Nameless Narrator Research Articles

Ce qu’il reste des mots par Matthieu Mégevand

into any available quarter of the city and set up camp or occupied empty buildings. In these places, refugees seeking food and shelter were determined to occupy properties abandoned by the former owners seeking safety elsewhere. Chakib exercised tight control over his affairs, building an empire in which none of his sons had an interest as each followed his own pursuits. No one ever outmaneuvered Chakib. One person proved to be his match—Lamia, Hamid’s mother and the wife of the superintendent of his country estate. Her inscrutable ways, obstinate temperament, and fervent attachment to her son’s interests, made her capable of anything. Chakib’s control ran headlong into her wily web. A father, striving to prevent the disintegration of his lifelong labor while searching for an heir, Chakib decides to hold fast against forces ready to encroach on his property, remaining a heroic but lonely figure unyielding to the winds of change. Taking us inside politics, cultural diversity, and family tensions in Beirut during the civil war, Charif Majdalani writes with intensity and passion, employing a neighborhood as symbol for his homeland, Lebanon. Neumann University (PA) Maria G. Traub Mégevand, Matthieu. Ce qu’il reste des mots. Paris: Fayard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-21367799 -6. Pp. 209. 17 a. This is a work of popular theology in the form of a récit: the nameless narrator, a lapsed French Catholic, examines the problem of disease, suffering, and death by focusing on a bus accident in Switzerland that killed twenty-two children. He claims that because there is no rational explanation for the crash, “ne reste que le hasard, l’absurdité, le mal, l’absence de sens” (162). A writer by trade, he devotes weeks to questioning others and to reading philosophy, believing that it is impossible that “les mots ont abdiqué” (27) their job of making sense of events. He studies Wittgenstein, consults a doctor specializing in psychology, reads Quignard and Camus, visits a cardinal at the Vatican, and considers the ancient Stoics. He also re-examines his own near brush with death due to Hodgkin’s lymphoma in his youth, relishes the beauty of his dying friend Hannah’s musical compositions and performances, and reflects on the ability of poetry to create joy. None of this activity gives him answers, though, because he wants to find a guilty party, as if history were a whodunit. His breakthrough comes when he reinterprets the word metanoia in the Greek text of Luke 13:5 not as “repentance” or “conversion” but as “un changement radical de pensée” (128). Although the book does not say so, this reading is used by a number of recent Englishlanguage translations of the New Testament and corresponds to the meaning of metanoia as a rhetorical term in English. In the passage in Luke, then, Jesus would be saying that the correct response to inexplicable loss is to think differently, to consider not its metaphysical causes but our response. The narrator goes on to read contemporary Protestant process theologians and is drawn to their concept of a Jesus whose death did 274 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 275 not redeem the world and a God who “n’a pas voulu, ni même prévu la Croix” (151). In this theology, God is not indifferent to suffering, but he cannot prevent it because he is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He is developing, just like us, and he needs our help. Loss is still loss, but our response should not be to blame God or question fate but to try to improve the world. This is the conclusion toward which the book has been working from the start, a theology which exculpates God and empowers people. Not all readers, however, will find the narrative or the development of the theology compelling enough to reach the end of this book. Mégevand, a journalist for Le Monde des Religions, previously published a collection of short stories and a novel, Les deux aveugles de Jéricho. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Mérot, Pierre. Toute la noirceur du monde. Paris: Flammarion, 2013. ISBN 978-20813 -1273-9. Pp. 237. 18 a. After a launch...

Forest Fictions: Thomas Bernhard’s Holzfällen and Henrik Ibsen’s Vildanden

One hundred years after Ibsen’s Vildanden (1884; The Wild Duck [1890]), Thomas Bernhard published Holzfallen (1984; Woodcutters [1987]), a venomous roman a clef about the Vien nese artistic class. A nameless narrator eagerly pours his contempt on the middle-aged guests he observes at a dinner party after a premiere of Vildanden at Vienna’s Burgtheater. The entire narrative consists of his thoughts and reminiscences as he watches the dinner party unfold from a wing chair off to the side. Earlier that day, the same group of people attended the funeral of their friend Joana, a dreamer who has committed suicide. As the dinner party awaits the guest of honor, a respected actor who will be joining them after playing Old Ekdal in the Ibsen premiere, the narrator reflects with bitterness and contempt on the inauthentic life he witnesses. His harsh and hilarious invective streams over almost two hundred pages of unparagraphed yet rhyth mically structured prose—a typical feature of Bernhard’s captivating narrative style. Why would Vildanden be employed as an intertextual antecedent by this controversial novel? Readers of the Ibsen drama will recall its main characters and incidents: a vain photographer, Hjalmar Ekdal, lives with his wife, Gina, and 14-year-old daughter, Hedvig. Also living in the apartment is Old Ekdal, Hjalmar’s father, a former lieutenant whose illegal felling of timber with Haakon Werle in the play’s backstory led to his punishment and current degradation. When Haakon Werle’s idealist son, Gregers, returns from self-imposed exile in the

Backwards by Todd Mitchell (review)

Reviewed by: Backwards by Todd Mitchell Deborah Stevenson Mitchell, Todd. Backwards. Candlewick, 2013. 277p ISBN 978-0-7636-6277-6 $17.99 Ad Gr. 8-12 “I was alive, alone, and trapped in the body of a dead person.” So says our nameless narrator, who comes to consciousness in just as teenaged Dan is leaving said body after slitting his wrists. What’s odd, though, is that each awakening brings the narrator and Dan to the previous day, so that together they go back in time to uncover what led Dan to this desperation: his interest in a girl who is raped at a party he invites her to, a situation that spirals down every time he attempts to help and support her. The narrator despises Dan, seeking to make him a better person and maybe avert his eventual suicide, but he soon realizes that he’s actually moving Dan toward the very outcome he’s trying to prevent. The writing often tells rather than shows, tending toward the melodramatic at times, and it’s initially difficult to get past the unsympathetic personalities of both Dan and the narrator. As the days continue backward, however, the story becomes more interesting, and the fact that the narrator is, though he doesn’t initially realize it, the spirit of Dan himself, provides an unusual perspective on what is essentially his self-loathing and also on the random and conflicted thinking that can bring a teenager to the precipice. The result frames the fatalistic thinking of depression in a fresh way, making this a thoughtful read and a provocative title for discussion. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Passing and the State in Junot Diaz's "Drown"

This essay presents Junot Diaz’s 1996 short story “Drown” as an important discussion of passing that not only spans racial and sexual identities but also tracks state strategies for managing racial and sexual difference. “Drown” describes a post-Fordist overlap between long-standing, ghettoizing state racism and the later, apparently orthogonal state strategy of closeting and homophobia analyzed by Margot Canaday in The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (2009). While teachers, the police, and the Army are still glaringly white in this story’s 1990s Dominican immigrant neighborhood, state goods such as higher education and military service have now become the benefits of a “sexual citizenship” (Canaday 256) that premises individuals’ access to modern state benefits and resources on heterosexuality and that defines suspected homosexuals as “anticitizen[s]” (9), beyond the state’s care or concern. The coincidence of these two systems of exclusion means, of course, a doubled burden for the story’s nameless narrator, a ghettoized young Dominican American man with some queer sexual experience. However, it also demonstrates the state’s appropriation of passing for its own biopolitical ends. Passing-for-white was an interstitial tactic of African American resistance to state-sponsored racism, but in the homophobic “straight state,” passing-for-straight becomes the normal condition of full citizenship for everyone. Moreover, for racial minorities, the imperative to pass for straight reinforces existing spatial and geographic forms of institutional racism. “Drown” responds to “sexual citizenship” with a “move to guard the margin” (Spivak 132), marking and maintaining a gap between state and self, discourse and speech. The narrator’s calculated silences preserve ethical possibilities that the state cannot enact, predict, or regulate. I begin here with a prologue recounting Canaday’s major claims, her use of the term passing, and the potential I see for expanding her analysis beyond its original, white-normative conditions of existence. I go on to close-read “Drown,” explicating its narrator’s (self-aware) collaboration with state strategies of racist ghettoization and homophobic exclusion, and then explore theoretical means for imagining an end to such collaboration. Finally, I discuss implications, based on Diaz’s and my analyses, for a more general project of reading race and sexuality together.

“Cyclops” in Progress, 1919

The surviving early drafts for the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses show how Joyce moved away from the interior-monologue technique of the first eleven episodes, and they do this in some surprising ways. The drafts reveal him composing first the passages of “gigantism” and of dialogue and only later developing the memorable, nameless first-person narrator. They indicate the gradual development of the characters and Stephen Dedalus’s startling presence among them and reveal the close relationship between Joyce’s notesheets and his revisions to the episode. The early “Cyclops” drafts provide a unique glimpse into the beginnings of the new novel that Ulysses eventu-ally became in its last episodes. This early version of a chapter from “Ulysses” in Progress contains many details that were deleted as the article was revised into the shorter book chapter.

Epistemic Addiction: Reading “Sonny's Blues” with Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 26, no. 3, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA James Baldwin writes that “I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis.” Baldwin dealt with this crisis in his literary works through the strategic use of Christian theological themes and imagery to make compelling critiques of bourgeois cultural and Christian values. So “prolonged” was his “religious crisis” that Christian theological themes permeate Baldwin’s immense literary corpus. Baldwin thus both was influenced by Christianity and critiqued it in his works. Considering these two points, I think it appropriate to begin this essay with a biblical reference to the Christian narrative of the “fall” of humanity. I choose this biblical starting point not only because of Baldwin’s Christian background and literary inclinations but also because I think that this starting point accurately depicts the moral problem that is at work in Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues.” I shall call this moral problem “epistemic addiction.” Epistemic Addiction: Reading “Sonny’s Blues” with Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche

A Topography of Shards: Peter Weiss and the Paradoxes of Justice

We read Die Aesthetik des Widerstands as instantiating a novel form of justice through its own aesthetics. By putting on display emancipatory justice claims, which are both a corrective to and a real source of totalitarianism, Weiss has us consider using the aesthetic domain as a kind of quarantine for them, where they can work on our imaginations without producing contagion and pathology. The aesthetic domain cannot stand alone, but rather works in tandem with discredited emancipatory claims to produce an ethos that we suggest is a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of a holistic post-Marxist conception of justice. Weiss's consideration of emancipatory justice shuns affirming anything. At the same time it does not deny our need for affirmation, and guides this impulse through a matrix, permitting us to identify at moments with the position taken by various characters in the novel while denying any uncritical or uncontextualized legitimacy. A prominent example of this is Weiss's nameless narrator, who takes a perspective from which the events unfold, but who has no authority, not even that of a single voice or identity. He provides an aesthetic expression to the maxim: in propri causa nemo iudex. This article begins with an account of the justice matrix within which to situate Weiss's work. Just as Weiss's text is not a conventional narrative in novel form, our commentary does not purport to trace the story of Die Aesthetik des Widerstands. Rather, we go on to explore a selection of key sections from the first volume that reveal a few of the largest and sharpest shards.

Picturing Family Histories: Torill Kove and Lene Ask

TO READ COMICS requires an understanding of two factor: first, what is pictured inside the frame of each comics panel, and second, what is implied in the space outside the frame. This article compares two texts, both combinations of word and image, to see how the narratives use the photograph within the medium of comics to tell a family history. Photographs are not the main focus of the narratives, but their inclusion creates a full stop in the otherwise cartoon or animated universe that begs interpretative attention. The two texts are Hitler, Jesus og farfar (Hitler, Jesus, and Grandpa) by the Norwegian photographer Lene Ask and Den danske dikteren (The Danish Poet) by the Norwegian-Canadian director Torill Kove. In particular, I focus on the use of photographs within the visual text to produce a point of reference around which the narrator builds a new story via closure by recreating the story beyond the frames. Patricia Holland writes that family photography, or what she calls personal photography, developed as a medium through which individuals confirm and explore their identity, that sense of selfhood which is an indispensable feature of a modern sensibility (Holland 119). A researcher in the history of television, photography, and representations of childhood, Holland has written much on the use of family photography to assist in narrative creation. The narrators of these two stories rely on variations of personal photographs to explore their identities by attempting to find what lies beyond the frame of a given image. Their contemporary stories incorporate visual evidence from the proverbial family photo album and work back in time to recreate a family history where framed photos play a central role in meaning construction based on a series of formative life moments, the narrators try to fill in the gaps of missing information to piece together a coherent life story. The photograph opens several points of interpretation to understand the self: the photo itself as an icon, the bodies pictured inside the frame, and the integration of art and identity within photography. These three elements unpack the seeming simplicity of these pictorial texts by Ask and Kove. After a discussion of the structure and symbol of the flame and photograph itself, I will then read what is inside the frame (the bodies) followed by the information outside the frame (the context) to show how photography complements the genre of comics and animation to support the thematic project of construction of the self. I argue that the act of reading the combination of word, image, and space in these visual texts is a construction of meaning that parallels the way the protagonists search for their own identity. These authors have made a name for themselves in the course of this decade. Lene Ask was born in 1974 near Stavanger and now lives in Oslo. Ask debuted as an author in 2006 with the graphic novel Hitler, Jesus og farfar. In Ask's multimodal text, a nameless narrator travels from Oslo to Germany on an art stipend to take self-portraits. While in Berlin, she searches for information about her unknown German grandfather and, in the process, begins to come to terms with her self, her art, her religion, and her sensitive family history, Ask has won several awards for the text, including the 2006 Sproing Prize for the year's best comics debuting in Norway. (1) Ask has also written and illustrated a children's picture book. Torill Kove was born in 1958 in Hamar, and now lives in Montreal, Quebec. Kove has directed two animated short films and illustrated four children's picture books with authors Henrik Hovland and, most recently, Endre Lund Eriksen. Kove wrote, animated, and directed Den danske dikteren, a prize-winning animated short film that won two prestigious animation awards in 2007: a Prix Genie Award in Canada and an Academy Award in the United States. (2) In the film, a nameless narrator tells the story of how her parents met. …

Jan Karski by Yannick Haenel

Upon reading the text, the reader soon comes to understand that this is no ordinary dictionary, for the definitions of the words cannot be separated from the uniquely unorthodox and intensely subjective perspective of the nameless narrator . The overwhelming diversity and unusual complexity if not baroque aspects of the thematic fabric, together with the discontinuity of thought, often give the text an illusiveness and an obscurity which make precise comprehension and intelligibility difficult. In addition, many of these definitions, being grounded not only in an astonishing erudition but also in a poetic prose that, in its dazzling imagery and in its flashes of eroticism, can be at times challenging for the reader to work through. But the reader is likely to be disconcerted less by these seeming obstacles than moved and inspired by what the narrator has poured into these definitions. Some of the subjects included are poignant anecdotes of his tumultuous past, isolated incidents of a childhood characterized by great sadness but also by a compulsive interest in and by a compelling fascination for the outer galaxies, meditations at once philosophical and psychological in nature, scientific reflections on cosmology, illuminating observations (often conveyed in maxims) on mankind, on the inadequacy of language and on the hypocrisy of societal conventions , rhapsodic words describing his desire to find a lost love, etc. Yet a profound pessimism and skepticism both in thought and in tone pervade these definitions. Very little is sacred to the narrator who tends to overtly negate and rebel against human values and institutions and reject most forms of idealization. Nonetheless, a sense of hope does manifest itself in the narrator’s belief in the power of love: “Aimer est le seul mystère, sans doute. Tout le reste est trafic d’aveugles” (106). He knows that he has loved. This is his one truth, the memories of which, however fleeting and even fantastical, sustain him: “Car enfin, j’ai aimé, j’aime une femme, sans même savoir ni où je l’ai connue, ni qui elle peut être” (129). The density of these definitions would work against any rapid review or analysis. Suffice it to state that, from multiple perspectives, many of them are brilliant, original, and above all, marvelously poetic. Remarkably, these definitions have the potential to startle the reader, to challenge old beliefs and concepts, and perhaps even encourage the reader to reflect upon and to reexamine if not transform his own reality. Haddad’s literary genius shines throughout this novel. University of Southern Maine Lucia A. DiBenedetto HAENEL, YANNICK. Jan Karski. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. ISBN 978-2-07-012311-7. Pp. 187. 16,50 a. Yannick Haenel’s protagonist, Jan Karski, was a Catholic Pole who worked for the Polish resistance as a secret agent to publicize the plight of the Jews and mobilize international aid. The novel vividly depicts the frustration of a man who witnessed one of the greatest human tragedies and was unable to stop it. Throughout the novel, Haenel explores conceptions of time and memory. Haenel, fascinated by Karski’s telling of his visit to the Warsaw ghetto in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film, Shoah, analyzes the interview in the first chapter of his book. He describes Karski’s initial reticence and emotional break-down. After recovering, Karski begins the story in the past tense, and then shifts into the present. Although he says “I will not go back,” he does, as if he cannot recall the story without returning to the past. Reviews 419 The first chapter also highlights Haenel’s experiments with notions of perspective and narrative viewpoint. In this chapter, we have Karski, quoting the two Jewish leaders who guided him through the ghetto in 1942, being filmed by Lanzmann in 1985, being watched by Haenel, who is writing about it in 2009. In the second chapter, the prism of perspectives narrows. Haenel narrates the story in the third person, summarizing Karski’s autobiographical text, Story of a Secret State, published in 1944. The third chapter’s perspective is even more direct, as Karski himself emerges as the fictional first-person narrator. This is the voice that highlights the case of Poland, which Karski feels was forgotten...

L’Univers by Hubert Haddad

the sacred bond of friendship. But this is not an institutionally religious narrative. Mando’s mother, Enza, receives respect initially from Loup for her pious ways, but eventually they become suspicious as she loses patience with the sickly Mando. The religious awe builds up through the recurrence of rituals honoring the scapegoat , the sacrifice, and the stranger. Meanwhile, the narrator’s name reminds us of Freud’s case of the Wolfman. The title of Grimbert’s novel refers to the French rendition of the moment when a psychotic patient reveals his sickness. As a student of psychoanalysis, Loup not only reminds us of this term’s significance but also of his mentor, Professor Psychopompe as the two friends call him, who insists that psychosis is innate. When Mando reveals his madness by talking about a visitor who has taken possession of him, Loup tries to save Mando by telling him that they could find the words to tell their narrative together. But Mando has already written their narrative and gives Loup his journal. Loup then realizes that it is too late to save his friend. Mando’s suicide makes Loup the scapegoat, the sacrificed victim of a relationship that could not endure. As the survivor, Loup is busy in his story ascribing betrayal to himself. Loup’s reader does not have access to the words of Mando’s journal. What the reader sees is Loup trying to analyze who is responsible for Mando’s psychosis. Although Loup tells us that this is not a story about women, there are women who have important roles to play. Loup’s own mother is absent, so his Aunt Gaby raises him and becomes his best friend after Mando. Loup promises her he will attend her deathbed. But comical events with Anna, a local member of a hospice, intervene so that Loup once again betrays a friendship . Promises seem to be challenges for Loup, who represents himself as leaving a trail of faithlessness, and who by contrast sees his friend Mando as keeping his word. Finally, the spaces between the paragraphs of Loup’s story also represent the blanks of Mando’s own version of their unhappy friendship. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne HADDAD, HUBERT. L’Univers. Paris: Zulma, 2009. ISBN 978-2-84304-474-8. Pp. 510. 22 a. In Hubert Haddad’s novel, a middle-aged astrophysicist, adventurer, and explorer finds himself shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific, and as a result suffers from a rare form of amnesia that has impaired his ability to make rational connections to the multiple memories which assail him: “Ce n’est pas la mémoire qui manque, mais les connexions” (27). Without identity, feeling abandoned, desperate, and suffering from a terrible emptiness, he does not know what has happened to him but he nonetheless realizes that he must count on himself alone to understand his past: “Puisqu’on ne veut m’aider ni me croire, et qu’on me prétend fou, dissimulateur, affabulateur même, je ne compterai qu’avec moim ême” (13). He will attempt to reconstruct if not restore his life by writing a dictionary which will enable the sequential continuance of thought: “Ce cahier sera donc une sorte de conquête du dedans par le dehors” (19). Moreover, the dictionary stands for hope, even if it is imaginary: “Un monde vivant m’attend, dans une bouleversante proximité, peut-être imaginaire” (30). But at the end of the novel, the narrator, despite tremendous efforts and with more than 700 entries, has not yet attained the knowledge sought: “J’ignore mon nom. Je ne sais rien de moi vraiment” (510). 418 FRENCH REVIEW 84.2 Upon reading the text, the reader soon comes to understand that this is no ordinary dictionary, for the definitions of the words cannot be separated from the uniquely unorthodox and intensely subjective perspective of the nameless narrator . The overwhelming diversity and unusual complexity if not baroque aspects of the thematic fabric, together with the discontinuity of thought, often give the text an illusiveness and an obscurity which make precise comprehension and intelligibility difficult. In addition, many of these definitions, being grounded not only in an astonishing...

Highway Robbery (review)

Reviewed by: Highway Robbery Deborah Stevenson Thompson, Kate. Highway Robbery; illus. by Jonny Duddle. Greenwillow, 2009 [128p]. Library ed. ISBN 978-0-06-173035-1 $16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-173034-4 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 3–5 It’s a tough life as an eighteenth-century street kid, so it’s not surprising that our nameless narrator sees opportunity when a handsome gentleman promises him a golden guinea if the boy will only hold his horse for a time. The urchin, taken with the man’s kindness as well as his glamour, staunchly hangs on to the beautiful black mare in the face of threats from horse thieves and the promise of greater reward when soldiers inform him that he’s holding the famous Black Bess for the infamous highwayman Dick Turpin. Thompson, known for her books for older [End Page 463] readers, proves to be a clever stylist for younger audiences as well; her protagonist’s narration has both fluidity and flair. Unfortunately, that same audience is going to want more action than this waiting-for-adventure plot provides, especially as it turns out it may all be an equine version of a shaggy-dog story (the tale seems to be a yarn the boy is spinning to get a good price for a carthorse), a revelation that may elude less experienced readers. The playful note and richly drawn atmospheric are appealing, though, and fans of Sid Fleischman’s historical adventures may appreciate this sly maybe-encounter with one of Britain’s colorful antiheroes. Lush line drawings capably incorporate humor in their satirical depiction of the human figures and grandeur in their treatment of the noble Black Bess. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Front Porch

Front Porch Harry Watson Click for larger view View full resolution In Kimberly D. Hill's Southern Voices interview, Lemuel J. Delany tells how several renowned people, including Cab Calloway (here), often spent time in his childhood home. From the Carl Van Vechten Photographs at the Library of Congress. At the end of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's wrenching novel of the African American experience, the nameless narrator has locked himself alone in an all-white basement room, endlessly replaying Louis Armstrong's haunting lament, "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?" Despairing to the point of madness, the narrator has suffered devastating disappointment in one version after another of the black man's "place" in white America, from the regimented uplift preached by Booker T. Washington, to earnest striving in menial employment, to the angry radicalism of the Communist Party. Everywhere he has been unseen, misunderstood, ignored, dismissed, marginalized. Invisible in all the ways that matter, he ends his story as a black drop in a white sea, with nothing left but jazz to sort out his pain. For many generations in the white South, the notion of invisible black people must surely have seemed odd. Whatever whites thought about them, blacks were always there, variously laborious, rebellious, resistant, fearsome, loving, saintly, demonic, and on and on. The list of adjectives could be endless, but absent or unseen would not be on it. But Ellison was not writing about the exterior visibility of black bodies. Echoing Paul Laurence Dunbar's famous poem, "Masks," he referred to an unrecognized inner self, hidden behind protective layers of evasion, denial, stoicism, laughter, song, and endless equivalents. Seeing that black reality has been rare indeed for whites, and not just southerners—the dual result of willful blindness on one part and painstaking disguises on the other. Most of the features in this issue of Southern Cultures explore some rarely seen facets of the southern black experience. Invisibility of one kind or another runs through many of them. Invisibility is ruthlessly imposed in one example, defensively adopted in another, unsuccessfully exploited in a third. Even taken together, these stories cannot embody the whole southern black experience, but they do illuminate some overlooked corners. First-time visitors to Duke University invariably comment on the majesty of its Gothic chapel, the towering centerpiece of an entire campus assemblage of delicately dappled stone cloisters and quadrangles. Every detail is perfect, from [End Page 1] the soaring arches to the gargoyles. For those familiar with many campuses, Duke plainly evokes the foundational spaces of Anglo-American academic culture, Princeton most directly, with ancient Oxford and Cambridge looming behind it. Click for larger view View full resolution Bruce J. West's photo essay, "Take Time to Appreciate," reveals his admiration for people in harmony with their environment. Mr. Fortner, 1994, photographed by Bruce J. West. How many knew that this reverential quotation from Western Civ, squarely planted in the Jim Crow South for a lily-white university, was designed between 1924 and 1935 by an African American? His name was Julian F. Abele, a classically trained architect who designed Duke's Gothic West Campus and its Georgian East Campus for the Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer. The firm's other commissions included Beaux Arts icons like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Harvard's Widener Library, and countless private mansions, including the New York home of university benefactor James B. Duke. "I lived in the shadows," Abele observed of his professional training at the University of Pennsylvania, and this acknowledgement of invisibility was doubly true at Duke, where knowledge of Abele's identity was largely unknown until recently. Duke University Archivist Emeritus William E. King shares Abele's story with us and recounts the arduous sleuthing that was necessary to bring it to light. There is a story (which may be untrue, King [End Page 2] tells us) that Abele never saw his masterpiece because he refused to submit to the humiliations that segregation imposed on black travelers to the Jim Crow South. Invisibility protected Abele from insult, but it also protected Duke and the white South from the disconcerting reality of his superior talent and achievement...

Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility by Scott Slovic

> w P?' Z l-H w D H < w H ? *j c* O 5? iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimii Scott Slovic. Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocriti cal Responsibility. Reno. University of Nevada Press. 2008. xv + 245 pages. $24.95. isbn978-0-87417-756-5 In this collection of occasional essays, several published else where, ecocritic Scott Slovic gath ers, under the poles of savoring and saving, the thoughts resulting from more than a decade's worth ofworld travel.The tension he feels between "the responsibility (shared by every living organism) tobe fully present in this lifeand the responsi bility (of a privileged, empowered human citizen) tobe involved with the transgressions and opportuni ties of my community" provides the connective tissue between these disparate essays. While the concept of contemplation in retreat certainly provides a foundation for Slovic's choices here for inclusion, it raises questions about intellectual work that Slovic seems unprepared to analyze with the acuity ofwhich he is capable. In concept, all essays serve his thesis?in practice, some far more successfully than others. In the weakest of the essays, such as "Going Away to Think" and "Eco criticism," Slovic presents the aca demic critic as a "man in a gray flannel suit," an ineffectual "third wheel" whose job is to serve as a kind of sportscaster who describes and contextualizes the work of creative writers and scientists. But elsewhere, Slovic knows better and shows himself to be a much more adept and important thinker.One suspects such lapses could have been avoided with a better round of editing for the collection as a book, rather than as a series of discreet essays. Critics who don't feel the iiiiiiiii.iiiii.iiii.ii.iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii tension between savoring and sav ing (and not necessarily because we are first-world wastrels) will have to search a little harder in these essays forwhat is useful to them, but it ishere. The strongest essays in the col lection give us the truest sense of the critical human at work. In "Be Prepared for the Worst," the most illuminating and challenging essay, Slovic reveals the way a critic's mind works, almost compulsive ly and regardless of the situation at hand, which in this case is the death of a child and the subse quent family-breaking grief.Here, Slovic writes at the height of his intellectual and stylisticpowers. In other standout essays, Slovic gets beyond theutilitarian bibliographi cal essays and offers close readings of literary texts, such as in his chap ter on Rick Bass. I'm not sure who the intended audience is for this collection. Sea soned ecocritics will find the sim plification annoying, or will have encountered some of these essays already, and those new to the field may be put off by the dismissive references to a general audience. Both sets of readers will findmuch to engage in Going Away toThink, but a stronger introduction could have helped us tease out much more. Nancy Cook University of Montana, Missoula Philippe Sollers. Les voyageurs du temps. Paris. Gallimard. 2009. 244 pages. 17.90. isbn978-2-07-077977 2 Philippe Sollers has been a fixture of the Parisian literary establish ment for nearly a half-century as thedirector of the influential review iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiifiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.iiiiiii.iiiiii Tel Quel (which became LTnfini in 1982), as a member of the edito rial board of the prestigious Gal limard publishing house, and as the author of an impressive list of books. Through his marriage to the psychoanalyst and literary theorist JuliaKristeva, Sollers also created the image of a latter-day version of the Sartre/Beauvoir couple that once occupied a central place in French intellectual life. Les voya geurs du temps (Time travelers) is fairly representative of theway in which his writing has evolved over the years. In this amalgamation of autobiography, poeticized narra tion, and literary essay, a nameless narrator uses a tone reminiscent of thedistanced irony thathas become the trademark of Sollers in order to recount, not only some of the events in his daily life,but main ly his musings on art, music, and literature. In the process, Sollers reminds us constantly of the con trast that he perceives between the excellence of his aesthetic outlook and thedecadence that is spreading over theworld lying outside of his increasingly lonely literarybubble: "On a pu parier autrefois de 'deca dence' . . . mais lemot qui convient desormais est celui de deliquescence" (While "decadence" may once have been the appropriate term, today it is decay). For Sollers, traveling through time mainly means roaming through literaryhistory, or rather through an accumulation of literary anecdotes. In no particular order, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Michel Houellebecq, T. E. Law rence, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Orwell, and Arthur Rimbaud are all invoked and briefly commented on (and this is of course only a partial list). It 78 i World Literature Today ...

Les voyageurs du temps by Philippe Sollers

Les voyageurs du temps by Philippe Sollers

"The aesthetics of relinquishment": Natural and Social Contracts in Beckett's "The End"

This article explores the notion of Beckett as an ecocritical writer by considering Lawrence Buell's criteria for an environmentally-centered work in terms of Beckett's short prose piece "The End." As the nameless narrator moves from a monastic to a hermetic to a mendicant existence and then to death by suicide, he cycles between city and country, growing increasingly anonymous. Beckett casts doubt on the ethics of the "social contract," formed in human culture, and suggests that the "natural contract" between humans and their environment may be the viable one, although it may lead to relinquishment and death.

Multiple Perspectivism in James Welch's Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney

Multiple Perspectivism in James Welch's Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney Sidner Larson (bio) During the years 1974–79, when Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney were written, James Welch had already long since left the Hi-Line of Montana to settle in Missoula. I, on the other hand, was still there, existing as a kind of combination of the nameless narrator and Jim Loney. Like the narrator, I had a strong sense that "there was not enough for me" at the ranch and had begun to make forays outside the Fort Belknap Indian Community. Those forays were also markedly unsatisfying to me, and I kept returning home, only to face the impossibility of making a living amid acute awareness of the expectations of society that I do so, by whatever means necessary. Thoroughly brainwashed by such expectations, and fearful of becoming a "failure" at doing so, as I had been conditioned to do, I worked practically day and night, trying to get through school, working in the bar business as both employee and proprietor, and trying to raise a family. By 1979 I was dangerously close to the situation and fate of Jim Loney, and I took a course of action modeled to a certain degree upon the choices of my cousin Jim Welch. I removed myself from the love/hate relationship that I had developed with Montana, going so far as southern Oregon, and returned to the world of education. Although I was able to interrupt the potentially destructive cycles of my own life, I have to admit that it was significantly luck that enabled me to do so. Things happened so fast, and the life tools that I had at the time versus their inapplicability to the modern world were so dramatically dissonant, that I realize now I was truly flying by the seat of my pants. I did know enough, however, to run far and fast and devote some time to reflection on certain things, a kind of expression of the phrase "SLOW ME DOWN LORD" from The Death of Jim Loney. [End Page 513] In addition, although I had not yet read Loney when I exiled myself from Montana in 1979, I had read Winter in the Blood during my first foray outside Montana, when Jack Marken invited me to begin graduate studies at South Dakota State University in 1974. Winter, and its reflection of the Fort Belknap Indian Community, including some of the problematic aspects of that community, allowed me to begin a process of self-reflection that very likely saved my life. It is equally interesting and helpful to me to think about the books and that community at this point in my life and, as I gain greater insight, to pass on what I think might be of help to others. There is also a profound sense of gratitude for Winter, Loney, and my relationship with Jim himself, who, in his own distinctive way, helped me to begin to understand my own life, as well as some of the reasons why it was necessary to do so. In my own book, Captured in the Middle (2000), I have argued that contemporary criticism of American Indian written forms is stalled, a situation that I see as essentially unchanged in 2007. I use the term written forms because "literature" does not accurately describe the work of Native writers who tend to move freely among various disciplines as they conduct written examination and articulation of their postapocalypse situation. Much existing criticism of these written forms is similar to the activities of the social sciences and their tendency to reiterate older "stones and bones" issues. For example, continued overemphasis on American Indian use of Western European literary tropes, connections between James Welch and T. S. Eliot, or tired social sciences theories about American Indian dysfunctions are more variations on the stereotype of the Vanishing Native than pragmatic discussion of real-life issues such as enforced poverty. Avoidance of the contemporary realities of American Indians in favor of esoteric academic exercises is similar to the ways in which Western Europeans have steadfastly refused to acknowledge social, environmental, and...

Paranoid Park (review)

Reviewed by: Paranoid Park Cindy Welch Nelson, Blake Paranoid Park. Viking, 2006180p ISBN 0-670-06118-2$15.99 R Gr. 7-12 Visiting the edgy skate park Paranoid Park is an impulse that changes the nameless narrator's life, as does meeting homeless skateboarders and hopping a train with a skater named Scratch, who is headed for the next town on a unique kind of beer run. If a private security guard on the train hadn't seen them both and started brutally beating Scratch with his nightstick, the narrator would never have gone to Scratch's aid by knocking the guard to the ground. Unfortunately, he does, and the guard is then dragged under the train and sliced in two across the tracks. The narrator is able to get away and clean everything but his conscience; when a police officer shows up at his high school and starts asking questions, his guilt intensifies, and he believes it's only a matter of time until they come for him. Subplots about the narrator's parents divorcing, his losing his virginity to the wrong girl while falling for the right girl, and his interactions with skating friends from school are simply yet effectively written as a backdrop for the incident and its Poe-like echoes in his head and heart. An opening quote from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment foreshadows the psychological tenseness of this teen drama, and Nelson's style feeds that drama by tending toward the stark without being abrupt, effectively suggesting the unquiet mind of a boy working his way through a haze of regret, horror, and responsibility. Although the ending is a bit neat, teens will embrace the narrator's dilemma, his difficulties with family and friends, and the spare prose that moves the story along like the steady beating of a human pulse. Pair this with a retelling or adaptation of Crime and Punishment or Poe's "The Telltale Heart" for lively discussion. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Fact, Fiction, and Anti-Semitism in the 'Cyclops' Episode of Joyce's Ulysses

James Joyce's Ulysses--the episode in which Leopold Bloom has an altercation with an anti-Semitic citizen--flared up in the nineteenseventies. David Hayman put forward an argument about the Erzdihlzeit of the episode-the time of its telling-that projected it forward from the Erzahlte Zeit, the time of the occurrence. order to find out what occurred in Barney Kiernan's at 5 on 16 June, the reader is transported at an unspecified hour to an unnamed pub where he listens silently to the porterous voice of an insistent and self-assertive clown (242). Four years later, in 1979, Herbert Schneidau disputed Hayman's notion that the telling of the events in the pub occurs later that night in yet another pub. Instead, Schneidau suggests that the nameless narrator is not telling the events to someone later in the evening, but is actually offering a running commentary on them. Instead of telling the story, the narrator 'rehearses' it, so to speak... the point is that the Nameless One cannot even experience the events without having his consciousness prepare them for later performance (100). In a rebuttal in the same James Joyce Quarterly issue, Hayman cedes the potential plausibility of this alternative formulation but without relinquishing his own point, that a past tense retrospective narra-

Jüdische Aspekte Jung-Wiens im Kulturkontext des 'Fin de Siècle'. (Conditio Judaica 52) by Sarah Fraiman-Morris

AUSTRIAN STUDIES, I4, 20 6 359 J?dische Aspekte Jung-Wiens imKulturkontext des Tin de Si?cle'. Ed. by Sarah Fraiman-Morris. (Conditio Judaica 52). T?bingen: Niemeyer. 2005. 138 pp. 36,00. isbn 3-484-65152-0. The engagement of Jewish authors of thefin-de-si?cleYoung Vienna group with issues related to spirituality and acculturation continues to attract substantial interest, as evidenced by this compendium of eight essays. This volume offers a combination of detailed studies of some of the period's most significant writers, together with a measure of fresh insight into the relevance of Judaism, Jewish identity and anti-Semitism for our understanding of their texts and of the period. As part of his discussion of the political, historical and aesthetic legacies carried over into the fin de si?cle by Jewish authors, Jakob Hessing usefully explores how Freud's psychoanalytic models can deepen our interpretations of texts by Theodor Herzl and Arthur Schnitzler thatwere created against the backdrop of thewaning Empire. By presenting Jewish self-loathing as the darker flip-side to the brilliance of Jewish cultural achievement around 1900, Robert S.Wistrich tempers Karl Kraus's unique and celebrated exposure of hypocrisy and corruption with a balanced discussion of his undeniably destructive critical and anti-Semitic statements against Jewish Young Vienna authors and others, including journalist Alice Schalek. As he notes, 'Kraus's strong sense ofmoral indignation rarely extended to cases where itwas a Jew who fell victim to palpable injustice' (p. 28). The inclusion in the volume of Arthur Schnitzler's original notes related to his frustrations regarding American copyright law does, as Jeffrey Berlin indicates, lend exciting new insight into Schnitzler's life and work by bringing to the fore his views on intellectual property and itsmisappropriation. Less clear, however, ishow Schnitzler's concerns with the ethics of copyright law can be linked to the general premise of a book focusing on Jewish aspects ofYoung Vienna. Shimon Levy's informative review introduces helpful information about the reception of Austrian drama in Israel, while italso provokes deeper questions about the implications of these data for the construction of more recent Israeli theatrical traditions described in the essay. Hanni Mittelmann persuasively discusses how Herzl's Philosophische Erz?hlungen (1900) reflect his ambivalence toward his Jewish background through a nameless narrator who guides the reader through theworld of assimilated, bourgeois Central European Jews in coffeehouses, hotels, society balls and country homes, a process that, according toMittelmann, reveals the importance of Jewish Angst and self-doubt for both Jewish self-understanding and general societal discourse. Likewise, Jakob Golomb convincingly argues for reading Stefan Zweig's fascination with Nietzschean philosophy as the response of an alienated Jew not fullyassimilated into Austrian society for whom Nietzsche's goal of 'personal authenticity' remained particularly compelling. And although Richard Beer-Hofmann was the only writer of Young Vienna who turned to Judaism for answers to the group's collective devastation at the moral bankruptcy of the era, Sarah Fraiman-Morris explains that he faced disappointments similar to those of his Reviews more secular contemporaries in his search for answers to broader, existential questions drawn from theJewish spiritual world. In an especially insightful essay,Mark Gelber probes how interfaces between Young Vienna and the lesser-known Young Jewish Poetic Movement, two streams in Viennese literature normally regarded as completely separate, call into question the viability of 'Young Vienna' as a category in itsown right. Through discussion of both texts and their reception, Gelber explains how the writings of Stefan Zweig and Richard Beer-Hofmann, as members of both groups, were incorporated into various literary strategies with differing goals, such as the promotion of Zionism or attempts to create unified, modern, Jewish national expressions. By examining how interpretations of Young Vienna and Young Jewish texts shifted significantly according to the sites inwhich they appeared, whether in journals intended for a Jewish audience or as part ofmore general Viennese publications, Gelber's thought-provoking analysis questions the extent towhich Jewish' aspects of any literary or cultural movement can truly be separated from other, broader concerns. His essay, along with a number of others, provides a solid basis for further inquiries into the literature...

A Narrative on “Shame”

IN a poem entitled “Return the Bridewealth,” Okot p’Bitek, an Oxford-trained anthropologist turned poet and novelist, offers a treatment of “shame” by focusing on three earthen mounds in a rural Acholi setting in northern Uganda (Okot p’Bitek, 1971). The mounds are graves that contain the remains of three dead grandchildren who lie buried in the compound as a permanent rebuke to an old man and an old woman—the two grandparents. The mounds have not been attended to by the love of a caring mother because she has eloped with her lover, a soldier. Consequently , “some labikha weeds and obiya grasses are growing on the mounds.” When a man, apparently the father of the children, asks his own old wrinkled father a question he considers urgent, the old man, now supported by creaky and brittle old bones that keep him from carrying out a wish to bend down to pluck the weeds himself, does not respond with words but with a sign of profound anguish: “only two large clotting tears crawl down his wrinkled cheeks” (124-129). In a much pruned and policed rage, the old man uses his walking stick, which is “oily with age and smooth like the long teeth of an old elephant” to hit each mound in a violent act of counting, an arithmetical mourning: “And with the bony-dry staff he strikes the mound: One! Two! Three!” The nameless (Karenga, 1989) narrator in the song (nameless presumably because shame has eaten away his name)1 had asked the old man a flippant question, one loaded with a selfish and childish preoccupation with erotic aspirations: “Father, I say to him, / Father, gather the bridewealth so that I may marry the girl of my bosom!” Like a child he assumes that bridewealth SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Winter 2003) A Narrative on “Shame” OKELLO OCULI (probably in the form of a large number of livestock) is a resource the old man can summon with a tap of his stick. Like a spoiled child, he ignores the pain felt by the old man of previous bridewealth now buried in graves that rebuke him daily. The old man probably also cries because of his son’s show of foolishness and failure to keep his wife, who has left him for an illicit affair with a soldier. This soldier shamelessly uses his better-fed physique, money, and a gun he carries about with his finger on the trigger to lure away the father’s daughter-in-law and bring death to his homestead. Three out of the five children she had given birth to are already dead and buried, presumably because she abandoned her maternal duties. When the son and jilted husband catch the soldier-lover and his wife in the act of kissing in a public spot, he does not exhibit the tradition-prescribed show of manhood and refrains from physically attacking the solider and raising an alarm over the profaning of communal morality. Like a coward, he remains cold, silent; unable to assume responsibility for defending marriage as a technology that ensures the health, survival, and continuity of his part of the human species. Instead, he is as limp as the soldier-lover, who is furious at having his amorous exploits interrupted by a wimp who is unable to challenge him to a fight. He struts past him, provocatively and contemptuously touching the husband with his gun’s butt. The husband is also increasingly isolated from the web of other filial obligations. He tells his former wife that he cannot find her father to demand the return of his bridewealth; when she tells him that her mother has died he remains silent, presumably unaffected , thereby desecrating the sacred status of a woman whose daughter has given his clan children, both boys and girls: “The woman says, My mother is dead! / I am silent!” He has metamorphosed into an emotionally and morally barren and naked wizard , wandering outside the fabric of a communal economy of emotions and moral nutrition. 1278 SOCIAL RESEARCH The shame that now cloaks him as a cowardly figure without a socially prescribed manhood—as a husband who must use his martial...