Modern Languages Studies — Issue 53.2 — Winter 2024

FATHER , SON: GHOST Dozens of years you searched the streets of Baltimore looking for him. A trip when opportunity arose, when curiosity got the better of you. You wandered Inner Harbor where cops swept the bedraggled from tourist-shop streets, Druid Hill Park up by the zoo where craggy old men sold thin plastic bottles of water from ice buckets on sweaty summer days, Westside where pock-marked corner stores sell fresh crabs at good prices. Once in Fells Point you walked beside Frederick Douglass for a few blocks. An apparition, he offered some comfort, said he was seeking his father too. He put a heavy hand on your shoulder as he turned to depart. Those days, you were not even sure who you were looking for. He was only half-conjured, a ghost. He occupied your dreams, your days, lived in your skin. But the only thing you had to go on were unstable and murky words. The only one who might have revealed more never would. Took her secret to the grave. Your alternative was to fashion someone from a memory that did not exist, which added to the misdirection. You didn’t know then, but he'd left Baltimore years before, travelled north for a better job, to forget, move on. He never married, never had other children. You think about the times you roamed so close to him. Away at school, and still in your teens, walking the streets of New York and he over in Jersey. You heard he took the Verrazano to Brooklyn on weekends to see his brother, nephews and nieces, sometimes spent a Sunday in Manhattan. You could have crossed paths one hundred times. Who knows?

It’s hard to see a ghost. When you think beyond yourself you realize that you too are a ghost. You are a ghost flying through time to summon him back home in Carolina, just a bit older than you are now. By the end, he was a ghost of himself, weak of body, of mind. Confined in those last days to an insignificant cinder block and tile room, he bore the end alone. No son to call out to, no touch of fingers on the back of a palsied hand, no whisper of assurance: love. In those final days, when he pressed his ear to the cold glass of a sealed window, all that he could hear was his own faint utterance of a name shrouded by the late winter wind.

JERRY WEMPLE

53.2

VOLUME 53, NO. 2

WINTER 2024

staff LAURENCE ROTH EDITOR AMANDA LENIG CREATIVE DIRECTOR JIMMY HENDERSON GRAPHIC DESIGNER PATRICK THOMAS HENRY ASSOCIATE EDITOR Fiction and Poetry ANGELA FULK ASSOCIATE EDITOR Profession and Pedagogy RANDY ROBERTSON ASSOCIATE EDITOR Reviews HEATHER LANG ASSOCIATE EDITOR Online NICK STEPHENSON WEBMASTER CRYSTAL VANHORN SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER ALLEE MEAD COPYEDITOR

about NeMLA The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) is a scholarly organization for professionals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other modern languages. The group was founded as the New York-Pennsylvania MLA in 1967 by William Wehmeyer of St. Bonaventure University and other MLA members interested in continuing scholarly discourse at annual conventions smaller than that hosted by the Modern Language Association. In 1969, the organization moved to wider regional membership, election of officers, formal affiliation with MLA, and adoption of its present name.

NeMLA continues its traditions of intellectual contribution and advancement at the 55th Annual Convention, to be held March 7–10, 2024 in Boston. “Surplus” is the keyword for 2024 NeMLA convention for critical and creative work that, in addition to the commonly associated meanings of profit and value, can be more broadly construed as excess or excessive, as surfeit, or what is leftover, or unwanted: an excess of emotions (anger, fear, passion, desire), for example; or surplus time (leisure or its absence); or populations rendered “surplus”—migrants, the marginalized, the unemployed, the incarcerated.

NeMLA is delighted to host, for the Thursday opening address, Rickie Solinger, an historian of reproductive politics and the author of Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade (1992, 2000) and Pregnancy and Power: A History of Reproductive Politics in the U.S. (2007, 2019). The Friday keynote event will be given by Tiphanie Yanique, a professor at Emory University and the acclaimed writer of the novel Land of Love and Drowning, the focus of this year’s “NeMLA Reads Together,” which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award and the Phyllis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, among other honors.

Please see the NeMLA web page at www.nemla.org for information on joining the organization and about the fellowships, awards, and publications available to members.

Modern Language Studies appears twice a year, in the summer and winter, and is a publication of the Northeast Modern Language Association.

© 2024 Northeast Modern Language Association • ISSN 0047-7729

NeMLA board of directors 2023–2024 EXECUTIVE BOARD MODHUMITA ROY, Tufts University President VICTORIA L. KETZ, La Salle University Vice President SIMONA WRIGHT, The College of New Jersey Second Vice President JOSEPH VALENTE, University at Buffalo Past President

OFFICERS CARINE MARDOROSSIAN, University at Buffalo Executive Director ASHLEY BYCZKOWSKI, University at Buffalo Associate Director

BOARD OF DIRECTORS DONAVAN L. RAMON, Kentucky State University American and Diaspora Studies Director ANGELA FULK, SUNY Buffalo State College British and Global Anglophone Studies Director MARIA PLOCHOCKI, City University of New York CAITY Caucus President and Representative JULIA TITUS, Yale University Comparative Literature Director MARIA MATZ, University of Massachusetts–Lowell Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing Director KATHLEEN KASTEN-MUTKUS, Stony Brook University–SUNY Cultural Studies and Media Studies Director ANN MARIE SHORT, Saint Mary’s College Diversity Caucus President YVES-ANTOINE CLEMMEN, Stetson University French and Francophone Studies Director ANDREA BRYANT, Appalachian State University German Studies Director CHRISTIAN YLAGAN, Western University Graduate Student Caucus Representative ESTHER ALARCON-ARANA, Salve Regina University Hispanic and Lusophone Studies Director GIUSY DI FILIPPO, College of the Holy Cross Italian Studies Director JINA LEE, Westchester Community College–SUNY Professionalization and Pedagogy Director MARIA ROVITO, Penn State University at Harrisburg Women’s and Gender Studies Caucus Director

submission information Authors should submit their manuscripts using MLA style for citations and notes. Please use parenthetical citations that reference a works cited list; notes and works cited should appear at the end of the text. Submissions to the reviews section do not need a works cited list.

We take electronic submissions in Microsoft Word format. These should be set in 12 point Times, double spaced, and use superscript for footnote numbers rather than the footnote function. Please clear all identifiers from electronic submissions, including the author and company fields in “Properties” under the “File” menu.

For submission guidelines, our statement of ethical practices, and link to the MLS Submittable site, visit www.mlsjrnl.com/submissions. Address all correspondence to mls@susqu.edu.

NeMLA membership is not required to submit to MLS; however, membership is required for publication.

Detailed submission guidelines and descriptions of all the editorial sections are posted at www.mlsjrnl.com.

subscription information 2023–2024 RATES Institutions: $75.00 International Shipping: $36.50 Single Copies (Vol. 35 and on): $32.00 for institutions $22.00 for individuals $15.00 for NEMLA members $19.25 for international shipping Subscription agencies receive a 10% discount ($67.50, plus $36.50 for international shipping if applicable).

To subscribe online, go to www.mlsjrnl.com/subscribe.

Send all other subscription inquiries, address changes, and payments to: Modern Language Studies, Attn.: Subscriptions Susquehanna University Box 1861 514 University Avenue Selinsgrove, PA, 17870

Erratum: In MLS 53.1, on page 73 of Randy Robertson’s review of Mere Civility by Teresa M. Bejan, the phrase “bad model of the public square” should be “bat model of the public square.”

MLS 53.2 contents

Articles Landscape in the Shadow: The Self in 1973 Lorenzo Bartolucci Debating Distance: Abstraction and Conformity in Phil Klay’s “After Action Report” and “Ten Kliks South” Trevor Jackson

10

36

Poetry & Fiction Christina Gessler: Two More Cups of Coffee

60

Sarah Lawrence-Sandkvist: Every Wretched Present Thing

62

Deidra Suwanee Dees: Excerpts from “Indian Ice: Indigenous Witness / Estv-Cate’ Het’ute”

74

Review Timothy Zick. The First Amendment in the Trump Era Omar Swartz

80

Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth. It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom Phillip Zapkin

86

53.2

articles

10 Modern Language Studies 53.2

articles 11

I would say this landscape Too is a document. But What is landscape? A procession Across the soul that thinks It’s entering something?

12 Modern Language Studies 53.2

—John Ashbery

INTRODUCTION

A

list can be a formidably divisive thing—the anathema of history, for Hayden White (Content of the Form 1-25), but also one of its most revealing devices, according to Umberto Eco, for whom lists epitomized the “swing between a poetics of ‘everything included’ and a poetics of the ‘etcetera’” at the root of all narrative (7). Like ends of a constellation, dates and facts on a list arrange everything they leave out around the impression of a clear, discernible pattern, framing the course of events within a beckoning sense of their significance. The year 1973, for example, marked a very discernible turn in U.S. politics with the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, the beginning of the Watergate hearings, and the withdrawal of forces from Vietnam. It marked an equally critical moment in geopolitics more generally with Northern Ireland’s referendum to remain part of the United Kingdom, Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in Chile, and the Yom Kippur War in Israel.

Pivotal LPs appeared that same year, like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and The Who’s Quadrophenia.

And American Graffiti, Papillon, and The Sting were also all released in 1973. Anyone could think of things (so many things) that fail to appear in each of these lists, and that is precisely the point—because their incompleteness brings 1973 into focus as a moment whose import in the history of politics, music, and cinema is still worth our attention, beckoning in the swing between the connections we see and many more waiting to be discerned.

This kind of revisitation evidently does not lead to an argument for the uniqueness of a particular year, but rather for its exemplarity as a lens to scrutinize historical trends from new angles. And the year 1973, as this essay will endeavor to show, provides a remarkable vantage from which to reconsider the literary history of the last century and its cultural legacy. Another list can be drawn detailing how many of the period’s landmark

theoretical texts came out that year, including White’s Metahistory, Charles Altieri’s “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence,” and Gerald Graff ’s “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough.” Such flourishing perfectly mirrors the timeline of larger transitions in the context of mid-century American culture. Just two years earlier, the artist Mel Bochner had made a very influential case for Jasper Johns as the originator of the postmodern rejection in painting of “sense-data and the singular point-of-view as the basis for his art” (91), crystallizing a retrospect on the 1960s and early ’70s centered on the advent of increasingly abstracted critiques of subjective experience.1 Even as scholarly perceptions continue to shift and adjust, another look at 1973 should therefore throw into relief the contours of an epistemological outlook shaped by the dismissal of such notions as meaning, reality, and human nature.2 Yet, upon closer inspection, even such an eminently discernible pattern begins to reveal connections that are still waiting to be accounted for.

One of these connections involves a cultural entity whose rise, albeit simultaneous, is rarely associated with that of postmodernism: neuroscience.

Alongside the triumph of metaphysical skepticism, the 1960s and ’70s witnessed the tail end of the “cognitive revolution,” a period of reorganization in disciplines linked to the study of the mind that led to the consolidation of subject-specific studies of the nervous system (neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, etc.) into a new field, officially named “neuroscience” in 1962.3 Once again, the resonance of this transition was especially prominent in mid-century America, where the Society for Neuroscience—still today the field’s largest professional body—was founded in 1969 and, under the aegis of entities like the Sloan Foundation, cognitive neuroscience was also established as a discipline in its own right.4 Less apparent than such institutional emphasis, of course, was the collective imagination’s reaction to the extra-scientific ambitions of cognitive articles 13

research, which had already inspired Gilbert Ryle’s famous comparison of the mind to an illusory “Ghost in the Machine” (5).5 As neuroscientists have since made it something of a habit to reiterate, it was their aim from the start to develop a new framework for the exploration, rather than the dismissal, of the idea of human nature.6 And the ramifications of that aim decisively converged with the cultural ascendance of postmodernism.

A list of contemporary articles by scholars in the humanities and cognitive sciences, reflecting each realm’s awareness of the other’s relevance for its own specific concerns, would situate 1973 very suggestively in the unfolding of this convergence.7 Nevertheless, the pattern that this essay will endeavor to trace is one that emerges from what such a critical review would most visibly leave out—writers and neuroscientists themselves. In the latter’s work, the question of human nature often coalesced with another one at the very center of postmodernism’s epistemological turmoil: the question of the nature of the self. Two poems written in 1973, A. R. Ammons’s “For Harold Bloom” and John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” mark ends of one more constellation of events and influences that powerfully illuminate the interplay of literary and neuroscientific imaginations in the exploration of that question. And as we will see, such interplay discloses a whole new perspective not only on a key moment in the history of American poetry, but also on the idea of human nature that continues to beckon from it to this day.

the following year with a prefatory poem dedicating it to the literary critic Harold Bloom: I went to the summit and stood in the high nakedness: the wind tore about this way and that in confusion and its speech could not get through to me nor could I address it: still I said as if to the alien in myself I do not speak to the wind now: for having been brought this far by nature I have been brought out of nature and nothing here shows me the image of myself: for the word tree I have been shown a tree and for the word rock I have been shown a rock, for stream, for cloud, for star this place has provided firm implication and answering but where here is the image for longing: so I touched the rocks, their interesting crusts: I flaked the bark of stunt-fir: I looked into space and into the sun and nothing answered my word longing: goodbye, I said, goodbye, nature so grand and reticent, your tongues are healed up into their own element and as you have shut up you have shut me out: I am as foreign here as if I had landed, a visitor: so I went back down and gathered mud and with my hands made an image for longing: I took this image to the summit: first I set it here, on the top rock, but it completed nothing: then I set it there among the tiny firs but it would not fit: so I returned to the city and built a house to set

WHERE HERE IS THE IMAGE

the image in and men came into my house and said that is an image for longing

On December 28, 1973, the poet A. R. Ammons sent the final draft of Sphere: The Form of a Motion to W. W. Norton & Co., where the book was published

14 Modern Language Studies 53.2

and nothing will ever be the same again.

(Complete Poems 1: 645)

Under the title “For Harold Bloom,” this poem continued to appear on its own in Ammons’s later collections, signaling that although he composed it together with Sphere, Ammons himself regarded it less as a preface than as a self-standing declaration of poetic intent.8 That intent seems to transpire unambiguously from the poem, which bears all the hallmarks of a postmodern play on the idea of a substanceless self scattered in the flow of perceptions. While every other object glimpsed on the summit anchors the etherealness of language (“the word tree… the word rock”) to the “firm implication and answering” of visible presences, the voice of the speaker remains suspended in an elusive reverberation (“my word longing”) that haunts the poem to the very end. Such reverberation, moreover, confronts the summit explicitly as a site of existential desolation, where nothing “shows me the image of myself.” On the other hand, a closer look at the language of this confrontation shows that it does not actually lead to the dissolution but to an uninterrupted reaffirmation of the speaker’s presence. The poem’s entire stanza, in fact, progresses through a series of sentences subdivided by columns, rather than periods, allowing only one word to be capitalized from beginning to end, the very first: “I.” As a result, this ascent so emphatically devoid of images for the self simultaneously articulates a statement in, of, and therefore just as emphatically about, the self it cannot locate.

What does this mean? Why would Ammons go to such pains to configure a human presence which he so insistently isolates “out of nature” as the very condition of possibility of his poem? The poem itself, notably, invites the reader to examine this exact question in a slightly different form: “where here is the image for longing.” How can this journey to the summit make up for the absence that the speaker discovers there? What does the new image obtained through this journey indeed look like—the

one shaped in the mud by the speaker’s own hands?

To grasp the significance of this narrative framing, it is helpful to look over the poem again in the context of Ammons’s relationship to its addressee, Harold Bloom, which figures prominently among the “bromances” of twentieth-century American poetry (Gilbert). One of the reasons behind the dedication of Sphere is that the long poem was composed in a period of exceptionally formative tension between the poet and the critic, during which Ammons strove to balance himself between the ideal of high poetic sublimity championed by Bloom and his own imaginative penchant for simple, everyday experience.9 Bloom later noted how poignantly the ascensional journey of “For Harold Bloom” captured the importance of such a balancing act for Ammons’s artistic development, in direct parallel with another famous ascent recounted by the poet that, as Bloom once put it, “invented lyric poetry as we continue to know it today” (Petrarch 7): Francesco Petrarca.10 On April 26, 1336, Petrarca set off with his brother Gherardo to climb Mont Ventoux, “the highest mountain” in the region of Avignon, in the south of France (Letters 1: 172-80). Like the “high nakedness” of Ammons’s poem, this too was a place pervaded by the intimation of exposure (“the old man … pointed out the steep path, giving and repeating many warnings … I was still wandering through the valleys … by the time the others had reached the summit”), guiding the poet to the same transformative longing to come to terms with his own self: On its summit there is a small plain. There… it occurred to me to look into the Book of Confessions of St. Augustine… where it was written: “And they go to admire the summits of mountains and the vast billows of the sea and the broadest rivers and the expanses of the ocean and the revolutions of the stars and they overlook themselves.” (Letters 1: 173-74, 175-78)

articles 15

This return to the Augustinian distinction of self from world, as Bloom remarked, has become one of the primal scenes in the history of lyric poetry, encapsulating the metamorphosis of reality into “a brilliant surface,” in John Freccero’s phrase, “whose momentary exteriority to the poet serves as an Archimedean point from which he can create himself ” (39). While the factuality of Petrarca’s account has long been called into question, the “small plain” on the summit lends strikingly iconic succinctness to the turn of the poet’s “inner eyes within” (Letters 1: 178), along with the contemplation of the depths of his being as that turn’s ultimate reward.11 It would be difficult not to notice how carefully Ammons’s poem restages the same ascensional turn only to flip it on its head, retracing Petrarca’s steps to uncover the disappearance of his confident vision: “nothing here shows me the image of myself.” The world’s brilliant surface offers no more reflections to claim as one’s own, leading the poet “back down” from the summit to seek a new image for his restless longing—and right back to the question, therefore: what would that image look like in 1973?

other poem, accordingly, has received more attention from Ashbery’s critics, who have painted a remarkably detailed picture of its relationship to the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of its time.

Nevertheless, a series of events connected with its composition place the “Self-Portrait” at a very unexpected angle with respect to the riddle presented in “For Harold Bloom”: how to imagine the self in 1973?

The first event was the publication of The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Bloom’s landmark study of poetic creation as the struggle of writers with their predecessors. Ammons and Ashbery both figure prominently in the book, where Bloom introduced them as the authors of “the contemporary poems that most move me” (Anxiety 12). The two poets remained long smitten with the particular terms of Bloom’s appreciation, with Ashbery still veiledly alluding to the comparison between his own work and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium (1923) almost twenty years later, in the long autobiographical poem Flow Chart (1991): I’ll try another ticket. Meanwhile thanks for the harmonium: its inoffensive chords swept me right off my feet near the railroad

SOFT AS THE EARTH While Ammons does not answer the question raised in his poem—we never learn what the image made by the speaker actually looks like—one of the bestknown answers to it took shape between February and May 1973, in the hands of another poet both Ammons and Bloom considered “better than anybody” among their contemporaries: John Ashbery.12 As a matter of fact, no other poem Ashbery wrote proved as decisive for his career as “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” published in Poetry in 1974 and then in the eponymous collection that won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976. No 16 Modern Language Studies 53.2

and—nice—are returning to bloom tomorrow and each day after that. (Flow Chart 28)13

The jovial mordancy of this passage, presenting Stevens’s “inoffensive chords” as a well-domesticated influence on the poet’s imagination, conceals a very subtle play on the theoretical framework of The Anxiety of Influence. The repurposing of Bloom’s name as a verb to describe the echoes of Stevens’s poetry (“returning to bloom tomorrow and each day after that”) cleverly morphs the critic into the personification of his own notion of “poetic misreading” (Anxiety 14), the interpretative act by way of which poets appropriate the work of their predecessors.

Bloom himself, in other words, has been “misread” into a tribute to his own influence on Ashbery’s imagination. As such, he has also come to personify an aspect of the idea of misreading that Ashbery explicitly repurposed as the conceptual cornerstone of the “Self-Portrait.” As Bloom explained in another important study, Yeats (1970): The revisionary readings of precursors … are not being condemned by me … They are taken instead as a series of swerves away from the precursors, swerves intended to … free Yeats from creative anxieties … These examples … can help us understand Yeats’s poems, or the poems of any poet when we read those poems in relation to their ancestors.

(Yeats 7)

This passage introduces Bloom’s favorite term for the process that leads poets onto creative paths of their own: “swerve.” Interchangeably with clinamen— the poet Lucretius’s Latin word for the motion of atoms through space—Bloom used “swerve” to describe how a writer reshapes the imaginative universes of predecessors in what he later called a radical “usurpation of mental space” (Agon 286), moving away from the imitation of models into the free and uncharted space of creation.14 And in the exact same way, in 1973, Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait” also memorably begun: As Parmigianino did it, the right hand Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer And swerving easily away, as though to protect What it advertises. (Collected Poems 474)15

Face to face with the painting that gives the poem its title (see fig. 1), Ashbery instantly spotlights his theme in the elusive, swerving tension of the painter’s posture. We will return more extensively to consider Ashbery’s own verbal swerve from his visual model.

Along with the terminological overlap, however, it is important to note how revealingly Bloom’s

theoretical perspective already situates the “SelfPortrait” with respect to the question raised in “For Harold Bloom.” The simple gesture of swerving away, toward, and then beyond the image “thrust at the viewer” by the poet’s predecessor dramatically restages the longing experienced by Ammons’s speaker for an image beyond the derivative kind of reflection Petrarca gleaned from the pages of St. Augustine. It is not therefore just topically, or even contextually, but in a literal sense that Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait” materialized what Ammons believed must now be pursued away from the Petrarchan summit: “an image for longing / and nothing will ever be the same again.”

This sense of impending change was amplified by an event that marked a second inflection point in Ashbery’s life and work. On September 29, 1973, at the age of sixty-six, the poet W. H. Auden suddenly passed away in a small hotel near Vienna, bringing an end to a career that even Bloom (notoriously ambivalent about Auden’s poetry) celebrated as that of “the laureate of our age’s secular humanism” (Auden vii). It is well-known that Auden, in Forrest Gander’s words, was “one of Ashbery’s first and, over the years, most executive sources of pure poetic joy”—a joy as vividly manifest on the level of stylistic influence (“Auden really is the best of all forever and ever,” Ashbery once told his friend Sandy Gregg at Harvard, where he also wrote his undergraduate thesis on Auden) as on that of personal affinity (when the two of them met at an event organized by the Harvard Advocate, in 1949, it appears that the mutual transport very nearly culminated into a full-blown romantic encounter).16 It was Auden who selected Ashbery’s first collection of poems, Some Trees, for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1956, proving just as key to his literary success as the “Self-Portrait” did almost twenty years later. In every respect, therefore, Auden’s death cast a very sharp emphasis on the transitional valence of Ashbery’s poem, highlighting the moment of its articles 17

composition as that of an irreversible swerve, for the latter, onto an imaginative path of his own.

There is an aspect of Auden’s influence that illuminates a very important dimension of the context in which the “Self-Portrait” was conceived. In his foreword to the first edition of Some Trees, this facet of Auden’s imagination emerges in the form of a question: “What is the language really used by the imagining mind?” The answer at first appears to be relatively straightforward: “A style of rhetoric expresses a notion of what is to be considered nature” (Foreword 16). But what exactly did Auden mean by this? In and of itself, such a statement could easily be read as a riff off the Petrarchan reduction of “nature” to a brilliant surface for poetic self-creation.

But even a cursory glance through Auden’s work shows that his own notion, in fact, was the precise opposite: not a reality shaped by style, but rather an identity between the very idea of style and a poet’s effort to express a certain experience of the world.

A few more questions raised in an early poem, “Detective Story” (1936), helpfully elaborate: For who is ever quite without his landscape …

A home, the centre where the three or four things That happen to a man do happen? Yes, Who cannot draw the map of his life …

… mark the spot

Where the body of his happiness was first discovered?

(Complete Works 1: 264)

The language really used by the imagining mind, for the young Auden, was that of home, the “centre” of a person’s encounter with the world. It is important to notice how insistently the passage underscores the literalness of this idea, equating home not with loved ones, or even one’s memories, but with an actual landscape: a “spot” whose physical, geographical “map” sets the coordinates of the human life that unfolds in its midst. Even when Auden moved away from England and the nativist attachments of 18 Modern Language Studies 53.2

his early poetry made way for more cosmopolitan ambitions, this sense of the inextricability of mind and place never lost hold of his imagination. It was right around the time when Ashbery first met him, indeed, that Auden delivered one of its most haunting affirmations in the poem “In Praise of Limestone” (1948): … “Come!” purred the clays and gravels, “On our plains … … soft as the earth is mankind and both Need to be altered.” … when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

(Complete Works 2: 353-54)

The landscape has overtaken the speaker here, expressing a kinship between place and thought (“soft as the earth”) for which the human voice merely catalogues the verification of the senses (“what I hear is the murmur… what I see is a limestone landscape”). It is a kinship, furthermore, which the poem explicitly identifies with the act of imagining, framing the landscape not simply as a model but as the literal language for a whole inner reality of feelings (“a faultless love”) and abstractions (“the life to come”). As the map and the voice, in other words, of an entire self.

Scholars have discussed Auden’s landscapes for decades, and Willard Spiegelman for example very perceptively connected him to the exploration of the same theme in Ashbery’s work.17 Nevertheless, there is an important element of this connection that remains to be examined, and a third event that unfolded just as the “Self-Portrait” was being drafted situates it right at the heart of the constellation of influences mapped out so far. On June 28, 1973, the British publisher Gerald Duckworth & Co. issued the first edition of Awakenings, a collection of clinical

stories about the effects of a new drug on patients affected by encephalitis lethargica (also known as the “sleepy sickness”), which almost overnight turned its author, the neurologist Oliver Sacks, into one of the most popular medical writers of the second half of the twentieth century. To the end of his life, Sacks himself confessed a lingering disbelief at the amount of attention that Awakenings continued to generate, winning the Hawthornden Prize in 1974 and being successively adapted into a documentary, a play by Harold Pinter in 1982, an Oscar-nominated movie in 1990, a ballet in 2010, and an opera in 2022 as well.18 Two decades into the twenty-first century, this kind of resonance offers a paradigmatic illustration of the cultural ascendance of neuroscientific discourse over the past fifty years. But even before Awakenings was published, there was one person— among only three to be shown the book’s galley proofs—who confidently pronounced it “a masterpiece” as early as February 1973: Auden.19 Sacks and Auden had met a few years earlier in New York, and their fast friendship represented the high point of an admiration that, for Sacks, dated all the way back to his days as an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1950s (On the Move 196-97). In his autobiography, Sacks went so far as to attribute his decision to leave England and volunteer in the Royal Canadian Air Force to an inspiration from “Journal of an Airman,” part of Auden’s long poem The Orators (1932), bolstering up the narrative of an influence at the very origin of his own personal and intellectual path (On the Move 43-44). When they finally came together, Auden rapidly stepped into the role of a trusted and sought-after mentor, reviewing Sacks’s first book, Migraine (1970), for the New York Review of Books and taking an equally active interest, despite ailing health, in the writing of Awakenings. And the advice Auden offered to the neurologist harkened right back to the problem highlighted in his foreword to Ashbery’s Some Trees—that of the language really used by the mind:

“You’re going to have to go beyond the clinical … Be metaphorical, be mystical, be whatever you need.” 20 How do such parallels—between Auden’s directives as well as the nature of his relationships to their authors—speak to the chronological proximity between Awakenings and Ashbery’s “SelfPortrait”? The comparable extent of Auden’s sway, for one thing, is evident from Sacks’s presentation of his book as a creative, rather than a strictly clinical, exploration of his patients’ experiences: … we must adopt a different and complementary approach and language … our quarry in this strange country will not be “specimens,” data, or “facts,” but images, similitudes, analogies, metaphors—whatever may assist to make the strange familiar, and to bring into the thinkable the previously unthinkable.

(Awakenings 8)

Such a conflation of facts and imagination is a striking methodological premise for a neurologist to argue for—all the more striking because the argument’s language, when it comes to the “strange country” that Sacks thus set out to explore, actually turns out to be very literal: “My aim is not to make a system, or to see patients as systems, but to picture a world, a variety of worlds—the landscapes of being in which these patients reside” (xviii). It would be difficult to miss the echo of Auden’s poems (“For who is ever quite without his landscape”) in this depiction of human existences as so many landscapes and worlds.

It is a depiction to which Awakenings returns time and again not as a similitude, an analogy, or a metaphor, but as the centerpiece of Sacks’s theoretical framework (“These deeply pathological states,” he explains at one point, “seem to lead us towards exceedingly strange yet possible images of ‘inner space’ … an essentially relativistic ‘ontological space’”), confirming how deeply it had penetrated the scientific as well as the imaginative outlook of his book (256). Just as Ashbery was finishing up the articles 19

draft of the “Self-Portrait,” therefore, one of the seminal poetic visions of his youth was also reemerging at the heart of one of the most influential neurological texts of the twentieth century. How did the latter compare, then, to the vision that Ashbery himself set out to portray in his poem?

BRAIN, OR BRAIN PAN Few aspects of the “Self-Portrait” have been dissected as thoroughly as its relationship to the painting of the same title that Ashbery first encountered in 1959, as he explains in the poem, during a visit at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna: Francesco Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (fig. 1). 21

Fig. 1: Francesco Parmigianino, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1524)

20 Modern Language Studies 53.2

Numerous studies of Ashbery’s stylistic debt to the painting as well as the place of the “Self-Portrait” in the long tradition of ekphrastic literature have illuminated virtually every facet of the poem’s engagement with its visual model.22 Nevertheless, something that continues to attract the attention of commentators is what Michael Davidson has called Ashbery’s ability “to reveal the unstable, often critical features of the painting” (17-18), activating the latent philosophical energy of Parmigianino’s aesthetics.

And a broader account of the circumstances that surrounded such activation, reflected in the personal and thematic connections retraced up to this point, shines an important new light on the cultural energies synthesized in Ashbery’s poem.

As Nikki Skillman and other critics have observed, Ashbery’s work testifies to the complex history of his own curiosity about the imaginative ramifications of neuroscientific discourse.23 As early as 1962, for example, the poem “The Adirondacks” vividly physicalized the feeling of a late walk home, “Aware of intense cold battering your brain tissues / Like dozens of photo-electric cells on a dark night” (CP 927). In the collection Rivers and Mountains (1966), references further ranged from a vision of truth “raging and burning the design of / Its intentions into the house of your brain” (146), in the poem “Clepsydra,” to the Eliotian comparison of “the human brain, with its tray of images” to a lantern projecting “shadows / On the distance of my hand,” in “The Skaters” (150). By the time the collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror appeared in 1975, it included another famous poem, “As You Came from the Holy Land,” evoking the dissipation of all human meaning (“that thing of monstrous interest”) into a ghostly emanation of material existence, “knowing as the brain does it can never come about” (430-31). Such interpolations are notable for two reasons in the context of the present discussion. The first is that Ashbery’s evident interest in cognitive research makes it unlikely he would have overlooked

Auden’s endorsement of Sacks’s work. The question raised earlier, therefore, from this angle becomes even more difficult to ignore: how does the idea of human nature explored in Awakenings compare to the one that emerged from the “Self-Portrait”? Or, to go back to the framework that Ashbery borrowed from Bloom: how does Sacks’s appropriation of Auden’s poetic vision compare to Ashbery’s contemporary swerve away from it?

The other notable aspect of brain-centered imagery in Ashbery’s poems is the emphasis it consistently places on the uncertain, slippery nature of the mind. This is evident in the passages quoted above, where memory, feeling, and the very process of thinking—when it is no longer a person but the brain itself that “does” its own knowing, in “As You Came from the Holy Land”—vanish from the body like “shadows” from a sterile “tray” or an empty “house.” Later, in the collection As We Know (1979), the split-voice poem “Litany” (whose innovative form, incidentally, was conceived in parallel with a surge of interest for split-brain surgery and the physical partition of consciousness) similarly returned to consider the “eroding” that “goes on constantly in the brain / Where its music is softest” (CP 616).24 And in Flow Chart, Ashbery openly entreated his readers to weigh the ultimate consequences of that erosion: “But if one’s destiny is enclosed in one’s brain, or brain pan, how about free will / and predestination, to say nothing of self-determination?” (129) Within the interval of a comma, the brain itself here disappears from its cavity (which no longer even resembles a tray or a house: just the dried-up “pan” of a skull), bringing vertiginously full-circle this decades-long contemplation of the impermanence of anything associated with the notion of an inner, spiritual life (to say nothing of “destiny” or “free will,” as the passage resignedly quips).

The discourse of neuroscience, therefore, is one to which Ashbery repeatedly appealed as a source of imaginative demystification, destabilizing

old-fashioned exaltations of interiority as the only poetically relevant dimension of human existence.

As he put it in the “Self-Portrait,” addressing himself to Parmigianino’s image: … your eyes proclaim That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there And nothing can exist except what’s there. (CP 476)

Such apprehensions of human fragility in contrast to the hard, impersonal surface of its material constituents have often been linked to Ashbery’s flair for the precariousness of personal identity.25 Besides the fluidity of pronouns, syntax, the proliferation of cultural references and other signature stylistic gestures, however, it is the attitude with which Ashbery’s sense of this fragility led him to approach the perspective offered by neuroscience that begins to shed light on the relationship between the “Self-Portrait” and Awakenings. Given the demystifying eye that Ashbery had already been turning toward the brain as the new frontier in the exploration of human nature, what would he have made of the neurological resurgence of Auden’s poetic vision? What does the “Self-Portrait,” indeed, make of the landscape that Sacks, in 1973, claimed to have recognized in each and every one of his patients?

BEFORE ONE'S SHADOW It should be clear by now that whether or not Ashbery literally laid his hands on a copy of Awakenings after writing the “Self-Portrait,” and then revised the poem accordingly, is a circumstance that it would be both difficult and unnecessary to verify. We saw how many other circumstances, in fact, by 1973 had already drawn Ashbery within the orbit of Sacks’s clinical work, from their concurrent involvement with Auden to Ashbery’s own flirtations with neuroscientific imagery—not to mention the eagerness, articles 21

of course, with which Sacks himself sought to air out the arguments of Awakenings before the book even hit the shelves:

world has been literally reduced to the surface of a mirror, there is still nothing to be seen there: … This otherness, this

Is not the brain in the organism, and the organism in the

“Not-being-us” is all there is to look at

world? Does not the brain picture or express the organism and

In the mirror, though no one can say

the world … a simultaneous seeing of the world as a state, as a

How it came to be this way. (CP 486)

field and as a thought … this will be the great awakening. (“Great Awakening” 524)

Statements like these, from an article Sacks wrote for The Listener in October 1972, illustrate how openly his idea of the relationship of self and world had been circulating by the time Awakenings recapitulated it in the “landscapes of being” inhabited by his patients. Whether or not it was in the latter that Ashbery first came across that idea, therefore, changes little about its relevance for a reading of his poem. Because what the “Self-Portrait” showed, in 1973, is that the poet was already ahead of the neurologist in taking stock of its ultimate implications.

These implications revolve around the same absence that Ammons’s speaker climbed all the way back to the Petrarchan summit to face and announce: “nothing here shows me the image of myself.” As the “Self-Portrait” quickly clarifies, in fact, Ashbery’s renewed interest in Parmigianino’s painting fourteen years after first seeing it in Vienna sprang from a strictly formal consideration: “It is the first mirror portrait” (CP 479).26 In a compositional gesture that startled even its first viewers in Renaissance Italy, all this painting reproduces is the surface of a mirror, nothing more and nothing less (see fig. 1). As a result, in 1524 Parmigianino’s portrait achieved the clearest possible literalization of the problem that Ammons in 1973 was still trying to negotiate within the framework of Petrarca’s ascensional narrative: the problem of locating one’s own reflection on the brilliant surface of the world. And what the portrait reveals, in this way, is that even when the whole 22 Modern Language Studies 53.2

This rigidly anti-metaphorical angle leaves no room for the kind of metaphysical heroism that Ammons was still not quite ready to give up on in his poem.

In direct contrast with “For Harold Bloom,” no men here come to look and confirm that yes, “that is an image for longing.” Likewise, no new image is created to replace the absence that the mirror has exposed.

That is because this absence, for Ashbery, is not the trigger of an epistemological crisis, but of a transformative insight: … I go on consulting This mirror that is no longer mine For as much brisk vacancy as is to be My portion this time. (CP 482)

The feeling of self-alienation instilled by the painting, which really does look like a mirror and yet reflects not the viewer, but Parmigianino, makes visible something much more fundamental than a clever optical illusion. That instant of failed recognition discloses a “vacancy,” an emptiness that can no longer be ignored after “consulting” the painted reflection.

It is an emptiness that Parmigianino himself confronted as soon as he sat to reproduce the surface of the convex mirror: because what that surface showed him, in 1524, effectively captured no greater “portion” of who he was than remained when Ashbery saw its reproduction in 1959. The reflection, real or reproduced, says no more about the painter who is no longer there than it does about whoever happens to stand in front of it now. Which is to say that the illusion, plain for all to see, was ever to

assume that a mirror (this “Not-being-us,” as the poem inclusively notes, not just “not-being-me”) could actually turn up the image of anyone’s own, real self.

This is where Ashbery’s vision begins to swerve from the one delineated in Sacks’s clinical stories.

Unlike “For Harold Bloom,” the “Self-Portrait” in fact does not end with an absence the poet has only made it his business to expose. Whereas Ammons retreated into an image that the reader never actually gets to see, Ashbery’s imagination continues to follow the lead of his visual model, swerving away from what disappears—his reflection—into a description of everything that such disappearance does allow him to see (“all there is to look at / In the mirror”).

And what he sees rapidly takes on the contours of one of the most significant entities in Ashbery’s poetic vocabulary: … It doesn’t matter Because these are things as they are today Before one’s shadow ever grew Out of the field into thoughts of tomorrow. (CP 477)

It would be difficult to read the slightly cryptic last line of this passage without being reminded of Sacks’s “simultaneous seeing” of organism and world, in the Listener article, “as a state, as a field and as a thought.” It would be more difficult after connecting the phrase with the “shadow from the future” that in Awakenings darkens the “mountainous, precarious landscape” evoked by the symptoms of Sacks’s patients (201). Beyond their suggestiveness, such correspondences highlight how conspicuously Sacks’s language—his “quarry” of “images, similitudes, analogies, metaphors”—converges with one of the central nodes of Ashbery’s imaginative universe: the concept of shadow.

The full textual history of a term so prominent as to inspire the title of another one of Ashbery’s collections (Shadow Train, 1981) falls beyond the

scope of the present discussion.27 The assiduousness with which shadows recur throughout Ashbery’s poems, however, provides a crucial context to understand what it is that Parmigianino’s portrait makes visible in the form of “one’s shadow.” From the start of his career, Ashbery was peculiarly sensitive to the figurative potential of “shadow” as a synonym for “reflected image” (“Shadow”), as in the poem “For a European Child” (1949), where a newspaper photograph evokes a vision of countless “Copies of your shadow across our feasting land / … a face no mirror would understand” (CP 894-95).

Poets have resorted for centuries to this connotation of “shadow” to underscore the suggestiveness of mirror images as proxies for the idea of the self.28 But what Ashbery’s poems enact is often a complete metamorphosis of the self into a shadow. In “The Thinnest Shadow,” from Some Trees, when a group of children cry after a young man walking down the street (“Is that the thinnest shadow?”) “A face looks from the mirror” again to clarify that the young man’s appearance reflects precisely the torment of one’s identity being exposed: “Be supple, young man, / Since you can’t be gay” (CP 21). As Ashbery put it perhaps most explicitly in “The Picnic Grounds,” from As We Know: So we, with all our high-minded notions Of the self and the eventually winged purpose Of that self, are now meaning The raw material of the days and the ways that came over.

The shadow has been indefinitely postponed.

And the shape it takes in the process Of definition of the evolving Delta of shapes is too far, far in the milky limpid Future of things. (CP 677-78)29

This is an exceptionally methodical illustration of Ashbery’s approach to the self as an object of imaginative scrutiny, replacing the religious fantasy of a transcendent soul (a self with an “eventually winged articles 23

purpose”) with a sense of identity rooted in the immanence of experience (“The raw material of the days”). Just as the abstractedness of one conception gives way to the concreteness of the other, so the poem modulates its argument into a syntactical materialization whereby “that self,” relegated within a subclause at the very beginning of the passage, makes way for the shadow that surfaces as the referent of the next two sentences (“The shadow has been indefinitely postponed. / And the shape it takes … ”). In this way, the “high-minded” notion of some inner, immutable identity diffuses in the “postponement” of self-definition as part of the evolving, unpredictable course of events (“the milky limpid / Future of things”). And the new kind of self that becomes visible in this perspective is one more and more distinctly coterminous with the world it inhabits—the “evolving / Delta of shapes” that make up the reality one experiences, navigates, and changes along with.

This figuration of existence as a delta, a space shaping and shaped by the confluence of self and world, is one to which Ashbery returned in many of the poems we have already encountered. In “The Skaters,” for instance, the description of an “incredibly wet” spring scene culminates in the contemplation of “The delta of living into everything” (CP 176-77). One of the voices in “Litany,” at one point, turns to address the past (“Dear yesterday”) and declare that no matter what one may have experienced (“You were ugly and full of promise”) still “today the delta is forming,” gathering everything into the memory and sense of one’s place in the world (583). It is an image, in short, that tends to recur precisely in the poems where Ashbery’s fascination for the brain is most evident—a telling conjunction given how prominently shadows figure in those same poems as well. Alongside the shadows projecting out of the lantern-like brain in “The Skaters,” for example, there is the “wan, tainted shadow” left by the erosion detected deep in the 24 Modern Language Studies 53.2

brain in “Litany” (616). And still more manifestly in Flow Chart: … before the thing sinks in the mouth of the river, memory has been transformed into corpses and while we stand discussing the news the unmanageable outline of something much bigger and more profuse is struggling to understand itself… (Flow Chart 31)30

Besides Ashbery’s fondness for certain motifs, these intertwining figures reveal a very consistent synergy between his interest in neuroscience and the sense of self coalescing around his depiction of shadows: between the realm of Sacks’s clinical landscapes, that is to say, and the poetic one that Ashbery approached at the “delta of living into everything.”

The shadow glimpsed in the “Self-Portrait” in 1973 comprises one of the fullest expressions of this synergy. The similarity will have already been noticed, in fact, between the shadow of “The Picnic Grounds,” which comes into view against the “limpid / Future of things,” and the one that Parmigianino’s mirror shows “Out of the field into thoughts of tomorrow.”

But while in the first case the shadow is only briefly recognized amidst the “evolving / Delta of shapes,” in the “Self-Portrait” it is the whole space of the delta that suddenly surfaces through one’s fading reflection: … This otherness, this “Not-being-us” is all there is to look at In the mirror, though no one can say How it came to be this way. A ship Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor. (CP 486)

Where have this harbor and this unknown ship come from? What do they have to do with Parmigianino’s painting, which contains no scenery besides the dimly lit space of his studio (see fig.

1)? As it turns out, this seemingly unplaceable scene has been haunting the view for a while by this point in the poem, just as the shadow’s form

grew increasingly more distinct over those of painter and poet: The shadow of the city injects its own Urgency: Rome where Francesco Was at work during the Sack …

Vienna where the painting is today, where I saw it with Pierre in the summer of 1959; New York Where I am now, which is a logarithm Of other cities. Our landscape Is alive with filiations, shuttlings …

Whispers of the word that can’t be understood But can be felt, a chill, a blight Moving outward along the capes and peninsulas Of your nervures and so to the archipelagoes And to the bathed, aired secrecy of the open sea. (CP 480-81)

From the mirror’s illusory reflection, the shadow broadens to encompass the painting as an object encountered in a larger place: a city. But even this city, as soon as its contours begin to be defined, immediately broadens to encompass other cities where Parmigianino’s portrait has been encountered: Rome, where the painter donated it to Pope Clement VII; Vienna, where Ashbery saw it with his thenlover, the French poet Pierre Martory; and New York, “Where I am now.” As these cities add context to the connection between painter and poet, the passage from each to the next is silently punctuated by a disappearance—a “brisk vacancy”—just like the one that Ashbery sensed as his own reflection dissolved from the painted mirror: the disappearance of Parmigianino, after handing over the painting, into the city outside of his studio; of Pierre into the one outside of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, when he and Ashbery walked away from the painting; and finally of Ashbery himself into a “logarithm” of this endless dissolution of human figures.31 After exposing that which a mirror could never preserve—one’s own self—Parmigianino’s portrait thus gradually awakens the poet to the human reality of all the

places where that same mirror has been encountered.

Wherever it has been approached, the portrait has prompted its viewers to look for an image—one’s own—that was nowhere ultimately to be found. But what each viewer was actually looking for in that image was already part of the world that all of them, for an instant, were tricked into glimpsing and recognizing behind the fading reflection: not only Parmigianino, but also the room he was sitting in and the city shining its light through the window behind him; not only Pierre, or Ashbery, but the time and the place from which each of them approached again to peer into the convex mirror.

It is not therefore in a new image but in its dissolution that Ashbery’s vision of the self fully came together in 1973. This is consistent with what Angus Fletcher has described as the “natural, if no less worrisome, apocalypse” constantly unfolding in the background of Ashbery’s poems (189), his insatiable appetite for the plenitude of experience in the imminence of death and loss (both good candidates, indeed, for “the word that can’t be understood / But can be felt” in the passage above).32 At an even more fundamental level, however, what the “Self-Portrait” explores is a reconfiguration of the very concept of selfhood in terms of one’s involvement, and therein consubstantiality, with the world one inhabits. The shadow that Parmigianino’s painting urgently “injects” into the poet’s imagination is one filled with people whose existence grows no less distinct, and indeed all the more concrete, as their experience in front of the mirror becomes a reflection of Ashbery’s own: the experience of one’s very being, that is, as one and the same with its world.33 In Flow Chart, the evocation of that experience reaches only as far as the outline of “something much bigger and more profuse” still “struggling to understand / itself ” at the mouth of the river. But in the “Self-Portrait,” the outline expands over the entire space of the harbor—over the capes, the peninsulas, and the archipelagoes—animating the articles 25

“nervures” of “Our landscape”: a vision, clear and unobstructed, of the human self in the shape of its world.

This reading’s consequences extend well beyond the purview of the year 1973. Despite longstanding objections from critics like Bloom, John Hollander, and Helen Vendler, in fact, it is still common to hold up the “Self-Portrait” as a preeminent model of the kind of epistemological outlook associated with the rejection of subjectivity by postmodern artists like Jasper Johns.34 Ashbery’s inspiration, however, had much less to do with the dismissal than with a whole new understanding of subjective experience as a gateway to the world.35 And while his engagement with neuroscientific discourse was certainly not the sole source of this understanding, it provided an invaluable context to chart its development throughout one of the most transformative periods in the history of American poetry. Each of the poets gathered within the constellation of this essay exemplified how eagerly the literary imagination mobilized to grapple with this new presence in the cultural ecosystem of the time. “For Harold Bloom” illustrated the nuance of Ammons’s alertness to the challenges brooding deep in the heart of that ecosystem. Auden’s ramified influence showed how far poets became involved with neuroscientific responses to many of the same challenges. And the “SelfPortrait” showcased how those responses promoted the articulation of intuitions that it would take scientists many more years to come around to consider.

It took another full decade, for instance, before Sacks seriously began to think of his clinical landscapes as evidence not merely of the connection but of the fundamental identity of self and world—“an amazing feeling of ‘personal physiology,’” as he excitedly wrote, “the physiology of the self ” (“Reminiscence” 131).36 It was 1984 and another poem Ashbery published that year, “The Foggiest,” presented his readers with the very same question that the neurologist thus sought to answer—the question, indeed, from which this essay began: 26 Modern Language Studies 53.1

I would say this landscape Too is a document. But What is landscape? A procession Across the soul that thinks It’s entering something? (CP 973)37

NOTES 1.

See also Huyssen; Hutcheon.

2.

For a comprehensive review, see Cahoone. Among recent reassessments, see Eeckhout and Goldfarb; Belletto; Stephan; Giles.

3.

See Adelman; Maxwell Cowan et al. For an overview of debates concerning the history of the cognitive revolution, see Leahey; Mandler.

4.

See Douglas Fields; Miller.

5.

First published in 1949.

6.

See for example Edelman; Ramachandran.

7.

A glance through the issues of Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, illustrates the point: in the spring (“The Search for Knowledge”) Gombrich alongside Eccles; in the summer (“Language as a Human Problem”) Lenneberg next to Kiparsky. The overlap grows increasingly evident by expanding the list to other publications, of course (see for example Prusok; Vogel; Puccetti).

8.

For details about the composition of Sphere and “For Harold Bloom,” see Robert M. West’s introductory note to Sphere (Ammons, Complete Poems 1: 1063) as well as a letter Ammons sent to Bloom on January 25, 1974, noting he had already “made ‘I went to summit’ your dedication poem so I hope you were telling the truth about liking it because you’re stuck with it” (An Image for Longing 424).

9.

See Gilbert 184-89; Ammons, An Image for Longing 414-15.

10. See also A Map of Misreading 200-03; “A. R. Ammons.” For a perceptive discussion of motifs common to Ammons and Petrarca, see Greene.

11. For a review of discussions about the symbolism of this anecdote, see O’Connell; Beecher; Rubini; Falkeid.

12. As Ammons wrote to Bloom: “I think it very likely that Ashbery is better than anybody. In spite of the difficulty, there is a clarity of measured dealing most attractive in many poems. Also, something I haven’t done … he has moved the possibilities of perception in poems forward a little. That is important. I wish you would do an essay on him. I would love to read it” (An Image for Longing 341).

For Bloom’s endorsement of Ashbery at this time, see Ringers in the Tower 313; Anxiety of Influence; A Map of Misreading. For details about the composition of Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” see his foreword to the Arion Press edition of the poem, as well as Shoptaw 174. The poem was first published in Poetry, vol. 124, no. 5, 1974.

articles 27

13. For Bloom’s discussion of Ashbery and Stevens, see Anxiety 142-46. For an overview of Ashbery and Bloom’s relationship, see Schultz, “‘Returning to Bloom.’”

14. For Lucretius’s definition of clinamen, see On the Nature of Things, 2.216-20.

15. References to this volume are abbreviated as CP throughout the rest of the article.

16. See Roffman 146, 173-74. Ashbery and Auden first met at a reading Auden gave at Harvard in March 1946 (Roffman 138).

17. See How Poets See the World 7-12, 137-72, as well as Spiegelman’s analysis of Auden’s poem “New Year Letter” (The Didactic Muse 3-24).

18. See Sacks, On the Move 220; Dallas; Pinter; Marshall; Picker.

19. From a letter Auden sent to Sacks on February 21, 1973: “Have read Awakenings and think it a masterpiece” (quoted in Sacks, On the Move 201).

20. From a conversation quoted in Sacks, On the Move 197.

21. See Ashbery, CP 480.

22. See Shoptaw 157-91; Heffernan; Fischer.

23. See Skillman, The Lyric in the Age of the Brain 168-204.

24. For an overview of neuroscientific studies of patients of split-brain surgery at the time, see Gazzaniga; Gazzaniga and LeDoux.

25. As Ashbery memorably said to David Lehman: “I must have a sort of cuckoo instinct that makes me enjoy making my home in somebody else’s nest” (111). Among recent contributions to this critical perspective, see Quinney; Spaide.

26. As further elaborated in a review of a Parmigianino exhibit Ashbery wrote in 1964: “If one accepts this definition of art, then one must consider Parmigianino … as one of the greatest artists of all time.

And even if one doesn’t accept it … When one remembers the important role distortion plays throughout his work, starting with the self-portrait in which the hand is larger than the head, it is possible to see in Parmigianino an ancestor of Picasso and other artists of today” (“Parmigianino” 31-33).

27. For an analysis circumscribed to Shadow Train, see Gery.

28 Modern Language Studies 53.2

28. Perhaps most iconically in Cassius’s wooing speech to Brutus, in Julius Caesar (ca. 1599): “And it is very much lamented, Brutus, / That you have no such mirrors as will turn / Your hidden worthiness into your eye, / That you might see your shadow” (Shakespeare 1.2.61-64).

29. A more compact version of this reflection appeared in A Wave (1984), at the start of the poem “The Songs We Know Best”: “Just like a shadow in an empty room / Like a breeze that’s pointed from beyond the tomb / Just like a project of which no one tells— / Or didja really think that I was somebody else?” (CP 734).

30. At a different but complementary angle, in “Clepsydra,” the final form taken by the truth raging and burning “In the house of your brain” turns out to be that of “groping shadows of an incomplete / Former existence” (CP 146).

31. Critics have tended to overlook this metaphor, but it is worth considering it in detail in the context of this reading. The logarithm of a number expresses the power to which another number (the base) must be elevated in order to obtain that first number (e.g., log₆36=2, since 62=36). Correspondingly, here, any city where Parmigianino’s portrait is encountered—New York, in Ashbery’s case—becomes the expression of its power to trick the viewer into the illusion of catching his own reflection in the painted mirror: the expression of any viewer’s world, that is, as the underlying substance of the human desire (the “base”) to see and understand one’s own self.

32. In reference to a much later collection, Quick Question (2012), William Logan also vividly captured the way Ashbery’s “poems live on ruin, busted memory, and the vague sense of an apocalypse soon to arrive, or perhaps already here” (65).

33. In this sense, the “Self-Portrait” offers one of the most literal illustrations of Ashbery’s career-long pursuit of the “experience of experience,” as he famously called it in 1972: “What I am trying to get at is a general, all-purpose experience—like those stretch socks that fit all sizes” (“Experience of Experience” 251).

34. See the volume of critical interventions on Ashbery edited by Bloom (John Ashbery) as well as Schultz, The Tribe of John. For a recent analysis of the “Self-Portrait” from the perspective of cultural history, see Benedikter and Hilber.

35. As Ashbery put it a little less politely in the poem: “There is no other way, and those assholes / Who would confuse everything with their mirror games / Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or / At least confuse issues by means of an investing / Aura that would corrode the architecture / Of the whole in a haze of suppressed mockery, / Are beside the point” (CP 484).

36. A shortened version of the same essay was originally published as “Musical Ears” in London Review of Books, vol. 6, no. 8, 1984.

37. The poem was first published in Mudfish, vol. 1, 1984. articles 29

WORKS CITED Adelman, George. “The Neurosciences Research Program at MIT and the Beginning of the Modern Field of Neuroscience.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, vol. 19, no. 1, 2010, pp. 15-23.

Altieri, Charles. “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics.” boundary 2, vol. 1, no. 3, 1973, pp. 605-42.

Auden, W. H. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, Princeton UP, 2022. 2 vols.

---. Foreword. Some Trees, by John Ashbery, Yale UP, 1956, pp. 11-16.

---. “The Megrims.” Review of Migraine, by Oliver Sacks. New York Review of Books, 3 June 1971, p. 25.

Ammons, A. R. The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, edited by Robert M. West, W. W. Norton & Co., 2017. 2 vols.

---. An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals of A. R. Ammons, 1951-1974, edited by Kevin McGuirk, ELS Editions, 2013.

Ashbery, John. Collected Poems 1956-1987, edited by Mark Ford, Library of America, 2008.

---. “The Experience of Experience: A Conversation with John Ashbery,” by Alfred A. Poulin, Jr. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 20, no. 3, 1981, pp. 242-55.

---. Flow Chart. Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

---. Foreword. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Arion Press, 1984.

---. “Parmigianino.” Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987, edited by David Bergman, Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, pp. 31-33.

Beecher, Donald. “Petrarch’s ‘Conversion’ on Mont Ventoux and the Patterns of Religious Experience.”

Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, vol. 28, no. 3, 2004, pp. 55-75.

Belletto, Steven, editor. American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960. Cambridge UP, 2017.

Benedikter, Roland, and Judith Hilber. “The Post-Modern Mind. A Reconsideration of John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ (1975) from the Viewpoint of an Interdisciplinary History of Ideas.” Open Journal of Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012, pp. 64-73.

30 Modern Language Studies 53.2

Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford UP, 1982.

---. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford UP, 1973.

---. “A. R. Ammons: The Breaking of the Vessels.” Salmagundi, vols. 31-32, 1975-76, pp. 185-203.

---. A Map of Misreading. Oxford UP, 1975.

---, editor. Modern Critical Views: John Ashbery. Chelsea House Publishers, 1985.

---, editor. Modern Critical Views: Petrarch. Chelsea House Publishers, 1989.

---, editor. Modern Critical Views: W. H. Auden. Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

---. The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. U of Chicago P, 1971.

---. Yeats. Oxford UP, 1970.

Bochner, Mel. “ICA Lecture.” Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings & Interviews, 1965-2007, The MIT Press, 2008, pp. 90-93.

Cahoone, Lawrence, editor. From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. 2nd ed., Blackwell, 2003.

Dallas, Duncan, director. Awakenings. Yorkshire Television, 1974.

Davidson, Michael. On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics. Wesleyan UP, 2011.

Douglas Fields, R. “The First Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, 1971: Reflections Approaching the 50th Anniversary of the Society’s Formation.” The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 38, no. 44, 2018, pp. 9311-17.

Eccles, John C. “The Discipline of Science with Special Reference to the Neurosciences.” Dædalus, vol.

102, no. 2, 1973, pp. 85-99.

Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. Translated by Alastair McEwen, Rizzoli, 2009.

Edelman, Gerald. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. Basic Books, 1992.

Eeckhout, Bart, and Lisa Goldfarb, editors. Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. articles 31

Falkeid, Unn. “Petrarch, Mont Ventoux and the Modern Self.” Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2009, pp. 5-28.

Fischer, Barbara K. Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry.

Routledge, 2006.

Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination. Harvard UP, 2006.

Freccero, John. “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics.” Diacritics, vol. 5, no. 1, 1975, pp. 34-40.

Gander, Forrest. “In Search of John Ashbery.” Boston Review, 1 July 2007, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/in-search-of-john-ashbery/ Gazzaniga, Michael S. “The Split Brain in Man.” Scientific American, vol. 217, no. 2, 1967, pp. 24-29.

Gazzaniga, Michael S., and Joseph E. LeDoux. The Integrated Mind. Plenum Press, 1978.

Gery, John. “En Route to Annihilation: John Ashbery’s Shadow Train.” Concerning Poetry, vol. 20, 1987, pp. 99-116.

Gilbert, Roger. “‘I Went to the Summit’: The Literary Bromance of A. R. Ammons and Harold Bloom.”

Genre, vol. 45, no. 1, 2012, pp. 167-93.

Giles, Paul. The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions.

Oxford UP, 2021.

Gombrich, E. H. “Research in the Humanities: Ideals and Idols.” Dædalus, vol. 102, no. 2, 1973, pp. 1-10.

Graff, Gerald. “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough.” TriQuarterly, vol. 26, 1973, pp. 383-417.

Greene, Thomas. Calling from Diffusion: Hermeneutics of the Promenade. U of Massachusetts P, 2002.

Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery.

U of Chicago P, 1993.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge, 1988.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.

Indiana UP, 1986.

32 Modern Language Studies 53.2

Kiparsky, Paul. “The Role of Linguistics in a Theory of Poetry.” Dædalus, vol. 102, no. 3, 1973, pp. 231-44.

Leahey, Thomas H. “The Mythical Revolutions of American Psychology.” American Psychologist, vol. 47, no. 2, 1992, pp. 308-18.

Lehman, David. “The Shield of a Greeting.” Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery, edited by David Lehman, Cornell UP, 1980, pp. 101-27.

Lenneberg, Eric H. “The Neurology of Language.” Dædalus, vol. 102, no. 3, 1973, pp. 115-33.

Logan, William. “Collateral Damage.” Review of The Word on the Street, by Paul Muldoon, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, by Matthew Dickman, Come, Thief, by Jane Hirshfield, Quick Question, by John Ashbery, The Late Parade, by Adam Fitzgerald, Red Doc>, by Anne Carson. New Criterion, vol.

31, no. 10, 2013, pp. 61-68.

Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Translated by W. H. D. Rouse, Harvard UP, 1924.

Mandler, George. “Origins of the Cognitive (R)evolution.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 38, no. 4, 2002, pp. 339-53.

Marshall, Penny, director. Awakenings. Columbia Pictures, 1990.

Maxwell Cowan, W., et al. “The Emergence of Modern Neuroscience: Some Implications for Neurology and Psychiatry.” Annual Review of Neuroscience, vol. 23, no. 1, 2000, pp. 343-91.

Miller, George A. “The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical Perspective.” TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 7, no. 3, 2003, pp. 141-44.

O’Connell, Michael. “Authority and the Truth of Experience in Petrarch's ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux.’”

Philological Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 4, 1983, pp. 507-19.

“Shadow, n., II.5.a.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, Sept. 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1987174682.

Petrarch, Francesco. Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum familiarum libri). Translated by Aldo S. Bernardo, Italica Press, 2008. 3 vols.

Picker, Tobias, composer. Awakenings. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, 5 June 2022.

---, composer. Awakenings. Rambert Dance Company, The Lowry, 22 Sept. 2010. articles 33

Pinter, Harold. “A Kind of Alaska.” Other Places: Three Plays, Grove Press, 1983, pp. 1-40.

Prusok, Rudi. “Science in Mann’s Zauberberg: The Concept of Space.” PMLA, vol. 88, no. 1, 1973, pp. 52-61.

Puccetti, Roland. “Brain Bisection and Personal Identity.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 24, no. 4, 1973, pp. 339-55.

Quinney, Laura. “Ashbery’s Power and the Phantom ‘I.’” Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950, Volume 2, edited by Robert Faggen and Robert von Hallberg, U of New Mexico P, 2021, 351-63.

Ramachandran, V. S. “Neuroscience – The New Philosophy.” A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers. Pi Press, 2004, pp. 83-112.

Roffman, Karin. The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Rubini, Rocco. “From Translation to Allusion: Petrarch’s Descent of Mount Ventoux.” MLN, vol. 135, no. 5, 2020, pp. 1021-34.

Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. Routledge, 2009.

Sacks, Oliver. Awakenings. Vintage, 1999.

---. “The Great Awakening.” The Listener, vol. 88, no. 2274, 1972, pp. 521-24.

---. On the Move: A Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

---. “Reminiscence.” The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Picador, 1986, pp. 125-42.

Schultz, Susan M. “‘Returning to Bloom’: John Ashbery’s Critique of Harold Bloom.”

Contemporary Literature, vol. 37, no. 1, 1996, pp. 24-48.

---, editor. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. U of Alabama P, 1995.

Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar, edited by John Dover Wilson, Cambridge UP, 2009.

Shoptaw, John. On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry. Harvard UP, 1995.

Skillman, Nikki. The Lyric in the Age of the Brain. Harvard UP, 2016.

34 Modern Language Studies 53.2

Spaide, Christopher. “What We Said of It: The Generational ‘We’ in Stevens and Ashbery.”

Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, 2021, pp. 229-50.

Spiegelman, Willard. The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry.

Princeton UP, 1989.

---. How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry. Oxford UP, 2005.

Stephan, Matthias. Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation.

Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

---. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

Vogel, William E. “Poetry and Science: The Metaphysics of Imagination.” Spirit: A Magazine of Poetry, vol. 39, no. 4, 1973, pp. 19-28.

articles 35

36 Modern Language Studies 53.2

articles 37

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

-George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

38 Modern Language Studies 53.2

I. INTRODUCTION

F

ar from the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which we might use as a marking point for modern, Western national sovereignty, the state today has gained a much-advanced grasp on the mechanisms of power and the tools of social management. Though abstraction has long been an implement for differentiation encouraged by the contents of print-capitalism and the various media that proceed it, the advance of technology and the proliferation of information have developed increasingly effective means of amplifying the perceived separation of subjectivities from individual human beings. Indeed, with its tightening technological grip, modernity—bringing modernization and globalization—permits abstraction and distance to a violent degree. This abstraction is accomplished via discourse, through speech and language, image, and media; is policed and reinforced; and, as we will see, leverages psychic tensions on individuals that are perpetually unsettling, unhealthy, and damaging.

The cultural and national motifs composing the hegemonic package of American identity rely not just on differentiation but separation and distance, and though this has long been a Western imperial principle, globalization’s interconnectedness has wrought serious compromises on our ability to retain this aloofness. Public discourse—floods of political expression, advertisement, mass onslaughts of reinforced information, the devaluing of legitimacy—labors to create bifurcated realities based on ideological divisions, values, and tensions.

Social and institutional forces work to delineate and manage what is available in the public sphere, establishing limits on behavior and negotiating the range of acceptable expression. These efforts function to close options for thought, formulate and reinforce personal identity, and align public and private attitudes, and are at work generally upon the American mind daily. I would like to focus on one specific place in which this geography of bifurcation is clearly pronounced: in the military, in warzones

where the institutions and interests of global economy place and push individuals to confront the basic existential challenge of interacting with the projected cultural and ideological enemy. Especially in the military—where the ethos of fellowship and obedience are central—expressing a line of thinking that deviates from its hegemonic discourse is to risk becoming an outcast. The term whistleblower, so stimulated in contemporary political debates, makes this obvious and clarifies the serious potential consequences of institutional transgression. These can be both bodily and psychic and are much more pronounced in the space of the warzone, where servicemembers put their lives directly at risk and risk taking the lives of others.

With these considerations, this article examines two short stories from Phil Klay’s collection Redeployment (2014) and argues that both place the consequences of abstraction and institutional pressure in sharp relief, revealing the social, moral, and mental damage wrought not only on individual servicemembers but on the American public (and ethos) at large. In his consideration of experientially difficult situations faced in the warzone, Klay is concerned to show how Marines process and respond to guidelines and expectations placed upon them by leaders of higher ranks, peers, family at home, and the hegemonic cultural assumptions that shape the conditions of available action. He is also concerned to examine and undermine perceived expectations on the part of readers and the American public who often only encounter the distant happenings of war through prefabricated narratives.

Finally, these stories provide a point of critique of the logic of war, especially as individual actors perceive—or fail to perceive—their place in the wider framework.

In “After Action Report,” one Marine stands in for another who has shot and killed an armed Iraqi adolescent, literally taking as his own from the other both responsibility and story in order to spare his articles 39

fellow Marine the imminent onslaught of questions, congratulations, and demands to repeat the story endlessly. An excursion in empathy similarly foist on the reader, the Marine seeks support on behalf of his now-silent friend through the military’s own culture of silence and, ultimately

rebuffed and blocked at every effort for authentic discussion and reflection from his friend and superiors, resigns the effort, leaving both himself and his fellow in an isolated state of psychological disturbance for which no assistance will become available. In “Ten Kliks South,” an artillery team fires multiple rounds on a distant target, obliterating the theoretical enemy along with the entire area, and proceeds to debate how credit for possible kills might be divided up among a crew operating a single weapon. There are clear doubts about the efficacy of the weapons that were discharged, though the ranking Marine imposes an authoritative (though not authoritatively believed) narrative in tight military logic. Concerned about the destruction wrought by the artillery, the narrating Marine seeks information and advice only to recognize the astoundingly stark difference between the institutional machinery he finds himself in (the global economy, the United States, the Marine Corps) and that of the country in which he is an occupying force. “Ten Kliks South” provides an exemplary instance of a protest (against a potential war crime; against gratuitous force utilized from the distance 40 Modern Language Studies 53.2

by an artillery unit; and against the killing of unseen, potentially non-enemy combatants) rendered impotent by institutional power, abstraction, and community pressure. “After Action Report” similarly shows not just the suppression and neutralization of divergence, but even how it effects conformity.

Both stories emphasize the tension between individual thoughts and feelings and institutional pressures to partition one’s psychic life.

This bifurcating pressure clearly operates outside the military and is on display in daily life—the servicemember/civilian, public/private, and professional/personal social divides all exemplify this reality—but I argue that the military is one specifically articulate zone for discussing this perennial contradiction between individual will and social pressure. This article, then, examines how the context of Klay’s two stories, the power of abstraction, the force of language, and ideas of truth promote an ironic unfreedom in American culture.

In what follows, I will contextualize the increased visibility of warfare as it pertains to the American public and its technological portrayals, which take place at a distance for American spectators, as part of a longer history of maintaining security through crisis (Section II). Turning to Klay’s stories, I will then analyze how characters are separated from one another with respect to their experiences of wartime events (III) and how they attempt to process and resolve those experiences initially (IV). I then discuss how each story situates the division of responsibility among group and individual (V) before examining the consequences characters face as a result of seeking help (VI) and finally the recognition of near futility ultimately presented to them at the conclusion of each story (VII).

II. CRISIS AND SECURITY The visibility of war to the American public is closer than ever before because of technology’s ability to transmit information to spectators with great speed across long distances. Colored by national interests, portrayals of the warzone rely upon a variety of narrative motifs—threats to a way of life, fears of violence and insecurity, pride in identity and accomplishment, strength and military prowess—as part of a longer history of maintaining security through crisis. As Rob Nixon points out, the Gulf War (August 1990 to February 1991) has been “widely acknowledged as a benchmark moment in the representation and experience of war” because America’s “corporate media represented that war as a spectacular achievement of speed and untainted victory—a strategically, technologically, and ethically decisive war” which can be considered “the nation’s anti-Vietnam” (200). The redemptive aspect of the Gulf War’s media portrayal bears emphasizing, especially in contrast to the long “War on Terror,” which again begins to resemble Vietnam. As an increasingly unpopular and convoluted conflict, the Vietnam War (November 1955 to April 1975) presented a number of issues that helped to destabilize the American national narrative, including the structural racism revealed by the employment of the draft, the volume of war crimes, and its extensive length. 1 Accentuating this increased narrative portrayal, Nixon points out how such images emphasize conclusiveness and narrative closure and deemphasize the lasting effects of war, writing that “in thrall to speed and spectacle” the media “lacks the attention span to follow war-inflicted catastrophes that take years or generations to exact their toll” (200). Nixon demonstrates how the language employed to describe such matters—for two instances: precision weapons, which are neither “smart” nor precise, and depleted uranium, which is not depleted but remains quite radioactive and perpetually harmful—places a distance between and disguises the actual realities in question, a designation

that intentionally elides in order to misrepresent or neutralize. Unlike the Gulf War, a rapid conflict concluded with great speed and covered from a distance, narratives of insecurity appear to be more open and freer in the era of endless war.

The perpetual “War on Terror” initiated with the Invasion of Iraq in 2003 retained its distance for American audiences but added more sophisticated modes of representation. As Slavoj Žižek observes, the Iraq War added to the “abstract computer game” quality of the Gulf War, where missiles were watched being guided toward and destroying their designated targets, the intimacy of the embedded reporter, thereby “generating an instant identification of the spectator’s perspective with that of the soldier” (3).

Citing the dubious presumptions for preemptive invasion and their economic underpinnings, Žižek posits the abstract “War on Terror” not only as “a global geopolitical rearrangement in the Middle East and beyond, but also [of] American society itself ” whose recalibration centers around “the repression of whatever remains of its emancipatory potential” (19). The means of representation (the media) obviously takes center stage in this rearrangement of American society, and the imagination becomes its discursive battleground. United States’ involvement in Iraq (and beyond) represents a set of messages not so much for enemies in the zones of combat as to an audience at home, to “all of us, the witnesses to the war … its true ideological … targets” (Žižek 5). In positing a critique of military experiences, Klay urges the American public to interrupt the endless cycle of uncritical images of war and recognize some of the more detrimental aspects of their ceaseless presentation.

However much the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent military response represent a legible historical marking point for the expansion of state power, these structures of representation and narrative are not novel tools but rather deeply seeded into longer articles 41

histories of Western conflict. As Eli Jelly-Schapiro argues, the “forms and ideas of the War on Terror both derive from” and are a continuation of the “long history of colonial modernity,” a “five-hundredyear history of European empire and its afterlives” (2).2 That the War on Terror is framed as a perpetual war, an endless war, remains clear.

Permanent war requires constant threat, constant insecurity, and the totalized framing by a nation that the defense and survival of civilization is at stake. This is a central component of much political rhetoric. Presented in the hegemonic language of coloniality,3 such rhetoric aims to limit the scope of public expression and social discourse, which exerts regulative pressure on the range of private, psychic life that individuals can experience. Jelly-Schapiro cites NSC-68 and Truman’s 1950 declaration of emergency, which “outlined the culture and rationale of Cold War emergency governance,” as “[t]he intellectual and spiritual antecedent of the Bush Doctrine” because, among other reasons, it indicated “that the struggle against communism”—substitute terrorism—“would necessarily be waged internal to the United States as well as in the world” (39).4 Such efforts at regulative internal security in public discourse and social imagination concern managing divergent modes of expression and resistance to official institutions. For example, in the aftermath of September 11, a proliferation of ideological phrases and commemorative ephemera—“These Colors Don’t Run,” “Never Forget”—were generated to capture, reinforce, and capitalize on public sentiment.

The widely used phrase “Support Our Troops” proffers distinctions between political-administrative action and military protection, which offer latitude to a range of divergent argumentative positions while tacitly accepting the wider systemic, historical, and ethical arrangements that might otherwise come under scrutiny. The maintenance and manufacture of insecurity within the American public have only intensified since this time. Internal insecurity was 42 Modern Language Studies 53.2

more acutely perpetuated in the media by 2020, with the combination of the COVID-19 crisis, racial civil unrest, unprecedented environmental destruction, and the unaddressed crisis of climate change.

The normalization of constant war and the investment of American society in the processes that support and sustain it have grown ever more interconnectedly woven into everyday life. Visuality, representation, and identification represent a few of the ways the media apparatus increases feelings of distance and maximizes familiarity. The American public is the target of this spectacle, and—although it is recognized that the methods of control, governance, and management in colonial modernity contain extensive, consistent histories—these methods grow more sophisticated with the increasing technological ability to generate and disseminate information. Reinforced on this level, the powerful scripts of social order—national and neoliberal—aim to incorporate (even recruit) individuals as participants in carrying out the mission of the state.5 The militarization of American life and the normalization of war, we have seen, are both internal—individuals, identities, attitudes of mental life—and colonial, which is to say it concerns the imposition of systems and structures by forces whose institutionalization began hundreds of years ago and which continues to reverberate today. In these historical, national, and psychic contexts, Klay’s fiction responds to changing perceptions about these circulating ideas concerning the individual’s participation in a wider machinery of power that both resists and incorporates one’s ability to resist it.

III. SEPERATING THE NARRATOR Collected with ten other short stores in Redeployment (2014), “After Action Report” was first published in the Spring 2013 issue of Tin House entitled “This Means War” and a portion of “Ten Kliks South” was

published in November 2013 in Guernica. The stories open with scenes of intense separation that both set the narrator apart from his fellow Marines and situates the reader in a unique position to contemplate the social and institutional dynamics of power, conformity, and identity formation (or maintenance).

Exacerbated by their subsequent encounters and inquiries, this initial separation leads the characters eventually to question the efficacy of the military apparatus and reveals a precariously absent structure of support that prefers to dismiss and abstract issues rather than address them.

“After Action Report” opens in the settling chaos of an improvised explosive device (IED) blast that has just damaged an MRAP—a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle—in a convoy on the outskirts of Fallujah. Starting with the affirmation that “[i]n any other vehicle we’d have died,” the narrator testifies to the closeness of potential death and the difficulty of describing the intensity of the experience as it becomes total: “The world pivoted and crashed while the explosion popped my ears and shuddered through my bones” (“AAR” 29).

Thrust into this intensity, the ensuing scene concludes with the narrator and his fellow Marine Timhead in a brief firefight as the two approach the wall of a building: On the other side there was a woman in black, no veil, and maybe a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kid lying on the ground and bleeding out.

“Holy shit,” I said. I saw an AK lying in the dust.

Timhead didn’t say anything.

“You got him,” I said.

Timhead said, “No. No, man, no.”

“One of them was the bomber, probably” [“AAR” 30]), Timhead’s silence and then denial indicate his rejection of the difficult implications of the event.

With the narrator—a 19-year-old Lance Corporal named Paul Suba, nicknamed Ozzie for biting the head off of a pet scorpion of the same name in a bet (“AAR” 40, 44)—one step withdrawn from the event, he is positioned similarly to a reader: a witness removed from the inner contemplation of Timhead’s action but one still curious about and concerned with his inner psychological state (“I wanted to know what it was like, too” he confesses at one point [“AAR” 33]). Situated close to the experience of death, witnessing often precludes adequate description, and here invites the reader to share the experience of this separation with the narrator. No sooner is the position amplified: Timhead said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“So don’t,” I said. “[The vehicle commander Corporal] Garza thinks you did it.”

“Yeah.”

“Can we keep it that way?”

Timhead looked serious. I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “Sure. I’ll tell everyone I did it.” Who could say I didn’t? (“AAR” 34)

This intensification requires interpretive and imaginative work, comparative work that takes into account expectations, realities, power dynamics, and identity and their complicated interplay as they relate to questions of how trauma is processed.

“Ten Kliks South” offers an even more theoretical project with respect to distance, as an artillery team discusses their recent mission:

But he did. (“AAR” 31-32) This morning our gun dropped about 270 pounds of ICM

The implied separation between occupying military personnel and the ambiguous Iraqi civilian/ally/ enemy already heavily in place (“I saw Iraqi faces in a few shitty one-stories,” Klay’s narrator tells us.

on a smuggler’s checkpoint ten kliks south of us. We took out a group of insurgents and then we went to the Fallujah chow hall for lunch. I got fish and lima beans. I try to eat healthy. (“TKS” 271)

articles 43

The casual movement from discharging a weapon on an unseen target ten kilometers away and then eating in a cafeteria is doubly underscored by the nutritious meal choice. But the contrast between distant enemy and close company dissolves as the narrator dissociates himself with another Marine at the table eating “a big plate of ravioli and Pop-Tarts” (“TKS” 271). The exhilarated tension is palpable and ambiguous in the group as another Marine declares that it’s “about time we killed someone” and as others laugh the narrator tells us that “[e]ven I chuckle, a little” (“TKS” 271) in dialogic display of what readers can easily recognize as performative.

The narrator is not comfortable with the situation.

The story evinces a clear discrepancy between the words spoken and ideas expressed in the company of others—community, public, official—and those private, intimate, more authentic thoughts harbored within a person’s individual consciousness. We enter at this juncture the problem of other minds, of communicating genuinely and safely about real experiences, emotions, and reflections. Beneath the expected, authoritative discourse of conformity for which the military is particularly well known lurks the possibility that private interior dispositions are quite different. As we will see, however, the social mechanisms in place—those which manage the range of available public expression—work to prevent the narrators in both stories from being able to express opposing or divergent positions.

The dynamic of empathy Klay establishes in both stories works doubly: for narrator and reader.

With the first-person account of the events,6 these stories place distance between the narrator and his fellow Marines. The narrators must contemplate actions, implications, and—perhaps most unsettlingly—other minds in the individual isolation of their own reflections. Very similar is the position of reading, where the distance—the consciousness of a reader and the crafted world of a writer—again forces solitary reflection upon the implications of 44 Modern Language Studies 53.2

events that are not wholly visible, discernable, or immediate (to say nothing of the longevity of their painful aftereffects). Indeed, Klay selects the space of fiction, saying it “is ideal for asking the most risky questions about experience” and admits the need for “stories to critique notions of war that seems to me to be false or outdated” (qtd. in Jammes 2, 6).

With respect to the military milieu, Klay highlights “the disconnected civilian world … which likes to project all kinds of ideas onto the veteran that never quite match the individual lived experience, and which complicate the veteran’s ability to process that experience through dialogue with other people” (Jammes 5). Such disconnectedness extends even to Marines in the warzone and their self-portrayal on social media. Caught between conventional concepts of “war” and “everyday life,” and “[e]ven as sensory witnesses to war,” as Lisa Ellen Silvestri notes, Marines’ “thought processes appear to rely on mythic understandings” of ‘over there’ and ‘over here’” (166). Further, she writes: Although we would expect eyewitnesses to have more nuanced perceptions and be able to tell us that war is actually very complicated, messy, and even boring, US troops on deployment are restricted by institutional guidelines, communication infrastructure, and culture convention.

The result is a version of Iraq and Afghanistan that is a representational hodgepodge. On the one hand, there exist messages and images readily interpreted as “war,” and on the other hand, we see texts more fitting to the norms of social media culture, invoking an image of everyday life in the United States. (166)

Social media blends the home front with the warzone to such an extent that even one of the most direct manifestations of war (the eyewitness account presented on social media) is pressured to conform not to the realities of war but to the representational pressures of home. “[W]ith constant connection and access,” servicemembers “perform dual identities

as both members of the public audience and members of the armed forces” (Silvestri 168). Indeed, military personnel are all civilians before—and return to being such after—their service, and so are subject to the unceasing flow of projected ideals, values, expectations, and stereotypes attached to the military.

Servicewoman, civilian, or veteran, a reader of these stories—preconceptions, experiences, and all—is set into the conflict of other minds, into the question of how trauma is processed (or not processed) and how language is crafted to articulate it (or to prevent its articulation). With their interior attitudes seemingly at odds with their fellows, the narrators of both stories are forced to question how they think about themselves and their relations to others and in doing so occupy a space apart from other Marines, outwardly conforming but inwardly conflicted.7 In suspecting that others perhaps harbor but do not express similar interior attitudes, we confront again the problem of other minds and the pressures of systemic conformity.

IV. FINDING CONFLICT How the two narrators respond to and attempt to resolve their initial trauma makes up the central and ultimately fruitless quest of these stories. Their value is in bringing our attention to how these events—the killing of an Iraqi adolescent; the destruction of a distant target, death count unknown—generate trauma and give rise to mental and moral conflict for which no resolution is found in either story.

In “After Action Report,” how to resolve the close-quarters confrontation and killing witnessed

by Ozzie and enacted by Timhead takes on a tripartite form: it involves in the first place the narrator’s interior reflections on the event and his speculations about Timhead’s mental state; in the second place

Timhead’s actual interior mental state to which we have no access but only potential speculation based on the narrator’s own experiences and inferences; and finally the other Marines in the platoon and their outward social behavior (again, we have no access to these mental interiors). Just before Timhead asks Ozzie to take credit for the killing, effectively transforming his friend into an actor before fellow Marines, it is clear that Timhead is concerned with the social, sharing, celebrating aspect that he expects to follow: […] “I shot that kid.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You did.”

“Ozzie,” he said, “you think people are gonna ask me about it?”

“Probably,” I said. “You’re the first guy in MP platoon to…”

I stumbled. I was gonna say “kill somebody,” but the way Timhead was talking let me know that was wrong. So I said, “To do that. They’ll want to know what it’s like.” (33)

Based upon contextual, social, and gestural inferences, the narrator’s substitution for the harsher, more reality-confronting phrase “kill somebody” of the vague referent “that” displays in no uncertain terms the narrator’s knowledge of language and euphemism, an acknowledgement of their powerful effects to confront reality, to manipulate and muddy it.8 Clearly, it is an understanding common enough in everyday life: we speak of loved ones who have “passed on,” gone to a “better place” or been sent into “great unknowns” or who have “returned to the earth” to stave off our fear of mortality and turn away from fear and death. This extends more generally, as we maneuver language to plaster over uncomfortable or compromising things though different avenues of approximate representation.

Immediately after this substitution of language intended to spare his fellow the additional psychological weight of public confrontation, a tableau of

articles 45

the military attitude recognizable from popular culture arises as narrator Ozzie recalls his former drill instructor Staff Sergeant Black: the rumor that he had “beat[en] an Iraqi soldier to death with a radio” and how he would shout “crazy shit” about “find[ing] pieces of little kids, tiny arms and legs and heads everywhere” or “a nine-year-old girl who don’t know her daddy’s dead ’cause his legs is still twitching” (“AAR” 33).9 It is at this point Timhead asks Ozzie to take credit for the killing and tell the story of it as though their positions were switched: Ozzie the killer, Timhead the witness. The question of whether or not to speak about the experience and his reflections upon it has all but been answered by Timhead: he answers in the negative and for the most part takes the route of stubborn silence and repression.

The necessity for mental and emotional distance from acts of violence has not, of course, gone unobserved. Raised on a discourse that largely glorifies the military, initiated into it through training, and now situated in a place where people are activity trying to kill you, the intense closeness to death and encounters with violence (perpetrators, witnesses, victims) can render attempts to cope with it and its aftereffects confusing. Consider Ozzie’s description of riding in the convoy, where being hit by an IED seems to be part of the mission: “I was scared all the time,” he says, locked in “a kind of low-grade terror that mixes with the boredom,” and the “general feeling that you might die at any second and that everybody in this country wants to kill you” makes you “just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do” before “go[ing] back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, and you go back to thinking” (“AAR” 42-43). Indeed, it is in the space of thinking—in the space of moral risk and its confrontations—that Klay situates his characters and environments. As much a defense mechanism (as in the case of Timhead), silence can also be a weapon (as in the case of institutions and their 46 Modern Language Studies 53.2

command structures). In “After Action Report,” Ozzie finds himself representing outwardly and reflecting inwardly on an event he witnessed but in a position he did not occupy—that of the first killer in the platoon.

The narrator of “Ten Kliks South” finds himself in a position where he has committed an act of destruction without the accompanying sensation of having done so. With six howitzers on the artillery battery, each cannon firing twice for a total of twelve rounds, and nine Marines required to operate each weapon (272), the narrator acknowledges not only the massive destruction such a bombardment necessarily caused (278-80) but also the distance between their current position and that of the target area, there being “no indication here of what happened, though I know ten kliks south of us is a cratered area riddled with shrapnel and ruined buildings, burned-out vehicles and twisted corpses” (280), a place that with only one of the twelve rounds “wherever we hit, everything within a hundred yards, everything within a circle with a radius as long as a football field, everything died” (279). This is “the first I’d ever fired at human targets,” the narrator says, and aside from being in the context of a warzone and the attendant emotions of reality, the procedure is the same as having fired in training sessions. A distant and theoretical target has been destroyed— unquestionably overkill, although their sergeant tries to deny this—but fellow Marine Jewett communicates that, with one round being enough and

disputes about whose projectiles landed first, the absent sensation will also haunt the narrator: “But I don’t feel like I killed anybody. I think I’d know if I killed somebody” (273).

Because the state possesses a monopoly on legitimate violence (Ahram 7-8), and the United States military provides an ambiguous permission space for the exercise of such violence, our culture has long treated the work and experiences of servicemembers with a strange mixture of esteem, intrigue, and horror, and no curiosity is more central to this concoction than the prospect of taking another human being’s life. Indeed, this trope carries tremendous prevalence in our cultural imagination.

We see it in “After Action Report,” as demand for the story drives the narrator’s self-discovery. A touchpoint of popular culture, we see it in Full Metal Jacket (1987). We see it critiqued and undermined, however, when Allyson Booth writes that Klay’s fiction highlights writing’s ability “to teach civilians something about war that their own needs and expectations would otherwise prevent them from learning” (171). Part of those needs and expectations involve both the “civilians’ own political responsibility for killing done on their behalf ” as well as the “American provincialism” whose “understanding of war is shamefully one-sided” (Booth 170) and whose cognitive reach extends only so far as the American public imagination allows. Booth uses the familiar “thank you for your service” compliment, which elides and takes for granted the veteran’s actual experience and feelings, allows the civilian to “hav[e] sympathized with the suffering American veteran,” and “ignores the massive destruction and thousands of casualties those veterans have left behind” so that the civilian feels good about themselves and need not think further beyond the idealized, abstracted sentiments of sacrifices and gratitude (170). That there is going to be a specific sensation, a peculiar and unique “feeling” for having taken another human life, is a standard enough trope. It beckons to be

some kind of special or cinematic event—a vast repository for these such images and scenes—and when transferred to experience, the anticipation and then absence of some predetermined sensation is part of the processing, as some of the artillery Marines in “Ten Kliks South” struggle to negotiate personal uncertainties and social expectations with the reality of their feelings. Beneath these pressures, they also attempt to make sense of their experience and how they should talk about it.

Expectation reverberates again when Jewett (who first said aloud that he did not feel as though he had killed anyone) and the narrator (who clearly shares Jewett’s sentiment and whose courthouse wedding one week before deployment has him not “feel like I’m married”) consider how they will discuss the artillery discharge with their relations at home: “What am I supposed to tell her?” I say.

Jewett shrugs.

“She thinks I’m a stud. She thinks I’m in danger.”

“We get mortared from time to time.”

I give Jewett a flat look.

“It’s something,” he says. “Anyway, now you can say you got some bad guys.”

“Maybe.” I look at my watch. “It’s zero four, her time.

I’ll have to wait before I can tell her what a hero I am.”

“That’s what I tell my mom every day.” (“TKS” 276)

As Jewett offers a few impoverished pieces of evidence for upholding the expected war narrative of danger and action—occasional incoming mortars, bad guys—they both acknowledge the division between their experience and how they are expected to express it to others. Joyce Wexler remarks that the currently pervading hero narrative—which she says has taken on a more dominant autobiographical mode over a patriotic one, foregrounding personal reasons for fighting rather than national or political ones (1-3)—“makes everything important, including the individual soldier,” each of whom apparently has articles 47

“faced more than we have faced … done … and knows[s] more than we do” and through this “transformative experience constitutes the new heroism that emerged in the eighteenth century and continues today” (11). Following this, we might posit the familiar notion that proximity to mortality brings one’s existential awareness into crucial view, eroding superficial concerns that occupy large portions of Western life (work, entertainment, socializing, and so on).10 “Ten Kliks South” frustrates the patriotic model of autobiography—all of Klay’s stories do—and turns to the individual as Wexler suggests, but upsets even this idea of superior experience as the disparity of the artillerymen’s expectations and their lived reality grind to a tenuous incommensurability. Not only have their training exercises seemed largely indistinct from their real missions, but the narrator and Jewett recognize that, in the absence of this sensation of having killed, a significant and destabilizing change has taken place. Without visible confirmation of the target zone, the artillery Marines have only their imaginative capacities to consider the destruction: an experience often shared with the American public unaccustomed to seeing the raw violence of warzones with any kind of sustained closeness or contextualization. As the narrator goes on to imagine the bodies and building rubble in the target area, the wider assemblage of a socializing and distancing machine begins to reveal itself, and his continued reflection, as we will see, clarifies its consequences.

Both narrators in “Ten Klicks South” and “After Action Report” reckon with the fracturing of public and private agreement as well as the disparities of expectation that they must negotiate with their fellow Marines. Neither pliant to the misleading suggestions of others nor uncritically accepting of them, neither man lacks the quality of reflection. Confronting these issues directly and trying to articulate them constitutes their initial response, and this results in greater dilemmas. Indeed, the narrating Marines 48 Modern Language Studies 53.2

appear more active than others in pursuing a wider set of knowledge, more curious and concerned about the ramifications of their actions.

V. DIVIDING RESPONSIBILITY The lunch discussion at the Fallujah chow hall in “Ten Kliks South” moves through a number of layers of responsibility—from the theoretical effect of each artillery cannon, to the culpability of each individual out of the nine operators of each howitzer, to the arms manufacturers and logistics that moved the bullets, to the American public for its selection of representatives and influence on policy. In conducting this discussion, the Marines acknowledge different zones of official legitimacy: legal and geographic jurisdictions and the protections they provide for their members in varying contexts.

If their target was a platoon-sized element of around forty as Sergeant Deetz continues to claim without evidence, and six howitzers fired on the target, then each gun killed 6.6 people as the Marines calculate it. Sanchez, another Marine in the group, computes that each of the nine Marines on the gun, then, achieved 0.7 kills, “like, a torso and a head. Or maybe a torso and a leg” (“TKS” 272). Even the individual operators of the howitzer get consideration for their respective roles and concerns about which gun struck first (though neither are mathematically articulated). The narrator extends the conversation, wondering what crime they would be charged with: If we used a howitzer to kill someone back in the States […] murder, sure […] but for each of us? In what degree? I mean, me and Bolander and Jewett loaded, right? If I loaded an M16 and handed it to Voorstadt and he shot somebody, I wouldn’t say I’d killed anyone. (“TKS” 274)

Another step along this chain, the narrator considers the Ammunition Supply Point (ASP) Marines who

delivered the munitions that were discharged.

Although the Sergeant continues to insist the culpability is shared on a crew-served weapon, he broadens the extension further himself, asking, “Why not the factory workers who made the ammo … or the taxpayers who paid for it” (“TKS” 274).

Though he thinks this extension “stupid” in an effort to dismiss the whole line of considerations (“TKS” 274), the Sergeant nonetheless provides the crucial fulfillment of the spectrum of culpable entities and the complex barriers placed between them. He short-circuits further discussion, homogenizing in a diffusion of responsibility comparable to and consistent with the abstractions of American public discourse, and here: Sergeant Deetz thumps his fist on the table. “Listen to me. We’re gun six. We’re responsible for that gun. We just killed some bad guys. With our gun. All of us. And that’s a good day’s work.” (“TKS” 275)

As I have said, this abusive simplification leaves out numerous, intricate barriers the Marines have already themselves articulated and yanks the reins of the conversation back into coordinated obedience to the centralizing narrative. Stifled by Sergeant Deetz in proceeding any further in their elaborations, the undetailed but coherent chain of connections between the casualties caused by the artillery team and the American taxpayer present themselves in full relief. We might also imagine this opaque taxpayer to be the consumer at large, the reader encountering the story in one form or another such that the implication stretches far enough to incriminate the audience, the general reading American public. At the same time this is achieved, plenty of distance places a reader safely beyond consequence, and the balancing act between credit and culpability can take place on the level of the individual group member (artillery Marine) or individual member of society (reader, taxpayer, person) and be played

out with full ethical considerations on each level of separation slotted between this first point (event: howitzer discharge) and the system it alleges to uphold (life, liberty, free expression, democracy, and so on enacted by the individual member of society).

An early reviewer of Redeployment critiques Klay for not declaring an anti-war stance through this collection of stories but lauds the convincing articulation of “the confusion, disgust, and horror of many … Marines who occupied Iraq and, for the most part, unwillingly ravaged the nation” (English).

The point I emphasize here is that these zones of separation exist and are acknowledged through the whole chain of interacting forces (from that of command to that of the American individual), that they allow the diffusion of responsibility to layer across a vast network of subjectivities and institutions where accountability increasingly thins and fades away, and that this is a critique of the representation of war that Klay levels with his stories.

While the opening of “After Action Report” is more immediately set in a threatening combat situation than the artillery crew in “Ten Kliks South,” the same mediating barriers interfere with respect to action, abstraction, and responsibility. In the aftermath of the IED explosion that leads to the killing of a fourteen-year-old child, the narrator testifies to his rapid, almost automatic response: unbalanced and disoriented, he is unsteady “but training kicked in” as he performed his “fives and twenty-fives” (a process of scanning the area for more potential explosives); on hearing gunfire, he “snapped back to training” although detects no shooter; and as Timhead opens fire, the narrator “fired where he was firing … Timhead stopped. So did I … Timhead had his rifle at the ready, and that’s where I kept mine”—all Marines having been “trained to fire a rifle,” “trained on man-shaped targets” to the extent that “[i]nstinct took over.” (“AAR” 30-32).

Clearly here, and especially retrospectively as the narrative unfolds, accountability descends to the articles 49

level of biology, to muscle memory, to the key actor: training. This regimenting force sinks inward on the individual level, but undoubtably references a more intricate dynamic by which that individual is contextualized, protected, and constrained within the military apparatus. In the exceptional space of the warzone, normative legal codes are relaxed or ignored, social circumstances displace the distance of deployment and cultural barriers (language, custom, history), and abstract idealism contextualizes the actions of the individual within wider mission (protecting democracy, resisting tyranny, liberating people, fighting terrorism, neutralizing weapons of mass destruction, following orders). Training as the semi-successful coupling of individual to institution—not to mention the often-referenced chaos of war: hell, fog, tacit acceptance of circumstantial atrocities—in this fashion traces its way back to the American public, to the enabling conditions of Western liberalism and its colonial lineage in the state’s monopoly on and exercise of violence.

VI. SEEKING HELP One commonly understood way of resolving trauma is by discussing it, but the narrator of “After Action Report” finds himself in a position to address a trauma not directly his own. Thus, Klay frustrates the usual striving for a coherent ordering through narrative that is the formulaic response to war trauma in countless commentaries. Instead, “After Action Report” compromises the common narrative of coherent order and suggests that such a telling may be out of reach, weighed down by conventions and expectations concerning what war is said to feel like in the abstract discourse. As he recites the story of the shooting as though he were in Timhead’s position knowing “[i]t was bullshit” but recognizing that “every time I told the story, it felt better,” Ozzie strives unsuccessfully for a coherent ordering of the events 50 Modern Language Studies 53.2

at the same time he seeks help for his fellow Marine: […] Even saying it was dark and dusty and fucking scary made it less dark and dusty and fucking scary. So when I thought back on it, there were the memories I had, and the stories I told, and they sort of sat together in my mind, the stories becoming stronger every time I retold them, feeling more and more true. (my italics, “AAR” 35)

What more succinct crystallization of ideology in the age of mass media could there be: the statement and endless restatement of dominant, self-strengthening motifs and stories that do not originate within an authentic self but nonetheless emanate from that self and spread to others in an increasing avalanche of conviction. Even so, this performance requires a great deal on Ozzie’s part—memory, empathy, embodiment, and imagination to skein them into consistency—and though the resulting story is ostensibly one of superficial (and often mutually reinforcing) exchange, its power to shape group identity is apparent as it works its way onto others.11 In this process providing his own take to anchor down the story, Staff Sergeant “roll[s] up” to redirect the narrative back into the collectively machine of the military: […] "Shut the fuck up, Suba. Hajji shot at us. Lance Corporal Suba shot back. Dead haiji. That’s the happiest ending you can get outside a Thai massage parlor. Now it’s over. Gunners, be alert, get positive ID, you’ll get your chance." (“AAR” 35-36)

Staff Sergeant in this instance forecloses on the story’s introspective possibilities (indeed, this is what Klay’s story so vehemently showcases) and rethreads them into the normative level: kill enemy, good day’s work, do it again, this is our duty, and it is normal— thereby publicly repressing the potential for processing the event.

“Ten Kliks South” articulates similar foreclosures. The narrator asks Sergeant Deetz—who had

seen the bodies on his first deployment and who has told the men that witnessing them is what overcomes the abstraction of distance—who cleans up the bodies and destruction the artillery weapons have recently made. The answers—“I’m an artilleryman. We provide bodies. We don’t clean ’em up” and “Do I look like a PRP [personnel retrieval and processing or mortuary affairs] Marine to you?” (“TKS” 281-82)—advances the inquiry little save for reminding the narrator about the existence of Mortuary Affairs, which he subsequently searches for and finds on base.12 There, an old, overweight, probably reservist Gunnery Sergeant tells an awkward narrator that “Iraqis take care of their own” and advises him to put the wedding ring he was nervously fiddling with at the story’s opening with his dog tags on the chain around his neck because they “need to collect personal effects” (“TKS” 285-86). He complies with the request but leaves the Mortuary Affairs building unresolved, more fully aware of the structural compartmentalization that keeps the immediacy and ramification of his experience at a distance.

As soon as Ozzie leaves the mortuary building and finds his way back to his artillery team, they’re “snapped to attention, not knowing why” and “Sergeant Deetz raised his right hand in a salute, and so did we” as an American flag-draped stretcher emerges from the surgical area and passes from view (“TKS” 287). The story concludes with the narrator imagining his way along a chain of events—the various apparatuses and personnel of the military whom the body will come into contact with, the places it will go on its way back to the United States, and the ritual silences that will greet it at every turn by men and women in uniform, a stark contrast to the uncertainty of how and if the carnage ten kliks south will be resolved.

In “After Action Report,” the Staff Sergeant, who insists he talk about the incident and suggests that the narrator see the chaplain, provides the narrating Marine with some revealing advice:

“Look,” he said, “it ain’t like your sister. It’s not the same.”

“What do you mean?”

“This kid’s Iraqi, right?”

“Sure.”

“Then this might not even be the most fucked-up thing she’s seen.” (“AAR” 49)

It must be kept in mind that Ozzie is at this point seeking advice, leadership, and counsel to take back to his fellow Marine Timhead who actually killed the 14-year-old whose presumed sister watched from a window. The Staff Sergeant persists: "Shit. There’s explosions in this city every fucking day.

There’s firefights in this city every fucking day. That’s her home.

That’s in the streets where she plays. This girl is probably fucked up in ways we can’t even imagine. She’s not your sister.

She’s just not. She’s seen it before." (“AAR” 50)

“She’s seen it before.” Normalized and desensitized, the landscape of numbness and violence presumed throughout the military and throughout Iraq seems both the weapon of rupture and the response to those very conditions cultivated in every direction Ozzie turns. Soon after this, he expresses in thoughts only the reader is privy to the sense of being locked in a vicious cycle with no prospect of exit, driving down the road: […] It doesn’t stop. Tomorrow we would do this again. Maybe get blown up, or get injured, or die, or kill somebody. We couldn’t know. (“AAR” 51)

Aside from revealing the circuitous logic of avoidance, the Staff Sergeant’s advice is more damaging than anything else, encouraging Ozzie to suppress his thoughts and feelings. The silencing of divergent thought and expression also reveals itself to be a learned, institutionalized practice, as the various Sergeants in both stories act as authorities and examples, participating in and passing on that mode of normativity. articles 51

VII. RECOGNIZING CONSEQUENCES In both stories, narrators seeking assistance for processing trauma and making sense out of their position and experience are foreclosed on and rerouted back into the distancing machinery of the military. In “Ten Kliks South” the concluding silence is literal: the movement of and meditation upon a dead servicemember, foregrounding the abstracted American ideals of country and sacrifice. Displaying his unease with the situation from the opening lines, the narrator is consistently rebuked for seeking to process the phantom trauma of discharging an artillery cannon on a distant target.

Compartmentalized barriers to information, command structure, and narrative policing all contribute to this blocking.

In “After Action Report,” the final silences are psychological and mutually reinforcing. After Ozzie takes the credit for Timhead’s killing of the Iraqi teenager, he consistently searches for ways to discuss the event with Timhead—who remains mostly silent on the matter—and is continually denied any glimpse of Timhead’s interior state. Partway through the story, the narrator admits that “[t]he best I could get were little signs” as when other Marines hassle him about being slower than the narrator (38), and later he gets “Timhead to open up a bit” (48). Here, Timhead admits that the teenager’s family being present for the killing and their faces are what bother him most (48, 40-41) and the only advice that the narrator can muster at this point—advice borrowed directly from the Sergeant—is that “[i]t’s a fucked-up country, man” (“AAR” 48). Aside from this, the rest of their time is spent together “[i]n our can,” mostly silent: “We’d get back and I’d play GTA and he’d play Pokémon until we were too tired to stay up. Not much to talk about” (“AAR” 35, 37, 41). Knowing he is not getting enough sleep—“Didn’t matter if we had a mission in four hours, we’d be in our beds, on the video games” and “I’d tell myself, I need it to come down”—the narrator eventually smashes his PlayStation Portable on a rock (39), but this is nearly as far as he gets to resisting the ideological machinery of the military.13 52 Modern Language Studies 53.2

The story concludes with a brief conversation between the narrator and Timhead. Distraught with the bragging of another Marine whose neck was grazed by a bullet, Timhead complains about the authenticity of the story juxtaposed with the severity of the event itself—“Harvey’s so full of shit” (“AAR” 52)—and finds no company for his complaint in the narrator who, under the weight of Timhead’s consistent resistance to discussion and the wider military apparatus’s silencing gravity, has exhausted his efforts to resist. The narrator enters into the same silencing practice that he has been rebuffed by and has attempted to overcome throughout the story: “Hey,” he said, quiet, “do you think—” That did it. I sat up straight. “What do you want him to say?” I said. “He got shot in the neck and he’s going out tomorrow, same as us. Let him say what he wants.”

I could hear Timhead breathing in the dark. “Yeah,” he said.

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.” (“AAR” 52)

While the narrator in “Ten Kliks South” evinces recognition of the vast separating apparatuses of the military and modern society, Ozzie in “After Action Report” is confronted not only with the silencing apparatuses but frustrated to the point of giving over to and perpetuating them, passing on the silence at the point when Timhead is most susceptible to reflection.

VIII. CONCLUSION Both stories ultimately broach and leave open the question of the interior attitudes of Marines besides the two narrators in question. That is to say, readers can be justifiably suspicious that more than these two narrators stand out as unique imposters in an otherwise vastly ideologically numb and uniform military. Klay puts this on full display though

narrative confrontation with the structure and methods of these abstracting and silencing powers.

As I suggested at the opening, the pressures on full display in the military apparatus exert themselves in the world of daily life as well, and I have attempted to show the military as one specifically articulate zone for discussion of the pervasiveness of these pressures in the American imagination and in the routinization of daily life. We have examined how the power of abstraction, the force of language, and ideas of truth promote an ironic unfreedom in American culture. Again, both stories emphasize the tension between individual thoughts and feelings and institutional pressures to confirm one’s psychic life into a set of limited, prefabricated options. The longer we can connect the lines and logic of emergency governance the better, and the more focus on the maintenance and manufacture of crisis that has been consolidated to direct public discourse the more seriously we can recognize the ethical implications of our social and institutional interconnectedness. Klay’s two stories center crushed attempts at empathetic action wrought by a regime of compartmentalization and silencing.

articles 53

NOTES 1.

See, for instance, Ronald Eyerman’s “Perpetrator Trauma and Collective Guilt: My Lai” in Trauma and Transcendence: Suffering and the Limits of Theory, edited by Eric Boynton and Peter Capretto (Fordham UP, 2018).

2.

For instance, Jelly-Schapiro traces Roosevelt’s 1933 emergency declaration, where “emergency” enters the legal, public discourse, as “the beginning of a continuous line of emergency governance that remains unbroken today,” as well as to Truman’s 1950 emergency declaration which effected the consolidation of “the emergent but already hegemonic National Security state—a new political order founded on the specter of total and permanent war” wherein the distinctions between wartime and peacetime erode and the militarization of society expands (39). As Žizek writes in 2004, “The problem with today’s USA is not that it is a new global Empire, but that it is not: in other words, that, while pretending to be, it continues to act as a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its own interests” (italics in original, 19).

3.

See Walter D. Mignolo’s The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke UP, 2011) for an extensive discussion of coloniality matrix of concepts and power structures that condition modern subjectivity in the west.

4.

See Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard UP, 2018) for a connection of white supremacy to the strains of struggles against communism, immigration, and terrorism.

5.

Affirming that the “state of security as permanent emergency and endless war has become the hegemonic logic of governance” and that “constructs of security have come to dominate everyday life in the US,” Inderpal Grewal has detailed how with the “insecurities of the new century, private individuals who see themselves as normative citizens become empowered to take responsibility for maintaining the imperial security state” (2).

6.

All twelve stories in Redeployment are narrated from the first-person point of view.

7.

See Lisa Zunshine’s Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (JHU Press, 2012) for more on theory of mind and literature.

8.

Klay’s stories “Psychological Operations” and “War Stories” contend with the willingness to represent events apart from reality, where characters exchange expected conversations in familiar forms.

9.

See also Klay’s essay on “The Citizen Soldier: Moral Risk and the Modern Military” (Brooking Institution Press, 2016).

10. Consider the title story in Klay’s collection, “Redeployment,” in which euthanizing a dog has a veteran going back to his experiences, mixing them into the everyday world so that, in some sense, this 54 Modern Language Studies 53.2

“everyday” has been disrupted with PTSD on the one hand and an epistemology awareness of social constructs on the other.

11. At one point in the story, during a ceremonial roll call to honor a killed Marine, ritual reinforcement of group identity and mission is effected through silence, as the Sergeant’s angry voice cracks when he calls out the name of the missing Marine and “let[s] the silence weigh on us a second” before playing Taps (“AAR” 37). “At least you got one. One of those fucks,” one of the Marines tells him.

“That was for Mac [the deceased marine],” and the narrator responds only to the reader: “Except I killed haiji first. So it was more like Mac for hajji. And I didn’t even kill haiji” (“AAR” 37).

12. . The story “Bodies,” directly following “After Action Report” in Klay’s Redeployment collection, deals with a Mortuary Affairs Marine and the issues of expectation and authenticity in traumatic storytelling.

13. See Tim Lenoir and Luke Caldwell’s The Military-Entertainment Complex (2018) for an extended discussion of the military’s entrenchment into gaming and gaming’s entrenchment into modern culture.

WORKS CITED Ahram, Ariel I. Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State-Sponsored Militias. Stanford Security Studies, 2011.

Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

Harvard UP, 2018.

Booth, Allyson. “Thank You for Your Service: Negotiating the Civilian-Military Divide in Phil Klay’s Redeployment.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 62, no. 2, 2019, pp. 168-92.

Caldwell, Luke, and Tim Lenoir. The Military-Entertainment Complex. Harvard UP, 2018.

English, Sandy. “Redeployment: Phil Klay’s short stories about the Iraq war only go so far.”

World Socialist Web Site. 25 June 2015, www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/25/rede-j25.html.

Eyerman, Ronald. “Perpetrator Trauma and Collective Guilt: My Lai.” Trauma and Transcendence: Suffering and the Limits of Theory, edited by Eric Boynton and Peter Capretto, Fordham UP, 2018, pp. 163-94.

Grewal, Inderpal. Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America.

Duke UP, 2017.

articles 55

Jammes, Lucie. “An Interview with Phil Klay.” Transatlantica, vol. 1, 2017, pp. 1-7.

Jelly-Schapiro, Eli. Security and Terror: American Culture and the Long History of Colonial Modernity.

U of California P, 2018.

Klay, Phil. “The Citizen Soldier: Moral Risk and the Modern Military.” Brooking Institution Press, 24 May 2016, csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2016/the-citizen-soldier.html.

---. Redeployment. The Penguin Press, 2014.

Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options.

Duke UP, 2011.

Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” The Orwell Foundation, www.orwellfoundation. com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language.

Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.

Silvestri, Lisa Ellen. Friended at the Front: Social Media in the American War Zone. UP of Kansas, 2015.

Wexler, Joyce. “The New Heroism.” War, Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities, vol. 27, 2015, pp. 1-12. Žižek, Slavoj. Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. Verso, 2004.

Zunshine, Lisa. Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture.

JHU Press, 2012.

56 Modern Language Studies 53.2

articles 57

53.2

poetry+fiction

articles 59

Two More Cups Of Coffee I am following a woman on social media.

I don’t know her. I suspect most of us don’t know her, but still she signs off her twitter each night telling us she is still alive, and we are beloved.

Her tweets are a real-time war diary made public, made permanent, in a cyber space as the built world around her falls and she flees from her apartment in Kyiv to her mother’s, where the lack of bombing is eerie and unsettling, but so is being alive when a coworker in another town no longer answers texts, and she opens the single suitcase she evacuated with to find 3 bottles of perfume and very few clothes.

“How crazy the war made me,” she tweets, and then tells us the coffee there is terrible.

War coffee, she now calls it.

I have not yet gone online today, because until I do this woman I do not know is still alive, she still has a mother, they sit at her kitchen table, two cups of coffee and a new day before them.

poetry + fiction 61

Every Wretched Present Thing

by Sarah Lawrence-Sandkvist

62 Modern Language Studies 53.1

I. I don’t have a name.

You pulled me from the knot without one, and now it falls to you to offer me a name.

When you first brushed the dirt from my hair and tore the mycelium from my arms, I was nothing. A shrieking sky suddenly exposed to my young eyes. Now, sitting in your kitchen, you throw out names with a toss of your hand, waiting for me to catch one.

In the moment you drew me, I came shaking into the world, fresh and sure that it was wrong and I had no place in it.

The whisper of leaves on my raw skin, thick brush below, and a horrid, bright sky above.

My mother’s language cannot be spoken with this tongue that feels fat and foreign and far too mobile. I’ve been exiled from the body I was born in.

I was informed by my birch-mother to take the weight of snow, bending bowstring drawn to the earth released, shaking troubles off my limbs. But that had always been the most difficult lesson. Leaves I could scatter easily in the wind, but when the heaviness came I never knew when it left, even after the thaw arrived.

“What would you like?”

You offer me a name, a life, as generous and easily as breathing; a violent, reaching, retching tenderness.

“Birk? Bjork?”

Nails that I didn’t know were sharp (I had not felt sharp before) catch on the soft skin of my arms, and the noise is too much. I can hear myself breathing. I could never hear that before. I am crying. I never cried before.

“Oh,” you say, your hands moving like little thrushes, fluttering from the perch of your elbows, to your stomach, to your face. They finally land on the back of my head where fine hairs sprout like life.

Your hands are warm.

II. When I was young, a bluethroat made its home in a hollow at my birch-mother’s feet. In the early summer, downy young things came out into the brush on legs that ought to be too thin and took their first flights. It seemed then they must have been born with the knowledge. They shook and came down fast and early, round breast catching dirt. Those little legs, more delicate than reeds, lifted them again, stretching and scratching the earth, skipping, then running, and taking flight again.

These legs have none such knowledge. They shake and bend in ways unfamiliar.

You keep your arm around my middle and offer cooing support as I take one step and then another. My breath is bruising and sweat pours from foreign places. You drop me back in the chair and take your own steadying breath.

poetry + fiction 63

I wake in the morning with something new in my mouth.

In the kitchen, you have me peel my lips back and stick out my tongue. With a small, sharp knife, you cup the mushrooms from my tongue and the inside flesh of my cheeks. They line up on the counter, slick with spit. And you shrug away the fear in your eyes, and slide them into the pot simmering on the stove, promising soup for lunch.

I sit at the table and flex my tongue, searching for stumps and stems where you cut, but there is nothing left, only the softness of my gums and the memory of your knife.

You turn down the radio that is always pouring out sound like sand, and begin to talk, trying to fill the space.

You explain to me how you don’t speak much with your mother, that the two of you love each other in silences and distance. That you don’t feel you have much to say to each other, but that she’ll call if she finds an excellently old gold button at the flea market, and that you’ll call if the gulls come to sit before your window and look in.

You don’t talk about your father, but there’s a picture of him hanging above the kitchen table, and before I came, I suppose he was the one you ate with in the mornings. In the picture he’s hard at work, scrubbing down a boat. It’s up on the grass, but it looks like the kind I’ve seen from your window, the ones that seem small, but always manage to pack in families; the ones that sit low in the water, open to the sun like a bowl, the kind that will bob in the center of the bay for hours on a Sunday and will pick up their noses and gurgle and foam the water behind them as they speed home for dinner in the evenings.

Beside the boat, in the grass, is a plate with half a sandwich gone and a glass fogged up in the heat.

Your father looks stout and wiry, like the spruces that dropped their needles around my mother’s feet, forearms flexing, running a cloth down the side of the boat, barefoot, wearing only shorts, a cap, and glasses.

“You’re very quiet.”

You don't know how lucky you are to be born understanding yourself. To enter and exit the world in the same body, to feel that you are what you are called.

“This is your home; do as you like. Take as much space as you can.”

There is nothing of me in this house. If I disappeared, the blankets wouldn’t even be wrinkled in the place where I once slept.

III. When you go to bed in the evenings, I turn myself inside out. I examine myself and try to understand where my roots are. Each thought, each moment, I feel my way along it and try and find from where it grows, but the network of growing things beneath my skin is confused and stretching over itself each day. Some things are gone, as if they never were. And some things are not deep and twisting. Some things are moss and liverwort, bryophytes growing gently over the ground left open.

64 Modern Language Studies 53.2

I’ve grown stronger, strong enough to walk once around the house without stopping for breath, though my knees still knock together more than they should, I think, from watching you.

I pass the mirror in the hall and notice new shape to my arms and legs, change as real as fresh spring leaves.

And still the bad days seem to be born out of nothing. It’s the worst kind of mystery to me, why some days I feel like I’m burning up from the inside with all the love I feel for the way the wind moves in the grass, and other days I wake pasted to the mattress in dark oil. Why, on those days, everything is tinged with such overwhelming wrongness that I want to return to the earth, to let the moss grow over me, stretch its fingers over mine and swallow me down to where I can sleep without sleeping. But even that feels far from me now, sickly and sour with unnatural rot.

My mother did not birth me, but told me every day of my death, of the kind that came with winter, of the kind that came with saws, of the kind that came with fires. My birch-mother promised me death without feeling, death without fear, in the way of life, in the way of all things.

Something that would only land on a branch and fly away when ready.

There are days I forget that I’m flesh, until I pass that same mirror and see the eyes and the arms and the skin. And I might look the same as any other person, but when I look at my eyes through my eyes, I feel like I’m missing something. To see the bones move beneath my skin when I move my hand is to know that I’m not earth anymore.

It’s on those days, which you’ve gotten remarkably good at recognizing, that you take my hand and gift me with silence. You ask for nothing, but give me time to feel that you’re with me, solidly, and that I can come back. That this body isn’t a punishment for something that I can’t understand.

I don’t know how long it is that we sit there, on the sofa, in the grass, on my bed. But you stay, shifting with the wind and the murmurs of the floorboards, running your thumb over my knuckles, eyes on something in the distance, and show me how you’re not waiting. You’re just with me.

And in the morning, when I wake to find that the flies have come to me in the night and eaten away my eyelashes and the hair on my arms, you smile and bring me warmer clothes.

IV. It rains for four days straight and I learn that you lose something in yourself when the sun doesn’t show. When the air is finally clear again, you pass me a jacket from your closet, and I learn that you’d gladly take back the rain if it meant the mosquitos wouldn’t return.

And it is this night that I realize it’s finally dark. The sky no longer stays that smoky bruise after sunset, but sinks into sweet ink, with all the depth but none of the shine of the crows that hop and skitter over the roof. Night seems to slither in gently over the earth until you forget that there was a time without it. But the appearance of the moon in your window whispers to me in such a kind and quiet way that I can’t help but slip out the back door to walk down to the dock. The wood, still damp and swollen with the memory of the morning’s rain, presses up poetry + fiction 65

against me, holding me above the water. A thick breeze carries the taste of the sea to me. I suppose the night must have come gradually, but the world has suddenly changed again, going foreign before me.

I can hardly make out the line where the water ends and the sky begins. The world is so still, the bay, the black ice under this black sky, I wonder if there is a difference at all.

The fish that sometimes jump from the water—how it must feel for them, to throw their bodies out of their atmosphere and suddenly find themselves in another, in a place dry and sharp and made of air. How it’s done willingly, but I still feel uprooted in this envelope between the ground and sky, in a pocket that isn’t my own. And how welcoming the water looks.

“The water won’t ask you in, you’ll have to go to her.”

I didn’t hear you follow me, but your voice settles over me with the ease of a warm, curling zephyr and seems to blend in with the night.

You smile with the corners of your eyes and tilt your head forward. You’re made of these small movements that push me and twist me and confound me and drive me to step forward.

From here, the water is a mouth, gaping with strange stillness. Leaving the dock, my bare feet make impressions in the grass, grass that grows in wetness until I’m making ripples in the black water.

The bay begins to eat at the hem of my pants, crawling up my legs through threads of cotton, raising my skin in a threat and a welcome, and I know forward is the only way to go.

I walk out into the bay, letting the dark water swallow me until I can see nothing of myself. Standing in water up to my shoulders, everything still and silent in this new darkness, the earth seems to welcome the first sleep after so long in sunlight.

I lean back into the water and feel a soft burn in my stomach as I lift my feet from the soft, sinking seabed and begin to float.

The moon looks down on me and Mother. It’s so quiet, I feel as though I’ve left the world behind. But my breath is heavy and beats against my ears, disturbed water lapping and licking my face as I struggle to keep my mouth free. The water is so dark it seems to encompass everything, and night came so steadily it was difficult to know when the stars started to come out.

The water whispers around my legs as I kick them with a force that makes me pant.

The cold presses itself deep inside, like a body forcing its way into you, wrapping its hands around your heart until the cold is no longer cold. It transforms itself, wrapped around bare limbs and tangled in quiet places, sending such delicious shivers through me. Is this what it is to be alive? Reminding yourself to breathe, forcing it in and out, kicking and flapping and always pushing, always feeling, always touching something and feeling it in return?

The water holds me, and with it comes this excellent nothing. The sky bleeds into the water and it seems as if everything is touching. The stars, the air, the water. And me.

I know now how much more you hear the rain in the forest for the way it plays against the leaves. How much more there is when there is less of it. And I think of how you tell yourself stories about the world to make sense of it or to offer beauty when there seems little. How you give names to souls pulled from the knot of a birch tree, driving your hand in to take my wrist,

66 Modern Language Studies 53.2

and make this out of so little. A plane passing overhead, one that flashes and moves like a star scared to being, and I’m tempted to write some folklore of it and repeat it until I’ve convinced myself of my own lie.

I’m shaking as I step out of the water. You meet me at the wet grass with a blanket that you throw around my shoulders. You rub my back for a moment, my wet clothes melted into me, and still you don’t pull away.

Sharp shoulders and soft arms. Your skin seems to hold on to heat long after the sun has left.

I feel it in me, like a new limb grown, invisible but distinct. Something that has been stretching for some time but has suddenly sprouted, solidified as solid as oak, a tree growing straight through the core of me.

Like the warmth of a house in the dark, you beckon me in with your soft voice, a simple promise of gentle touches, open spaces, heavy blankets, and mornings that wait at the kitchen table.

You hold me and hold me together. And I know, feeling your breath on the back of my neck is the sweetest thing that I will ever know. Pressing my nose against the line between your neck and shoulder: this is the place everything lives. I feel your heart beat and I am in the world again.

V. In the evening we dangle our legs over the edge of the dock, sitting at the edge of day, and with soft and sure movement, you slide your littlest finger under mine, resolute in your desire not to trap me, but to reassure, in the uncertain light, that we’re both still real. Like birds in the coldest forest calling out for their mates, one singing, “Hello, I am here,” and the other answering, “Love, that must mean I am here, too.”

I think on the image of your father that hangs in your kitchen. How simple it is, and yet each morning I seem to notice something new—a strange impression in a patch of grass, the fraying edge of his cap, the cracked paint on the lip of the boat. How much more beautiful is a sky striped with clouds for the way they catch and caress the sun as it’s setting.

And the next night we are on the dock again. I cup my hands and let them fill full of sun—sweet and warm and sparkling softly in the shaking breeze.

I don’t know what to say but that it amazed me the first time I understood that all things were real and existed outside of myself.

When I fall into the mattress that night, something plinks against the windowpane. The whistle of something outside, beyond me.

To be able to delight in that—suddenly struck by such feeling for the things I can’t control—it opens a wound in me, a strange ache behind my ribs.

And I think on how you say that you feel powerless, but when we sit at the kitchen table in the morning and I see you run your finger around the lip of your coffee cup and blow the curling steam away, it fells me.

I remember how you brought me to your home when you first found me, one arm under

poetry + fiction 67

the bend of my knees, the other around my back. Time compressed like the accordion your mother bought and never played, two points drawn together in a flash, the next two drawn out to eternity.

And then there was something cold. You laid me out in the bath and poured warm water over me.

And we stayed in the dark, in the bathroom, the only light spilling in from the cracks between the window shade and the wall, creating a glowing shape overhead. I remember studying it while you washed the dirt from my knees and my hair, and made noises that I’ve heard you give to those birds that stop to feed on your windowsill. And how curious that light was, young and loud in the quiet corner of the bathroom.

To be known and unknown in a moment, turned inside out and rebuilt in this quiet, is a violence I had never known. There’s sharpness in the newness of the world I have grown up in: jagged and gaping. Every touch too much in this new skin.

And now, you lay your hair out, like petals seeking the sun.

I don’t know that I ever thought of you as beautiful. But one day I noticed how lovely and strong your hand was when you held mine. And that your hair was soft. And the way your ankles look when you go up on your toes, searching for something on a high shelf.

I suppose I started to notice how you fit together. How, if you could be all of these lovely little things, and still one whole thing, maybe I could be too. Maybe there is a way to live in a body. To fit a boundless thing inside arms and legs and ribs.

The more I see of it, the more I am sure that the earth was made for warmth, for these short lives and their turns, the way logs lay together in the fire and crumble into dust, collapsing against each other in relief, transforming their bodies into heat. And when that is what they become, they move outward and upward, into the night sky to mix with all the rest.

And we sit at the table, on those stark, bright mornings, and you softly scrape the mold from behind my ears, collecting it in the cup of your hand and dropping it out of sight.

VI .

The house is filled with crevices, deep set windows which, once the days get shorter, serve as homes for lamps and candles. You seem to feel that the more light the warmer, the happier. You put lights in those windows to burn away the darkness outside, and I hover between them.

You still talk too much (too much, too soon) and I listen to the rustle of your voice rather than the words. Sometimes your voice goes reedy and strained, and I turn my face to yours and hold your eyes until you come down again.

You touched first, but I pulled you back in.

You lean against the kitchen counter with a kiwi in your hands. Pry out the soft center and let it slip down your throat, tongue glancing out to trace the edge of the spoon. And it draws me in.

68 Modern Language Studies 53.2

We stumble into the bedroom at the end of the hall, your legs suddenly as unsteady as mine.

You don’t seem afraid, not in the way you feed me. I’ve grown, my body unknowing but following me all the same, soft rivers of new skin stretching over hips and stomach—the places kept safe.

Your fingers dig into the flesh of my stomach, and a strange, ripping sound—the skin crushes inwards, bark suspended over wood grown wet and fragile and mostly air. You shrink back. I run my fingers over the cracks in my skin and taste the smell of humid earth that seeps from it. I bring your fingers back to my body and you only touch lightly, delicately. There is nothing that I need in that touch.

The choking wholeness of my desire that has nowhere to go.

Are you trying to swallow me down before my mouth grows large enough to take you?

Birch-mother had no hunger, she had no wants, how could she teach me of them? You put this thirst in me, thick and greedy, that I try to bury. Up it wells in strange moments: when your knee brushes mine, when the first blood of rain begins to fall, when I feel warm earth beneath my toes.

Sudden feeling: you shouldn’t feed it, don’t let it grow, or I’ll not be able to house it anymore. You might have drawn me out, but if it overtakes me, why shouldn’t it you? One will swallow the other, you or the hunger. It is the way of things.

You turn away, eyes lowered, arms bumpy with gooseflesh and shoulders brushing your earlobes. The sickness in me relishes in it, the uncertainty in you that sometimes swells higher than the uncertainty in me.

I will take any comfort there is, even if it isn’t meant as comfort at all.

Your movement has always been so deliberate—cautious and calculated, your eyes always darting to me and away again like a hare. Your neck full of tension but hands soft, brushing your dark hair away from that flushed, careful face.

The sky beyond the window is beginning to flake apart. I am envious of the arrogance of cold. How long am I meant to stay this thing with arms and legs? I am the leaves, shaking on a birch tree in a damp and windy October.

VII .

The whir of a motor skips in over the water. It’s too late in the year for the sound to be a common one. The sky is an anemic sort of gray and the topsoil has already frozen over several nights.

You told me weeks ago about how the fishermen had pulled their boats from the water and retired until the time when the bay would freeze over, a place where they might bore holes into the ice and make a day of it, sipping coffee from brown-tinted thermoses and dropping sugar from iced buns into the hollow.

The sound of the motor grows and deepens, growling closer and slowing until it putters out.

Scuffing steps bring me to the corner of the house. My eyes reach around the corner.

poetry + fiction 69

There, a stranger. Sharp inhale, I duck back behind the house. My nails scratch against the rustpainted wood and I look again.

The stranger hasn’t seen me. He is tying his boat to your dock and calls your name. His voice reminds me of your father’s portrait.

I haven’t seen another so close.

And that settles in my stomach.

He lifts a bucket from the belly of the boat and turns towards the house.

He looks clean and his cheeks are red from the cold.

You come running from the backdoor and catch him up in your arms. Your laugh—a seldom thing—appears.

And my new, strong legs turn and carry me to the woods.

They bring me to the place where only the birch trees watch you.

I don't know if this stranger has the urge to crush soft things, but they could. This is a new sort of death. Even if I do not feel myself a soft thing. My elbows are sharp and I think, if I tried, I might be able to shriek the blood from his ears. But I’d be more likely to spear myself.

He rises some anger in me, the thought that he has ownership over things in the world.

Who is he, who is this person who moves confidently, who knows things that I never will?

I’m gone to where the trees move together in a choir, kissing whispers from one side of t he grove to the other. This is my forest, this is my home, something I never claimed before I had hands. Not when I never was a person, not even an approximation of one. Am I as far as I ever have been from what I was?

The birch trees here are the ones I have known all my life, ones that I have known all that there was to know of them.

The wind tilts my chin up, and I’m looking at the crown of my birch-mother.

Did it always look like that? So delicate and shriveled?

My breath tastes sour and sweat pours yet I am cold, cold, cold.

The friend beside birch-mother looks the same.

The world is a haze, muted colors, gray and indeterminate, pressing in close and moving away, away, away, always.

Further in, further in—they are growing shorter, fewer limbs, weaker trunks.

The bile rises and locks my knees, burning coughs, tears squeezed from lids, snot dripping, heart racing.

They are not the spring they once were.

Can they still take the fall of snow?

Is this a kind of death? Lowering to the ground and spitting, air coming in and out but never touching me—I miss who I was when I didn’t feel fear.

And what happens when it takes them all? When memory is physical and feeling is loss?

My birch-mother spoke of death. I didn’t know. I never knew, not really.

Now my skin is picked clean and in my chest, a fistful of sparrows.

70 Modern Language Studies 53.2

I suppose my leaves have fallen.

There’s a cut on my hand.

A thin layer of blood smeared across my palm.

I wipe it against my shirt, and when I open my hand again, a single bead blooms from the heel, like a welling spring. How strange it is to see my inside seep outside, the color of it so bright and raw and unforgiving.

That for all that time, furtive, furious and distant now, spent warm in my mother’s arms, I was moving towards my own exodus and her expiration, an end disguised as growth? And did she know, did she feel me slipping, growing distant from her limbs, pulling away from her expanding rings? Was I always headed here, toward an end but without resolution, without any goodbye, only a crooked stump in a field, still wet from living? Time, a thing that I didn’t know until I left this place, precious and murky, is it always time?

Snow is falling. Your voice rocks in behind me, winded and splintered, “They’re gone,” and it doesn’t matter anymore.

How deep did you have to reach until you found me? Was I already wrong then, growing weak and numb in ways I couldn’t know?

Had it already been ending?

And how lonely have you been, that you started talking to the trees?

VIII. Like that, it’s as though we’ve come to the end of something and yet must walk the same line home. The eyes rest heavy on my back, even as the quiet air fills the forest with the feel of sleep. Your boots, too large on my strange feet, break branch and bramble below them, sinking deep in damp moss and lichen.

Silent anthills made of dirt and tree-needles reach up to my waist and gather the few snowflakes that stretch their way to the ground.

I go to my room and close the door quietly. It’s some time before the light in the hallway goes dark. The radio never turns on.

Nauseated by the rough silence of the house and how endless this night is, everything catches against me, pulling at skin and hair, twisting something inside of me until I feel crumpled and worn and too large for my skin.

Sleep doesn’t come. Time wraps rings around me. How loose the world feels with only the weight of the blanket against my back.

When light finally starts to filter in, it’s misty, catching the dust motes drifting gently in the air. And I suppose I might just stay here, toes pinching the blanket, knees rubbing together, loose and tired and devoid of any want, full of the knowledge that nothing can be fixed. poetry + fiction 71

There is something I forgot to show you. That picture in the kitchen, the frame around it seems so harsh and shallow, covering the corners and the pale toes of your father, glass crushing the grass. I wish it was me, next to him, a photo in a home, and home that will have me and keep me and maybe love me, if there is love to spare.

Maybe you knew that already, maybe you saw me looking and thought there was already a picture there and room for no more on the weak and dimpled wall. Or maybe you were waiting for me to show myself, maybe you have the camera ready, you were only waiting for me to understand myself, and if it never came, dust would place its hands over the lens and settle comfortably on the table beside your bed, and you would know that you did what you could.

Maybe you would like me to ask. Or you’ve noticed nothing at all, and it will only ever be the thing I meant to tell you but didn’t.

And there comes a thud. Something slams into the window where I didn’t draw the curtains the night before. And the shock of it pulls me up by strings, my feet on the floor before thought can threaten the movement out of me. On the glass—a streak of oil.

And it draws me further, from the bed, over the knots in the floorboards, and out the door.

Standing in the dirt, I don’t see it at first. A slight ringed plover, far from home.

Death by glass, death by reflection, death by confidence, death by flight.

My fingers find the earth of the flowerbed and begin to dig. The ground is still soft there, damp from the snowmelt and warmed by the house. Wind chews at my neck, the mud drinking its way into my socks. My nails claw at the dirt, asking, give cover and warmth, some sort of home to hide away in, to welcome the rot in. Let that place be where, I know, the flowers will grow in springtime, where there is something beautiful to be had. If you must leave an absence in the world, even one felt by no one, let the body be wrapped in the sweet roots that swallow sunshine.

The sick turn of the neck: life left so quickly, perhaps the wings don’t know yet. They wait to stretch and catch a breeze that will never come. And I feel full of dead things, my fingers reaching deeper, and still the wind tugs at my hair, and still my breath rips out in thin clouds. The ache catches in my nose and burns a path down my cheeks, collecting in the collar of my shirt.

And I can feel the muscles flex in my arms, the sharp bones of my fingers, I can see their work in the piles of dirt brushing against my elbows as I dig deeper.

Let there be a purpose to it, let there be something for me to do. Give me something, some reason for the hollowness that shakes within me and demands reason for breath. A fingernail catches and tears; move the rocks away, dig deeper, deeper, fit me in beside you, earth home and earth warm, earth softer than the skin of my stomach but not as soft as yours, care for me, comfort, peel this away, dig deeper and deeper.

Finding the heart isn’t enough, it hasn’t helped—wipe my dripping nose—every living thing only makes me look back, only makes me brace for some anticipated harm, how do I do anything at all? Every wretched, present thing is laid out before me.

Through the cut in my skin, a root emerges, twisting downward into the earth. The color of it, moon-white and strange, fades up into my skin where the blood still pumps. But my hands keep digging, fingers growing, sprouting newer, thinner hairs, that dig themselves in, reaching deep—somewhere secret.

72 Modern Language Studies 53.2

Until it is enough.

Better to love things that are already dead, things that can’t change. But no, things change far more underground than they ever do in the light.

My fingers pull back into myself.

Not yet.

Not if I can still remember the brightness of spring.

The wing, brushed along the rachis from the downy afterfeather to the tip, is as soft as the kiss you give me on the bone of my shoulder, and the awkward rough of the wrong path upwards, as wrong as the catch in my throat when your breath leaves me. I am kneeling in the mud with loss cupped between my hands. A world, growing stiff between my hands.

And I place the cold, broken, little bird into the earth.

My socks drip as I drop them beside the threshold, dirt and sand trapped between my bare feet and the floor. I leave a path of footprints from the side door to the kitchen where the coffee machine spits and steams like a spring flood cutting through ice. You’re at the table already, a sandwich half-gone in front of you.

“Good morning,” you say, and for the first time, I hear the question in it, and the offering: your voice a trembling, open palm.

Like that, I learn something new about you. You tell me about your fear of the empty bed at the end of the hall in the tilt of your chin, the thinness of your voice, your thumb rubbing against your wrist.

There’s still something sour in the air and your face seems changed to me. As if your eyes are farther apart than they were yesterday or perhaps your top lip is slightly smaller. We won’t discuss it, but we are changed without any of the subtly that gentles and soothes. The chair stutters against the floor as I draw it back from the table. The day seems too delicate, the light peeling in through the window pale enough to break, but there you are, solidly.

There is no love without agony, though I’m not sure which bore the other, and my grief chatters to me, asking for a purpose, for a reason to exist other than the simple turn of earth.

You look tired in a way that speaks to the ache in me. And don’t we ache for each other?

Don’t the moments we share, take that ache and cradle it in chapped hands, and say, “I know, and I’m here.” It is a kind of warmth, to share this morning with you, in such a beautiful and broken world.

Where we are, in the middle of things, the gray wind moves the water, I can hear the seagulls swoop and shriek, and I know you and am known by you, if only for a moment, for a breath, over crumbs on the kitchen table.

poetry + fiction 73

Excerpts from

“Indian Ice: Indigenous Witness/ Estv-Cate’ Het’ute” Deidra Suwanee Dees

Force

worthless— good for nothing dirty Indian, lifelong descriptions I hear from preacher, teacher, textbook, tv, Internet …plausible considerations, but there is a force inside me— strong life force compelling me forward, even fancies at times brief images of being somebody— an attraction to significance and worthiness unknown, perhaps it’s groanings for justice from my soul long ago, the one who was neglected, abused rejected, the one who, because of this, can never be whole; my soul lives with ever-present anguish of not being whole, while whole people pass me by, enjoying their wholeness, unaware of my fragment poetry + fiction 75

splashed ebony hair

…silvery snow

Roots

Rain

rain-

wet disproportionate roots jutting skyward, live oak gives Sally1 the finger as she pushes over his body

1. The enormously destructive Hurricane Sally hit Gulf Shores, Alabama, with a powerful impact on September 16, 2020.

Pierced

no money for Bell Air Mall, daddy

pierced Ellanae’s ears

when she was twelve, school kids

laughed

Longleaf Pines

when they found out… fragrant armless horizontal longleaf pines, partly de-crusted, move past my line

but we’ve done it this way for ten thousand years

of sight on Highway 21 headed to the paper mill, sacrificed home of woodpeckers and grey squirrels, dying for us to have paper to write on poetry + fiction 77

53.2

reviews

articles 79

The First Amendment in the Trump Era Timothy Zick Oxford University Press, 2019. 163 pp. $39.99/Hardcover

Omar Swartz, University of Colorado Denver Zick’s timely book explores the Trump era from the perspective of its impact on the First Amendment.

As such, it is a critique of something larger than Trump, the man. Trumpian personalities and proclivities, grounded in apparent ignorance, denialism, parochialism, Christian nationalism, racism, and xenophobia have sadly been embodied by other politicians (Michele Bachmann, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and Tom Tancredo being obvious examples), and more such politicians are likely to appear in the future. There may be no going back to “normal.”

Nevertheless, Zick’s point is to defend the First Amendment rights of press and speech from the threats he correctly perceives to have been building up for some time by negligence and maleficence from both the Right and the Left.

As Zick points out, the relationship between the executive branch and the institutional press has been at times contentious; for example, the Vietnamera press was critical of both the Democrat President Johnson and Republican President Nixon administrations. Indeed, this contentiousness goes back to the beginning of the nation as exemplified by the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798). Into this historical context, Zick places the challenges of the current era, which seem extreme even by historical standards.

Trump’s precedent forces us to rethink how we want the First Amendment (and political leadership,

80 Modern Language Studies 53.2

generally) to function going forward. Five points from Zick follow.

First, Zick worries about the fragility and vulnerability of a free and independent press and how the Trump era is exacerbating this condition, weakening this core institution and pillar of our democracy. Zick sees the institutional press in decline (both in substantive content and credibility) as online and popular sources proliferate without the concurrent rise in professional standards. We have entered, he writes, “a ‘post-truth’ culture” (xii) marked by excessively partisan media companies who exploit siloed audiences of citizens existing in self-reinforcing bubbles of partisan rancor. Trump, of course, did not cause this situation, but he utilized it remarkedly well and directed it toward his own purpose. The cacophony of distrust and confusion felt by many Americans provided fertile ground for Trump’s open contempt of the “mainstream media” (12). For example, Trump regularly attacked individual reporters by mocking or making fun of their appearance, race, or disability. He attacked the foundational New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) case and its progeny for allowing critics of government “breathing space” to make mistakes in their accusations of government wrongdoing.

While Trump was not the first president to attack the press, he outstripped his predecessors in both consistency and vehemence, threatening at

times to revoke press credentials for White House briefings and broadcasting licenses from media outlets that offended him. Trump ordered antitrust investigations into AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN, and he proposed higher postal rates on Amazon, since Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, a paper highly critical of his administration. He went after Google for its search algorithm, which he claimed was biased against him.

He revoked security clearance for outspoken government employees who cooperated with the press, and he forced employees into non-disclosure agreements that went beyond protecting legitimate state secrets to preempting criticism by White House employees from being leaked to the press. Trump threatened criminal liability for The New York Times when he was angered by an anonymous critical op-ed from his inner circle, demanding the name of the source. He blocked opponents from social media. All told, when it was to his advantage, Trump worked to undermine press credibility (what proto-Trumper Sarah Palin called the “Lamestream Media”). Trump, Zick concludes, nurtured and benefited from an adversarial relationship with the press unlike any recent president.

Second, Zick notes Trump’s scorn for public dissent and his tendency to associate criticism with sedition. Trump was notably disdainful of protest and dissent and held a particular ire against people

he deemed disloyal. Loyalty, for Trump, meant loyalty to him, not to the Oval Office or to the Constitution.

Monarch-like, Trump equated criticism of himself with disloyalty, treason, and sedition. Trump called for the imprisonment and denaturalization of flag burners. He threatened a protestor with one year in jail for involuntarily laughing at Jeff Sessions during his Senate confirmation hearing. Trump inspired a spate of state legislation to curtail public protests that arose during his tenure and encouraged the use of command and control policing instead of the negotiated management model that arose in the 1970s after Americans were shocked by police violence during the 1960s war protests and the civil rights movement. More recently, in 2023, Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after Trump learned that Milley had reached out to the Chinese military during the Capitol riot to assure it that the U.S. government was in control of the situation. Trump frequently called for shooting shoplifters and continues, to this day, to attack and threaten judges and other legal officials who are working hard to give him fair trials in his various legal cases.

Third, Zick discusses Trump’s disregard for the anti-orthodoxy principle made concrete in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), in which Jehovah’s Witnesses prevailed in their

reviews 81

" WHETHER WE BELIEVE IN ONE OR THREE GODS, OR NONE AT ALL, IS OF NO CONCERN TO THE PRESIDENT" efforts to overturn state laws mandating that students salute the American flag. In its majority opinion, the Court denies states the power to coerce assent to state ideology. Broadly interpreted, Barnette prevents government officials from declaring a privileged way of being an American in terms of allegiance, religion, style, sexuality, etc. Trump’s mantra of “flag, fealty, and faith” (50) ignores the fact that, while the president is expected to use the bully pulpit to promulgate American values and to encourage national unity and a defined purpose, there is a difference between “reaching across the aisle” to urge common goals by appealing to unity and patriotism, on the one hand, and propagating a one “true” faith, on the other, demonizing or criminalizing all others. As Zick notes, the First Amendment is essential to prevent the “pall of orthodoxy” from descending from on high and smothering us, keeping us from being treated as equal citizens. Trump’s dispute with the National Football League over pregame protests (i.e., kneeling for the National Anthem), his objection to “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” (i.e., that Christmas was “under siege”), his desire to criminalize flag burning and denaturalize flag burners, and his general support for Christian nationalism, are all symptoms of an emergent authoritarian orthodoxy, the opposite of Barnette. Whether we believe in one or three gods, or none at all, is of no concern to the president.

The followers of Zarathustra as well as atheists have the same integrity as the followers of Jesus in the national community. Further, the Pledge of

82 Modern Language Studies 53.2

Allegiance, the National Anthem, and the flag, while hortatory emblems, are not respected by everyone, nor should they be. Fighting over their meaning is part of the continual struggle of inventing this country through trial and error, learning, hopefully, from our national mistakes, which are many. The United States is a process, not a product. Our loyalty as citizens must be to the process of creating what Walt Whitman called “democratic vistas,” inclusive and creative communities. Whitman correctly believed that an egalitarian society in the United States was still on the horizon; it remains so. The poet had faith, nonetheless, that the realization of our founding ideals, imperfectly practiced and under-realized for centuries, will be accomplished by living citizens.

Fourth, Zick notes the increased threat across the country of limiting access to public property for protest and dissent. He points to the overmanaging of the public forum, the gating of communities to wall out differences, the restrictions of cyberspace that limit freedom of expression, the heightened and indeed excessive security around public buildings and spaces, and the rough and disrespectful treatment of protestors by police as ill omens for the future of the public sphere. The brutal suppression of dissent in the 1960s, either in the form of protests against the Vietnam War or for civil rights, gave way to a managed oversight where the government and protestors worked together to preserve space for dissent, balanced against the need for safety and order. Zick warns that such balancing has given way to the coercive suppression of dissent in the Trump era.

Fifth, Zick calls out Trump’s pervasive hate speech and belittling communication style. Zick notes how this practice contributes to an increase of hatred and intolerance in this country. Trump benefited from our culture of tolerating intolerance.

In this country (unlike most of the world), so-called hate speech is not a crime but a protected form of

political expression, which is how Trump uses it.

Our constitutional allowance for hate speech as the “cost” of living in a free society is something most Americans do not appreciate. Hate speech is hideous and harmful, and the job of government is not to suppress it but to urge us as speakers to rise above it. Trump, however, relishes hate speech and uses it to rally his supporters, dismissing its collateral effects, which are real and detrimental to democratic inclusion. Zick urges readers to recall that our commitment to protecting dissent means protecting hate speech, while at the same time working to educate people on its harms, finding ways to protect its victims, and reassuring these victims of their equality and their place at the American table.

Responsible government needs to be our partner in promoting not just freedom but equality as well, and leaders need to model good behavior.

The media, notes Zick, share some of the blame for our condition in the Trump era. Sources such as Fox News, Breitbart News, Infowars, and Rush Limbaugh served at times as Trump and proto-Trump enablers, spreading misinformation and extreme bias for decades with, until recently, little accountability. In 2023, however, Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle the defamation claims of Dominion Voting Systems for falsely claiming that the company rigged the 2020 presidential election.

Fox News still faces damages over similar allegations against Smartmatic. Infowars’ Alex Jones suffered nearly a billion dollars in defamation damages for his sustained attacks on the family members of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims in 2012. The plaintiffs in both cases won under current libel laws, which, in spite of Trump’s criticisms, do work to hold the media accountable when they act irresponsibly. At their core, our defamation laws bar states from enforcing seditious libel and common law strict liability for defamation in situations dealing with the public interest. They protect

the press in their crucial function of holding government accountable, but the law does require the press, no matter how ideologically motivated, to play by some common rules. The Constitution protects opinions, values, and inadvertent mistakes by the media in collecting and processing the news.

It protects what Aristotle called “artful persuasion” (ethos, pathos, and logos). The Constitution does not protect damaging lies about reputation or inartistic persuasion (for example, it does not protect bribes or true threats).

Zick is quick to point out that it is not just the more extreme news sources that deserve blame for the ills of our age. Even the more responsible media sources make mistakes with their reporting, suffer ideological blindness, and put profit over integrity on occasion. Rolling Stone magazine recently lost a large defamation suit for its erroneous reporting in an alleged rape case. Even The New York Times, by far the most reputable of news sources, admitted in 2004 to pimping the invasion of Iraq for George W. Bush. But no news source (or candidate for that matter) is perfect, nor is it expected to be. This is why Zick’s book is so important: it champions the First Amendment as an ideal. The more we understand what it is the more we vigorously use it to pursue our vision of the good and the better off we will be as a nation. But using the First Amendment is not enough. We must be profoundly committed to not abusing it. It is a common good for all of us, but it can be diluted and destroyed if we do not exercise good stewardship of it. Trump’s obvious disdain for the Constitution, and Congressional acquiescence to this disdain when he was president, damages our nation. Without a vigorous, trustworthy press and political leadership dedicated to democratic and constitutional norms, the American democratic experiment becomes threatened. Hate speech, when it comes from powerful sources, affects people psychologically and endangers them physically. The

reviews 83

increasing intolerance of our political sphere leads to more than dysfunctional governance. It breeds violence and, ultimately, disunion.

I end this review with two small criticisms of Zick’s otherwise useful book. In some sense, this book is premature, an “unusual project” (he acknowledges) for the author of many fine books on the First Amendment, as Zick was writing about a topic that was unfolding before him. There is nothing wrong with this, but it was not clear why the book needed to be rushed, why Zick could not have waited for the issues to become riper with more examples to analyze. Zick’s book was published in 2019; I write this review near the end of 2023. These extra years provide depth to Zick’s foundation, highlighting his warning that Trump represents a unique threat to democracy.

My other criticism is that I did not find wise Zick’s desire to grant “special press rights” to the organized media (“institutional press”), protection beyond that given to individuals. I understand his motivation: the media, however we define them, are essential for our democracy. My point is that we should not define them. Unintended consequences come from this, including the decrease of protection for anything not in that category of protected institutions (bloggers, for example). The First Amendment should not depend on who is a “real” journalist or what is a “real” publication. The institutional press is important, but not because it is an institution. It is important for the work it does, when it does its job, and that depends upon individuals who, while working for the machine we call “the media,” put the interests of the public above the interests of the institution, which are first and foremost pecuniary.

No matter how much the media wrap themselves in the mantle of public service, the corporate interests that drive them do not always align with the public good.

84 Modern Language Studies 53.2

review 85

It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom

Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. 293 pp. $29.95/Hardcover or ebook

Phillip Zapkin, Pennsylvania State University The key tangle Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth attempt to unpick in It’s Not Free Speech is the precise relationship between the connected but distinct concepts of free speech and academic freedom. Generally, they pose the question of whether academic freedom should always protect professors’ free speech or whether there are instances in which speech may be free but not protected by academic freedom and therefore subject to professional censure. Specifically, they pose the question of whether overtly white supremacist expression should enjoy the protection of academic freedom when promoting harmful ideas, particularly ideas contrary to the bulk of existing evidence (1)—though, as they acknowledge, the principles they explore may also apply to the rhetorics of misogyny, anti-LGBT bias, ableism, religious discrimination, etc.

In response to this problem, what Bérubé and Ruth propose is the creation of faculty-led academic freedom committees, which would address questions of professional fitness within the context of academic norms. They argue that this procedure would avoid the often arbitrary decision-making of administrators, lawyers, or courts by democratically rooting the power to parse academic freedom complaints with those best prepared to understand the complexities of research and teaching. As they put it, “Not only might there be some clarity under a model in which a faculty committee was under an obligation

86 Modern Language Studies 53.2

to offer clearer guidelines than any faculty currently receive; more important, it would not be lawyers or HR personnel alone judging events that unfolded in places most of them rarely inhabit—like classrooms” (216). They further point out that centering assessments of academic freedom with faculty would increase shared governance and the authority of bodies like faculty senates (17) and that it could provide increased protections for vulnerable contingent or pre-tenured faculty (226-227). Bérubé and Ruth acknowledge that there are limitations to the proposed academic freedom committee solution (16), but they argue that these committees could nonetheless provide protections for vulnerable academics unfairly accused while holding genuine offenders to account.

Structurally, It’s Not Free Speech consists of two complementary halves, the first parsing debates around and definitions of academic freedom and the second arguing for how academic freedom committees might work effectively. In the first half, the authors compare and contrast free speech and academic freedom, considering different views on both issues, though typically aligning with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) understanding of academic freedom (4).

While freedom of speech typically applies to even the most reprehensible of personal views, for Bérubé and Ruth the determining factor in academic freedom

cases is “whether [the speech in question] suggests that a professor is unfit to be a professor at all” (72).

And that determination must be made with a complex and sophisticated understanding of contexts, including both the impact and intent of a statement (58), whether a statement is related to the faculty member’s scholarly expertise (101), and even whether racist ideas unsupported by legitimate evidence have a larger impact on public life in general (121-122).

The book’s second half begins by outlining critical race theory (CRT) and its critiques of systemic and structural inequalities in the U.S. as a basis for arguing that the protection of racist speech that does not meet scholarly standards is systematically detrimental both inside the profession and for the country at large. Building from this foundation, the book then moves to Bérubé and Ruth’s larger argument that academic freedom should be conceptualized as a tool to fulfill the intellectual mission of the university as such. In contrast to free speech absolutists—who claim that all speech must be protected, with (theoretically) no differentiation made between good and bad speech—Bérubé and Ruth point out, following Ulrich Baer, that “the university is not a public square, but an educational institution with a mission to foster robust and legitimate intellectual exchange” (185). This principle grounds their advocacy for an academic freedom committee. As Bérubé and Ruth claim, existing

mechanisms have largely failed to root out white supremacy (and sexism, anti-LGBT bigotry, ableism, etc.) amongst the professoriate and the wider public, where bigoted professors’ rhetoric is often taken as authoritative, thereby stoking hatred. Instead, Bérubé

" THE UNIVERSITY IS NOT A PUBLIC SQUARE, BUT AN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION WITH A MISSION TO FOSTER ROBUST AND LEGITIMATE INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGE" and Ruth suggest, academic freedom committees can establish guidelines for determining professional fitness based on assessing the contexts in which faculty make inflammatory statements and whether those statements meet standards of academic rigor.

While free speech absolutists and their fellow travelers (not to mention white supremacists or other bigots) will likely be unswayed by Bérubé and Ruth’s arguments, the authors ground their analysis in real examples of instances where openly bigoted professors have escaped punishment or where vulnerable professors have been unfairly penalized.

In this sense, one peripheral benefit of the book for

review 87

faculty ourselves is a lesson in humility—one might further subtitle this book Professors Behaving Badly.

Within the first three pages, readers are confronted with the stories of Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania, who openly advocates the cultural superiority of “Anglo-Protestant culture” and has been removed from teaching first-year courses because she cannot be trusted to fairly assess students of color (1-2), and Portland State University’s Bruce Gilley, who publishes non-peer-reviewed articles extolling the virtues of European colonialism and race-based slavery (2-3). Bérubé and Ruth do a thorough job showing readers why we should be skeptical of liberal assumptions about the inherent power of free speech and why universities should place more value on responsible speech.

Apart from the authorially acknowledged “thin gruel” of the recommended committees (16), some readers may find off-putting the continual framing of this debate through the lens of the AAUP. Both Bérubé and Ruth are deeply involved with the AAUP (19-20), and so the union’s framing of academic freedom guidelines profoundly shapes their view of the subject. They do disagree with AAUP positions at times—they are not simply mouthpieces for the organization—but for readers not associated with the AAUP, whether they are in a different faculty union or ununionized, those four letters may come to be an overly familiar refrain.

Ultimately, It’s Not Free Speech is worthwhile reading for all academics, particularly those with an interest in anti-racist activity, faculty governance, the protection of vulnerable faculty, or issues of free speech and academic freedom. If Bérubé and Ruth’s suggestions were carried out at scale, it would be interesting to see how that might reshape the landscape of higher education, particularly for those most at risk amongst our ranks and for those professors behaving badly.

88 Modern Language Studies 53.2

contributors Lorenzo Bartolucci is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His dissertation investigates connections between the histories of American poetry and neuroscience, documenting their influence on modern understandings of the self.

Dr. Deidra Suwanee Dees’ family descend from Hotvlkvlke (Wind Clan) following Mvskoke stompdance traditions. Dr. Dees is the author of the chapbook, Vision Lines: Native American Decolonizing Literature.

She serves as Director/Tribal Archivist at the Poarch Band of Creek Indians and teaches Native American Studies at the University of South Alabama. Prior, she taught English Composition and English for Speakers of Other Languages at Pensacola State College and the University of West Florida. A Cornell and Harvard graduate, she focuses her work on equity for the underrepresented. Heleswv heres, mvto.

Christina Gessler holds a PhD in American history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Her primary area of expertise is in decoding nineteenth-century farm women’s diaries; she attributes her ability to do this to a childhood spend trying to read her dad’s handwriting. She is currently at work on a collection of poetry about resuming life after both human-made and natural disaster, entitled Some Re-Assembly Required. She has been awarded numerous writing fellowships and grants, and her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies including the Black Fork Review, Santa Clara Review, Slipstream, AntiThesis, and elsewhere.

Trevor Jackson received his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Humanities in 2018 from the University of California at Merced. His research is on contemporary American culture and the intersection of philosophy and literature. He lives and works in the Central Valley of California, lecturing for California State University, Fresno and the University of the Pacific in Stockton.

Sarah Lawrence-Sandkvist is a Swedish-American fiction writer based out of Boston, MA. She holds a degree in English and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. She has previously taught English in Sweden, currently works in academic writing and curriculum development, and volunteers as a fiction reader for The Maine Review. Her work can also be found in Stoneboat Literary Journal, Furrow Magazine, Awakened Voices Literary Journal, and more.

Jerry Wemple is a poet, nonfiction writer, and editor. He has published four poetry collections, mostly recently We Always Wondered What Became of You from Broadstone Books. Among Wemple’s honors are the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and the Jack and Helen Evans Endowed Faculty Fellowship. Wemple also served seven years in the US Navy and was a newspaper reporter in Massachusetts. He is at work on a nonfiction book about his ancestors who include a “free mulatto” born in Tidewater Virginia in the 1700s and early German immigrants to Pennsylvania. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Commonwealth University—Bloomsburg.

review 89

Executive Editor: Timothy Yu ISSN: 0010-7484, e-ISSN: 1548-9949 Published four times per year Contemporary Literature publishes scholarly essays on contemporary writing in English, interviews with established and emerging authors, and reviews of recent critical books in the field. The journal welcomes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative. As a forum for discussing issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies, Contemporary Literature features the full diversity of critical practices. The editors seek articles that frame their analysis of texts within larger literary historical, theoretical, or cultural debates.

cl.uwpress.org twitter.com/C_L_Journal facebook.com/contlit

THE

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

JOURNALS DIVISION

uwpress.wisc.edu/journals

90 Modern Language Studies 53.2