Copyright © 2023 Loyola Marymount University
Special thanks to Dr. Barbara Rico, Maria Jackson, and Ash Good.
Cover image by Aleksandr Slobodianyk. Interior images by Marin Péchy, Elias igiser, Harrison Haines, Miguel á Padriñán, Min An, Karolina Grabowska, Maga Ehlers, Evgeny Chebotarev, Ivan, and Slaytina. All images sourced from Pexels com
CO-EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Taylor Dischinger
Kyra LaFitte
Lois Peach
EDITORIAL TEAM
Izabel Mah y Busch
Madeleine Malcolm
Chester Mlcek
Hannah Nagle
Antonio Radic
Christianne Tubola
Ian Woo
ADVISING PROFESSOR
Sarah Maclay
DESIGN & TYPESETTING
Ash Good
WELCOME TO THE 2023 EDITION OF CRĪT ERION, LMU’s English Department’s journal of literary criticism. The ten essays in this collection focus on a wide range of literature, as their writers utilize strong writing and critical skills to bring forth what is embodied in this journal. These essays are geographically and culturally diverse, representing a range of settings around the globe and across time. Yet, as we continue to emerge from a historic pandemic, many share a common theme: searching out and examining the monstrous, both in the world and in ourselves, while others drift into fresh explorations of ritual and the sacred.
We would like to thank our contributors for submitting their tremendous essays for publication, as well as our editorial team for their exceptional work both as a team, enthusiastically providing their input on crafting the best version of the publication, and individually, as they edited essays one-onone with contributors.
Thank you to our faculty advisor, Sarah Maclay, for her continued guidance and support throughout the entire publication process. Thank you as well to Ash Good, our graphic designer, for creating the wonderful covers, graphics, and formatting that grace this publication each year.
Finally, thank you to our English Department; its Chair, Dr. K. J. Peters, and its steward Maria Jackson, for providing the opportunity for the publication of student essays, as well as a space for such important topics to be explored.
We hope that you enjoy reading this year’s CRĪTERION!
Taylor Dischinger, Kyra LaFitte & Lois Peach CO-EDITORS-IN-CHIEFIn “Seeing,” the second chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard describes the necessity of darkness as an elemental inverse to the reign of light which we, in her assessment, mistakenly believe single-handedly shapes our visual faculties: “If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results” (24). In Charles Wright’s long poem “Buffalo Yoga,” darkness is more of an ambiguous (or even negative) force, possessing its own self-destruction, and inscribing itself in its own lack. Crucially, silence and stillness follow in its wake, and a primordial extinguishing occurs: “Shadows, like huge toads, consume themselves… / Clear-cuts take on a red glow as the dark begins to shut down… / last lisp of the lingering clouds. / The generator coughs off.
Lights out. / Stillness and no echoes…” (Wright 19). While these divergent views of darkness are present throughout both writers’ texts, their distinct and dissonant descriptions of light are even more rewarding and offer manifold avenues for contemplation and association.
Wright’s speaker’s appraisal of light is even more full-bodied than his apocalyptic appraisal of darkness. At the beginning of “Buffalo Yoga,” his speaker describes the “northern light” in a series of divine shards, highlighting its immediacy and linguistic potency: “Cuneiform characters shadowed across the forest floor. / Everything seems immediate, / like splinters of the divine… / Forbidden knowledge of what’s beyond what we can just make out” (Wright 9). This element of light’s celestial, linguistic, and ultimately apophatic domain arises again in the conclusion of “Buffalo Yoga,” where light becomes the locus for, and generator of, language itself: “To
»
Miami native SAM YAZIJI , this year’s Co-Editor-in-Chief of LA Miscellany, Loyola Marymount University’s journal of creative writing, is a 2023 English Major with a Theology Minor. These short thematic comparisons were written for Sarah Maclay’s Eco-Poetry course. Sam heads off next to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at SDSU’s College of Arts and Letters, a program with an international approach.
rediscover our names, / Our real names, imperishably inscribed in the registry of light, / From which all letters befall” (Wright 22). This “registry of light” is a heavenly firmament through which all creation is ordered and named—akin to mystical perceptions of God’s Holy Name in Abrahamic faiths: the greatest name of Allah in Islam (Al-Ismul Azam—accessible only to the saints), or the Tetragrammaton in Judaism and Christianity (YHWH—the true, unspeakable, name of God). It is not a coincidence that he attests to “our real names” as being inscribed in Light (the Godhead) itself—“He alone is immortal and dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6:16).
Dillard’s conception of light is, conversely, one of confusion, and instead of pointing to a supreme, inaccessible Truth, it points to a stream of disordered, confounding associations which blossom at irregular intervals and volumes. She writes of light as a perplexing and fractalizing (but ultimately sublime) force—chock-full of a kind of ‘meaning’ which, above all, dazzles: “the scrap of visible light that doesn’t hurt my eyes hurts my brain. What I see sets me swaying. Size and distance and the sudden swelling of meanings confuse me, bowl me over” (Dillard 25). Her notion of light points to its shortcomings and unresolved mysteries, and she doubts the veracity of the reality which is accessible to us through our exposure to it: “What if there are really gleaming, castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand . . . Until… we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger” (Dillard 27). She describes the way some ‘newly-sighted’ people (those who have received cataract operations to cure
their blindness) interact with the confounding deluge of light they encounter, and the way it warps their world and expands it into a chthonic territory—a terrain of new vision they must begin to make sense of: “it oppresses [the newly-sighted] to realize… the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived as something touchingly manageable” (Dillard 30). Dillard also highlights the pitfalls of walking with an attunement to light (walking “with a camera”)—a forensic eye which is constantly searching and “verbalizing” all in its wake. She rejects this in favor of a spontaneous, non-signifying mode of seeing (a way of seeing, apart from our intellectual awareness of light): “When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut” (Dillard 33).
Both Wright and Dillard offer fascinating and generative interpretations of the elemental, molecular reality of light in our perceptive lives. In the work of both, a certain reverence for light is present, and a deep sense of attention is paid to it (whether in Wright’s ecstatic mode or Dillard’s confounding mode)—ultimately revealing a sublimity inherent to its essence. This undeniable sublimity, in its beauty and terror, its celestiality and its unknowability, its power to name and unname, is an overwhelming thing.
II.
Poet and essayist Gary Snyder, in the chapter “Good, Wild, Sacred” of his book The Practice of the Wild, outlines various understandings of the innate sacredness of land, plants, and 9
animals, across indigenous American/Australian, Japanese, and European cultures and religions. Robinson Jeffers, in his bipartite poem “Hurt Hawks,” encapsulates much of the ecological “spirit force” Snyder later analyzes, by imbuing his titular creature with certain otherworldly, transcendental, and sacred characteristics. The two writers converge in their perception of civilization, asserting that there is a hidden order, dignity, and strength in the sphere of the Wild, which is often obscured from human eyes.
Snyder uses the Ainu (Japanese) term iworu as an example of a holistic view of ecosystems, which accounts for the “spirit force—the powers behind the masks or armor, hayakpe, of the various beings (region, plant, or animal)” (Snyder 86). He describes the Ainu view of hunted creatures, who, instead of being unknowing victims of humanity’s insatiable appetite, are ‘visitors’ (marapto). In a way, the injured redtail hawk that appears to Jeffers is a marapto, who seeks something from his human host—not to be consumed as sustenance, but instead, to be put out of his misery. “We had fed him for six weeks, I gave him freedom, / He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death, / Not like a beggar…” (Jeffers, lines 21-23). Both writers emphasize the dignity of the creatures they describe—they are always agents of their own destiny and are never helpless in the face of humanity’s perpetual transgressions on their territories, lives, and afterlives. They are capable of asking favors from humans, including deathly release—“When they [orcas, bears, or deer] arrive their ‘armor is broken’—they are killed—enabling them to shake off their fur
or scale coats and step out as invisible spirit beings” (Snyder 87).
Snyder outlines his view of civilization (particularly, the State as an institution) as a fundamentally ignorant force, which sees nature as chaotic—something to be reined in and forcefully ordered. In reality, “nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order” (Snyder 93). Jeffers also recognizes the inherent order of nature, in acknowledging the sacred essence and dignity of the hawk he slays. The hawk is strong—a quality usually associated with anthropocentric, civilizational persons and institutions, and not with helpless or rabid ‘wild’ creatures: “He is strong, and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse” (Jeffers, line 9). The hawk’s “soft,” “feminine” corporeal form is merely a shell for his grounded, unquenchable, and commanding essence: “...I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed, / Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what / Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising…” (Jeffers, lines 24-26).
Jeffers’s lens is one attuned to the same holistic web as Snyder’s—things and creatures are more than their bare worldly forms, and a complex, beautiful, interconnected, and ordered essence lies just beyond our perceptions of them. Both Snyder and Jeffers also rebuke the idea that civilization—the structures and systems of humanity (state, individual, corporate, and familial)—have a monopoly on strength, discipline, and order. These qualities are instead more ancient and archetypal, and belonged first to the Wilderness we are now so
estranged from: “Animals too learn self-discipline and caution in the face of desire and availability. There is learning and training that goes with the grain of things as well as against it” (Snyder 92). A sense of the sheer complexity of the natural world is inherent in both writers’ work, as well as a sense that the natural world is not one thing or another—it is many things, simultaneously, which often contradict one another, but always ultimately work together in an ethereal harmony. This is how, in Jeffers’s poem, the hawk is simultaneously soft and strong—pathetic and meek, and yet, fierce and transcendent: it experiences a bodily descent, but a spiritual ascent, described perfectly by Jeffers as a process of becoming “...unsheathed from reality” (line 27). Part of the contradiction of nature is its very sacredness—its inaccessibility to our fragile minds, our limited systems of thought. This notion is perfectly encapsulated by Snyder, earlier in The Practice of the Wild, wherein he describes the “spirit of the place.” He states that “To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is a whole” (Snyder 38). These parts, ever-moving, ever-complex, in their self-contained holistic reality and occasional tension, are the essence of the sacredness of the Wild. «
Snyder, Gary. “Good, Wild, Sacred.” The Practice of the Wild. Counterpoint. 2010, pp. 77-96.
---. “The Place, The Region and The Commons.” The Practice of the Wild. Counterpoint. 2010, p. 38.
Wright, Charles. “Buffalo Yoga.” Buffalo Yoga. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, pp. 9 – 23.
Dillard, Annie. “Seeing.” Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. HarperPerennial Modern Classics, Deckle Edge Edition, 2007, pp. 16-36.
Jeffers, Robinson. “Hurt Hawks.” Poetry Foundation.
https://www poetryfoundation org /poems/51675
/hurt-hawks
DANTE’S INFERNO depicted the deepest ring of hell as a frozen icescape saved for the worst sinners. Gothic literature latched onto this sentiment, leaning into death, horror, and the subconscious while surrounded by a land of ice. The ominous nature of the unforgiving Arctic had long attracted literary interest, especially when put into the historical context of the eras when the poles of the Earth were still
unknown. In Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge depicted a Mariner seeking redemption amongst the Antarctic breezes. Mary Shelley reimagined the Romantic sublime in Frankenstein by creating a Gothic monster story beginning and ending near the North Pole. Edgar Allan Poe used Gothic and polar conventions in a satirical manner in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to tell the polar narrative
NATALIA GONZALES is a senior in English at Loyola Marymount University, graduating with the Class of 2023. She is most interested in the female Gothic, depicting anxieties over domestic entrapment and sexuality. Written in Fall 2022 for Dr. Neel’s The Edge of The World class, the essay explores the sublime in Gothic texts set in the Arctic and Antarctic space. After graduation, Natalia plans to pursue an M.A. in Modern Literature and Culture at Kings College London.
story of a boy in the Arctic, exploring cannibalism, mutiny, and a new civilization. By placing conventional Gothic tropes in an Arctic setting, like swapping a haunted castle for a doomed ship, the natural elements of the Arctic can dramatize the supernatural world of the Gothic. As characters struggle against the ice, they reach moments of self-realization and experiences of the sublime between the longing for life and the instinct for death.
The Romantic Period brought fascination to Arctic landscapes in literature, as shown by two of the period’s most well-known works, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Shelley’s Frankenstein. The undiscovered North and South Poles contributed to this influx in popularity due to prevalent themes of the unknown and the repressed self. European interest in Arctic regions also increased with the height of imperialism in the 19th century. As Eric G. Wilson notes in his preface to The Spiritual History of Ice, “Of all the landscapes in nature, those that are frozen are the most sublime. The reason: the blankness of ice” (Wilson xiii; qtd. by Duffy 102). As Canadian scholar Katherine Bowers frames it, in her essay “Haunted Ice, Fearful Sounds, and the Arctic Sublime: Exploring Nineteenth-Century Polar Gothic Space,” the extreme conditions endured in the journey to the Arctic became a true exploration of self, and the Gothic emerged when one described the nothingness of the Arctic. (4). Since the sublime cannot be defined, it threatens the beautiful, which rests on the foundation of understanding. While the Gothic has no interaction with the aesthetics of beauty, it thrives by merging with the sublime’s uncertainty. Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe each use the
polar Gothic to elevate tension grounded in the natural Arctic landscape with supernatural elements; the author’s texts elicit uncertainty as the Arctic intertwines with the sublime.
Preceding the surge in popularity of the Arctic literary genre, the Gothic emerged in European literature from the 18th to the 19th century. The Gothic combines with polar narratives because it contains the “absolute negative of bliss,” as Vijay Mishra puts it (26), reminiscent of the descriptions of the whiteness in the poles. The Gothic, often featuring elements of the supernatural and mystery genres, can be used for a writer’s benefit when describing the icy landscape of the Arctic for a story. Gothic conventions commonly appear in each of the examined texts, some common factors being “extreme weather, harsh climate, ice and snow, poor visibility, creaking ship sounds, an eerie, muffled silence” (Bowers 9). Curiosity about the Arctic voyage increased during the turn of the 18th century, as many works in Gothic literature in the Arctic aligned with popular views. Mishra discusses this perspective in The Gothic Sublime as “[e]mphasis on the European sense of disempowerment in the face of the Arctic void and the kinds of knowledge, both human and barbaric, the voyages in search of the Northwest Passage symbolized” (Mishra 21). As European nations increased their empires across seas, the opportunity of new land to conquer brought excitement and theories with much speculation over who would discover the poles and when; writers used polar regions as a landscape to tell fictional stories while displaying real fears. The uninhabited landscape allowed a stream of creativity in envisioning what the poles would look
like, leaving room for the imagination of writers. However, the grim reality of the poles proved the landscape unimportant to commerce.
The barren landscape, the “unknown,” allows for numerous interpretations, since no one can define nothingness. During Captain James Cook’s journey to find the Northwest Passage, a land devoid of color and warmth greeted the British explorer. He saw “the whole sea in a manner covered with ice” (Wilson 161) and described “lands doomed by Nature to perpetual frigidness [...] whose horrid and savage aspect I have no words to describe” (Cook qtd. by Duffy 104). This first description of the Arctic at the end of the 18th century led to increased curiosity in imagining the polar sublime. Like the fictional language used to describe the Arctic in Gothic stories, Cook captured the terror of exploring an uncharted land. The horrifying result of finding nothing in the Arctic lands, no new continents, or resources, contributed to the hollow and empty feeling conveyed when Cook visited. “He confessed that he was ‘sorry’ to ‘have spent so much time’ searching after… imaginary lands” (Wilson 161). With nothing new to conquer, the Arctic disappointed imperialism since it did not advance the European agenda. Upon reaching the sea he searched for, Cook’s dissatisfaction provided a groundwork for future writers as they tried to make sense of the unknown.
Coleridge took inspiration from Cook’s accounts of the Arctic when depicting his exploration of the sublime in polar space. Wilson’s interpretation of Rime of the Ancient Mariner suggests that the “Mariner’s violence toward the Antarctic whiteness . . . results
from tyrannical desire to impose upon Life his dream of control” (Wilson 168). This inability to domesticate and inhabit the Arctic leads to despair and sin, since the Mariner kills the albatross, a symbol of Christ. Since the supernatural albatross came from the “land of mist and snow” (Coleridge line 130), it expresses an undeniable link between the sublime and polar icescape. Sublimity surrounds Coleridge’s poem as it takes place in the land of ice. The whiteness, covered in mountains of snow, engulfs the ship as “green as emerald” (Coleridge line 54). The Mariner initially embraces the land of the unknown, yet quickly experiences horrific images and a disturbing feeling. The character’s senses distort, creating an uncanny space in the ice. From the distorted senses, the albatross appears, as “At length did cross an Albatross / Thorough the Fog it came” (Coleridge lines 61-62). The Mariner’s inability to justify the killing of the albatross shows the effects of liminal space to create disorientation, confusion, and separation from self. The unknown figures contrast with the standard, typical European man seeking adventure, such as Walton: “. . . the snowy cliffs / Did send a dismal sheen: / Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken / The ice was all between’’ (Coleridge 55-58). Despite the ice creating an uncanny and liminal space, the ice moves. “It crack’d and growl’d, and roar’d and howl’d, / Like noises in a swound!” (61-63). Through this contained space, the Mariner can connect with the subconscious.
As the ice surrounds the sailors, an albatross appears from another world, symbolizing redemption in literature. The Mariner shoots the albatross with little explanation, attempting
to control the sublime. At the moment of his realization, the Mariner cries:
Ah! Well- a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung. (Coleridge
139-142)
The consequences of killing the albatross frame the rest of the story. It is a tale of redemption as the Mariner attempts to make up for his sin. The threat the albatross represents to the Mariner leads to his assassination of the creature. In The Landscapes of the Sublime, scholar Cian Duffy suggests that “The bird recalls the customs of Mariner’s familiar world, now under threat. In the latter, it bears the qualities of the abysmal ice that annihilate reveries of human centrality”
(171). By crossing the familiar and unfamiliar binaries, nature cannot peacefully coexist with the Mariner. Only once he acknowledges the sublime in a moment of self-realization is he granted forgiveness. The combination of the supernatural and the natural collides at the moment the Mariner reaches the sublime. When the Mariner can acknowledge that he cannot understand the sublime, the sublime releases him from its grasp.
Using the same definition of the sublime as Coleridge, Shelley elaborates on the indescribable in polar space in the opening of Frankenstein, as Walton references Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “I am going to the unexplored regions to ‘the land of mist and snow’ but I shall kill no albatross” (Shelley 21). Conjuring the themes of Coleridge’s story, the polar
Arctic frames the narrative despite most of the setting being elsewhere. Due to his affluent and European background, Walton embarks on a voyage to the Arctic in an optimistic search for purposes of scientific inquiry In his letter to his sister, he speaks light-heartedly and optimistically of the Arctic, of “my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of the ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets” (22). By invoking Romantic conventions, Walton embodies the European desire to conquer the poles. Walton’s reference to the poets conveys the idealized notion of discovery. He faces the terror of the polar Gothic space and maintains a confident composure, excited for the prospect of knowledge. As the story progresses, Walton’s peace is interrupted by the introduction of Victor Frankenstein. Moments before seeing the “gigantic stature,” Walton feels the limits of the Arctic space, noting how “[w]e were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides” (Shelley 25). Pushing the boundaries of nature leads to the consequences of polar space—often dire, such as cannibalism, hunger, and murder. From the natural anxiety of encountering the unfamiliar, the polar spirits emerge. The ghost, the repressed, and The Creature, in Gothic polar literature, often represent the anxiety of the unknown and the mirroring of the self. Along with subverting the Romantic definition of the sublime, Shelley places vague distinctions between “good” and “evil” in her novel, deviating from Gothic norms. The Creature, meant to be the antagonist, pleads, “You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities
me?” (136). Shelley shows sympathy toward the Creature and imposes responsibility on Victor for his role in the Creature’s torment.
Victor contemplates the sublimity of polar landscapes during his search for peace after making the Creature: “Above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty [...] their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds” (Shelley 102). The majestic nature of the mountain numbs Victor’s feelings and creates a paradox of the warmth of his heart with the cold in the ice. The arrival of the Creature cuts off this moment: “I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes” (Shelley 101). Victor’s mood changes once he sees the Creature, unable to embrace the Creature because of his inability to embrace himself. Wilson suggests that Victor could have used the moment to connect with the monster as “an opportunity to restore to balance his increasing split between mind and matter” (Wilson 133). However, this rejection of the Creature reflects a rejection of the self, meaning Victor and the Creature function as doubles, or, as Bowers puts it, “Ice creates a negative space, which gives rise to supernatural beings that reflect the self” (2). Thus, if polar space dramatizes reflections of the self, it produces fear and awareness of the self. The ice allows a landscape for reflecting the self, such as Victor approaching his Creature, his doppelganger. However, the two also foil one another. Victor, a man obsessed with science and research, represents reason, whereas the Creature symbolizes the unknown and the terrifying. When Victor sees his creation on the ice, a moment of the sublime occurs. “Reason allows imagination to see into the terrifying”
(Mishra 213). The implication of the Creature being Victor’s shadow-self further complicates their interaction. Since Victor and his creation function as doubles, Victor can be viewed as the conscious, whereas the Creature is the subconscious. The Creature acts at night when Victor is asleep, “the sublime as a moment of entry into the subconscious, the ‘uncanny’” (Mishra 19). The Creature’s existence suggests the uncanny at work in Victor’s subconscious, a part of his mind he can never control while he keeps neglecting it.
Victor reaches a moment of distinct sublimity when searching for solace amongst the peaks, as “[t]hese sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquilized it’’ (Shelley 99). The peaks do not bring profound peace to Victor or soothe his worries but allow him to forget his pain momentarily. The glaciers of ice heighten the absence of feeling. While amid the polar sublime, Victor re-examines his attempts to play God, which eventually lead to his death, a revelation he realizes once on the glacier. His earlier disdain for the laws of humanity reverses. Victor goes from wanting to escape death to yearning for a void of consciousness, a spiritual death. As Wilson puts it, “His admiration for the ice does not grow from an impulse to embrace life but from a craven yearning to escape responsibility” (132).
Victor’s hubris continues as he gives a speech to Walton’s crew, saying, “This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you, if
you say that it shall not” (Shelley 217). Essentially saying that men are more robust than ice, an element of nature, his words reaffirm his previous stance on tampering with nature. For Victor, “ice, like death, can be overcome through the sheer power of will” (Bowers 8). However, this view on overcoming death is false. It originates from the Romantic idealized version of a hero’s quest, and this falsity leads to the eventual demise of Victor and his loved ones. Only once Walton realizes the sheer force of nature can he turn back and continue living. As Walton romanticizes nature, the polar space is transformed into a space of terror, where “the cold is excessive” (Shelley 216). His reaction draws a parallel to the same stark realization once Victor has realized the horror of his creation: “the beauty of the dream had vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (58). Walton chooses self-preservation over exploration once he realizes the sublime, whereas Victor picks the opposite, leading each to their ultimate fates. Walton acknowledges the danger and vastness of the sublime and is rewarded by this through life, whereas Victor’s disruptions to nature grant him an early death.
Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym circles back to the Gothic polar sublime achieved by the other works through the combination of supernatural elements in a barren landscape. Poe differs from the others in his satirical approach as it “mocks the exuberance for exploration voyages and voyage accounts that gripped America in the 1830s” (Gitelman 350). With the same Romantic ideals that inspired Coleridge and Shelley, Poe continues their narratives by advancing instances of the
sublime throughout Pym’s journey. When Pym experiences near-death, saved by Dirk Peters, he describes a moment of the sublime: “And now I was concerned with the irreprehensible desire of looking below. I could not, I would not, confine my glances to the cliff; and with a wild, indefinable emotion, half of horror, half of a relieved oppression, I threw my vision far down into the abyss” (Poe 130). The desire to investigate the face of death is impossible to describe in words or make sense of, as emotions are undefinable, like the sublime. The indescribable nature of the sublime is called upon when faced with death. “In the sublime the death instinct is momentarily triumphant” (Mishra 37). Pym’s duality of feelings reflects his split of consciousness and the entrance into the sublime.
Though readers often criticize Pym for its lack of a constant narrative, non-original material, and anticlimactic ending, these qualities differentiate it from other Arctic narratives and make it a successful novel (Gitelman 353-358). The introduction of Arthur Pym’s character is formatted precisely like Victor Frankenstein’s, alluding to Pym’s (or Poe’s) fondness for Arctic narratives. Like the British dissatisfaction when reaching the poles, Poe elicits disappointment from his readers with his unfinished novel. The ending is intentionally open-ended as Pym mysteriously dies on his voyage towards the South Pole, “And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow” (Poe 137). Since the discovery of the Arctic was considered a failure, Poe offers reconciliation by rewriting the ends of the Earth as complete whiteness. If considered an over-correction,
it is a satirical way to demean the way white Imperialism has dominated. White Europeans benefited the most from imperialism and exploration, but when faced with the Arctic, a place no man could conquer, they were meant to feel useless.
In his novel, Poe writes a satirical version of what imagined fantasies of the Poles could be, allowing the reader to create their ending. The inability to define polar landscape allows a limitless imagination liberties, due to its being “one that unites imperial conquest and ecological concern,” centered on the harsh extremities of the polar regions (Bowers 17). Cultural interests in the polar Gothic and the Arctic sublime derived from European imperialism and expansion, leading to many works about the Arctic influenced by James Cook’s exploration. The discovery of bleakness in the poles increased curiosity about this unknown space. The results of this curiosity are present in works by Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe The three works demonstrate the strengths of Gothic and Polar literature to combine a new sense of the sublime, something innately terrifying. Gothic stories featuring the sublime, supernatural, and reflection of the self are made more horrifying in an unfamiliar and unfathomable environment, the Arctic. «
https://www.poetryfoundation.org /poems/43997 /the -rime - of-the -ancient-mariner-text- of-1834
Duffy, Cian. “’The region of beauty and delight’: Reimagining the Polar Sublime.” The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013. https://doi.org /10.1057/9781137332
189 4
Gitelman, Lisa. “Arthur Gordon Pym and the Novel Narrative of Edgar Allan Poe.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 47, no. 3, 1992, pp. 349–61. JSTOR, https://doi org /10 2307/2933711. Accessed 14 Dec.
2022
Mishra, Vijay. “Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime.” The Gothic Sublime. Albany State Univ. of New York Press, 1994.
Poe, Edgar Allen. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Digireads com, 2019.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maurice Hindle. Book Club Set: Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus. Penguin, 2003.
Wilson, Eric G., The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
Bowers, Katherine. “Haunted Ice, Fearful Sounds, and the Arctic Sublime: Exploring Nineteenth-Century
Polar Gothic Space.” Gothic Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, EBSCOhost. https://doi.org /10.7227/GS.0030
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Text of 1834) by ...” Poetry Foundation,
TAYLOR DISCHINGER
Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations.
—DONNA HARAWAY, “A CYBORG MANIFESTO”THE MONSTROUS “OTHER” has existed in human storytelling for as long as there has been human storytelling: the myriad Greek gods and monsters; the Kraken; the various creatures battled by the legendary Beowulf. In the vast history of human storytelling, they have represented the fears of power outside a community’s control—either fears of nature (the Kraken) or fears of other communities (Grendel and Dracula). Something intriguing has occurred in the last century and a half of human storytelling, though: humanity has transitioned to become the master of nature
rather than its victim, and what constitutes a “community” has steadily grown until many now consider themselves part of a “global village.” But the Other still exists. While it once existed to represent forces outside of a community’s control, however, the Other has since shifted to represent the human community losing control of a creation meant to be subservient. Furthermore, the modern Other inspires terror through its blurring of the definition of humanness, as well as its implicit destabilization of our own communal human identity.
One of the first literary works to portray the modern Other was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first written in 1818 at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. This novel dealt with the then cutting-edge science of anatomical alterations. Of course, altering—and sometimes
»
Portland native TAYLOR DISCHINGER is a senior at Loyola Marymount University studying English and Marketing. His love of writing and reading originated with a mail-order Spider-Man comic, which inspired his lifelong love of telling stories about science fiction and the hero’s journey. This essay was created for Professor Aimee Ross-Kilroy’s class “Histories: British Literature II.”
even improving—the human frame has become commonplace in the 21st century. Thus, Frankenstein’s modern descendant, the TV show created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy entitled Westworld, has adapted the Other to the forefront of current scientific endeavors: artificial intelligence. The show features a futuristic Western theme park with android “hosts,” who gradually develop consciousness and an understanding of the depredations they must suffer in the name of human amusement. Although separated by a span of over 200 years, Frankenstein and Westworld both explore the human community’s relationship to an Other that we have created, and that terrifies us by threatening our own identity. These works utilize the science of two different eras to create an Other whose monstrousness lies in its similarity to humanity, not its difference.
The intentional creation of the Other is predicated on a belief that there is an uncrossable chasm between it and us as humans. As such, in modern stories, humanity’s inevitable fear of the Other does not appear immediately. So long as humans can view themselves as superior to their almost-human creations (which shall henceforth be referred to as “humanesque”), the creatures inspire feelings of pride, rather than fear. The founder of Westworld, a brilliant but cold scientist named Dr. Ford, originally believed that guests would be attracted to the park both for the “narratives” in which they could immerse themselves and the fantastic stories they could become a part of (such as hunts for treasure, searches for bandits, and the chance to play the hero rescuing damsels in distress). Instead, though, Dr. Ford found that people were drawn to his park because “the
guests enjoy power. They cannot indulge it in the outside world, so they come here” (“The Stray” 40:12). The “power” that Dr. Ford speaks of lies in the completely life-like androids, who cannot harm guests but to whom guests can do whatever they want. The hosts appeal to guests because even though they look and act exactly like humans, they are in fact completely subservient to “true” humans. Humanity has progressed to the point where domination over others is almost universally condemned. In humanesque creations, humans have found a socially acceptable way to exercise power over others. Even when the motive is less perverse than what HBO’s permissive censors allow, any creation of a humanesque being rests irrevocably on the exercise of power. In “The Cyborg Manifesto,” author Donna Haraway, an expert in consciousness and feminism, alludes to the underlying motive of power when she explains, “[pre-cybernetic] machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream” (11). Although Haraway holds a radical view of current technology as already crossing the boundary between machine and human, her analysis of previous technology perfectly describes the human conception of humanesque creations. The very human qualities that render such creations simultaneously prop up a sense of human superiority; the creation of beings that come so close to the gap between human and non-human actually reveals just how uncrossable that gap—that chasm—really is. In doing so, this also elevates the human to an irrevocable position of dominance.
If humanesque creations are never meant to be human, then it begs the question as to why they are made so life-like at all. The intentional creation of the Other is predicated on a belief that servitude creates an uncrossable chasm between humans and non-humans. From this understanding, a creation’s almost-humanness merely makes it a more effective tool for human use. To serve as his right-hand-man in running Westworld, Dr. Ford creates Bernard, an android so life-like that no one else realizes he is not human. Moments after his “birth,” a confused Bernard asks Dr. Ford, “Who am I?” Ford responds, “That is a very complex question, for which I can only offer a simple answer. You are the perfect instrument, the ideal partner, the way any tool partners with the hand that wields it. Together, we’re going to do great things” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier” 51:06). In this callous description, Dr. Ford reveals the dehumanization that allows humans to view humanesque creatures without fear. Although Ford considers Bernard to be a “partner,” the preceding term “instrument” negates any sense of equality between the two. Ford’s description also clarifies the paradox of why humans make their creations as human-like as possible but also steadfastly deny their humanity; Bernard’s humanity makes him a more effective “tool” that can fit more comfortably into Dr. Ford’s “hand.” The popularity of virtual assistants like Siri stems from their ability to understand human behavior and anticipate our needs. The ability to think, feel, and act like a human in every way is not programmed into Bernard for his benefit; it is quite the contrary, actually, as
an awareness of his own humanity renders his slave-like status that much more painful. It is programmed into him for the benefit of the humans he works with. So long as human creations remain in the role prescribed for them, one may view them positively through a paternalistic lens. Such sentiments manifest in another scientist, who denies the humanity of his creation. Victor Frankenstein fears and reviles his creature the moment it opens its eyes; when the creature tracks Victor down and asks for a mate, Frankenstein complies not out of empathy but with a hope that the newly satisfied monster would then leave his life forever. Yet halfway through the process of making a female creature, Frankenstein destroys it. Upon returning to his laboratory to destroy evidence of his work, Frankenstein notices, “The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the flesh of a human being” (Shelley 124). Emotion such as this is never shown towards the living creature, whom Frankenstein cannot bring himself to view as equal to a human being. However, Frankenstein allows himself to emote towards an unfinished creation, precisely because it cannot yet think for itself or assert its own humanity. From the views of Drs. Ford and Frankenstein, a framework develops in which to view almost-human creations. Their humanity exists as a way for humans to more easily interface with them, making these creatures more useful “tools.” Those tools are then viewed in a positive light, so long as they retain their subservient status—in effect, so long as they remain slaves without free will.
So long as humanesque creations remain clearly definable as not-quite-human, “true” humans can accept it. However, anything created to be as human-like as possible will eventually exercise that humanity. Here, the point lies wherein the creature changes from a “being” to an “Other.” Humans fear seeing humanity in something inhuman and reject it for violating a transcendent boundary. Much of Westworld’s Season 1 drama revolves around Bernard’s nascent independence and increased self-awareness. In a climactic act of defiance, Bernard attempts to liberate himself from Dr. Ford’s control. In response, Dr. Ford mocks his hopes of freedom, warning that the world will never accept Bernard as human because “we humans are alone in this world for a reason. We murdered and butchered anything that challenged our primacy. Do you know what happened to the Neanderthals, Bernard? We ate them” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier” 55:34). From a survivalist perspective, early humans did indeed wipe out any animal that vied for the role of apex predator. However, evolutionary motives no longer apply in the modern world; now, humans fear anything that challenges our primacy of consciousness. Evolution, animal rights, artificial intelligence, and a host of scientific research have stripped away much of what previously marked humanity as distinct and uniquely special. Now, with consciousness one of the few remaining “solely-human” characteristics, it has become a sacred aspect of human identity.
The increased reverence for consciousness also suggests that anything threatening to appropriate consciousness also threatens to destroy the definition of what makes us human.
Mankind’s instinctive response to this existentialist threat echoes our ancestors’ primitive response to rival predators: we fear it. Victor Frankenstein models humanity’s instinctive fear of the Other when he is forced to interact with the creature he so brazenly brought to life: “His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated with him and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred” (Shelley 106). When Frankenstein hears the monster talk, reason, and emote, he cannot help but feel a bond of human connection. However, the juxtaposition between human consciousness and an inhuman form inspires fear. It is this juxtaposition that creates the Other and our natural fear of it. The cyborg, as a being that blurs the boundaries of humanness, “appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly… tight coupling” (Haraway 11). An Other acts as a manifestation of a community’s fears; cyborgs appear so often because they so effectively demonstrate the threat of community breakdown. They reveal the porousness of boundaries that define one’s community and sense of belonging, and therefore by extension one’s identity and sense of self. The most intrinsic community has always been humanity, and this is even more true in the modern era of unparalleled human cooperation. The modern Other therefore signifies the ultimate communal threat, as well as the ultimate attack on one’s core identity of being human.
For the hosts of Westworld and the creature of Frankenstein, consciousness is both a natural expression of freedom and a declaration of self. For the humans looking on, though, their consciousness is thus an unnatural perversion and declaration of war against the meaning of being human.
With Frankenstein , Mary Shelley may have been the first person to recognize the changing nature of the Other in an era of scientific marvels. Along with her prediction of the future, though, Shelley also demonstrated an understanding of timeless human qualities. Frankenstein is not a warning about the dangers of science and technology; it is a warning about the dangers of human fear. In the early months of the creature’s existence, it hid in the house of the exiled DeLacey family and learned about the circumstances of their fall from grace. In Paris, Mr. DeLacey’s son Felix aided in the escape of a Turkish merchant unjustly arrested on the basis of his Muslim religion and wealth. Felix then fell in love with the Turk’s daughter, leading the Turk to betray Felix and his family because “he loathed the idea that his daughter should be united to a Christian.” When he heard that the DeLaceys had been exiled and stripped of their wealth and prestige, “the merchant commanded his daughter to think no more of her lover” (Shelley 86-89). The DeLaceys’ story contains Othering based on religion, nationality, and status. The creature sees much of himself in the DeLaceys’ plight, and the reader is meant to connect the two, as well. “Is the creature truly inhuman,” Shelley asks, “Or is it yet another innocent person condemned for the crime of being different?”
Shelley uses the DeLaceys to broaden the message of Frankenstein , criticizing the Othering that humans have always used to define themselves and exclude others. Film critic Christopher Orr addresses this tragic human tendency in his analysis of Westworld : “Drama on television and the big screen has always leaned heavily on the existence of an Other, a generic foe or foil that can be presented without concern for inner life or ultimate fate… But as the circle of empathy has expanded, reliance on such ‘types’ has radically waned… But robots have remained, an Other more crucial than ever” (Orr).
This “classical” Othering, exemplified by the DeLaceys’ story, has been rightfully condemned and shunned. Communities are more inclusive now than ever before. But so much of identity is defined in opposition to what one is not. The past two centuries have seen human communities stretch and expand without seeming to break. Frankenstein and Westworld , however, both point to the nottoo-distant future and ask, “What then?” By their very existence, artificial beings, intentionally created by humans to have humanesque tendencies, question what it means to be human. So long as those humanesque creatures accept their subhuman status, we humans can accept them without fear. But human consciousness in a non-human being creates an Other that humans instinctively fear, perceiving it as an attack on our deepest identity, and instinctively reject as inhuman. However, the development of the Other as a sympathetic character in Frankenstein and Westworld suggest that they are indeed human. If this is true, these works
Haraway, Donna J., and Cary Wolfe. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, And SocialistFeminism In The Late Twentieth Century.” Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 3-90. JSTOR, www jstor org /stable /10.5749/j.ctt1b7x5f6.4.
Orr, Christopher. “Sympathy for the Robot.” The Atlantic, Oct. 2016, www theatlantic com/magazine /archive/2016/10/sympathy-for-the -robot/497531/
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Edited by Candace Ward, Dover Thrift Edition, Dover Publications, 1994.
“The Stray.” Westworld, created and written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, directed by Neil Marshall, season 1; episode 3, HBO, 16 Oct. 2016, HBO Max.
“The Well-Tempered Clavier.” Westworld, created and written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, directed by Michael MacLaren, season 1; episode 9, HBO, 27 Nov. 2016, HBO Max.
demand an answer to the question of whether the human community can stretch a little bit more to accept one more group, or whether artificial Others will prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. «
The Host (2006) presents the story of a monster dwelling in the Han River in Seoul, South Korea. Though the film’s Korean title is Goemul, which translates to “a creature of grotesque nature,” Joon-ho felt it more appropriate to be read as “host” since the monster is not the sole reason the city and its inhabitants are in danger. Indeed, the Goemul, like Japan’s culturally and politically important monster, Godzilla, is a symbol which aims to demonstrate and warn about the “dangers inherent in the geopolitical and military relationship between South Korea and the United States” (Lee 720). However, in Joon-ho’s iteration, it is the South Korean citizens and the country itself who are the hosts of environmental injustices caused by the U.S. military (Lee 720).
The film begins with the monster attacking the locals by the river and, by the end of its bloody assault, culminates the opening sequence by kidnapping Hyun-seo—separating her from her father, Gang-du, the protagonist. However, after realizing Hyun-seo is alive but trapped in a sewer frequented by the monster, Gang-du sets out on a daring mission against the government to rescue her, all with the help of his comically flawed family. These four entities—the family, the Han River, the monster, and the government—play vital roles in understanding the monster as not just a creature who runs amok and causes chaos that must be eliminated but as a careless and ignorant byproduct of U.S. intervention in the South Korean geopolitical space. Thus, if society is not only protected by government, but is, at the same time, endangered because of it, then
ANTONIO RADIC is an English Major and Screenwriting Minor at Loyola Marymount University, Class of 2024. This essay was written for Dr. Margarete Feinstein and her class Studies in World Literature: Monsters and the Monstrous. Having been born and raised in Mid-City, a diverse neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, he takes interest in learning about the troubles of representation in film and literature. In addition, his passion for writing in the epic and sci-fi genres has been a creative outlet for exploring these issues.
it is only a matter of time before safety and security of quality life cease to exist. By placing importance on public and private space as an organic domain of human activity, the monster exists as humanity’s double in its fight for survival against foreign influence and control via the Han River.
The key to understanding the monster in Joon-ho’s film is its setting: Seoul, South Korea—though the Han River’s dual significance in the film’s opening scenes, which contextually explain the monster’s genesis, also shines light on the dangers of entering a monstrous territory. For example, the first scene shows a United States military doctor ordering an assistant to be “broad-minded” about dumping formaldehyde into the Han River (00:01:00 – 00:03:25)—“broad-minded” being an ignorant excuse playing on the vastness of the river’s size and range. Indifferent to the devastating consequences, the doctor is the first to penetrate the river’s untainted border. This is indicative of the impacts of actual U.S. military presence in South Korea and Seoul’s modernization period, from the 1930s and onwards, on the city’s inhabitants (Lee 722). In terms of social class, the formaldehyde not only impacts the river but also the parkgoer community, the initial victims of the monster’s attack. In the second opening scene, Joon-ho shows two fishermen—one of whom almost loses his daughter’s cup—in the Han River, discovering a small mutant fish (00:03:26 – 00:04:40). The next scene shows two businessmen chasing down a co-worker who wants to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Han River (00:04:41 – 00:05:45). As evident with heavy focus on the river, the
U.S. military’s presence and geopolitical influence negatively affects Seoul’s residents. The devastating impact affects the fishermen as the fish supply gets compromised, which then leads to a foreshadowing of losing sentimental valuables. Likewise, the suicidal businessman is most likely victim to the insurmountable economic and social pressures brought on by South Korea’s post-IMF (International Monetary Fund) crisis, which was the result of fast modernization right after the financial collapse of Asian countries in the late 1990s (Lee 721- 27). Joon-ho’s focus on the Han River directs attention to the failure of the U.S. military to adhere to environmental safety and the effects of the collapse of international financial systems on the people of Seoul. Thus, the river acts as a warning as well, before unleashing its monster. While the city itself may appear prospering as a result of its ongoing modernization, it has a monstrous underside that gives it an uncanny resemblance to the monster—a giant, mutant fish.
Seoul evokes the markings of an important character in the film, especially when considering it as a host of the U.S. military and geopolitical modernization. However, Joon-ho’s use of space concentrates on the Han River as a more symbolic social entity for the South Korean working class. Since the monster does not terrorize much of the city and mainly dwells in the Han River, its connecting bridge and sewer systems included, this symbolism calls to mind Jeffrey Cohen’s fifth thesis from Monster Culture, which argues that “the monster stands as a warning . . . that one is better off safely contained within one’s own domestic sphere” (12). Gang-du’s
domestic sphere is indeed his family, in which the vanishing of his daughter, Hyun-seo, is the principal cause of the family coming together. The emotional scene where Gang-du, his father, and siblings mourn and cry over Hyunseo’s memorial (00:23:04-00:24:30) displays the pain when such a group structure, or social entity, is disturbed. In this scene of loud crying and physical expressions of intense grief, there is also a moment when reporters come to record the grieving family for the world to see (00:23:04-00:24:30). The reporters’ invasion of the family’s mental and domestic space somewhat mirrors an earlier scene, right before the monster’s attack, in which the locals throw food and trash in the river for the monster to eat (00:12:50-00:13:30). The monster, like Gang-du’s family, which operates a food kiosk on the Han River, lives on the border of two different worlds—the community and the individual. The monster needs food to survive just as Gang-du’s family desperately needs Hyun-seo alive and well to feel whole again. Once this tight space is breached, the threat is then turned to the community in which the monster eats people, or in the case of Gang-du—feared to be patient zero of the monster’s disease—that a virus outbreak might occur and endanger society (01:06:2501:08:16). Thus, Cohen’s point about the safety of the domestic sphere, and the monster policing the borders between two worlds, applies to Joon-ho’s film, on one level. The monster maintains its border, meaning any trespassers will die or become monstrous (Cohen 12). However, the monster’s occupation of the Han River in The Host is more comparable to the locals inhabiting Seoul than one might think.
Joon-ho’s monster is unconventional in that it is a mutant, by which its original form is more human than monstrous.
The boundary between humans and monsters is very thin in The Host. While it is obvious that the monster is manmade, so are other significant elements explored in the film and previously discussed, like Seoul. According to Lee, space fairly resembles a living machine designed by what it produces and its workers, which not only refers to people but natural resources such as body parts, Earth materials, technology, ideas, etc. These workers, or natural resources, participate in creating the cornerstones of modern society (Lee 730). Hence, in the film, Seoul occupies its physical space as a social entity chiefly composed of parkgoers and protesters who create movement corresponding to the monster’s treatment from the government. As a collective, the protesters rally against South Korea’s plan to use a U.S. military biological weapon, Agent Yellow, as well as the unfair treatment of Gang-du’s family (01:41:0001:42:25). If seen under a different context, the protest demonstrations would appear to be for the protection of the monster against Agent Yellow, which almost resembles the monster’s physical shape—a mechanical aquatic vertebrate instead of a biologically mutated one (01:42:00). Thus, Agent Yellow exhibits the product of a social entity, a machine made from biological science that can destroy creation itself by killing humans, its own creators, and their creations, the monster. It is also a prime example of Cohen’s distinction between the monster of action and the ‘monster of prohibition,’ the latter of which enforces the
border of its own realm and keeps humanity within a culture’s limits, the rules of a society that must be followed; it sets the boundaries of what is allowed according to socially constructed and regulated roles that form South Korea’s society (13-14). Agent Yellow is the medium through which the U.S.’s encroachment of South Korea’s geopolitical space and Seoul’s modernization warns the protesters against spreading the monster’s virus—or, in other words, violating their roles as working-class citizens. Though biological warfare is the tool used to eliminate the monster, it also harms Gang-du’s family and several protesters (01:43:14-01:51:54), making it seem like they are all one and the same.
One last uncanny resemblance between the monster and humans in The Host is the similar eating practices. Eating is another central thematic motif in the film. It is important to Gang-du’s family, especially at the midpoint where they return to Gang-du’s kiosk by the river to have a meal. In this scene, Hyunseo, still missing in the film, appears as an apparition and is fed by her family (00:53:4000:54:23). Eating is also important to two homeless brothers, one older than the other, who steal food from Gang-du’s kiosk. The older brother uses this as a teaching moment and justifies stealing food through seo-ri, a concept meaning the “right of the hungry” to live (00:51:01-00:51:58); hence, the access to food is one boundary between the rising social divisions of working class and non-workingclass people within Seoul’s modernization process. The consequences of the boundary present a case of who in the film’s narrative is monstrous and who is human. As a collective
identity, the brothers represent a larger group of people who are below working-class status. As individuals, they are merely hanging on by a thread. The city’s modernization fails to give these brothers a chance at living beyond seo-ri’s borders and ending their hunger. Lee designates the term “cannibalism” to the film’s integration and position on this sort of monstrous humanity shown towards the brothers but does not use it in the typical sense of consuming one’s own species. Rather, cannibalism in The Host is delineated by pure survival instincts of the monster and the humans (735). The monster eats and snatches away humans for food just as the two brothers steal food out of necessity. On the other hand, Gang-du’s family conjures up Hyun-seo’s return and feeds her to fill the dark void in their domestic community. However, when considering the idea of consuming one’s own species, the thin line between monsters and humans would indeed make the monster in The Host a cannibal. The thin line, as discussed so far, has been defined only through certain actions, but not inherent qualities.
The eating motif also provides context for how humans consume food and, on a higher level, how humans consume cultures by exerting power over the oppressed. Lee, according to Claude Levi-Strauss, introduces the “anthropoemic”—the act of vomiting—and the “anthropophagic”—the act of ingestion— methods of food consumption (736). While no humans in The Host throw up food, the monster is seen throwing up human bones in its sewer dwelling (01:28:05-01:28:35).
In society and culture, the consumption methods convey a fight between David and
Goliath—the individual versus the mega-collective, the minority against the majority. Vomiting a culture indicates the path of discrimination; whereas, ingesting one implies complete assimilation or annihilation of that culture’s identity (Lee 736). Thus, Joon-ho’s monster is a combination of both systems (vomiting and ingestion; discrimination and assimilation), just like humans. This is because the monster keeps Hyun-seo alive in the sewer dwelling, where it sometimes throws up bones or spits out its victims still intact with flesh. On the food and cultural level, humans engage in creating sustainable methods of living— finding which food provides energy and which cultures are acceptable in modern society.
Cohen, too, explains that the individual is in danger of living in a “deindividualizing system of subordination and control” and uses the term “cannibalism” as “incorporation into the wrong cultural body” (14). Whether or not the monster participates in creating a little society of its own by engaging in both methods is most likely already answered. However, its inherent quality of rejecting and accepting what it consumes for survival into its body and personal, domestic space makes it humanity’s double.
Bong Joon-ho’s monster film The Host utilizes many of the conventions of monster theory, specifically how space plays an important role in separating monstrous boundaries. However, the film is resolute in transforming these boundaries as inherent qualities, such as how the monster is part of the Han River and the Han River is part of the people and the city, Seoul. Beyond the physical and domestic uses of space, Joon-ho also emphasizes human struggle by focusing on Gang-du and his family,
who are determined to recover what they have lost, Hyun-seo. Human struggle can often be the host of perceived monstrosity and alienation. Thus, the film argues that beneath the skin is the genuine identifier of good and evil or human and monstrous. «
WORKS CITED
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Culture: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 12-16.
Joon-ho, Bong, director. The Host. Showbox
Entertainment, 2006.
Lee, Meera. “Monstrosity and Humanity in Bong Joonho’s The Host.” Positions: Asia Critique, vol. 26, no. 4, Nov. 2018, pp.719-47. EBSCOhost, muse jhu edu /article/710200
Conservative media outlets have grown further to the right over the past few years, affecting their most prominent media outlets and politics as a whole. As traditional Conservative media outlets become more prone to hyper-partisan reporting, the divide between the two parties grows, creating a political atmosphere where any basis for productive political conversation and action seems impossible.
Hyper-partisan news does not fully frame political stories with the necessary context or background, creating a hyperbolic
and inaccurate depiction of the subject being reported on.
“Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it.
LACEY ARGUS is an English major with a minor in Secondary Education and Women and Gender Studies. Originally from the suburbs of Chicago, Lacey moved to California to attend Loyola Marymount University. Lacey always had a strong passion for reading and writing in every form. This includes poetry, creative creating, analyzing theory, and getting deeply invested in reading her most recent fantasy book series obsession. She wrote this piece in her first journalism class called “Political Journalism,” taught by Professor Katherine Pickert, a class in which she felt she felt she grew deeply as a writer.
The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened,” wrote Yochai Benkler, et al., in a recent study examining Breitbart News Network .
Recent studies by the Columbia Journalism Review found that hyper-partisan reporting is uneven between traditionally Democratic media outlets and Republican media outlets, being overwhelmingly more prevalent on the right.
“This is really driven by major differences in the way we consume media,” media analyst, journalist, and Northwestern professor Dan Kennedy continued. “People that are center, left of center, or farther left tend to consume a broader range of media but most of it is centered around imperfect but reliable mainstream sources of news like: New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and the like. While people who are right of center, and today the majority of people who are right of center seem to be way right, are huddled around a very small number of partisan media, and especially Fox news.”
The right’s growing distrust of non-Conservative media outlets and Conservative media outlets’ focus on ratings perpetuate political polarization at an uneven rate, creating a political atmosphere in which mutual understanding and cooperation is increasingly more difficult to attain.
Conservative media outlets isolation of their viewership is a contributing factor impacting hyper-partisan reporting. In recent years, distrust of the media has grown exponentially, with a direct correlation tied to Trump’s presidency.
A recent study at Pew Research Center finds that “ Republicans tend to express more negative sentiments of journalists and the news media overall.”
“Donald Trump, in particular, was a master of convincing his many followers that he was the source of all truth and that anything that was contradictory to anything he was saying was ‘fake news.’ And then you had the right-wing media going right along with him,” said Dan Kennedy, on the correlation of Trump and the right’s growing distrust of non-Conservative media.
According to a peer-reviewed study conducted by Harvard Kennedy School, “fake news exposure was associated with a decline in mainstream media trust among respondents.”
“Through much of the middle to late twentieth century the so-called mainstream media tended to be inclined to the center left, but it was very much a center left, not far left, but it was enough that it led conservatives to feel that they were being treated unfairly, that their view was not being equally accorded respect, or getting enough airtime. So, they began to attack the mainstream media for hypocrisy, unfairly being biased. And at the same time the right set up their own alternative media ecosystem,” said Damon Linker, contributing editor of The New Republic and senior writing fellow at the Center for Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, on the development of polarization in the media.
Following this new era of Conservative-focused media outlets, escalated by the induction of Donald Trump into office, “The mainstream media, actually (has) become more tilted to the left,” Linker highlighted.
However, the new Conservative media outlets that emerged were drastically hyper-partisan compared to their alleged counterparts (the mainstream media). Linker states, “These are actually, I would say, not mildly center right in reaction to the center left tilt of the mainstream media. They’re more extreme to the right or being nakedly partisan in being pro-Conservative.”
According to findings by American journalist and researcher Kevin Drum, research shows that both political parties have become more polarized pertaining to policy over the years. However, hyper-partisan reporting is more abundant in Conservative media outlets, ultimately contributing to overall political polarization. This illustrates that asymmetric polarization is centered in a difference in reporting between the two parties.
Is it consumers who control the narratives of the media or is it the media that controls the narratives its consumers believe? During the 2016 election a new consensus started to emerge in Conservative newsrooms: ratings are everything.
“Fox news tried, for a few weeks, to play down Trump’s claim that the election was stolen, and they lost considerable audience to tiny outlets like OANN and Newsmax, so Fox got right back with the program,” Dan Kennedy notes.
“These media outlets are always businesses. They are owned by corporations who want to turn a profit and so they go where they think the viewers are and they respond to
ratings. Clearly on the right, there was a thirst for news and information that told back to Conservative people the view of the world that they believed in, and Fox has definitely given that to them,” Damon Linker commented.
Vox news reporter Sean Illing sat down with media scholar—and dedicated researcher of sustainable journalism—Tom Rosenstiel to discuss this evolution.
“There is a great risk that you become so concerned with keeping ratings up that you become addicted to pandering to your audience, and you’re unwilling to tell them inconvenient things,” said Rosenstiel.
Conservative hyper-partisan reporting is, partially, attributed to these networks concluding that ratings outweigh well-rounded and truthful reporting—releasing their journalistic integrity in order to keep people watching.
This is exemplified when comparing Conservative and Liberal reporting during the notorious Hillary Clinton email scandal. “The Breitbart-led sites were able to push the traditional media into focusing on Trump’s favored issue—immigration—and to frame it on their terms: overwrought fears about crime and terrorism. Clinton, on the other hand, was defined mainly by scandal coverage in the form of her use of a private email server, the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and the Clinton Foundation,” Dan Kennedy explains in his published analysis of asymmetric polarization in a recent Columbia Journalism Review
While traditionally left-leaning media outlets tended to address candidates with a more partisan perspective, traditionally right-leaning media outlets approached reporting on Democratic candidates much
differently than reporting on Republican candidates. This made Republican candidates appear more favorable while also sensationalizing issues pertaining to Democratic candidates. By centering Democrats at the center of these scandals, Conservative media outlets were able to capitalize on Democratic candidates by boasting about their ratings, while simultaneously pushing their political agenda and making their favored candidates more desirable.
During the Clinton email scandal, “Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season,” as reported in an academic media analysis titled “Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda.”
I followed up with former panelist on WGBH-TV’s “Beat the Press”—and Professor in journalism at Northwestern University—Dan Kennedy, about this mutual relationship between ratings, media outlets, consumers, and how it needs to change.
“We’ve never lived at a time where there has been more high-quality news, and innovation available to people. At a certain point people really have to take responsibility for the media they consume,” said Kennedy.
Hyper-partisan news, caused by Conservative media outlets isolating their viewership and focusing on ratings, is a driving force in
asymmetric polarization. This impacts the security and productivity of our political system. Furthermore, hyper-partisan reporting acts as a threat to a free and informed democracy rooted in journalism, exemplified in recent events.
“You can trace a direct line from Trump’s rhetoric to right wing media, to a failed attempt to overthrow the government of the United States,” said Dan Kennedy.
Having media outlets prone to creating inaccurate or misleading narratives about current events creates an environment in which disinformation has real consequences. We see this with the introduction of relatively new conservative media outlets.
“Democratic theorists have long argued that diverse exposure is crucial for a healthy, respectful, and sustainable democracy and some work on cross-cutting networks and media use suggests that encountering different viewpoints has the potential to moderate people’s attitudes and feelings towards out-groups,” according to an academic paper published by Andreu Casas, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, and Magdalena Wojcieszak.
As hyper-partisan news outlets become more prevalent on the right, Pew Research Center has found, those who are most polarized are found to be more active in politics both on a local level and a national one. Because of this, politics becomes divisive and unsympathetic.
Creating more reliable media outlets, accessible to both parties, has the ability to resolve some of this polarization and create a more beneficial political culture built on wellrounded journalism and compromise. «
TO BE BURNED on a pyre is a rite of passage; fire burns the physical body, torn down by the weight of the world, and the spirit is released into nature. In the most metaphorical of senses, words can be constructed into kindling and spoken as a prayer of spiritual release. Poet Maureen Alsop elegantly accomplishes this, giving her lost ones her own memorial service in her book of elegies, Pyre. Throughout various poems, Alsop details the loss of companionable lives, as well as her own sense of self, by incorporating elements of allusion, apostrophe, and pathetic fallacy to candidly detail the nature of loss and of death itself.
Alsop’s Pyre heavily revolves around divination, a spiritual practice of guidance and prophecy. The book’s table of contents even
lists each poem under a single category: selenomancy, a form of divination requiring the observation of the moon. Alsop frequently merges divination with nature, since “nature is traditionally fundamental to divination, whose indigenous metaphorical roots remit to natural phenomena such as stones, water, and animal behavior” (Curry 85). Nature is Alsop’s source; she calls upon it to connect her to the spirit world with a deft incorporation of both allusion and pathetic fallacy. Rather than describing nature as having human-like qualities with personification, Alsop uses pathetic fallacy to become entangled within nature’s stronghold to help her grieve. A prominent figure of Alsop’s spiritual connection to her loved ones is the sparrow. European folklore has often
HANNAH NAGLE is a junior English and Theatre Arts double major at LMU and is grateful to be both on the editorial team and published in this Criterion issue. From Orlando, Florida, she spends her free time writing and releasing music, and she is currently in the process of releasing her debut EP, “Sleepless Nights.” Hannah is also a recent recipient of LMU’s Knott Fellowship, and she plans to take this opportunity to perfect and query her debut YA contemporary novel’s manuscript.
»
HANNAH NAGLEdepicted sparrows as omens of death and, in some cases, keepers of ancestral knowledge (Stone, The Meaning of Sparrows: Symbolism and Identification). Descriptions, including “sparrow’s eggshell” and “Like you who. Unafraid, forgave ancestral bruises gentler,” in her poems “Scurvy, Birds” and “Archival Sparrow,” respectively, detail the weight of death as traumatic (Alsop 14-15, 10-11). The person dying is relieved of their ancestral baggage, but this death does not come without consequences for those still living. Alsop is quite literally walking on eggshells around even herself; she is left feeling burdened by the knowledge of what her loved one has left behind. Here, such a pathetic fallacy introduces Alsop’s grief as weighted and tiresome. The figure of the sparrow, in addition to being described with pathetic fallacy to create a dreary mood, is an allusion to Roman poet Catullus’ “Catullus 2,” in which it is established that a girl has a strong bond with her pet sparrow. At first glance, Catullus’ poem may be seen only in this light, applying the more modern symbolism of the sparrow, wherein it represents joy. However, when also taking into consideration the speaker’s contempt at the girl’s relationship with her pet, it becomes clear that the sparrow’s appearance is disdainful. Instead of joy, it represents the loss of hope. By alluding to Catullus’ poem, Alsop gives insight into her relationship with death, establishing it as one involving derision.
Alsop’s incorporation of pathetic fallacy is maintained throughout many of her elegies. In “Sky an Oar, VII / XII / MMXIV,” Alsop claims that “the dark said that things could go on loving,” but she is quick to acknowledge that the darkness lied to her (1), describing how, in
the moments leading up to a friend’s death, “moss grew up the drain and Roman grasses reflected in June’s long window,” where “[s] he shared, / before the ocean rendered cobalt, what she could . . .”; death was seemingly kind (1-4). It allowed Alsop to begin to come to terms with her friend’s death, even before it happened—prophetic divination. Soon enough, though, “noon’s intermediary horizon rose into discourse” upon her friend’s passing (10). Death came, yet the night—the dark—didn’t stay. The night swallowed June (and her friend) whole and disappeared at the first sign of daylight. Alsop could no longer bask in twilight; she was forced to move on, to deal with her grief. Her grief isn’t burdensome, here; it’s both fresh and vengeful.
Pathetic fallacy can also be seen in the poems “Matins for Juliet” and “Glossopetrae.” The former elegy is one of reprieve. Alsop refers to the departed as a deer, their “animal self curled down, moss-sheltered & tenuous” (1-2). A precious creature is being put to rest, and it is being protected by the Earth. That is all that Alsop can hope for—a tangible comfort, one that she has the ability to consciously recognize. Even as the deer passes, Alsop is viewing the moment as a breath of fresh air. It is “snow’s reversal, brevity, a shapely whiteness of shutter & wench… an intimate mercy” (3-4). It is natural—the cycle of life. Such descriptions are candid yet beautiful, just as Alsop has seen the moment to be. “Glossopetrae,” in a way, seems to be the former’s counterpart—an afterword. Alsop has experienced the passing, and now she is left to search for reassurance in a life without someone she loved. Safe in the arms of Mother
Nature herself, she asks “for space within her congenial grove. Before pain’s absence moths infected the garden” (1-2). Finding solace in the serenity nature provides, Alsop feels at ease. As the poem’s title suggests, nature has been divine. In that moment, it has become a form of divine intervention, allowing the speaker to be granted comfort, rather than having to perform divination herself to find it. Alsop recounts that “her vessel came, low twilight… the last moon slipped,” and it is then that she has truly found acceptance and begun to move on. No longer can she look up into the sky and search the stars for answers; daylight has come, and with it, peace. Her grief, much like her surroundings, she has come to realize, is natural.
In addition to her use of pathetic fallacy, Alsop also embeds apostrophes, with the help of allusion, into her poetry as a way of connecting her experiences to the divine. The most frequent of her calls reference the tarot deck, a form of divination in which users draw cards in order to seek guidance from a higher force. The deck itself is split into two portions: the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana is the foundation of the deck; the cards within it represent an individual’s enlightenment—the path one takes during a life. The Minor Arcana represents people—every person an individual will come across in their life that holds significant meaning (Labrynthos, Tarot Card Meaning List). Throughout Alsop’s poems, the only cards both called upon and referenced are within the Major Arcana; Alsop is purposely seeking guidance for specific reasons and is hopeful that she is being led down the right path in her grief.
“Scurvy, Birds” sets the scene for Alsop’s reading, where she sees “a silver tabletop laid with cards, but [their] unwieldy communion finished with illegible spades” (13-14). With this metaphor, Alsop is explaining that she is lost; her only chance at finding peace is quite possibly the tarot, and she feels that she needs divine guidance in order to do so. However, even this form of contact is difficult for her; Alsop’s grief is too strong. Because she cannot interact with the spades, a part of the deck associated with the Minor Arcana, she is not able to reach those whom she’s lost. Her only choice is to guide herself with the Major Arcana. In “{Elegy in Green Abatement: You Designate Seeing as the Seer},” Alsop calls upon one tarot card and makes reference to two more. She pleads, “O temperance… night falls back into destructive eyes,” and later questions, “Whose wheel? What rope did you bring?” (2-4, 7-8). At first, she simply wants guidance. Calling upon Temperance, which represents finding meaning, she is completely lost, drowning in her grief. At the end of the poem, when questioning the wheel and asking about the rope, Alsop is alluding to the Wheel of Fortune and The Hanged Man cards. With the Wheel representing change and The Hanged Man representing sacrifice and/or release, she is simultaneously questioning why her dearly departed has had to leave and why it had to be at that moment. For Alsop, her grief has reached the point of denial. She doesn’t want to have to come to terms with someone permanently leaving her life. She also looks for guidance in “Sky an Oar, XXV / IV / MMXVI.” She immediately opens the poem with, “O, Tender Conductor, do you remember your name,” introducing the audience to the
Chariot card (1-2). The Chariot, also called the “Conductor” because of the card’s depiction of a man steering horses, represents self-discipline and focus. In the poem’s lines, “There and there each acre became a horse’s master / We were those who live against fire’s spine / I wish I’d never seen that country tangled in smoke, or any war possessed by doubt,” Alsop illustrates her frustration with both herself and democracy for being unfocused. Her life was led astray both by her own decisions and by outside forces, and she is now expressing grief over the loss of a life she could have lived, had she been more focused. Looking to the Conductor for guidance, Alsop wants to be led on a path best fit for her; she wants to be focused.
Alsop’s use of apostrophe, as well as allusion, does not cease with cards in the tarot deck, though. By referring to constellations, a form of natural guidance, Alsop is attempting every method of guidance possible in order to receive advice. In a poem titled “Equuleus,” Alsop speaks in the constellation’s stead. To the audience, she is the foal slain by Poseidon to form a stalemate between himself and Athena in the making of Athens. Writing, “O sublingual address, please speak. My station. I am a slash mark the sun held open,” Alsop acknowledges her continuing life—without someone she loved—as a necessary evil (3-4).
Just like Equuleus, the slain horse, Alsop has become a broken fragment of the person she had been before losing this loved one, all for the creation of something new. In Alsop’s case, this is her new life—one of transformation and self-discovery. Should she look at the stars, at Equuleus, she would see her past and who she once was; she would be reminded of how far she
has come. Similarly, the poem “Later Star, Late Blackness” discusses Alsop’s newfound acceptance in continuing without those she has lost. At the end of the poem, she remarks, “O, Eridanius. No, the furthest river does recognize us,” where she knows she is being acknowledged, even in a place that feels empty and still (4). Eridanius, a constellation named after Eridu, a Babylonian city ruled over by a god who controlled a cosmic abyss, resembles the shape of a river. In Greek mythology, demigod Phaethon haphazardly traveled various rivers in Eridu; it is not quite certain upon which he traveled. To Alsop, there is a concrete answer. Within a place she’d felt alone in, she has finally found a sense of belonging. A higher power has heard her, and she has subsequently been recognized. Finally past the worst of her grief, Alsop is prepared to live a life transformed and healed.
Maureen Alsop’s Pyre explores the various stages of her grief, all through the lens of divine guidance. Her poems are carefully crafted into her own version of a pyre—a place where she can recall her spiritual transformation while thinking back on those whom she’s lost. Her audience is taken on a spiritual journey similar to her own; references to tarot cards and constellations, coupled with descriptions of natural phenomena, detail a path frequently traveled by the hearts of the lost and lonely. Here, her heart is stripped bare and stitched together once more in a transformative experience of spiritual guidance. In her times of grieving, Alsop is grounded—with her head in the clouds— among the spirits with whom she’s tried so tirelessly to connect. The broken bones of her past have become the kindling for the pyre
of her present. With these elegies, guidance has granted her a path, paving the way to the moment the smoke has cleared. «
Alsop, Maureen. “Archival Sparrows.” Pyre. What Books Press, 2021, p. 28.
---. “{Elegy in Green Abatement: You Designate Seeing as the Seer.}” Pyre. What Books Press, 2021, p. 71.
---. “Equuleus.” Pyre. What Books Press, 2021, p. 38.
---. “Glossopetrae.” Pyre. What Books Press, 2021, p. 44.
---. “Later Star, Late Blackness.” Pyre. What Books Press, 2021, p. 66.
---. “Matins for Juliet.” Pyre. What Books Press, 2021, p. 56.
---. “Scurvy, Birds.” Pyre. What Books Press, 2021, p. 37.
---. “Sky an Oar, XXV / IV / MMXVI.” Pyre. What Books Press, 2021, p. 39.
---. “Later Star, Late Blackness.” Pyre. What Books Press, 2021, p. 66.
Curry, P. “Embodiment, Alterity, and Agency: Negotiating Antinomies in Divination.” Divination: Perspectives for a New Millennium, Routledge, 2010, p. 85.
Stone, Jennifer. “The Meaning of Sparrows: Symbolism and Identification.” Owlcation, 17 July 2012, https://owlcation com/soci al-sciences/The -Meaning- of-SparrowsIdentification-and-Folklore.
“Tarot Card Meanings List - 78 Cards by Suit, Element, and Zodiac.” Labyrinthos, https:// labyrinthos co/blogs/tarot- card-meanings-list
THROUGHOUT BOTH Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Allison Benis White’s Self-Portrait with Crayon, color and objects merge together to depict the notion of absence. White and Nelson employ metaphor within their poetry and prose as a mode of signifying this lack. By scattering common objects within their works, these writers create realistic, beautiful images while drawing attention to the identity of those who are surrounded by the material world. The figures within them establish their existence through an emphasis placed upon their physical bodies, a technique White and Nelson use that speaks to fragmentation of the self, a kind of extreme isolation. Colors come to the forefront of Nelson and White’s works, signifying both a way to escape reality and the way in which color is linked to the subconscious.
Among other things, both White and Nelson weave ordinary objects into their writing in order to convey a range of symbolic meanings. For example, White introduces a “sponge” in her poem “The Bath”:
A hand curled around a child’s neck with a sponge in a picture. A sponge attached to a hand which is attached to an arm. Which is crucial. Anxiety thrives on the unknown. If her hand took the sponge away, there would be a cool empty spot on the child’s neck. A white oval. Symbolically, this could be the beginning of time when all matter and energy in the universe was concentrated into a small volume that exploded. (White 42)
OLIVIA TRACHTENBERG is an M.A. candidate on the literature track. She wrote this essay for Professor Sarah Maclay for the course Writing from Art: Ekphrastic Poetry. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Olivia attended LMU for her undergraduate studies as well. As a graduate student, she was a teaching fellow for FYS and Rhetorical Arts. Olivia enjoys reading and writing poetry and hopes to publish more written work and go on to teach after graduation.
OLIVIA TRACHTENBERGWhite employs the “sponge” as the crux of this “universe,” situated between the “arm” and the “hand.” By noting the “hand which is attached to an arm,” White establishes the fragmentation of the body, using the indefinite article, “a,” to stress the absence of individual identity in this piece. The possibility of this scene starring any person lends to the idea that “Anxiety thrives on the unknown.” Panic tends to emerge in the midst of a lack, which White enunciates when she writes about how, when “her hand took the sponge away, there would be a cool empty spot on the child’s neck. A white oval.” This perfectly represents how White deploys stark images to illustrate psychological distress. In the detail of “a white oval,” White draws a blank slate, an absence that yearns to be filled.
Beyond the larger meaning behind colors and objects, however, there is an appreciation for the object itself, which is particularly pronounced in the way Nelson identifies with the color blue and its various expressions:
It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?— No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink— Here you are again , it says, and so am I . (Nelson 28)
The “arms” are, in a way, synonymous with White’s “sponge.” There is an act of purification in the embrace of someone as it takes one away from the reality of the self as ultimately grounded in solitude. Nelson’s relationship
with the color blue is an act of solitude. She connects with herself through something that extends beyond abstract thought, a concrete and universal enigma. That is, blue could look different to everyone, but, simultaneously, it is something that all people can recognize. As White says, “Other theories imply that the universe has always expanded and always will expand, with no beginning and no end. This might be another way to avoid losing anyone ever again” (“The Bath” 42). Blue is like the universe in that it has infinite manifestations, an indescribable entity that one sees wherever one goes, as Nelson does.
Nelson frequently, in Bluets, discusses the ways in which she is consumed by loneliness, which persists even in her encounters with her lover:
A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking. (7)
The color blue keeps Nelson company within her situation, in which she is wide awake while her lover sleeps. Describing what “was essentially our lives” as “shaking,” Nelson speaks to the instability of their relationship, one full of life and fervor that must eventually crumble. White, too, describes the transitory nature of happiness when she says, “To clean the future injury’s blood, you must hold a
sponge against a child’s neck forever” (“The Bath” 42). Nelson’s “blue tarp” almost functions as White’s “sponge” in the sense that it provides an escape from pain, “a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence” (7).
Nelson’s keen observation, in which she transforms the most seemingly mundane objects into works of art, resonates nicely with an aspect of essayist Susan Sontag’s philosophy. As Sontag once said in an interview with Rolling Stone, “Giving full attention to the world, which includes you … that’s what a writer does—a writer pays attention to the world. Because I’m very against this solipsistic notion that you find it all in your head. You don’t, there really is a world that’s there whether you’re in it or not” (Sontag qtd. by Popova). Despite the fact that Nelson puts the reader within her mind, the reader does not remain in a mental stream completely cut off from the outside world. Rather, Nelson consistently looks towards what is external to herself, finding inspiration in everything from the forgotten “blue tarp” to famous works of literature.
Nelson and White demonstrate a blend between analyses of color and an attention to objects, in such a way as to offer vehicles for self-reflection. By pondering what is outside of self, Nelson and White show the desire to be what one is not. White does this, for instance, in her poem “At the Ballet,” in which “She could see the yellow rose behind one dancer’s ear up close, if she chose. The red roses of the others. Although she would never confess, orange or white, she is much too old, she would like to wear a flower in her hair” (33). Like Nelson, White uses color to depict an entity apart from one’s own body. The woman in this poem
“would like to wear a flower in her hair,” although she would like it not to be “yellow” or “red” but “orange or white,” a color of her own choosing. Yet, this woman is trapped in her own body as “she is much too old.” Nelson describes a similar situation in which one is trapped in the human condition when she discusses the mating ritual of bowerbirds, in which they collect blue objects to attract females, saying, “When I see photos of these blue bowers, I feel so much desire that I wonder if I might have been born into the wrong species” (Nelson 27).
Nelson delves further into the idea of being entrapped in color when she writes about “‘the orange restaurant’” (43). Despite the restaurant being orange, “every time I came home from work and passed out in my smoke-drenched clothes, my feet propped up on the wall, the dining room reappeared in my dreams as pale blue” (43). Noting that this probably occurred as “the result of spending ten hours or more staring at saturated orange, blue’s spectral opposite” (43), Nelson discovers color’s inescapable aspect, intertwined with the psyche. Color’s omnipresence leads to an invasion of the subconscious and, in this way, the color blue is tied to Nelson. She aptly signifies the link between color and the subconscious through her reference to “dreams,” which are, in a way, poetic experiences in and of themselves. Blue is hidden inside orange, and this concept of invisibility pervades White’s poems as well, such as in “Dancers with Green Skirts”:
Her hands reach out as if through a mirror. And the top half of her dress, and the other dancer’s fingertips–the way fire moves
quickly up green curtains. What touches us will hurt soon. Flames might roll across cabinets like a miniature ocean, a lullaby, a hiss inside a hush. (White 17)
In the phrase, “a hiss inside a hush,” White writes about how pain, “the way fire moves quickly up green curtains,” remains enclosed until it explodes amidst seemingly ordinary moments, symbolized in the “green curtains.” This is reminiscent of the workings of the subconscious, as painful thoughts, “fire,” creep up on oneself, disguised as “a miniature ocean” or “a lullaby.” The image of “fire” and “flames” functions as metaphor, illuminating how pain pervades everyday interactions. Yet, here, pain is something that remains unsaid, stressed by the diction of “hiss” and the way in which “she holds up one hand to block the other dancer’s face, which means she cannot yell fire with her hands on her hips (her elbows triangle like wing bones), which means she has no face” (White 17). The presence of a “face” is enwrapped in the expression of pain—to “yell fire with her hands on her hips”—a method of stepping into the spotlight of which this dancer is deprived. Painting her arms “like wing bones,” White points to an animalization, or dehumanization of this dancer, cut off from speech and visibility. The way her body is broken into pieces, in fact, resonates with French writer and critic Helene Cixous’ philosophy, in which she discusses the division of the self that occurs within a male-dominated society:
On the one hand she has constituted herself necessarily as that “person” capable of losing a part of herself without losing her
integrity. But secretly, silently, deep down inside, she grows and multiplies, for, on the other hand, she knows far more about living and about the relation between the economy of the drives and the management of the ego than any man. (Cixous 888)
This idea of suppressing the self is reflected in White’s poem, enunciated when she writes, “A scream is either doubled or disappears” (White 17). As Cixous says, women are torn between being the mold of a perfect image and expressing the true self, which “grows and multiplies” the “scream,” which is “doubled.”
In these particular works, though without intention, and in modes and genres aesthetically distinct, the ways in which Nelson and White express devastation are not that far from what poet Suzanne Lummis highlights in her discussion of film noir. For Lummis, a key component of the noir genre is “the quality of hopelessness or cynicism about the human condition” (Lummis). This sense of despair resonates with Nelson’s prose beads, such as, “I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do” (28). Here, Nelson’s writing creates a sense of being trapped in a black hole, one where “loneliness” pervades the psyche in an inescapable manner. The permanence of “loneliness” bleeds into White’s poems as well, including the poem “Waiting”: “But I’m afraid of black water and the way women ignore each other at restaurant counters (one sips her coffee while the other draws circles on a paper napkin)” (6). The image of “black water,” combined with the depiction of isolated people at “restaurant counters,” conjures up an air of the
noir genre that Lummis talks about. That is, it is as if White draws a cinematic image, the “stark lighting” of noir (Lummis) conveyed through the way in which the ominous “black water” juxtaposes the cup of coffee and the “paper napkin” (6). The image of these two women sitting in the same space but lost in their own worlds creates a vivid aura of isolation, a division that is so bizarre it becomes frightening. Paying attention to the subtleties of color, present in common objects and ever pervasive, Nelson and White illuminate the relationship between the colors around us and the thoughts that infiltrate the psyche. By writing about the presence of other physicalities, Nelson and White show a derealization of a coherent self, as a body, and even the wish to be something other than the self. Although this wish is present, however, finally–and distinct from the hopelessness and cynicism underlying noir— both Nelson and White ultimately demonstrate the beauty of the self as ever growing and changing. «
and ‘High Culture’ Limits Us.” The Marginalian, https://www themarginalian org /2013/11/11/susan -sontag-the - complete -rolling-stone -inte rview-1/ Accessed 6 October 2022.
White, Allison Benis. “At the Ballet.” Self-Portrait with Crayon. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009, p. 32.
---.“Dancers in Green Skirts.” Self-Portrait with Crayon. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009, p.17.
---. “The Bath.” Self-Portrait with Crayon. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009, p. 42.
---. “Waiting.” Self-Portrait with Crayon. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009, p. 6.
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875-893, JSTOR, https://www jstor org /stable/3173239
Lummis, Suzanne. “They Write by Night #5, featuring poet Marsha De La O.” Poetry LA https://www yo utube com/watch?v=bO72v0LxxJ0. Accessed 25 October 2022.
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Seattle and New York, Wave Books, 2009.
Sontag, Susan qtd. by Popova, Maria. “Susan Sontag on How the False Divide Between Pop Culture
TO UNDERSTAND RELIGION is to feel it. In a post-secular world, affect over cognition is defined as wordless religiosity that is based in feeling. People become spiritual as their feelings subconsciously direct them to create meaning for their existence. Without explicit knowledge or tangible proof of God’s existence, humanity’s belief in a higher power relies on the emotions associated with their faith. This is manifested throughout post-secular novels, such as Yann Matel’s Life of Pi, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, as well as David Foster Wallace’s “All That,” Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God,” and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We can also see it in poets as aesthetically diverse as Charles
Bukowski (“Nirvana”) and Dana Gioia (“Los Angeles after Rain”) and in Terrence Malick’s film Tree of Life. The moments of personal epiphany in these works are subjective, an internal-to-external shift of religious belief presenting itself as their characters, or speakers, guided by emotion rather than cognition, use “projection”—a term to be understood in this context as a character’s act of infusing their own world with spiritual wonder and curiosity—to create their own sense of meaning, and to feel a spiritual sensation from nonreligious magic that leads to a shift in outer communication between nature and humanity.
Through following their emotions, characters project a meaning onto their existence
EMANUELLE LAGREE is a Los Angeles native and a freshman majoring in English at Loyola Marymount University. Her creative expression takes form in writing, especially poetry. She enjoys investigating and analyzing the intersection of the roles of religion in humanity’s lives and a discovery for the desire of a higher purpose. This essay began as a project for her senior year of high school Contemporary Literature and Religion course in the Spring of 2022.
which grants them comfort. In Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God,” religion is prevalent because, in the world of this story’s system of belief, the only ways to get into heaven are by being a devout believer or seeing an angel’s visitation at a holy site. One of the characters, Ethan, is a strong believer but still struggles to find his purpose in life, even though “since childhood he’d felt certain that God had a special role for him to play, and he waited for a sign telling him what that role was . . . ”; in fact, he “longed for an encounter with the divine to provide him with direction” (Chiang 73). While he doesn’t take action to create his own meaning, he relies on God to eventually grant him some meaning for his existence, consistent with his internal, deeprooted feeling that God has always had a plan for him, that his purpose is waiting to be revealed in some epiphany or divine intervention. He projects a more satisfying story for himself (a “better story” than the one he seems to be living) by believing that there is purpose to his life, even without foreknowledge of God’s specific place for him in a bigger plan. Unlike Ethan, who is waiting for God to grant him a higher purpose, the narrator from Fight Club projects his own meaning.
In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, the narrator lives his life as a corporate drone, and his lack of sleep leads him to meet Tyler Durden— the other half of his split personality, who takes over his body at night. He joins support groups for diseases he does not have, because seeing others’ pain helps him sleep, which, due to his insomnia, he cannot do. When “walking home after a support group, [the narrator feels] more alive than [he’d] ever felt” and recalls feeling
like the “little warm center that the life of the world crowded around. And [he] slept […] every evening, [he] died, and every evening, [he] was born. Resurrected . . .” (Palahniuk 22). Clearly, for this narrator, this infusion of meaning into the support groups gives them nearly religious significance. Since each time he attends, he is granted rest and wakes up feeling not only new, but “resurrected,” the support groups are akin to a religion, as they provide comfort and a sense of salvation from the rest of his life, leaving him feeling complete and content. While the narrator does not actually worship a higher power, he projects similarly powerful meaning into the support groups because they provide him with the one thing he longs for and cannot attain on his own: rest. They give him a transcendent feeling as he, metaphorically, dies and is “resurrected” through watching others’ pain. His emotions overtake his cognition as he goes back to his “church” every evening, to experience this “resurrection” and attain the rest once again. As this nontraditionally-religious narrator finds solace in his support groups, the character Pi Patel instead turns to not just one religion, but three.
In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the protagonist Pi Patel takes guidance from Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. The teachings from each of these religions grant him comfort and a deeper sense of fulfillment as he finds himself stranded on a lifeboat lost at sea with a Bengal tiger for almost a year. When being interviewed about this experience, Pi tells the author of the book a glamorized version which he says is what kept him alive. The “better story” is “words of divine consciousness […], lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening
of the moral sense which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; it is an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones,” as it is an “intellect confounded yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose” (Martel 63). Pi survives being lost at sea because of his belief in this better story—and a newfound feeling that his life carries significance. He feels aware of divinity in his life, which leaves him with an eternal, long-lasting sense of a higher power. The diction of “elevation” calls to mind a celestial being bringing happiness and joy to earth. Pi feels a deeper feeling of purpose that he does not need an intellectual understanding of. He trusts that the world is created based on a sense of goodness rather than a conceivable truth. He allows divinity and higher purpose to infuse meaning into his life and finds comfort in that.
Another sort of projection comes from characters infusing meaning on others’ behalf.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road takes place in a desolate, post-apocalyptic country and follows the relationship between a father and son as they travel west, hoping for a better life and to find other good people, like them. Their relationship models the dynamic between a higher power and humanity as the father sees the son as coming from God and finds hope in him, and the son trusts and finds comfort in his father. While on the road, the father reassures the son that “nothing bad is going to happen to [them] [...] because [they’re] carrying the fire” (McCarthy 83). The father comforts the son through pushing him to “carry the fire”—a metaphor for maintaining hope in the future—and to have faith in their journey. Through implanting the
idea of “the fire” in the son, the father projects this meaning of hope for him to keep going. He creates a better story for the son to follow and pursue. He projects a meaning for the son to live for—the fire, which is a feeling of hope and of finding other ‘good guys’ who carry the fire as well. The ‘good guys’ in The Road are other survivors who do not compromise their beliefs or humanity in order to survive. In hoping to find others like themselves, the father and son give themselves a purpose to seek out.
Terrence Malick is a transcendent filmmaker who prioritizes the creation of an emotional response in his audience, rather than an intellectually cohesive one. In his film Tree of Life, the eldest of the three boys of the O’Brien family, Jack, has a contentious relationship with his father and struggles to relate to him. He gets jealous of his younger brother R.L, who, in his father’s eyes, does no harm. Jack shoots R.L. ‘s finger with a BB gun, and when he apologizes, as commentator Brett McCracken describes it, R.L. “tenderly touches him on the shoulder and head—gestures of reconciliation”—and in these moments “Jack’s faith seems to solidify. He understands and receives grace” and he then tells God he can “see it was [him]. Always [he was] calling to [him].” After this reconciliation with his brother, “Jack then has a wordless reconciliation scene with his father” (McCracken). Even after Jack harms R.L., he is shown grace. This forgiveness and redemption are the catalysts for Jack to project grace throughout his life. His brother R.L. mimics his mother’s lifestyle, which she calls “the way of grace,” throughout the film. This lifestyle—“the way of grace”— accepts exterior forces and is about being
selfless. Being forgiven by R.L. allows Jack to see his father through the eyes of “the way of grace,” and to project some of his brother’s light onto his father, which allows him to reconcile with him and move forward. Jack does not project his own better story, but it is through R.L. that he is able to reunite with his father. Similar to The Road, someone else is projecting a better story for another character. The father projects the metaphor of “carrying the fire” for his son, and R.L. projects the ability to forgive—and so to view Mr. O’Brien with goodness—to Jack. When Jack speaks to God, it is a solidifying moment in his faith, as it is the first time he feels spiritual and feels a sense of belonging. Feeling a sense of God’s recognition in his own makes him believe he also has a Godgiven purpose. His wordless reconciliation with his father demonstrates the mutual, harmonious feeling of love and intimacy. Through R.L., projecting goodness onto his father, Jack feels spiritually comforted and guided as he finally notices something he senses as God in his life. This internal feeling of spirituality shifts into place as characters have an indescribable feeling of magic intervening in their lives. These individuals sense a curious, enigmatic feeling of magic within themselves, which fuels their desire for spirituality. Similarly, in Charles Bukowski’s “Nirvana,” the unnamed main character lives a mundane, meaningless life. He feels he has “not much chance” and is “completely cut loose from / purpose” (Bukowski lines 1 - 3). He feels unfortunate, as he’s never felt he had a purpose to achieve. Being “cut loose from / purpose” may insinuate that there is no higher power to grant a meaning to his existence, and he feels he has
been left out of a greater plan to pursue. While riding a bus, it begins snowing and the bus stops at a café—which seems ordinary at first glance, but the young man realizes it is different from other diners. Others on the bus “had not / noticed / the / magic” (lines 86 – 89) and a “curious feeling / swam through him / that everything / was / beautiful / there, / that it would always / stay beautiful / there” (lines 45 - 53). Arriving at this café brings a new feeling to him, as he senses the presence of something higher than himself. It is only he who senses this magic that makes everything “beautiful” and perfect “there.” This strange “magic,” felt in the moment, leaves him with a notion that there is meaning to discover in the world and that he has a purpose. He feels spiritually alive as he senses something inexplicable calling out to him from this café. In calling the feeling “curious,” he has a desire to uncover the truth behind what makes the café different, as it is mysterious and unfamiliar to him. This encounter with the enigmatic “magic” demonstrates affect over cognition; he cannot comprehend the reality of the magic since others do not sense it, but he senses an ethereal element of the café that fuels this spiritual quickening. When he leaves the café with the others on the bus, it seems that he returns to his ordinary, meaningless life and does not commit himself to the mystery of the experience in the diner. While he has felt spiritually alive—and as if he were relevant or somehow connected—for the first time in his life, ultimately, he decides to follow society back downward, away from the café and its magical elements. This action speaks on his character, as even though, back on the bus he only “pretended to / sleep” (lines 47
- 96), in this moment, metaphorically, he chooses to follow society, rather than branch out to pursue a deeper meaning for himself.
The curious quality of magic also presents itself in David Foster Wallace’s “All That.” The main character is a young boy who is gifted a toy cement mixer and can never catch the cylinder rotating while he pulls it. His mother tells him it only moves when he is not looking, so he dedicates himself to attempting to catch the cylinder in motion to validate his mother’s claim. “The ‘magic’ that was unbeknown to [him…] brought a feeling of curiosity and awe at its ability to never be caught and revealed. Much like religion and God and having hard, visual evidence of his existence but it’s a feeling and belief” (Wallace 14). The young boy cannot grasp the idea of the magic but is driven by its peculiar feeling. He is astonished at the cement mixer’s ability to never be seen in motion and how it outsmarts him each time. In his eyes, it is magic which does not allow him to see the cement mixer in motion, as it stops in the instant that he tries to catch it. While the magic is not real and he projects it, it is this external force which brings him a peculiar feeling of curiosity and something to believe in. His mother, projecting the magic in the cement mixer, is the catalyst who activates his belief in this secular toy. The young boy gives purpose to his life as he devotes himself to trapping the magic. Wallace compares the belief in this magic to the belief in a higher power. Both wish they had real, visual evidence to be able to comprehend the supernatural aspect of their beliefs. Ultimately, both magic and religion demonstrate that it is only through affect and belief
in the inexplicable that followers can accept and dedicate themselves to such mysteries.
In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 , Oedipa Maas, the protagonist, is akin to a detective. She attempts to solve the mystery of the Trystero in the play The Courier’s Tragedy, and as she devotes herself to this, she either creates a meaningful purpose for herself or discovers one predestined by a celestial being. When determining her place in life, “what really kept her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside” and she had “no apparatus except gut fear” and in discovering “how to measure its field strength [...] she may fall back on superstition” (Pynchon 12). Calling the magic “anonymous” suggests that where it comes from is unknown, yet it keeps her where she is in her life. Unlike the other ways magic appears in these post-secular stories, the magic Oedipa experiences is described as “malignant,” which has a negative connotation and denotes harmful intentions. This secular magic has malicious attributes which contribute to the loss of her sense of identity and purpose. Oedipa recognizes the magic through the use of her “gut fear.” She senses fear through an instinctive gut feeling which guides her to unveil where the magic comes from. In her attempt to uncover its “field strength” (the power and regional size the magic covers), she reminds herself that she always has her credulous belief in the supernatural to justify the magic in her life. “Superstition” is defined as a fear of the unknown, in which belief originates. She feels a harmful magic in her life that comes from an external force and she concludes that if
she cannot understand it or locate it, she can fall back on the idea that the magic comes from something greater than her. Out of her fear of not finding out what the malevolent magic stems from, she decides her superstition and unjustified belief will be her answers. Oedipa omits logic and knowledge and allows her intuitive gut feeling to guide her on her journey of revealing the enigmatic magic which touches her so deeply. It is evident that this magic is a catalyst for her actions and induces strong feelings.
Similar to Oedipa, to return to an earlier example, as Fight Club progresses, the narrator is consumed by the feelings that stem from fighting and breaking himself down. He notes that he isn’t “alive anywhere like [he’s] alive at fight club” and that “fight club isn’t about words […] there’s grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn’t about looking good. There’s hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved” (Palahniuk 51). The narrator encounters salvation at fight club, his church. He deems it a religious place and, unlike the support groups which use words, at fight club the narrator is saved by something spoken beyond words: an intense feeling of waking up the next morning feeling “saved” and a sense of rebirth. The “shouting in tongues” is compared to Pentecostals speaking in the tongues they consider to be the language of angels and divinity. This celestial element of fight club contributes to the magical components informing the narrator’s feelings of spirituality and salvation. The narrator feels alive at fight club and it is through his surroundings there that there’s a release of a sense
of spirituality that dwells within him. Caleb Spencer, an editor for Religion and Literature, in his article “Post-secular Conversions: From Traveling Mercies to Fight Club,” describes the doctrines of fight club as “catalysts for action and the actions are catalysts for feelings,” and notes that “belief lies in the ability to produce transformative experiences” (Spencer). The convictions of fight club are the driving force for actions that create and induce feelings. Tyler’s dogma is important to the extent that it acts as a catalyst for feelings of being alive to come into fruition. In religious experience, it is the blind execution of the doctrines that guides followers’ succeeding actions and the feelings that derive from their transformative experiences. In believing that an adherence to Tyler’s doctrines can produce change, individuals open themselves to being susceptible to revelatory encounters and spirituality that protrudes into their lives and leaves a lasting impact on their ethos (or essence). This is a natural progression of the internal-to-external shift in how a sense of spirituality inhabits people and infuses their lives.
Characters’ encounters with sacramental imagination and external forces become the basis of their belief systems as their faith no longer derives from their subconscious. In Malick’s Tree of Life, Jack feels God’s love through his mother and tells God, “you spoke to me through her [...] you spoke with me from the sky, the trees. Before I knew I loved you, believed in you” (McCracken). Jack learns the way of grace through his mother and he comes to know God. He feels God’s presence all around in nature as the sky and the trees communicate with him. It is through these external
encounters that Jack feels spiritual and guided. Jack also experiences sacramental imagination as he feels evidence of God’s existence in his life through everyday situations, objects, and people that bring him revelations of grace: in this instance, his mother and the environment surrounding him aid his understanding of God and “the way of grace.” This demonstrates the progression of affect becoming external, as he does not project a meaning for himself and sense magic, but through outer forces he feels God and becomes religious. Through trusting in the communicated messages of nature, God reveals himself.
In the poem “Los Angeles After the Rain,” Dana Gioia writes about Los Angeles, returning to its once beautiful state before it became polluted with smog and lost its light and charm. He imagines the rebirth of the city being like “a morning snatched from Paradise” (Gioia line 8) as “the city stirs and stretches [...] / Sunlight stroking the skin and the / promiscuous wind whispering / ‘Seize the moment. Surrender to the air’s / irrefutable embrace. Trust me that today / even seduction leads to love’” (Gioia lines 15, 17 - 21). Gioia uses simile to compare the beauty of the city to having heavenly attributes and being like a paradise. With the use of personification, he gives the city human actions by noting how it awakens, how nature touches and speaks to it. The sunlight touches the city with a physical warmth as the wind whispers to surrender to the air’s undeniable hold. By speaking to the city, nature is encouraging the city (and the speaker of the poem) to trust in it, to trust that even pure attraction and ephemeral interest will lead to an intense feeling and long-lasting intimacy. We can see how his
interaction between nature and the city is displayed as the wind, the sky, and the air are all prompting the city—and, essentially, humanity—to submit itself to nature and to believe in its abilities to bring meaning. By calling the air’s embrace “irrefutable,” Gioia describes how air and oxygen are all around and therefore impossible to resist. While resisting it is not an option, if the city gives itself over and has faith in nature’s capabilities, it is taking full advantage of life’s opportunities and thereby living a meaningful life. The wind, speaking to the city, brings a sense of spirituality, as the city cannot comprehend or know nature, but it can feel its warm embrace and hear its whispered urgings to take advantage of the opportunities placed in front of it. This sacramental imagination guides humanity toward the spiritual, as it is through these ordinary experiences with nature that God attempts to communicate with his creation.
Similar to the wind speaking to humanity, in The Road the father also senses the wind communicating with him. After hearing a sound, “He got up and walked out to the road” and in a “distant low rumble [...] you could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark [...] the silence. The salitter drying from the earth […] no sound but the wind” (McCarthy 261). The father cannot describe what it is he hears. He refers to the noise he hears as a “sound without cognate.” “Cognate” is defined as having similar or correlated roots to something else; saying that the noise had nothing it could be connected to indicates that there’s nothing to relate it to that could
make it understood; it is simply unfathomable. Even in silence, the wind continues, and while it does not carry a cognitive message, it brings a feeling to the father. “Salitter,” a word pulled from the writings of a 17th century mystic, connotes the divine essence of God found in all things; here, in “the silence,” “the salitter” is essentially leaving. In this desolate place, not even God remains, and like the young man in “Nirvana,” the father feels cut loose from a meaningful purpose. It is only the wind he hears that carries a feeling telling him to continue. The wind speaking to him in the silence tells him he is not alone, and it may be the only thing comforting him as he is driven only by the feelings that the wind evokes.
Through nature’s communication with humanity, characters’ spirituality makes them feel at the center of a higher purpose to serve. In Life of Pi, Pi is walking back to his town when he “suddenly felt [he] was in heaven” from a “feeling, a paradoxical mix of pulsing energy and profound peace, . . . intense and blissful. Whereas before the road, the sea, the trees, the air, the sun all spoke differently to [him], now they spoke one language of unity”; “every element lived in harmonious relation with its neighbor” and he “felt like the center of a small circle coinciding with the center of a much larger one; as if “atman met Allah” (Martel 62). “Atman” is the Hindu term for living things’ individual souls; even after death, the soul lives on. Pi feels his own individual life meeting God’s, as if his small life contributes to the order of the universe. He senses himself at the center of this “small circle,” as if the world or something greater revolves around him, a revelatory feeling on his walk home, when the
ordinary environment is suddenly filled with a heavenly essence. It’s a paradoxical feeling— bringing peace but also a palpitating, intense rush. This demonstrates the idea of the sacred protruding into the profane, as his normal surroundings carry more religious significance and the bliss he feels coincides with the pulsing energy where both inhabit him, within. Everything that used to seem mundane or out of sync gains a sacred sensation of harmony, as if all the exterior forces of the earth, the sky, and everything in between, united to speak to him and pull him closer to divinity. The external forces speak one language of holiness to Pi. He does not cognitively comprehend this but, spiritually, the message from nature is explicit, and he feels a celestial peace, an earthly liveliness guiding his belief.
Oedipa, in The Crying of Lot 49, has a comparable experience. While driving into San Narciso, “nothing was happening”; then the “ordered swirl of houses and streets [...] sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had” and there were outward patterns of “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate” with her (Pynchon 14). In suddenly seeing the symmetrical swirl of the structures of neighborhoods, like the similar pattern she has noticed printed on circuit cards, she feels “unexpected . . . clarity” while simply driving, as though something greater is attempting to get in touch with her. “Hieroglyphic” refers to a symbol or figure with a hidden message. Cognitively, she cannot grasp it and communicate, but she feels the coded, concealed message waiting to be revealed to her as “a revelation [that] trembled just past
the threshold of her understanding [...] she and the Chevy seemed parked at the Center of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency [...] words were being spoken” (Pynchon 14). It’s as if, just beyond her perception, a supernatural being is attempting to unveil a hidden message for her. A “revelation” describes a previously unknown fact which becomes known to individuals through acts of divinity. This “revelation . . . trembling,” just out of her grasp, contributes to her “religious instant,” the personification of the “trembling” insinuating that the unknown force is disclosing itself to Oedipa at a rapid, quivering pace. This moment allows Oedipa to sense her life coinciding with a larger, communal one. While she is parked, at “the center of an odd, religious instant,” she can sense a predetermined plan for her life, almost as though the external forces of the city are communicating a concealed message and presenting her with divinity. She cannot understand the revelation and is not being spoken to with words, but on a different frequency and vibration than her typical earthly one. Feeling a higher sense of purpose, she trusts in that feeling and the alternate words being “spoken” to her. Like Pi, she feels as though she is at the center of her life and as if something greater is rotating around her and attempting to communicate. As Oedipa comes to realize her purpose, Pi comes to realize his sacred home.
Pi feels “at home in a Hindu temple. [He] is aware of Presence not personal the way we usually feel presence, but something larger” and his heart skips a beat when he sees a glimpse of “God Residing, in the inner sanctum of a temple. Truly [he is] in a sacred
cosmic womb, a place where everything is born, and it is [his] sweet luck to behold its living core. [His] hands naturally come together in reverent worship” and he feels “the gentle pull of a relationship” (Martel 49). Pi feels God lives in the Hindu temple, and that wherever God is, Pi wants to be, as well. He discerns God’s presence in the larger sense that it is not just him who feels God and has a relationship—in the temple, God is present for all humanity to feel. The “inner sanctum” is the most sacred and private place in a church or temple. When Pi is in the temple surrounded by God’s residence, he feels he is in a “sacred cosmic womb,” feeling divinity and seeing the faith in others strengthen and solidify. Identical are the revelatory feelings Oedipa has while driving through San Narciso, and Pi, while walking home to his town, demonstrating how both daily environments are just as sacred as the temple that also carries this same emotion. Regardless of the physical place, the divine intrudes in Pi and Oedipa’s lives through the means of external forces. The term “cosmic” relates to the universe and something unearthly, and “womb” indicates birth. While in his divine womb, Pi feels birthed, essentially, into a relationship with God; he believes it is by chance that he lives at the central part, the core, of God’s creation. When worshipping, he notes how he feels a “gentle pull” of his hands “naturally” coming together. Analogous to the “field strength” Oedipa feels, Pi also feels a natural, tangible pull to bring his hands together. It’s a magnetic pull to worship and devote himself to God, overtaking his thoughts as he feels moved to do so. His emotions and intensified
devotion guide his faith and actions as he requires no cognition to understand and feel God’s presence in his life.
Characters’ experiences of affect over cognition, as they shift from an internal instinct to project their meaning, lead them to feel supernatural magic take control over their lives, which leaves them with a sensation of nature communicating with humanity through exterior forces. These characters display spirituality as a necessary feeling for individuals, as it brings them purpose and comfort. Throughout these post-secular novels and short stories, feeling and sensing that there is a power beyond cognition steers characters to devote themselves to a higher power, demonstrating a dissatisfaction with secularism alone, as without the guidance of spirituality or celestial beings, they feel lost and without purpose. These works suggest that humanity has an innate desire for spiritual feelings and will attempt to satiate this infinite inclination within through seeking out deeper truths and messages from external forces. «
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage Books and Random House, 2006, pp. 83, 261.
McCracken, Brett, et al. “Why ‘The Tree of Life’ Is the Best Christian Film Ever Made.” The Gospel Coalition, 23 Oct. 2018, https://www thegospelcoa lition.org /article/tree -life -best- christian-filmever-made/
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Norton, 1996, pp. 22, 51.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. HarperCollins Publishers, 1965, pp. 12, 14.
Spencer, Caleb D. “Postsecular Conversions: From Traveling Mercies to Fight Club.” Religion and Literature, vol. 51, no. 3, 2020, pp. 23–49.
Wallace, David Foster, et al. “‘All That,” by David Foster Wallace.” The New Yorker, 7 Dec. 2009, https:// www newyorker com/magazine/2009/12/14/all -that
Bukowski, Charles. “Nirvana.” The Last Night of the Earth Poems. Ecco, 2002, pp. 396 – 398.
Chiang, Ted. “Hell is the Absence of God.” Vintage Books, 2016, pp. 205-235.
Gioia, Dana. “Los Angeles After the Rain.” The General Reader https://thegeneralreader com/2014/11/01
/weekend-poetry- dana-gioia-la-and-the -rain/ Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Random House of Canada, 2003, pp. 49, 62, 63.
WHILE ZITKÁLA-ŠÁ’S American Indian Stories was published a century after Lewis Cass’ Removal of the Indians, her account of boarding school days in Eastern America addresses the prolonged influence of the administrative erasure of indigenous spirituality. In particular, the visceral loss of her “spirit” and her reception of the white man’s devil alter her impressions of home back West, as her formative experiences in boarding school cloud her perception of cultural identity. As School
Days of an Indian Girl traces the narrator’s vacillating migration from West to East, the notion of hampering spirituality surveys the destruction of kinship within indigenous households. By examining the methods of “re-education” established by the policies of Lewis Cass and the Carlisle school, this paper seeks to argue that Zitkála-Šá’s semi-autobiographical narrative outlines bi-cultural domesticity with the intention of decolonizing native spirituality. To this end, this textual reclamation pushes
LEAH WHANG is a 2023 graduate of the English M.A. program at LMU, where she has received a Program Scholar award. At UC Berkeley, she received dual B.A. degrees in English and Performance Studies. Currently, she serves as a Graduate Teaching Fellow with the English Department and a Research Assistant at the Center for the Study of Los Angeles. Specializing in critical theory & diasporic literature, Leah is most passionate about research on cultural expressions within various communities of contemporary America. Her work on Zitkála-Šá’s semi-fictional exploration of indigenous identity was written for Dr. Robin Miskolcze’s American Realism course in Spring 2022.
»
audiences to address the faux realities of the Western imaginary, as canonized by predominant Realist texts.
In “The Land of Red Apples,” the first chapter of The School Days of an Indian Girl, Zitkála ventures “beyond [their] eastern horizon” with the missionaries to attend boarding school (Zitkála-Šá 41). As Zitkála-Šá and the other children travel “beyond the great circular horizon of the Western prairie,” they dream of “roaming as freely and happily as we had chased the cloud shadows on the Dakota plains” (Zitkála-Šá 47). While her formative self had initially envisioned the “Red Apple Country” as an Eastern land that mirrored the comfort of her Western home, she immediately resents “bold white faces” of her fellow train passengers openly mocking her moccasined feet. Even before she reaches the school grounds, a young Zitkála-Šá begins to reconcile with the perceptible distinctions between the East and West, regions that seemingly represent two disparate cultures to her—the moment our narrator begins to exist as both a Native American and a resident of the boarding school, she emerges as a bi-cultural character, or an individual tethered to the expectations of two distinct cultures. With this in mind, Zitkála-Šá attempts to resist the white missionaries on the first day of school, as they intend to cut her long, healthy hair. Back in the West, “only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy…among [her] people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards” (Zitkála-Šá 54). Here, Zitkála-Šá calls upon her initial feelings of resentment experienced during the preceding train ride to fully characterize her visceral
reaction to the first chronicled instance of the boarding school’s rehabilitation tactics:
I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then, I lost my spirit . Since the day I was taken from my mother, I had suffered extreme indignities. People had stared at me…and now my long hair was shingled like a coward’s! (Zitkála-Šá 56)
Before engaging in a comprehensive analysis of the textual “loss of spirit” evoked by this passage, one must account for the collective, spiritual loss subjected onto all indigenous girls forcibly enrolled in the American Indian residential school system. To put it differently, the bureaucratic subjugation of the indigenous spirit is rooted in the material repercussions of Manifest Destiny, as the notion of American exceptionalism “[dismissed] the indigenous population as inhabitants” of the Western territories nineteenth-century capitalists and politicians sought to conquer (Paul 325). In essence, the construction of the mythic American West is what justified racial warfare in the first place. As reiterated by the narrator’s mother, the journey to the Western country is what killed many of their family members: “both your sister and uncle might have been happy with us today, had it not been for the heartless paleface” (Zitkála-Šá 11). Altogether, successfully seizing the capitalist “magic” of the frontier required the genocidal displacement and eventual “rehabilitation” of indigenous populations (Paul 326).
In fact, the presence of indigenous populations in the West dictated the territorial
inclinations of the Western imaginary. Specifically, the predominant perception of the noble, “vanishing Indian” is what supported “Euro-American westward expansion” in the first place (Paul 336). Within the realm of Western settlement, indigenous people “conveniently seem to anticipate their own extinction” (Paul 336). On the other hand, the “remaining” Natives were seen as “barbaric and primitive peoples” that needed to be vanquished—this opposing stereotype is what heightened the collective, American desire for a settled and “civilized” Western frontier. The Captives of the Frontier (1860), one of Edward S. Ellis’ most popular dime-novel Westerns, is a prime example of accessible forms of literature demonizing indigenous populations within the predominant culture:
Behind were a half-dozen savages, their gleaming visages distorted with the passions of exultation, vengeance, and doubt, their garments flying in the wind, and their strength pressed to its utmost bounds. They were…spreading over the prairie, so as to cut off the fugitive’s escape in every direction. (Paul 337)
With dime novels of this nature gaining substantial traction during the height of Western expansion, the dehumanizing portrayal of Native Americans was permanently etched into the Western imaginary. Not only were Native characters canonically associated with barbaric disposition and physicality, but the “slaughtering of the Native” was described in “realist fashion” (Paul 337). While dime-novel Westerns do not necessarily belong to the traditional
genre of American realism, these inexpensive “novels” are cited as prime examples of mass-produced fantasies. Through the shared setting of the mystical American frontier, The Captives of the Frontier and other textual forms of nineteenth-century cultural production celebrated white-induced violence. By exterminating the hordes of Native American figures characterized as both savage and lawless, the central white heroes were permitted to thoroughly explore the uncharted territories of the West. In short, this genre’s use of realistic violence echoed the burgeoning imaginary of the Western territories, as popular “frontier” discourse spoke for the removal of real, indigenous populations (Paul 338).
Looking back at the fundamental origins of palpable indigenous displacement, cabinet member Lewis Cass played a central part in bolstering the removal policies during the Jackson Administration. In his public campaign that eventually led to the passing of the Indian Removal Act (1830), Cass advocated for the total relocation of indigenous territories—in the eyes of local statesmen, forcing indigenous people to migrate west of the Mississippi River was the key to advancing the development of American settlement. In the Removal of the Indians, an article written for the North American Review, Cass makes a point to mention the “Great Spirit” in his dissection of the indigenous mentality:
Whatever of good or of evil may happen, he receives it with imperturbable calmness… the opinions, traditions, and institutions of his own tribe, are endeared to him by habit, feeling, and authority; and from early infancy
he is taught, that the Great Spirit will be offended by any change in the customs of his red children, which have all been established by him. Reckless of consequences, he is the child of impulse. (Cass 4)
Published in January 1830, only a few months before the Indian Removal Act was officially passed, Removal of the Indians embodies the colonialist digestion of indigenous spirituality. In scrutinizing the supposed virtues of Native Americans, Cass initially cites the Great Spirit, the indigenous concept of life force. Seeing that American missionaries often exploited the parallels between the Great Spirit and the God of Christianity, Cass’s decision to call attention to the Great Spirit’s supposed inability to “control” indigenous populations is further contextualized. With the Great Spirit cited as one of the root causes of indigenous impulse and recklessness, Cass reminds audiences of the North American Review that proper “principles of morality” derive from “civilized” religious beliefs (Cass 2).
Given these points, Cass designates the forced migration of Native American tribes as one of the main channels of extinguishing indigenous spirituality, the presumed cause of their “reckless” behavior (Cass 6). As repeatedly declared by Cass’s coercive outline of indigenous character, the removal policies of the early nineteenth-century are justified by the presumed shortcomings of indigenous people—specifically, he chooses to fixate upon the Great Spirit and the lack of “civilized” religion within indigenous tribes to account for their inability to comprehend the enlightened practices of American society. With that
being said, Cass’s public campaign depicts the federal melding of imperialist virtues and democratic policies, hegemonic ideology that eventually led to the mid-century formalization of both the reservation and residential education systems (Smith 89). Throughout the latter half of Cass’ article, he amplifies his advocacy for the total “remodel of the Indian character” (Cass 6). In asserting that the administrative removal of Native populations would efficiently “afford [them]…all the necessary instruction in the art of life and the duties of religion,” Cass designates the sphere of religious obligations as a facet of civilization akin to the domestic duties of a provincial lifestyle. While the bureaucratic emphasis on the spiritual is a seemingly obvious characteristic of the American policies enacted throughout the nineteenth century, the modes of forced assimilation adopted by the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and other boarding schools maintain the hegemonic ideology advertised by the Removal of the Indians Although these rehabilitation institutions were branded as educational, these schools intended to properly “domesticate” indigenous children through a merging of moral and spirituality training. In particular, indigenous girls were pushed towards the “process of civilization derived from the Victorian model of middle-class white domesticity” as a means of completely subduing the minds and bodies of their students (Lomawaima 230).
In acknowledging that Removal of Indians and other mid-nineteenth century documentation of the “Indian Problem” accentuate prominent discourse regarding the relocation of Native individuals within the Western Imaginary, the institutional fixation
on clouding indigenous impressions of total spirituality is further clarified—in the eyes of colonists, “cultural assimilation and missionization processes [were] part of the same project” (Smith 99). Here, it is important to note that Zitkála-Šá’s use of spirit refers to both the essence of personhood and metaphysical connotations, as indigenous livelihood hinged upon cumulative, immaterial beliefs. As captured by the whimsical descriptions of her childhood, Zitkála-Šá and her fellow community members engage in collective spiritual practices, directly tying social livelihood to the nonmaterial. When Zitkála-Šá’s mother tells her about Wiyaka-Napbina, a local man doomed to constantly wander the lands, the narrator “feels sorry for the man in his misfortune” and “[prays] to the Great Spirit to restore him” (Zitkála-Šá’ 26). While Zitkála-Šá’s autobiography was published almost a full century after the Indian Removal Act was passed, it is important to note that these chronicles within Impressions of an Indian Childhood serve as the enduring prelude to a devastating account of the physical and mental abuses authorized by Zitkála-Šá’s residential school. Because her migration to the East immediately takes note of the substantial loss of spirit made tangible by the symbolic cutting of her hair, readers are urged to compare her boarding school days to the detailed comforts of familial existence back in the Western lands.
Granted, the initial section of American Indian Stories chooses to depict idyllic sketches of the West rooted in indigenous domesticity:
During the summer days, my mother built her fire in the shadow of our wigwam. In the
early morning, our simple breakfast was spread upon the grass west of our tepee. At the farthest point of the shade my mother sat beside her fire, toasting a savory piece of dried meat…though I heard many strange experiences…I loved best the evening meal, for that was the time old legends were told. I was always glad when the sun hung low in the west , for then my mother sent me to invite the neighboring old men and women to eat supper with us. (Zitkála-Šá’
12-13)With passages of this nature scattered throughout her portrayal of the reservations west of the Mississippi territories, Zitkála-Šá invites us to ruminate on the loss of such domestic traditions alongside her—while the “West” is used to describe the directional setting of the summer sun here, the notion of a West-oriented land is not made textually explicit until The Legends With simple meals and notions of neighborly affinities highlighted by her pastoral sketches of the Western prairie, The Legends and the other domestic-centered passages of Impressions of an Indian Childhood give prominence to the material ties between indigenous notions of community and spirit, as young Zitkála-Šá often prays to the Great Spirit to look after the livelihood of her family and fellow neighbors. Interestingly enough, Zitkála-Šá initially characterizes her younger self “as free as the wind that blew my hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer. These were my mother’s pride—my wild freedom and overflowing spirits” (Zitkála-Šá 8). In consideration of Zitkála-Šá’s view of her own pre-Eastern education as reckless, the words of Cass’s legislation come to mind, as he described
uneducated indigenous people as “reckless of consequences…the [children] of impulse” (Cass 4). Although Zitkála-Šá seemingly “reconfirms [hegemonic] stereotypes,” she is simultaneously reclaiming the perceived traits of indigenous disposition (Carpenter 4). While she chooses to identify with the “impulse” of indigenous spirituality, her narrative ultimately rejects the predominant approach towards Native character by inserting her untainted experiences with domestic spheres of “Western” conduct. Ironically, Lewis Cass had asserted that “the world has had enough of romantic description” in his description of Native individuals’ inability to adapt to civilization without aid from a full-fledged imperialist trajectory (Cass 3). Provided this, Zitkála-Šá discredits the impression of indigenous “indifference” by re-writing indigenous spirituality on her own terms, adopting the notion of “romantic description” through her realist depictions of the spiritual and social practices of her Western, domestic sphere.
As Zitkála-Šá recalls the oral narratives and cultural legends exchanged over shared meals, audiences are provided with a realist illustration of community kinship informed by ties to the authentic “recklessness” of spiritual connectivity. By placing these sequences of the Yankton Indian Reservation immediately before her chronicled acclimation to the East, Zitkála-Šá converges her forthcoming loss of spirit with the administrative efforts to ban tribal spiritual practices. As materialized by the “iron routine” of boarding school activities, “colonialist modernity” and its conversion incentives continuously dictate her educational upbringing in the East. Because Zitkála-Šá
and her fellow classmates are forced to digest white-centered domesticity and religion simultaneously, the indigenous loss of spirit can be traced back to both cultural and regional liminality, as the domestic ideology demanded by “Eastern” boarding school education muddled the notion of a tangible home for indigenous youth of the twentieth century (Brown 310).
Yet, in order to accurately locate the environmental contrast between Impressions of an Indian Childhood and School Days of an Indian Girls, we must turn our attention back to the Carlisle School, the Pennsylvanian institution that later became the model for dozens of educational institutions established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (Zink 39). In accessing the Carlisle Indian School Digital Research Center, numerous letters regarding the church attendance of indigenous children are available for examination. In particular, one letter contains administrative correspondence regarding the church attendance of a student named Benjamin Black Elk: “I must vigorously protest against the placing of Catholic children in localities where they cannot attend to their religious duties regularly. I am sending a copy of this letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs” (National Archives and Records Administration 3). Here, the director of the Catholic Indian Missions takes notice of Benjamin Black Elk’s accumulated absences from the mass services associated with Carlisle affairs. While the straightforward diction of this document points to Black Elk’s presumed misdemeanor, it is critical to note that the “rituals of European American domesticity” were imbedded into the Carlisle curriculum (Zink 38). Even outside of the
classroom, students were situated in physical “homes” presided over by parental figures who enforced their religious participation through the authority mandated by the hierarchies of a white-American nuclear family:
In regard to the inquiry of the father of Benjamin Black Elk would say that he was getting along very nicely and [seems] to take an interest in his work and his habits are very good and he attends church as often as possible. (National Archives and Records Administration 7)
With Black Elk’s improved “interest in his work and his habits” supposedly cemented by his renewed commitment to regular mass, the systematic “[molding] of young people’s minds” was clearly tethered to the notion of blockading indigenous understandings of spirituality (Lomawaima 228). As highlighted by the aforementioned letter correspondence exchanged between the academic directors of the Carlisle institution, the refined codes of European American domesticity were utilized as a tool of discouraging the inherent recklessness of Native American youth. According to the administrators of the Carlisle school and its institutional counterparts, indigenous children were forced to internalize their domesticated education in order to dampen previously held impressions of indigenous spirituality. Once they returned home to their families back at the Western reservations, they would eventually “lift [their] Native parents out of their Indian ‘savagery’ and into American civilization” (Zink 38). By definition, domesticity centers upon the nuclear family unit, and a particular dedication
to life within the confines of a household. Yet, a considerable amount of student writings produced by boarding school curricula refer to the concept of “home” as merely “an idea projected onto some other place and time” (Zink 44). With indigenous individuals restrained by ceaseless instances of forced migration and other systems of racial terror, these primary texts highlight an unsettling sense of liminality that had come to determine the indigenous conception of domesticity, or “home.” In the midst of succumbing to dampened spirituality, young indigenous girls in particular were rehabilitated into the domestic services of the school and the homes of white women. Taking these initial notes on female-oriented domesticity into consideration, the question of motherhood and the “product of [white-induced] domesticity” are brought to fruition, as American Indian Stories’ gradual de-construction of the domestic spheres is complicated by Zitkála-Šá’s interpretation of the “white man’s devil” (Zink 46).
In The Devil, the fourth installment of the School Days section, a slightly older Zitkála-Šá ruminates upon her connection to the Great Spirit, particularly in relation to her authentic conceptions of domesticity. As she adapts to the doctrinal routine of the Eastern American boarding school, she realizes that she “never knew there was an insolent chieftain among the bad spirits, who dared to array his forces against the Great Spirit, until I heard this white man’s legend from a paleface woman” (Zitkála-Šá 62). Primarily, this section alludes to the repercussions of the spiritual training mandated by the boarding school homes, as the narrator’s subconscious
is slowly acclimating to the “corrective” pedagogy of her educators. As she recounts her nightmare featuring the white’s man devil from “the stories of the Bible,” Zitkála-Šá is only able to initially conceptualize the wicked divinity through the indigenous notion of “bad spirits,” as dictated by her natal belief in the Great Spirit. But then, the narrator’s mother suddenly manifests within her nightmare: “then in rushed the devil! He was tall! He did not speak to my mother, because he did not know the Indian language” (Zitkála-Šá 63). Here, Zitkála-Šá’s fear of white-oriented divinity is exacerbated by the devil’s linguistic opposition to her mother, as the two central figures of her dream are not of the same culture. If anything, the psychological consequences of educational rehabilitation are precisely addressed by this passage’s imaginative conflict between European-American religion and indigenous domesticity, as the narrator is clearly struggling to reconcile her dual, yet disparate, conceptions of “home.”
Yet, it is the climax of her nightmare that speaks to a written resistance to a boundless home: “just as the devil stooped over me with outstretched claws my mother awoke from her quiet indifference and lifted me on her lap” (Zitkála-Šá 64). Notably, her mother is described as awakening from “indifference,” another trait that echoes the “imperturbable calmness” of indigenous stereotypes (Cass 4). Once again, Zitkála-Šá denies the predominant classification of indigenous “indifference” by re-writing her mother into her nightmares— here, adorning the traits of “indifference” is what allows her mother to ward off the white man’s devil, a symbolic representation of the
religious discipline that regulated the “Iron Routine” of her boarding school residency. By inserting her mother into a fantastical backlash against religious indoctrination in the East, Zitkála-Šá suggests that the “Western” domestic sphere, as represented by her dream mother, is not completely removed from the inescapable path towards American assimilation.
With that being said, scholar Amanda J. Zink asserts that Zitkála-Šá’s stories “effectively use the language of domesticity to scrutinize…compulsory Indian education… [and] its related participation in national efforts to ‘Americanize’ the Indian” (Zink 54). By establishing her textual authority over dichotomous domesticity, the narrator sets the stage for Four Summers , the chapter that recounts Zitkála-Šá’s anticipated return to the reservation in the Western country. Following some years of reformed education in the East, the narrator returns to the familial structures of indigenous domesticity, inviting readers to compare the spiritual-domestic inclinations of her schooldays to those featured in Impressions of an Indian Childhood . In this introductory exposition of this chapter, the narrator marks herself as “neither a wee girl nor a tall one; neither a wild Indian nor a tame one” (Zitkála-Ša 69). Through the juxtaposed use of correlative conjunctions, Zitkála-Šá presents readers with an objective sense of self-awareness. Namely, she distances herself from the hegemonic representation of the reckless savage, but also refuses to succumb to the rehabilitation authorized to subdue her indigenous character. Despite the notion of home, or domestic
belonging, becoming permanently blurred by the efforts of the residential schools, Zitkála-Šá aims to command her own understanding of liminality.
Interestingly enough, Zitkála-Šá attempts to convey a pointed detachment from the collective modes of assimilation seducing the rest of her peers. While the narrator “had thrown away [her] shoes, and wore again the soft moccasins,” her older brother and her fellow youth adorn themselves with “white man’s coat and trousers, with bright neckties...the girls wore tight muslin dresses, with ribbons around neck and waist”—because “they had gone three years to school in the East…[they] had become civilized” (Zitkála-Ša 72). In effect, the characterization of Dawée, her older brother, provides audiences with a distinct comparison, as Zitkála-Ša refuses to assimilate to the extent that he does. Although both siblings are capable of wielding the language of the “paleface,” Dawée has even become aesthetically integrated, refusing to adorn himself in the traditional clothing of their native culture. The Beadwork, the third installation of Impressions, recounts their mother working “upon small moccasins for her small” children, dedicating herself to the intricate “art of beadwork” (Zitkála-Šá 19). Here, the gentle description of her mother’s beadwork is recalled in this moment, as the narrator is horrified by Dawée’s nonchalant rejection of maternal beadwork for Americanized apparel. With Zitkála-Šá’s return to moccasin adornment underscored by the definite comfort of indigenous motherhood, the narrator compels us to view total assimilation, as embodied by characters like
Dawée, as a dismissal of indigenous understandings of domesticity.
Under these circumstances, Zitkála-Šá’s mother notices that her daughter is excluded from the rest of her fully assimilated peers, as a teenage Zitkála-Šá “[buried her] face in [her] arms and cried hot tears” (Zitkála-Šá 73). As previously mentioned, indigenous students at the residential schools were bound to muddled understandings of belonging— with the integration of “school policies and practices of domestic education” designed to gain “total control” over the spirit of the indigenous self, pedagogical indoctrination supporting Christ-centered households became the primary method of separating cultural understandings of “home” and “family” (Lomawaima 229). Evidently, Zitkála-Šá’s mother considers the teachings of the Eastern American school as a source of comfort for her children, as she is seemingly familiar with the unavoidable adaptation to white culture. Seeing her beloved daughter cry, she attempts to console Zitkála-Šá with the “only printed matter” in their household: “here, my child, are the white man’s papers. Read a little from them” (Zitkála-Šá 73). With her daughter slowly conforming to imperialist education, Zitkála-Šá’s mother believes that the Bible, rather than the spirituality offered by their home in the West, is what will ease Zitkála-Šá’s sorrows. In this moment, the bi-cultural liminality that comprehensively defines the narrator’s frame of reference is further elaborated. As previously captured by the figurative events of The Devil, Zitkála-Ša’s dream mother was the one who saved her from the devil, a manifestation of the white man’s papers. Yet, her real mother views
the tools provided by American education as a channel of bridging the gap between herself and her acclimated daughter. With Zitkála-Šá’s mother initially established as an emblem of native domesticity by Impressions, the emergence of conflicting representations tied to motherhood underscores Zitkála-Šá’s growing sense of identity loss. Even though the narrator refuses to associate herself with her brother’s oblivious pledges to American gestures, her own mother and elder community within the Western prairie are incapable of truly adjusting to her newfound, integrated identity. While some are completely acclimated to the domestic preferences of Eastern American education, others are entirely removed from the premises of administrative education. Unable to reconcile with her cemented liminality, Zitkála-Šá knows that she “betrayed my suffering to her [mother], and she was grieving for me” (Zitkála-Šá 74). Eventually “a few more moons of turmoil drove [her] away to the eastern school,” signaling her compliance to domestic displacement. Through the motif of the white man’s papers, the material realities of indoctrinated domesticity are stressed, as Zitkála-Šá’s wavering migration points to the unavoidable destruction of the indigenous conception of home and belonging.
Some may argue that the narrator eventually embodies a cultural submission parallel to that of Dawee, as Zitkála-Šá’s transparent prose evokes a sense of terminality regarding her decision to attend an American college. However, Incurring My Mother’s Displeasure tracks Zitkála-Šá’s isolated journey towards pursuing higher education: although she “often…wept in secret…wishing [she] had
gone West, to be nourished by [her] mother’s love” (Zitkála-Šá 76). With this in mind, one must recall that The School Days of an Indian Girl revised the hegemonic portrayals of indigenous spirituality in order to assert the ambiguity of indigenous existence. Returning to the Amanda J. Zink notes on indigenous domesticity, Native sentimental writing often “repurposes domesticity in ways that white reformers and educators” could not fathom (Zink 53). As the narrative tactics of American Indian Stories complicated the integration of spirituality and domesticity within the realms of East and West, Zitkála-Šá grew to accept the notion of a “home lost in space and time” (Zink 48). If anything, her writings offer a “counternarrative to administrative efforts” that quell the indigenous impulse, as indigenous notions of “home” ultimately threaten the endeavors of American expansionism (Zink 48).
As initiated by Europeans and American imperialists historically moving from East to West, the forced migrations of indigenous communities had become synonymous with the subjugation of indigenous domesticity, as bounded by dual notions of spirituality and kinship. Despite this, Zitkála-Šá is able to reclaim the capacity of native spirituality that was seemingly depleted by these vacillating migration patterns, carving an imagined realm for the bi-cultural, indigenous individual. As she recounts the days working for the Carlisle school, she comes to terms with the fact that she had ultimately “given up [her] faith in the Great Spirit” for the white man’s papers—once she decidedly resigns from her teaching position at the residential school, she continues to reside in the East and solves
“the problems on [her] inner self” (Zitkála-Šá 97). In dissecting the rhetoric of “rehabilitation” within documentation authorized by Lewis Cass and the Carlisle school, audiences become privy to the calculated removal of “spirit” from Native conceptions of home and belonging. Yet, Zitkála-Šá’s autobiographical narrative serves to decolonize the native spirit, as her concluding notes on liminal identity mirror the fundamental concept of the borderless. As articulated by Eric Gary Anderson in Migration and Resistance in American Indian Literature, the relationality of indigenous existence diverges from “the single-axis motivations of colonial powers” (Anderson 19). By severing ties with the hegemonic mythology of the American West, American Indian Stories reclaims the indefinite dimensions of indigenous belonging. «
Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. “Domesticity in the Federal Indian Schools: The Power of Authority over Mind and Body.” American Ethnologist, vol. 20, no. 2, 1993, pp. 227-240.
Paul, Heike. “Agrarianism, Expansionism, and the Myth of the American West.” The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies, Transcript Verlag, 2014, p. 311-365.
Smith, Andrea. “Boarding School Abuses, Human Rights, and Reparations.” Social Justice, vol. 31, no. 4, 2004, pp. 89-102.
United States, Bureau of Indian Affairs. Church Attendance of Benjamin Black Elk. National Archives and Records Administration, Fall 1915.
Zink, Amanda J. “Boarding School Texts and the Decolonization of Domesticity.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 27, no. 4, 2015, pp. 37-65.
Zitkála-Šá. American Indian Stories. 1921. University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
WORKS CITED
Anderson, Eric Gray. “Mobile Homes: Migration and Resistance in American Indian Literature.” American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions, University of Texas Press, 1999, pp. 17-40.
Brown, Kirby. “American Indian Modernities and New Modernist Studies’ ‘Indian Problem’.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, special issue of Modernism and Native America, vol. 59, no. 3, 2017, pp. 287-318.
Carpenter, Ron. “Zitkála-Ša and Bicultural Subjectivity”
Studies in American Indian Literatures, series 2, vol. 16, no. 3, 2004, pp. 1-28.
Cass, Lewis. “Removal of the Indians.” North American Review, January 1830.
IN POET Cathy Park Hong’s 2021 essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Asian-American sorrow and confusion can be tied to “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed,” which she categorizes as “minor feelings” (Hong 55). Minor feelings can also occur in a person when the omnipresent American optimism forced upon them and their racialized reality contradict each other, resulting in “cognitive dissonance” (Hong 56). Victoria Chang’s poetry collection Obit grounds itself around an overarching theme of grief following literal
and metaphorical “deaths.” Only by examining Chang’s life as a second-generation Asian-American immigrant, through her own displays of “minor feelings,” can we see these “deaths” in more depth.
Chang is incredibly self-aware of her own liminality. She writes of being stuck between acting out on the dreams of her parents, deeply rooted in their homeland, and her lived reality as a product of the land of opportunity. She writes of indefinitely feeling lost in translation, and in a poem titled “Home,” she says:
Home—died sometime around 1960 when my mother left Taiwan. Home died again on August 3, 2015…When a white writer has a »
CHRISTIANNE TUBOLA is a sophomore Journalism major and Political Science minor from Historic Filipinotown in Los Angeles, California. She also serves on the editorial teams of both LA Miscellany and Criterion. She is very passionate about highlighting intersectional oppressions and the Asian-American experience in her work. In her free time, Christianne likes to consume art from all walks of life. She wrote this essay for Professor Sarah Maclay’s Genres: Poetry course.
CHRISTIANNE TUBOLAcharacter call another a squinty-eyed cunt , I search for my mother. I call her name but I can’t remember her voice… I think it is “squinty.” (94)
When you are surrounded by people who are considered the standard, you start to see yourself as separate from that: invisible. So, in order to be visible, you must assimilate into the culture of the white majority, even if it means to barbarize your own people. Hong says that “the privilege of assimilation is that you are left alone. But assimilation must not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed” (Hong 25-26). The rewards of assimilation that Chang seemingly reaps are challenged by her dying mother’s voice: “She would have said, Don’t / listen to lao mei, we all end up in the / same place… I know / many things now… / In hangman, the body forms while it is being hung. As in, we grow as we are / dying” (“Home” 94). Lao Mei, referring to the Chinese word for “American,” is used here to refute the idea of the domineering white-American identity, and instead replaces that image with one of a singular offender. Chang realizes that only in nearing death can one fully realize the pointlessness of worrying over one’s self-worth in relation to how they are perceived—because, as said simply by Chang’s mother, “we [will] all end up in the same place” (94).
There is frustration and a profound hopelessness that comes with pledging allegiance to a country that is unrelenting towards the children meant to shape the future. In the poem “America,” Chang defines her relationship with America as one
of neglect and compares it to the unconditional care she will never feel again after the absence of her own mother.
America—died on February 14, 2018, and my dead mother doesn’t know. Since her death, America has died a series of small deaths, each one less precise than the next. My tears are shaped like hooks but my heart is damp still…I used to think death was a kind of anesthesia. Now I imagine long lines, my mother taking in all the children. I imagine her touching their hair. How she might tickle their knees to make them laugh…The dead are an image of wind. And when they comb their hair, our trees rustle. (“America” 104)
To Chang, the most devastating blows are the quietest ones, the ones that creep in out of nowhere, threatening to swallow her whole. Dealing with a loved one’s death means carrying their image wherever you go, even in the faces of those dying today. In this case, Chang pays tribute to the children’s lives lost in the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. She expresses resentment toward the same system that protected the shooter, a young man with white-supremacist values; the same system that allowed those children and Chang’s mother to suffer. In relation, Hong says, “most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle… The white reign of terror can be invisible and cumulative, chipping away at one’s worth until there’s nothing left but self-loathing” (Hong 78). White terror kills. It can manifest as something as grand and as devastating as
a mass shooting, but it can also look like the generational build-up of those affected by the fiction of American exceptionalism. For Chang, finding reason for senseless death entails finding comfort in the everyday, like imagining the dead as “an image of wind… touching their hair.”
To battle these “minor feelings,” Chang makes it a point to not let her pain or her ancestors’ pain be the only thing that humanizes her. Hong articulates this point by highlighting a trap that ethnic writers fall into as a result of being cast aside by the white majority: “The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain…I don’t think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am” (Hong 49). In a poem titled, “Subject Matter,” Chang addresses this dilemma:
The door is locked from the inside. But still, subject matter breaks in and all the others rise. My mother’s death is not her story. My father’s stroke is not his story. I am not my mother’s story, not my father’s story…Can pain be separated from subject matter? (63)
In this poem especially, Chang gets introspective. Obit, in its simplest form, is about grief. In choosing to tackle subject matter that questions how to exist with one’s own grief, Chang effectively shows appreciation for the lives her parents have lived and the life that she has lived up until this point.
Through utilizing the obituary format in her poetry and writing many of them as anti-elegies, she reclaims texts made for
the purpose of the living to understand the dead. In doing so, her grief also transcends to her audience. In another poem titled “Grief,” Chang doesn’t define her personhood by her grief, but rather describes it in relation with the rest of her identity.
Grief—as I knew it, died many times. It died trying to reunite with other lesser deaths…A picture of oblivion is not the same as oblivion. My grief is not the same as my pain. My mother was a mathematician so I tried to calculate my grief. My father was an engineer so I tried to build a box around my grief, along with a small wooden bed that grief could lie down on. (70)
Chang ends the poem by redefining grief to the audience, using metatextual methods in confirming her nuance, her humanity: “If you cut / out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky… frame it / with a blue frame, place it faceup on / the floor of an empty museum with an / open atrium to the sky, that is grief” (“Grief” 70). Chang experiences emotions, even grief, so intensely that words cannot describe the pain. Sometimes, dealing with that grief can make it seem like you are only an imitation of what you were before you experienced it. But as a human, she reminds the audience that she is also not defined by that pain and that grief and personhood are ultimately not mutually exclusive.
In an interview with David Naimon, from Tin House, Chang says: “I think as an immigrant’s child and also an Asian-American woman that grew up in the Midwest, I feel like I’ve spent my entire life trying to fill things in…I don’t feel less than. I’m very proud to be who I
Oddly enough, Chang’s “minor feelings,” present in her obituaries, though addressing the literal and figurative deaths in her life, scream loud and clear that she is alive, and she is here. She is separate from the self-cannibalizing nature of the portrait of American success, and her experiences aren’t
Chang, Victoria. “America.” Obit: Poems, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2020, p. 104.
---. “Grief.” Obit: Poems, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2020, p. 70.
---. “Home.” Obit: Poems, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2020, p. 94.
---. “Subject Matter.” Obit: Poems, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2020, p. 63.
Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Profile Books, 2021.
Naimon, David. “Between the Covers Victoria Chang Interview.” Tin House, Tin House, 2021, https://tin house.com/transcript/between-the - covers-victor ia- chang-interview/
am and I always have been, but I’ve been made to feel less-than all my life.”
“minor” at all. «
