Moving Back

Dear readers,

SnuggleBunny, René Daumal was one delightfully crazy character. I think he should be the beginning of a new movement to make René as cool as Gauloises.

I can’t be as anonymous as I’d like. Already the response over here has been wonderful, but what I and others have invested in The Kugelmass Episodes makes it worth going on over there. In addition, The Kugelmass Episodes is always going to be Google-able, que será.

Thank you so much for investing your time in protecting the pseudonym and changing links. I’m keeping this blog around, of course, since I like the “About” page and appreciate your comments. Also, the title of the blog is fun.

Cheers,

René Daumal

Absolutely Fun and True Fact #2

I am currently reading The Life of Samuel Johnson for my exam lists, and enjoying it fairly, even though it only has a claim on my Interest and Approbation rather than upon my Heart’s feelings. I received the Book in a nice hardcover edition from Amazon, and have just come upon two pages in the middle that are literally uncut. I cannot read them without fetching a knife. I have never had to cut open pages in my life, and I cannot tell you how much it delights me to do so with a book written in the 18th Century.

Poor, Unfortunate Societies: Getting to the Bottom of The Little Mermaid

Of all the works of art that haunt modern life — James Joyce’s Ulysses, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring — perhaps none has caused as much critical puzzlement and dispute as The Little Mermaid. Terry Eagleton, in his book Ariel’s Tempest, described the film as a “delightful romp for the whole family,” unsettling a whole tradition of Wittgensteinian criticism that began with Stanley Cavell. Cavell, writing in The Strange Object: Combs and Cutlery, was famous for such statements as “the dinglehopper is the real protagonist of Disney’s unsettling sea-shanty, which raises the crucial question of what we mean when we speak of a dinglehopper” (TSO 13).

For my part, I want to examine the way the film ends, because, while watching it with my friend uncomplicatedly, the events leading up to the climax were so wretched that she exclaimed: “Oh wait, how do they get out of this one? It looks like they’re totally fucked.”

The way they “get out of it” is, the prince steers the carcass of a sunken boat right into the heart of the monstrous Ursula, who by this time has assumed gigantic proportions. When the boat pierces her, she dies, and all the spells she has cast over merfolk and oceans fade. This is a resolution on the level of the symbolic, as well as the solution to the riddle of the plot. It restores a traditional way of life, structured by myth, to a society corrupted by rationalism and contractual economies.

The Little Mermaid is a romance, and the love between the mermaid and the prince symbolizes a pre-lapsarian social whole, where men and merfolk live in harmony. The film takes place in a world cut off from tradition. The prince can’t remember the name of the human princess he was supposed to marry, and apparently has no parents. Triton, the mermaid’s father, is superficially a traditional figure, but he can’t think of any of Ariel’s suitors names either, and has actually usurped Ursula, though you need to watch the bonus features to have this confirmed.

Ariel and Prince Eric, in their respective worlds, have nostalgic myths imposed upon them in the form of art. Triton is outraged when Ariel fails to play her part in the enormous pageant held in his honor. A clam shell opens, symbolizing Ariel’s birth, but Ariel isn’t inside — which only makes sense, since according to the Venus myth Ariel should actually emerge from the sea onto land. Later, Ariel will be missing at the end of Sebastian’s “Under the Sea” musical number.

In the same vein, the rationalist tutor Grimsby (I call him “Voltaire,” and he doesn’t believe in merfolk) makes the odd gesture of commissioning a statue of Prince Eric in an antiquated pose, with a sword. Eric rejects the statue, and it later becomes part of Ariel’s collection of human objects. In other words, both Ariel and Eric refuse to be turned to stone by assigned roles in nostalgic artworks that compensate for the evident state of lack: missing parents, disgruntled sea-witch, undistinguished suitors, and war between the two kingdoms. Art only takes you so far, as Ariel admits when (in “Part of Your World”) she sings about her boredom with merely collecting human objects. Sebastian’s songs neither convince Ariel to stay undersea, nor get her the kiss she needs. (However, it is significant that when he leaves the king’s service, and enters her’s, he stops trying to write symphonies, and returns to his roots by singing lite reggae.) Art can even be perverse, if it substitutes for the real thing. Ursula steals Ariel’s voice, and her song convinces Eric to abandon Ariel, via an aesthetic illusion of presence.

Art is a compensation in a society run by contracts: Triton’s rules, Grimsby’s insistence that Eric wed, and above all Ursula’s contracts with customers in need of magic. Ursula is a Usurer. If you don’t pay your debt to her in time, she is legally able to turn you into a small, boneless chicken of the sea. Her victims live in a garden of the oppressed that is meant to resonate with the Medusa myth and the theme of petrifaction. The force of the contract first protects her against Triton’s old-fashioned magic, then allows her to re-claim it.

Like Grimsby, Eric is nostalgic, but he’s nostalgic for a real person. He’s nostalgic for the maternal figure of Ariel, who is singing to him at the moment he is brought back to life on the shore, and reborn. So he follows her out to sea, having been primed to believe in mermaids by the old salts among his crew. Ursula, returning to the position of ruler of the seas, stirs up the shipwrecked boat from the bottom of the ocean. Yet she is still vulnerable, because she can’t return to the Ariel-like being she was formerly. So the prince drives the masthead into her: disturbing. We know from countless establishing shots that the masthead is a mermaid, and in effect, Ursula is killed by the cold statuary in her own heart, of herself as she was. She becomes a monster by confusing herself with that effigy in a way Eric and Ariel will not.

The resurrected ship, like the parallel scenes of Ariel and Eric’s rebirths on the mediating strip of shore, is a symbol of the present reunited with the past through living practice, rather than lifeless art. The very holes along its sides are indices of the prince’s ability to look beyond the thing, to see the thing as a mere sign, just as he was close to doing by kissing mute Ariel out of love for her voice. The separation between the aesthetic world of fantasy, and the hierarchies of contract, are swept away and replaced by a holistic order. Art withers away and becomes the free festival, rather than the imposed pageant.

Yet, in its way, this too is a Cold Pastoral, a trick to tease us out of thought. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? First of all, most of all, not Ariel’s mother, Eric’s parents, or Ursula herself (though she was more usurped than usurious)…but Flounder, the fat kid.

Absolutely Fun and True Fact #1

If you whistle with a soft drink fast food straw held up to your lips, at the right angle, you will sound like you are playing pan pipes. I just figured this out ten minutes ago, and it’s like Zamfir’s Greatest Hits over here. My versions of “El Condor Pasa” and “Memories (from the musical Cats)” were particularly incredible.

This has been the first ever absolutely fun and true fact, brought to you by the nominalists at Coffee and Critique.

Enjoy your afternoon!

The Rejection Letter

Becks, over at the stream-of-consciousness blog Unfogged, asked us what to do about some poor guy’s manuscript, which apparently was as Freudian as a mispelled hero fantasy can get. She was asking us for suggestions about possible rejection letters.

She writes:

So this guy comes up to my table and starts talking about the novel he’s been working on, but it could also be a comic book script or a screenplay, etc., etc., and he hands me a two-page excerpt and a cover letter and takes off.

I read it on the way home from work tonight. It’s… not good.

I feel obligated to send the guy a polite rejection notice. My questions:

1) Should I also advise him to use the spelling and grammar checkers in his word processor?

2) Should I also advise him to read Norman Spinrad’s essay, “The Emperor Of Everything” and attempt to understand why the SF/Fantasy/Occult/Horror genres don’t really need more masturbatory, misogynistic adolescent power fantasy stories?

3) Should I also advise him to see a therapist?

I started to respond over there, and I think I’ll finish up here:

You could break it to him gently. You could say: Hey, right now this is a novel. It could be a comic book; it could be a screenplay, too. It could be a novella. It could take a turn towards realism. Kids picking blackberries, they have a dog, the dog dies. But then the turn away from realism. Maybe the dog was an alien or is dreaming it all. It could be a short story. It could be some notes, with accompanying sketches. The sketches might not be related. I’m talking about doodles. Little drawings of trees and Captain America’s shield. It could be something you scribbled on a napkin. It could be a napkin that you quickly tucked in your pocket. Coffee stains on the most important phrases. The ink bleeds away and the napkin goes pulpy in the wash. It could be an idea you had once that you were going to write but didn’t have a pen. It could be a silly idea. Something you should never tell a soul. There, there. Don’t be sad. Grindhouse is still in the theaters. Treat yourself to a matinee.

The Myth of the Ineffective Teacher

Over at the thoughtful, medievalist blog In The Middle, Eileen Joy has posted a response to Scott Eric Kaufman’s Valve post about teaching (which begins with Seung-Hui Cho, but I’m not going to revisit that). She writes:

But, over the years, I’ve also developed a hunch that we only really help students who are already hard-wired to embrace and open up to what we and literature have to offer….You can never teach morality. You can only model it. And maybe live it, in imperfect fits and starts, and only with the recognition that morality is more related to affect than it is to principles or rules or even final actions.As to the relation of pedagogy to leading students to the better sorts of lives, I stopped agonizing about that a while ago. I don’t mean to say I don’t care about pedagogy [I care a lot], but that I don’t anymore torture myself worrying about whether or not I am leading my students to liberalism or humanism [or, humaness (sic)] or any other political or philosophical mode of being/thought, either through hectoring or a more subtle and laudably non-ideological method. Is there a way we can merely “be ourselves” [?], simply modelling to our students our desire[s] to read and think out loud and wonder and be moved? More and more, I worry less about students’ moral bearings [and lack thereof] and more about their emotional affect. I worry about their ability to be enchanted and to feel–”to feel” in the sense of allowing themselves to be swept away by art and literature into the lives of other persons. There is some kind of predisposition, I think, to being “open” to that possibility, without which ethics, of any sort, cannot be possible.

As this blog grows and develops, I hope to find many ways of investigating an odd dissymmetry: what people advocate for as their own intellectual and ethical projects is often acceptable or even admirable, while what they advocate against or seek to limit casts them in a less flattering light.

For example, I can only applaud Eileen’s efforts to model morality, which she does despite being aware of her own imperfections, and (I would think) admitting the possibility that even her most exemplary actions will be misunderstood. It is intuitive for any teacher of literature to teach the relationship between morality and feeling, since the two are inseparable in works of art. One tries to share with students the feeling of expansive (but still determinate) sympathy that literature can provide. In fact, this ethics of imaginative sympathy is the basis for much of Richard Rorty’s pragmatist writings on literature and ethics.

That said, there is a blatant contradiction between Eileen’s assertion that one can never teach morality, and her concern for her student’s emotional responses. Their emotional responses, in her world, are their ethical judgements and moral attitudes. When she says that morality is “more related” to affect than to principles or rules, she means that the content of effective, adaptive morality is emotional, and has to do with the ability to sympathetically imagine another person’s life. When she is modeling her desire to read, think out loud, wonder, and be moved, she is modeling morality in a classroom setting. In other words, she’s teaching morality (or ethics, by the end of the passage). She’s just not teaching it as a set of abstract rules.

Certainly, the passage remains skeptical about whether this sort of modeling is possible, but it flatly refuses to allow that any other sort might succeed. This is rather similar to Scott’s approach. He first rejects the efficacy of teaching out of hand, then gradually returns to the notion of efficacy, but only through inspiring in students a constructive, critical disillusionment with sentimental and rationalizing discourses (for example, the myths of noble “Injuns”). All of which is just to say that Scott comes across as a teacher who’s good at teaching literature as a tool for critical thinking, and Eileen comes across as a teacher who’s good at teaching the ethics of imaginative sympathy.

Eventually, I want to write a post about difference, examining where the postmodern ethic of difference really comes into play, and tying it back to statements like “You can never teach morality.” I can easily imagine the student, probably male, who likes to discuss moral principles, and who would be very annoyed to hear that morality just doesn’t work that way. The last sentence I quote raises the disturbing possibility that Eileen thinks some people are more ethically predisposed than others, and that this is “hard-wired” into them according to their capacity for openness. But for now, let’s focus on the fact that what Scott and Eileen are teaching are fundamentally skills. These skills are ethical, not “practical,” if we define practicality in a very superficial manner. But they aren’t that different from teaching students to write clearly and effectively. Sympathy and skepticism are habits of thought, just like looking for the formal and symbolic elements of a text, identifying pertinent research data, or organizing an essay in a coherent fashion.

Almost no teacher in the fields of literature or composition would be willing to say that students can’t learn to write; somehow, often over a very short period of time, we bring students a long ways towards being able to express themselves. In the process, we necessarily refer to all sorts of moral principles: for starters, we expect them to be objective, and we forbid them to plagiarize.

I’m not suggesting that a teacher of literature should be blithe about teaching morality and ethics; actually, teachers of literature should doubt their own abilities as writers, too. But to describe such pedagogy as impossible, just because both critical thinking and affective sympathy are radical positions in today’s society, is both an act of surrender and a phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. I call it cognitive dissonance, because we know how hard it is to teach students to write well, to teach them the elements of style, and we do it anyway.

Madness, Neither Free Nor Pure

Suppose one were to ask why so many Americans go mad: an estimated 57.7 million American adults suffer from some form of mental illness, and approximately one in four of those are seriously mentally ill.

LarvalSubjects, in a recent post and thread at his remarkable Lacanian blog, links this to the sources of his own despair. He writes,

There has been a collapse of our sense of who we are as individuals, (the “selfness of our self” as Kierkegaard might say), the orderliness or lawfulness of the world, and of purposes and goals. Or maybe this is just me. I cannot seem to find any fixity for my identity. I am suspicious of any goals I set for myself, suspecting some hidden catch behind them. And the world appears chaotic to me. Where is the joy in schizophrenic processes of desiring-production promised to me by Deleuze and Guattari? Why do I experience this as so anxiety provoking?

It is not for me or anyone to try, via the blogosphere, to soothe his anxieties, or even to map them in a way that prepares them for entry into some game of critique. However, it might be possible for me to examine how Deleuze and Guattari (specifically in the book Anti-Oedipus) figure in these conversations about madness.

Deleuze and Guattari are often identified with the schizophrenic as we know him; that is, with the muttering and unstable person who turns on family and friends, and exhibits all the rage and anxiety one would expect from a person who cannot read the world, and who is therefore confronted with a bewildering set of demands that he interprets in a paranoid fashion.

I refer to a “set of demands” because ultimately the schizophrenic, as he is idealized by Deleuze and Guattari, is not a mentally ill person. A mentally ill person is responding to the expectations of his society, and responding wrongly. A person who is producing desires, on the other hand, is writing his own codes in the absence of defined social expectations. For example, if two people take solitary hikes, and one of them spends the entire hike singing “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd, neither are mad. The silent one gets to experience his environment more fully, perhaps, but from the standpoint of desire, that is neither better nor worse than singing. The question of madness simply cannot arise.

I’ll linger for a moment on this question of joy, of Nietzschean or perhaps Deleuzian joy, before turning to tragedy. The sort of liberation (or, in Deleuzian terms, “deterritorialization”) that is supposed to produce joy is a necessary condition of capitalism, but this has already been taken into account — re-territorialized — and that not freely. In order to be both the consumer who enjoys his leisure time, and the worker who meets the demands of productivity, one must be transformed over and over again. These transformations are adaptive rather than revolutionary, and are thus superficial compared to the perpetual demand that one live up to the moment. This demand takes its toll on everyone.

A lot of skeptical readers dismiss Anti-Oedipus on the grounds that it is somehow cruel to people who are actually mad, and who need help more than they need a book written in their honor. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would agree that recognizably insane people need help, because they have been forced to conform to a particular and maddening form of alienation that puts them and others in considerable danger. To dismiss Anti-Oedipus out of a supposed concern for mental illness actually means acting as though mental illness arises in a pure fashion, without reference to the immense difficulties of contemporary life.

In my own life, I’ve known several people who became permanently mentally ill, and others who passed through periods of nonadjustment to varying degrees. In none of these cases would it be at all reasonable to talk about madness in the same way one would talk about the common cold (ignoring, for the moment, the deeply contextual nature and etiology of illnesses like the common cold). Instead, these illnesses were linked to American recreational drug culture, American psychiatric and antidepressant culture, the American indifference to poverty, and the shifting ground of familial obligation and rites of passage. (Clearly, trying to understand just those four fields leads one inexorably to a study of the whole society.) Medical terms like “latent schizophrenia” only reveal the ex post facto nature of diagnoses of insanity, and the tendency of such diagnoses to erase the significant social facts that become concrete through individual lives.

The shootings at Virginia Tech are a tragedy that we as a society have been struggling to understand, and we have been doing so partly through our understanding of madness. That’s a start; still, there is no way to comprehend those deaths without reference to the guns that Seung-Hui Cho was able to procure, and the drama of shootings to which our culture obsessively pays homage. Those guns worked their way into his consciousness; troubled as he was, he would have lived a different life in a country with adequate gun control. Many of the analyses of what was wrong with him will be written in order to avoid the question of why he was able to transform from a maladjusted person into a shooter.

If anything, Deleuze and Guattari help us understand the phenomenon of the shootings, because they contributed so much to our understanding of the single knot that binds madness to sanity, and even to psychoanalysis, within Western society. Seung-Hui Cho’s criticisms of his fellow students were similar to the criticisms of college life in I Am Charlotte Simmons. I read one of his plays: the debauched, illegitimate, and abusive father is unmistakably Oedipal. He did not inhabit a world different from our own, and our responsibility to the dead goes beyond investigating why this one young man wasn’t understood and treated in time.