January 2022
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The Article
THOMAS MANN AND THE FATE OF DEMOCRACY IN THE AGE OF WORLD WAR II by Tobias Boes Although we rarely remember it today, the American intervention in World War II was hardly driven by an idealistic desire to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world. Without the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States might well not have entered the conflict at all. In fact, American society during the years immediately prior to 1941 was deeply divided about its role in a changing world order. Did the democratic constitution of the United States, along with its immigrant heritage, saddle it with a moral obligation to combat authoritarianism abroad? Or would it be better to continue the policy of isolationism that had governed US foreign policy for much of its history? This was the time of Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic radio-addressed and of mass rallies by the isolationist America First Committee. But it was also the time of courageous interventions by outspoken public figures, such as the journalist Dorothy Thompson or the polymath Lewis Mumford. At times, the contrast was direct and dramatic. On September 25, 1938, for example, almost 30,000 people assembled in New York’s Madison Square Garden to protest the impending Munich Agreement, and to urge the U.S. government not to surrender Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Less than half a year later, an equivalent number of American Nazi supporters came together in the very same venue, raising their arms Although we rarely remember in the Hitler salute and parading swastika banners it today, the American interin front of a giant portrait of George Washington.
vention in World War II was hardly driven by an idealistic desire to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world.
My book, Thomas Mann’s War, focuses on a chapter from this larger history that has so far received very little attention in the United States: the anti-fascist activities of the Nobel-prize winning novelist Thomas Mann, who arrived in America as an exile from Nazi Germany in 1938. For much of his career, Mann had been celebrated on this continent in an unpolitical fashion, as simply “the Greatest Living Man of Letters.” During the period from 1938 to 1945, however, he was acclaimed as “Hitler’s Most Intimate Enemy.” He gave speeches in front of capacity crowds all over the country. He published essays and letters
to the editor of major newspapers. He recorded radio broadcasts. And he met with President Roosevelt, won the acclaim of cabinet officials and Supreme Court Justices, and testified in front of Congress. These activities have so far received comparatively little attention in part because their impact is difficult to quantify. No policies were changed, and no armies were launched, on account of Mann’s interventions. But Mann knew that his proper During the period from 1938 task was not to spur direct action. Instead, he took it to be his mission to help overcome democracy’s bigto 1945, however, he refashgest weakness: the fact that it does not inspire the ioned himself as “Hitler’s same devotion that totalitarian ideologies do. What Most Intimate Enemy.” mattered most about his speeches thus wasn’t their content, but their symbolic character, and the fact that they brought ordinary Americans together in a celebration of freedom and equality. This strikes me as a remarkably prescient lesson also for the present day, in which enthusiasm for democratic institutions is once again in global decline. The example of Thomas Mann is prescient in other ways as well. He was celebrated in America in no small part because he was regarded as a spokesperson for the German cultural tradition, and thus as a legitimate competitor to the propaganda apparatus of the Nazis. This is something that we still do today: when countries at the other end of the world move to the center of US foreign policy, we turn to artists in the hopes that they might tell us what the situation there is really like. Whenever we read an essay or open letter by Salman Rushdie on Modi’s India, or by Elif Shafak on Erdogan’s Turkey, we thus engage with literary authors in a way that was largely pioneered by Thomas Mann.
THE EXCERPT
Scanned Introduction in Overview
The word’s ways are not the world’s ways. Except when they are constructing a fictive world. The word’s ways are not natural, at least in the ventures, and wagers, of literary writing. If some swaths of words are found more or less at the vernacular ready, they are just as quickly reshaped, no sooner given than remade. Remade to order. Neither in their turns of phrase, nor their sway over us, are the word’s ways of elicited literary response as much discovered as contrived. Their artifice is their art, not only in the occasional neologism, but in their local verbal ecology: an aesthetic maintenance from sentence to sentence, edging forward from word to/ward word. A reader’s reflexes may be inclined to ward off any glancing phonetic echoes and overlaps, as italicized there, that may result—or leave them be, let them happen, taking place within their own lexical displacements. In the latter case, touchstones of stylistic notice are often touchtones: grace notes playing— in a phonetically compressed echo or otherwise—across wording’s variable syllabic register. Such stray tones may sound within the broader
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instrumentation of syntactic harmony or dissonance in literary writing, with lexical spans as well as phonetic clusters at times bent out of shape, pulverized, and redistributed. And in the phrasal membrane of a resulting literary tympanum, that summoned drum of the inner ear in reading, it is, as the epilogue will summarize it, one destination of this study to isolate and name—and by a typifying sound play in its own denomination—the literary moment of epiphony. By “literary,” I mean first of all to stress an etymological, not canonical, sense. This book’s verbal attention is to the “lettered” text, where syllables and their words depend on an internal and serial structure analogous to the inclusive build of syntax in the temporality of reading. The provocations to such episodic verbal attention are drawn not just from narrative fiction but also from poetry. The effort is to course-correct two familiar critical tendencies: in prose fiction, where language loses ground to plot, even though language is that ground; in verse, where the richness of wording may be over-ridden on the rails of meter and lineation. My alternate story about “the ways of the word” calls out internal fashionings—as well as grammatical fastenings across the platform of lettered enunciation— that include, and also underlie, the normal rhetorical preoccupations of stylistic analysis. Certain simple and preliminary assumptions, then, can guide one’s lexical instinct in checking out (rather than dreaming to chart) some selective ramifications of the word over two centuries of literary writing, classic to contemporary, in poetry as well as prose, from Dickinson and Dickens to Don DeLillo, Whitman through Wharton, Woolf, and Wolfe down to Colson Whitehead, Tennyson to Thomas Pynchon, Melville to Toni Morrison, Forster and Fitzgerald to Jonathan Franzen, Poe to Richard Powers. The language in play across such writing produces “style” not just in—but as—the behavioral modification of words by syntax, even while the structure of wording is often rethought from within. Words: filed in technical stylistics under the rubric “diction” or “vocabulary” before being subdivided, in whatever order, by tone (in the restricted sense of low or elevated register), scale (syllable count), lineage (origin and derivation), phonetic stress (sound shapes), figurative quotient (metaphoric or literal). Wordings: felt in immediate literary motion as the triggers of verbal sensation and its sense—the word’s ways of driving associations home.
Introduc ti on in O ver view
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En route, words work overtime in literary prose, both in their strenuous expended energies and over the course of syntactic time. Words in this way both structure and disrupt meaning, build and disconcert it by turns. Even momentary stumbling blocks can become alternate routes to sense. In the latest novel by the last-mentioned writer above, for instance, Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Overstory (2018), a lexical understory concerns the introvert girl, lover of reading and trees, whose inscription in “booklike bark” sends roots into the deep etymology of book in the beech on which runes were once carved.1 Yet when belatedly learning to talk, she is cursed with a sludgelike enunciation whose description at first calls up “slurry” as an adjective in a phrase that skirts oxymoron (hard ooze) when we are forced back on its noun form instead: “When her own speech started to flow at last”—with the dead metaphor of flow immediately materialized in the gurgle and clot of further wording—“it hid her thoughts behind a slurry hard for the uninitiated to comprehend” (113). The unsaid modifier slurred (deferring to the specialized noun form for “muck”) feels echoed momentarily (in its “urred” nucleus) when we learn, two sentences on, that “her father alone understands her woodlands world, as he always understands her every thickened word” (113): a breadth of comprehension sustained across the phonetic span—and evoked underbrush thicket—of wood/world/word. Let such a modest phonic buildup, such “thickening,” stand as emblematic. In one corner of my mind, an alternate subtitle for this volume from the start: “Episodes in Literary Concentration,” that last abstract noun intended in a comparable double sense to its settled-upon alternative. As with the attention manifest in the shapings of prose—in the exactions of its own tensile energy, well in advance of being bestowed on it by close reading—the notion of literary concentration would also evoke its own response. Density breeds intensity in the work of reading. Or might well do so in a given case. There is no definitive way to range or categorize such moments, of course, only to sample some of their daunting variety of devices and enticements. The effort to do so here has resulted in a book that might once have been called “practical criticism”—except that its main praxis is appreciation rather than interpretation: no thesis in the usual sense, no organizing themes, no remobilized theory, just a motivated series of focal points tactically subdivided for comparison. The Ways of
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the Word does not advance any defiant position paper. Its only polemic is to exist at all in an academic climate where verbal issues of this sort are so seldom kept in sight (or earshot)—and whose mainstream weathervanes, to say nothing of methodological barometers, are tooled for other disciplinary crosscurrents than those of wording’s high- or low-pressure fronts. Yet certain facts about literary production, about writing as such, hence about wording, remain demonstrable—and very much worth recovering. Even when deliberately indeterminate, vocabulary sets the tenor of a sentence, drawing from a dictionary archive that is ideally revitalized in the process. Tapping the lexicon of a given linguistic inheritance, a writer’s mental thesaurus is on call to narrow or sharpen a notion toward its most pointed form. Clarity is a matter of paring down, even as the mot juste can then be loosed into the fuller music of grammatical amplification, where surplus linguistic inference may remain in play beyond the task of exactitude. It is in this manner that words make the sense of a sentence. They contour the sensory medium of a given prose sequence—the aural and graphic traces of inscription—while generating a semantic yield from its succession. When craftily channeled, the sensorial grows tutorial, guiding our reception of what it brings to mind—as true for the grandes allées of ceremonial procession as for detours into the back alleys of the lowbrow. So-called Cockney punning, for instance, flummoxes a character in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend when, advised to seek counsel in the law courts of Doctors Commons, he wonders why he needs a physician named Scommons. Appreciative reading is advised to keep well within hailing distance of such phonetic play. On points that may seem, so far, quite obvious, you are hearing here from the author of several academic studies of literary language meant to pursue such issues at their fullest theoretical scope. The Ways of the Word offers, instead, an approach held at a deliberate distance from the full panoply of technical vocabulary—linguistic, rhetorical, and theoretical alike.2 Verbal intuition alone—including its upending at times by phrasal surprise or unexpected tangles—can get us to wording’s inner linings without having to drive a categorical, let alone theoretical, wedge at every turn (of phrase). This amounts to no “resistance to theory,” let alone mounts any. It is about reading in practice—and the practice of writing potentially learned from it. The anchor of the study’s paired last chapters is (accordingly) an undergraduate syllabus for a course in creative writing,
Introduc ti on in O ver view
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a transmedial venture that compares screen montage to the kinetics of syntax: analysis and prose writing together. Through it all, fascination remains axiomatic. What should grab and hold us straight off, riveting us no less in prose fiction than in poetry, is the vital action of language in its generative complexity: a complexity that could never be exhausted by categorization, but that can best be evidenced by certain enlivening distinctions. I’ve therefore chaptered this verbal energy according to a tripartite structure meant to rotate into notice some leading features of its inventive drive. This involves writing at first paged (emplaced as script) for typical print reception; writing next staged in anomalous recitation (the theatrical “production” of a novelistic text—the text itself, its prose lines, not its storyline); writing then screened in the mind’s audiovisual projection room for its latent cinematic analogues. These are merely convenient administrative divisions; the through line is an inquiry into the vibrant linguistic charge of words at work. What makes writing tick, and at how many coordinated levels, as a time-based medium? How to sound this out, in exactly more senses than one? How to keep up a close, almost tactile, contact with wording’s shaping grip, its potent hold. Hold, clench, “shaping grip”—and sometimes (as right there) a latent internal rip whose impact may ripple into adjacent lexemes in a wording where verbal units are mobilized and regrouped as gradient modules. Such are the word’s ways, singled out and doubled down on, when weighed in the balance—in the stylistic equilibrium they themselves install and sustain. Sophisticated descriptive terminology, however commonplace or arcane, is certainly available—but not always immediately availing. Let’s take (up) words on their own terms first. Kick off your shoes even while rolling up your sleeves, since it’s mostly when one relaxes into language that its way with us gets fully engaged, even gently wrestled with, our attention always confident that literature’s fictional force is bound—bound punctually forward—to win out. But relaxation in this sense retains its own vigil, as well as whatever an innate (or learned) verbal sensitivity may bring to the table and the sentence. So a few ground rules (very few) for what lies ahead. To be taken for granted in later engagements, what follows is the book’s essential dictum—etymologically, that is, the already “said” in any instance of the verbalized: namely, the recognition that wording is the manifestation of grammar in syntax as
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well as of phonemes (the sound bites of alphabetic speech) in morphemes (the formative units of word meaning). Regarding the armatures of the verbal that will be met with ahead, there are, first, grammatical rules (possibilities for meaning): the static, because stabilizing, base for any potential shapes of phrase. At this level, wording is the grammatically sanctioned activation of the lexicon in syntactic form. Second, and closer in, wording is also more narrowly shaped by syllables: the consolidation of phonemes into morphemes, or sometimes their refusal to stay put there. Such refusal—a deviance, a freedom—is one mark of the literary moment at its most distilled. Ground rules are one thing, but with this book’s movement in and out of linguistic generalization and its literary instances, what about the principle of selection? Some readers will come to these chapters well enough disposed to “verbal concentration,” the manifold pleasures of such “attention,” but end up wishing the study had concentrated on other writings, other textures of writing, instead of—or in addition to—those brought forward in the course of its chapters. Inevitable. Yet the test cases offered here—for the mechanical “test” and tension of phrased words in syntax’s pliable twining of sense, the functional slack and give and snap of the word’s grammatical patterning at its most dramatic—are neither arbitrary nor in some blanket way meant as representative. They are simply exemplary in the best sense, each of its own linguistic intelligence to begin with. Even before poetry comes into conversation with prose in these pages, no thorough literary-historical scope is, nor could reasonably be, intended, either by selection or by expository overview. Mined from a rich but intermittent vein of mostly modern and contemporary writing in English, and tapping some predecessor moments in the fictional and verse canon, the effort is a matter of breadth rather than coverage. The intent is not to anatomize stylistic options but to put the faceting of literary phrase under a fine-ground and multifocal lens of attention, polished further by each new scrutiny. The risk, of course, is that the variegated display may seem vagrant, the argument wayward. But it is a risk mitigated by the fact that the real argument of these readings is the mental and sensory feel of immersion itself, not a sorted-out dispersion of verbal devices. There is certainly no proposed cross section of contemporary fictional writing offered here, no tabulation of leading habits, just a sampling of that radiant aptitude of language to which certain intensities, rather than codifiable
The Article
MORAL INJURY AND THE MILITARY MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS by Joshua Pederson Many breathed a sigh of relief earlier this year when President Biden announced his decision to pull remaining American ground troops out of Afghanistan. And many more were heartened when, just last week, the White House signaled its support for legislation that would repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force that paved the way for the United States’s long involvement in Iraq. Taken together, these two decisions may signal the end of what has come to be known as America’s “forever wars.” However, it would be folly to believe that Biden’s moves will lift the psychological burden these conflicts have left US veterans to bear. Brown University’s Watson Institute reports that more than 2.5 million American service members spent time on the ground in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and the VA indicates that between eleven and twenty percent of these conflicts’ veterans suffer from PTSD in a given year. These figures add up to a full-blown military mental health crisis. And yet what’s worse is the fact that standard strategies for treating this mountain of trauma— many of which were developed in the aftermath of the Vietnam War—don’t seem to be working anymore. Two of the most common, prolonged These figures add up to a full- exposure (PE) and cognitive processing therapy (CPT) are at best only marginally effective when blown military mental health used on Afghanistan and Iraq vets. crisis. The crucial question is, why? Boston University Psychology Professor Brett Litz thinks he has at least one answer: our efforts to treat the suffering of veterans are falling short because our diagnostic tools aren’t precise enough. Indeed, Litz argues that many service members are plagued by something different from “standard” PTSD: he calls it moral injury. Moral injury is the name given to the deep and durable psychic pain that sometimes afflicts those who breach their own closely held ethical codes. And, according to Litz and an increasing number of other specialists in the field, it is a real and under-appreciated problem.
Now, I’m no psychologist. But I do believe that one of the ways we can come to better appreciate (and understand) the moral injury of our service members is by reading the growing body of novels and poems they have written. Or, to adapt a phrase from the literary critic Geoffrey Hartman, the literature produced by veterans of our forever wars can help us “read the wound” of moral injury. That’s what I argue in one of the chapters of my new book, Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature. In that project, I suggest that novels, poems, and plays can help us “see” a novel form of psychic suffering that has gone unseen for far too long.
Some specialists describe moral injury as the state in which one’s shame switch gets stuck in the “on” position.
Take as just one example Kevin Powers’s 2012 National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds. That book, which draws on Powers’s own wartime experience in Iraq, focuses on a soldier named Bartle and tells the story of his time in-country and his failing efforts to settle back into some sense of normalcy after his tour is over. Some specialists describe moral injury as the state in which one’s shame switch gets stuck in the “on” position. Powers captures this sense perfectly when he describes Bartle’s attempts to come to terms with his memories of the conflict—and his own perceived battlefield sins: “Anyone can feel shame. I remember myself, sitting under neglected and overgrown brush, afraid of nothing in the world more than having to show myself for what I had become” (Powers 132). Powers never uses the phrase “moral injury” in Yellow Birds. But he gives us a vocabulary for talking about the concept that is as precise and as nuanced as that of any clinician. And so do other author-veterans, like Phil Klay in Redeployment (2014), Roy Scranton in War Porn (2016), or Brian Turner in his verse collection, Here, Bullet (2005). All of these literary works testify poignantly to a type of pain whose contours we are just learning to trace, but that will be with us long after the last of the troops come home.
Three Questions with REBECCA R. FALKOFF author of Possessed 1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book? At a visit to the Contemporary Archive of the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence I saw a display of books destroyed in the flood of 1966, including a copy of Vol. VI of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, malformed like a heavy heart wearied by mudclogged vessels. The Gabinetto Vieusseux also holds some 11,000 of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s papers: receipts, correspondence, promotional pocket calendars, and inventories from the great reorganization begun in 1933 and
into a project, giving it room to breathe. I wish I believed (or at least practiced) everything I know about writing, including two truths I often repeat to graduate students: You can’t write everything all at once, and the hardest thing about writing is not writing. 3. How do you wish you could change your field of study? I have no such wish. I confess, however, that many of the recent scholarly works that I have found to be particularly exciting are by historians reading like scholars of literature, by
“Thousands of hours of meticulous labor has been undertaken to salvage some words from the trove of paper, ink, mud, and mold.” never completed. The documents were badly damaged in the flood; thousands of hours of meticulous labor has been undertaken to salvage some words from the trove of paper, ink, mud, and mold. 2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now? When I began this project, I wanted to know why hoarding, and why now? And what does hoarding discourse do? The more I learned about hoarding and hoarding-adjacent practices of the last two centuries, the clearer it became that hoarding discourse does a lot of things. I stopped trying to find one theory that could encompass the semantic field of hoarding and recognized that contractions let air
scholars of literature reading like historians, or by theorists working between disciplines.
INVITE A CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS AUTHOR TO SPEAK TO YOUR CLASS Learn more at cornellpress.cornell.edu/guest-lecturers/literary-studies/
an interview with author of
José Vergara,
All Future Plunges to the Past,
hosted by Jonathan
Hall
1869
The Cornell University Press Podcast
the transcript
Jonathan
Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Jose Vergara., author of All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature. Jose is Assistant Professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College. His teaching interests cover a wide variety of topics, Russian language, prison literature, Chernobyl, Russian novel, (of the classical and experimental varieties), and contemporary Russian culture and society. We spoke to Jose about what inspired him to study James Joyce’s influence on Russian literature, the five major Russian authors he studied, and the Joycean themes he found in their work. Hello, Jose, welcome to the podcast.
Jose
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Jonathan
Well, we’re happy to have you on the podcast to talk about your new book All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature. Tell us how you got interested in this topic and the backstory of this project?
Jose
Yeah, I think it’s a slightly long one and kind of goes back quite a while I feel like there’s certain moments or events in my life or my academic life anyway, that kind of brought me to to this topic, convoluted history with Joyce. I actually first tried to read Ulysses, Joyce’s book in high school on my own. But I ended up stumbling when I got to the part where we pulled blooms cat starts talking, I thought, well, maybe I’ll come back to this later. And I think I just had other writers on my mind and other things to read at that point. But later in college, I had some extra room in my schedule, and I did an independent study with one of my professors Tim, Tim Langon on Ulysses, Andrei Bely’s novel, Petersburg - Russian novel. That’s often compared with Ulysses and Flann O’Brien’s at SwimTwo-Birds, these three great, classic, modernist texts. And they’re it’s sort of hit me that. For me, Joyce is at its best when it’s a communal experience when I’m engaging with other people and talking about him with other people. And that’s something that ended up happening for this book was, which was really exciting for me.
Jose
So between those two things, and then in grad school, when it was time to pick a dissertation topic, this is my book based partly on my dissertation. I was taking a course on Joyce and Beckett and modernity, that was the title. And as we started reading Ulysses, I recognize these moments in the book that reminded me a lot of a Russian novel by Yury Olesha, the first author I look at in my book novel is called Envy. And I realized that that might be what I should write about, started digging around and recognize that there was no kind of systematic study of Joyce in Russian literature of his influence, for lack of a better term. Nothing that kind of brought it all together, there were individual studies and hints at how writers had responded to him, but nothing kind of broad and with the scope that I wanted to approach it with. The closest thing was Neil Cornwall’s excellent James Joyce and the Russians. But for the most part, he’s looking at the critical reception, or he was in that book. And what
I was interested in doing is really looking at the literary response how these Russian writers took Joyce’s ideas and his kind of persona and his devices, all these things in his books, and adapted them for their own purposes. So in other words, kind of what he represented and continues to represent to them as a Western writer, as an innovator, as this kind of unavoidable figure in literature. So yeah, all of these things, just kind of chain of events throughout my recent life, from high school anyway, kind of brought me to the point of this topic and baking in, you know, I just found all these really fascinating connections and the topic resonated with me.
Jonathan
Nice, nice. Now, Joyce was his his work was suppressed by the Soviet authorities for decades. And so a lot of researchers have kind of overlooked Joyce’s influence on modern Russian literature. You dive into that, and you found clear influences of choice and five major Russian authors. What brings together these authors?
Jose
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s so kind of one possible explanation that I consider in the book that with the response to Joyce starting in the 1930s, in forward and the kind of clamp down on modernist writing and the simultaneous turn into socialist realism, there kind of wasn’t room for Joyce to be a significant figure in Russian literature. And therefore this question wasn’t really brought up or considered under the assumption that there wouldn’t be anything. Look for any sort of influence. But right in kind of digging around and looking closely at these author’s texts, I realized that that wasn’t the case, they were still discussing him still reading him accessing him in these different ways, both direct and indirect. Not so direct. And on the one hand, what I’m trying to emphasize throughout the book is that these these case studies that I bring up Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, are probably the most well known among these authors, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin. In these case studies, there’s no kind of single monolithic, quote unquote, Russian Joyce, there’s a kind of series of choices that they pick up and create. And that’s kind of manifested in their work depending on when they’re writing. So a Russian writer, like Olesha from the 1920s 1930s. Reading, Joyce, what he gets out of Joyce is going to be much different than what a writer after Stalin’s death gets from Joyce, or after the fall of the Soviet Union. It’s all very contextual. That’s, on the one hand, what I meant was sizing. On the other hand, to get more directly to your question about what brings them together, I think there are some commonalities and themes and ideas that they were attracted to enjoys. And I can speak about one of those. And that’s the kind of through line that I develop in the book about how these authors in again, very different ways. Turn to Joyce’s ideas about lineages and genealogies and history. And this really goes back to, to get specific about it. Episode nine in Ulysses, in which Joyce has his hero, Stephen Dedalus, explain what he calls his kind of Shakespeare theory or his idea about creativity via Shakespeare. And according to this theory, the creative artist or writer particular can kind of become a father to
himself, by creating a park that lasts forever, so you create a hamlet or you create a Ulysses. In that way, the world recognizes us as Great Creator and your legacy is sort of ensured. And thus, you’re a kind of father to yourself to how others perceive you. This is even more possible or more effective when you kind of supplant the biological father figure in your life with a literary one. So again, Joyce’s case, in his hero Stephens case, it’s a turn to Shakespeare and creating these connections between life and literature. And I noticed that all my writers, the writers I selected to focus on in the book kind of observed this idea in Ulysses and responded to it in some way. So the kind of key through line or thread of the book.
Jonathan
Interesting, interesting. So for the listeners, if you’ve got if you could tell us again, who the authors were that you studied, and the joycie and themes that you found in their work?
Jose
Sure. So the five authors are Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokoloff, and Mikhail Shishkin. And I can say a little bit about this, a couple of them and kind of how they dug into the Joycean worldview in this this theme of fathers and sons in particular. So the first one is Yury Olesha in chapter one, who again, was writing in the early Soviet era in the 1920s, and 30s. He represents this early response to James Joyce, who publish envy his novel in 1927, to just a couple years after the first translation, Russian translation of Ulysses appeared, which was just fragments, but he would have access to this. And vi notice these connections between the two works. But in particular, what’s most most intriguing to me about Olesha is how he feels this tension between wanting to pursue the individual his path, the Western path, Joyce’s path of becoming a father to yourself and kind of narrating and telling your own story, on the one hand, and on the other hand, adhering to what was developing in the Soviet Union at the times, not socialist realism, officially, but moving toward that moving in that direction of the kind of regimented system that would support the state, in literature and art and so on. And art with The purpose as opposed to art for art’s sake. So in the novel, Olesha has this hero couple yet of kind of try out evens path, going out on his own and becoming an individualist artist but ultimately shows that that’s not possible in these changing conditions in Soviet Russia, Given these circumstances and given the kind of ambivalence that both of Yeshua and his hero expressed in their, their lives. And so Joyce, excuse me, Olesha is using Joyce and using Ulysses and his idea from Ulysses as a way to comment on what he was experiencing at the time are starting to feel anyway. And then the second chapter with Nabokov - he’s unique in a number of ways, he could rejoice in English, you know, much more easily and readily than any of the other writers. And one of my favorite parts of his story is that he actually offered to Joyce he wrote a letter to Joyce offering to translate Ulysses in the early 1930s. And obviously, this didn’t come to be, but it’s one of the great what ifs of literature to my mind, what if Nabokov had been able to translate Ulysses in the 1930s? What would that have actually looked like? So it didn’t happen. But I read and argue
that his final Russian novel The gift, (Dar) can actually be read as a creative translation, even a kind of miss translation of Joyce’s book. There’s structural similarities, in some ways in the plot, themes, and images, dogs and footsteps, various numbers of things. But the main one is that Nabokov like his hero, had to flee into immigration to go to Europe from Russia after the Civil War. And they both lost their fathers in different ways. And Nabokov’s father was assassinated, accidentally assassinated he took a bullet for someone, someone else. And then Nabokov’s hero in The Gift loses his father, when, when his father disappears on a scientific expedition is never seen again. So for Nabokov the idea of cutting out the biological of kind of breaking your ties in the way that Steven proposes, and Ulysses was kind of blasphemous and wrong in a certain way. But in The Gift he does pursue this Shakespeare project, he merges though the literary with the biologicals instead of cutting things apart, he’s bringing them together. In his case, he’s uniting the father figure with Pushkin, the kind of Russian equivalent of Shakespeare, the father of modern Russian letters. So He retells in a way, this translates bits of Ulysses and uses the project but to a different end. So these are two examples, in the book of how these Russian writers would use Joyce’s ideas, but alter them, due to the conditions around them, their their context, or to achieve something different. And the other three chapters do similar things and also look at stylistic influence and kind of more playful attitude toward intertextuality in these connections between the books, again, depending on when and where the writers were writing from.
Jonathan
Interesting, interesting. And now you also have, you’ve interviewed authors who are alive today, other living writers in Russia, there’s a whole section of this Moscow based choice reading group called The Territory of Slow Reading, I thought was fascinating. There’s others. Tell us about these interviews and what you learned from authors today.
Jose
As someone that factored into my fifth chapters book with me how Shishkin about choice and exchanges with him. But in the conclusion, in particular, I interviewed this reading group as well as other writers, like you mentioned, and the conclusion is divided up into five sections. And the first one, I focus on this Moscow Joyce reading group called TheTerritory of Slow Reading, as you said, they’re a group of Joyce fans basically that meet once a week on Sundays for an hour, and then meet on Zoom. And they’ve been doing this for several years now before soon became a reality for everyone. And as I was getting ready to conduct some research in Moscow in the summer of 2019, I was asking around and someone mentioned this group, so I got in touch and while I was in Moscow, I was able to sit in on a session of theirs again, it’s on Zoom. But that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise because of the time difference. I’d be up really later. Make up really early to participate. And they go through Ulysses bit by bit, and also read some other texts that are, you know, contextually related to Ulysses or Joyce or thematically in some way. And focus on both the details in the work, as well as kind of broader themes and sort
of more universal aspects of the novel and what they get out of this experience of reading Joyce. They really take it slowly. That’s why it’s called Territory of Slow Reading as one should. Joyce. Obviously there are other Joyce reading groups all around the world do similar things. But for me, it was really useful and fascinating to talk to them about why they rejoice. I posed that question, you know, after the session to some of them. And there are different answers. One participant, for instance, suggested that Joyce allows them. This group, at least are readers in Russia, according to his view, to discuss things that aren’t often discussed in Russian literature, at least not so candidly, like sex or money was another example they brought up. So that was really neat to hear. And they also hold an annual Bloomsday walks on June 16, they wander around central Moscow and read bits of Joyce in in the Russian translation and then have some drinks at a pub or bar suppose there. Yeah, and beyond that, as I said, for the conclusion, I wanted to get kind of most recent perspective on Joyce and Ulysses in his work. So I interviewed some writers really range from younger generations, Ksenia Buksha, Ivan Sokolov, different Sokolov. And then some writers from older generations like Dimitry Bykov, Anna Glazova, Marina Stepnova, Zinovy Zink and other ones. So either interviewed them or corresponded with them via email or Facebook and other ways, and talk to them about Joyce’s place in Russia, how they first encountered him, and so on. And for this part of the conclusion, the penultimate section, what I did is put together all their voices. So I asked them all the same questions, and then some individual ones, and took parts of these interviews and created a kind of mini oral history, but the their words, the things they had to say about choice and dialogue with one another, and for me, it was, I don’t know, exciting and useful exercise and kind of restructuring, reframing this history of choice that I do throughout the book that it’s held throughout the book. So the book has five chapters, it moves chronologically, but here, it’s a mix of voices and different perspectives. And has the, the writers, you know, speaking for themselves, and I think kind of emphasizes the spontaneity and chance encounters that you find in Joyce, in their voices, show that reveal that. And then beyond that, it was just nice to see the connections between what they had to say, for instance, Stepnova and Grigory Sluzhitel both describe Joyce - they use the metaphor of a mountain that is a mountain in the writerly landscape that no one can avoid. But sometimes you turn your your view slightly to the side or something to avoid his influence it to change things. But again, that was totally by chance that they use the same metaphor. Yeah, and finally, most broadly, it was, again, useful in a way to see how the same debates about choice that we saw in the 20s and 30s, about whether he’s sort of passe, or is he actually an innovator, is he worth emulating for Russian writers or in general? All these kinds of debates that started a century ago are still happening now. Joyce’s place in Russian culture is still not settled entirely. Can we see all this recur on these pages here?
Jonathan
Wow. Well, this is an amazing project that you’ve, you’ve created. And I
like that analogy of Joyce as a mountain. I mean, he looms over the literary world, and people are still working to try to understand him more clearly. Without not only groups in Russia, but all over the world reading his book. I know of one book group in Ithaca, that’s taken on Ulysses now wow, you know, how to even start. I think that’s it’s amazing what you’ve collected for anyone who is interested in James Joyce and his writings to see the different perspective that another culture can can bring to to the conversation, and they may be able to see things that we are blind to because we’re immersed in it. So having that Russian view and Russian experience of his literature, I think is a great contribution to to understanding Him. And it’s all right here in this new book, All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature. Thank you so much for sharing just a little bit of the book, we encourage folks to to take a deeper dive into it by getting the book it’s on our website. You can get it on a library. It’s available now. So we encourage you to read it. And I want to thank you again, Jose, for for coming on to the podcast.
Jose
Thank you so much for having me. That was a pleasure. Thank you.
Jonathan
That was Jose Vergara. Author of All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature.
Three Questions with GLYNNE WALLEY translator of Eight Dogs, or “Hakkenden” 1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?
3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?
I fell in love with this novel long before I read it. I remember finding an old edition of it in my university library and gazing, entranced, at the illustrations, which hinted at adventure and romance and magic. But it wasn’t translated, and while it’s mentioned in all the histories of Japanese literature, I could tell they hardly scratched the surface. My favorite moment was when, as a grad student, my language level reached the point where I could read it for myself. It turned out to be everything I’d
I’d like to see translations taken more seriously. There was a time when I would have said I’d like to see “translation” taken more seriously, but by now Translation Studies is well established as a field of theoretical inquiry and pedagogical practice. Still, I’m not sure I see that translating (pun intended!) into a greater respect for translations themselves. Hiring committees and tenure committees are perfectly happy to see candidates writing about translation, but producing actual translations
“My favorite moment was when, as a grad student, my language level reached the point where I could read it for myself.” hoped it would be and much, much more. 2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now? I started this translation as part of the research that led to my 2017 Cornell East Asia Series monograph (Good Dogs). I learned so much through translating that part of me wishes I could have finished the translation before writing the monograph; then again, everything I learned through writing the monograph informs my translation, so another part of me wishes I could have finished this book (Eight Dogs) first. I guess that’s a paradox, but it’s also an illustration of how translation itself is a form of scholarship, not an adjunct to it.
is still, all too often, seen as peripheral to scholarship. It’s not. It is, or can be, central.
The Article
SURVIVING R. KELLY AND THE RAPE OF JOAN BELLINGER by Carissa M. Harris Like many Americans, I watched Lifetime’s six-hour Surviving R. Kelly docuseries. The series painstakingly narrates how Kelly leveraged his multiple advantages—of gender, wealth, fame, and age—to victimize teenage black women, whose intersecting inequalities have long been exploited by perpetrators of all races. My recent book, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain, argues that this racialized sexual disadvantage has its cultural roots in medieval attitudes toward young low-income women. The popular stereotype of the sexually available servant girl responsible for her own exploitation was later racialized so the medieval “wanton wench” became the stereotyped “likely [attractive] Negro wench, about seventeen years of age” advertised for sale in 1781 and the “fast little girl” cited several times in Surviving R. Kelly by those who chose to deny Kelly’s abuse. We can see the traumatic real-life effects of sexualizing socially disadvantaged young women not only in Surviving R. Kelly but also in premodern legal cases. In Canterbury in 1574, a fifteenyear-old servant named Joan Bellinger appeared before two town officials. She testified that her master, the tailor Stephen Jeffrey, had ordered her to come to him one evening when his wife was out enjoying supper with a neighbor. He grabbed her by the arm and threw her down on a bed before exposing himself to her, pulling up her dress, and raping her. Joan reported that He forced her to swear that “she did tell him that he did hurte her, and he said, she would not tell her parents ‘No, Joane, I do not hurte the, for this dothe me or anyone else what he had good and thee no harme.’” He forced her to swear done. that she would not tell her parents or anyone else what he had done. Similarly, Jerhonda Pace broke a nondisclosure agreement to say of Kelly’s sexual predation when she was sixteen, “I told him it was a bit uncomfortable . . . It was painful.” John Petrean, one of the jurors in Kelly’s 2008 child pornography trial, explained why he had voted to acquit Kelly. “I just didn’t believe them, the women,” he said regarding the young black women who had testified about Kelly’s abuse. “The way they dressed, the way they acted…I
didn’t like them . . . disregarded all what they say [sic].” In other words, his deep-seated misogynoir prevented him from believing their experiences. Similarly, one of Kelly’s former employees said, “I thought, These bitches are crazy.” In contrast, the sixteenth-century witnesses in Joan’s case believed her: three women appointed by the town alderman examined Joan and affirmed “that she…is very sore hurt in her prevy partes, by suche meanes as she hathe confessed.” Both R. Kelly and Stephen Jeffrey used various Servant girls appear repeatedforms of power at their disposal—including gender, ly in premodern legal records age, and socio-economic status—to victimize young as victims of abuse and exwomen disadvantaged by intersecting inequalities. ploitation. Just as young black women are disproportionately victims of sexual violence, with between forty and sixty percent reporting coercive sexual contact before the age of eighteen, young servant women in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England were similarly vulnerable. Living in urban areas far from their families, sharing close quarters with their employers, and subject to stereotypes that portrayed them as perpetually sexually available, servant girls appear repeatedly in premodern legal records as victims of abuse and exploitation. Katherine Bronyng’s master and mistress forced her to sleep in their son’s bed, resulting in her pregnancy and legal punishment in 1505. Margaret Haburgh’s master impregnated her and killed her baby by throwing it into the sea in 1519. Both Surviving R. Kelly and these premodern cases remind us how social inequalities have intersected for centuries to produce violence that falls more heavily than some bodies than others. And they remind us, echoing #MeToo founder Tarana Burke, that movements to end sexual violence cannot ignore poor women and women of color, who have borne the disproportionate burdens of victimization and survival for far too long.
THE EXCERPT
Introduction
Of Origins and Orifices
Late in 1867, Charles Darwin sent out a questionnaire titled “Queries about Expression” to a group of scientific contacts and personal acquaintances scattered throughout the world. An important piece of preliminary research for Darwin’s 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the document consisted of seventeen questions concerning the way that people around the world expressed their emotions. “Is astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide and by the eyebrows being raised?” it reads. “Does shame excite a blush, when the colour of the skin allows it to be visible? . . . Is extreme fear expressed in the same general manner as with Europeans?”1 Darwin’s hypothesis, which continues to influence and to organize the psychological study of the emotions today, was that certain emotions were biologically innate and universal and thus would be expressed in like manner by all human faces across the globe. “Observations on natives who have had little communication with Europeans would be of course the most valuable,” the end of the questionnaire reads, “though those made on any natives would be of much interest to me” (fig. 1). Darwin wove the responses he received into the text of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, where he argued that their “remarkable uniformity” was “evidence of the close similarity in bodily structure and mental disposition of all the races of mankind,” including those he deemed the “savage races of man.”2 1
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INTRODUCTION
With this goal of demonstrating the universality of emotions in mind, the questionnaire urged respondents to try to stick to the observable facts of what they saw, and to avoid generalization. “General remarks on expression are of comparatively little value,” it explains. “A definite description of the countenance under any emotion or frame of mind would possess much more value.” However, many of the replies to “Queries” fell far short of Darwin’s proposed empirical standard, and often reflected little more than the racial prejudice and violence of the colonial setting in which the observations were made. For example, the Scottish botanist John Scott, whom Darwin had helped to secure a post as curator of the Royal Botanic Garden in Calcutta, wrote to Darwin of the difficulty in distinguishing shame from fear among natives, since their behavior was motivated by “the brute-like dread of corporal punishment and not the susceptibilities of a moral nature.” In “native faces,” Scott goes on, “really there is very little expression at all . . . but there is sometimes slyness and vindictiveness very evidently indicated.”3 Though Darwin used their responses as evidence of the universality of emotions, his respondents tended not to agree with his insistence on the fundamental physical and psychological similarity between all human beings. Writing from within the spaces of colonial domination, some argued that certain kinds of emotional behavior were too culturally complex for nonEuropean people and so did not exist within allegedly primitive societies. “Indeed, I do not think such semi-civilised races as those on which I am making the observations are capable of manifesting such a calm pensive melancholy as that indicated in your query,” Scott responds to Darwin’s question about grief. “Though enthusiastically demonstrative within the range of animal passions,” he elaborates, “they are in general lamentably wanting in the higher characteristics of our race.” In this view, emotions are not innate or universal modes of response shared by all humans but rather acquired cultural protocols that are distributed unevenly, according to a measure of something called “civilization” that was related but not quite reducible to racial difference. The term is inherently ambiguous, but ubiquitous. “Whatever be the characteristics of what we call savage life,” John Stuart Mill hedged in 1836, “the contrary of these, or the qualities which society puts on as it throws off these, constitute civilization.”4 Just as there were alleged to be civilized and savage peoples, there were deemed to be civilized and uncivilized emotions. These uncivilized emotions were universal, but according to the circular reasoning and race thinking inherent to this view, the mark of civilization—of modernity and progress as well as of sensibility and refinement—lay in the “higher” capacity to overcome or to resist such “animal passions,” as Scott calls them.
Figure 1. Charles Darwin’s questionnaire “Queries about Expression.” Darwin wove the responses he received into the text of his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (DAR 186: 1).
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INTRODUCTION
It is easy to dismiss this civilizational ideology as an artifact of Victorian imperialism, with its plain basis in racism and self-serving pseudoscientific argument, but it is more difficult to measure its concrete effects on the formation of modern culture. This data was, after all, the foundation upon which the psychological theory of emotions was erected. How easily could the scientific substance of emotions be extracted from the civilizational ideology that was its raw material? What was left behind, and what carried forward, in the process of universalizing emotions? Such questions are not faced by historians of psychology alone. The apportionment and distribution of the alleged capacity for affective expression informed a far wider range of nineteenth-century social practices, from colonial policy to public works projects to the production of scientific knowledge across a variety of emerging disciplines. Not just psychology but all the new social sciences of the late nineteenth century—sociology, anthropology, and economics alike— shared in precisely this presupposition that the capacity for complex emotion expression was unevenly distributed throughout the world and could therefore be held up as a token of racialized civilizational difference. My point is not merely to critique Victorian culture’s racial, sexual, and class prejudices but to think about how those prejudices—and more specifically the emotional discourses that underpinned them—came to organize knowledge and to structure social experience in unexpected and as yet unexamined ways. Tracking the entanglement of the discourse of emotion with the ideology of civilization therefore quickly opens up broader vistas of the rapidly transforming nineteenth-century lifeworld. And to the extent that the social world remains organized in pronounced ways by the concrete as well as the ideological structures of the nineteenth century, we remain saddled today with the baggage of Victorian civilizational thinking and its conflicted presumptions about the uneven distribution of the emotions. This book reconstructs the singular, outsized role played by one particular emotion—disgust—within this wide-ranging and still-unfolding nineteenth-century drama of civilizational ideology, social transformation, and the universalization of emotion. Although it is often denigrated as a low emotion, disgust has had a tendency to turn up in unexpected places, connecting disparate areas of social life. Darwin’s sources allow us to observe disgust’s composition in particular. Unlike many of the other emotion expressions the survey asked about, in the case of disgust Darwin’s informants concurred overwhelmingly with his characterization: “the lower lip being turned down, the upper lip slightly raised, with a sudden expiration, something like incipient vomiting, or like something spat out of the mouth.”5 In the reflexive recoiling of disgust, Darwin did seem to have
INTRODUCTION
5
identified a form of affective response whose universality was indisputable; it was in many respects the epitome of a low, animal passion. Yet even if disgust was deemed universal, it nonetheless sat in a contradictory relationship to the nineteenth century’s civilizational ideology. For if disgust was an uncivilized emotion, it was also an important medium through which the claims of civilization were articulated. Indeed, where there is talk of civilization, or invocation of the tenuous attainments of culture, the appeal to disgust—with its churning stomach, gaping mouth, and pinched, recoiling nose—is never too far off. In his response to the survey’s question about disgust, Scott stages what Darwin describes in Expression as a “graphic scene” of coerced ingestion.6 Though the scene raises more questions than it answers, it can nonetheless serve as an emblem of the discourse of disgust. “A servant of mine of rather delicate constitution and to whom I had thus frequently to prescribe . . . Castor-oil,” Scott writes, “which he most cordially detested—used thus to express his disgust”: The sight of the bottle indeed was quite enough to make him shudder and shrug his shoulders. When I handed it him he would open his mouth, with an eructation of wind and spasmodic backward with short rapid horizontal shakings of the head: then he would shudderingly put it to his lips, smell and withdraw with a shrug a few horizontal paralytic shakes of the head, firmly closed teeth with lips somewhat opened (or rather by the turning up and down of lips as you express it) and eyes obliquely upturned (avoiding the sight of oil) with a lowering brow and a disposition to vomit. I have seen disgust thus strongly pronounced frequently both in administering medicines to natives and in observing Hindoos of high caste coming contact in proximity [sic] to a defiling object &c.7 Scott describes a series of reflex actions, but those actions are so thoroughly embedded in the scene of colonial domination that it is difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. This indissolubility is central to the character of disgust. On the one hand, the expression of disgust appears here as a paradigmatic image of physiological mechanism—as a spasming, shuddering, paralytically quivering body that quasi-instinctively resists the incorporation of an unwanted object. On the other hand, these putatively reflexive behaviors are also described in unmistakably social terms that link the present scene to a matrix of presumptions about defilement and purification, and about caste status and cultural difference. Even while Scott describes disgust as a set of mechanistic reactions, he has preemptively yoked the emotion to
6
INTRODUCTION
structures of religious belief and scientific knowledge. Indeed, the emotion seems to offer a kind of ersatz knowledge, Scott suggests, as though your disgust already knows what it dislikes, what is pure and impure. Not only is this confusion of physiological, moral, and cultural registers typical of descriptions of disgust in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it is in a sense one of the primary functions that has been assigned to the emotion historically—it is captured, for example, by a 1999 psychological study, which refers to disgust as “the body and soul emotion.”8 Disgust, on this account, is an emotion that collapses boundaries between body and soul, low and high, sweeping up bad smells, spiritual defilement, and moral infraction in a messy compound of repudiation and expulsion. But what Scott depicts is not merely the imbrication of the body’s ordinary autonomous functioning with cultural categories, but rather an implicit judgment about that imbrication. We come to know the emotion’s slippery character only within the frame of civilizational coercion and disapprobation. That is, Scott characterizes his servant as a person in thrall to a body that is crucially ignorant of the difference between poison and medicine, between superstition and knowledge, between individual preference and necessity, and at the most fundamental level, between what is to be resisted and what is to be taken in; hence he must be induced to take his medicine against his wishes. In this regard, we might say that Scott characterizes disgust as an emotion in need of discipline. It is, we are led to understand, an unruly affect, one that cannot be trusted to make sound judgments—and therefore one that needs to be excluded or overcome. In the following pages, I place this nineteenth-century discourse of disgust within a wider historical and conceptual arc, one that reaches back into the eighteenth century as well as forward into the twentieth and toward the present. For the last three hundred years, modern European culture has been utterly fixated with its own disgust—the way you might pick fixatedly at a scab while reading a book. Although the experience of being disgusted might seem unambiguous in its capacity to pass forceful judgments about things felt to be too vile or too gross to stomach, the meaning of that experience has, by contrast, invited continuous rumination and provoked critical analysis from a range of different and often opposing perspectives. Zooming out from the Darwinian moment, we find that in the second half of the eighteenth century disgust was the focus of heated debate among German and British philosophers working in the new field of aesthetics, where the repulsive was taken to be the antithesis of the beautiful; now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the philosophers are joined by neuroscientists, who conduct brain scans of the insula, seeking to elucidate the primal nature
Don’t forget. You can view our entire literary studies subject catalog by scanning the QR code below with your smartphone camera or clicking on it.
SCAN ME
THE EXCERPT
Introduction
Desire and Death in Elite Medieval Emotional Communities
Their hands were so cold they were touching only in intention, an illusion, in order for this to be fulfilled, for the sole reason that it should be fulfilled, none other, it was no longer possible. And yet, with their hands frozen in this funereal pose, Anne Desbaresdes stopped moaning. —Marguerite Duras, Moderato cantabile
Ribald, raunchy, and rooted in the desires of the body, the fabliaux offer some of the most remarkable and least restrained problematizations of death, grief, and sexuality in medieval culture. The memorably vulgar thirteenth-century Cele qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son mari, for example, imagines widows’ grief as barely masking untrammeled, uncontrollable desire. The story begins with a widow who refuses to vacate her husband’s grave after his interment; her steadfast grief is initially lauded by the narrator as an exemplary performance of spousal duty: Si a mout bien son preu prové, Ce semble, a toz vers son seignor, Ainz fame ne feist tel dolor, . . . Et poins de tordre et cheveus trere (118–19) Thus, she proved her worth to her lord well, it seems, and no woman has ever shown such grief, . . . and wringing of her hands and pulling of her hair1 1. In this book, translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. Citations from De celle qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son mari in Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1872). 1
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INTRODUCTION
The narrator cites the widow’s grief as a model performance of both spousal devotion and femininity, and a cursory reading seems to tie her performance of emotion to the performance of her gender. But the fabliaux are often deceptively simple, and here the widow’s grief does other kinds of work. It also performs her husband’s prowess: the fabliau’s end-rhyme offers an audible alignment of dolor and seignor (“grief ” and “lord”) that links women’s grief to the construction of masculinity, tying emotion to the performance of both gender and status. When the lady refuses to leave her husband’s grave, her cries eventually attract an errant lord and his squire, who ride up and interrogate her while she sobs, in a scene reminiscent of many episodes within romances both medieval and modern. The squire immediately rebukes his lord for pitying her grief, betting instead in vulgar language that “si dolente comme el se fait, / la foutrai” (even as sorrowful as she seems, / I will fuck her there). The squire’s wager that the lady’s performance is not what it “seems” resonates with widespread concerns about the relation between truth and appearance, and, as I discuss further in this book, with concerns about the veracity of emotions in patristic texts, sermons, trial records, and fictional texts. The misogynistic question asked in fabliaux—“Are women’s emotions reliable?”—may be transformed to be read as a question about whether any emotions represent a truthful testament to an internal psychological landscape, revealing concerns about how emotions intersect with veracity and intent as they are deployed to negotiate relationships between people. Not only does this fabliau stage a critical disjuncture between emotional sign and signifier; it also imagines that the signs themselves are ephemeral in ways that undermine their significance. Indeed, the punch line here is that the squire vaunts his sexual prowess, claiming in explicit and vulgar terms that he killed his last lover by making love to her so well: Je avoie mis tout mon cuer En une dame que j’avoie. Et assez plus de moi l’amoie, Qui ert bele, cortoise et sage; Ocise l’ai par mon outrage. —Ocise l’as? Coment, pechierre? —En foutant, voir, ma dame chiere, Ne je ne voudroie plus vivre. —Gentilz bon, vien ça, si délivre Cest siècle de moi, si me tue I had placed all of my heart in a woman that I had
INTRODUCTION
3
and I even loved her more than myself, and she was beautiful, courteous, and wise; I killed her by my wantonness. —You killed her? How, sinner? —By fucking, truly, my dear lady, and I no longer even want to live. —Dear good man, come here, and so deliver me from this century, and kill me thusly. When the widow is aroused by the squire’s claims and acquiesces to his proposition, she becomes a sign of women’s general unreliability. Here, the lady’s unproblematized elision of death and desire resonates with widespread concerns about the sexuality of medieval widows, and in particular it recalls patristic concerns that widows’ loud laments were meant to attract nearby men.2 However, what interests me in this episode is not the veracity of its emotions, or its misogynistic view of women’s reliability, but rather its curious twinning of death and desire, of grief and love, in order to weave a complicated and multivalent picture of how emotional performances describe the contours of communities of privilege. In this book, I explore how privilege is shaped by what I am identifying as an erotics of grief, and I explore what that can tell us about the interplay between gender, emotion, and power. Specifically, I focus on how twelfth- and thirteenth-century narratives designed for and commissioned by the medieval elite imagine the contours of their communities of privilege through eroticized grief. In texts as diverse as the fabliaux, travel narratives, chansons de geste, and romance, grief and sexuality are never far apart. Ribald and outrageous, Cele qui se fist foutre both eroticizes and problematizes grief as imperfect; its genius plays upon the foundational fear that old lovers will be forgotten in the face of new desire. Yet it invites us to take a closer look at grief ’s erotics: what is it about the grieving widow that is so arousing? The widow may be beautiful in her grief, but as I argue in this book, that grief is also eroticized because of its promise to narrate and commemorate. The men’s wager is as much about actually having sex with her as it is about transferring her narrative potential from one man (her dead husband) to another (a new lover). As such, Cele qui se fist foutre not only ties grief and sexuality to a discussion of the nature of emotions, but also to the narrative functions of grief ’s power to commemorate, imbuing grief
2. See discussions of Jerome’s “Letter to Furia,” Ambrose’s “Concerning Widows,” and John Chrysostom in Leslie Callahan, “The Widow’s Tears,” in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 245–63.
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INTRODUCTION
with not only sexual, but also narrative, power. This is our erotics of grief: a complicated weaving of death and desire, love and grief, power and loss; it is an erotics performed, policed, and explored in the nexus of medieval communities of privilege; it is an erotics that functions across and calls into being a spectrum of gender performances; it is an erotics of commemoration and sacrifice fundamental to narrating and producing patriarchy.
Defining Emotions In the past twenty years scholars have investigated emotions in fields as disparate as anthropology, sociology, neurology, and visual studies; entire institutes dedicated to the study of emotions are conducting investigations from perspectives ranging from neurobiological to sociological and historical.3 Nearly every field has had a critical discussion of what emotions mean, whether they are biological or cultural (or neither, or both), and how considering them relates to the primary focus of study; in the humanities, this has often been framed in terms of subjectivity and community. As this spate of recent scholarship attests, we cannot begin to discuss emotions without a common understanding of generalized emotion words such as “affect,” “feeling,” and “emotion,” and, more particularly in this book, “desire,” “erotic,” “grief,” “mourning,” amor, and dueil—words that are not only specific to discipline, but also to time, place, culture, and language. In my writing, I distinguish between the terms “affect” as a physiological, biochemical process in the body; “feeling” as post-cognitive; and “emotion” as the deployment of feelings in community. Ruth Leys offers a good working explanation of the differences between affect (precognitive), feeling (personal, cognitive), and emotion (social) when she summarizes that “affect is not a personal feeling. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, . . . and affects are pre-personal. . . . An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. . . . Affect cannot be fully realised in language.”4 Yet, as I explain in my
3. A mere handful of examples include Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 434–72; Jan Plamper, Geschichte und Gefühl. Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2012); Carroll E. Izard, Human Emotions (New York: Plenum, 1977); Rom Harré, The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Nico H. Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 4. Shouse summarized in Leys, “Turn to Affect,” 442.
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readings, medieval texts—and in particular, medieval languages—resist such discrete differentiations, and I follow their lead in exploring how emotions are entangled with the communities in which they are expressed. In this book, and in keeping with recent scholarship by Stephanie Trigg, Barbara Rosenwein, and William Reddy, I use the term “emotion” to discuss how externalized, bodily expressions of feelings become read, exchanged, and socially contextualized as community. While I am careful in how I use these terms, it is not my goal to reproduce a neat taxonomy of human feeling. Rather, I seek to shed light on how biological processes become socially mediated expressions of emotion that both expose and collapse this crucial difference. That is, I read the texts in this study as attesting to emotions as socially conditioned, produced within and for the communities in which individuals are socialized. In the medieval period that is the focus of this research, some languages themselves collapse this difference, tightening the relation between emotion and community. As I discuss below, whereas modern English scholarly usage may expect to differentiate between affective states, feelings, and the socialized practice of emotions, medieval terms are more capacious in ways that may be productive not only for understanding medievals and their communities, but also for challenging conversations insistent on cleaving feelings from their practices within affect studies. Monique Scheer asserts that culturally contextualized displays of feelings are produced and received by what she calls “knowing bodies.” She views emotions as “acts executed by a mindful body, as cultural practices.”5 For Scheer, our widow’s grief would be an embodied performance that renders “cultural practices” visible in ways that confound distinctions between mental and physical, between private and public performance. As she explains, “the habits of the mindful body are executed outside of consciousness and rely on social scripts from historically situated fields. That is to say, a distinction between incorporated society and the parts of the body generating emotion is hard to make.”6 Here bodies producing emotions become generative, sites of social scripts that might also be construed as communal norms. Hippocratic and Galenic medicine offered the predominant model of the body through which medieval physicians approached emotional
5. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (May 1, 2012): 205. 6. Ibid., 207.
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INTRODUCTION
disturbances in their patients.7 Galen held the body to be grounded in four essential humors (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm), and affective states were tightly linked to the ratios of the four humors. In this model, all sorts of problems stemmed from humoral imbalances, including disease, reproductive difficulties, and, especially, mood and emotional disorders.8 The humoral model asserted that men and women had naturally different baseline humoral ratios, thereby naturalizing a gendered approach to describing and treating emotions. If women were to be aligned with cold and wet, they were more likely to be phlegmatic and aggrieved; similarly, since the Greeks first aligned men with dry, hot temperaments, they were “naturally” more choleric. Later philosophers and theologians followed the humoral approach presupposing gender-distinctive emotional patterns in men and women—a move that essentially socializes the biology of emotions and describes community (male, hot, rational) in opposition to “other” (female, cold, emotional). As Alison Levy points out, Augustine’s discussion of mourning suggests that he believed men and women should grieve differently, creating a “distinct dichotomy between male and female manners of mourning: Monica’s loud and constant lamentation is countered by Augustine’s stoicism and silence; presumed female hysteria is checked by male composure.”9 The humoral model invites us to consider how gender and emotion interface in our medieval texts. As I suggest here, medieval literature troubles the hierarchical naturalization of gender and emotion propagated in medieval medical discourses; some of the most powerful, poignant moments of medieval literature are those that complicate medical discourses, which seem to fall apart and become inadequate, as when Charlemagne wails in despair over the death of his beloved Roland, tearing out his hair in a wild display of grief. Medieval literary examples eroticizing grief offer another model for
7. As in Leys, who remarks, “the problem here is not the idea that many bodily (and mental) processes take place subliminally, below the threshold of awareness. Who would dream of doubting that they do?” “Turn to Affect,” 456. 8. For more on medieval medical theories of emotion see Olivia Weisser, “Grieved and Disordered: Gender and Emotion in Early Modern Patient Narratives,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43, no. 2 (2013): 247–73; Ortrun Riha,“Emotionen in Mittelalterlicher Anthropologie, Naturkunde und Medizin,” Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven Mediävistischer Forschung 14, no. 1 (2009): 12; Mones Abu-Asab, Hakima Amri, and Marc S. Micozzi, Avicenna’s Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts, 2013); Faith Wallis, Medieval Medicine: A Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 9. Allison Levy, “Augustine’s Concessions and Other Failures: Mourning and Masculinity in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany,” in Grief and Gender, 700–1700, ed. Jennifer C. Vaught and Lynne Dickson Bruckner (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 85.
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understanding the power of emotions in community, and challenge assumptions about the relation between emotion and gender. If some medieval humoral treatises naturalize gendering emotion, others focus on the physiological production of emotional signs. Gregory of Nyssa, following late classical medical teachings, for example, identifies the stomach as the seat of tears, which contracts upon the other organs and subsequently compresses the bile duct, pushing moisture up and out into the brain, whereupon ducts drain into the eyes and produce tears.10 Reading Gregory, Mary Carruthers points out that this school did not see tears as indicative of any particular emotional reality, but only as an “agent or instrument rather than a symptom or representation—and their product must be carefully examined.”11 Like us, medievals worried about the disjuncture between truth and bodily reality, and wondered, Can tears, gasps, blushing, or fainting help us discern whether affective displays are genuine? And can feelings be controlled by a body or a mind? If feelings are not controllable, who should be held accountable when we are moved to do the unthinkable? The wager in our fabliau concedes that all we know about a woman in mourning is that she seems upset, and the supposition of the wager itself is couched in the unreliability of bodily signs: “si dolente comme el se fait” (as grief-stricken as she makes herself seem). These concerns remind us that feelings become emotions as they are produced and read in community. Feelings become emotions as they gesture successfully toward a shared understanding between people, as bodies become sites for performing community.
Performativity: Emotions as Cultural Practices Bodily displays of feeling can be likened to performatives—they make feelings real for others, they are exterior signs that are supposed to perform an inner psychological reality. In The Erotics of Grief, I take emotions to be culturally contextualized performances of feelings. And the felicity of performatives, as J. L. Austin and Judith Butler separately remind us, depends on community.12 Reading others’ affective displays creates community—it puts the emitter (the feeler) in dialogue with the reader, who processes the display 10. Mary Carruthers, “On Affliction and Reading, Weeping and Argument: Chaucer’s Lachrymose Troilus in Context,” Representations 93, no. 1 (2006): 8. 11. Ibid., 9. 12. On the performative and its powers see Judith P. Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997); J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). See also William Reddy’s “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38, no. 3 ( June 1997): 327.
Three Questions with MIEKA ERLEY author of On Russian Soil 1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?
3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?
While completing this manuscript, I received an unexpected letter. It was from a hydrologist and applied mathematician who worked in the Kara-Kum Desert in the Soviet period. He shared his enthusiasm about one of my articles about the Soviet writer Andrei Platonov and the transformation of nature in the Kara-Kum Desert. As a cultural historian and literary scholar, I was really gratified to find that my work could speak to many publics and bridge the gap between the so-called “two
In recent years, there’s been a shift in the humanities away from traditional humanist inquiry and towards materialist orientations. I think this is an exciting development. But I hope that we will find ways to re-balance our approaches after these successive linguistic and materialist turns.
“As a cultural historian and literary scholar, I was really gratified to find that my work could speak to many publics.” cultures” of science and the humanities. 2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now? New materialism and STS became quite central to this book. I wish that I had been more familiar with these bodies of theory and scholarship earlier in the process.
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