Sustained Meditation Research Articles

“The Sword and the Book”: The Benjamin Franklin Library and U.S.-Mexican Relations, 1936–1962

“The Sword and the Book”The Benjamin Franklin Library and U.S.-Mexican Relations, 1936–1962 Julie Irene Prieto (bio) On April 13, 1942, politicians and members of the literary and cultural elite of Mexico City gathered for the opening ceremonies of the Benjamin Franklin Library in the grand, old, French-style building at Reforma 34, on one of the capital’s European-style boulevards. Entertained by bands that played both traditional Mexican ballads and the “Star Spangled Banner,” the assembled guests of the new library toured the grounds and the freshly remodeled building politely ignoring, much to the relief of organizers, the still half-empty shelves.1 The guests were then seated outdoors, where they listened to speeches by both Mexican and U.S. officials. Broadcast live by radio throughout Mexico and the southwestern United States, these speeches celebrated the new library as a powerful symbol of friendship between the two countries and of hemispheric solidarity in the face of the dissolution of old Europe in war. In his speech, the guest of honor, President of Mexico Manuel Ávila Camacho, touched on the issue of hemispheric friendship before moving on to present a sustained meditation on the nature of the library as an institution. Camacho argued to the assembled that libraries were particularly potent symbols of democracy, a bulwark against “present-day imperialisms” and an “international society” that worked by joining nations within a common cultural framework. A library was not just a place to hold books but an embassy of ideas that provided the basis and support for connections between similarly minded democratic governments.2 President Camacho’s speech effectively captured both the spirit of the occasion and the vision U.S. officials had for the Benjamin Franklin Library. As the first U.S. government–sponsored library to open abroad, the library was crucial to the state’s program of cultural diplomacy during World War II. Founded through a partnership between the American Library Association (ALA) and the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), both groups intended the library to be what Camacho called an “embassy of ideas,” [End Page 294] promoting greater understanding and interest in U.S. culture across the border.3 While the OIAA saw the library as a means of advertising U.S. foreign policy in Mexico, the ALA was more inclined to see the institution as a tool for encouraging the long-term growth of democracy in Mexico. ALA officials believed that the more educated a populace, the less prone it would be to embrace radical ideology. Libraries therefore had an essential role to play in ensuring that Mexico maintained political unity with the United States by providing citizens with greater access to U.S. materials and by aiding the nation in preserving its own cultural heritage. Because of the influence of the ALA, the Benjamin Franklin Library grew as an institution during the war, eventually housing the most extensive collection of freely circulating U.S. literature and scientific publications in Latin America. In this, it escaped the fate of many reading rooms established by the U.S. Department of State in London and other Allied cities, which served more as narrow repositories for wartime propaganda. Due to its relative popularity, the library also became a template for similar institutions in Montevideo and Managua during World War II, and for U.S.-sponsored libraries across the globe after 1945. Despite the growth of these newer libraries, the Benjamin Franklin Library remained the flagship institution for U.S. book-diplomacy throughout World War II and during the Cold War. With the end of World War II and the closure of the OIAA, the library passed under the direct control of the State Department, and later the United States Information Agency, which came to view it as an indispensable tool in its arsenal for combating Communism in Mexico. As a department official argued, “the two weapons of man are the sword and the book,” and the Benjamin Franklin Library was the linchpin in a department strategy that was aimed at using the book to prevent political instability and promote cultural unity in Latin America.4 This essay traces the Benjamin Franklin Library’s establishment during...

Remembering Lot’s Wife/Lot’s Wife Remembering: Trauma, Witness, and Representation in Cleanness

Cleanness is not only a work of biblical didacticism but also a sustained meditation on trauma, a poem whose consideration of several biblical cataclysms reveals a robust engagement with loss and the concomitant issues of traumatic witness and representation. It is, moreover, a poem that reveals both the necessity and danger of witnessing by turning its gaze upon the bodies of the dead and upon the suffering of the doomed and the living. Drawing from recent work on trauma by Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys, and others, as well as from scholarship on Cleanness itself, this essay shows how the figures of witness within the poem advance its central didactic argument even as they imply a subversive counter-narrative of mourning and loss that frustrates the poem’s Christological agenda. It also speculates that Cleanness offers a literary witness to the fourteenth-century plague pandemic now commonly known as the Black Death, reading the poem’s repetitions and obsessive focus on the traumatic scene both as symptomatic of a response to that trauma and as paradigmatic for how the poem mediates the interactions among traumatic event, human witness, and memorial representation.

“L'au-Delà du Dehors-Dedans”: Paradox, Space and Movement in Beckett

It is argued here that several of Beckett's texts offer a sustained meditation on space. What is meant by 'space' is laid out with reference to the formulations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Bergson; namely, a non-metric, indivisible and qualitative space. Using Beckett's texts, the question of the significance of literary space is addressed. It is claimed that the Beckettian figures of aporia, paradox, metaphysical absurdity, and spatial relativity may be drawn on to trace the contours of a qualitative and exemplarily literary space in the texts in question.

The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said Karni Pal Bhati McCarthy, Conor. 2010. The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $79.00hc. $19.99 sc. $16.00 e-book. i–ix +158 pp. Conor McCarthy presents a lucid and highly readable overview of the oeuvre of one of the major intellectuals of our time. For readers who think of Edward Said primarily as a postcolonial critic whose chief work was Orientalism, this introduction should prove to be a compelling corrective that shows the eclectic trajectory not only of Said himself, but also of the field of postcolonial theory. Chapter one provides a helpful overview of Said’s life and work that goes on to explore their imbrication, while chapter two offers an excellent account of intellectual influences on Said. Chapter three discusses five of Said’s key works: Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975); Orientalism (1978); The Question of Palestine (1979); The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983); and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Finally, chapter four sketches out the “crucial and representative reactions” to Said’s work (123). The opening chapters seek to explain why Said was not just “the most widely known intellectual in the world” (1) at the time of his death, but also one whose “reputation and work polarized and polarizes opinion” (3). Within the academy, McCarthy notes, Said “was controversial because his work crossed disciplinary boundaries,” and outside it, “because [he] was active in the cause of Palestine” (3). [End Page 139] The study lists phenomenology (represented chiefly by the critics of consciousness, or the Geneva School), philology (Giambattista Vico and Eric Auerbach), Marxism (Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, and Raymond Williams), and poststructuralism (chiefly Michel Foucault) among the “various intellectual currents and traditions” that contributed to the catholicity of Said’s oeuvre (13). McCarthy argues that what some of his detractors saw as Said’s “interfering . . . in areas outside . . . his professional expertise” was in fact a “kind of methodological principle” (3). By pursuing the project of “bringing disparate knowledges and epistemologies into unexpected conjunction,” Said’s writing was “concerned . . . not only with the production of knowledge, but with the conditions of possibility of the production of knowledge” (3, 13, emphasis original). In discussing these diverse strands of thought, McCarthy provides a succinct overview of the key ideas in each field as applicable to an understanding of the development of Said’s own work. So, we learn that Said’s early interest in phenomenology is carried further not only in his second book, Beginnings, with its sustained meditation on intention, but also in The World, the Text, and the Critic, with its insistence, for instance, on the “worldly self-situating” act of T.S. Eliot’s well-known essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (20). While the influence of philology could be seen as an indirect one, emerging out of Said’s training in comparative literature and intersecting with the influence of phenomenology and other abiding themes in his work, Said learned from Auerbach, a German Jewish intellectual exiled in Turkey, about the “relationship between distance, exile, and alienation, on the one hand, and profound knowledge, on the other” (22). This insight becomes axiomatic in later work as the form of an exemplary relationship of distance necessary to criticism. “The dialectic between distance and closeness, home and exile, rootedness and alienation,” the subject of recurrent rumination by Said, is rearticulated, McCarthy reminds us, in Culture and Imperialism: “exile is not a matter of utter disconnection from a home or culture; rather it is a matter of proximity to a native place of which one is fully aware but to which one may not return” (23). Said learned much from several Marxist thinkers without ever being a fully committed Marxist. He assimilated many of Lukács’s insights about the novel form—“as the genre of alienation, disillusionment, and ‘transcendental homelessness’”—to his own idea of criticism: as an “anti-dynastic,” “non-linear [and] decentred process” that is “modern and modernist” in its being “homeless in the world of language and writing, restless, perpetually reinventing itself, . . . perpetually re-examining and reinstating its own conditions of possibility” (30). More...

Melancholia in the Subjunctive Mood

Melancholia in the Subjunctive Mood

A Post-Humanist Moralist

The films of Michael Haneke, so some critics argue, exploit the nihilism of a media-saturated culture, indulging in a dubious manipulation of audience expectations and our fascination with violence. Such criticisms, however, misunderstand or distort the complex moral, political, and aesthetic purpose of Haneke’s work. Indeed, his films are better understood as examining the socially disorienting and subjectively disintegrating effects of our post-humanist world of mass-mediatised experience. At the same time, they are highly reflexive cinematic works that force us to reflect – both morally and aesthetically – upon our relationship with cinematic and media images. These two strands of Haneke’s work comprise a sustained meditation on what we might call the “post-humanist condition”: a cinematic critique of the disintegration and fragmentation of affect and subjectivity, a disintegration closely linked with contemporary forms of mediatised spectacle and the cynical consumption of images of violence. Given the mediatised nature of contemporary social experience, the only effective way to engage in cinematic critique is by means of the very images that capture and captivate us.

Tillich and Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror is a “stream-of-consciousness” film that eschews traditional narrative structure. The author interprets the film as having an “emotional structure,” insofar as it sequentially explores different manifestations of the experience of anxiety. Using the typology of anxiety developed by Paul Tillich in The Courage to Be, the author demonstrates how the first three parts of Mirror separately explore the anxiety of emptiness, of guilt, and of fate. Throughout these early parts of the film, symbols of death underscore themes of anxiety. The author interprets the fourth part of Mirror as a sustained meditation on the sources of what Tillich called absolute faith, the source of the courage to exist in spite of imminent anxiety.

The anatomy of influence: literature as a way of life

'Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it', writes Harold Bloom in Anatomy of Influence, 'is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate'. For more than half century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of the written word with students and readers. In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads us through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years. The result is a critical self-portrait, sustained meditation on life lived with and through the great works of the Western canon: Why has influence been my lifelong obsessive concern? Why have certain writers found me and not others? What is the end of literary life? Featuring extended analyses of Bloom's most cherished poets - Shakespeare, Whitman, and Crane - as well as inspired appreciations of Emerson, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Ashbery, and others, Anatomy of Influence adapts Bloom's classic work Anxiety of Influence to show us what great literature is, how it comes to be, and why it matters. Each chapter maps startling new literary connections that suddenly seem inevitable once Bloom has shown us how to listen and to read. A fierce and intimate appreciation of the art of literature on scale that the author will not again attempt, Anatomy of Influence follows the sublime works it studies, inspiring the reader with sense of something ever more about to be.

Wittgenstein, the Criticism of Philosophy, and Self-Knowledge

The Philosophical Investigations can be read as a sustained meditation on the metaphysical effects philosophical requirements have on our understanding of the phenomena of philosophical inquiry. The present essay proposes the basic outlines such a reading might take by attending to Wittgenstein’s distinctive form of philosophical criticism, a form that interrogates the theoretical and moral integrity of our requirements and the claims we enter on their behalf. On this reading, the moral perfection of thought can be said to consist in the criticism of the requirements that emerge in the course of philosophical inquiry or, in Kantian terms, the critique of the dialectical requirements of reason.

"To wondre upon this thyng": Chaucer's Prioress's Tale

Examining the miraculous things in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, this essay suggests that the importance of such things lies in their resistance to clear signification, a resistance that unsettles their human observers even as it reconstitutes them. The tale posits wonder as the product of a series of ontologically ambiguous things — the automata-like body of the little clergeon and his mysterious greyn but also the tale itself, as a literary object that produces a wondrous response in its audience. Chaucer's depiction of this series of wondrous things shows him to be interested in the incommensurability of certain kinds of things, as part of a sustained meditation on the exigencies of religious wonder itself. The Prioress's Tale thus suggests that at the crux of object and thing, animate and inanimate, the intelligible and the indeterminate lies a double-edged wonder at the miraculous: displaying a deferential mode of passive response to a privileged miraculous object while nonetheless reasserting the priority of the subject, suppressing, containing, and silencing the things that produced such passivity in the first place.

<em>Desire: A History of European Sexuality</em>, by Anna Clark

Reviewed by: Desire: A History of European Sexuality Matt Houlbrook (bio) Desire: A History of European Sexuality, by Anna Clark; pp. ix + 282. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, £60.00, £17.99 paper, $100.00, $31.95 paper. Anna Clark's Desire: A History of European Sexuality traces the changing ways sexuality has been understood, experienced, and regulated in European societies. Ranging from Ancient Greece to contemporary Sweden, it interweaves ambitious panorama with a keen eye for the telling vignette. In so doing, Clark builds upon an increasingly vibrant historiography in sexuality studies. Going where most historians would not dare, Desire collapses boundaries between national histories, focused chronologies, and narrow case studies—synthesizing, reflecting, and ultimately producing a groundbreaking intervention in the history of sexuality. It is a mark of Clark's scholarship that she integrates notoriously difficult theory into an absorbing narrative that will engage academics, undergraduates, and general readers. Clark's central premise is simple: "sexual desire and behavior are constructed" (3). In early Christian thought desire was considered diabolical temptation; for Victorian scientists it represented a "biological urge to procreate and further evolution" (4). Desire thus provides a sustained meditation on the importance of historicizing sex. In discussing female same-sex intimacies, Clark (perhaps influenced by Laura Doan or Sharon Marcus) suggests that "rather than investigate the 'truth' of what these women actually did, it would be more productive to explore how people articulated their desire" (4). Clark repeatedly confronts the reader with the particular nature of their own sexual practices and subjectivities. Unlike other general histories of sexuality, Desire moves beyond comforting and congratulatory narratives of liberation. Considering the transformative interrelationship between state, market, and sexuality in the twentieth century, Clark concludes: "sexual desire cannot be liberated, because there is no 'authentic' natural desire to be freed; rather, sexual desire is now just constructed in different ways" (220). There are two features of Desire worth stressing. First is Clark's insistence on understanding sexuality in a European context. Despite important national differences, there are common themes—for example, the association between state formation and the management of desires and bodies from the nineteenth century. Desire is thus an effective exercise in transnational history. Understandings of sex were shaped by the flow of ideas and populations across borders. Sexology developed in the nineteenth century through dialogues between scholars in France, Austria, Germany, and Britain. Eastern European migrations in the late twentieth century reinvigorated older narratives of sexual danger and national purity. Europe, moreover, is never a discrete entity: a chapter on early modern Spain affords a suggestive perspective on links [End Page 183] between sexuality, conquest, and colonization. Spanish depictions of Indian peoples as "sodomitic cannibals" (100)—like Britain's suppression of early marriage and purdah in India—demonstrate how European sexualities were produced through encounters with colonial Others. The second factor that makes Desire more than historiographical synthesis is Clark's ability to tease a genuinely challenging argument out of such diverse material, providing an alternative framework for thinking about the historical formation of sexualities. Clark sees two "competing concepts of sexual desire": "polluting and dangerous" versus "creative, transcendent and transformative" (1). These recurring tensions were manifested in different ways and with different social, political, and cultural effects. The "Church denigrated sexual desire except in tightly controlled situations in marriage" in the twelfth century; "religious and secular authorities tried to control sex outside marriage" while female mystics articulated a transcendental desire and spirituality (64-65). In the nineteenth century social purity activists "spread moral purity pamphlets to young people, arguing that they must have sexual education to remain unpolluted" while radicals deemed "sexual freedom . . . essential to creativity" (142). Behind this narrative, church gave way to state, market, and scientific expertise in managing desire's disorderly power. Clark's most bracing intervention lies in what she terms the "twilight moment" (7), which offers ways beyond the fixation on the supposedly rigid boundaries between deviant and "normal" that often characterizes histories of sexuality. It denotes sexual activities or desire which people are not supposed to engage in, but they do. The twilight fades into deepest darkness, and then the light returns at dawn . . . twilight moments were those...

“WHEN I WAS A PHOTOGRAPHER”: NADAR AND HISTORY

ABSTRACTThis paper takes as its point of departure Roland Barthes's proposition in La Chambre claire that the nineteenth century “invented History and Photography,” that the era of photography is one of revolutions, and that the photograph's “testimony” has diminished our capacity to think in terms of “duration.” Barthes also asserts that the French photographer Nadar is “the greatest photographer in the world,” but takes no account of Nadar's acute receptivity to the history of the nineteenth century. The paper argues that, though he fully recognized (and indeed documented) the unique properties of the new medium, Nadar himself was overridingly preoccupied with assessing photography's role in a period when war and revolution were compromising the onward march of social and economic progress. Throughout his life, he was committed to the progressive ideas that he assimilated while growing up in Paris and Lyon in the 1830s. He wrote of the emergence of a Bohemian culture in the Latin Quarter of Paris, and remained keenly aware of the visual impressions that he had received in his youth from the popular lithographs of the pre‐photographic era. He became a supporter of the artistic avant‐garde, which led him to purchase important work by the landscape painter Daubigny. In his art criticism, he excoriated the later portraits of Ingres, which might have competed with his own reputation as a photographic portraitist. Yet, in his admiration for Delacroix, he emphasized the lengthy initiation necessary for the appreciation of the master's paintings, implying a direct contrast with the “instantaneity” of the photographic process. By common consent, the period of Nadar's great success as a portraitist, which secured his posthumous fame, occupied a short phase in his career as a whole. But his writings show that it was his lively intuition of the wider ramifications of photography that impelled him to move on—experimenting successfully with the first aerial photographs and documenting the catacombs of Paris with the aid of magnesium lighting. Though he could never experience television, he left a narrative in which the feasibility of transmitting images over a distance was presented as being startlingly realistic. In short, Nadar's published work can be viewed as a sustained meditation on the interaction of historical experience and the media, which not only records but anticipates photography's impact within the wider framework of visual culture.

An investigation of brain processes supporting meditation

Meditation is an ancient spiritual practice, which aims to still the fluctuations of the mind. We investigated meditation with fMRI in order to identify and characterise both the "neural switch" mechanism used in the voluntary shift from normal consciousness to meditation and the "threshold regulation mechanism" sustaining the meditative state. Thirty-one individuals with 1.5-25 years experience in meditation were scanned using a blocked on-off design with 45 s alternating epochs during the onset of respectively meditation and normal relaxation. Additionally, 21 subjects were scanned during 14.5 min of sustained meditation. The data were analysed with SPM and ICA. During the onset of meditation, activations were found bilaterally in the putamen and the supplementary motor cortex, while deactivations were found predominately in the right hemisphere, the precuneus, the posterior cingulum and the parieto-temporal area. During sustained meditation, SPM analysis revealed activation in the head of nucleus caudatus. Extensive deactivations were observed in white matter in the right hemisphere, i.e. mainly in the posterior occipito-parieto-temporal area and in the frontal lobes. ICA identified 38 components including known baseline-resting state components, one of which not only overlaps with the activated area revealed in the SPM analysis but extends further into frontal, temporal, parietal and limbic areas, and might presumably constitute a combination of frontoparietal and cinguloopercular task control systems. The identified component processes display varying degrees of correlation. We hypothesise that a proper characterisation of brain processes during meditation will require an operational definition of brain dynamics matching a stable state of mind.

Melville, Three Ways

The books discussed in this review take very different critical approaches to Herman Melville's fiction. The essay collection Whole Oceans Away, edited by Jill Barnum, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Sten, presents a variety of contextual or historicist approaches to understanding Melville's time in? and use of?the Pacific in his writing. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker expand upon their earlier biographically-inflected textual investigations into the version of Pierre that they claim Melville originally intended to write, before his personal and professional disappointments compelled him to insert distracting passages on Pierre's history of authorship. Branka Arsic offers a sustained meditation on passivity and Melville's Bartleby, engaging with a range of theoretical works. Each succeeds in its own terms; yet each could benefit from some consideration of the perspectives offered by the other modes of analysis. Reading these three books together suggests that the challenge is to produce scholarship that is responsive to Melville's own sustained theoretical meditations on the categorizations and taxonomies that structure such thinking.

Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert (review)

Reviewed by: Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert Naomi Baldinger Ranen Omer-Sherman . Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. xvii, 210. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 0252030435. Biblical and liturgical Hebrew frequently conceptualizes God as "Makom," or "place," especially in the context of the exodus from Egypt. This concept, combined with a sense of urgency inherent in the contested national space of Israel, makes Ranen Omer-Sherman's Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert a timely study of the desert's crucial role in the construction and reconstruction of Jewish ethics and identity. The desert, as a site both metaphorical and physical, has been a key trope in Jewish literature from the Bible to contemporary works both Israeli and diasporic. From the biblical narrative of desert wandering to twentieth century Zionist discourse of "making the desert bloom," the desert has been an unrivaled locus for nation-building and transformations both collective and personal. As a transitional space between exile and nation, between slavery and redemption, it challenges both collectivity and individual. It also opens space for encounters with alterity, including those dissenting views and revolutionary undercurrents inherent in collective discourses of Self. For example, Moses's encounter with the rebellious Korah and an Israeli officer's encounter with a dead Egyptian pilot provoke meditations on the definitions and limits of the nation and the self. As Omer-Sherman puts it, "the desert not only crystallizes the urgency of re-visioning the other and reappraising the self, but it affords a space for transformation outside of the particularism of the Zionist, or any other exclusionist, narrative" (161). Indeed, Israel in Exile is, to a large extent, a sustained meditation on the ethical possibilities that desert space opens. Chapter 1 introduces the multiple intersections of "poetics and politics" that inform Omer-Sherman's study, including the consistent thread of Levinasian ethics that runs through the book. Omer-Sherman writes that "the revelation in the desert continues to provoke an ethical orientation towards alterity" (13), citing Levinas's thoughts about Abraham's hospitality towards strangers in the desert he inhabited. Omer Sherman uses Levinas's concept of ethics as a perpetual orientation towards the Other, coupled with Theodor Adorno's injunction that "it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home," to craft a notion of Jewish ethics based in the experience of exile even when applied in the national homeland of Israel. In addition to introducing this notion of ethics, Omer-Sherman details the renewed interest in writings about the desert that emerged in the twentieth [End Page 71] century. To this end, he evokes various traditions of writing about the desert including British romanticism as well as diasporic Zionism. One of the unique features of Omer-Sherman's style is how he blends his broad and well-considered textual analysis with his own experiences in the desert. He writes that following his decision to make aliyah as a teenager, the desert provided a crucial place for him to explore the tensions inherent in his love for Israel and his increasingly critical stance towards its political positions with regard to the Arab other. This approach is unusual in academic writing, but it lends a sense of urgency and enthusiasm to Omer-Sherman's style, which is eminently clear and engaging. Israel in Exile's greatest strength lies in Omer-Sherman's close readings of contemporary Jewish texts that engage the trope of the desert. He interweaves his interpretation with biblical analysis informed by scholars like Ilana Pardes and theological reflections by the likes of Annie Dillard and Rabbi Aaron Soleveichik. Omer-Sherman devotes his second chapter to Shulamith Hareven's The Desert Trilogy, and argues that it offers a feminist critique of "the power of territorial redemption" (53) and an alternative reading of how Israel's national consciousness was forged. This divergent explanation challenges tribalism and emphasizes the ethical treatment of minorities. He treats Hareven's text as a contemporary midrash on biblical and prophetic texts that resonates in Israel's contemporary political context. In the next two chapters, he analyzes Amos...

"I Could Always Feel Race Trouble . . . Never More Than Two Feet Off": Chester Himes's Melancholic Perception

In summer of 1950, having been fraudulently arrested and jailed for causing a minor automobile accident with a moneyed white woman, Chester Himes steeled himself for yet another round of ongoing anxiety he believed to typify and organize African American psychic experience. Don't let it throw you, Himes encouraged himself. Despair is characteristic of black (Quality 112). Though circumstances that surrounded writer's brief incarceration at time seemed bleak and unfair, this kind of unbridled pessimism about what he construed as psychological condition of all blacks--and incessant personal struggle to fight off such malaise--was not uncharacteristic of Himes. His published memoirs reveal artist to be poignantly aware that racism exacted a heavy psychological cost on black people, and that he himself may have been chief among its victims. Late in The Quality of Hurt (1972), first volume of his autobiography, Himes declares black man to be the most neurotic, complicated, schizophrenic ... specimen of mankind (285) after stating earlier in account that his entire life had conditioned [him] to a constant expectation of catastrophe (249). After all of accomplishments Himes had earned by early seventies, including a fiction-writing career that spanned a quarter century and had gained him international literary renown, why would writer feel compelled to foreground the quality of [his] hurt? Why, at a moment when he seemed most existentially at peace, while writing his memoirs by Spanish seaside, did Himes commit his pen to documenting what appears to be his lifelong unrest? In following essay, I argue that answers to these questions lie in Himes's theory of melancholia. Himes's ideas about melancholia, I argue, represent a sustained meditation on interminable mourning for loss first conceptualized by Freud in 1917, and which Ann Cheng and have recently revised in study of race in United States. Focusing on his late memoir, as well as his early novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), I will show that Himes was as much a theorist as he was a victim of racial melancholia. What Himes saw as eternal mourning of black Americans over impossibility of being white could be understood not merely as a paralyzing pathology but as a necessary strategy for endurance and engagement within spaces defined by white supremacy. Whereas racial paranoia and epistemology of prediction it implies may have stood for Himes as a virtually inevitable consequence of black life in United States, it was racial melancholia that furnished him with a viable theory of black political subjectivity. What makes Freud's theory of melancholia responsive to predicament of race in United States is that it seems directly to address how intersubjective--and thus social estrangement may produce in persons an unending experience of emotional strife. Since racialization is fundamentally a process of separation and subsequent objectification of human beings, a theory predicated on object loss is likely to provide some insight on race's psychic affects. Such is thinking of Anne Anlin Cheng, as she articulates it in The Melancholy of Race (2001). Cheng explains that melancholia is a condition in which both white and nonwhite subjects participate. This is possible because both subject positions take on other as an ambivalently desired object that is destined to be lost through uneven distribution of racial privilege and power. For whiteness, melancholia manifests itself in what Cheng calls exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others (Cheng 10). The codification of whiteness as a national ideal engenders exclusion, and thus loss of which Cheng speaks, yet national needs have historically worked to counterbalance this ban since nonwhites often provide human capital that enables economic growth. Though nonwhites are integral to reproduction of American life, attempts to circumscribe their privileges of citizenship despite their contributions--have been incessant. …

Saint's Everlasting Rest : The Martyrdom of Maggie Tulliver

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She knew little of saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision against spread of Catholicism and had all died at Smithfield. --George Eliot (The Mill on Floss 286) Most contemporary scholarship on Victorian literature is very much aware of sophisticated understandings--and innovative uses--of genre to be found in these texts, yet importance of hagiography as a rhetorical resource for nineteenth-century writers remains largely unexplored. While it is therefore unsurprising that hagiography should not be included in section devoted to genre in Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (1999), it is nevertheless remarkable that it receives no mention in accounts of Victorian and sage appearing in same volume. Such genres, after all, are undoubtedly related to hagiographic tradition--broadly speaking, writing that represents lives of exceptional figures in order to inspire a similar striving after the highest and best (Eliot, The Mill on Floss 471). Although rhetorical possibilities offered by hagiography as a genre have been masterfully examined by Charles LaPorte in context of Victorian poetry, no similar attempt has been made to theorize relevance of such textual models to major Victorian prose genres--a peculiar oversight, considering more obvious generic resemblances between hagiographic writing and nineteenth-century prose narratives. It is particularly surprising that generic relations between hagiography and nineteenth-century Bildungsroman have not attracted more critical attention, for suggestive parallels exist between these two text-types: both focus on formation of individuals, whose lives are often conceived of in terms of a journey; there is in both kinds of writing an emphasis on interiority of their subjects, and turning points, or moments of revelation, are usually readily identifiable. Structural similarities aside, larger rhetorical functions of two genres are remarkably congruent: hagiographic narratives and novels of development both employ textually-mediated manifestations of personality in order to affirm a particular system of values, and to provide suitable models for emulation. Widely recognized as definitive Bildungsroman, Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1821) gestures to intimate relationship between two genres by means of its very constitution: by embedding Confessions of a Fair Saint within novel, (1) Goethe quite explicitly invites us to explore generic affiliations between hagiography and Bildungsroman. This essay attempts to respond to this invitation by considering George Eliot's engagement with notion of hagiography in The Mill on Floss (1860). To be sure, Eliot's interest in concept of sainthood and hagiography has not gone entirely unnoticed, and several noteworthy studies have registered and elaborated on comparison between Dorothea Brooke and St. Theresa in Middlemarch (1871-72). Robert Damm and Hilary Fraser usefully suggest potential value of studying function of hagiographic discourse in Eliot's writing, but Damm leaves crucial link between sainthood and writing unexplored, while Fraser confines her study to way in which hagiographic references to a particular saint (St. Theresa) contribute to characterization of Dorothea. Building on such studies as Damm's and Fraser's in order to revise limited role that R. J. Schork assigns to hagiography in Eliot's writing, (2) my own essay examines Eliot's sustained meditation in The Mill on Floss on question of what it might mean to construct a saintly life in nineteenth-century England, and proposes that her peculiar Bildungsroman can profitably be read as an exercise in modern hagiography--an attempt to adapt this longstanding tradition of Christian writing for modern, secular ends. …

The Voices in "The Desert Music"

William Carlos Williams wrote Desert for fifteen-minute performance at the Sanders Theater at Harvard in June 1951. It was composed in the weeks following his first stroke at the end of March, few months after his return from long reading tour across the western United States. The poem had to justify his selection poet of the year by the Alpha chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa society, reassure Williams that he could still write poetry, express insights he had reached during the past year of intense conversations on his travels, and lend itself to oral performance. Perhaps surprisingly given the occasion, which he described to Louis Zukofsky the next day semi-ecclesiastic, hall hallowed by tradition (Ahearn 439) his poem was, he told Zukofsky low (high), drawing on memories of visit with his wife and Robert McAlmon to the Mexican border town of Juarez where they visited the market, saw strip tease, and listened to banal music. The result was his most sustained meditation on the situation of poetry sound in the modern world, poem that brilliantly addresses the question of it means to be modern poet in the nineteen-fifties, and does so by exploring another question: what does the poem sound like in the modern world? Desert is not just one of the collected editions of his poetry called his later poems;1 it would seem to exemplify Edward Said's idea of late style as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction, (7) lacking harmony and resolution. Even the poet's own identity is fractured, his own Hispanic roots marked by Spanish middle name appear to leave him stranded on border, like the shapeless form in the poem, between Anglophone and Latin American cultures. He catches this division neatly in strategic linebreak when he records the slightly ironic challenge offered by one of McAlmon's companions: It is not difficult to hear quizzical vocal emphasis on the middle name, if that were his actual name and the repeated name William were mask for the other identity: so this is William Carlos Williams. The sound and sense of fracturing identity is closely tied to his sense of lateness. He reflects wryly in response to series of questions about why one should want to write poem at all: This is tacit allusion to classic of late literature, Goethe's conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann. In John Oxenford's translation Goethe complains about his isolation and the geographical dispersal of his intellectual contemporaries in an oddly graphic image: Our talents and men of brains are scattered over the whole of Germany ... so that personal contact and personal exchange of thought may be considered rarities (20O).2 No doubt this lament resonated with Williams after his stroke and his recent journeys to see the men of brains scattered across America, though with certain irony the poem presents us not with modern [Alexander von] Humboldt but the sick McAlmon and his uncomprehending relatives. The intimations of Goethe (and of Yeats, I shall show) are part of heterogeneous pattern of echoes, outbursts, conventional stanzas, and single disconnected lines barely connected by narrative, all of which assemble into work for which the adjectives that Said excavates from Adorno's account of Beethoven's late compositions seem remarkably apposite: distracted (10), 'catching fire between extremes' (10), a plethora of 'unmastered material' (11), and self-imposed exile from is generally acceptable (16) are typical examples. Although Said discusses plays, prose, films, and poems, his meditations always return to music. Music is the art most sensitive to lateness, because although it is temporal form it rarely uses historically indexical material: it is not representational art are texts and images but highly structural art capable of registering the finest gradations of discontinuity and fragmentation; non-semiotic sound, it transcends the limitations of national boundaries marked by language; and acoustically it immerses the body making its mortal presence an inescapable accompaniment. …

The Sisyphean Task of Art

SPENCER FINCH: WHAT TIME IS IT ON THE SUN? MASS MOCA NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS MAY 26, 2007-MARCH 31, 2008 After the monochromatic canvases of Kasimir Malevich, Helio Oiticica, and Robert Ryman, it might be difficult to envision an artist who could make an entirely work of two dimensions seem novel. But Spencer Finch, whose exhibition, What Time Is It on the Sun?, currently occupies the entire first floor of MASS MoCA, has accomplished just that. His white drawings, which include Sun (August 27, 2001) (2001), created by exposing a sheet of paper to the sun from dawn to dusk, suggest that there is far more to the world than can be discerned at first glance. The result of this long exposure is a barely perceptible warping that stands as a testament to the power of otherwise invisible sunlight. It reminds us that for much of history, one of the more noble goals of art was to inspire sustained meditation on the elusive brilliance of nature. Finch's art does this and more. Fittingly, the show's title is derived from Ludwig Wittgenstein, as Finch's experiments bear witness to the ineffable nature of all sensory perception. It was Wittgenstein who stated, If a lion could talk, we would not understand him, proposing that how one perceives and thus describes the world is entirely individual. This philosophical truth is borne out in two of Finch's endeavors from the installation Studio Interior (Odor of the Gowanus Canal Six Attempts), August 7, 1995, and the painting Grand Canyon from Walhalla Plateau with My Eyes Closed (morning, late morning, noon, evening effects, October 16/17, 1995). In Studio Interior, Finch tries to recreate the smell of the polluted water outside his Brooklyn studio, using pastels to create six multi-hued squares that range from a fiery yellow to a corrosive gray. But Finch's attempts (as he rightfully refers to them) at synesthesia are ultimately that: mere attempts. A tactile person might find these images too flat to recall what once viscerally overwhelmed them; a visual person might find Finch's pea-green the perfect olfactory invocation of something putrid, yet find his purple inoffensive. No descriptive system seems quite right. In Grand Canyon, Finch tries to capture the view of that iconic landscape through his eyelids, and renders it as a palpably heated blend of reddish-brown brushstrokes that seemingly pulse and hum. Here, in using a visual medium to recreate a visual effect, one might be tempted to think that Finch comes closer to achieving a universal point of view. But, like Wittgenstein's queries, Finch's witty trials reveal just how subjective seeing through our own eyes really is. The influence of Eastern philosophy is also present, particularly the contemplation of nature's transience and the futility of trying to recreate its beauty in art. …

“Un drame interdit d'accès”: Remembrance and the Prohibited Past in Barbara Honigmann's Generational Texts

Discussions of Barbara Honigmann, both inside and outside academia, have repeatedly placed her work on the cusp of what is summarily cast as Jewish relations, thus framing her as a writer whose main artistic interest lies in the exploration of, to borrow from Homi Bhabha, hybrid or interstitial figurations of culture (see especially, The Location of Culture 1-12). This approach is anchored in Honigmann's frequently cited biography, the fact that she was born and grew up in an assimilated Jewish family in the GDR, but decided, in 1984, to leave Berlin for Strasbourg, where she has worked and lived ever since. As one of her many autobiographically inspired first-person narrators explains in Bonsoir, Madame Benhamou, a short piece at the end of her first prose collection Roman von einent Kinde (1986), this emigration amounted to a triple Todessprung ohne Netz: vom Osten in den Westen, von Deutschland nach Frankreich und aus der Assimilation mitten in das Thora-Judentum hinein (111). This heavily condensed (auto)biographeme, summarizing Honigmann's existence between a number of worlds to which she, in various ways, lays claim, has materialized as the single-most quoted sentence from her work, and not coincidentally: for it establishes, as indicated above, the basis for a certain mode of reading that is engaged in narrating and redefining identity positions outside and beyond the framework of the nation (Remmler, En-gendering Bodies of Memory 53; Guenther 216; Fiero 62),1 moreover from an emphatically gendered perspective (Lorenz 210-15). In view of this lethal leap, then, her texts are often seen as negotiating the terms of a double life, a Doppelleben, as Honigmann says herself in her acceptance speech for the Kleist-Preis in 2000 (Das Schiefe 35), which is suspended between her allegiance to German language and literature as an author writing in German, on the one hand, and her concerted efforts to reclaim an active Jewish identity moored in religious practice, on the other. My own reading, in essence sympathetic to the critical approach sketched above, seeks to delay the through which Honigmann's texts are organized thematically as figurations of Doppelleben and identitarian pluralization. It aims to effect a return to an implied moment in this discussion, namely to the by now firmly established reconceptualization of identity, to cast it in the words of one of Honigmann's critics, Christina Guenther, as process (216). Although Guenther, to stay with her example, does not seem to use these terms in a strong sense, I would like to seize upon what they propose in order to establish Honigmann's texts as acutely attuned to the challenges of envisioning and writing a possible relation between I and Other as a precarious performance in language; more specifically, as a colloquy always haunted by the prospect of failure. This is especially poignant in what could be called her or genealogical texts-i.e., essays, stories, and novels dedicated to representing complex intergenerational constellations in post-war Europe-because repeatedly, particularly due to the freighted past of the Third Reich, no exchange seems possible, let alone communication between parents and children of Jewish background, however much desired by the latter. As the first-person narrator of Graber in London, a narrative which is part of Honigmann's Damals, dann unddanach (1999), her most sustained meditation on identity in the landscape of post-war Europe, explains: Unsere Eltern sprachen nicht besonders gerne uber die Vergangenheit und schauten nicht gerne zuruck. So war unsere Herkunft eher mythischer Art, ein Geheimnis, nichts jedenfalls, das mil einem normalen Leben oder auch nur mit einem Gesprach daruber zu tun hatte (my emphasis; Damals 27). Honigmann's generational prose is full of instances that narrate or imply these impossible conversations between children and parents. In what follows, I investigate this hesitancy or even refusal to speak as a condition that lies at the heart of the communicative or dialogic of identity so patiently portrayed in many of her texts. …