and Raro as a mythical, and one could posit, Hölderlinian, way of examining the condition of earlynineteenth-century German music. He warns “‘[l]et us not look idly on, let us take matters in hand, so that the situation may improve, so that the poetry of art may once again be held in high esteem!’”13 For Schumann, and his Davidsbund, music must attain its level of the highest form of art, poetry, in the face of the encroaching “low” tastes of the Philistines.14 In his 1835 “New Year’s Editorial” for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann writes that “[o]ur basic policy [of the Davidsbund] was set forth at the outset…: to be remindful of older times and their works and to emphasize that only from such a pure source can new artistic beauties be fostered…to prepare the way for, and to hasten, the acceptance of a new poetic era.” 15 The evocation of this new sensibility is the function of the Artist. This is similar to Hölderlin’s function of the poet, calling for a new sensibility that would prepare for reigniting the fire of civilization. Just as Schumann warns the composer and the performer of their duty in conveying the highest Artistic thoughts to the audience, Hölderlin’s “call” to the poets is a performative act, as 12

Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, trans. Paul Rosenfeld (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 40. 13 Schumann, “Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker,” “From the Writings of Schumann,” in Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, ed. Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1984), 358, emphasis added. 14 Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin sum up Schumann’s argument, writing that “…the League of David’s ultimate mission…[is] to slay the Philistines. Who…[are] the Philistines? Why, the fashionable mass producers of trivial music and the thousands upon thousands of unthinking concert and opera goers who applaud…their efforts” (359). 15 Robert Schumann, The Musical World of Robert Schumann: A Selection from His Own Writings, trans. and ed. Henry Pleasants (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 28.

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the poet is “called” to perform the “call” to mankind to examine itself and prepare for the return of this light and the dawn of a new age.16 The invocation at the beginning of Hölderlin’s poem, “[e]ager are we / To see the day…” evokes a sense of performativity. Heidegger attempts to identify the poets, who are “…called to a calling [and] can truly call: ‘come,’” and notes their performative purpose in their calling to call on mankind to prepare for the return of the Greek fires of civilization.17 The calling of the poets, as Dieter Henrich writes, is the performativity of Hölderlin’s poetry. He states that “[t]his ‘perfect moment’ is the moment in which the poem itself as a totality can be realized inside of the poem, as I am reading it, or as I am singing it (taking the Greek singer, Pindar, as the example of the lyric poet).”18 For Henrich and Heidegger, Hölderlin’s hymn is a performative act. Heidegger writes that “[t]he Greek word ύμνος means song in praise of the gods, ode to the glory of heroes and in honor of the victors in contests.”19 Though the genre of the hymn is performative in its celebratory function, the “calling” of the poet is reciprocal, in that the poet performs his hymn as the hymn calls the poet to perform the call to humanity. In this performative aspect, Hölderlin’s hymn has a musical quality. Henrich notes Hölderlin’s “…types of linguistic elements in literature he calls ‘tones’—using the association with music…So [that] poetry makes us ‘feel ourselves as equal and one with everything in the original source of all the works and deeds of man.’”20 This suggests that Hölderlin’s poetry is musical in its structure and content. Hölderlin notes this in his 3 July 1799 letter to Christian Ludwig Neuffer. He points out the correlation between the performative aspects of music and poetry that force the listener, through contemplation, to search and meditate on its meaning. He writes that

16 As Erving Goffman or J.L. Austin would note, Hölderlin’s poet is Artistically and prophetically

granted the philosophical “right” to demand that civilization step back and meditate in order to find its Self, essentially ushering in the new light of a new age. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, second edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). 17 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, 8. 18 Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. David S. Pacini (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 230. 19 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, 13. 20 Henrich, Betwen Kant and Hegel, 229.

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…tragic [poetic] subjects are made to move forward in pure major autonomous [musical] tones, harmoniously modulating, and to present a whole that is charged with energetic meaningful parts, with a minimum of accidentals, so are sentimental subjects, love for instance, entirely suited for moving forward in harmonious modulations not in major tones, proud and firm, and not with a decisive rejection of accidentals, but with this delicate diffidence toward accidentals, and in deep, full tones whose meaning is elegiac, tones which are highly evocative, because of the longing and the hope which they express, and for presenting the central idea of a living whole...21

For Hölderlin, the performative poetic aspects of music, through its structure and key modulations, force the listener into contemplation for meaning. This effect is a performative function of Hölderlin’s poetry, but it is also the sonic quality that can be seen in the musical ideology of the Romantic composers. The musical Romantics were concerned with music’s ability to transcend its sonic quality and evoke a sense of deep thinking and meaning in its listeners. Charles Rosen argues that it is in the “Romantic Generation” where we see this concern for the extra-musical qualities that the process of music evokes. Rosen writes that

[i]naudible music may seem an odd notion, even a foolishly Romantic one—although it is partly the Romantic prejudice in favor of sensuous experience that makes it seem odd. Still, there are details of music which cannot be heard but only imagined, and even certain aspects of musical form which cannot be realized in sound even by the imagination.22

21 22

Hölderlin, The Poet’s Vocation, 22–23. Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 3.

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This concern with the ability of the mind to “imagine” the meaning evoked by the musical process is similar to the extra-poetic function of Hölderlin’s poetry. In his Aphorisms, Schumann writes that

[i]f heaven has gifted you with a lively imagination, you will often, in lonely hours, sit as though spellbound at the piano-forte, seeking to express your inner feelings in harmonies; and you may find yourself mysteriously drawn into a magic circle proportionate to the degree to which the realm of harmony is still vague to you. These are the happiest hours of youth. But beware of losing yourself too often in a talent that will lead you to waste strength and time on shadowy pictures. You will only obtain mastery of form and the power of clear construction by firm strokes of the pen...23

Schumann warns the Artist, advising him to only embrace the essentially sublime forms; likewise, Hölderlin advocates that the poet should also embrace the epic Greek forms. Conversely, Hölderlin’s poetry evokes the performativity and musicality of Romantic music. One can thus see the tension between the function of Schumann’s composer and the function of Hölderlin’s poet/artist. The function of art, whether musical or poetic, is to reveal itself as a process and allow the observer to reflect deeper about oneself in relationship to the work. Schumann acknowledges this in his “New Year’s Editorial” as he celebrates the genius of the Romantic Artist. He writes that

…we fail to see what it is that we musicians have over other arts and sciences where various parties are openly opposed, and openly carry on their disputes and feuds. Nor do we see how it is compatible with the honour of art and the truth of criticism to contemplate with equanimity the three arch-enemies of ours and every other art: the untalented, the too versatile and the talented scribblers… Art must be more than a game or a mere pastime.24

23 Schumann, On Music & Musicians, 36. 24 Schumann, “New Year’s Editorial,” 29.

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For Schumann, the sacred space of high Art, like Hölderlin’s poet, is the duty and obligation to the forms of the past (the symphony, the sonata, the theme and variations).25 It is through these “traditional” forms that the Artist conveys his message. This, as Barbara Bolt claims, is the place of art. Though Bolt investigates visual art, one could expand her argument to the disciplines of music or poetry. She states that “…the work of art is never just an object, the artwork, but is always a process; a transitional moment when our assumptions about the world are brought into crisis and we are able to see the world in a new and unique way.”26 This new way of seeing the world is similar to the new sensibility that Schumann and Hölderlin invoke in their performative spaces. It is in this space where Hölderlin is concerned with the ability of the poet to urge humanity to reflect on its self in order to prepare for the return of the Greek fire. Terry Pinkard writes that “Hölderlin used his poetry to work out a complex conception of the way in which we imaginatively and creatively respond to the conflicting tendencies in our self-conscious lives that arise out of this elemental nature of self-consciousness.”27 Pinkard argues that Hölderlin’s poetry is the space where the poet is able to reveal the missing light of civilization and call the listener to prepare for its return. This, as Rosen notes, is the function of musical silence: it allows the listener a space for

25 Hölderlin himself acknowledges this in his 3 July 1799 letter to Neuffer. He writes

…people only want stirring and exciting moments and situations; writer and public seldom trouble about the meaning and impression of the whole. Thus the most rigorous of all poetic forms, whose entire function is to move forward, naked and unadorned, in harmonious modulations, almost entirely in pure and major tones, each of which is itself a self-contained whole, and which in this proud rejection of all accidentals presents the central idea of a living whole, with maximum conciseness, completeness and substantial meaning, and thus with more clarity and gravity than all other known poetic forms. (22) These forms, for Hölderlin, are the Ancient poetic forms of the Greeks (tragedy, epic, comedy); Hölderlin “mourns” for the loss of the Classical forms, in favor of the emotionally-laden ambivalent forms of the Romantics. According to the poet, the voice of the Romantics would be best employed if they picked up the traditions of the Greeks and added their own emotional language, allowing readers (and performers) to emotionally and meditatively revive the spirit of the Greek fire. 26 Barbara Bolt, “Heidegger reframed interpreting key thinkers for the arts.” (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2011), 34. 27 Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860, 142.

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self-reflection, similar to Hölderlin’s poetic distance. According to Schumann, this is the poetic function of music.28 For Schumann, music was a philosophical and poetic experience. He drew his musical inspiration from the philosophy of the literature he read as a youth and this is clear in the structure and tone of his musical compositions and critical writings. Ulrich Tadday writes that “…it was in matters of form…that literature in general, and the writing of Jean Paul in particular, left its mark on his early musical compositions.”29 Just as Hölderlin approached the formal conventions of poetic writing from the musical “tones” that poetry could express, Schumann approached musical composition from the intense expression of meditative poetic thought. In his Aphorisms, Schumann writes that “[m]usic speaks the most universal of languages, that through which the soul finds itself inspired in a free, indefinite manner, and yet feels itself at home.”30 Hölderlin’s poet invokes the spirit of the Greeks in order to force readers, consciously, to feel at home in the “foreign” in order to pave the way for the return of the fire of Greek civilization; this is similar to Schumann’s statement: that the function of music is to stir the “soul” and make one feel at home within complicated and novel forms and harmonies. However, it is in the form of the “fragment” that we can see the literary influences on Schumann’s music, as he drew from the poetic fragments of Jean Paul. Rosen writes that

[t]he Romantic Fragment…had a distinguished literary history by the time Schumann wrote… [his early works]. It came into being with the early Romantic movement in Germany, the circle of young

28 Studying the connection between Schumann’s music and the “Romantic Distance” of Novalis,

Berthold Hoeckner writes that “…distance makes music out of language, creating metaphysically…, the language of music. But a language it is, albeit a distant one. Distance may transform language into music, yet music remains under the spell of language, which must spell out its meaning when trying to bridge that distance” (57). According to Hoeckner, who is interpreting Novalis, “Romantic distance is primarily a poetic trope…” and it is Schumann’s unique position to bridge the poetic trope with its musical equivalent (56). Hoeckner writes that music, for Schumann and Novalis, is the aural bridge between the distant realm of philosophical poetics; it allows one to access this “distant realm.” 29 Tadday, “Life and literature, poetry and philosophy,” 41. 30 Schumann, On Music & Musicians, 40.

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artists, philosophers, scientists, and poets in Jena during the very last years of the eighteenth century…31

This fragment is the basis for Schumann’s musical poetics. In an analysis of Hector Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique, Schumann outlines his poetics of music. Tadday cites Schumann’s musico-poetic manifesto in its entirety; in it, Schumann writes that

[m]any people worry too much about the difficult question of how far instrumental music can be allowed to go in representing thoughts and events…There is often an idea at work unconsciously alongside the musical imagination, the eye alongside the ear, and amid all the sounds and notes the eye, this ever-active organ, holds fast certain outlines that may solidify and take distinct shape as the music advances. So the more elements related to the music convey ideas or shapes that were generated with the notes, the more poetic or plastic in expression the composition will be.32

Schumann’s poetics of music invoke an extra-musical idea: music should “unconsciously” (and one could suggest, poetically) inspire the “imagination” and create a space for self-reflection. It is this inspiration of the imagination that is interesting in relation to Hölderlin’s poetry. For music and poetry, it is the inspirational flight of the imagination that creates the self-reflexive space and allows for the questioning of the self in relation to the Other, which Schumann’s music invokes and Hölderlin’s hymn allows. Hölderlin first references the foreign early in “The Ister.” He states that

We, however, sing from the Indus Arrived from afar and From Alpheus, long have We sought what is fitting…33

31 Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 48. 32 Schumann, qtd. in Tadday, “Life and literature, poetry and philosohpy,” 43. 33 Hölderlin, “The Ister,” 4.

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These singers from “afar” are seeking to be at home in the foreign land, in search for “…what is fitting...”. Heidegger writes that “[t]hose who have arrived from afar, from rivers, are to build by a river.”34 By building on the river, the singers are attempting to become at home in their “unhomeliness” of this new land.35 For Hölderlin, in order for the individual (or a nation of people) to understand their current historical moment, they must confront their Self in relation to the Other and appreciate this confrontation. It is through this confrontation with the Otherness of the foreign that forces one to examine oneself. Hölderlin acknowledges this in his 4 December 1801 letter to Bohlendorff, where he writes that “…what is proper to oneself must be as well learned as what is alien. Therefore the Greeks are indispensable to us. It is simply that we shall not approach them in that which is proper and native to us, because…the most difficult thing is the free use of what is proper to oneself.”36 Hölderlin turns to the foreignness of the Greeks, urging that Germans must feel “at home” in feeling historically and culturally removed from the fires of Greek civilization. This awareness of the separation from high culture creates a crisis moment, one in which the poet leads the way for its recovery. As he argues in his poem, Hölderlin’s assumption is that before one can become aware of oneself in relation to one’s Other, one must become aware of what one is not, as by building on the river of the foreign land. Once one can understand the Other in reference to oneself, one can become fully aware of oneself as a subject. This self-awareness allows the space for self-revelation and drives Hölderlin’s poet or Schumann’s musical genius. This is seen as Hölderlin’s “Ister” switches its course. When Hölderlin’s “Ister” switches its course, it is a way for the self to return home from the land of the foreign and to recognize the Otherness that has come to be at home in the self. He writes that 34 Heidegger, “The Ister,” 10. 35 Heidegger writes that

[l]ocality and journeying, however, in which the poetic essence of the rivers is announced, relate to becoming homely in what is one’s own. And this is so in the distinctive sense that one’s own, finding one’s own, and the appropriating what one has found as one’s own, is not that which is most self-evident or easiest but remains what is most difficult. (48-49) It is in this search for that which is one’s own, that which is “fitting” (or homely) that which is the Other. 36 Hölderlin, The Poet’s Vocation, 27.

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“Ister” was the Roman name for the lower Donau, for the river that the Greeks knew only in its lower course…The Roman designation for the upper Donau is “Danubius.” Yet Hölderlin…names precisely the upper course of the Donau with the Greco-Roman name for the lower course of the river, just as if the lower Donau had returned to the upper, and thus turned back on its source.38

As the river turns “back on its source,” it allows the spirit of the Greeks, the fire of Otherness, to flow back up the Donau/Ister and come to be “at home” with that which is German. This return revives the spirit of Greek civilization within the German nation. Henrich writes that “[w]e seek to be at one with the world, to be ‘at home’ in it, yet we are also necessarily distanced from that world, never quite able to fully identify with our place in it.”39 For Hölderlin, it is through the recalling of the Greek fires of civilization that the doldrums of late-eighteenthcentury Germany can rekindle its own light of civilization. In his 10 January 1797 letter to Johann Gottfried Ebel, he writes that the

38 39 40

…character of the better-known sector of the human race is certainly a forecast of extraordinary things to come. I believe in a coming revolution of attitudes and ways of thinking, which will make everything till [sic] now blush for shame. And perhaps Germany can contribute to this. The more quietly a state grows, the more glorious the maturity. Germany is quiet, modest, men are thinking much, working much, and in the hearts of young men[,] there are stirrings which do not overflow in empty phrases elsewhere. Much civilization of the mind, and, infinitely more important, the right raw material—good temperedness and industry, childlikeness of heart and virility of mind, these are the elements from which and excellent people shapes and cultivates itself.40

Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, 10. Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, 143. Hölderlin, The Poet’s Vocation, 13.

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For Hölderlin, as he invokes the glories of the French Revolution in ushering in a new age in France, the dawn of a new German age was possible only if the Germans consciously embraced their difference in relation to the Greeks. While Hölderlin approaches that which is foreign through the historical literariness of the Greeks, Schumann turns to the foreignness of musical form and tonality in order to confront the Other. Schumann approaches the idea of the foreign, not only through the three fictional characters that inspire his compositional process, but through the compositions themselves—structurally and harmonically—that allow the composer, like Hölderlin’s poet, to create a self-reflective space for his listener. In his Aphorisms, Schumann writes that “[b]ehind the mountains there also dwell people. Be modest. You have never invented or discovered anything that other s have not invented or discovered before you. And even if you have, consider it as a gift from above which it is your duty to share with others.”41 In his advice to young composers, Schumann sounds remarkably like Hölderlin, whose poetic duty is to reveal to man the missing fire of civilization and, through his poetry, create the meditative space for man to prepare for its return. The listeners who dwell beyond the “mountains” are the duty of the composer and the musician: it is to them that he must write and speak, stirring their minds to reflection. Schumann’s poetically-driven lieder musically provides such a space. As Barbara Turchin traces Conradin Kreutzer’s contribution to establishing the Lieder tradition of the “Wanderlieder Cycle” that inspired composers from Schubert, Schumann and Mahler, she notes that the genre of the Wanderlied allowed these composers to investigate the philosophical potential of poetic music. She writes that poetry “… is the raison d’etre for the [art]song…” and notes the importance of the poetic “…figure of the solitary wanderer; a character central to many contemporaneous novels including Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Tieck’s Franz Sternbald, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Eichendorff’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts.”42 For Turchin, this wandering figure is the metaphorical embodiment of composers’ musings on the philosophical possibilities of their poetic music. The solitary figure of the wanderer was a way for Romantic composers, like 41 42

Schumann, On Music & Musicians, 34. Barbara Turchin, “The Nineteenth-century Wanderlieder Cycle,” The Journal of Musicology 5.4 (Autumn 1987), 499.

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Schumann, to address the Otherness of the traveler, as Hölderlin’s travelers from afar attempt to build a dwelling by the river. Turchin writes that

…the wanderer and the act of wandering were at the heart of German Romantic literature and philosophic thought. To paraphrase Abrams, the travels of the wanderer symbolize mankind’s quest to recover, through a circuitous journey, the lost primal state of unity experienced in the Golden Age of long ago…The goal of the inner quest [the journey] is to achieve a higher state of unity, a greater wholeness through increased self-awareness.43

This wanderer is seeking a re-unification in a connection to the fire of the past in order to usher in a new age of humanity, as mankind, through self-reflection, comes to dwell in the unhomely. As Turchin breaks down Schuman’s Wanderlieder, she examines the narrative content of Schumann’s cycles; however, it is in the structure—the tonality and harmonic processes—of these cycles where Schumann’s solitary wanderer confronts his Otherness in his surroundings. “And when the trial / Has passed through our knees, / May someone sense the forest’s cry.”44 As Hölderlin’s “trial” marks the birth of a new age, this new age can only be met when one is confronted with one’s Otherness. Once one has journeyed to the foreign and become at home within one’s “unhomeliness” there, one can truly begin to sense the place of the foreign within the self. It is from this self-awareness that one’s journey can truly begin. This confrontational trial of the new beginning can be seen in the opening gestures of Schumann’s music. Rosen writes that many of Schumann’s lieder begin as if they have already begun. He writes that

[t]he first song of Schumann’s Dichterliebe begins in the middle, and ends as it began—an emblem of unsatisfied desire, of longing eternally renewed. The introduction returns not before the second stanza but

43 “Turchin, “The Nineteenth-century Wanderlieder Cycle,” 499, emphasis added. 44 Hölderlin, “The Ister,” 4.

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at the end as well. It starts as if continuing a process already in motion, and ends unresolved on a dissonance.45

Schumann’s false opening forces the listener to confront the beginning as if it is a return to the beginning, or in a Hölderlinian sense, ἀρχή . Schumann maintains the unstable harmony throughout the opening gesture as an Other-ing effect: the unresolved dissonance creates an ambiguous tonal center (tonic) and reinforces the Otherness of the opening material. Rosen writes that the “…resolutions which come too late to be completely convincing or to muffle the gradually increasing tension” keep the listener “wandering” in search of the final resolution to the tonic.46 Essentially, Schumann turns his listener into the foreign wanderer. Rosen writes that the purpose of this unsettling harmonic rhythm

…stands basic tonal structure on its head. The standard tonal procedure…is to define a point of rest, a central triad, move away from it, and return to it one or more times. Schumann’s song, however, starts with a traditionally unstable chord, moves to a point of rest, a stable cadence, and returns to the unstable chord as its goal.47

This unstable harmony creates the Otherness of Schumann’s beginning, where the “wanderer” is forced to confront the Otherness within himself in order to feel at “rest” and begin his journey. It is in this journey through the foreign lands of tonality, structure, and even content that Schumann’s work seems at home within the Hölderlinian discourse. Though Schumann never set any of Hölderlin’s poems to music, their approaches to the function of art as creating a space for self-reflection, and the role of the artist in ushering in this self-reflection seem simultaneously at odds and at home with one another. Where Hölderlin’s poet journeys to the foreign in order to reveal his nature to himself through the “confrontation” with the Other, Schumann sets his listener up in just such a “confrontation,” as one must come to 45 Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 41. 46 Ibid., 46. 47 Ibid., 48.

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terms with the ambiguous melodic and harmonic functions of the opening of his music. The poetic quality of Schumann’s music correlates to the musicality of Hölderlin’s poetic “call” to usher in a new dawn for humanity. Though they may not explicitly share the same philosophical tenets, the realization of their philosophical art has enough in common that their art could be cut from the same philosophical mold.

Works Cited Bolt, Barbara. Heidegger reframed interpreting key thinkers for the arts. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2011. Bonds, Mark Evan. “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50.2/3 (Summer-Autumn 1997): 387–420. Burford, William and Christopher Middleton, eds. and trans. The Poet’s Vocation: Selections from letters of Hölderlin, Rimbaud & Hart Crane. Austin: The University of Texas, nd. Daverio, John. Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Poetic Age.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Eldridge, Richard. “Kant, Hölderlin, and the experience of longing.” In Beyond Representation: Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts, edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Grout, Donald Jay and Claude Palisca. A History of Western Music, fifth edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996. Heidegger, Martin. “Remembrance.” In Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, translated by Keith Hoeller. New York: Humanity Books, 2000. ———. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Henrich, Dieter. Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, edited by David S. Pacini. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

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Hoeckner, Berthold. “Schumann and Romantic Distance,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50.1 (Spring 1997): 55–132. Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Being Judgement [sic] Possibility.” In Essays and Letters, translated and edited by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth. London: Penguin Books, 2009. ———. “The Ister.” In Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, translated by Martin Heidegger, William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. “On the Different Modes of Poetic Composition.” In Essays and Letters, translated and edited by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth. London: Penguin Books, 2009. ———. “There is a natural state…” In Essays and Letters, translated and edited by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth. London: Penguin Books, 2009. ———. “When the poet is once in command of the spirit…” In Essays and Letters, translated and edited by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Nielinger-Vakil, Carola. “Quiet Revolutions: Hölderlin Fragments by Luigi Nono and Wolfgang Rihm,” Music & Letters 81.2 (May 2000): 245–74. Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Rosen, Charles. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Schumann, Clara and Robert Schumann. Complete Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Schumann, Robert. “From the Writings of Schumann.” In Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, edited by Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1984. ———. The Musical World of Robert Schumann: A Selection from His Own Writings, edited and translated by Henry Pleasants. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965. ———. On Music and Musicians, reprint, edited by K.W. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

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Tadday, Ulrich. “Life and literature, poetry and philosophy: Robert Schumann’s aesthetics of music.” In The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, edited by Beate Perrey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Turchin, Barbara. “The Nineteenth-century Wanderlieder Cycle,” The Journal of Musicology 5.4 (Autumn 1987): 498–525.

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‘Without Will of Her Own’: Middlemarch and the Woman Question Kate Zavack Hours before death, Peter Featherstone demands that his niece Mary help him prove his power over his family once and for all. “He now lowered his tone with an air of deep cunning. ‘I’ve made two wills, and I’m going to burn one.’”1 Of course, it is Mary, not Featherstone, who would actually burn the extra will, and Mary refuses to comply or to even hear the wills’ contents. Featherstone, who above all wants to “do as I like to the last,” is powerless, throwing his cane “with a hard effort that was but impotence.”2 But Featherstone does not depend on right of force: his legal will ensures his intentions are carried out, granting him an agency that extends even beyond his natural life. When Featherstone’s will is read, Mary, who had seemed to assert her agency, now finds the opposite is true: “she was conscious that fatally, without will of her own, she had perhaps made a great difference to Fred’s lot.”3 This lack of will is double. First, Mary did not have any expectations of Featherstone willing property to her, nor could she, as a woman, legally manage or bestow her own property: she is deprived of the legal agency that the law grants to Featherstone even after death. Second, Mary’s dilemma curtails her individual agency. She could not make a fully informed, rational decision because she did not know the contents of the will—but she could not know its contents without perhaps invalidating them in the process. She is thus excluded from a will, in both the legal and the philosophical sense. The double meaning of the will in Middlemarch connects a person’s philosophical agency to her material conditions—specifically, her right to inherit, own, and bequeath property. Writing of this “move from will to will” in the novel that followed Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Jeff Nunokawa explains that “the 1 George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin Press, 1994), 316. 2 Ibid., 318. 2 Ibid., 340.

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displacement of the limited prerogative of ownership by ongoing psychological mastery…takes on the force of mechanical necessity.”4 In 1869 and 1870, as the Married Women’s Property Act moved through Parliament and Eliot wrote Middlemarch, how material conditions relate to individual agency—particularly women’s agency—was especially pertinent. If men’s individual agency necessarily followed from their exclusive property rights, then changes to the existing legal structure would undermine not only the ideological division of men and women into separate spheres, but also the presumption of rational agency that underpinned Victorian liberalism. This article examines how Middlemarch responds to this problem by juxtaposing it to two contemporaneous instances. First, I build on Jeff Nunokawa’s work on Eliot’s “move from will to will” by locating Middlemarch’s discussion of women, property, and agency in the context of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870. This juxtaposition illustrates the bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and exposes its internal tensions. Middlemarch critiques the position held by opponents of the Married Women’s Property Act, capitalizing on the tropes in the debates about the Act to disrupt the ideology of separate spheres and its attendant notions of agency. Then, I turn to Middlemarch’s relationship to John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women as a contemporaneous instantiation of Enlightenment feminism. While Mill relies upon the traditional gendered binary wherein men have total agency and women totally lack it, Eliot undermines this binary through the character Rosamond, whose representation I connect to Mary Poovey’s theory of Victorian women’s agency. This model, itself problematic, gives way to an alternative model of universal, attenuated agency. In the final section of this paper, I explore this alternative form of agency as Eliot’s rethinking of what Amanda Anderson calls the “diffusive power of the ‘angel in the house.’”5 I argue that Eliot’s model of attenuated agency is doubly threatening to the gendered binary of agency, and conclude by suggesting ways that this model can be extended in Victorian studies.

4 Jeff Nunokawa, Afterlife of Property (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 93. 5 Amanda Anderson, Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment

(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5.

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Middlemarch and the Married Women’s Property Act In 1868, the Married Women’s Property Bill was introduced to Parliament. In the two years that followed, politicians debated the measure to grant married women more control over the assets they earned or inherited. What was the practical need or moral imperative for the law? How would it affect the Victorian family, and how would it control for class distinctions? Opponents feared that granting legal equality to women would disturb what they considered the divinely ordained relationship between husbands and wives. If wives were financially independent, they might no longer respect their husbands—or even lose interest in their maternal and domestic responsibilities. Others argued that it was only lowerclass women who needed the legal protections of the bill—despite research to the contrary—and the measure would create needless discord in bourgeois homes.6 In Britain, the first women to read Middlemarch in 1871 and 1872 would have been newly able to keep their property when they married. Before 1870

all of a woman’s personal property passed to her husband when she married, as did any property she subsequently acquired, and the husband gained a life interest in any freehold land. The only way around this…was to be found in the courts of equity, where property could be placed in the hands of trustees.7

The equity courts were too expensive for most women, whose property consisted of wages and possibly household items. However, trusts actually did little to mitigate male control. Trustees were men, often including the husband from whom a settlement supposedly shielded a wife.8 In the 1850s, a group of women reformers 6

Cf. Ben Griffin, “Class, Gender, and Liberalism in Parliament, 1868–1882: The Case of the Married Women’s Property Acts,” The Historical Journal 46, no. 1 (2003): 59–87. 7 Griffin, 62. 8 Griffin cites “the famous Caroline Norton case” as a contradiction to the common Victorian belief that trusts protected middle- and upper-class woman from spousal abuse or negligence: “The fact that her property was held in trust did not dissuade her upper-class husband from exercising ‘physical and emotional brutality’ in order to gain control of her belongings. … As Amy Louise Erikson has written, ‘Most women, even those with a marriage settlement, were largely at the mercy of their husband’s good will, both during and after their marriage.’ This fact was ignored by everyone but Mill” (72–73).

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had pushed to have the property law reformed, but their efforts were unsuccessful until 1870, when the Married Women’s Property Act gave married women the right to keep money or moveable property they earned or inherited (although protected inheritance was capped at two hundred pounds). As a result, women began allocating more of their assets in moveable property, which they could both own and control, instead of in real property, which they could own but not control.9 Moreover, more women made wills, and they bequeathed more moveable property in them.10 Although Mill’s Subjection of Women was published during the debates, little of the discussion was philosophical. According to Ben Griffin, the “most striking feature of the debates…is how little time was spent discussing the principle of sexual equality, and how much time was spend discussing the idea that giving married women property rights would cause discord in the home.”11 Griffin traces this to the separate spheres ideology. He argue that for opponents, “household harmony could only be achieved” when a husband had total authority—an authority that “not only had scriptural support…but…was essential to masculine status.”12 If a woman had control over part of the family’s property—if she had the right to a will—then disagreements would follow and “the precious order of the home would be torn asunder.”13 Mary Poovey explains the threat of this disharmony in Uneven Developments: “the illusion that freedom and autonomy existed for the man within the home…depended on the illusion that within the home no one was alienated.”14 If a husband and a wife could defy each other’s wills, then either could be alienated, belying either male superiority or female contentedness. One place politicians displaced the threat was on the working class. The case for the Married Women’s Property Act—that women suffered financially 9

Mary Beth Combs, “‘A Measure of Legal Independence’: The 1870 Married Women’s Property Act and the Portfolio Allocations of British Wives,” Journal of Economic History 65, no. 4 (2005): 141. 10 Cf. Combs, 1039–40. The percentage of women who left wills doubled between 1860 and 1900, and the percentage of women’s wills that included no real (i.e. landed) property rose sixteen percent. 11 Griffin, “Class, Gender, and Liberalism in Parliament, 1868–1882,” 62. 12 Ibid., 63. 13 Ibid. 14 Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 77–78.

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because of tyrannical, negligent, or irresponsible husbands—was an indictment that many lawmakers refused to believe extended to their own class. Rather, the abuses that the Act would redress were thought to be committed predominantly by working-class men. These men were constructed as “the most naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower classes,” as Mill put it: illiterate, drunk, and violent.15 Thus, the bill was intended to help poor women specifically.16 One way this manifested was in the bill’s focus on a woman’s right to her earnings. This automatically excluded women who did not earn because they did not work— that is, middle- and upper-class women. Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, is the sort of woman lawmakers felt did not need the legal protection of the Act. Casaubon is not drunk, poor, or a wife-beater, but a gentleman with no “backward pages,” as he describes his chastity.17 Moreover, Dorothea’s settlement would theoretically insure her against impoverishment. Nonetheless, Dorothea’s marriage becomes a “nightmare of a life in which every energy was arrested by dread.”18 Casaubon’s quiet check on Dorothea is another kind of coercion, the “ideal and not the real yoke of marriage” that keeps Dorothea “fettered.”19 In widowhood, she regains agency because of both the property at her disposal and her freedom from the “ideal”—that is, ideological—yoke. But after death, Casaubon, like Featherstone, makes his agency felt through his legal will. Even if Casaubon’s will gives Dorothea financial stability, its clause preventing Dorothea from marrying Will restricts her from exercising her will. Dorothea’s predicament is like Mary’s: one way or another, she is excluded from having a will. The Lydgates’ financial distress is another response to the commonplace that it was not middle-class women who were ruined by reckless husbands. Victorian liberalism presumed that most men were rational, and therefore responsible. Critics fall into this assumption when they blame Rosamond for ruining the Lydgates’ finances. In reality, Tertius’s spending is not only more extravagant but also given in more detail. The narrator explains Lydgate’s spending habits thusly: 15 16 17 18 17 18 19

Griffin, “Class, Gender, and Liberalism in Parliament, 1868–1882,” 68. Cf. Griffin, especially pp. 70–80. Eliot, Middlemarch, 44. Ibid., 375. Ibid., 481. Ibid., 353. Ibid., 481.

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Marriage, of course, must be prepared for in the usual way. A house must be taken…and Lydgate, having heard Rosamond speak with admiration of old Mrs Bretton’s house…took notice which it fell vacant after the old lady’s death, and immediately entered into treaty for it. He did this in an episodic way, very much as he gave orders to his tailor for every requisite of perfect dress, without any notion of being extravagant. … But it had never occurred to him that he should live in any way other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table.20 Lydgate’s spending doesn’t end here. He keeps two horses and buys furniture for the house, an amethyst necklace for Rosamond, and an expensive dinner service that “struck him as so exactly the right thing.”21 When Lydgate finds himself three hundred eighty pounds in debt, it is predominantly his spending, not Rosamond’s, that accounts for it. Rosamond’s chilling response—“What can I do?”—takes the doctrine of separate spheres to its logical conclusion.22 Rosamond did not spend the money, cannot earn it, and is told by Lydgate to “take my judgment on questions you don’t understand.”23 Lydgate’s finances are something that feminine delicacy precludes her from knowing. Paradoxically, the doctrine of separate spheres would also have been compromised if Rosamond had not refused to involve herself in the finances. Female property ownership threatened Victorian domestic ideology not only because it allowed for spousal discord, but also because it allowed the marketplace to infiltrate the home, which was supposedly a safe haven from the vicissitudes of the economy. Nunokawa explains the ideal of the Victorian home thusly:

20 21 22 23

The home…is a complex of money-laundering operations, a place where the war of all against all, or the one between the classes, or the

Eliot, Middlemarch, 348. Ibid., 353. Ibid., 594. Ibid., 596.

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whose essence is the love of a good woman, offers a vacation from the pressures of the market economy.24

According to Poovey, the wife is the crucial figure in the Victorian domestic ideal. She explains, “As superintendants of the domestic sphere, (middle-class) women were represented as protecting and, increasingly, incarnating virtue.”25 The effect of “linking morality to a figure immune to the self-interest and competition integral to economic success” was that it “preserved virtue without inhibiting productivity.”26 When the home’s exemption from the marketplace is belied, it no longer protects against the alienation of the marketplace. A wife with substantial property, particularly forms of property subject to economic fluctuations, would no longer be “immune” to the economy. Thus, the home’s separateness from the alienating world of capital disintegrates and the assurance of morality is compromised. Rosamond’s refusal to involve herself in the family’s finances arises from the ideological imperative of keeping the home—and the wife as its bedrock— separate from the marketplace. However, with the auctioneer’s gavel hanging over the Lydgate household, the illusion of the home as a haven from the marketplace is already irreparably damaged. Nunokawa identifies the frequent bankruptcy auctions in Victorian novels as a common scene in which the separate spheres ideology is disrupted, showing “how the household goes the way of all capital.”27 In Middlemarch, the Lydgates’ bankruptcy auction never materializes, although its imminence is as effective as the real thing. Significantly, Rosamond is most affected by the threat of the auction. The goods that were up for sale at a household auction were exactly the form of property that women could legally own after the Married Women’s Property Act. Rosamond, however, neither brought moveable property into her marriage nor would have been financially insulated prior to the Act. The threat of an auction not only reveals Rosamond’s exclusion from property rights, but also,

24 25 25 25

Nunokawa, Afterlife of Property, 5. Poovey, Uneven Developments, 10. Ibid., 10. Nunokawa, Afterlife of Property, 5.

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as a remark by Barbara Bodichon illustrates, reveals her own status as property:

A married women’s body belongs to her husband; she is in his custody, and he can enforce his right by a writ of habeas corpus. But…the belief that a man can get rid of his wife with a halter round her neck is a vulgar error. This disgusting exhibition, which has often been seen in our country, is a misdemeanor.28

The “disgusting exhibition” of a wife for sale with a “halter round her neck” gives specific resonance to the reference to the “yoke” of marriage in Middlemarch. While it is typically in reference to Lydgate that the “yoke” is invocated, in light of Bodichon’s remark it becomes a symbol of the wife’s status as living property—a kind of slave. Indeed, after Rosamond learns of the possible bankruptcy auction, she goes from being idle to nearly catatonic, as though she is an object instead of a person—which, legally, is hardly an exaggeration. Both Casaubon and Lydgate have dreams of a marital bliss based on male preeminence. For Casuabon, his reservations about the reality of male preeminence prompt his pettiness towards Dorothea. Lydgate, however, never demonstrates any doubts in male authority and female passivity. His ideal of marriage goes beyond having a wife who will admire and defer to him. In the last few weeks of his engagement, he imagines marital bliss:

Ideal happiness (of the kind known in the Arabian Nights, in which you are invited to step from the labour and discord of the street into a paradise where everything is given to you and nothing claimed) seemed to be an affair of a few weeks’ waiting, more or less.29

Lydgate’s ideal happiness, of course, has nothing exotic about it—it is the Victorian trope of the home as an oasis in the competitive, commercial male world. Under scrutiny, the bliss “where everything is given…and nothing claimed” is a kind of slavery. By projecting the separate spheres ideology onto the foreignness of the Arabian Nights, Eliot makes the point that the separate spheres ideology, like 28 Nunokawa, Afterlife of Property, 83. 29 Eliot, Middlemarch, 351.

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slavery, has no business in England, or in the late nineteenth century, or outside of fiction. As suggested by Barbara Bodichon’s remark on the “disgusting exhibition” of wife sales, the trope of women’s subjection as slavery is common to nineteenthcentury feminist rhetoric. However, even though it is used against the legal system that protects the separate spheres ideology, it nonetheless reproduces the binary in which men are associated with total agency and women are associated with a total lack of agency. In the next section, I examine how this binary functions in Mill’s Subjection of Women and compare it to Eliot’s representation of gender formation and agency in Middlemarch.

Determinism and Gender in Mill and Eliot In The Subjection of Women, published in 1869, John Stuart Mill historicizes the condition of women to argue against the prevailing understanding of femininity. He writes that what right of force had first established was then translated into law, eventually becoming customary and seemingly natural. But “[w]hat is now called the nature of women,” he says, is actually “an eminently artificial thing.”30 In fact, the nature of women, if there is one, has never been known, since women have always been subjugated. Eliot also argues that social factors determine women’s characters. In “Woman in France,” Eliot compares the French tradition of women writers to the English tradition. One reason for the quality and quantity of women writers in France is the “laxity of the marriage tie” that granted women more intellectual independence and more life experience.31 “Gallantry and intrigue are sorry enough things in themselves,” Eliot says, “but they certainly serve better to arouse the dormant faculties of woman than embroidery and domestic drudgery.”32 Secondly, the salons gave both sexes a venue to discuss intellectual matters of all kinds. This social environment cultivated the flourishing of literature in seventeenth-century France, especially among women writers. Eliot thus argues 30

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), chap. 1. 31 George Eliot, “Woman in France: Madam de Sablé,” in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 55. 32 Ibid., 56.

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that social conditions play a large role in intellectual and moral development, a position that carries over into Middlemarch in its representations of not only the domestic trivialities of the middle-class woman, but also her education. Coming out of Enlightenment feminism, Mill and Eliot both emphasize women’s education as a source of inequality.33 In Middlemarch, the narrator describes the subjects typically taught to women as “toy-box history” and “the shallows of ladies’-school literature,” corresponding to the intellectual childishness and moral shallowness that they produce.34 Rosamond, especially, is a product of this education. When the Lydgates’ finances become dire, Mrs. Bulstrode is moved by her niece’s trouble but is not surprised. Family feeling has never prevented Mrs. Bulstrode from disapproving of the Vincys’ worldliness, and now she pities “poor Rosamond, whose extravagant education she had always foreseen the fruits of.”35 The “fruits” of Rosamond’s education are part of an extended metaphor that connects the bitterness of Rosamond’s marriage to her education. Rosamond begins the novel as a “water-lily”36 with a “flower-like head on its white stem”37 —her very name is connected to flowers—but life for “Mrs. Lemon’s favourite pupil”38 eventually becomes sour. The puns in Rosamond and Mrs. Lemon’s names reflects the commonplace that describes women as “delicate plants” and their education as horticulture.39 According to Deidre Shauna Lynch, the commonplace took hold during the horticultural development in the late eighteenth century that she calls “greenhouse romanticism.”40 The British middle class not only celebrated and learned more about nature, but also domesticated it and used it to represent, naturalize, or critique ideology. Hothouses allowed the British middle class to enjoy nonnative 33 For Eliot’s relationship with Enlightenment and evangelical feminism, see Suzanne

Graver, “‘Incarnate History’: The Feminisms of Middlemarch,” in Approaches to Teaching George Eliot’s Middlemarch, ed. Kathleen Blake (New York: MLA, 1990), 64–74. 34 Eliot, Middlemarch, 86, 25. 35 Ibid., 691. 36 Ibid., 346. 37 Ibid., 117. 38 Ibid., 268. 39 Jane Austen, Emma (New York: Penguin, 1985), 295. 40 Deidre Shauna Lynch, “Young Ladies are Delicate Plants: Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism,” ELH 77, no. 3. (2010): 691.

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fruit and exotic cultivars the year round; however, over-breeding often produced weak or sterile flowers. Wollstonecraft compares women’s education to the hothouse where such overbred flowers lived: “[Ladies] are tender plants, whose ‘sensations’…have been ‘heightened in the hot-bed of luxurious indolence,’” and [Wollstonecraft] ‘laments…their ‘barren blooming.’”41 The barren blooming of Wollstonecraft’s miseducated lady is literalized in Middlemarch when Rosamond miscarries riding horses with Lydgate’s cousin, in pursuit of the male attention she has learned to define herself by. In Subjection, Mill also describes women’s education in horticultural terms: “…in the case of women, a hot-house and stove cultivation has always been carried on for some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters.”42 Mill describes “what is now called the nature of women” as an “eminently artificial thing,” writing that women are prompted to “sprout luxuriantly” in some directions and “have a stunted growth” in others.43 The descriptor “luxuriant” carries a specific horticultural meaning, denoting the exotic but often barren blooms that were prized by hothouse gardeners.44 One area in which Mill thinks women are encouraged to “sprout luxuriantly” is in obedience to men, the “masters” for whose “benefit and pleasure” they are cultivated.45 Mill focuses on how education has served to indoctrinate women to their subordinated positions. Comparing women to slaves, Mill argues that women have been taught to not only obey, but to want to obey:

The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite of that of men; not

41 Lynch, “Young Ladies are Delicate Plants,” 699. 42 Mill, The Subjection of Women, chap. 1. 43 Ibid. Implicit in Mill’s argument is that men’s education allows them to develop naturally and

productively—that men are not “eminently artificial.” This is another instance of the contradiction in Mill’s thinking on agency and determinism. 44 Lynch, “Young Ladies are Delicate Plants,” 699. 45 Mill, The Subjection of Women, chap. 1.

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self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others.46

Mill represents women’s education as an extreme subjectification, in which the woman is fully determined so that she willfully surrenders her agency. The mentally enslaved woman is, as Mill says, “the very opposite” of men, who are characterized by “self-will” and “government by self-control.” In other words, men are self-determined, while women are socially determined. Implicit in the analogy of women as over-cultivated flowers is that men, by contrast, are natural, immune to the forces that determine women. Amanda Anderson points out that Mill’s thinking on women is at odds with his theory of liberalism. Anderson notes Mill’s awareness of the tension between determinism and liberalism in his thinking. Mill writes about his struggle with the doctrine of determinism: “Philosophical Necessity weighed on my existence like an incubus. I felt…as if my character and that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our control, and was wholly out of my power.”47 Anderson observes that the “strange gendered image” of the incubus

thus casts Mill’s own apprehension about being a fully determined subject in explicitly sexual and feminine terms: for Mill, to feel he lacks autonomy as a deliberative, rational subject is tantamount to being sexually ravaged while he remains unconscious and helpless.48

46 Mill, The Subjection of Women, chap. 1. 47 Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian

Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 25.

48 Ibid., 26.

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In other words, the sense of being determined is emasculating, while the force that does the determining is gendered male.49 Mill’s investment in exempting men from the doctrine of determinism reveals how an alternative model of agency could undermine not only the dominant gender dynamics, but also the dominant political-economic model of classical liberalism: the proper functioning of a capitalist democracy is predicated on a society of rational agents. In Middlemarch, the scientist Lydgate represents both the rational agency described in Mill’s liberal democracy and the separate spheres ideology. In Lydgate’s premarital mind, Rosamond is “instructed to the true womanly limit and not a hair’s-breadth beyond—docile, therefore, and ready to carry out behests which came from beyond that limit.”50 But Rosamond is known for her single-mindedness and, like Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda, takes pride in getting her own way. Rosamond’s willfulness is a surprise to Lydgate, who assumes her feminine exterior bespeaks a feminine (that is, obedient) interior. Later, after Lydgate realizes his view of Rosamond’s docility is mistaken, he nonetheless pities her. However, “it was inevitable that in that excusing mood he should think of her as an animal of another and feebler species. Nevertheless, she had mastered him.”51 According to the narrator, Lydgate’s reason “reduces [him] to meekness”52 and, conversely, Rosamond’s ignorance gives her “dumb mastery”53 over her husband. Eliot’s depiction of Rosamond as a stubborn animal finds precedent in “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” where Eliot uses this trope to support the argument for women’s education:

There is a notion commonly entertained among men that an instructed woman, capable of having opinions, is likely to prove an impracticable yoke-fellow… But surely…your unreasoning animal is the most unmanageable of creatures.54

49 The heteronormativity in Anderson’s argument rests upon reflects Mill’s own heteronormativity:

he predicates his argument in Subjection on “the natural attraction between opposite sexes.” Eliot, Middlemarch, 352. Ibid., 667 52 Ibid., 595. 53 Ibid., 667. 54 George Eliot, “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 203. 50 51

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In a passage that Eliot cites in her 1855 essay, Wollstonecraft writes that “women have been allowed to remain in ignorance and slavish dependence many, very many years, and still we hear nothing but their fondness of pleasure and sway.”55 Eliot agrees, saying, “as far as we see, there is no indissoluble connexion between infirmity of logic and infirmity of will.”56 Rosamond’s power without logic confuses the association of agency with rationalism and masculinity in one way. As I will argue in the next section, Dorothea and Mary Garth’s moral influence, while seeming to confirm the trope of the angel in the house, confuses these categories in a potentially more fundamental way.

Attenuated Agency and Womanly Influence Amanda Anderson critiques the model of female agency described by Victorian critics such as Mary Poovey, in which

the middle-class woman is the principal instrument of power that is instantiated in her fundamental practices yet falls below the level of conscious strategy. …She is powerful but not critical, profoundly effective but not self-reflective.57

Anderson connects this model of agency to the angel in the house, writing that “the theorization of diffusive, potent agency…is virtually invited by the Victorian conception of the domestic angel.”58 Arguably, Middlemarch supports just this conceptual connection that Anderson criticizes. Rosamond, for instance, perfectly describes the “powerful but not critical” agent. And in the Finale of Middlemarch, the narrator describes Dorothea’s moral influence with the exact terms that Anderson uses:

55 56 57 58

Eliot, “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” 202. Ibid., 203. Anderson, Powers of Distance, 39. Amanda Anderson, “Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity,” Victorian Studies 43, no. 1 (2000): 53.

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Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for that growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.59 At first, the novel’s description of Dorothea’s influence as “incalculably diffusive” does seem to uphold the passive domestic angel. Dorothea finds her happy ending living for her family and supporting her husband’s active role as a reforming politician through her effusive goodness. On the other hand, Dorothea is in some instances critical and self-reflective; she questions primogeniture when she is a child and her own moral assumptions when she is an adult. Partly conforming to and partly resisting the conventional understanding of Victorian female agency, Dorothea prompts us to develop an alternative to the conventional notion of womanly influence and, more broadly, of human agency in general. In Middlemarch, water is used figuratively to represent the relationship of individuals with their socio-historical world. This metaphor functions in two ways, first as an idealist symbol for the force of the individual’s will; and second, as a materialist symbol of the social force engulfing the individual. In the first instance, the metaphor represents the individual’s will as a body of water. In Dorothea’s mind, for example, “there was a current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow – the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good.”60 Mr. Casaubon’s mind, on the other hand, is to be known as “one knows of the river by a few streaks amid a long-gathered deposit of uncomfortable mud.”61 The force of one’s character corresponds to the force of the water that describes it: a clear, swift current in Dorothea’s case, and a “swampy ground” in Casaubon’s.62

59 60 61 62

Eliot, Middlemarch, 838, emphasis added. Ibid., 202–3. Ibid., 417. Ibid., 279.

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In the second instantiation of the water metaphor, the river is a force that surrounds and carries the subject along with it. Describing the historical moment of the 1832 Reform Bill, the narrator characterizes historical change as a river:

some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rock firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder.63

The currents of history carry along some subjects and change the face of those “that stood with rock firmness,” while also depositing newcomers like Lydgate, Rigg Featherstone, and Raffles. If the current is favorable to the subject’s wishes, the subject seems, like Rosamond, “to be sailing with a fair wind just whither she would go,” or to be in “a water-lily’s expanding wonderment at its own fuller life.”64 When Lydgate is drowning in debt, on the other hand, he feels his sense of agency suppressed as he “was every day getting deeper into that swamp…in a condition which, in spite of himself, he is forced to think chiefly of release.”65 Overpowered by external forces, Lydgate thinks of surrendering the little agency he has; that he is forced to think of it speaks further to weakness of the will. Eliot’s theory of agency combines the metaphors, and in doing so rejects the extremes of aggregated agency and determinism. What emerges is a model of attenuated agency, in which an individual and her environment are mutually influential. Each individual’s current joins “the living stream” of history, affecting its course in a minute way. Agents in Middlemarch are not “simply…culturally embedded subjects.” Nor are they “exempted from networks of power, and consequently accorded…‘aggrandized agency.’”66 Rather, subjects are embedded in the living stream but also comprise it, determining its course by the force of

63 64 65 66

Eliot, Middlemarch, 95. Ibid., 346. Ibid., 587–88. Anderson, “Temptations of Aggrandized Agency,” 44.

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their agencies in aggregate. Connected back to Dorothea’s “incalculably diffusive” influence, this model of agency transforms Victorian notions of not only feminine passivity but also masculine agency.

Conclusion The model of attenuated agency that I have briefly described is doubly threatening to the gendered binary I discussed in the first two sections of this article, in that it grants both more agency to women and less agency to men. As I discussed in the context of the Married Women’s Property Act, granting more agency to women would undermine the ideology of separate spheres and the moral assurance that it provided in a capitalist economy. But, as Mill’s position on the woman question reveals, granting more agency to women does not necessarily translate to granting less agency to men, nor to disrupting the theoretical premise of liberal capitalism—the rational, total agency of men. A model of universal, attenuated agency does, on the other hand, undermine this basic assumption of liberalism. This ramification of Eliot’s theorization of attenuated agency, only briefly introduced here, is one of many consequences that can benefit from further analysis. Attenuated agency has bearing, for example, on the omniscient narrator of the realist novel, the methodology of the empirical scientist, and Victorian theories of historical agents. Middlemarch illuminates the intimate connections between gender and agency in Victorian discourse, offering a path to reconsider the role that women played in Victorian culture and ideology.

Works Cited Anderson, Amanda. Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993.

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———. “The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity.” Victorian Studies 43, no. 1 (2000): 43–65. Austen, Jane. Emma. New York: Penguin, 1985. Combs, Mary Beth, “‘A Measure of Legal Independence’: The 1870 Married Women’s Property Act and the Portfolio Allocations of British Wives,” Journal of Economic History 65, no. 4 (2005): 1028–57. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. New York: Washington Square Press, 1961. ———. Daniel Deronda. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. ———. “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft.” In Essays of George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney, 199–206. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. ———. Middlemarch. London: Penguin, 1994. ———. The Mill on the Floss. New York: Norton, 1994. ———. “Woman in France: Madam de Sablé.” In Essays of George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney, 52–81. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Graver, Suzanne. “‘Incarnate History’: The Feminisms of Middlemarch.” In Approaches to Teaching George Eliot’s Middlemarch, ed. Kathleen Blake. 64–74. New York: MLA, 1990. Griffin, Ben. “Class, Gender, and Liberalism in Parliament, 1868–1882: The Case of the Married Women’s Property Acts,” The Historical Journal 46, no. 1 (2003): 59–87. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. “‘Young Ladies are Delicate Plants’: Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism,” ELH 77, no. 3 (2010): 689–729. Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869. Kindle edition. Nunokawa, Jeff. Afterlife of Property. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Women. New York: Dover Thrift, 1996. Kindle edition.

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The Uncanny, Castration, and Sight as Perceived Remedy in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket WIL NORTON Stanley Kubrick’s films are quite often overtly sexual, and the films seem to consistently present themes of the objectified woman in dark and complex ways. Known as a versatile director who created films in diverse genres such as film noir, science fiction, period pieces, war movies, suspense, and black comedy, Kubrick constantly returns to issues of masculinity and male sexual hegemony. From the boxer Davey Gordon’s peeping-tom scene in Killer’s Kiss to General Turgidson’s sexual relationship with his bikini-clad secretary in Dr. Strangelove, to the French Army’s forcing a German girl to perform for them in Paths of Glory, women are treated as loci of ocular desire in the films. However, Kubrick confounds the code of sexuality in his films by introducing complications that disturb males’ confidence in their heterosexual privilege and sexual and social dominance. Kubrick deploys depictions of the female figure as the uncanny, which results in fear and castration anxiety in male characters and unsettles their sense of stability and control of gender representation. Additionally, men in Kubrick’s films seek to reassert their perceived dominance through their use of spectatorship, which violently reasserts patterns of male hegemony in Kubrick’s films. Freud defines the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar,” and describes the state as a fear-rendering or unsettling experience that results when the customary becomes distorted.1 Freud notes that the uncanny makes itself “powerfully felt” in aesthetic forms, and he performs a close reading of E.T.A Hoffman’s literary work Nachtstücken to demonstrate both how the eerily lifelike dolls in the story channel the sensation of the “uncanny” and how Copolla’s removal of the dolls’ eyes

Jo Collins and John Jervis, eds., Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1.

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reflects a male castration complex.2 According to Freud, what is visually frightening in the uncanny reflects a fear of blindness, and this terrifying force challenges the spectator’s sight as well as the cognition of whether what is seen is real or manifested in the mind. Furthermore, the uncanny unsettles the individual’s confidence in sight, causing the spectator to question whether anything he or she has ever seen is accurate or whether everything has previously been a kind of “blindness.”3 Freud explains, “a study of dreams, phantasies, and myths has taught… that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated,” binding anxiety over blindness or sight with fear of castration.4 Recently, modern scholars have continued to develop Freud’s work on the uncanny by finding new situations that channel these experiences. Jo Collins and John Jervis explain that Freud’s Das Unheimliche “led a suitably subterranean existence for its first half century” and only returned to popularity in the 1970s, where it became “widely read throughout the humanities and cultural studies.”5 They speculate that the uncanny became popular due to its “distinctively modern” characteristics as the “‘phantasmagoria’ of city life” allows for a transformation of the urban world into a “visual and spatial spectacle inhabited also by the shadowy hauntings of the fleeting and insubstantial.”6 Collins elaborates that the uncanny is an elusive experience that transcends “boundary-defining” aspects of thought. The uncanny is “experience…which is neither inside nor outside, self or other, or both at once… [T]hus the very registering of these experiences as experiences can contribute to our regarding them as ‘uncanny.’”7 Hélene Cixous discusses the Unheimliche (the “uncanny”) as “not unreal: it is the ‘fictional reality’ and the vibration of reality.”8 She claims that the uncanny reminds individuals of death and castration, unsettling the “repression of death or of castration” that “betrays death (or castration) everywhere.”9 Cixous reinforces Freud’s claim that the un2

Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” accessed December 11, 2009, <http://people.emich.edu/ acoykenda/ uncanny1.htm> 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Jo Collins, “Uncanny Presences,” in Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, eds. Jo Collins and John Jervis (Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 12. 6 Ibid., 12. 7 Collins, “Uncanny Presences,” 12. 8 Hélene Cixous, “Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche” in Literature in Psychoanalysis: A Reader, ed. Steve Vine (China: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 93. 9 Ibid., 93.

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canny unsettles male sexuality by reminding males of the typically repressed castration fear, forcing them to either accept their castration or fight to regain their male sexuality. One major form of typified masculine sexuality perpetuates in the pattern of phallocentric behavior that maintains male hegemony over women. In Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the “paradox of phallocentrism” is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman in order to “give meaning and order to the world.”10 To a patriarchal world demanding “meaning and order,” women must remain in their passive and submissive state denoted by their “castration,” and when women stray from expected behavior, men become uncomfortable in their masculine roles.11 In order for men to subjugate women as the “castrated female,” Mulvey explains: Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.12 Mulvey claims that one predominant method of maintaining patriarchy is through scopophilia, the act of looking for sexual pleasure (the “gaze”). Freud’s connection between male sight loss and castration finds its inverse in scopophilia, which becomes a tool males utilize to “prove” their virility and social dominance, wielding the gaze upon women as a patriarchy-maintaining technique and controlling women through objectification. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the scopophilic “gaze” functions as a performative act, and it is a moment in which both male and female rehearse heterosexual roles, with the male assuming the dominant role of viewer and the female becoming a reified, fetishized “Other” that serves as the object of the male gaze. Mulvey alludes to Freud’s writings on scopophilia, noting that “[Freud] associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.”13 The male gaze, subjected upon women in cinematic productions, is one that controls and imposes the 10 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in The Audience Studies Reader, eds.

Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (New York: Routledge, 2003), 133.

11 Ibid., 133. 12 Ibid., 133. 13 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 134.

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reified and fetishized woman onto the dominant linguistic order. Here, under the male gaze, Mulvey asserts, the woman becomes signified as the male Other, a passive “bearer” rather than “maker… of meaning.”14 This kind of male projection in film enables masculinity to inscribe itself on the characters of the film, and a form of heteronormative and patriarchal privilege becomes inscribed in the medium of the cinema. In this manner, film is also a performance that allows the male viewer to project himself as a kind of “ideal I” that is both heterosexual and patriarchal. Judith Butler, who draws from the French poststructuralism of Jacques Lacan and appropriates it for her perspectives on gender subjectivity and performance, notes the fraught relationship between the perceived need to establish normative heterosexuality in order to view one’s self as stable. In her discussion of gender performance, she notes that when an individual puts on drag, the purpose is to put “categories” of gender in question. She writes that when typically reified views of sexuality and gender “come into question,” the reality of gender is also put into crisis: it becomes unclear how to distinguish the real from the unreal. And this is the occasion in which we come to understand that what we take to be ‘real,’ what we invoke as the naturalized knowledge of gender is, in fact, a changeable and revisable reality.15 Butler seems to evoke Lacanian concepts of selfhood, in which the gaze functions as a powerful technology of ego recognition and misrecognition that occurs in what Lacan calls “the mirror stage.” When a child is old enough to recognize his or her image in a mirror, this becomes the moment of identity formation, the “transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image.”16 The moment of self-recognition in the mirror for the infant, Lacan argues, is already flawed, as it emerges from the reflection of the mirror, which is already a “mirage,” fragmented and distorted by the inversion of the mirror image and the uneven quality of the mirror.17 For Lacan, the mirror stage

14 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 134-5. 15 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Rout-

ledge Classics, 1990), xxiv.

16 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Expe-

rience,” in Écrits (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 76.

17 Ibid., 78.

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…is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of fantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.18 The “drama” in which Lacan describes the child’s process of development of one’s sense of self, from viewing oneself as something insufficient (or perhaps more than sufficient, a participant in the “yolky enjoyment” of the Real19) to seeing oneself as a complete, bounded being, is one that is as performative as what Butler describes in her notions of gender performativity and also as performative as the male gaze of the spectator in film. For Lacan, sight works as a form of rehearsal that establishes normativity and a sense of a reified self; additionally, according to Butler and Mulvey, the male gaze is a strategy that forces heteronormativity and patriarchal privilege by inscribing the language of male sexual privilege into forms of cinema. Kubrick’s films Eyes Wide Shut, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket ostensibly present themselves as films of male sexual dominance, yet the films collapse these notions with the presence of the uncanny female. These females generate fear in the male characters much in the same manner theorized by Mulvey, who articulates the kind of psychological fear that resides in men, as “active controllers of the look,” when they realize that women actively challenge male constructions of heterosexual privilege.20 Kubrick’s use of the female as an uncanny figure is one that disturbs male phallocentric thought and causes the male figures to enter an encounter with the Real that disturbs the male characters, leading them to question their own sense of selfhood. Mulvey suggests that, when confronted with the uncanny female who disturbs the male sense of patriarchal privilege, [t]he male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), coun18 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 78. 19 Slavoj Žižek, “Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Crit-

icism, ed. Vincent Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010), 2409.

20 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 135.

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terbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object… or else complete disavowal of the castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the cult of the female star).21 In Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket, the male protagonists, presented early in the films as confident, and hypermasculine figures, experience uncanny female figures that cause them to lose certitude in their own sense of reified heteronormative privilege. For them, their concepts of sexuality and selfhood break down when their phallocentric cultures become threatened by the uncanny female figure. As a result, men utilize sight and the gaze to restore their concepts of heteronormative privilege and authority over women. Thus, Kubrick leads the viewer to consider the violence inherent in viewing and in the reification of traditional masculine and feminine roles. In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick demonstrates the primacy of sight for maintaining the status quo of male sexuality and the unsettling effects of the uncanny in the relationship between Dr. Bill Hartford and his wife Alice. Eyes Wide Shut opens with the image of a nude Alice posing in front of a mirror as she prepares to go to a party with Bill. The spectator watches Alice, framed within a doorway, as an already fetishized image, objectified in the spectator’s gaze, establishing the film’s themes of sight and sexuality and seeming to embody Mulvey’s writings on the way the female figure functions as an object in film. After the party, Bill and Alice discuss the nature of sexual desire as they jealously prod each other with questions about their respective seducers. “Tell me something,” Alice asks Bill, eyes closed and speaking slowly, challenging Bill about male sexual desire, “Those two girls… at the party last night… did you by any chance, happen to fuck them?”22 Bill embodies the typical masculine response, as he admits that though he would never cheat on his wife, he occasionally does desire other women. Alice then surprises her husband as she retells a sexual fantasy she had about a naval officer, telling Bill that if the man had wanted to “she would have given everything up” just for one night of sex.23 The camera reverses to portray Bill’s shocked expression as he becomes unsettled in his own heteronormative confidence. Kubrick’s cinematic and narrative contributions lend to creating a sense of the uncanny. 21 “Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 135. 22 Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut 23 Ibid.

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One manifestation of the uncanny, as Elizabeth Bronfen mentions, is nighttime, which “shifts between the familiar and the unfamiliar.”24 Alice seems to become a part of this shifting familiarity as she sits framed by an open window that covers her in unnatural blue light, turning her into an eerie, same-but-different, figure and while she smokes marijuana, Alice’s voice becomes slow and unnatural, sounding increasingly distant. The blue filter of the camera and the slow churning sounds of an orchestral soundtrack render discomfort, and as Alice speaks, Bill experiences the uncanny in his wife, and her otherworldly nature metaphorically castrates him as he doubts his own ideas of how men and women operate in desire. Bill’s sense of identity seems to hinge on his confidence in heteronormative privilege, and for a moment, Alice becomes the creator of meaning rather than the passive signifier of meaning. Kubrick chooses to complicate the interaction further by showing the typified male response to moments that unsettle the dominant order of heteronormativity: rather than attempting to understand Alice’s sexual desires, Bill decides that he must prove his own virility immediately. The next night, Dr. Bill retaliates by pursuing his own sexual escapade, in which he enters a night of a variety of heteronormative sexual experiences. Interestingly, he appears to be only capable of gazing upon women in a bizarre, all-night sexual adventure where he steeps in scopophilic fantasies in an effort to reestablish his ideas of sexual power over women. For Bill, who merely watches sexual acts from a remote position of spectatorship, it seems that the mere rehearsal of sexual normativity is enough to re-reify his sense of masculinity. At a costume shop, he views the owner’s daughter with two naked men from behind a glass wall, which creates a frame that distances Dr. Bill from the action and emphasizes his role as solely a sexual spectator. In the climax of the film, Dr. Bill infiltrates a masquerade-themed orgy that places all the women in a circle, where they disrobe and present themselves to a large ring of male spectators, naked save for an identity-concealing mask. As Mary Ann Doane explains, the masquerade “confounds the masculine structure of the look,” and turns the women into purely sexual beings that Dr. Bill can gaze upon without attaching pathos to the individuals.25 As the event begins, Kubrick leads a camera through the mansion where the orgy takes place, transporting the audience into a perspective that emulates Dr. Bill’s sight as he watches the orgy. Here, Kubrick’s portrayal of viewing 24 Elisabeth Bronfen, “Night and the Uncanny,” in Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Mod-

ern Anxieties, eds. Jo Collins and John Jervis (Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 51.

25 Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Rout-

ledge, 1991), 66.

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demonstrates repeatedly how men actively work to reify the typified structure of masculinity when their own sense of castration becomes threatened by the uncanny. Bill’s actions establish Kubrick’s connection that, for men, sight is directly related to establishing male sexual dominance. In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick manipulates the mise en scène to suggest that, for the protagonist Alex, sight is directly associated with heteronormative virility. The first scene opens with a close up of Alex’s face, with one chillingly blue eye framed by mascara foregrounding sight’s importance in the film. Alex unblinkingly and confidently challenges the audience as he stares into the camera, demonstrating that he wields power over his world as well as over the spectator’s. The camera zooms out to reveal that Alex is in a milk bar where all the furniture is made in shapes of sexually submissive naked women. Throwing his leg on the female-shaped furniture and gazing at the viewer, Kubrick connects Alex’s gaze with his dominance over both men and women. Sight and sexuality fuse again in the scene where Alex and his droogs laugh and enjoy the sight of one of group members raping a girl on a stage in an abandoned playhouse. Later, when Alex and his droogs infiltrate a house to rape a woman, Alex cuts off the woman’s clothing while singing “Singin’ in the Rain,” creating for his droogs a performance to be watched, emphasizing once again sight and spectatorship as directly related to male sexuality. Alex’s experience with the uncanny occurs when he is imprisoned and undergoes the Ludovico technique, a form of aversion therapy that will cause Alex to become a “normal” member of society. In this process, Alex is forced to watch images of violence and sex while given a serum that will sicken him when he feels urges of violence and sexuality. For Alex, viewing a sort of doppelgänger gang creates a sense of the uncanny, and as he is forced to watch a girl being raped by an altered double of his gang, Alex becomes disoriented and distressed, and through this process, he becomes blinded to his desires. Alex’s sexuality only returns when doctors restore him, and he immediately envisions a scene where he and a naked woman are having sex, surrounded by spectators who applaud the intercourse. “I was cured, all right!”26 Alex narrates, and for him, returning to a state of performance-based sexuality becomes emblematic of his notions of virility. Alex uses sight as his sexual hegemonic tool, counteracting the uncanny images within aversion therapy that inverted his idea of masculine sexuality. When given the chance to return to his previous, hypermasculine sense of selfhood, his imagination instantly works to reify his sense of heteronormative sexuality by imagining 26 Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange.

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a scene in which he rehearses a sexual act in front of approving male and female spectators. For Alex, the act of spectatorship is just as important as the act of sex, as if viewing is the part that ensures the stability of the constructed hypermasculine identity, and sight becomes the way that Kubrick demonstrates the problematic way that males work to assert their senses of heteronormative privilege, in which selfhood is inextricably tied for the characters. Finally, Full Metal Jacket continues Kubrick’s yoking of the uncanny and sexuality, as the film follows the training of the US Marine Corps and their experience in Vietnam. In boot camp, the soldiers undergo the abuse of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, who not only trains them how to fight but also indoctrinates the men in misogynist, phallocentric language. For Hartman, his job is to assimilate a group of recruits into a Gestalt of hypermasculine Marines. From the first day of boot camp, he yells at the recruits, shouting at them to sound off “like you got a pair,” calling them “girls,” and questioning their sexual orientation.27 Hartman’s work is highly performative, and he publicly abuses those who do not perform to his standard of masculinity, beating them and humiliating them until they rehearse their masculinity correctly. The boot camp operates as a sort of mirror stage, and Hartman shouts to the soldiers on the first day: “You are not even human beings… You’re nothing but unorganized, grab-asstic pieces of amphibian shit!”28 At the moment, the recruits are not even human: they exist in a kind of shapeless Real in which the symbolic order (of Marine masculinity) must inscribe itself. Hartman shapes his Marines using a variety of performative acts. In marches, Hartman often shifts into call-and-response chants enforcing patterns of male sexuality, rebuilding their psyches with violent masculine sexuality. By the time the soldiers leave, they have internalized Hartman’s program of reification, and nearly everything they do is in relation to killing and heteronormative sexual activity: their rifles have been given female names, their “instincts” for killing “are clean and strong,”29 and they chant with a kind of joy along with Hartman’s sexual chants about Eskimo female genitalia. These hypermasculine and reified traits become apparent when the Marines arrive in Vietnam, and nearly every encounter the Marines have with women involves spectacle, with the Marines enacting heteronormative and dominant roles with women while enjoying the spectatorship of their comrades. Two out of 27 Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid.

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the three women they meet in Vietnam are prostitutes, and the Marines conduct transactions while seated, collectively watching the prostitute “perform” in her negotiations. In Vietnam, sexuality is inseparable from group dynamics. Spectatorship implies male virility, a sense of the objectified and fetishized woman and a rehearsal of heteronormative privilege. Joker and Rafterman take photos of themselves with a prostitute, objectifying the woman as well as symbolically using the camera as a method of the gaze. Later, a group of soldiers negotiate with a pimp and his prostitute, and when African American Marine Eightball tries to take her, and she refuses on the fact that he is too “bookoo,” or large, he stages a sexual act by showing her and the Marines his penis.30 For the Marines, aggressive masculinity has become so indoctrinated that war-struck Vietnam is also a place of rampant sexual performance. The Marines’ sexual confidence throughout the film wavers as a Vietnamese sniper threatens to compromise their mission to march through a demolished city, which simultaneously challenges the Marines’ sexual hegemony. As Lusthog Squad attempts to traverse the city, Eightball walks down a street. The camera angle cuts to the view of the sniper’s gun, turning the soldier into a mysterious, terrifying figure, and Kubrick forces the film’s spectator to passively watch the Marine walk into the sniper’s aim. The unseen sniper shoots Eightball through the rear, and the bullet penetrates through his phallus in a blatant act of castration. Evoking Freud’s concepts of blindness and castration anxiety, the soldiers fearfully and blindly retaliate with excess and futile gunfire, haphazardly shooting the cityscape while the unseen sniper, on the other side of the buildings, is completely safe. As the Marines cautiously enter the sniper’s edifice, they enter a hellish burning wasteland of a building that is terrifying, otherworldly and uncanny in nature. As the killer turns around, Kubrick edits the scene so the soldier’s pigtails swivel around in slow motion, dramatically revealing that the sniper is actually an armed girl. The girl contorts her face in terrifying anger as she shoots her machine gun at the soldiers. Joker fearfully drops his gun, and the girl, shooting at the Marines, demonstrates the momentary reversal of female sexual power and emphasizes Joker’s sudden castration anxiety. Kubrick uses the murderous young girl as an uncanny figure and films the reflection of fire in the girl’s eyes and face, paired with her twirling pigtails, to emphasize her aggressive femininity. With her uncanny violence, the female sniper both physically threatens to castrate the males and reverses the status quo of masculine hegemony over females as demonstrated in earlier scenes. 30 Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket.

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Kubrick makes the Marines’ connection between sight and sexual power clear as they overpower and kill the girl sniper. After Rafterman shoots her, the Marines form a circle around the girl. The camera points up from her position up to the staring eyes of the Marines, who silently gaze upon her dying body. As she lies on the ground wheezing in pain, Rafterman gloats, “I fucking blew her away! Am I a life taker? Am I a heart breaker?”31 Rafterman cheers his first kill as if it were a sexual experience, seeking approval for his “first time.” The Marines utilize phallocentric language and images as they gloat over her dying body. “No more boomboom for this baby-san,” another soldier claims, and Animal Mother dismisses her, saying, “Fuck her. Let her rot.”32 The castrating fears the Marines previously experience when challenged by the uncanny female sniper, ones that threatened their sense of unity of selves, turn into hypersexual gloating after they kill the female castrating figure. By seeing and confronting the female sniper, the Marines restore confidence in their reified roles as subjugators of both Vietnam and the women inside the warzone and in their sense of stable selfhood, which comes from a forceful reassertion of heteronormative privilege. Kubrick’s ability to create situations that eerily stretch reality is a major characteristic of the director’s style, and the uncanny becomes an effective way to break into characters’ psychology. The director dismantles ideas of male sexuality in his films by demonstrating the castrating effect of the uncanny on men as well as their need to reassert confidence in their masculinity through the use of the gaze. Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket all demonstrate these notions, and the uncanny and blindness provide alternate states to “standard” existence that allow the audience to become detached observers of a sexual system where men struggle to assert dominance in both physical and sexual realms. Laura Mulvey warns that in many films, identification with the “erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen” can lead to the spectator associating with the sexual identity of the protagonists, and that typically, a spectator might associate with the attempts of the male characters to find their sexuality through the gaze. However, Kubrick uses Freudian theory of the uncanny, as well as the narrative and visual power of the cinema, to generate dissonance and discomfort with the male characters’ misogynistic use of sight, reminding the audience that concepts of phallocentrism are largely constructs of sexual hegemony that are volatile and constantly susceptible to disintegration. As a result, Kubrick leads the viewer to question the notion of selfhood and the 31 Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket. 32 Ibid.

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processes by which individuals work to establish a sense of a stable, unified self. For Kubrick, asserting a stable sense of selfhood seems to require violence, and spectatorship is a major form of violence that reifies gender representations in a way that asserts heteronormative privilege at the cost of considering more fluid representations of gender.

Works Cited Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Night and the Uncanny.” In Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, edited by Jo Collins and John Jervis. Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge Classics, 1990. Cixous, Hélene. “Fiction and its Phantoms.” In Literature in Psychoanalysis: A Reader, edited by Steve Vine, 84-96. China: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Collins, Jo. “Uncanny Presences.” In Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, edited by Jo Collins and John Jervis, 10-50. Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Collins, Jo and John Jervis. “Introduction.” In Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” Web. Dec. 11. 2009. <http://people.emich.edu/ acoykenda/uncanny1.htm> Kubrick, Stanley, dir. A Clockwork Orange. Warner Brothers, 1971. ———, dir. Eyes Wide Shut. Warner Brothers, 1999. ———, dir. Full Metal Jacket. Warner Brothers, 1987. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” In Écrits, 75-81. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In The Audience Studies Reader, edited by Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn, 133-43. New York: Routledge, 2003. Žižek, Slavoj. “Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent Leitch, 2407-27. New York: W.W.

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