And Now, a Necessarily Pathetic Response: A Response to Susan Schweik

Abstract

I have the pleasant task of responding to an article I admire immensely, one that models the irrepressible curiosity that is at the heart of all fine scholarship. When Susan Schweik jumps on a plane to go not to London, not to Paris, but to Port Jervis, a city signaled as unexceptional by the very text propelling her there, she takes us on something of an ethnographic excursion to show us how literature is historicized in everyday life. We now know what Port Jervis, or Anytown, considers worthy of note and preservation: not the site of a lynching, but the life of an already valorized author. This moment is salient in her article, because the question of what is worthy of preservation is at the heart of Stephen Crane's The Monster (1899). Why should Henry Johnson's life be preserved? Would it not have been better to let him die as the hero who had tried to rescue a white boy from the flames than to allow him to live as a faceless and seemingly mute monster? These questions, raised in the novella itself, are paralleled in its critical reception: As Schweik demonstrates, in the critical economy to date a story about a lynching is worthy of note, but one about face cancer, we can let die. To arrive at an analysis that considers the disabled and racialized body at once, Schweik deftly mobilizes disparate texts: the testimony on Levi Hume, the ugly laws of New York, the dime novel. She gives us revisionist literary history in the making, and then she revises it to suggest there are some questions we should not let die, especially because they are considered too ugly.