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Page [unnumbered] BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD TARGET Graduate Library University of Michigan Preservation Office Storage Number: 010:: a 67000232 ACT2080 022/1:0: a 0026-2420 035/1:: a (RLIN)MIUG0690-S 035/2:: a (CaOTULAS)175715235 040:: c MUL Id CtY d DLC id NSDP d MiU 042:: I a Ic a nsdp 050/1:0: a AS30 I b.M48 082/1:: a051 222/1:00: | a Michigan quarterly review 245:00: | a Michigan quarterly review. 260:: | a Ann Arbor, I b University of Michigan. 300/1:: a v. I bill. Ic26cm. 362/1:0: I a v.1- Jan. 1962 -500/1:: | a Vol. 1, no. 2- issued as the University of Michigan official publication, v. 63, no. 74 -580/2:: | a Electronic serial mode of access: World Wide Web via ProQuest Research Library. 690/1: 4: | a General Interest and Popular Journals and Newspapers 710/1:2: | a University of Michigan. 730/2:0: a ProQuest research library. 740/3:0: a Michigan quarterly review (Online) Scanned by Imagenes Digitales Nogales, AZ On behalf of Preservation Division The University of Michigan Libraries Date work Began: Camera Operator:
Page [unnumbered] ichigan uarterly _ eview Spring 1987 Published at the University of Michigan $3.50
Page [unnumbered] ichigan uartely Vrol. XPXV9r, No. 2 Spring 19879 Vo~l. XXVI, No. 2 Spring 1987"" n~~" MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW is published quarterly (January, April, July, and October) by The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Subscription prices, $13.00 a year, $24.00 for two years; Institutional subscriptions obtained through agencies $15.00 a year; $3.50 a copy; back issues, $2.00. Claims for missing numbers can be honored only within two months after publication. Available on microfilm from Xerox University Microfilms, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106, where full-sized copies of single articles may also be ordered. Reprinted volumes and backvolumes available from AMS Press, Inc., 56 E. 13th St., New York, 10003. Indexed or abstracted in Abstr.E.S., Am.Bib.Cent., Ann.Bib., Bk.R.Hum, BK.R.Inc., P.A.I.S.,P.M.L.A., Index of American Periodical Verse, Index to Periodical Fiction, American Humanities Index. Editorial and business office, 3032 Rackham Bldg., The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109. Unsolicited manuscripts are returned to authors only when accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes or by international postal orders. No responsibility assumed for loss or injury. Second class postage paid at Ann Arbor, Michigan. Copyright ~ The University of Michigan, 1987 All Rights Reserved ISSN 0026-2420 Editor: LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN Associate Editor: E. H. CREETH Administrative Assistant: LOIS BRIGGS-REDISSI Assistant Editors: LYN COFFIN STEPHEN DUNNING ALICE FULTON WILLIAM HOLINGER JOHN KUCICH ALAN WALD Contributing Editors: PHILIP LEVINE ARTHUR MILLER JOYCE CAROL OATES Interns: Lorinda Coombs Judith Gale Suzanne Misencik
Page [unnumbered] EDITORIAL BOARD John W. Aldridge, Chairman Joseph Blotner Enoch Brater Elizabeth Douvan Marvin Eisenberg C. R. Eisendrath Robert Fekety Sidney Fine David A. Hollinger David L. Lewis Alfred S. Sussman Joseph Vining Charles Witke Published with financial support from The Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Now available in a second printing DETROIT: AN AMERICAN CITY Essays, memoirs, fiction, poetry, graphics, and reviews all devoted to the history and spirit of the nation's sixth largest city. 320 pages $8 per issue WOMEN AND MEMORY Edited by Margaret A. Lourie, Domna C. Stanton & Martha Vicinus An interdisciplinary assemblage of essays and reviews, with fiction, poetry, and graphics. $8 per issue Forthcoming Fall 1987: CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION Edited by Nicholas Delbanco
Page [unnumbered] CONTENTS The Spoiling of the American West Why This Obsession, Poetry From 20,000 Feet, Poetry Through the Nursery Window, Poetry Sleeping Through, Fiction AIDS: Five Years and Counting A Plea for Body History Porno; Adultery, Poetry The Sunday Outboard, Poetry The Takeover; Freeze Warning, Poetry Gisants, Poetry Casablanca and the Larcenous Cult Film A Dancer in the Lake, Fiction Catch-22 Twenty-Five Years Later Family Dilemmas in Holocaust Literature Lt There is a Way to Walk on Water, Poetry Brother, I Am Here, Poetry (trans., Carolyn Kizer with Y.H. Zhao) BOOKS Essaying: Hot and Cool Fame and Its Audience Scholars of Decadence Dialogues Between History and Dream Recent Books in Review (Geoff Eley on Bitburg; Claudia Thomas on Pope) Wallace Stegner Macklin Smith Heather McHugh W.D. Snodgrass Bret Lott June E. Osborn Ivan Illich Baron Wormser Stephen Sandy Jane O. Wayne Clayton Eshleman 293 311 314 315 317 324 342 349 351 353 355 J.P. Telotte 357 Rita J. Doucette 369 John W. Aldridge 379 iwrence L. Langer 387 Pattiann Rogers 400 Shu Ting 402 Marjorie Perloff 404 Timothy Erwin 413 Herbert Tucker 421 Lisa M. Steinman 428 439 Cover: Highway Bridge across Marble Canyon, Arizona Photograph by Howard Bond
Page [unnumbered] JOHN W. ALDRIDGE is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of a number of critical books, most recently The American Novel and the Way We Live Now. RITA J. DOUCETTE's stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Story Quarterly, and MQR (Spring 1985). A resident of Salem, she currently works on the floor of the Boston Stock Exchange for Pershing. GEOFF ELEY is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. His most recent book is a collection of essays, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Allen & Unwin, 1986). TIMOTHY ERWIN is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers, where he specializes in eighteenth century and modern literature. He is a former editor of Chicago Review. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN's The Name Encanyoned River: Selected Poems 1960-1985 was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1986, and his Selected Prose will appear this fall from McPherson & Co. He is Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. IVAN ILLICH's books of social commentary include Deschooling Society (1971), Energy and Equity (1974), Medical Nemesis (1975), Shadow Work (1981), and Gender (1982). LAWRENCE L. LANGER, Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons College, is the author of The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975), The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (1978), and Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (1982). His present project is a book called Injured Merit: The Rebellious Spirit from Milton to Dostoevsky. BRET LOTT's first novel, The Man Who Owned Vermont, will be published by Viking in June. His stories have appeared, among other places, in The Yale Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, and in the collection 20 Under 30. HEATHER McHUGH is currently Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, on leave from the University of Washington. Her latest book, To the Quick, has just appeared from Wesleyan, and the next, Shades, is due in February of 1988. JUNE E. OSBORN is Dean, and Professor of Epidemiology, in the School of Public Health, as well as Professor of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases, Medical School, at the University of Michigan. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the National Academy
Page [unnumbered] of Sciences/Institute of Medicine Committee to Assess National Strategies for AIDS Research and Health Care, and Chairman of the World Health Organization Technical Working Group on Blood. MARJORIE PERLOFF's most recent book is The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. She is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. PATTIANN ROGERS's second book, The Tattooed Lady in the Garden was recently published by Wesleyan University Press. She teaches at Vermont College. STEPHEN SANDY, Professor of English at Bennington, will publish a new collection of peoms, Man In The Open Air, from Alfred A. Knopf next year. MACKLIN SMITH, Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, has published a book and several articles on medieval literature. He has just completed a manuscript of poems on birding in Alaska. W.D. SNODGRASS, Professor of English at the University of Delaware, is the author of three major collections of poetry, Heart's Needle (1959), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, After Experience (1968), and The Fiihrer Bunker (1977), as well as a book of critical essays, In Radical Pursuit (1975), and several collections of translations. WALLACE STEGNER retired in 1971 from Stanford University, where he served as Jackson E. Reynolds Professor of Humanities. His novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, and the novel The Spectator Bird won the National Book Award in 1977. For many years he has been writing about and working for the environment. In 1961 he served as special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, and from 1962 to 1967 he was a member of the Advisory Board on National Parks, Historical Sites, Buildings, and Monuments. LISA M. STEINMAN is Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. She is the author of a book of poetry (Lost Names, Ithaca House) and of a book about American poetry (Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets, Yale University Press, 1987). J.P. TELOTTE's book on film fantasy, Dreams of Darkness, appeared recently from University of Illinois Press, and his essays on various film genres have appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, Western Humanities Review, Genre, Quarterly Review of Film
Page [unnumbered] Studies, and South Atlantic Review. He is coeditor of the journal Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, and a professor in the humanities department at Georgia Institute of Technology. CLAUDIA THOMAS is Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University. She is working on a study of Pope's works in relation to contemporary readers. SHU TING, born in 1952, began to write poems in the early 1970s and since then has achieved recognition throughout China as the leading member among the Chinese New Poets. Her translator, CAROLYN KIZER, has recently published The Nearness of You from Copper Canyon Press. HERBERT TUCKER is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure (University of Minnesota Press, 1980), and the forthcoming Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism from Harvard University Press. JANE 0. WAYNE's Looking Both Ways (University of Missouri Press, 1984) received the Devins Award for Poetry in 1985. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Massachusetts Review, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. BARON WORMSER's most recent book of poetry is Good Trembling, from Houghton Mifflin.
Page [unnumbered] AN INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY VOLUME 53, NUMBER 4 OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES WINTER 1986 A publication of the GRADUATE FACULTY SOCIAL RESEARCH KEYNES AND FREUD ORDER AND DISORDER E.G. Winslow IN FREUD'S VIENNA James Walkup NATURAL SOCIETY, REIFICATION, AND SOCIALIST INSTITUTIONS IN MARX Joergen Poulsen IS THE METHOD ALL MADNESS? COMMENTS FROM A PARTICIPANT OBSERVER ECONOMIST S.S. Sivakumar MICHEL FOUCAULT'S HISTORY OF SEXUALITY AS INTERPRETED BY FEMINISTS AND MARXISTS Edith Kurzweil NOTES ON THE THE MORAL STATUS OF THE MORAL STATUS CHILD IN LATE IMPERIAL OF THE CHILD CHINA Ann Waltner THE EVOLUTION OF THE STATUS OF THE CHILD IN WESTERN EUROPE Jacques Gelis THE BYZANTINE CHILD Ann Moffatt Individual Subscriptions: $20; Institutions: $40 Single copies available on request Editorial and Business Office: 66 West 12th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011 Room GF354
Page [unnumbered] Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, Arizona. Photograph by Howard Bond
Wallace StegnerStegner, WallaceThe Spoling of the American WestVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 293-310http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:01
Page 293 WALLACE STEGNER THE SPOILING OF THE AMERICAN WEST The summer of 1948 my family and I spent on Struthers Burt's ranch in Jackson Hole. I was just beginning a biography of John Wesley Powell, and learning some things about the West that I had not understood before. During that busy and instructive interval my wife and I were also acting as western editors and scouts for a publishing house, and now and then someone came by with a manuscript or the idea for a book. The most memorable of these was a famous architect contemplating his autobiography. One night he showed us slides of some of his houses, including a million-dollar palace in the California desert of which he was very proud. He said it demonstrated that with imagination, technical know-how, modern materials, and enough money, an architect could build anywhere without constraints, imposing his designed vision on any site, in any climate. In that waterless pale desert spotted with shadscale and creosote bush and backed by barren, lion-colored mountains, another sort of architect, say Frank Lloyd Wright, might have designed something contextual, something low, broad-eaved, thick-walled, something that would mitigate the hot light, something half underground so that people could retire like the lizards and rattlesnakes from the intolerable daytime temperatures, something made of native stone or adobe or tamped earth in the colors and shapes of the country, something no more visually obtrusive than an outcrop. Not this architect. He had built of cinderblock, in the form of Bauhaus cubes, the only right angles in that desert. He had painted them a dazzling white. Instead of softening the lines between building and site, he had accentuated them, surrounding his sugary cubes Delivered as one of the Cook Lectures in the School of Law at the University of Michigan, October 29, 1986. 293
Page 294 294 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW with acres of lawn and a tropical oasis of oleanders, hibiscus, and palms - not the native Washingtonia palms either, which are a little scraggly, but sugar and royal palms, with a classier, more Santa Barbara look. Water for this estancia, enough water to have sustained a whole tribe of desert Indians, he had brought by private pipeline from the mountains literally miles away. The patio around the pool - who would live in the desert without a pool? - would have fried the feet of swimmers, three hundred days out of the year, and so he had designed canopies that could be extended and retracted by push-button, and under the patio's concrete he had laid pipes through which cool water circulated by day. By night, after the desert chill came on, the circulating water was heated. He had created an artificial climate, inside and out. Studying that luxurious, ingenious, beautiful, sterile incongruity, I told its creator, sincerely, that I thought he could build a comfortable house in hell. That pleased him; he thought so too. What I didn't tell him, what he would not have understood, was that we thought his desert house immoral. It exceeded limits, it offended our sense not of the possible but of the desirable. There was no economic or social reason for anyone's living on a barren flat, however beautiful, where every form of life sought shelter during the unbearable daylight hours. The only reasons for building there were to let mad dogs and rich men go out in the midday sun, and to let them own and dominate a view they admired. The house didn't fit the country, it challenged it. It asserted America's never-say-never spirit. It seemed to us an act of arrogance on the part of both owner and architect. I felt like asking him, What if a super-rich Eskimo wanted a luxury house on Point Hope? Would you build it for him? Would you dam the Kobuk and bring megawatts of power across hundreds of miles of tundra, and set up batteries of blower-heaters to melt the snow and thaw the permafrost, and would you erect an international style house with picture windows through which the Eskimo family could look out across the lawn and strawberry bed and watch polar bears on the pack ice? He might have taken on such a job, and he was good enough to make it work, too-until the power line blew down or shorted out. Then the Eskimos he had encouraged to forget igloo-building and seal-oil lamps would freeze into ice sculptures, monuments to human pride. But of course that is all fantasy. Eskimos, a highly
Page 295 WALLACE STEGNER 295 adapted and adaptable people, would have more sense than to challenge their arctic habitat that way. Even if they had unlimited money. Which they don't. That desert house seemed to me, and still seems to me, a paradigm-hardly a paradigm, more a caricature-of what we have been doing to the West in my lifetime. Instead of adapting, as we began to do, we have tried to make country and climate over to fit our existing habits and desires. Instead of listening to the silence, we have shouted into the void. We have tried to make the arid West into what it was never meant to be and cannot remain, the Garden of the World and the home of multiple millions. That does not mean either that the West should never have been settled or that water should never be managed. The West - the habitable parts of it-is a splendid habitat for a limited population living within the country's rules of sparseness and mobility. If the unrestrained engineering of western water was original sin, as I believe, it was essentially a sin of scale. Anyone who wants to live in the West has to manage water to some degree. Ranchers learned early to turn creeks onto their hay land. Homesteaders not on a creek learned to dam a run-off coulee to create a "rezavoy" as we did in Saskatchewan in 1915. Kansas and Oklahoma farmers set windmills to pumping up the underground water. Towns brought their water, by ditch or siphon, from streams up on the watershed. Irrigation, developed first by the Southwestern Indians and the New Mexico Spanish, and reinvented by the Mormons - it was a necessity that came with the territory - was expanded in the 1870s and 1880s by such cooperative communities as Greeley, Colorado, and by small-to-medium corporate ventures such as the one I wrote about in Angle of Repose - the project on the Boise River that after its failure was taken over by the Bureau of Reclamation and called the Arrowrock Dam. Early water engineers and irrigators bit off what they and the local community could chew. They harnessed the streams that they could manage. Some dreamers did take on larger rivers, as Arthur Foote took on the Boise, and went broke at it. By and large, by 1890 individual, corporate, and cooperative irrigators had gone about as far as they could go with water engineering; their modest works were for local use and under local control. It might have been better if the West had stopped there. Instead, all through the 1890s the
Page 296 296 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW unsatisfied boosters called for federal aid to let the West realize its destiny, and in 1902 they got the Newlands Act. This permitted the feds to undertake water projects - remember that water was stateowned, or at least state regulated - and created the Bureau of Reclamation. Reclamation projects were to be paid for by fees charged irrigation districts, the period for paying off the interest-free indebtedness being first set at ten years. Later that was upped to twenty, later still to forty. Eventually much of the burden of repayment was shifted from the sale of water to the sale of hydro-power, and a lot of the burden eliminated entirely by the practice of river-basin accounting, with write-offs for flood control, job creation, and other public goods. Once it was lured in, the federal government - which meant taxpayers throughout the country, including taxpayers in states that resented western reclamation because they saw themselves asked to pay for something that would compete unfairly with their own farmers- absorbed or wrote off more and more of the costs, accepting the fact that reclamation was a continuing subsidy to western agriculture. Even today, when municipal and industrial demands for water have greatly increased, 80 % to 90 % of the water used in the West is used, often wastefully, on fields, to produce crops generally in surplus elsewhere. After all the billions spent by the Bureau of Reclamation, the total area irrigated by its projects is about the size of Ohio, and the water impounded and distributed by the Bureau is about 15 % of all the water utilized in the West. What has been won is only a beachhead, and a beachhead that is bound to shrink. One of the things Westerners should ponder, but generally do not, is their relation to and attitude toward the federal presence. The bureaus administering all the empty space that gives Westerners much of their outdoor pleasure and many of their special privileges and a lot of their pride and self-image are frequently resented, resisted, or manipulated by those who benefit economically from them but would like to benefit more, and are generally taken for granted by the general public. The federal presence should be recognized as what it is: a reaction against our former profligacy and wastefulness, an effort at adaptation and stewardship in the interest of the environment and the future. In contrast to the principal water agency, the Bureau of Reclamation, which was a creation of the boosters and remains their
Page 297 WALLACE STEGNER 297 creature, and whose prime purpose is technological conversion of the arid lands, the land-managing bureaus all have as at least part of their purpose the preservation of the West in a relatively natural, healthy, and sustainable condition. Yellowstone became the first national park in 1872 because a party of Montana tourists around a campfire voted down a proposal to exploit it for profit, and pledged themselves to try to get it protected as a permanent pleasuring-ground for the whole country. The national forests began because the bad example of Michigan scared Congress about the future of the country's forests, and induced it in 1891 to authorize the reservation of public forest lands by presidential proclamation. Benjamin Harrison took large advantage of the opportunity. Later, Grover Cleveland did the same, and so did Theodore Roosevelt. The West, predictably, cried aloud at having that much plunder removed from circulation, and in 1907 western Congressmen put a rider on an agricultural appropriations bill that forbade any more presidential reservations without the prior consent of Congress. Roosevelt could have pocket-vetoed it. Instead, he and his Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot sat up all night over the maps and surveys of potential reserves, and by morning Roosevelt had signed into existence twenty-one new national forests, sixteen million acres of them. Then he signed the bill that would have stopped him. It was Theodore Roosevelt, too, who created the first wildlife refuge in 1903, thus beginning a service whose territories, since the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, now exceed those of the National Park Service by ten million acres. As for the biggest land manager of all, the Bureau of Land Management, it is the inheritor of the old General Land Office whose job was to dispose of the Public Domain to homesteaders, and its lands are the leftovers once (erroneously) thought to be worthless. Worthless or not, they could not be indefinitely neglected and abused. The health of lands around them depended on their health. They were assumed as a permanent federal responsibility by the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, but the Grazing Service then created was a helpless and toothless bureau dominated by local councils packed by local stockmen-foxes set by other foxes to watch the henhouse, in a travesty of democratic local control. The Grazing Service was succeeded by the Bureau of Land Management, which was finally given some teeth by the Federal Land Policy and Man
Page 298 298 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW agement Act (FLPMA) of 1976. No sooner did it get the teeth that would have let it do its job than the Sagebrush Rebels offered to knock them out. The Rebels didn't have to. Instead, President Reagan gave them James Watt as Secretary of the Interior, and James Watt gave them Robert Burford as head of the BLM. The rebels simmered down, their battle won for them by administrative appointment, and BLM remains a toothless bureau. All of the bureaus walk a line somewhere between preservation and exploitation. The enabling act of the National Park Service in 1916 charged it to provide for the use without impairment of the parks. It is an impossible assignment, especially now that more than three hundred million people visit the national parks annually, but the Park Service tries. The National Forest Service, born out of Pinchot's philosophy of "wise use," began with the primary purpose of halting unwise use, and as late as the 1940s so informed a critic as Bernard DeVoto thought it the very best of the federal bureaus. But it changed its spots during the first Eisenhower administration, under the Mormon patriarch Ezra Taft Benson as Secretary of Agriculture, and began aggressively to harvest board feet. Other legitimate usesrecreation, watershed and wildlife protection, the gene-banking of wild plant and animal species, and especially wilderness preservation-it either neglected or resisted whenever they conflicted with logging. By now, unhappily, environmental groups tend to see the Forest Service not as the protector of an invaluable public resource and the true champion of multiple use, but as one of the enemy, allied with the timber interests. The Forest Service, under attack, has reacted with a hostility bred of its conviction that it is unjustly criticized. As a consequence of that continuing confrontation, nearly every master plan prepared in obedience to the National Forest Management Act of 1976 has been challenged and will be fought, in the courts if necessary, by the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and other organizations. The usual charge: too many timber sales, too often at a loss in money as well as in other legitimate values, and far too much roading-roading being a preliminary to logging and a way of forestalling wilderness designation by spoiling the wilderness in advance. What is taking place is that Congress has been responding to public pressures to use the national forests for newly-perceived social
Page 299 WALLACE STEGNER 299 goods; and the National Forest Service, for many years an almost autonomous bureau with a high morale and, from a forester's point of view, high principles, is resisting that imposition of control. Not even the Fish and Wildlife Service, dedicated to the preservation of wild species and their habitats, escapes criticism, for under pressure from stockmen it has historically waged war on predators, especially coyotes, and the 1080 poison baits that it distributed destroyed not only coyotes but hawks, eagles, and other wildlife that the agency was created to protect. One result has been a good deal of public suspicion. Even the current device of 1080 collars for sheep and lambs, designed to affect only an attacking predator, is banned in thirty states. The protection provided by these various agencies is of course imperfect. Every reserve is an island, and its boundaries are leaky. Nevertheless this is the best protection we have, and not to be disparaged. All Americans, but especially Westerners whose backyard is at stake, need to ask themselves whose bureaus these should be. Half of the West is in their hands. Do they exist to provide bargainbasement grass to favored stockmen whose grazing privileges have become all but hereditary, assumed and bought and sold along with the title to the home spread? Are they hired exterminators of wildlife? Is it their function to negotiate loss-leader coal leases with energy conglomerates, and to sell timber below cost to Louisiana Pacific? Or should they be serving the much larger public whose outdoor recreations of backpacking, camping, fishing, hunting, river-running, mountain climbing, hang-gliding, and, God help us, dirt-biking are incompatible with clear-cut forests and overgrazed, poison-baited, and stripmined grasslands? Or is there a still higher duty - to maintain the health and beauty of the lands they manage, protecting from everybody, including such destructive segments of the public as dirt-bikers and pot-hunters, the watersheds and spawning streams, forests and grasslands, geological and scenic splendors, historical and archaeological remains, air and water and serene space, that once led me, in a reckless moment, to call the western public lands part of the geography of hope? As I have known them, most of the field representatives of all the bureaus, including the BLM, do have a sense of responsibility about the resources they oversee, and a frequent frustration that they are not permitted to oversee them better. But that sense of duty is not visible in some, and at the moment is least visible in the political
Page 300 300 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW appointees who make or enunciate policy. Even when policy is intelligently made and well understood, it sometimes cannot be enforced because of local opposition. More than one Forest ranger or BLM man who tried to enforce the rules has had to be transferred out of a district to save him from violence. There are many books on the Public Domain. One of the newest and best is These American Lands, by Dyan Zaslowsky and the Wilderness Society, published by Henry Holt and Company. I recommend it, not only for its factual accuracy and clarity, but for its isolation of problems and its suggestions of solutions. Here all I can do is repeat that the land bureaus have a strong, often disregarded influence on how life is lived in the West. They provide and protect the visible, available, unfenced space that surrounds almost all western cities and towns - surrounds them as water surrounds fish, and is their living element. The bureaus need, and some would welcome, the kind of public attention that would force them to behave in the long-range public interest. Though I have been involved in controversies with some of them, the last thing I would want to see is their dissolution and a return to the policy of disposal, for that would be the end of the West as I have known and loved it. Neither state ownership nor private ownership -which state ownership would soon become -could offer anywhere near the disinterested stewardship that these imperfect and embattled federal bureaus do, while at the same time making western space available to millions. They have been the strongest impediment to the careless ruin of what remains of the Public Domain, and they will be necessary as far ahead as I, at least, can see. The Bureau of Reclamation is something else. From the beginning, its aim has been not the preservation but the remaking-in effect the mining - of the West. A principal justification for the Newlands Act was that fabled Jeffersonian yeoman, that small freehold farmer, who was supposed to benefit from the Homestead Act, the Desert Land Act, the Timber and Stone Act, and other land-disposal legislation, and rarely did so west of the 98th meridian. The publicized purpose of federal reclamation was the creation of family farms that would eventually feed the world and build prosperous rural commonwealths in deserts formerly fit for nothing but horned toads and rattlesnakes. To insure
Page 301 WALLACE STEGNER 301 that these small farmers would not be done out of their rights by large landowners and water users, Congress wrote into the act a clause limiting the use of water under Reclamation Bureau dams to the amount that would serve a family farm of 160 acres. Behind the pragmatic, manifest-destinarian purpose of pushing western settlement was another motive: the hard determination to dominate Nature which historian Lynn White, in a well-known essay, identified as part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Nobody implemented that impulse more uncomplicatedly than the Mormons, a chosen people who believed the Lord when He told them to make the desert blossom as the rose. Nobody expressed it more bluntly than a Mormon hierarch, John Widtsoe, in the middle of the irrigation campaigns: "The destiny of man is to possess the whole earth; the destiny of the earth is to be subject to man. There can be no full conquest of the earth, and no real satisfaction to humanity, if large portions of the earth remain beyond his highest control." That doctrine offends me to the bottom of my not-very-Christian soul. It is related to the spirit that builds castles of incongruous luxury in the desert. It is the same spirit that between 1930 and the present has so dammed, diverted, used and reused the Colorado River that its saline waters now never reach the Gulf of California, but die in the sand miles from the sea; that has set the Columbia, a far mightier river, to tamely turning turbines; that has reduced the Missouri, the greatest river on the continent, to a string of ponds; that has recklessly pumped down the underground water table of every western valley and threatens to dry up even so prolific a source as the Ogalalla Aquifer; that has made the Salt River Valley of Arizona, and the Imperial, Coachella, and great Central Valleys of California into gardens of fabulous but deceptive richness; that has promoted a new rush to the West fated, like the beaver and grass and gold rushes, to recede after doing great environmental damage. The Garden of the World has been a glittering dream, and many find its fulfillment exhilarating. I do not. I have already said that I think of the main-stem dams that made it possible as original sin, but there is neither a serpent nor a guilty first couple in the story. In Adam's fall we sinned all. Our very virtues as a pioneering people, the very genius of our industrial civilization, drove us to act as we did. God and Manifest Destiny spoke with one voice urging us to "conquer" or "win" the West; and there was no voice of comparable authority to remind us of Mary Austin's quiet but profound truth,
Page 302 302 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW that the manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and that the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion. Obviously, reclamation is not the panacea it once seemed. Plenty of people in 1987 are opposed to more dams, and there is plenty of evidence against the long-range viability and the social and environmental desirability of large-scale irrigation agriculture. Nevertheless, millions of Americans continue to think of the waterengineering in the West as one of our proudest achievements, a technology that we should export to backward Third World nations to help them become as we are. We go on praising apples as if eating them were an injunction of the Ten Commandments. For its first thirty years, the Bureau of Reclamation struggled, plagued by money problems and unable to perform as its boosters had promised. It got a black eye for being involved, in shady ways, with William Mulholland's steal of the Owens Valley's water for the benefit of Los Angeles. The early dams it completed sometimes served not an acre of public land. It did increase homestead filings substantially, but not all those homesteads ended up in the hands of Jeffersonian yeomen: according to a 1922 survey, it had created few family farms; the 160-acre limitation was never enforced; threequarters of the farmers in some reclamation districts were tenants. Drouth, Depression, and the New Deal's effort to make public works jobs gave the Bureau new life. It got quick appropriations for the building of the Boulder (Hoover) Dam, already authorized, and it took over from the State of California construction of the enormous complex of dams and ditches called the Central Valley Project, designed to harness all the rivers flowing westward out of the Sierra. It grew like a mushroom, like an exhalation. By the 1940s the bureau that only a few years before had been hanging on by a shoestring was constructing, simultaneously, the four greatest dams ever built on earth up to that time-Hoover, Shasta, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee- and was already the greatest force in the West. It had discovered where power was, and allied itself with it: with the growers and landowners, private and corporate, whose interests it served, and with the political delegations, often elected out of this same group, who carried the effort in Washington for more and more pork-barrel projects. In matters of western water there are no political parties. You cannot tell Barry Goldwater from Mo Udall, or Orrin Hatch from Richard Lamm.
Page 303 WALLACE STEGNER 303 Nevertheless there was growing opposition to dams from nature lovers, from economists and cost-counters, and from political representatives of areas that resented paying these costs to subsidize their competition. Uniting behind the clause in the National Park Act that enjoined "use without impairment," environmental groups in 1955 blocked two dams in Dinosaur National Monument and stopped the whole Upper Colorado River Storage Project in its tracks. Later, in the 1960s, they also blocked a dam in Marble Canyon, on the Colorado, and another in Grand Canyon National Monument, at the foot of the Grand Canyon. In the process they accumulated substantial evidence- economic, political, and environmental- against dams, the bureau that built them, and the principles that guided that bureau. President Jimmy Carter had a lot of public sympathy when he tried to stop nine water-project boondoggles, most of them in the West, in 1977. Though the hornet's nest he stirred up taught him something about western water politics, observers noted that no new water projects were authorized by Congress until the very last days of the 99th Congress, in October 1986. The great days of dam-building are clearly over, for the best damsites are used up, most of the rivers are "tamed," costs have risen exponentially, and public support of reclamation has given way to widespread and searching criticism. It is not a bad time to assess what the big era of water engineering has done to the West. The voices of reappraisal are already a chorus. Four books in particular, all published within the past five years, have examined western water developments and practices in detail. They are Philip Fradkin's A River No More, about the killing of the Colorado; William A. Kahrl's Water and Power, on the rape of the Owens Valley by Los Angeles; Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire, a dismaying survey of our irrigation society in the light of Karl Wittvogel's studies of the ancient hydraulic civilizations of Mesopotamia and China; and Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, a history that pays particular and unfriendly attention to the Bureau of Reclamation and its most empire-building director, Floyd Dominy. None of those books is calculated to please agribusiness or the politicians and bureaucrats who have served it. Their consensus is that reclamation dams and their little brother the centrifugal pump have made an impressive omelet but have broken many eggs, some
Page 304 304 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW of them golden, and are in the process of killing the goose that laid them. Begin with some environmental consequences of "taming" rivers, if only because the first substantial opposition to dams was environmental. First, dams do literally kill rivers, which means they kill not only living water and natural scenery but a whole congeries of values associated with them. The scenery they kill is often of the grandest, for most main-stem dams are in splendid canyons, which they drown. San Francisco drowned the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which many thought as beautiful as Yosemite itself, to insure its future water supply. Los Angeles turned the Owens Valley into a desert by draining off its natural streams. The Bureau of Reclamation drowned Glen Canyon, the most serene and lovely rock funhouse in the West, to provide peaking power for Los Angeles and the Las Vegas Strip. The lakes formed behind the dams are sometimes cited as great additions to public recreation, and Floyd Dominy even published a book to prove that the Glen Canyon Dam had beautified Glen Canyon by drowning it. But draw-down reservoirs rarely live up to their billing. Nothing grows in the zone between low-water-mark and high-water-mark, and except when brimming full, any draw-down reservoir, even Glen Canyon which escapes the worst effects because its walls are vertical, is not unlike a dirty bathtub with a ring of mud and mineral stain around it. A dammed river is not only stoppered like a bathtub, but it is turned on and off like a tap, creating a fluctuation of flow that destroys the riverine and riparian wildlife and creates problems for recreational boatmen who have to adjust to times when the river is mainly boulders and times when it rises thirty feet and washes their tied boats off the beaches. And since dams prohibit the really high flows of the spring runoff, boulders, gravel and detritus pile up into the channel at the mouths of side gulches, and never get washed away. Fishing too suffers, and not merely today's fishing but the future of fishing. Despite their fish ladders, the dams on the Columbia seriously reduced the spawning runs of salmon and steelhead, and they also trapped and killed so many smolts on their way downriver that eventually the federal government had to regulate the river's
Page 305 WALLACE STEGNER 305 flow. The reduction of fishing is felt not only by the off-shore fishing fleets and by Indian tribes with traditional or treaty fishing rights, but by sports fishermen all the way upstream to the Salmon River Mountains in Idaho. If impaired rafting and fishing and sightseeing seems a trivial price to pay for all the economic benefits supposedly brought by dams, reflect that rafting and fishing and sightseeing are not trivial economic activities. Tourism is the biggest industry in every western state. The national parks, which are mainly in the public lands states, saw over three hundred million visitors in 1984. The national forests saw even more. A generation ago, only 5,000 people in all the United States had ever rafted a river; by 1985, 35 million had. Every western river from the Rogue and the Owyhee to the Yampa, Green, San Juan, and Colorado is booked solid through the running season. As the rest of the country grows more stressful as a dwelling place, the quiet, remoteness, and solitude of a week on a wild river become more and more precious to more and more people. It is a good question whether we may not need that silence, space, and solitude for the healing of our raw spirits more than we need surplus cotton and alfalfa, produced for private profit at great public expense. The objections to reclamation go beyond the obvious fact that reservoirs in desert country lose a substantial amount of their impounded water through surface evaporation; and the equally obvious fact that all such reservoirs eventually silt up and become mud flats ending in concrete waterfalls; and the further fact that an occasional dam, because of faulty siting or construction, will go out, as the Teton Dam went out in 1976, bringing disaster to people, towns, and fields below. They go beyond the fact that underground water, recklessly pumped, is quickly depleted, and that some of it will only be renewed in geological time, and that the management of underground water and that of surface water are necessarily linked. The ultimate objection is that irrigation agriculture itself, in deserts where surface evaporation is extreme, has a limited though unpredictable life. Marc Reisner predicts that in the next half century as much irrigated land will go out of production as the Bureau of Reclamation has "reclaimed" in its whole history. Over time, salts brought to the surface by constant flooding and evaporation poison the soil: the ultimate, natural end of an irrigated field in arid country is an alkali flat. That was the end of fields in every historic irrigation civilization except Egypt, where, until the
Page 306 306 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Aswan Dam, the annual Nile flood leached away salts and renewed the soil with fresh silt. Leaching can sometimes be managed if you have enough sweet water and a place to put the run-off. But there is rarely water enough -the water is already 125 % allocated and 100 % used -and what water is available is often itself saline from having run through other fields upstream and having brought their salts back to the river. Colorado River water near the headwaters at Grand Lake is 200 parts per million salt. Below the Wellton-Mohawk District on the Gila it is 6300 ppms salt. The 11/2 million acre-feet that we are pledged to deliver to Mexico is so saline that we are having to build a desalinization plant to sweeten it before we send it across the border. Furthermore, even if you have enough water for occasional leaching, you have to have somewhere to drain off the waste water, which is likely not only to be saline, but to be contaminated with fertilizers, pesticides, and poisonous trace minerals such as selenium. Kesterson Reservoir, in the Central Valley near Los Banos, is a recent notorious instance, whose two-headed, three-legged, or merely dead waterfowl publicized the dangers of draining waste water off into a slough. If it is drained off into a river, or out to sea, the results are not usually so dramatic. But the inedible fish of the New River draining into the Salton Sea, and the periodicallypolluted beaches of Monterey Bay near the mouth of the Salinas River, demonstrate that agricultural runoff is poison anywhere. The West's irrigated bounty is not forever, not on the scale or at the rate we have been gathering it in. The part of it that is dependent on wells is even more precarious than that dependent on dams. In California's San Joaquin Valley, streams and dams supply only 60% of the demand for water; the rest is pumped from wellshundreds and thousands of wells. Pumping exceeds replenishment by a half trillion gallons a year. In places the water table has been pumped down 300 feet; in places the ground itself has sunk thirty feet or more. But with those facts known, and an end clearly in sight, nobody is willing to stop, and there is as yet no state regulation of groundwater pumping. In Arizona the situation is if anything worse. Ninety percent of Arizona's irrigation depends on pumping. And in Nebraska and Kansas and Oklahoma, old Dust Bowl country, they prepare for the next dust bowl, which is as inevitable as sunrise though a little
Page 307 WALLACE STEGNER 307 harder to time, by pumping away the groundwater through centerpivot sprinklers. Add to the facts about irrigation the fact of the over-subscribing of rivers. The optimists say that when more water is needed, the engineers will find a way-"augmentation" from the Columbia or elsewhere for the Colorado's overdrawn reservoirs, or the implementation of cosmic schemes such as NAWAPA (North American Water and Power Alliance), which would dam all the Canadian rivers up against the east face of the Rockies, and from that Mediterranean-sized reservoir supply water to every needy district from Minneapolis to Yuma. I think that there are geological as well as political difficulties in the way of water-redistribution on that scale. The solution of western problems does not lie in more grandiose engineering. Throw into the fact-barrel, finally, a 1983 report from the Council of Environmental Quality which concludes that desertificationthe process of converting a viable arid-lands ecology into a lifeless waste - proceeds faster in the western United States than in Africa. Some of that desertification is the result of overgrazing, but the salinization of fields does its bit. When the hydraulic society falls back from its outermost frontiers, it will have done its part in the creation of new deserts. The hydraulic society. I borrow the term from Donald Worster, who borrowed it from Karl Wittvogel. Wittvogel's studies convinced him that every hydraulic society is by necessity an autocracy. Power, he thought, inevitably comes to reside in the elite that understands and exercises the control of water. He quotes C.S. Lewis: "What we call man's power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument"; and Andre Gorz: "The total domination of nature inevitably entails a domination of people by the techniques of domination." Those quotations suggest a very different approach from the human domination advocated by such as John Widtsoe. The hydraulic society involves the maximum domination of nature. And the American West, Worster insists, is the greatest hydraulic society the world ever saw, far surpassing in its techniques of domination the societies on the Indus, the Tigris-Euphrates, or the Yellow River. The West, which Walter Webb and Bernard DeVoto both feared might remain a colonial dependency of the
Page 308 308 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW East, has instead become an empire and got the East to pay most of the bills. The case as Worster puts it is probably overstated. There are, one hopes, more democratic islands than he allows for; more areas outside the domination of the water managers and users. Few parts of the West are totally controlled by what Worster sees as a hydraulic elite. Nevertheless, no one is likely to call the agribusiness Westwith most of its power concentrated in the Iron Triangle of growers, politicians, and bureaucratic experts and its work done by a permanent underclass of dispossessed, mainly alien migrants-the agrarian democracy that the Newlands Act was supposed to create. John Wesley Powell had understood that a degree of land monopoly could easily come about in the West through control of water. A thorough Populist, he advocated cooperative rather than federal waterworks, and he probably never conceived of anything on the imperial scale later realized by the Bureau of Reclamation. But if he were alive today he would have to agree at least partway with Worster: water experts ambitious to build and expand their bureau and perhaps honestly convinced of the worth of what they were doing have allied themselves with landowners and politicians, and by making land monopoly through water control immensely profitable for their backers, they have made it inevitable. How profitable? Worster cites figures from one of the most recent of the mammoth projects, the Westlands, that brought water to the western side of the San Joaquin Valley. Including interest over forty years, the cost to the taxpayers was $3 billion. Water is delivered to the beneficiaries, mostly large landholders, at $7.50 an acre footfar below actual cost, barely enough to pay operation and maintenance costs. According to a study conducted by economists Philip LaVeen and George Goldman, the subsidy amounted to $2,200 an acre, $352,000 per quarter section - and very few quarter-section family farmers were among the beneficiaries. Large landholders obliged by the 160-acre limitation to dispose of their excess lands disposed of them to cronies, paper farmers, according to a pattern by now well established among water users. So much for the Jeffersonian yeoman and the agrarian democracy. As for another problem that Powell foresaw, the difficulty that a family would have in handling even 160 acres of intensivelyfarmed irrigated land, both the corporate and the family farmers solve it the same way: with migrant labor, much of it illegally
Page 309 WALLACE STEGNER 309 recruited below the Rio Grande. It is anybody's guess what will happen now that Congress has passed the Immigration Bill, but up to now the border has been a sieve, carefully kept open from this side. On a recent rafting trip through the Big Bend canyons of the Rio Grande, my son twice surprised sheepdog functionaries herding wetbacks to safety in America. Those wetbacks are visible not merely in California and Texas, but pretty much throughout the West. Visiting Rigby, Idaho, up in the farming country below the washed-out Teton Dam, I found a shanty-town whose universal language was Spanish. Wherever there are jobs to do, especially laborious or dirty jobs-picking crops, killing turkeys-there have been wetbacks brought in to do them. Like drug-running, the importation of illegals has resulted from a strong, continuing American demand, most of it from the factories in the field of the hydraulic society. One has to wonder if penalities for such importations will inhibit growers any more than the 160-acre limitation historically did. Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert, is less concerned with the social consequences than with the costs and environmental losses and the plain absurdities of our long battle with aridity. "Only a government that disposes of a billion dollars every few hours would still be selling water in deserts for less than a penny a ton. And only an agency as antediluvian as the Bureau of Reclamation, hiding in a government as elephantine as ours, could successfully camouflage the enormous losses the taxpayer has to bear for its generosity." Charles P. Berkey of Columbia University, a hydrologist, wrote in 1946, "The United States has virtually set up an empire on impounded and redistributed water. The nation is encouraging development, on a scale never before attempted, of lands that are almost worthless except for the water that can be delivered to them by the works of man. There is building up, through settlement and new population, a line of industries foreign to the normal resources of the region.... One can claim (and it is true) that much has been added to the world; but the longer-range view in this field, as in many others, is threatened by apparently incurable ailments and this one of slowly choking to death with silt is the most stubborn of all. There are no permanent cures." Raphael Kazmann, in Modern Hydrology, agrees: "The reservoir construction program, objectively considered, is really a program
Page 310 310 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW for the continued and endless expenditure of ever-increasing sums of public money to combat the effects of geologic forces, as these forces strive to reach positions of relative equilibrium in the region of rivers and the flow of water. It may be that future research in the field of modern hydrology will be primarily to find a method of extricating ourselves from this unequal struggle with minimum loss to the nation." And Donald Worster pronounces the benediction: "The next stage after empire is decline." The West, aware of its own history, might phrase it differently: The next stage after boom is bust. Again. What should one make of facts as depressing as these? What do such facts do to the self-gratifying image of the West as the home of freedom, independence, largeness, spaciousness, and of the Westerner as total self-reliance on a white stallion? I confess they make this Westerner yearn for the old days on the Milk and the Missouri when those rivers ran free, and we were trying to learn how to live with the country, and the country seemed both hard and simple, and the world and I were young, when irrigation had not yet grown beyond its legitimate bounds and the West provided for its thin population a hard living but a wonderful life. Sad to say, they make me admit, when I face them, that the West is no more the Eden that I once thought it than the Garden of the World that the boosters and engineers tried to make it; and that neither nostalgia nor boosterism can any longer make a case for it as the geography of hope.
Macklin SmithSmith, MacklinWhy This ObsessionVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 311-313http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:02
Page 311 MACKLIN SMITH WHY THIS OBSESSION? What makes us want to perch on island crags, To patrol cottonmouth-infested swamps, fens, Former penal colonies and metropolitan dumps, Sewage-treatment facilities, even to pursue The eyes of hurricanes? Birds. When other People leave Death Valley for the mountains, We jam those roadside tables - Furnace Creek, Scotty's Castle: meccas for casual migrants. The hotter the desert, the sweeter the oasis. Why this obsession? I can't explain it, but I'll testify to this: what began as a peaceful Walk in the woods will drive you to Perth Amboy For Little Gull, then to catch the late flight Out of Newark: destination South Texas, McAllen, 63d St., Crimson-collared Grosbeak. Feeling it, How the others are boarding other late flights Across the country, descending on south Texas. It's a national passion, literally: it's very American. Many of us are frequent flyers. I Myself fly Delta, Republic, Northwest, United. I just go, and I always know I'll meet someone At the Budget or Avis counter. This comradery Might seem entirely salutary and even ennobling If the activity that kept thrusting us together Weren't so insane. Which is not to say idiotic: I've made numbers of lifelong friendships birding, And the hobby is itself intrinsically mysterious: The varied nesting behaviors and flight patterns, For example, the incandescence of an Arctic Tern 311
Page 312 312 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Routinely cruising south, Greenland to Antarctica. The fact that birds migrate by stellar navigation, That a half-ounce warbler will fly in from Brazil, Setting down to nest in last year's spruce, one Of a hundred million such in the general location Of central Quebec. Like ours, the life of birds Expresses normal miracles. Learning to identify The hundreds of species of birds, a lot of them With obscure immature plumages and seasonal molts, Takes years and days - only compulsives try trying. I myself can call all our songbirds by their songs, And, yes, I enjoy my vain display of this ability; But I enjoy their songs. A Hermit Thrush's song Establishes Arcadia - it's Vermont's State Mantra, So for me the mystique of birds isn't ornithomania, It's paganism. My resident Kestrel is a goddess, And God sings in the songs of all Hermit Thrushes, Wood Thrushes, Robins, Ravens, Coots, and Bitterns. Go camp out for one night in the center of a marsh And you'll discover how it is if fear meets grace, Which accompanies you to Texas, so that what began As a peaceful walk in the woods doesn't really end There: it keeps recurring to itself. Even in Nome, The saddest air-serviced town in the United States. I've been there five times. You need to go to Nome To get to Gambell, and you need to get to Gambell To get Bluethroat, Ivory Gull- and Ross's Gull, Unless you got it in Massachusetts - Great Knot, Spectacled Eider, Ringed Plover, and Dotterel. Few birders can ever hope to reach seven hundred Without a trip to Alaska. Gambell's no vacation, But it's as much of a birding necessity as Attu. Just remember that it's their culture, not ours; Avoid runaway Hondas, dogs, and kids with guns. By now, there isn't much of anything else I need In Alaska except ultra-odd stuff. Nevertheless, It is fun to imitate Saint Anthony. I'm grateful
Page 313 MACKLIN SMITH 313 To each desert spring I've cooled off in and sipped Thanks to the hobby of birding. Thanks to birding, I've seen Sperm Whales. I've met a Mountain Lion. I've stumbled into a genuine 1928 National blues Steel-body in McAllen, Texas. If I had it to do All over again, I would, though maybe I wouldn't Buy more than that one ticket to Texas. Thoreau Had a good idea: go on foot. Take in whatsoever Presents itself. If I had to do it over again, I would walk more, probably would sit more too. I can see the idea in this new day-listing craze: You pick one spot-tree perches seem to do bestAnd simply observe. I'm told the record sit-list Is for Pt. Pelee, 10th of May, which would figure. However, I have one friend who sits all May long Along the San Diego County/Imperial County line In the hope that any of several Eastern warblers Will frequent the chaparral of the other county. Are we nuts or are we normal? Sedentary birding, Though unlikely to redefine the sport, may help Perpetuate an earlier era, a mood of moderation. Now that we've got the National Rare Bird Alert, A new rarity can show up monthly, weekly. Many Of us advise secretaries and significant others That NARBA calls have priority over all personal Emergencies and clients. To follow birds today Takes money, time, and an intimate understanding Of FAA regulations. Relationships are flaming out Each day; the top lister takes his beeper to bed, Or so I'm told. What's next? Birders Anonymous?
Heather McHughMcHugh, HeatherFrom 20,000 Feet Vol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 314http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:03
Page 314 HEATHER McHUGH FROM 20,000 FEET The cloud formation looks like banks of rock from here though rock and cloud are thought so opposite. Earth's underlying nature is resemblance - likeness everywhere disguised by wavelength, amplitude and frequencyif we got far enough away, could we decipher the design? From here so much goes by too fast or slow to see; and maybe death's a medium in which our life is just a flash. For all we know is what we'll lose. The foetus, expert at attachment, didn't dream that cramped canal would open into sound and light and love. It clung. It didn't care. The future looked like death to it, from there. 314
W.D. SnodgrassSnodgrass, W.D.Through the Nursery WindowVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 315-316http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:04
Page 315 W.D. SNODGRASS THROUGH THE NURSERY WINDOW -for Dylan Taylor McGraw There, there, sir. You have every cause For tears; which of us blames your grief? Knowing what high estate you've lost, What powers, what opulence you leave, That you must give up absolute Dominion, sole rule of a spot Where all desires, even your slightest Wish before that wish was thought Was satisfied, where you commanded All breathing things in pashadom And empery safe and sure, a land Which was, in brief, the paradigm Of every human heart's least earthly Paradise-how this could be torn By gross upheaval against your worthy Person and sweet governance, could turn You out of doors, roughly... dear sir, To banish you, unknown, abandoned By followers, washed up on this shore With no funds, not a leg to stand on, Helpless to feed and clothe your poor Small self - truly, it would be best To think of other matters. Spare Your eyes, your breath. Try; try to rest. 315
Page 316 316 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Have patience with your temporary Poor berth; we've filled out all your papers To leave this general dormitory For what suits with your rank and nature. A lovely woman, a brilliant man Will shelter and guard you, help you learn Your new name, learn our tongue and manners, Learn that a living can be earned. If this is not, dear sir, Illyria, It has its range of choices, freedom To follow whatever calls might lure you Into the the bounties rude coasts can afford. You may find, soon, that old life bland, Short on challenge, too confining for you. We need your wits, charm, ambition, and The wilderness lies all before you... True, things may never seem so lovely From now on. Still, a sort of life Exists; things can get somewhat lively Picnicking with our half a loaf And chipped wine jug. Some have felt glad They'd set foot over this dark sill. May your new family have a good Baby; you have a good exile.
Bret LottLott, BretSleeping ThroughVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 317-323http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:05
Page 317 BRET LOTT SLEEPING THROUGH The baby, in the crib at the foot of the bed, was sleeping through for the first time - he would be ten weeks on Thursday - and Paul and Kate lay awake in bed, listening. It was three-fifteen, the usual time for the baby to wake up, for Paul to change the diaper, for Kate to lay the baby next to her in bed, for the baby to take her nipple in his mouth and nurse. Paul lay on his back, his hands behind his head. He looked at the ceiling, watching it, trying to puzzle out in the darkness the shapes in the stipple up there. In daylight the shapes were rough sunflowers, but in the darkness they became only gray swirls, indistinguishable one from the next. He lay there, and imagined the builder who had put up the stipple; imagined a man on a step ladder here in his bedroom, some sort of sunflower template in his hand, pressing it into the wet ceiling, pulling it back to reveal the shape with its circle of short leaves, its center of sharp brushstrokes. Then he imagined what the house must have been like when that worker had put up the ceiling. It was easy for him to imagine this here in the darkness. He saw the bedroom empty, no carpeting, just plywood planks. The walls were bare sheetrock, spackle run in white lines up the walls and along the ceiling and baseboards. Downstairs the floor was cement, and in the kitchen there were no appliances: no stove, no refrigerator, no washer or dryer. No linoleum on the floor, the countertop only a wood frame, cupboards with no doors, ceiling lights only wires hanging down. Kate whispered, "Paul?" "I'm here," he whispered. "What are you thinking about?" she breathed, and he could feel her eyes on him as she lay next to him, the sheet and blanket pulled up to her chin. He turned and looked at the clock. The pale green hands read three-eighteen. 317
Page 318 318 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW He whispered, "Nothing," and smiled to himself at the truth of this: his thoughts of an empty house. Nothing there. "I'm scared," she said. "Of what?" "His sleeping through," she whispered. She turned onto her back. He looked at her, saw she was staring at the ceiling just as he had been. He wondered if she could see in that ceiling what he had been able to see, first designs up there, then an entire house filled with nothing. Finally, Paul whispered, "Let's go down to the kitchen and wait in there." They pushed the sheets back, climbed out of bed all in a moment, as if they had gone to bed only minutes before and had never fallen asleep. Paul got to the doorway first, and looked back. Kate had stopped at the crib, and was leaning over it. She was only a silhouette to him, a shape bent over the crib there in the dark, and he thought that she could not possibly have seen the shapes in the ceiling, the ceilingman working there, the white cardboard of the wall, the spackle even whiter. She was thinking of other things, he knew: the baby, his sleeping. And, he imagined, she was thinking of the baby's nursing, and how her breasts might become engorged again if the baby did not nurse soon enough, and about the pain the engorgement would cause, the baby unable to nurse because the breast was too full, the breast making more and more milk to keep up with the baby's normal demand, so that it would become a circle of pain for her: the baby crying for food, Kate holding too much food in her. Then he heard the baby stir, and for a moment felt relief, ready for the baby to awaken. Paul watched for Kate to lean even farther into the crib to pick him up. He listened for the small cry, the quick breaths in, but then she stood, moved from the crib. She came toward him, and in the small brown light cast from the nightlight in the hall she seemed a ghost to him, a gray nightgown floating across the room, a body with no face. "He's not waking up," came her whispered voice, a voice he thought for an instant he could not recognize in this darkness. He turned on each light in the kitchen: first the stove hood, then, from the switchplate across the kitchen, the small chandelier above the kitchen table and the ceiling fixture above the sink.
Page 319 BRET LOTT 319 He turned from the switchplate, looked at her at the stove. Her nightgown wasn't gray, he saw, but a light violet, patterned with small purple flowers. Here was her face and the colors of the nightgown. Her nursing gown. She had begun wearing the gown, he remembered, some two months before the baby had been born. The first time she had put it on, he had said, "Warming up?" and laughed. He was already in bed. She stood at the dresser, and he watched as she leaned over to brush out her hair, her face turned to him. She smiled. "Sort of," she said. "I just want to feel what it's like. It's a comfortable nightgown regardless. So don't make fun." He could see her breast through the opening in the nightgown, could see the white skin there, the pale pink nipple. He said, "I'm not making fun," and when she had climbed into bed and turned out the light, he had slipped his hand into the gown, cupped his hand on her breast, and said, "All the easier to hold you with, my dear," and they had both laughed. They made love that night, her above him, and when she sat up she pulled the gown off as if to reveal herself to him, and he placed his hands on the miraculous swelling before him, this baby already there. He moved his hands across her, then placed his mouth on her breast, drew the nipple out hard and taut and wondered what her milk might taste like when it would finally come. He looked at her now. Her face was blank, her hair everywhere. She pushed in a button for one of the burners, lifted the blue kettle from the stove. She brought it to the sink, filled it from the tap. For no good reason, more, he imagined, just to hear his voice in this room, to make sure he were still alive, he said, "You scared me up there." He leaned against the counter, crossed his arms. She rubbed her eyes as she carried the kettle to the stove. She said, "Why?" "You looked like a ghost. In the dark, you looked like the walking dead up there." He smiled. She stopped, the kettle just above the burner, the coils now going red. She turned to him, slowly, as if she might still be in her sleep. She said, "Don't talk like that." He stopped smiling and put his hands at his sides, his palms on the edge of the counter. "I was just talking," he said.
Page 320 320 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW "But don't talk about that," she said. She still hadn't moved, still held the kettle above the burner. "About what?" He put on a puzzled look for her, then pushed himself away from the counter. He got two coffee mugs from the cupboard next to the stove, and held them as if he had never felt their weight in his hands before, pretending he did not know she was still looking at him. She placed the kettle on the burner. She said, "Don't talk about death. About dying. Mine, yours. Anybody's. That's what." "You know I was just talking," he said and put the mugs on the counter. "You know I was just saying that. I wasn't talking about dying." He leaned against the counter. He was smiling again. She went to the kitchen table and pulled out a chair, sat down. "Whatever," she said. She put her elbow on the table, her chin on her fist. "What are you afraid of?" he said. She didn't move. She said, "Plenty." "Such as?" She let out a breath, and he knew he should stop pushing her as he did. But he wanted to know. He went to the pantry for the jar of instant coffee on the rack inside the door. He brought it back to the counter, pulled a spoon from inside the silverware drawer. His back was to her as he carefully measured the coffee. She said, "Like I already told you. Him, upstairs. I'm afraid of his sleeping through. I'm afraid he's not okay, that he's sick or something. That's one thing." He turned around. The water was heating up now, the soft rumble of the kettle behind him. "He's sleeping," he said. "That's what we want, isn't it? For him to sleep through?" He said this, but thought of the relief he had felt when, back in the bedroom, he had thought the baby was waking up. He felt that somehow, right now, he was lying to her. "I know," she said. "I know we want him to sleep." She closed her eyes. "But can't you even let me have that? I can be afraid of that if I want, can't I?" She opened her eyes, leaned back in her chair. She let her hand drop to the table. She looked at him. He shrugged. "If you want," he said. "But I don't see why you would." From where he stood he could see the opening in her nursing
Page 321 BRET LOTT 321 gown, the white skin again. Above the skin he could see the edge of her nursing bra, this even whiter. He turned to the mugs, put the lid back on the coffee. He put the jar back in the pantry, then opened the refrigerator for the carton of half-and-half. "Now," she said to his back, "what are you afraid of?" But he was already thinking about it. He was thinking about her, about how, a week ago, they had tried to make love for the first time since the baby was born, Kate having gone to the obstetrician two days before. The doctor had given her the okay to begin again. He had tried to make something of the evening, and had put a candle on the nightstand next to the bed, then brought the radio up from his workbench in the garage and set it next to the dresser. He tuned it to an easy-listening station, and climbed into bed, waited for her to finish in the bathroom. When she came out she had on a white chemise, something from what seemed years ago. She got into bed, whispered, "We have to be quiet," and pointed to the crib. "Fine," he whispered, and kissed her neck. She had on perfume. They had gone slowly, and then, just before he entered her, she had held him close, whispered, "Go easy." He nodded, his eyes closed. Once inside her, though, he had opened his eyes, looked down at her. Her face, shadowed by the candle, half in darkness, half in moving light, had been blank and pale. Then she flinched in pain, her legs moving up his back, her eyes squeezing shut, her lips pursed. At that moment he had closed his eyes and pulled away from her. "Well?" she said. He let the refrigerator door close, set the carton on the counter, all with his back to her. The water was boiling now, and he pushed the off button, lifted the kettle, poured the water. He put the kettle back, then poured a small amount of half-and-half into each cup. Clouds rose from the bottom of the cups to the surface, changed the coffee from deep brown to tan. He took the mugs to the table. He set a mug before her, then sat down. "Thanks for the coffee," she said, "but I'm still waiting." She picked up her coffee, touched it to her lips, winced. He said, "Of you. I'm afraid of you." He looked down at his hands
Page 322 322 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW in his lap, then at the tablecloth, white vinyl with large red and blue and yellow tulips with long green stems. She had one hand on the tablecloth, and it looked as if she were holding a bunch of flowers, her fingers curled over several stems. He saw the hand turn palm up, the fingers go straight. She said, "Why?" He shrugged. "Making love. That's what I'm afraid of. After the last time. What happened." He shrugged again, gave a small laugh. "Other than that, nothing," he said. She was looking at him, her eyes saddened, it seemed. She said, "No," and moved her hand toward him. "No," she said again. "You can't be afraid of that. You can't. Not of making love." He moved a hand to the table, and a moment later they were holding hands. "No," she said again, and he saw then what she was afraid of, saw, finally, what had happened an afternoon ten weeks before, Kate in the birthing chair, her feet in stirrups like the metal claws of some upturned, dead animal, himself standing next to her, her pale wet hand in his. The far wall of the delivery room had been one giant window, leaded squares of glass six inches thick mounted one on top of another like so many brittle bricks. The wall faced west, as did the birthing chair, and the room had been filled with light. He couldn't remember any lights having been on in the room. Just that wall, and the sun behind it. The doctor, at the foot of the bed, there between her legs with his hands ready to catch, yelled Push, and then Paul, too, had yelled, felt her squeeze down on his fingers, turning his own first red, then a light shade of blue. The nurses, one hovering just behind the doctor, the other holding his wife's other hand, urged her more gently. Push, Kate, they had whispered. And there it was. A baby, slick and a little blue, bluer than his fingers, he saw, the doctor then bringing it to the warming table across the room, the nurses wiping it clean. Then it had cried, this new, small voice in the room where before there had been nothing. A boy, the doctor had said over his shoulder, his hands gently working the baby's now pink arms and legs, and it had occurred to him then that they were now three. Three. He looked at her, now, before daylight in a kitchen with all its lights on, and felt for the first time the hollow he knew she had
Page 323 BRET LOTT 323 thought about before. He could look at a ceiling and imagine an empty house, he thought, but she could imagine it lifeless. "Don't be afraid," she said, and moved her other hand toward him across the flowers of the tablecloth. He looked at her. He swallowed', then blinked. He saw her come into focus,, then waver out again. He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. She held his hand with both hers now, held it even tighter. She said, "Paul,," and the word meant many things to him at once.
June E. OsbornOsborn, June E.AIDS: Five Years and CountingVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 324-341http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:06
Page 324 JUNE E. OSBORN AIDS: FIVE YEARS AND COUNTING Five years ago the term AIDS had not been coined; a few microbiologists, clinical immunologists and inveterate readers of the Center for Disease Control's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports were uneasily pondering the fate of a few young men with unheard-of disease problems; and an occasional student of sexually-transmitted diseases wondered whether the new syndromes reported that August of 1981 might represent new medical trouble for the gay community, whose increasing involvement with generally uncommon microbes such as Entamoeba histolytica and hepatitis B had already caused some alarm. One thing was clear: astute clinicians and the CDC had spotted and reported a pair of unique clinical happenings. On one coast of the United States, several healthy homosexual men had sickened and been hospitalized with what turned out to be pneumonia caused by Pneumocystis carinii. CDC had a particularly good hold on that situation since the pentamidine used as a drug of choice for pneumocystis was so relatively little needed that it was controlled by CDC and therefore easily accounted for. Never before had it been needed for a cluster of healthy individuals. On the other coast, another aggregation of unique events involved the recognition that Kaposi's sarcoma was aggressively attacking and invading healthy young men-also homosexual. Kaposi's sarcoma had always been a mild, superficialskin disorder, restricted to elderly men, and in fact had a strong ethnic pattern of occurrence which was not descriptive of the fresh outbreak either. So it was immediately evident that something new was at hand in the American medical arena, and in due course the profound immunodeficiency which facilitated such distinctive pathologies was recognized and the descriptive term "acquired immune deficiency syndrome" was coined. As we now know all too well, that was indeed the beginning of 324
Page 325 JUNE E. OSBORN 325 recognition of a pandemic caused by an entirely novel human pathogen, a new virus with an extraordinarily long incubation period, which had already seeded humanity and was silently doubling its victims like a ghastly prokaryote- initially at six-month intervals, slowing to an unmerciful thirteen or fourteen months doubling time at present in the United States. The increment in numbers of persons caught up in the epidemic has been a reminder to all of us that the mathematical power of 2 is powerful indeed: for in five years we have accumulated over 24,000 cases of AIDS, at least five times as many cases of AIDS-related complex, and we are fairly sure that there are over one million - perhaps two million - Americans silently infected with this new retrovirus of mankind, now called human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. It has only been five years, but we are counting... and counting... So, from such wispy beginnings, the situation has become decidedly serious. It is possible to say with unusual assurance now that AIDS will always be with us; that at least one-quarter of a million people will have sickened and died of it within the next five or six years, and that clinical medicine will be changed in many ways that demand quick, clever anticipatory planning of a sort for which we are terribly ill-prepared. How much more vast the problem will become is ours to control at present: that is, on the basis of present knowledge, transmission of the virus of AIDS is entirely preventable. The sole merciful fact in the dismal succession of new insights about the virology and epidemiology of the epidemic is that the virus is an unprecedented weakling when it comes to transmissibilityonly birth, sex or blood can transmit it, and even in those contexts it is far less contagious than is hepatitis B. In health-care workers, who have now cared for thousands of patients with AIDS over their countless dying days, there has yet to be a case of AIDS that was not associated with a known risk factor. Even more dramatically, more than a thousand health care personnel have gone the next step and punctured themselves with needles or scalpels directly contaminated with blood or secretions from AIDS patients. In fact, one klutz actually did so eleven times (prompting a colleague of mine to comment that he should have taken a position in the library); and yet only three such individuals have even developed antibodies to the virus, two of whom have possible other risk behaviors, and none has developed AIDS. That is
Page 326 326 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW thirty-fold less than would have been expected with comparable exposure to hepatitis B. The isolation of virus from saliva, tears and the like has received much excited attention, and the mosquitoes of Belle Glade seem to be a subject of intense fascination for the LaRouchites and other alarmists; and yet not a single case of AIDS can be attributed to such sources. Studies of family contacts, from homes in which loved ones have slowly died of AIDS, and in which toilets and razors, toothbrushes and many tears have been shared, have revealed absolutely no transmission of virus other than by sexual contact. In short, the scale of the predictable disaster in human terms at least matches that of Vietnam, and its potential is far greater. However, its control is eminently feasible, if we could solve just a few problems. If we could effectively communicate health prevention messages about sexual behavior and the newly-added hazards of drug abuse, and if in so doing we could motivate people to amend or avoid dangerous behavior in their own interest and that of their sexual partners or offspring, then we would still have the horrendous present to deal with, the million or so infected Americans (not to mention the rest of the world); but at least further catastrophe could be prevented and in that sense the future would be bright. That is the most optimistic thing I will say, and as medical optimism goes, it isn't bad; the fact of the matter is that one can make personal decisions which allow complete avoidance of this epidemic pathogen. In earlier centuries the bubonic plague stalked mysteriously due to ignorance of rat vector roles, prompting towns to erect useless walls; and more recently polio's apparent randomness terrified families and closed down swimming pools in the summertime, for they didn't know about serotypes or iceberg phenomena of clinical expression. Furthermore, even had they known, the epidemiologic facts as they later evolved did not allow complete evasion of the epidemic paths of plague or polio. AIDS is the first epidemic in human history for which knowledge is sufficient to permit such a degree of preventive control that one can decide on avoidance as an adequate guarantee of personal safety and well-being. Putting it more dismally, however, unless we learn to amend sexual mores, stem drug abuse, and abort health-destructive behavior in large groups of our citizens - and very quickly at that - Vietnam will look small by comparison with what will happen to the young adults of this and perhaps future generations.
Page 327 JUNE E. OSBORN 327 And yet, so far into this disaster, we are still having trouble capturing people's attention. My friend Jim Curran from CDC speculates that in 1990 people will be shouting at us, angrily, "Why didn't you tell us?" The only topics that capture headlines are bits of vaccine progress or minuscule treatment advances which promise to prolong the agony a bit for those already infected. I don't mean to belittle the effort that is being poured into AZT and similar therapeutic initiatives, but even the concept behind such efforts is akin to locking the barn door after a stampede of horses. I understand the public mindset about treatment and cure, for it is our habit to hope for miracles. But the truly odd phenomenon is the clamor for vaccines as a panacea. It is fascinating to me that at this juncture - in an era when the very existence of vaccine supplies is threatened by public resistance to their use and litigiousness over their rare complications - this crisis is viewed by many as having its end in sight when a vaccine appears! That isn't going to happen soon, and wishing for vaccines, treatments and cures only postpones or deflects the confrontation of our tough tasks. There will be no vaccine in the next five years (perhaps not in ten years, perhaps never), and it is likely that there will never be reconstitutive therapies applicable on a large scale to individuals who are already infected. Even if satisfactory treatment modalities are created, it is hard to envision any that could serve as a reasonable public health strategy, since the intimate interdigitation of viral genetic message with host cell DNA at the very outset of the infection means, almost surely, that treatment would need to be maintained lifelong. The only vaguely apt parallel I can think of is the use of isoniazid for tuberculosis control, and that certainly has not been trouble-free. So we are stuck with education and prevention-at once the weakest and the most potentially powerful tools imaginable. Why not joyous headlines saying "AIDS can be avoided! It is safe to help othersl" for that is the really good news - it represents the culmination to date of sophisticated twentieth-century science and should really be celebrated. There is nothing wrong with working toward vaccine, treatment and cure; but they do distract terribly from the harsh but usable truth that safety is already here and costs only personal decision-making to achieve. I will come back to these thoughts, for they are my main message. However I would like first to give a brief synopsis of our current
Page 328 328 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW knowledge of the pathogenesis of AIDS, of the new virus, of the increasing variety of clinical disorders recognized in association with it, and of the evolving epidemiologic data and concepts which lead me to such dire predictions of the future of the epidemic. The pace of progress has been breathtaking, and one must be impressed, I believe, with the incredibly rapid accrual of new insights. It is really hard to keep in mind that those first few cases were only recognized five years ago! (I must comment at this juncture about the role basic science has played in this cascade of insights: without the arcane and esoteric contributions of "pure" scientists over the last two or three decades, we would hardly have words, much less concepts, to describe our current problems. Indeed, our present knowledge is a useful reminder that science is called basic when we do not yet know to what it is relevant -not because it is irrelevant. We need to remember that lesson well so that we do not now make a mistake and mortgage our ability to cope with future crises in our urgency to handle this one.) First, about the virus: the causative agent of AIDS and related syndromes was identified in several laboratories in 1983 and 1984 and as a result acquired several names, none of them handy from the point of view of public education. It was called LAV by the French, HTLV-III by the National Institutes of Health group and ARV by the San Franciscans, and to this day is referred to as HTLV-III/LAV by diehards interested in French-American detente. However, in 1985 an international committee completed its efforts at neutralizing this unfortunate bit of territorialism and proposed that the new virus be called HIV, standing for human immunodeficiency virus. I hope that solution is embraced widely, for the battle for which it represents a truce was unseemly. In the context of the biggest challenge to public health education in recent memory, having to communicate clearly while fielding more than one name for the virus was the last kind of trouble we needed! So I will call the new virus HIV or, sometimes, the virus of AIDS. That it does cause AIDS is no longer at issue in the minds of virtually all investigators. There are interesting and perhaps important discussions about what besides the virus determines the clinical timing of onset and range of manifestations of infection; but HIV itself certainly is necessary and probably sufficient to establish the immunodeficiency characteristic of AIDS. Whatever the name, the taxonomy and molecular biology of the
Page 329 JUNE E. OSBORN 329 virus are now well established. It belongs to the retrovirus family, and indeed seems to belong to a subset of retroviruses (called lentiviruses) which are characterized not only by the integration of viral genetic information into the host genome, which is a property of the whole group, but also by the exceptionally long incubation period which has given the lentiviruses their name, as a subset of socalled "slow viruses." It shares several other unpleasant properties with the lentiviruses; among these are molecular variability with resultant antigenic variation which may thwart vaccine efforts to some degree. It also shares an apparent inefficiency in provocation of neutralizing antibodies, adding more difficulties for the immunologists. And it turns out to have a pronounced central nervous system tropism about which I will write at some length. Beyond these gross descriptive facts about the new human immunodeficiency viruses, much elegant molecular biology has been learned concerning control of transcription, translation and cytopathologic effects. I won't try to summarize that, but will simply note in passing that far from being a uniformly cytolytic (or celldestructive) virus as was first thought, a wide variety of virus-cell interactions occur, ranging from uneventful genome integration to cell fusion with giant cell formation, to explosive cell lysis with bursts of new virus production. These diverse outcomes of infection seem to be unified to some extent by the need for the T4 or CD4 antigen as virus receptor on the host cell; but far from tightly restricting the field of susceptible cells to those of the T4-helper-cell class of lymphocytes, as it turns out, this proclivity seems to allow for wide-ranging infection, for it has been learned that the T4 receptor is, while not ubiquitous, very widely distributed, particularly in the central nervous system. As to viral pathogenesis, there are a number of key facts still uncertain which may have substantial practical importance in vaccine and treatment strategies. Since the HIV virus initiates infection by integrating into host cell genome, it certainly exists in a cellassociated state primarily; if that were its dominant form of cohabitation it would have some significant implications, both for immunologists and for epidemiologists. Indeed, it is not clear whether the cell-free virus exists very commonly for more than brief intervals, nor do we know if it plays much of a role in transmission. On the basis of experimental evidence as well as theory, HIV certainly is more commonly represented as a cell-associated virus in blood and
Page 330 330 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW body fluids in which it is found, and if it is indeed dependent on the protection of intact cells for transmission, that fact might do much to explain a number of facets of its poor transmissibility. In blood it is not even well represented within cells: only 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 lymphocytes of the appropriate type contains virus at the height of viremic infection. In fact it is so rarely found that we are not sure whether virus infection per se is sufficient to account for the gradual, relentless attrition of T4 lymphocytes in infected individuals. Further insights into these cellular dynamics may be important; for instance, it appears that T cells in semennot spermatozoa-may be the transmitters of HIV, and it further appears to be the case that their representation in semen is very low except in the context of present or past sexually-transmitted diseases. If this association were valid it would explain a number of seemingly anomalous epidemiologic findings in heterosexual populations, perhaps in homosexual populations, and might indeed allow the distinction between "high" and "low" transmitters among infected men and women. Another implication of the blood-cell-associated state of HIV lies in the understanding of transmission to drug addicts through needlesharing, contrasted with the failure of transmission to health care workers via needle sticks. It is nowhere nearly so quixotic as it seems that drug users-who actually draw back blood to flush out the last microgram of panacea from shared syringes - could transmit the virus readily and health care workers not at all, when one recognizes the tremendous "dosage" difference of living cells that might carry the genome. These fine details of pathogenesis are of obvious importance, and the fact that we already know enough to ask and to answer them highlights the elegant sophistication that marks the biomedical scientific achievements of the past very few years. Moving away from these details of transmission, however, let us look at pathogenesis: let us assume that the virus has been effectively transmitted to a new host. The subsequent progression of events is slow, variable and not yet individually predictable. We cannot yet say which person will remain virus-positive but asymptomatic for eight or more years (as some have) and which will progress rapidly to lethal outcome in a year or two; but the outline of the clinical problem emerges steadily. Presumably T4 lymphocytes become infected, the viral RNA is transcribed by reverse transcriptase into double-stranded DNA, and
Page 331 JUNE E. OSBORN 331 that version of its genetic information then integrates into host DNA. Subsequent cycles of replication may follow quickly or may be much deferred, with ultimate destruction of T4 helper cells. Indeed, whatever the mechanism of T cell destruction or depletion, 90% of infected individuals are demonstrably immunologically abnormal by one year post-infection, regardless of other clinical manifestations. In addition to the T4 lymphocytes, it seems likely, from animal models, that macrophages are also infected quite early in the incubation interval, and we now think that some of these cells may serve to invade and infect the brain, later represented as astroglia in affected centers of evolving central nervous system malfunction. This CNS invasion and ubiquity of neurologic disease is one of the awful new insights about the epidemic which has emerged lucidly over the past year or so. Over 60 % of AIDS patients can be shown to have neurologic malfunction and deterioration clinically during the course of their illness, and more than 90 % at autopsy have demonstrable central nervous system pathologic damage. But I am jumping ahead of my story. After initial infection, in a period of four to six weeks some acutely infected patients experience a transient febrile illness not unlike infectious mononucleosis, and some develop neurologic syndromes such as acute encephalitis or aseptic meningitis, but most remain clinically well for a period of at least a year. Then the various forms of AIDS-related complex may set in, including possibly lymphadenopathy, sustained or intermittent fevers, debilitating diarrhea, and disproportionate weight loss. The weight loss of AIDS is of considerable interest for it goes well beyond the expected effects of poor intake and/or diarrhea and in fact mimics the cachexia of malignancy in its disproportionality, leading some to speculate that a substance akin to tumor necrosis factor may be playing a significant role in the pathogenesis of this part of the syndrome. In Africa a rather pure form of this HIVassociated cachexia has been recognized and given the misleadingly graceful label of "slim disease." If and when Kaposi's sarcoma and/or opportunistic infections such as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia occur, the formal diagnosis of AIDS is applied, assuming that the attending physician is not reluctant to make the diagnosis for humane, social reasons. Increasingly, the diagnosis is not made because compassion dictates resort to clinical subterfuge: bisexual men have wives, towns have under
Page 332 332 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW takers who will not deal with AIDS, dentists have other patients who will boycott an enlightened purveyor of oral hygiene to such folk, insurance companies have ledgers which cannot be aligned with the lethality of the new virus in a characteristically hale-andhearty age group, and so forth. The clinical clarity and finality of the diagnosis of AIDS is blurred beyond retrieval by the social chaos it creates. But I digress again. It is hard to keep one's eye on the medical ball with AIDS, for the impact on individuals, on society, and in fact on humanity glowers over even the most precisely defined aspects of molecular pathogenesis or clinical care. Anyway, once the diagnosis of AIDS is accurately made, the prognosis is more certain than that of any other disease in human medicine except rabies: if opportunistic infections have ushered in the full-blown syndrome, the patient's likelihood of being alive two years later is very close to zero. Kaposi's sarcoma -in the absence of opportunistic infections -carries a slightly less disastrous outlook, and a very few patients in that category have seemed to level off at a plateau of lesser ill-health while most still die in two to three years. Oddly, Kaposi's sarcoma is becoming steadily less frequent among AIDS patients, so the uniformity of lethal outcome becomes more and more accurate as a prediction. The year or so left to such patients is awful: not only do they suffer the physical horrors of neurologic deterioration, intractable diarrhea, disfiguring sarcomatous lesions and recurrent pneumonias (among other things) but they stand to lose their employment, their health insurance (if they have any), their homes sometimes and their contact with all but closest friends....sometimes even those. These trials are often superimposed on the social stress of revelations long deferred: a bisexual married man loses his anonymity; a closeted gay man finally must confront a family he has long delayed confiding in precisely because he feared rejection; a drug user who has thus far coped with his problem enough to function in society is rudely smoked out into the open to avoid the more devastating stigmata imposed by societal homophobia. The sheer awfulness of AIDS was put into a poem by Dr. Barry Blackwell, entitled "AIDS." It begins as follows: An immigrant it came an alien
Page 333 JUNE E. OSBORN 333 without a name creeping in at the coasts like other cultural quirks. Cerberus with different heads it changed its faces while it spread. In the East it was Kaposi's sarcoma in the West it was Pneumocystis carini (sic) purple skin blebs on the outside white webs of lung fungus on the inside opportunistic organisms that borrowed the body. Not much was known when it was named Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Acquired from whom? Whatever it was it wasn't emancipated liberated or even affirmative. Only gay men were picked. But then the phallus is the great inoculator men are the spreaders inserters, intruders of the venereal world. Women are the vessels lesbians give each other nothing (unless it's love) The lepers of sodom suffered slowly eroded by organisms their life style invited. Cryptococcus, hepatitis mononucleosis, amebiasis herpes, toxoplasmosis wasting flesh burning fevers bloody stools
Page 334 334 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW strangled breath behind barriers behind masks beyond antibiotics staying alive was awful None did. Dr. Blackwell's poem is quite long, but because he has so well encapsulated in a later part the enormity of social impact, I shall quote a bit more. After describing the discovery of the virus and its gradual spread, he summarizes as follows: Sponsored by an open society it saw its openings. Gays with Aids loved bisexuals Bis with Aids loved heterosexuals Bis and straights loved their wives wives with Aids gave birth to babies Babies were loved by uncles who were junkies aunts who were street walkers mothers who were easy lays The virus multiplied in a culture medium of nutrient juices a slum gullion of sweat, saliva blood, semen and colostrum freely shared stirred and fermented by love. Hysteria and science illness and morals co-mingled. It was costly to linger. One hundred grand a month or more for intensive care
Page 335 JUNE E. OSBORN 335 that nobody paid Insurance companies said AIDS was self inflicted (or had pre-existed) Government agencies said AIDS was not a research priority (nor even a medicaid category) Inside intensive care gays and junkies lasted long enough to go bankrupt. Outside intensive care landlords evicted tenants teachers excluded kids preachers preached damnation gays screeched genocide Then all at once intensive care came cheap The innocent were infected.... People said better knowing than not better truth than hope better but it was a sneaky virus lurking inside the cell stalking an unsure host leaving spoor in the blood that could be spotted years before it broke cover People said better knowing than not better truth than hope better but an arrow or a bullet are quicker than a slow snare or waiting wounded Instead People said better hope than truth better not than knowing if tests suggest you have pre-AIDS
Page 336 336 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW or maybe AIDS or maybe not.... Everyone is waiting for a vaccine in a foot race between virus and science Everyone is waiting practicing virus control by chastity and monogamy. Everyone is waiting redefining old values and discriminating. Dr. Blackwell had his agendas when he wrote that poem, but he captures some of the anguish without which the numbers of the AIDS epidemic truly numb. As we contemplate projections of a quarter of a million AIDS cases by 1991, the challenge is to keep in mind the several human tragedies that each case embodies, for AIDS causes a startling deletion of someone in the prime of life, whether the patient was realizing a high potential or living out a disappointment of loved ones who had not quite yet despaired - until the diagnosis. With enough drama to script a soap opera for a dozen years, it is strange that it is still hard to keep the attention of one's audience for more than a day or so; for AIDS seems distant, so unreal. But soon we will all know someone who.... someone who is caught up in the misery by virtue of a friend or an uncle or a son, by virtue of a temporary lapse of personal behavior, or even by the fear that old shadows of transitory peccadilloes will return to haunt him. It is because of the enormity of fear and rejection and unease that it becomes particularly urgent that the community of health professionals and educated members of society achieve and maintain a high level of sophisticated understanding of our horrendous problem. The fear must be allayed, the dread of personal revelation must be salved by reassurance, and the sick must be tended with compassion. Obviously in many instances the first line of reaction-either compassion or rejection - will be that of the professionals in health care, and up till now I am sad to say that the reaction has been uneven. Many of us have long been unsettled by sexuality as a facet of clinical practice, or have dealt rather categorically with it. Certainly we are not the first society to fail to cope well with homosexuality, for it is as old as the records of time, and yet the written history
Page 337 JUNE E. OSBORN 337 of mankind is lurid with episodes of revulsion and harassment of homosexuals. However, this is nearly the twenty-first century; pluralism is supposedly our proud accomplishment as a democratic society, and yet we have tolerated a level of institutional intolerance of people with same-sex orientation that has come as a shameful surprise to some of us who have learned-in the context of this epidemic - of the long-standing tribulations of those fellow citizens. My own sense of pride in our profession was shored up quite considerably in recent months by a reaffirmation published by the American College of Physicians and by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, in their respective journals. The first stated position should not have needed saying: it said, in part, "(we) urge all physicians, surgeons, nurses, other medical professionals, and hospitals to provide competent and humane care to all patients, including patients critically ill with AIDS and AIDS-related conditions. Denying appropriate care to sick and dying patients for any reason is unethical... " The second position is the one I wish to emphasize here, for it carries the burden of my message: "(all elements of organized society) are urged to educate themselves and others about [the virus], and particularly to understand the limited mechanisms by which the virus can be transmitted. Dissemination of such knowledge should serve not only to prevent the further spread of infection but also to alleviate discrimination against those who become infected with the virus." With these relatively few brushstrokes I hope I have painted a vivid picture of the epidemic, of the disease, and of our current quandaries. The medical facts of AIDS are clearer each month, and the news gets steadily worse: infection is far more likely to result in disease than we thought even a year ago. Neurologic disease is not a curiosity but rather a dominant feature of the clinical syndromes of AIDS and ARC. The inexorability of death in a short time is increasingly evident as Kaposi's sarcoma recedes. But there are some features that should be brought out especially, in order to focus on the source of our greatest future troubles. Health care delivery systems will be tested harshly, for much subacute and chronic care will be needed, and yet nursing homes adapted to 85 -year-old ladies are inhospitable to 35-year-old men or 21-year-old prostitutes. Innovative solutions to the discontinuities in our system of care are an urgent priority, if only because the cost differential is
Page 338 338 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW several-fold between living out life in an acute care bed as opposed to more graded access to care. AIDS patients spend much of their remaining time dying, and yet the hospice phenomenon is relatively new in our health care system and it too has proved sometimes inhospitable to the victims of the new virus. Some problems are approaching manageability: blood screening for antibody to the virus is technologically excellent, is being applied fully 20,000,000 times a year two years after its initial introduction, and has achieved a remarkable degree of cleansing of the blood supply. In the whole epidemic to date, with more than 30,000 cases of overt AIDS, only 500 are ascribed to transfusion, and only two so far are related to blood donations made after screening test procedures were instituted in the spring of 1985. The gay community has responded with urgency and has led the way in many respects in innovating health care modalities and approaches to public education. But I.V. drug use is an even bigger epidemic than AIDS, and it is also the conduit to much broader distribution of the virus than has occurred heretofore. I.V. drug abuse is the gateway to the future for the new virus, as other avenues close down. It is common for people to ask anxiously, "Is it getting into the heterosexual community?" The answer is that it has always been in the heterosexual community, most notably in the context of I.V. drug abuse; from the earliest times it was evident not only that I.V. drug users were at risk but so were their sexual partners. The early collections of pediatric patients included some infants who had received transfusions in the context of their extreme prematurity, a few hemophiliac youngsters who had received contaminated factor VIII concentrate, and a number of Haitian children born to infected mothers. But always and increasingly the pediatric part of the epidemic has been largely comprised of babies born to I.V. drug users, or to the sexual partners of I.V. drug users, or to prostitutes who often ply their trade to support their habit. In fact, we predict that I.V. drug use will account, indirectly, for over 90 % of pediatric AIDS in the United States in the future, and the biologic price paid is, if possible, more awful in children, for their nervous systems fail to develop properly as they grow, and while they suffer the agonies of their older counterparts, they do not die so readily. We have only recently finished celebrating the conquest of congenital rubella, and yet we are rapidly accumulating a
Page 339 JUNE E. OSBORN 339 cohort of infants infected with HIV who replace the rubella babies in every sense. Thus to those of us who are caught up in the epic of AIDS, the drug scene is important epidemiologically. Declaring war on it is rather exciting and catchy, but perhaps the expenditure of the equivalent of the whole AIDS budget in order to screen federal employees' urine is a bit off the mark-especially when the drug people are begging us AIDS people not to get too effective in our message, since drug users are already terrified of AIDS and the waiting lists for drug treatment "slots" are three to six months long. Just think of it! If a young heroin addict decided in May in New York City- and there are 200,000 of them there, with only 20,000 treatment slots - if she decided that she had had enough of a $200 a day habit that dominated her every move, and that now carries a 64 % likelihood of sharing needles with an HIV-infected junkie, she could screw up her courage and call a treatment center... only to hear "Give us your phone number and we'll call you in September or October, if a slot opens up." As a bitter veteran of the drug wards commented, having given me that information, "... and we all know, of course, that drug addicts are notorious for their ability to defer gratification!" We must rethink our approach to strategic planning in the war on drugs, for we now have a double motivation for attacking our national drug epidemic. If we believe our own science- that addiction is a physiologic state and not simply a willful disobediencethen we should be putting treatment access ahead of urine testing lest the admonition "First do no harm" take on a horrid relevance, as we block the exits to the theater and then yell "FIRE!" In summary, then, we need to do a lot of hard but doable things. First and foremost, we must educate health care professionals both to the urgency and to the critical roles they must play, not only in care of vast numbers of young adult patients, but also in reassurance of the rest of society whose reactions will determine our degrees of freedom in delivery of humane care. We need a great deal of help in educating the educated part of society so they can feel free to help. And of course, above all, we need to educate the people at risk, and in so doing we must be free to use language they can understand-it probably does no good to talk about "exchange of bodily fluids" (much less to write about it) when over 30 % of adults in the United States are functionally illiterate. But present U.S.
Page 340 340 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW government rules dictate that only certain language can be used to achieve this education for prevention; to qualify for federal sponsorship such words must be "judged by a reasonable person to be inoffensive to most educated adults beyond that group"! How shall we reach such people? Television comes quickly to mind, since it dominates our learning in so many ways - and probably is the sole source for the functionally illiterate adult. In that regard, sadly, it is a disappointing fact that until recently it has not been legally allowable, much less fiscally feasible, for the U.S. Public Health Service to put a spot announcement on prime time TV about all this, never mind the issue of what language they would be permitted to use if they could. (And yet most American viewers could probably hum the "Join the Army" jingle for all the times they've heard it at football halftimes). In this era of mass communication, we are officially tongue-tied in the midst of a burgeoning catastrophe! Among other things, we need that education to heal the frenzy of fear that is all around us. The price of frenzy goes far beyond the obvious, for if you really unloose the wolves who would savage our fundamental concern for the worth of the individual in the light of what we know about the non-transmissibility of the virus, it would violate every principle of our professional lives, and it would allow a savaging of the very foundations of our democratic society. I try to read about other things in order to get away from my AIDS worries every once in a while; usually it backfires, since the issues raised by AIDS are pervasive echoes of a multitude of human problems that have been left unsolved over decades or even centuries - the very things people write books about. Such an echo came to me recently, making me think of the arguable claim of the gay community that things would have moved faster if bankers rather than gay men had borne the initial brunt of the epidemic. I'm not sure that is true about biomedical science, for scientific inquiry is relatively impersonal and is driven by the intellectual fires that are humanity's proudest claim to uniqueness. But I do believe it may be true of the vast social and fiscal problems we now face in the area of health care delivery and, of course, education for prevention. The passage I was reading that made me think of our present social inertia with AIDS was in David Schoenbrun's autobiographical description of his entry, with General Patton, into a liberated concentration camp in Germany at the end of World War II. He
Page 341 JUNE E. OSBORN 341 described the horror of what he saw and then mused about how the surrounding civilian population could have lived so close to such horror - how much they knew of the ghastly conditions nearby. His conclusion struck me as entirely too apt, for he surmised that whatever the people did know they dismissed or did not pursue because, after all, it was happening to others. And then he commented, "Unless all men and women begin to understand in their very being that we are all one and that there are no 'others', humanity may be doomed." So my final comment, as we brace ourselves for the intensifying onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, is that there are no others. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The poem by Barry Blackwell originally appeared in The Psychiatric Times, February 1986, p. 18. The quotation from David Schoenbrun is from America Inside Out: At Home and Abroad from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p. 144. Further information on AIDS can be found in the following publications: J.E. Osborn. "The AIDS epidemic: An overview of the science." Issues in Science and Technology, Winter 1986, pp. 40-55. Mobilizing against AIDS: The Unfinished Story of a Virus. Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986. Confronting AIDS: Directions for Public Health, Health Care, and Research. Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1986.
Ivan IllichIllich, IvanA Plea for Body HistoryVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 342-348http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:07
Page 342 IVAN ILLICH A PLEA FOR BODY HISTORY Twelve years ago I wrote Medical Nemesis. The book began with the statement, "the medical establishment has become the major threat to health." Hearing this today I would respond, "So what?" Today's major pathogen is, I suspect, the pursuit of a healthy body. In 1987, I would place the historical phenomenology of this novel need into the center of humanistic research. For importantly, this endeavor has a history. As a public cause, the pursuit first appears with the emergence of the nation state. Here, people came to constitute a resource, a "population." Health became a qualitative norm for armies and then, during the nineteenth century, for workers; later, for mothers. In Prussia as in France the medical police were charged with its enforcement. But the pursuit of health was also understood as a personal right, as the physical realization of the Jeffersonian right to the pursuit of happiness. The valetudinarian's dream of a ripe old age on the job, together with the economy's demand for productive workers and fertile reproducers, fused in the idea of health. But what began as a duty and entitlement has been transmogrified into a pressing need. For many of our contemporaries, the pursuit of health has become consubstantial with the experience of their bodies. Since I wrote Medical Nemesis, the symbolic character of health care has changed. Americans now pay more money to health professionals than they spend for either food or housing. An instructive paradox appears: medicines, psychologies, environments and social arrangements increasingly influence how people think and feel, while the concepts and theories to which the professions appeal are publicly questioned. As a result, expenditures on various and sundry holistic wellness programs have increased faster than medical costs. Health appears to lie between the lines of every second advertisement, to be the inspiration of every other media image. Allocations 342
Page 343 IVAN ILLICH 343 for safety, ecology, law enforcement, education and civil defense are approved if they can be related to integral health care. Therefore, the relative importance of the medical establishment within the health sector has been reduced. A curious mixture of opinionated but detailed self-care practices joined to a naive enthusiasm for sophisticated biocratic technology make the efforts and personal attention of physicians ever more frustrating. I suspect that the actual contribution of medicine today is a minor factor in the pathogenic pursuit of health. In Medical Nemesis, I set out to examine the spectrum of effects generated by medical agents. I called these effects "iatrogenic" ("induced by a physician or his treatment"), doing so with a rhetorical purpose. I wanted to call public attention to the research on medical effectiveness carried out during the late fifties and sixties. My conclusion stated the obvious: only a small percentage of all healing, relief of pain, rehabilitation, consolation and prevention was attributable to iatrogenesis. Most of these outcomes occur without or in spite of medical attention. Further, the iatrogenesis of disease is comparable in importance to the iatrogenesis of wellbeing. What sounded shocking then, has now become commonplace. In his forecast for 1986, the U.S. Secretary of Health estimated that 80,000 to 100,000 patients would be seriously injured by hospitalization. But this kind of accidental damage to individuals was marginal to the central argument of my book. I wrote in order to highlight the institutional, social and cultural effects of the medical system. At the center of my analysis stood the iatrogenic reshaping of pain, disease, disability and dying, as these phenomena are experienced by their subject. The cultural constraints of and the symbolic impact on these experiences, insofar as they are mediated by medicine, were my interest. I am not dissatisfied with my text, as far as it goes; but I am distressed that I was blind to a much more profound symbolic iatrogenic effect-the iatrogenesis of the body itself. I overlooked the degree to which, at midcentury, the experience of "Our Bodies and Our Selves" had become the result of medical concepts and cares. I did not recognize that, in addition to the perception of illness, disability, pain and death, the body-percept itself had become iatrogenic. Therefore, my analysis was deficient in two respects: I did not clarify the historical "Gestalt" of that period's body percept or the role of medicine in shaping it. And since I was unaware of the
Page 344 344 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW iatrogenic nature of the experienced body, I did not explore its metamorphosis: the emergence of a body-percept congruent with a postprofessional high-tech lifestyle. To gain perspective on such a contemporary metamorphosis, Body History became for me an important condition for an examined life in the eighties. I originally came to Body History through teaching on the Middle Ages. In my courses on the twelfth century, I focus on the emergence of certain ideas, on themes and concepts for which antiquity has no true equivalents, but which in our time are experienced as certainties. One of these we call our "selves." "Some thirty inches from my nose / the frontier of my person goes," writes W. H. Auden in one of his poems. If you are uncertain about this distinction between yourself and all others, you cannot fit into Western society. There is general agreement that this sense of Self emerges with the Crusades and cathedrals, European peasantry and towns. Further, its successive forms and its contrast with the person in other cultures have been well studied. Little attention has been directed to the fact that the Western Self is experienced as flesh and blood, that the birth of selfhood endowed Europe with a body of experience unlike any other. In collaboration with Dr. Barbara Duden, who studies the early eighteenth century body of women, we developed concepts necessary for a historical phenomenology of the body. We soon met others struggling with the same questions in various periods and settings and began a five year research project at Pennsylvania State University. As Body History takes shape, we are able to understand how each historical moment is incarnated in an epoch-specific body. We now begin to decipher the body of subjective experience as a unique enfleshment of an age's ethos. Through these studies, I have learned to see the Western body as a progressive embodiment of Self. Searching for a common element which might help me interpret disparate changes in the transition from a Romanesque to a Gothic worldview, I hit upon the notion of Body History. I needed to explain how the odor of sanctity could disappear between 1110 and 1180, how relics came to heal on sight, the circumstances under which the bodies of the poor souls in Purgatory assumed their shapes. Why did the zoomorphs which people the inside of Romanesque churches become gargoyles poised for takeoff on the outside of Gothic cathedrals? How did the Christ figure, with outstretched arms and clothed in royal raiment, become the naked, martyred
Page 345 IVAN ILLICH 345 body hanging on a cross by the year 1200? How explain St. Bernard, training abbots for a thousand reformed Cistercian monasteries, teaching these men to breastfeed their young monks with the pure milk of Christ? And, most important because of immense social consequences, I began to understand the context in which the idea of modern sex and marriage was shaped: men and women were endowed with "human" bodies which each "Self" could give to the other, thereby creating kinship ties between their respective families; not by the will of elders, but by a legal contract between individuals who exchange rights onto their bodies a new kind of society was coming into being. I came to see that there was a distinct awareness of the body as the primary locus of experience. This body, specific to one period, but subject to profound transformations, sometimes occurring within relatively short spans of time, was parallel to but clearly distant from the body that was painted, sculpted, and described in that historical moment. Then this insight and understanding revealed to me the kind of critique which Medical Nemesis needed. At the core of my argument there I had placed the art of living - the culturally shaped skill and will to live one's age, bearing or enduring and enjoying it. As a philosopher, I was interested in fostering and protecting this art and its traditions in a time of intensive medicalization of daily life. I tried to show that the art of living has both a sunny and a shadowy side; one can speak of an art of enjoyment and an art of suffering. On this point, I was criticized by some who questioned my motives: because I saw "culture" in a subjective way as including the patterned skill and motivation for the "art of suffering," my critics claimed that I was a romantic, a masochist, or a preacher anxious to restrain any expectations of progress. Others applauded my attempt to root the concept of culture in the experienced meaning of personal action. Body History, however, led me to see what was genuinely deficient in my analysis. Both enjoyment and suffering are abstract concepts. They name opposite forms in which sensations are culturally embodied. Enjoyment speaks about the localization of pleasure as the "body," and suffering about the topology of depression, lassitude, irritation or pain. Until recently, I had looked at the body as a natural fact which stands outside the historian's domain. I had not understood the difference, which can be great, between the experienced body and other less ephemeral objects which the historian
Page 346 346 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW must examine for their use and meaning. My wonder at not finding a body like mine in the twelfth century led me to recognize the iatrogenic "body" of the sixties as the result of a social construction which belonged to only one generation, albeit in a gender-, class-, tradition- and place-specific way. I realize that the medical system cannot engender a body, even if it cares for one from conception to brain death. In every epoch, bodies exist only in context. They form the felt equivalent of an age, insofar as that age can be experienced by a specific group. In most periods, women seem to have different kinds of bodies than men, serfs different from those of lords. The first repairmen of the new windmills which appeared in the thirteenth century, itinerant mechanics, were shunned by city and country folk alike because of their feel. Transportation plays as large a part in the sociogenesis of our bodies as medicine does. Bodies which require daily shipment were unthinkable a few generations ago. We say that we "go somewhere" when we drive or fly. Engineering manuals speak of "selftransportation" when we use our feet rather than the elevator. And we feel entitled to high-tech crutches, deprived if we must fall back on our feet. I can understand the body of Americans during the period of the Vietnam war as belonging to homo transportandus, and caricature this body as the cancer-frightened consumer of Valium. But after some study I see that the terms most apt must directly refer to a transition now taking place: the dissolution of the iatrogenic body into one fitted by and for high-tech. Choosing the adjective, "iatrogenic", I call attention to the very special relationship between the medical establishment and body perception, a relationship which now dissolves before my eyes. I see something occurring. Around the middle of this century, the medical establishment reached an unprecedented influence over the social construction of bodies. Designers deferred to medical norms in creating new furniture or automobiles; schools and the media inundated the imagination with medical and/or psychiatric fantasies; the structures of welfare and insurance systems trained everyone for patienthood. We experienced a special moment of history, when one agency, namely medicine, reached toward a monopoly over the social construction of bodily reality. A somewhat comparable situation seems to have occurred around 1220 when the Church influenced the experience
Page 347 IVAN ILLICH 347 of lust: when the polymorphic bodies in the capitals that carry romanic churches became mere gargoyles or marginals in books. Usually the generation of the felt body cannot be assigned to just one agent. When the plague reached Florence in 1622 to 1623, no "health care system" was mobilized. In a remarkable study, Giulia Calvi describes how the entire city rose to the challenge of the scourge. Barbers and surgeons, together with candlemakers and smelling salts vendors, magistrates and grave diggers, chaplains of special sanctuaries for desperate cases and incense merchants, each had their particular response to the epidemic. The flesh of each Florentine, be he anguished or diseased, was reflected in various ways, as if from mirrors, pools of water, polished metal, the eyes of neighbors. No single professional body could catch the diseased flesh in one single mirror. No one agency was endorsed with the power to establish the felt body as such. The mid-twentieth century bid for such a monopoly on the part of medicine has been unprecedented. I have come to believe that the medical establishment has lost this claim during the last ten years. Professional power over the definition of reality has reached its apogee and is now in decline. At this moment, a confusing mixture of high-tech and herbal wisdom, bioengineering and autonomous exercise operate to create felt reality, including that of the body. Twenty years ago it was common to refer to "the body I have" as "my body." We know that this reference to ownership in ordinary speech is post-Cartesian. It first appears in all European languages with the spread of possessive individualism, a phenomenon well described by C.B. McPherson. But now I frequently meet young people who smile when somebody does not "identify" with his body. They speak of the body they "are," but then, paradoxically, refer to it as "my system." During the sixties the medical profession was prominent in determining what the body is and how it ought to feel. During the seventies it began to share the power to objectify people with other agents. From an enterprise that objectifies people as bodies or psyches a new model has sprung that engenders people who objectify themselves: who conceive of themselves as "producers" of their bodies. It is now but a part of a new epistemological matrix in the process of being formed. It may be one that brings forth people who experience themselves as contributors to a complex computer program and who see themselves as part of its text. Nothing seems to me more important now than the clear distinction between the current
Page 348 348 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW trend toward "body building" and the traditional art of embodying culture. NOTE 1The first result is B. Duden, A Repertory to Bibliography on Body History, Science Technology and Society Program, Pennsylvania State University. See also, Barbara Duden, Geschichte unter der Haut (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987).
Baron WormserWormser, BaronPornoVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 349-350http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:08
Page 349 BARON WORMSER PORNO Every good boy deserves fucking, The postures claim, and though nothing happens, The boys agree. The threat of power creates Its own community. Hands quiver slightly. You could say of this promised flesh that Someone was human once and may still be. Meantime in the backdropped light All the unnamed citizens like Sue, Wanda, Joy, and Cheri Return to the earth of identity - The basic, coveted body. All the boys brag of their opposition, The ease with which they subdue Argument, vanity, or virtue. They know that vision is cruel, That the eyes that look at the camera Will mock what is substantial, The eyes that feast on tits and ass Will pretend what is possible. At this extreme, all feeling is mental. Once a couple fucked in darkness Unknown, unseen, unremarked. It was the myth that got passed on Until someone forgot to tell Someone; someone no longer believed In the concupiscence of stealth. 349
Baron WormserWormser, BaronAdulteryVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 350http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:09
Page 350 350 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Conviction comes hard now. Eros is Pierced in a hygiene of photography. The visible speaks: "Oh stranger, Pause and imagine me." ADULTERY One steamy afternoon she steps out of her dress. Far below, cabs continue to almost collide. The windowful of scattered enormity Before him is always palpably personal, The scrabble of misplaced history. He turns to see a woman fold a slip. Lust is helpless intelligence. Sweetly unnerved, they seem to merge Into one agreed recognition. The city evinces its same relentless pain While they drowse and chat and muse. They laugh at their mingled courage. If there is no going backward, there is No need to strike a moral pose. Disillusion is easily gratified, The sighs that are the steps of time Wilt like the flowers that both have Forgotten to place in water.
Stephen SandySandy, StephenThe Sunday OutboardVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 351-352http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:10
Page 351 STEPHEN SANDY THE SUNDAY OUTBOARD To the right from the head of the water now The grinding burble of an outboard through The spruce crowding the shore; and now the boat Emerged, nibbling to view, brimming with people, A dark bouquet of heads against the lightSlabbed surface; working left toward town And the disused steamboat channel- no doubt fetching The Sunday papers. It passed as if in haste. Then nothing for minutes of blank silence, one Pigeon hawk sailing across the upper lefthand Corner of the sky. Soon the wake of the outboard In parallel swells dashed the shore, broadside At his feet, splashing in strokes scumbled with light. The boat just gone, whose absence now was Touching him at the edges of the medium Through which it drove, would make him think of them -He, she, all of them - placid, day by day Unmoving as a pond in autumn hills Until one morning they see how something's passed Through them; commotion hatching at the edges. Take the daughter, one day no longer hanging On his neck in wonder. She has taken note Of the sexy parts, goes off under the eaves By herself as if forever, without a doubt Offended seeing how things were at home: The roof of care they had to shield her with, Only a token shelter from the brawn Of avenues, or talk heard on a street. 351
Page 352 352 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW How long he sat there with lake for company Escaped him, till from the silting steamboat channel The far whine of the boat returning reached him. The papers, he thinks, and comics for the kids. Over the light-spill on the glassen calm The outboard cuts a fine loud swath: as if In haste heading up lake now, droning into The palisade of spruces, out of sight.
Jane O. WayneWayne, Jane O.The TakeoverVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 353http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:11
Page 353 JANE O. WAYNE THE TAKEOVER At first I thought you were hiding in another room, waiting behind a door for just the right moment to attack-but how slowly you disclosed yourself: one vein at a time, one strand of hair. I kept thinking I'd recover, clear my throat of you, outgrow you like a blackened fingernail, but you took over. Piecemeal you got the best of me, filled my calendar, filled the pages in my photo album. It's late. The front door slams again. I'm no fool upstairs who thinks you'll settle for the silver and leave me alone. I might as well accommodate you. I set your place at the table. I lie down with you at night. 353
Jane O. WayneWayne, Jane O.Freeze WarningVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 354http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:12
Page 354 354 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW FREEZE WARNING I heed cold air as a floodworker does a river. I pack up my garden in the dark to salvage what I can. Tonight I don't have to choose between the ripe and the unready. I can take it all no questions asked - stem-snapping, pepper- twisting, these doorknobs that open nothing, these green ends- in- themselves. I like the night-shift, working alone hours before the killer strikes, the last chance,, the close-call of it. I like hosta and hydrangea waving their hands, the ground before it hardens like a corpse. And walking back, the lights already on I like having more than I need: my arms spilling-full of vegetables, cold and moon-shiny, tomato leaf smell on my hands. I like, too, keeping pale tomatoes on the shelf, turning them red under my warm eye.
Clayton EshlemanEshleman, ClaytonGisantsVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 355http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:13
Page 355 CLAYTON ESHLEMAN GISANTS In Nantes, FranCois II curbed, and keenly cut, in sculptured white stone, his hands pressed in prayer, like a shark fin cutting the roily cathedral air. Marguerite de Foix, even more polished, as if oiled, duplicating his gestures, or was he duplicating M's? Two "gisants" in gender duplication, cut to resemble their prayers to remain! And to think anyone could be cut from this stone - by a deeper gouge here, a peasant, 3 gouges across the face, a suicide. In stone, then, it must be said, resides the potential resemblance of everyone. F and M guard themselves with cherubs, a greyhound, angels. They know, as they cruise the nave, how arbitrary their rule was! How their hunger to be remembered must be reinforced by our hunger to step inside their temenos, and swim with them in spirit, carnivorous and nuptial, to the throb of the organ against the organs of the worshipers, at attention as they make and unmake shark fins with their upended end-facing hands! Cathedrale St-Pierre et St-Paul 355
Page 356 H C) Q 04 0 4-J.~ CI -4-d P--4 C I.uQ
J.P. TelotteTelotte, J.P.Casablanca and the Larcenous Cult FilmVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 357-368http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:14
Page 357 J. P. TELOTTE CASABLANCA AND THE LARCENOUS CULT FILM [Casablanca] is a hodgepodge of sensational scenes strung together implausibly; its characters are psychologically incredible, its actors act in a mannered way. Nevertheless, it is a great example of cinematic discourse, a palimpsest for future students of twentieth-century religiosity, a paramount laboratory for semiotic research into textual strategies. Moreover, it has become a cult movie.1 Umberto Eco Casablanca is undoubtedly one of the most popular films of the American cinema. In 1943 it won Academy Awards for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, and in 1977, when the American Film Institute asked its members to select the ten best American films of all time, Casablanca finished third, behind those popular and artistic institutions, Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane. As Umberto Eco notes, it is also what we might call a cult movie, one with a devoted audience that seems to know every line of dialogue and to anticipate every plot twist. That status, however, also points to its problematic position among film historians and critics; for we usually associate the "cult," in film, literature, or music, with something less than high art, and consign it to a netherworld of popular culture. Eco's discussion of Casablanca illustrates this attitude, as he describes the random pattern of signification that occurs in this film and other cult works. A cult movie, he explains, lacks "a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness."2 Of course, as a student of semiotics Eco finds Casablanca's variety of signs- Bogart as existential emblem, the patterns of melodramatic formula, conventions of good and evil character portrayals -fertile ground for investigation. And the legend of 357
Page 358 358 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Casablanca's filming, that it was shot in sequence as the script was daily being written and finalized, encourages such an approach. Despite his efforts to avoid judging the film, Eco's analysis inevitably seems to trivialize what the public perceives to be a classic of the American screen; he suggests that it works only because it has "something for everyone" and little of coherence, depth, or unified focus to appeal to the more discriminating moviegoer. Focusing on the film's "organic imperfections" in this way obscures one of any cult film's most important characteristics, namely, its ability to "live on," to appeal across time periods. Certainly, we see enough instances in the film industry today of producers trying to attract a large audience share by shrewdly reading our culture's current and varied enthusiasms, and then designing narratives calculated to play on those enthusiasms. However, that same timeliness will, in turn, almost assuredly work against a film historically, as our attitudes and values go through their normal evolution. Viewed against a broad historical backdrop, a period film often seems like a mishmash, a piece of "camp" art, or worse, meaningless to an era in which none of its original attractions works upon the audience. Casablanca's appeal, however, is not "camp," and while there is much going on in the film, it is also surprisingly unified in ways that Eco's semiotic perspective overlooks. One source of unity shows up in the film's overarching mythic structure. As David Middleton has convincingly demonstrated, Casablanca's narrative closely follows the monomythic pattern of the "the journey of the hero figure through his physical and psychic life."3 Joseph Campbell, particularly in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, has outlined this universal narrative formula, which we find modeled most graphically in masterpieces of Western culture such as The Iliad, The New Testament, and The Divine Comedy. Two phases of this mythic formula in particular, its "retreat" and "quest" phases, largely structure Casablanca. In the retreat phase, a hero withdraws from the world of action and stubbornly resists all efforts to be drawn back into this realm. Eventually, though, the hero must emerge from his retreat and embark on a quest through which he proves himself and gains a new understanding of his being. As the action of Casablanca begins, we find the American expatriate Richard Blaine withdrawn into a private world, his cafe in Casablanca, but by the time the narrative concludes he has abandoned
Page 359 J. P. TELOTTE 359 his isolation - sold his cafe - and fully committed himself to a world of action, even embarking on a personal quest of sorts, as he returns to the fight against the Nazis. In following these fundamental patterns, Middleton argues, Casablanca "manages to achieve a kind of universality" that accounts for its broad and enduring appeal.4 One of the basic functions of myth is to shape the various events of human experience into some meaningful form, to transform life's multiplicity into a significant unity. While we might well see Casablanca operating within a broad mythic pattern, then, we can without contradiction also view it as pursuing multiple themes and developing various levels of thematic coherence. What I wish to do here is investigate one such structuring theme in Casablanca, the normally unnoticed one of thievery. First, however, we should note that what Eco finds amusing about the film is not the presence of various themes, but the randomness with which they seem to operate, the fact that the connection of any one to the narrative whole appears so elusive and arbitrary. A motif like thievery is instructive in this regard precisely because of its seeming slightness; it apparently works simply to signify a pattern of corruption in the world of Casablanca. Yet it is also a pattern that sharpens the focus of themes both archetypal and contemporary to its 1941 setting, and thereby lends a unity of action to the entire film. This pattern operates so subtly, though, that one might well ask, "What thievery?" The film's opening presents a variety of images, all of them linked by a significant pattern of thefts. First, we view a turning globe, then a map of Europe and North Africa, while a voice-over describes a world at war. Shifting from this global perspective, we are next introduced to the city of Casablanca which has become the locus of much of the refugee traffic caused by the war. And finally, we view various groups of individuals within the city, most of them anxiously seeking a way out to freedom. Accompanying each of these levels is a tale of theft that serves a monitory function, warning us of a need to be vigilant, not only at the individual level, but on the social and international levels too. First, the people of Europe have been dispossessed, their countries forcefully taken from them by the Nazi war machine. Second, several important documents, "letters of transit" that effectively control the refugee flow, have been stolen from German couriers in the desert and are now on their way to Casablanca and its flourishing black market. And third, a pickpocket lifts a wallet from an unsuspecting
Page 360 360 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW couple, even as he warns them about the "scum of Europe" who have migrated to Casablanca. From the international down to the individual level, then, a pattern of thievery is immediately established, and with it a sense of this world as a fluid, unpredictable, and threatening place. The narrative is effectively motivated by the second of these acts, the theft of the letters of transit or official travel permits. Their announced disappearance introduces a montage of search scenes, as the local police try to round up "all the usual suspects," and it introduces the major characters in the drama that will follow. This theft brings the Czech patriot Victor Laszlo, who is fleeing a German concentration camp, into contact with the American expatriate Rick Blaine, who operates a popular Casablanca nightclub; it involves the German officer Major Strasser in a contest of guile and strength to prevent Laszlo from obtaining those papers and return him to imprisonment in Europe; and it reunites Rick with his lost love, Ilse Lund, who tries to get the papers from him, first by persuasion, and then by taking them at gunpoint- in effect, by repeating the original theft. The initial theft thus establishes a relationship for all of the major characters, and even precipitates other thefts. It becomes their focal point, just as a similar "purloined letter" in Edgar Allan Poe's tale of that title forms a kind of hub for an interplay of deception and detection, guile and insight, theft matched by theft. In fact, Poe's tale has much in common with and offers a revealing gloss on this film. In both instances, a letter or letters have been stolen; in both the person who possesses the stolen documents is known or suspected; in both a shift in political power seems to hinge on their possession; and in both the documents are "hidden" in relatively plain sight - in Poe's story, the letter sits unnoticed in a prominently placed letter holder, while in the film the letters are in Sam's piano, which occupies a central spot in Rick's nightclub. What may be most significant about these similar situations for our discussion is that both represent a fundamental challenge to the prevailing political order. For each narrative presents its motivating action as not just a theft but a defiant act. In one case, the thief is "the Minister D-, who dares all things," as Poe notes, and even seems to delight in stumping the police who so thoroughly search his quarters. He "dares" because of the power to be gained, for through his theft of a personal letter, he wins control over the Queen, and through her over the government itself. In the other case, the theft represents a
Page 361 J.P. TELOTTE 361 The purloined letters remain concealed in the piano as film time goes by. Photo credit: The Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive significant strike at Nazi power - two German couriers were murdered to gain the letters - and an effort to usurp some of that conquering power's authority,, since the letters of transit open up the lanes of free travel that the Nazis have sought to close. Subsequently, it promises to reveal weaknesses in the Nazi system by permitting the escape of "a subject of the German Reich," the resistance leader Laszlo. While Poe'sstr seems to emphasize the powers of reason, or ".ratiocination," as the detective-protagonist Dupin puts it, Casablanca takes emotion as its subject. Through its romantic triangle of Rick, Ilse,, and Laszlo,, it turns our attention mainly to the human feelings of possession and loss that result from this motivating theft. Thus while the Poe tale works entirely through a distancing frame -
Page 362 362 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW the letter's original theft and even the manner in which Dupin recovers it are related after the fact- Casablanca quickly drops its introductory voice-of-god type narration in favor of an entirely "theatrical" drama consistent with traditional Hollywood narrative. The missing letters of transit shift into the background - are effectively replaced - as Rick Blaine's missing love, his stolen girl, comes to the fore. As we learn, just before they were to leave Paris and be married, Ilse was called away and spirited to her husband, Laszlo, who had been presumed dead in a Nazi concentration camp. The aftermath of that loss shows up here as Rick by turns spurns his former love and considers stealing her back from Laszlo. In fact, the film's conclusion turns on this linking of the girl and the letters, with Rick contemplating using them to take the girl away with him to America, or keeping her in Casablanca while sending Laszlo off, the letters effectively taking Ilse's place. That he does neither represents a significant turn in the narrative away from the selfish and cynical role he has enacted since being robbed of his happiness in Paris. The primary love relationship, wherein Ilse disappears, reappears, and effectively challenges Rick to steal her from her husband or lose her forever, plays against a broad pattern of theft at work in this world, and in the process points toward Casablanca's larger significance. For the warring world around Casablanca is, after all, one where possession seems determined by strength or guile, by the ability to dispossess others of what is rightfully theirs. While the Nazis and their conquest of Europe and North Africa are the primary example, that model of action has clearly filtered down to the Moroccan microcosm too. Our introduction to Casablanca, as already noted, is marked by a visiting British couple's being victimized by a pickpocket, who, even as he lifts the man's wallet, ironically warns him to be on guard because the "place is full of vultures, vultures everywhere." Shortly afterward, we see the same pickpocket at work in Rick's Caf6 Americain, the film's main setting, where we encounter various "parasites," even "cut-rate" ones like the thief and murderer Ugarte, and Germans who, the waiter Carl notes, receive the best table in the club because "they would take it anyway." A flourishing black market adds to this minefield of a milieu, as does the information that not even Rick is immune from the general degradation. His supply shipments, we learn, always come "a little bit short," with something stolen - a condition which the black market leader Ferrari passes off as the inevitable "carrying
Page 363 J. P. TELOTTE 363 charges" - and in recompense Rick's club seems to rely heavily for its business on the illegal activities that transpire inside and on its rigged roulette wheel. What this general climate of larceny and corruption helps sketch out is a world that is disturbingly fluid, readily open to dispossession and appropriation, in part because too many of its inhabitants are like the dotty British couple who, by their own admission, "hear very little" and often seem little more than objects themselves. Reduced in this way to objects, people easily become, as Ferrari notes, "Casablanca's leading commodity." Moreover, the authority that holds this culture together, as embodied in Captain Renault's Vichy French government, is itself little more than a kind of institutionalized corruption, permitted by that larger embodiment of social evil, the Nazis. The result of this pervasive atmosphere is a pointedly anti-social climate, an anti-social society, if you will. Thus Renault praises Rick's avowal that he would not help Laszlo escape Casablanca, because "I stick my neck out for nobody," as "a wise foreign policy." In such an unmoored, insecure world, the film warns, cynical selfishness quickly becomes a rational model for human behavior. Just as the climate of thievery here reflects the larger Nazi model, so does this cynical selfishness mirror the German attitude and even contribute to its power. Rick's isolationist, self-serving code is repeatedly underscored, as when he refuses to help Ugarte, when he turns a deaf ear to Laszlo's pleas and tells him to "ask your wife" why he will not help, when he initially counsels the Bulgarian girl who asks for his help to "go back" to her occupied homeland, or when he tells Ilse, "I'm not fighting for anything anymore except myself. I'm the only cause I'm interested in." The larger implications of this stance become explicit when Rick speaks of an America that, in December 1941 when these events take place, was still safely uninvolved and distant from the war: "I'll bet they're asleep in New York; I'll bet they're asleep all over America." This sort of retreat from involvement thinly masks a wish for oblivion to which the Nazis willingly cater. Thus when Laszlo argues that "if we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die," Rick simply sidesteps his argument, saying "What of it? Then it'll be out of its misery," and notes that he intends "to die in Casablanca. It's a good place for it." Of course, Rick's stance was meant to work ironically, challenging viewers of 1943 to adopt an opposite posture of action and commit
Page 364 364 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW ment to a cause. As Robert Ray argues, though, posing such a challenge was difficult, since it evoked the very tensions implicit in the narrative. With their respective commitments to isolation and group action, or rugged individualism and dedicated idealism, Rick and Laszlo represented "two divergent strains of American mythology" that had never been satisfactorily reconciled.5 The motif of thievery, however, helps to effect that reconciliation by shaping an individualistic action that ultimately serves the group, a kind of outlawry that implicitly acknowledges the need of law in this anarchic world. Again, Poe's story affords an interesting parallel. We never really know what the contents of the purloined letter are; our concern is solely with the power it conveys to the possessor. Similarly, the letters of transit signify nothing in a conventional "letter" sense; that is, they carry no message. They are pure signs that, as the thief Ugarte explains, "cannot be rescinded, not even questioned." Thus they are significant - they function as signs - solely in terms of their effect, their allowance of movement despite the Nazi effort to control all movement. As a result, the film increasingly focuses largely on effects, not meaning, on what shifts in power possession of the letters might produce, how they too might upset the status quo. What those letters ultimately say, consequently, is just how unstable power and authority are here-on the one hand, how easily they might be wrested from their rightful possessors, but on the other, how available they are to being retaken from the thieves. And this latter message would have been as comforting to audiences in the early war years as it is today for viewers who see themselves as dispossessed or repressed by a monolithic system or status quo. Poe's story, free from Casablanca's historical constraints, manages a simpler visitation of justice through a narrative repetition; the theft of the letter is redressed by Dupin's stealing it back from Minister D-, which results in political power being restored to its rightful wielder. While the film moves toward a similar narrative repetition, its task is complicated by the fact that we shift our sympathy to the thieves and thievery - insofar as that thievery is directed against the global thieves, the Nazis. The film first offers a complex model of such a turn when Ilse comes to Rick's room, asks him for the letters of transit, and after he refuses to surrender them tries to take them at gunpoint. Her theft fails, however, and appropriately so for the narrative's sake, since as noted the letters themselves are less important than their effect. While Ilse's effort to steal the letters
Page 365 J. P. TELOTTE 365 from Rick, motivated as it is by a concern with "something more important" than her own feelings, seems a properly revolutionary theft, an action we might embrace, we have already been led to believe that it might ultimately accomplish little. It would neither alter the dismal politics of Casablanca nor, in all probability, result in Laszlo's escape; as Rick notes, with his more realistic sense of this fluid and unpredictable world, "People have been held in Casablanca in spite of their legal rights." For this reason, it is important that Rick retain and dispose of the letters. For he represents a hope of difference or change, as his past history - running guns to Ethiopia to combat the Italian invaders, fighting on the Loyalist side in Spain, or being on the Germans' "black list" in Europe- and his deep knowledge of this world attests. Then too, Rick, after the fashion of the heroic gunslinger of the old West, shares the fallen condition of his adopted locale; he too, in his small fashion, is a thief and thus able to deal with this world on its own terms in a way that neither Ilse nor Laszlo can. Of course, he could not steal the letters from himself, but he can make off with what the Germans really want, which is Laszlo. And in the process he can affirm and make acceptable our previously uncomfortable placement in the narrative. Pulled alternately toward Rick's selffocused independence by the sheer weight of the Bogart persona, and toward Laszlo's selfless idealism by the wartime situation, we finally locate a narrative identity we can embrace in the underdog thief who hopes to turn the tables on the authorities; for where evil is law, defiance becomes the common good and the defier a proper hero. There can be no simple repetition of the prime or motivating theft, therefore, because it is not a theft that we want set right. On the contrary, it must remain an open violation for best effect, since that very openness promises an alternative to the Nazi status quo. What is taken away-or "stolen"-at the film's end, though, is especially fitting given the notion that people are the "leading commodity" in this fallen world. Laszlo has all along been connected with the letters and pursued as if he were what the letters of transit were really all about, their "meaning." And in effect he is, for his is the voice of freedom - or "transit"; he speaks a message made possible by the messageless letters that embody an effect of freedom - or "transit." Thus, the initial theft opens the way for another spiriting away from the Germans and their power, as Rick puts Laszlo and
Page 366 366 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Ilse - who is, as Rick says, "a part of his work, the thing that keeps him going"- on the plane to Lisbon and freedom. With this conclusion the film looks toward an eventual reversal of the Nazis' criminal power, even the possibility of "stealing" back all that has previously been taken from Western culture by their rapacious march of conquest, summarized by the film's narrating voice at the beginning. In his famous seminar on Poe's "Purloined Letter," Jacques Lacan suggested that the tale is essentially about how "a letter always arrives at its destination."6 What Casablanca's letters imply, particularly through their connection to Laszlo, is rather similar. It is the comforting notion that the stolen can eventually be stolen back, that theft-corruption, injustice, or simply repression -will be redressed. In this way, the film speaks a hope felt throughout much of the world at the time of the film's appearance, and a message which seems to have a universal and timeless appeal, that property -or people, even an ideal - will always return to its rightful place or destination, in effect, that what we have is naturally given, inalienable, and should be safe from theft. A shift within the film's narrative structure reinforces this point. The film begins with a framing voice-over and documentary-like presentation that recalls the Movietone newsreels of the period; however, that framing device disappears and is forgotten as the narrative's romantic thrust comes to the fore. With this shift the film carries out a movement from the real or factual to the imaginary, that is, to that realm of our desires to which the movies always cater. Simply put, Casablanca moves from the world of real experiencethe harsh reality of unchecked German conquest in 1941- into the realm of the movies themselves and the wish fulfillment they have always offered viewers, marked most conspiciously here by Major Strasser's sudden death, Louis' improbably sudden conversion to the Free French cause, Rick's own enlistment in "the fight," and the escape of an effective Resistance leader, Victor Laszlo. Eco's conclusion, that Casablanca finally represents "the movies" as a whole, already points in this direction. As he sees it, the factor that makes Casablanca a "cult" film is its naive use of so many conventions of classical film narrative: "it is not one movie. It is 'movies.' And this is the reason it works, in defiance of any aesthetic theory. For it stages the powers of Narrativity in its natural state, before art intervenes to tame it."7 Of course, what most American films typically do, through their "powers of Narrativity," is imagina
Page 367 J. P. TELOTTE 367 tively reframe our lives, providing us with the sort of appealing images or representations that will place us in an imaginary relationship to the real conditions in which we live. Like so many other narratives in this period, though, and especially those that had an implicitly propagandistic aim, Casablanca sought to link the imaginary to the real, thereby acting out our wishes. In the transformation that its conclusion displayed, with Laszlo and Ilse flying to safety and Rick and Louis heading off to continue the struggle, viewers were thus allowed to tap the very power of the movies in opposition to the Axis. Even today, Casablanca exercises, as the most effective films always do, this imaginative power. Through its own successfully "purloined letters" and whole context of thievery, it not only manages to work its varied elements into a unity of concern, but it also models a kind of outlaw justice that seems a key to both the film's cult status and its enduring appeal. The thieves here, after all, are the true heroes, their transgressions actually a blow for law and justice. Since the ultimate effect of their action is all that matters, we are thereby allowed to embrace an identity that is at once dangerous and safe, revolutionary and conservative, outlawed and lawabiding. Perhaps it is in this sense that the film, after the imaginary pattern of most classical narratives, might be said to offer "something for everyone." It is in this way too that Casablanca speaks of the very nature of the cult film, and thereby validates Eco's fascination with, if not his valuation of it. For the cult object utlimately works in a kind of thieving way. Perhaps its salient characteristic is an attractive difference, determined by its subject or the approach to that subject, that seems to place it, and through our immersion us too, outside or at the margins of the mainstream-much like Rick himself, or the Bogart persona for that matter. Almost by definition, it stands apart from the cinematic norm. From that privileged position, though, it gains a power of articulation. It can speak of the movies' power, suggesting how, through them, we might swipe back the various hopes and dreams that the real world so often and easily takes away from the imaginary one we long to inhabit, and indeed come to the movies to repossess. It is in this respect that the cult film surely comes to seem a kind of thief. Through its proscribed status, it lets us feel, comfortably and temporarily, like thieves ourselves, as it pos
Page 368 368 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW tures at stealing our varied desires, as well as our freedom to express them, back from the restrictive world outside the theater. NOTES 1Umberto Eco, "Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage," Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. 197. 2"Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage," p. 198. 3"Casablanca: The Function of Myth in a Popular Classic," New Orleans Review, 13, No. 1 (1986), 11. 4Middleton argues that the changes between the original play on which the film was based, Everybody Comes to Rick's, and the film script suggest that the screenwriters took a mythic approach to their work. "What the screenwriters did," he states, was "to strengthen the quality of universality in the material, to extend its likeness to mythic patterns" (p. 15). sA Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 103. 6"Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,' " Yale French Studies, No. 48 (1973), p. 72. 7"Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage," pp. 208-9.
Rita J. DoucetteDoucette, Rita J.A Dancer in the LakeVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 369-378http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:15
Page 369 RITA J. DOUCETTE A DANCER IN THE LAKE In early January there was a quick atmospheric change. The few leaves left on trees stiffened and plummeted to the ground, shattering like porcelain. Saplings died from the inside out, and the solemn and violent sound of exploding vegetation carried like pistol shots. Malmo Lake bowed to the onslaught and hardened, presenting a flash-frozen surface of flat white plain almost to its center. There, a mirror of open water struggled unsuccessfully for existence, finally blinking out on the third night. Under a grey moon, a strand of skaters whipped onto the ice and formed a necklace of bodies. It made a good film, flickering and ghostly. By nine there was a soundtrack, courtesy of the Malmo Township Orchestra, minus a first violin, an oboe, and the better of two cellists, all of whom had enlisted a few weeks before, just after Pearl Harbor. Soon, there was heartfelt but butchered Mozart, in keeping with the spirit of the times. Aside from this victimization of familiar music there were no other signs that the winter season or its participants were in a period of profound disruption. Perversely charmed by the bitter beautiful coldsnap, minds slowed in tempo, and muscles assumed the technical vivace of whatever brain cells would otherwise have contributed to patriotic fervor. Before Malmo Lake froze over there'd been a raucous eagerness on the part of the township boys to enlist. As the decimated orchestra had survived on the strength of its majority older members, it was now evident that the median age of the audience too had risen. In the group of skaters that night ten or twelve boys who weren't quite seventeen formed a long human whip that threw its outermost members off into the center of the lake. The slim linkage vibrated with bravado, defied the music, and formed a wall of howls and laughter that rebuffed everyone else's insistence on peace. They hurt at being too young to enlist. But they would have hurt more if they hadn't had the example of Dancer Gaines to help them bear this 369
Page 370 370 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW insult of bad timing. He would be seventeen in a few weeks, a beacon of the inevitability of adulthood and enlistment. At the moment he was at the hub of the whip, leaning away from the tail, bearing the circling weight of the others. All along his right flank the muscles were flexed and hard, stretched to their limits, while along his left they were cramped up. Whitney Hollis whooped and called "I'm out!" and let go between the eighth and ninth link. Dancer felt the extra weight of three boys fall away in the distance. Whitney Hollis, Phillip Arnold, and John Gosz. Sixteen, sixteen, and fifteen years old respectively. Dancer Gaines was not a Malmo boy. He was a member of the winter community, all of whom were drawn to Vermont from places like Sag Harbor, Amagansett, New York City, sometimes from around Osterville on Cape Cod, and occasionally, like Dancer, from Beacon Hill. Denson Gaines Sr. and his wife were ski enthusiasts, and the skill Denson Jr. acquired as a result of their tutelage earned him the name by which he soon became known. Flying down the hillsides north of Malmo Lake, a tall graceful form threading off-slope into the trees when the spirit took him, he did look like a dancer in the middle of a silent daring dance. If grace were defined mathematically, it would be either a geometric representation, like a skater forming perfect eights, or an algebraic equation, like a boy trying his growing sensibilities deliberately until he found values for the maze of social variables of his time. Dancer's time was the winter lake, his approaching birthday, and the war. The whip re-formed, this time with Whitney Hollis at the hub and with Dancer as second man. Whitney was a Malmo boy. Small, sturdy, blessed with New England determination, he spent his time in the countryside. He snared rabbits, hunted deer and duck with his father, orienteered through the Green Mountains with other Malmo boys each summer, and established his shack every winter on the lake for ice fishing. As the whip began to spin and speed up, Whitney's skates began to shave in a circular motion, transmitting up through the muscles of his legs and thighs the exact quality and temperament of the ice. If the cold held, he'd push the shack out in a couple of days, chip a hole, drop his lines. If the war kept on, this would be one of his last winters on Malmo, a good biting winter to build up his body for enlistment the autumn after next. He looked along the length of his arm, seeing where Dancer's hand was clasped around his wrist, and where his
Page 371 RITA J. DOUCETTE 371 own hand was clasped around Dancer's wrist. For a moment the grip seemed disembodied, living in the glassy air on its own. And, inexplicably, when Dancer called "I'm out!", and released his grip, Whitney held on. Dancer wobbled for an instant, regained his balance almost immediately, and fought to save the integrity of the whip which was now disintegrating in the wake of the incomplete command. Skaters went down, slid off a ways on their stomachs, and a chorus of voices in various stages of distress rose to meet the stripped menuetto of the Jupiter floating from shore. Whitney went down, but still fighting the grip of Whitney's hand, Dancer simply spun around him, taking the smaller boy with him through several circles. When they stopped, Dancer was still standing and Whitney was still holding on. The older boy stood silently, a shadow against the sky, with a halo of smoke where his breath puffed to the side of his head. "Are you going, Dancer?" "You going to let me go?" Dancer asked, and laughed, giving his captured arm a tug. Whitney seemed to realize for the first time what had happened, and released his hold. "Hey, sorry. I..I..." he stammered. "Forget it," Dancer said, and massaging his wrist he moved off in one long slow glide. Phillip Arnold shot by, cutting his skates and spraying Whitney with a small shower of shaved ice as he ground to a stop. "You alright?" "Yeah." They watched Dancer inscribe some figures on the ice. The orchestra paused between movements. "I wish I was him, Phil. He'll be fighting, and we'll still be wasting our time." "He's going then?" Phillip asked. "What do you mean. Of course he's going." He made a show of getting up, brushing himself off in a perfunctory manner. "He tell you that for sure?" "Yeah, he did." Whitney answered. "What's the big deal anyway? He'll be seventeen, no problem getting his parents to sign for him... what's the big problem?" "No problem," Phillip answered. "No problem." The next movement of the Jupiter began, and with unfailing resilience, the boys began realigning the whip. Whitney stayed out this time around, retreating to a bench and accepting a cup of chocolate. Barrel fires with grates on top gave out
Page 372 372 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW aureoles of buttery light, and Whitney watched Dancer join the whip again, this time several places away from the hub. The whip was already beginning to turn slowly by the time Dancer decided to join it, but with almost mathematical precision a space opened for him and he took the spot without having disturbed the slow rotation an inch. That was Dancer, Whitney thought to himself. A talent for attracting mystery. Take, for instance the mystery of his coming enlistment. The day Pearl Harbor was bombed, Whitney and Dancer were skiing the big straight north of town. They had an easy passing friendship, one as seasonal as Dancer's appearances in Malmo. Whitney, Phillip, and John Gosz were the triumvirate nearest in age to Dancer, and after seeing the older boy on the slopes and on the ice, made friendly advances to him. Dancer was polite but distant. Town information had it that he was a prep-school boy from a wealthy old Boston family, Tory roots, aristocracy in spite of the Republic. Phillip and John made little progress in their efforts to befriend Dancer, though as the seasons passed Dancer became a figure of elegance and excellence in their minds. Whitney gained greater but still limited intimacy by following Dancer off the edge of Meere Chasm, flying across the horizontal fifteen-foot-wide fissure in an attempt to mimic his idol. Dancer had cleared the void in an arch so understated that he seemed to have simply drawn a straight line from one side to the other. Whitney, smaller and lighter, had flown up off the lip on one side, been lifted imperceptibly in the massive updraft screeing up from two hundred feet below, and had smashed down like an egg on the opposite side, breaking his leg. Already far ahead down the slope, and apparently unaware that Whitney had followed him, Dancer flew off the trail and angled in and out of the forest until he was out of sight. But Dancer did know Whitney had followed him, because he sent help. Only Whitney ever wondered why Dancer hadn't come back himself. So Whitney dogged him relentlessly, befriending him in spite of his distance. Pearl Harbor day they were on the big straight, skiing a deep powdered-sugar surface. Whitney had gone there directly from inspecting his snares. Phillip and John came to the bottom of the slope, plowing through the woods on old ski-shoes, waving their hands over their heads, making fans in the distance. Perched to start their next run, Dancer and Whitney saw the boys below. "Look at that," Whitney said. "Looks like they have something
Page 373 RITA J. DOUCETTE 373 important to tell us." Dancer slowly adjusted the straps of his skipoles and lowered his goggles against the glare. "Probably just Pearl Harbor," he said calmly. "What?" Whitney turned and stared at the oval face, and saw himself reflected in Dancer's goggles. "Pearl Harbor was bombed, Whitney." And he smiled. It was an ironic smile, deliberate and clean. "Didn't you even know?" he asked. "The country's at war now. You'll be involved soon." And he pushed off, first the ends of his skis tipping up off the sharp little rise they stood on, then the slow lean forward, and finally the cold whoosh as the blades hit fully and began their downward rush. A second later Whitney had pushed off, and for once, his heart pounding and his skis almost out of control, he passed Dancer and ground to an explosive stop in front of Phillip and John. "The Japs bombed Hawaii!" they cried. "We're in the war!" Just then Dancer sailed past, disappearing in the icy haze below. "Dancer, you can fight!" Phillip hollered after him. "You can enlist soon!" and he hooted with excitement, anger, frustration, and directionless fear. Dancer never turned around. Never answered. That was three, no... four weeks ago. A contingent of Malmo enlistees left within a week's time. It seemed that everyone who was old enough and able enough, was gone. The first of the next bunch would be those who came of age next, got their parents' permission. Whitney hurt at being so young; he hurt more in the knowledge that his parents would never give their permission for early enlistment. His grandfather had been killed in the last war. His older brother, a doctor with a practice in Portsmouth, had already enlisted. Phillip and John were in the same boat. Wanting to go, to grow up and kill their country's enemies, but temporarily destined to stay back and pin their dreams on the available candidate. Dancer Gaines. Out on the ice, the whip had gotten longer. A few girls had joined, way out on the arm, and in the moonlight their bright clothes and peaked hats with bobbing pompoms made the whip look like the tail of a kite. At the very end, tall and swift, keeping up with the farthest sweep, Dancer was in stride. He'd changed his position on the line. The whip began to turn. Day after day on the slopes, Whitney spoke with Dancer about his own frustrations concerning the war. Actually, he spoke at Dancer, because the older boy rarely responded. In time, Whitney began communicating his feeling that Dancer was to be his surrogate in
Page 374 374 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW battle. He did it by saying things like "Every time you kill a Jap, tell me. I want to know, Dancer." And "When I get in there with you, we'll show 'em. We'll kill them all." And "I snared two rabbits this morning. I wrung their necks and wished I was you, wringing necks for real." Throughout these one-sided discussions, Dancer skiied wordlessly. The sun sent his long elegant shadow before him down the slope, glassy pearls of ice whizzed off the edges of his skis when the surface granulated, a windburn formed a butterfly across the bridge of his nose and fanned across his cheeks. Yet, if Whitney remained silent for too long, Dancer would turn to him and ask sarcastically, "How's your war?" as if it had nothing to do with him. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor Dancer's parents returned to Boston, and Dancer would follow soon. The long midwinter break was ending. He'd turn seventeen right at the end of his senior year. Whitney asked him twice, "When are you enlisting?" and twice Dancer had asked right back, "When am I enlisting?" with no inflection at all. The Malmo orchestra had had to readjust itself in view of the war, but it had not had to sacrifice the flutes, so with joy and eagerness a small contingent launched into a Mozart flute sonata. The notes rose, sailed horizontally across the ice, and got mixed up with the rotation of the whip, which had begun to move more quickly than it had all evening. Dancer was still at the very end, and was beginning to fold into a stationary crouch, skates aligned and close together. For some reason no one was giving the "let go" signal, and, entwined with the insinuating music, the human cord went around once, twice, again, again... Each time the tip passed by him Whitney tried to see Dancer's face, but a mist had crept in and particles of ice hung in the air between the shore and the skaters, blurring their outlines but sharpening the sounds of the skates on the flat surface. There was a subtle violence to the scene. The rotating spoke of people joined in danger, the eerie flute music, the uncompromising cold. Suddenly the tip of the line disintegrated. Someone at the very end had fallen, and the unexpected loss caused the individual members to go down so systematically and so quickly that within seconds the irresistible forward momentum had carried them all crashing to shore. There were cries and laughter. Retrieval of hats. Examination of twisted ankles. Two or three minutes during which the hubbub of reorientation masked one very important fact. Dancer Gaines was gone. Whitney heard the first stirrings of concern. Phillip ran up to
Page 375 RITA J. DOUCETTE 375 him, shouting that the whip had gone down because Dancer had flown off the end. Maybe he'd let go. Whitney jumped up and moved methodically through the crowd reassembling on shore. Phillip dogged him, suggesting what had already occurred to Whitney. "If he isn't here, he must have gone off into the middle of the lake. The ice isn't so good there, Whit!" Whitney grabbed Phillip and pushed him down. He was enraged that Phillip could be right. Whitney ice-fished. He knew Phillip was right. The view across the lake, hidden in its low smoky veil of encroaching fog, was unbroken as far as the eye could see. The coldsnap eased the next morning, and daylight revealed a sizable area of open water shining like a flat silver plate in the middle of Malmo Lake. Skate marks approached the spot, but the ice was so dangerously friable for yards around that there seemed little point in tracing them directly to the edge. State divers arrived. Stationed in orange and black inflatables, they dived again and again, until they turned blue with the cold. A drag line was established, but the weather was turning again, and two days after the search began it was ended. Malmo was once again frozen over, this time for the winter. Like all unfortunates who fell through the ice, Dancer would have to sleep in his frozen bed till springtime, when a proper search with divers, draglines, soundings, and everything else, could be organized with some hope of success. Given the fact that Malmo Lake was twelve miles around, it was a miracle that so many bodies were recovered. The average was 90 % discovery. Whitney pushed his fishing shack onto the lake a week after Dancer's disappearance, chopped a hole through the ice, and dropped his lines. Phillip and John, usually partners in the icefishing endeavor, made themselves unaccountably scarce. Whitney supposed they didn't want to be staring down into the circular hole one afternoon, mesmerized by the silvery water lapping at its edges, and suddenly find Dancer staring back at them. Not like Whitney. He wanted to find Dancer Gaines, and hoped each time he hauled in his lines that he'd feel a dreadful and inexorable drag. He wanted Dancer so much he could hardly think of anything else all winter. Parts of the lake froze clear, and whenever he had time he walked
Page 376 376 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW the surface. Head down, he watched for the telltale signs of a body trapped just below. Sometime that winter Dancer would have enlisted. Phillip and John spoke endlessly of this. To them, this was the real tragedy. Whitney didn't respond. He scanned the lake, he joined the search in the spring when the ice broke up like big pieces of glass, and all the following summer dropped drag lines, first on an east/west course and then on a north/south course. The obsession to find Dancer might have gone on forever if two things hadn't happened. On September 15, 1942, Whitney's older brother was killed in the Coral Sea. And three days later, Whitney lied his way into the army. The Malmo orchestra's oboeist fell at St. Malo in late summer, 1944. A Malmo boy, he'd been a handsome, introspective surveyor, a beau of one of the Christenson girls, and a friend of Whitney's older brother. Phillip Arnold and John Gosz followed Whitney into the army, both surviving Anzio in 1944 and returning home in time for Christmas of that year. Phillip had shrapnel wounds that were destined to bother him the rest of his life, and John's hearing had been permanently impaired by the sound of 240mm howitzers. Whitney was in the Pacific, fighting in places with names like Peleliu. The Malmo Township Courant published letters from the various war theaters, and Whitney's appeared regularly. They were descriptive, yearning, discouraged, compassionate... everything letters from the front have always been and will always be. They differed in only one respect. At the end of every letter, before signing off, he asked the same question: "Is Dancer still in the lake?" Whitney Hollis was not quite twenty-two when the war ended, or not quite twenty-one. He'd lied to get in, he'd lost the sense of what chronological age really was, as day to day he'd drawn on his inner reserves, depleting them so profoundly that he suspected there was only a vacuum left. It was a deep cold hole, into which Dancer Gaines had been sucked, and out of which he now had to be drawn. For four years Whitney had understood this need, almost from the instant Phillip had told him Dancer was missing. During those four years he'd seen bodies in every degree of mortification, but he hadn't
Page 377 RITA J. DOUCETTE 377 seen the one he needed to see. And over those years, living alone with his thoughts, he began to suspect why this deliverance had eluded him. As long as Dancer's body was not recovered from Malmo Lake, Whitney could indulge himself with speculation. Each letter from home had been encouragement on a wretched inescapable level. So before going home, he stopped in Boston to visit Dancer's parents. Beacon Hill had its good and bad sides, and Denson Gaines Sr. lived on the good side, on Beacon Street itself, near the Somerset Club. October had settled in, and the trees along Beacon Street, in the Public Gardens, and in the Common, burned against the low slate sky like a brushfire. Military uniforms were everywhere. Whitney sat on a bench near the State House, watching passersby and chain-smoking. His palms were alternately sweaty with apprehension and dry with anger. He half hoped that a passerby would be the one he was searching for. A tall man, an impassive oval face, a grace in danger, an isolation so profound that it was virtually impenetrable. But no one like that passed by, so after an hour he stood and walked down Beacon Street. The Gaines townhouse had a dull red facade that seemed warm to the touch, an illusion shared by all the townhouses on the street. Finding the correct number, Whitney stepped into the marble foyer and rang the bell. He was surrounded there by white stone, the bell sounded sweet and faraway. It was cool. It was like being on top of the straight behind Malmo, waiting with Dancer to tip their skis up and over the ridge, to start down. For no reason, except to do it. To start down in the cold. The door opened, revealing a young woman in a domestic's uniform. "Sir?" she asked. "Is this the residence of Denson Gaines, Sr.?" he asked. "Yes, sir." She paused a moment, taking in his uniform, his nervous bearing, the urgency of his stance. "But Mr. Gaines passed away last summer. Perhaps, with the war, you didn't know." Whitney stared at her. The cold of the marble floor was coming up through his shoes. There was mystery in living that could be unbearable. So he said, "No, I didn't know. But I'm looking for his son. Dancer Gaines." "Ah, yes. Please come in. I'll tell him you're here. Your name, sir?" She paused expectantly. Odd, how things that have been so important for so long can
Page 378 378 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW evaporate so quickly. How a vacuum can be filled. How, never having seen the script, an actor can take his place onstage and know the dialogue. "Why did you do it, Dancer?" "Why not? Who did it hurt?" "Didn't you want to go?" "No. I didn't." The girl was speaking to him again, her head to one side, a look of puzzlement on her face. "Sir, are you coming in or not?" She was rather pretty, with plump cheeks that had a butterfly of freckles in the same configuration as Dancer's perpetual snowtan. "No, thank you. I've changed my mind." "Would you care to leave a message?" she asked. He thought about it a moment. Life was strange, telescoped in some places and stretched out forever in others. "No," he said. That December an early coldsnap grabbed the Lake unawares and paralyzed its surface so suddenly and with such decision that the surface froze in the forms of waves and currents. The Malmo Orchestra set up onshore the second night of the freeze, protected from the wind by the huddle of ice fishing shacks all ready to be pushed out the following morning. This year, 1945, they went "popular," because an orchestra missing several instruments could play Gershwin. An orchestra could hum Gershwin. The next war would not catch them unprepared. Whitney leaned against the side of his ice shack, smoking and listening. Someone tried to form a whip on the ice, but the ripples on the surface interfered with rotation and acceleration, and the line broke up into single skaters. A blanket of low fog floated in, spreading like smoke toward the shore. Lost in thought, Whitney almost missed it when a young boy, someone he didn't even know, bent into a crouch, cried out "Here I go, just like the Dancer!" and was swallowed up in the fog.
John W. AldridgeAldridge, John W.Catch-22 Twenty-Five Years LaterVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 379-386http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:16
Page 379 JOHN W. ALDRIDGE CATCH-22 TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER Looking back today, twenty-five years after it was published, we are able to see that Catch-22 has had a remarkable, if not altogether unclouded literary history. It has passed from relatively modest initial success with readers and critics - many of whom liked the book for just the reasons that caused others to hate it-through massive bestsellerdom and early canonization as a youth-cult sacred text to its current status as a monumental artifact of contemporary American literature, almost as assured of longevity as the statues on Easter Island. Yet it is only in fairly recent years that we have begun to learn how to read this curious book, and as is the case with those statues, to understand how and why it got here and became what it is instead of what we may once have believed it to be. The history of Catch-22 is, in effect, also a significant chapter in the history of contemporary criticism, its steady growth in sophistication, its evolving archaeological intelligence, above all, its realization that not only is the medium of fiction the message but that the medium is a fiction capable of sending a fair number of frequently discrete but interlocking messages, always depending of course on the complexity of the imagination behind it and the sensibility of the receiver. The truth of this last is attested to in perhaps a meretricious sort of way by the large diversity of responses Catch-22 received in the first year or two following its publication in 1961. They ranged from the idiotically uncomprehending at the lowest end of the evaluative This essay was originally presented as a lecture at a conference held at the United States Air Force Academy on October 3-4, 1986, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the publication of Catch-22. A considerably shorter and slightly revised version was published in The New York Times Book Review on October 26, 1986. 379
Page 380 380 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW scale to the prophetically perceptive at the highest, and in between there were the reservedly appreciative, the puzzled but enthusiastic, the ambivalent and obscurely annoyed, and more than a few that were rigid with moral outrage. The most hysterically negative review was written by Roger H. Smith and appeared in the Winter 1963 issue of Daedalus. Mr. Smith seems to have felt personally insulted by the book and so alarmed by its potential threat to the fragile virginity of literature that he tried in every way he knew to annihilate it. In a fierce display of poorly articulated vituperation he denounced the book as being poorly articulated, utterly formless, pornographic, and immoral because so anti-institutional and so indiscriminate in its repudiation of just about everything right-thinking people have been brought up to believe in. Way over at the other end of the combat zone were those who seemed to have read another book altogether and to inhabit a completely different ontological epoch. Most notable among these were Nelson Algren and Robert Brustein, the former of whom made what became perhaps the most famous pronouncement on a literary subject to be uttered since John O'Hara announced, on the front page of The New York Times Book Review back in 1950, that Hemingway was "the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare." Algren, with far greater precision, called Catch-22 "not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it is the best American novel to come out of anywhere in years."1 Brustein, writing in the New Republic, was so superbly intelligent about the book that much of the later criticism has done little to improve on his essential argument. He saw at once, for example, that the Air Force setting in World War II is only the ostensible subject of the book and that Heller's achievement lies in his brilliant use of that setting as a metaphor or "a satirical microcosm for many of the macrocosmic idiocies" afflicting the postwar era in general. Brustein also saw and in seeing foresaw what later critics, after considerable equivocation, came to see: that the descent into phantasmagoric horror that occurs in the concluding chapters of the book is not a violation of the comic mode but a plausible vindication of it, since, as he put it, "the escape route of laughter [is] the only recourse from a malignant world." Finally, following the same at the time pioneering logic, Brustein recognized that, given the premises that Heller had established, Yossarian's much-debated decision to desert, far from being a poorly
Page 381 JOHN W. ALDRIDGE 381 justified conclusion for the novel, is in fact a meticulously prepared for conclusion that represents an act of "inverted heroism," "one of those sublime expressions of anarchic individualism without which all natural ideals are pretty hollow anyway," if only because it is proof that Yossarian, alone of them all, has managed to remain morally alive and able to take responsibility for his life in a totally irresponsible world. With these insights Brustein clearly demonstrated prophetic power, and every critic who has since written about Catch-22 is indebted to him for engaging so early and with so much perceptiveness questions about the novel that have proven much later to be the essential questions.2 If responses as sensitive and boldly appreciative as Brustein's were a rarity in 1961, one reason may be that most reviewers were locked into a conventional and, as shortly became evident, an outmoded assumption about what war fiction should be. They had, after all, been conditioned by the important novels of World War I and reconditioned by the second war novels of Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, John Horne Burns, James Jones, and others to expect that the authentic technique for treating war experience is harshly documentary realism. The exceptions of course were the sweetly hygienic productions of Marion Hargrove and Thomas Heggen that were comic in an entirely innocuous way and depicted military lifemostly well behind the combat zone- as being carried on with all the prankish exuberance of a fraternity house beer party. Coming into this context Catch-22 clearly seemed anomalous and more than a trifle ominous. It was a work of consummate zaniness populated by squadrons of madly eccentric, cartoonographic characters whose antics were far loonier than anything ever seen before in war fiction-or, for that matter, in any fiction. Yet the final effect of the book was neither exhilarating nor palliative. This was a new kind of comedy, one that disturbed and subverted before it delighted and that was ultimately as deadly in earnest, as savagely bleak and ugly, as the most dissident war fiction of Remarque or Dos Passos or Mailer. In fact, many readers must have sensed that beneath the comic surfaces Heller was saying something outrageous, unforgivably outrageous, not just about the idiocy of war but about our whole way of life and the system of false values on which it is based. The horror he exposed was not confined to the battlefield or the bombing mission but permeated the entire labyrinthine structure of establishment power. It found expression in the most com
Page 382 382 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW pletely inhumane exploitation of the individual for trivial, selfserving ends and the most extreme indifference to the official objectives that supposedly justified the use of power. It was undoubtedly this recognition that the book was something far broader in scope than a mere indictment of war-a recognition perhaps arrived at only subconsciously by most readers in 1961 -that gave it such pertinence to readers who discovered it over the next decade. For with the seemingly eternal and mindless escalation of the war in Vietnam, history had at last caught up with the book and caused it to be more and more widely recognized as a deadly accurate metaphorical portrait of the nightmarish conditions in which the country appeared to be engulfed. Ironically enough, in the same year that Catch-22 came out, Philip Roth published in Commentary his famous essay, "Writing American Fiction," in which he expressed his personal feelings of bafflement and frustration when confronted with the grotesque improbability of most of the events of contemporary life. In a frequently quoted paragraph he said that "the American writer in the middle of the 20th Century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents... " Roth than proceeded to discuss the work of certain of his contemporaries- most notably, Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, William Styron, and Herbert Gold - and to find in much of it evidence of a failure to engage the American reality - an inevitable failure, he believed, because "what will be the [writer's] subject? His landscape? It is the tug of reality, its mystery and magnetism, that leads one into the writing of fiction-what then when one is not mystified but stupefied? Not drawn but repelled? It would seem that what we might get would be a high proportion of historical novels or contemporary satire-or perhaps just nothing. No books."3 Roth was of course writing out of an era that was particularly notable for unbelievable and often quite repellent happenings. There had been the fiascos of the Eisenhower presidency, the Korean War, the sordid madness of the Joseph McCarthy inquisitions featuring such uncomic grotesques as Roy Cohn and David Schine, to say nothing of McCarthy himself, the Rosenberg execu
Page 383 JOHN W. ALDRIDGE 383 tions, the Nixon-Kennedy debates. But then Heller was writing out of the same era, and what makes Roth's essay historically interesting is that nowhere in it does he show an awareness or even imagine the possibility that the effort to come to terms with the unreality of the American reality might already have begun to be made by such writers as William Gaddis and John Barth, whose first work had been published by 1961, and would continue to be made by Thomas Pynchon, whose V came out two years later, as well as by Joseph Heller in Catch-22. These writers were all, in their different ways, seeking to create a fiction that would assimilate the difficulties Roth described and convert them into imaginative materials. And they achieved this by creating an essentially new kind of fiction that represented an abdication of traditional realism-a form rendered mostly ineffectual because of those very difficulties - and that made unprecedented use of the techniques of black humor, surrealism, and grotesque metaphorization to confront the unreal and dramatize its unreality, most often by making it seem even more unreal than it actually was. The complexity and originality of the work these and other writers have produced impose demands upon criticism that have forced it to grow in sophistication and have obviously contributed to such growth in the criticism of Catch-22. As evidence of this, we need only observe that most of the questions that perplexed or annoyed critics of the novel in the first years following its publication have now been answered, and as this has occurred, the size of Heller's achievement has been revealed to be far larger than it was first thought to be. Robert Brustein at least raised the most important of these questions in his pioneering early review. The first to be asked concerned the extent to which the novel could be read as a satirical attack on World War II, and Norman Podhoretz, in his well-known essay, "The Best Catch There Is," based his criticism of Yossarian's desertion on the assumption that Heller intended to make such an attack but, given the impeccable motives the Allies had for fighting the war, could not do so convincingly. Fortunately, that argument has been put to rest and no longer seriously troubles anyone.4 Of much greater interest is the continuing debate, which through the years has grown steadily subtler and more sophisticated, over the question of the form of the novel. And it comes as no surprise that the most valuable advance in this area has been the unitary or struc
Page 384 384 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW turalist approach, in which certain aspects of the novel that were most worrisome to early critics have been shown to be quite adequately prepared for in the development of the action. The credibility of Yossarian's desertion is one example. Another is the ostensibly sudden transition in the closing chapters from hilarious comedy to the blackest evocation of horror. The more sensitive of recent critics have demonstrated that in fact that horror has been present throughout the action, but its force has been blunted and, in effect, evaded by the comedy. Through a complicated process of thematic backing and filling, countless repetitions of references and details, foreshadowing flashbacks and flash-forwards, a looping and straightening inchworm progression, the moment is finally reached, beginning with the bombing of the undefended mountain village and culminating in the "Eternal City" chapter, when the humor and playful rhetoric are stripped away and the terrified obsession with death, from which the humor has been a hysterical distraction, is revealed in full nakedness. It has also been demonstrated that this tangled, excessively repetitive, and seemingly self-neutralizing narrative structure is a perfectly convincing formal statement of the novel's thematic content, even of the reiterated doublebind of the central symbol, catch-22, which is after all, the ultimate expression of sabotaged expectations, the cruel disparity between the humanitarian ideals by which life is supposed to be directed and the manipulative lies on which the bureaucratic system is actually based. The opening figure of the soldier in white, whose fluids are endlessly drained back into him, the soldier who sees everything twice, the constant raising of the number of bombing missions and loyalty oaths, the fantastically rapid expansion of Milo Minderbinder's empire, the massive incremental enumeration of detail, which is at first nonsensical, as in Cathcart's paranoid compilation of "black eyes" and "feathers in his cap," but by the end is horrifying, as in Yossarian's speculations in the "Eternal City" chapter about the number of victims and injustices there are in life, even the prevailing comic technique of instantaneous refutation and reversal employed everywhere in dizzying excess- all these come together to suggest a world based upon a principle of quantitative valuation in which more is better and most is best, and yet a world in which the accumulated excess of any one element may at any moment be neutralized by the greater accumulated excess of an antithetical element, as the comedy is finally neu
Page 385 JOHN W. ALDRIDGE 385 tralized by the weightier force of terror and death, as the fateful ubiquity of catch-22 finally eclipses all demands for logic and sanity. Thomas LeClair has observed in a brilliant essay that Catch-22 and Something Happened are connected in the sense that the struggle in the latter novel results in part "from Bob Slocum's mapping the quantitative assumptions of Catch-22 onto his own consciousness and life.. " This seems to me an altogether excellent perception and, surprisingly enough, one of the very few examples of a critical effort to find relationships between the two novels. Most commentators have treated Something Happened as if it were a completely different kind of book amounting to a fresh beginning for Heller and often as if it were a particularly unfortunate beginning.5 Yet there is much evidence to indicate that the two are actually quite closely related. In addition to the imposition of the quantitative value system on Slocum's consciousness and life, there is the fact that he inhabits a world in which the Cathcarts and Korns have clearly won. The malignant institutions of bureaucracy are now in complete control, and there is no longer the possibility, for Slocum or anyone else, of rebelling against or escaping their influence. If one tried, one would just be filed away and forgotten like Martha, the typist, when at last she goes insane. Self-interest promoted by power over others through the imposition of fear and insecurity is the universal value and represents an extension into the postwar civilian world of the military hierarchy of power-a development sinisterly envisioned by Mailer's General Cummings in The Naked and the Dead. Individual integrity and belief in justice are at best a memory; in fact, they are among the attributes that have been lost somewhere back in that past when Slocum believes that something terrible happened to him. Everybody, it seems, has sold out to M & M Enterprises. There is no longer a Sweden to escape to, and if there were, it would turn out to be a branch office of the syndicate. Something Happened is finally about the death of those humane values in the name of which Yossarian deserted, and that death is epitomized by Slocum's unconsciously intentional murder of his son, the honest and sensitive little boy who reminds him of the little boy he once was and unaccountably has lost. After the murder it follows logically that Slocum is free to embrace eagerly and even proudly the establishment values of the only world he now knows, for both his son and the innocent boy he himself was are dead and so can no longer stand reproachfully in the way of his capitulation.
Page 386 386 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW LeClair believes that Something Happened is a better novel than Catch-22, and the large body of critical scholarship accumulating around it may well prove his point. Yet it seems unlikely that Something Happened, whatever its merits, will become the literary monument that Catch-22 now is or exert a comparable influence on the life and literature of its time. It is not merely that Catch-22 added a wonderful new term to the contemporary vocabulary, one that has been shown to have a thousand ironical applications. The novel also indemnified the sense of universal but unspecifiable conspiracy that has become a major psychic affliction of our time, and there can be no doubt of its great influence on such productions as M*A*S*H, Dr. Strangelove, and Apocalypse Now or of its close affinities with the works of Pynchon, Gaddis, and Vonnegut. Like them Catch-22 represents a kind of comedy that depends upon the certain expectation of catastrophe and takes the form of a frenzied dance on the brink of the unspeakable. As is the case with most original works of art, it is a novel that reminds us once again of all that we have taken for granted in our world and should not, the madness we try not to bother to notice, the deceptions and falsehoods we lack the will to try to distinguish from truth. Looking back, twenty-five years after its appearance, we can see that the situation Heller described has, during those years, if anything grown more complicated, deranging, and perilous than it was in 1944 or 1961. The comic fable that ends in horror has become more and more clearly a reflection of the altogether uncomic and horrifying realities of the world in which we live and hope to survive. NOTES 1Nelson Algren, "The Catch," Nation, 193 (Nov. 4, 1961), 357-58. 2Robert Brustein, "The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World," New Republic, 145 (Nov. 13, 1961), 11-13. 3Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction," Commentary, 31 (March, 1961), 224-232. 4Norman Podhoretz, "The Best Catch There Is," Doings and Undoings (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), 228-35. 5Thomas LeClair, "Joseph Heller, Something Happened, and the Art of Excess," Studies in American Fiction, 9 (1981), 245-60.
Lawrence L. LangerLanger, Lawrence L.Family Dilemmas in Holocaust LiteratureVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 387-399http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:17
Page 387 LAWRENCE L. LANGER FAMILY DILEMMAS IN HOLOCAUST LITERATURE Four decades after the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi deathcamps, we still wrestle with the problem of retrieval, of finding an entry for future generations into that melancholy event we call the Holocaust and which signifies the attempted extermination of European Jewry. The prophetic tradition which confirmed the Jews, through their Covenant, as the Chosen People, does not prepare us - how could it? - for the ironic inversion which made of the Jews the people chosen, not for spiritual fulfillment, but for physical destruction. We have come a long way in our conception of human relations, and especially of family life, from the very first words of the Lord in Genesis to his newly-formed creatures-"Be fruitful and multiply" - to the survivor of Auschwitz who, speaking of her family in the Lodz ghetto prior to deportation, exclaimed: "In 1940 -thank God! - my father died." The gulf between the divine injunction to bear children and a child's relief that her parent has died before deportation to Auschwitz is the one we must cross if we are to understand what the Holocaust did to the values we normally live by. It left potential victims in a moral vacuum, knowing where instinct and tradition should lead but paralyzed by a context that provided no support at all for the kind of behavior we expect of individuals (and which they expect of themselves), even under the most adverse circumstances, when friends and family members are threatened by harm or violent death. Yet when we examine these "circumstances" not in theory but in fact, we are unprepared for what we find. Let us begin with a simple illustration, an unembellished descriptive passage from Alexander Donat's survivor memoir, The Holocaust Kingdom: 387
Page 388 388 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Nearby, a young woman was sitting on the steps in front of a store. With her was a little girl of about five. Both had been selected for deportation and were waiting to be marched away. The little girl was hungry and pulled at her mother's dress. The mother produced a portion of half-eaten roll from somewhere and broke off a bit. Up to this point, except for the sinister word "deportation," this might be a scene from any impoverished society, with the mother behaving as the traditional nurturer despite seemingly hopeless circumstances. But as the passage continues, the mother violates our expectations, and we are forced to revise our response to a scene that until now has been difficult but bearable: She drew the child in front of her, drank in her every feature, then handed her a bit of the poisoned bread. When the child began to eat it, the woman turned her own head away and stuffed the rest of the roll into her mouth, swallowing rapidly. The little girl ate greedily, but began to cough, then vomit. Screaming, she yanked at her mother's dress, but the woman was already dead. Terrified, the girl struck her mother's body with her fists, yelling over and over again, "Mommy, answer me! Answer me!" Suddenly pathos has been transformed into what we might call a moment beyond tragedy, though the mother's motives, the sources of her extreme despair, remain unexplored. At this point the episode makes no sense at all, unless the reader is prepared to become a collaborator in the drama unfolding before his or her eyes. The reader must accept the reality and possibly even the validity of such an unsettling family response, and then ask the questions that the text does not, with no assurance of receiving satisfactory answers. The rest of the passage complicates the situation further: The noise was not unnoticed by the SS officer and he cast an angry glance in the child's direction and saw her hitting her mother's body. "Look at that, Franz!" he said to one of his fellow officers, his voice loud and disgusted. "A child beating its mother. Can you imagine a German child doing that!" A young man standing among the group of lucky ones who had been selected to live raised his coat collar and turned his back on the scene on the opposite sidewalk. The little girl did not see her father as he turned away, but he did not have to hide his face for long. The SS man took careful aim and put an end to the irritating noise.1
Page 389 LAWRENCE L. LANGER 389 We are confronted now with a string of "abnormal" and unexplained behaviors, including the mother's poisoning of her child and herself, the father's lack of reaction to events, indeed his apparent abandonment of his family, and the SS officer's callous murder of the child. How do we enter the mind of the mother, at the fatal moment of feeding and eating the bread? Or the mind of the father, as he turns his back on the death of his wife and then of his child? Shall we call him insensitive? Cowardly? I doubt whether anyone confronting this episode would be content with such comfortable (and comforting) vocabulary to portray such a wretched human dilemma. And what of the SS officer? Innately cruel, like all Germans? Again, far too simple. No, a moment such as this, if we face it honestly, literally forces us to suspend those values signifying family solidarity to enter a universe where some human beings do not respond as we have been trained to expect them to respond. We enter a morally dislocated world, and to acknowledge, sympathize with, and perhaps comprehend the nature of that dislocation is one of the major challenges still confronting anyone willing to peer beyond consoling conventions into the obscure moral corners, the ones that continue to threaten our need for security, of that event we call the Holocaust. That threat is inherent in the theme, unavoidable, and sometimes I feel that stories of heroic resistance and determined survival, true as they may be, are introduced to protect us from the shattering implications of episodes like the one I have just described. Donat does not have to invent violations of the family bond in order to bring home to us the utter horror of the Holocaust; he merely presents them, recognizing that the haunting human drama is embedded in the situation, not in his treatment of it. He records scene, gesture, dialogue, setting, but eliminates authorial judgment, creating for the reader the role of participant and interpreter. Even less judgmental, ironically, since the setting is a courtroom and the "drama" the testimony of a witness in a trial, is the following episode, this time involving a father and son, "written up" by a journalist who attended the trial. Here the time is both present and past, the narrator a journalist who is "reporting" testimony of a survivor, so that the abnormality of the survivor account is set within a normal framework of the courtroom, where "justice" is being done. The reader, in other words, is asked to combine in the imagination the possibility of justice after the event with the incalculable injustice
Page 390 390 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW native to a place like Auschwitz. He or she must identify with a totally alien situation, and simultaneously with a principle of order, a judge, a trial, the notion of punishment for crime, on which the stability of society is based. Unlike Donat in The Holocaust Kingdom, the author here shapes our response before the survivor says a word, projecting onto the situation preconceptions of cause and consequence that may or may not have a foundation in the experience of the survivor. Donat had merely described the father in the previous passage as a "young man standing in a group of lucky ones who had been selected to live," leaving us to recognize the bitter irony of the ambiguous "lucky" after we have encountered the brutal end of the episode. Here we are predisposed to total sympathy for the victim, but note how that sympathy freezes into mute horror as the details of his ordeal unfold: The witness in the stand is Jean Weiss. One asks oneself under what burden this man still lives, how he can go on living at all, what nightmares haunt him at night. He was an expediter of death at Auschwitz - stretcher bearer and corpse packer; everything was done promptly. From the Black Wall (against which prisoners were shot) to the spot where blood was running out of still-warm bodies into the drain back to where the next batch of victims had just collapsed, covered with blood: "We looked like butchers," says Jean Weiss. And in the room in which Klehr [one of the former SS guards on trial] manipulated his phenol hypodermic, Weiss and another prisoner held the selectees whose lives the "medical orderly" was about to end. "We had to stand behind them, hold their left arm horizontally and put their right arm over their eyes. The other bearer then stepped in front of them, took them by the feet, and carried them out."2 Up to this point, we gain information, not insight. Many commentators familiar with the deathcamps might have recited similar details about the use of prisoners in the doom of the victims. Some might be inclined to blame Weiss for being drawn into the machinery of extermination; but those attuned to mass dying in our century of war and repression will understand how easy it is to be reconciled with the death of others - provided they are strangers. This moment of testimony is transformed into a complex human drama when Weiss's ordeal is suddenly personalized by the introduction of an unexpected confrontation that both Weiss and we are unprepared for. We are forced to experience the total collapse of generations of training in "appropriate" family relationships, when such training is
Page 391 LAWRENCE L. LANGER 391 filtered through the inhospitable atmosphere of Auschwitz. The passage continues: Jean Weiss's cup is not yet empty. He cries, and then goes on: "It happened on September 28, 1942. I don't know how many were lined up ahead of my father. The door opened and my father came in with another prisoner. Klehr talked to my father and told him: "You will get an anti-typhus injection." Then I cried and had to carry out my father myself. Klehr was in a hurry. He injected two prisoners at a time because he wanted to get back to his rabbits." The next day Klehr asked him why he had cried. "I would have let him live," Klehr said after hearing the reason. Why hadn't Weiss told him? Judge Hofmeyer: "Why didn't you?" And Jean Weiss's reply rings out with a stunning psychological force that casts a long shadow over our romantic heritage of stories of heroic response and spiritual resistance in the face of adversity: "I was afraid," Weiss answered, "that Klehr would make me sit down next to him."3 Episodes like these force the reader courageous enough to face the implications of what he is hearing to collaborate with the victim and enter into what I call an ethically insoluble situation. The moral environment is suffocating, polluted not by the victim's failure to act but by the persecutor's repudiation of values that would have permitted the victims to choose an ethically meaningful option. The disconcerting insight thrust upon us is that "deportation" and fatal "phenol injections" are eventualities beyond the moral vision of the potential victims, who retreat with relief into any activity that prolongs their own lives, because this activity, even if it leads to the death of others, permits the imagination to function within a framework of cause and effect that appears to resemble one which our training has prepared us for. Grateful that his own life has been spared temporarily, the father in the first episode stands silently by while his wife and child die. What might he have done? The fact is that in such a situation no gesture of his might have altered the fate of his family; at that point, he was without options. Similarly, SS guard Klehr's protestation notwithstanding, Jean Weiss was so fearful of receiving a fatal injection himself that he remained mute while he watched his father die. What basis had he for concluding that Klehr would have spared their lives had he spoken up, consider
Page 392 392 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW ing what he witnessed in this room every day? Such episodes reflect the power of the written word to dramatize the moral dilemma of being human at its most stringent, not to say most impossible moment. The challenge Jean Weiss faced when he saw his own father walk into that room, knowing what he knew about what went on there, illuminates with an unholy glow the destiny of man's precious faculty of free choice, as well as the equally precious bond joining son to father and father to son, in the alien moral universe of a place like Auschwitz. It may be argued that under equally stressful situations, some men and women reacted as if they confronted a traditional threat of adversity, and chose martyrdom-and this was often the case. Janusz Korczak might have saved his own life, but instead decided to remain with the orphans under his care in the Warsaw ghetto and joined them on the death train to Treblinka. Adam Cerniakow finally took his own life rather than preside over the deportation and death of Warsaw's Jews. One could accumulate many other examples of such behavior. But what fresh insights do they offer us into the human dilemma during the Holocaust? Having behind us generations and millennia of comparable examples of martyrdom, we are not surprised when some rare individuals fearlessly affirm community and love in the face of death. We expect it; we applaud it; we celebrate it; we are consoled and comforted by it. But are we instructed by it? Does it tell us anything about what the Nazi system of persecution reduced otherwise decent human beings to by transporting them into an alien moral universe and then treating them with unprecedented indifference and contempt? The inexorable pressure of this universe to separate the individual from what was traditionally best and worthiest in himself or herself, the accompanying impoverishment of usually dependable emotional and psychological resources, prods the imagination into unfamiliar terrain. Here it wanders about, as it were, dazed by the ambiguity and insubstantiality of some of its more cherished beliefs about mutual support and the family bond, on which normal civilization is supposed to be based. One advantage, or distinction, of a fully fictionalized version of the dilemma of parent-child relationships during the Holocaust is its ability to offer a more subtle and complex vision, more challenging to our capacity for judging behavior and evaluating motive, than either of the previous episodes. The following moments appear in a
Page 393 LAWRENCE L. LANGER 393 short story by Polish writer and Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski, and they dramatize forcibly the issue I have been exploring: the breakdown of normal response in the abnormal moral environment of the deathcamp. The story's title with bitter irony absorbs a familiar human attitude (politeness of tone) into the inhuman intention of the invitation: "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen." Borowski understands better than most how the "outsider's " response can be determined by the manner of description as well as by what is described. The story concerns the arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau of several transports of Jews, and is narrated by a member of the prisoner-detachment whose job is to help the victims descend, see them off to the gas chamber, and gather and sort their valuables, turning gold, jewelry, and money over to the SS officers and carrying food, medicine, and clothing to the warehouse barracks, where they are "permitted" to co-opt some of these precious goods for themselves, for personal sustenance or for barter in the camp black market. Thus we see at the outset that this is a place where victims prey on each other, the arrival of fresh transports insuring the survival of those "fortunate" prisoners whose job is to unload their belongings. What we witness before our eyes is a paralyzing transvaluation of values, which may be supported by the logic of survival in Auschwitz but which simultaneously violates our commitment to the kind of society we are accustomed to call civilized. Borowski has some leisure to prepare us for the parent-child episode and its distortion of normal values by describing the arrival of a transport where a deportee leaps down and asks the narrator: "Sir, what's going to happen to us?" A harmless inquiry, but the Polish narrator, lying, replies: "I don't know, I don't understand Polish." The point is not the lying, the point is the motive, twisted by the demands of the place. "It is the camp law," the narrator confides to us: "people going to their death must be deceived to the very end. This is the only permissible form of charity."4 A loaded word, misplaced in this context, but one which successfully wrenches our complacent moral vocabulary from its safe haven in the dictionary of tradition and forces us to confront this unprecedented definition: to be charitable is to conceal from the victim that he is about to be gassed. With this stunning verbal paradox seething in our ears, our instincts seem prepared for anything. But Borowski has learned that one is never sufficiently educated for Auschwitz, and when he intro
Page 394 394 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW duces the scene we are about to encounter, we might as well be on another planet, where bizarre creatures behave in patterns we cannot follow. A new transport has arrived, and the narrator returns to his unappetizing work. "It is impossible to control oneself any longer," he says. "Brutally we tear suitcases from their hands, impatiently pull off their coats. Go on, go on, vanish! They go, they vanish. Men, women, children. Some of them know." What happens to compassion under such circumstances? To respect for one's fellow being? To the solicitude for women and children that characterizes a civilized society? Do we call this a temporary lapse? A permanent aberration? Or has Auschwitz so disrupted the rules of morality that "charity" has inverted its meaning and all other ethical behavior has adjusted itself accordingly? These are painful questions, without easy answers, perhaps without any answers, but the responsive reader cannot evade them, and as they flounder confusedly in his mind, he is plunged once more by Borowski into an episode that violates our humanity, leaving us defenseless: Here is a woman -she walks quickly, but tries to appear calm. A small child with a pink cherub's face runs after her and, unable to keep up, stretches out his little arms and cries: "Mama! Mama!" In our first passage when a child called "Mama," the mother poisoned herself and her child, a grim enough gesture but just barely explicable by the mother's desire to end an intolerable existence that could only grow worse. Consider the reaction here: "Pick up your child, woman!" [cries one of the prisoners on ramp duty]. "It's not mine, sir, not mine!" she shouts hysterically and runs on, covering her face with her hands. She wants to hide, she wants to reach those who will not ride in the trucks, those who will go on foot, those who will stay alive. She is young, healthy, good-looking, she wants to live. But the child runs after her, wailing loudly: "Mama, mama, don't leave me!" "It's not mine, not mine, no!"5 On the one hand, a forlorn child, terrified, abandoned: "Mama, mama, don't leave me!" On the other, a forlorn mother, terrified, abandoned, who might have cried the same words to her husband, had she known where he was. She is young, healthy, good-looking: she wants to live. As Jean Weiss wanted to live. As the husband of
Page 395 LAWRENCE L. LANGER 395 the woman who poisoned herself and her child wanted to live. If Auschwitz teaches us a little about the dignity of dying, it teaches us more about the indignity of dying, and still more about the indignity of living when those we love are being slaughtered around us and we can do nothing to help them. Such moments do not confirm martyrdom, making the choice of the potential victim simple: they redefine it, they force us (or should) to see that martyrdom outside of Auschwitz, a public gesture of belief in the hope that some audience in the future will acknowledge and respect that gesture, is not the same as "martyrdom" inside Auschwitz, a misdefined gesture, because how could that mother believe that if she seized her child and went with him quietly to the gas chamber, anyone would ever hear of either of them again? We might commend such a gesture, we might even expect it, but in its anonymity, we could hardly be aware of it as "heroic." Borowski deliberately arouses some of these speculations in his readers by his continuation of this episode. His characters themselves, momentarily forgetting their own role in the gassing of their fellow prisoners, react with shock and disgust at the "insensitive" behavior of the mother: Andrei, a sailor from Sevastopol, grabs hold of her. His eyes are glassy from vodka and the heat. With one powerful blow he knocks her off her feet, then, as she falls, takes her by the hair and pulls her up again. His face twitches with rage. "Ah, you bloody Jewess! So you're running from your own child! I'll show you, you whore!" His huge hand chokes her, he lifts her in the air and heaves her on to the truck like a heavy sack of grain. "Here! And take this with you, bitch!" and throws the child at her feet. In a world of absolute values, in a world of absolute virtue, we have little trouble assessing human conduct: mothers must never abandon their children, nor choose their own welfare over that of their child. In the world of Borowski's fiction, to say nothing of the historical world of Auschwitz, we delude ourselves if we believe that such choices are simple and unambiguous. Borowski literally plays with our sympathies, as he switches the roles of victims until we don't know whose side we are on. Initially, we condemn the mother, as any civilized person would, for denying her child. But when Andrei, the Russian prisoner, obviously not Jewish, attacks the mother and treats her and the child as if they were sacks of grain, hurling them
Page 396 396 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW onto the truck that will carry them to their death, we instinctively condemn him and sympathize with the mother! Bizarre! But what values are we to judge by, and whom are we to judge? Just as we feel as if we have settled into some kind of satisfactory moral compromise, the passage continues: "Gut gemacht, good work. That's the way to deal with degenerate mothers," says the SS man standing at the foot of the truck. "Gut, gut Russki." "Shut your mouth," growls Andrei through clenched teeth, and walks away. From under a pile of rags he pulls out a canteen, unscrews the cork, takes a few deep swallows, passes it to me. The strong vodka burns my throat. My head swims, my legs are shaky, again I feel like throwing up.6 But if the SS man considers the mother degenerate, and we agree, then we are identified with the SS man - and surely that is impossible. Moreover, if the SS man compliments Andrei, and Andrei repudiates the SS man contemptuously, then how can we repudiate Andrei? No, this is indeed an unrecognizable terrain, where the unnatural is made to appear natural, where innocent victims are denounced by their murderers for trying to remain alive, where the absence of a stable moral measuring rod induces nausea not only in the characters, but in the reader as well. When the murderer confidently calls his victim "degenerate" without perceiving the irony of his statement; when one prisoner seriously redefines charity to mean concealing from another prisoner the awful nature of his impending doom, without even commenting on that doom itself-then we must understand that the Holocaust was about language as well as events, about the use and misuse, the failure or the inadequacy of language, of familiar vocabulary, to help us to convey what the deathcamps meant for victims then and what they mean for us today. We draw on the language of consolation, on words and expressions like "martyrdom" and "spiritual resistance" and "dying with dignity" to make the ordeal more bearable for ourselves. And this is natural; but if we confine ourselves to such vocabulary, we risk falsifying the total impact of the Holocaust on human values, then and now. Who died with dignity in the examples I have mentioned? We need too a language of what I call the inconsolable, to help us confront the unspeakable moments of ethical agony when blameless victims were compelled by a merciless enemy and circumstances insulated from reasonable choice to react
Page 397 LAWRENCE L. LANGER 397 against their civilized instincts and the faith in each other which would have motivated them in normal times. How do we speak authentically of victims who were denied the last vestige of inner freedom - a sense of connection between the manner of one's living and the manner of one's death? We need a language, and in the end, literature alone will not give it to us - we must also give it to ourselves. The writing I have been examining may not tell us where to go to get it; but it emphatically reminds us where not to go, and that is to the treasury of valuewords which have accumulated during the centuries preceding the Holocaust. We must invent or recreate if not a vocabulary then at least a point of view which acknowledges the totally unprecedented moral demands of the event we are confronting. We must draw on the discomfort of this perception; but first, we must understand the challenge that this implies, for language and values, for the meaning of the family, for our sense of history, for Jewish identity. To help us imagine this challenge, I know of no better place to turn than a brief poem by Israeli writer Dan Pagis, who has concentrated into a title and six lines, a mere nineteen words, the dilemma of finding a language to speak truly about the destruction of European Jewry. The setting of his poem is once again a difficult family situation: a mother, deported with one of her sons, wonders what message she shall send to her other son. What last words apply? What consolation might be meaningful? "Be fruitful and multiply" now seems a hollow heritage indeed. How does this event fit into the history of the Jewish people, and of all mankind, and what legacy does it bequeath for future generations? And how do we communicate it? We are forced to concede by the poem that we are made the agents of the message, the conduits of the testimony: it is an awful and awesome responsibility, and Pagis does not treat it lightly: Written in Pencil in a Sealed Boxcar Here in this transport I am Eve With Abel, my son If any of you see my older son Cain, son of Adam [or: son of man] Tell him that 17
Page 398 398 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW And the poem ends in mid-sentence, the potential victim silenced - by what? By the sudden recognition that you don't know what to tell your absent son when you are at the portals of extermination? And what do you tell your present son, when he asks, "Mama, what are they going to do to us?" Pagis compels us not only to accept intellectually but to experience verbally, emotionally, and artistically, the insufficiency, the absolute poverty of language in the face of such catastrophe. The mother's abrupt speechlessness warns us against glib formulations and conventional reassurances. But Pagis packs much more into his tiny poem. Eve, the archetypal mother of the archetypal family, has changed the locale of Jewish experience from the spacious Garden of Eden to a sealed boxcar on its way to the deathcamp, and in doing so she wrenches the story of Genesis from its original setting, rewriting it, one might say, to include the history of the Holocaust. Against the ancient fratricide, the primal act of violence, the first family disruption, the initial cause for parental grief and lament, Pagis would have us imagine a fratricide incalculable in scope, a grief immeasurable, a lament beyond words. We need not vision, but re-vision, in both senses: to change, and to see again, to see differently- to see back. This, I believe, is the most difficult challenge of the Holocaust, since it imposes on us, like Pagis's poem itself, the task of finishing this unfinished tale. But we cannot begin to fulfill this task until we gain access to Eve's consciousness in this poem and experience with her the sensation of verbal helplessness, and beyond that, a conceptual impotence that banishes speech: not from fear, but from the awareness that neither explanation nor consolation adequately conjures up life's uncertain last moments in a sealed boxcar. We are reminded, if our earlier selections have not already done so, of the fragility of the human bond, the family or maternal bond, under such instants of stress; but even more, we are reminded that there are no literary or intellectual or even religious antecedents for that event we call the Holocaust. As a result, literary versions of that event are always incomplete, because the reader must be a collaborator in the process of completion. Poems like Pagis's invite us to reexamine imaginatively, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the meaning of Jewish origin, and the meaning of Jewish destiny. Pagis illuminates this imaginative venture by fashioning a mini-drama in which Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, are deprived of their ancient but familiar roles. Indeed, Eve's message to her elder son Cain might very well be the
Page 399 LAWRENCE L. LANCER 399 information that a new destiny will be shaped for him (if he survives), since his traditional role as slayer of Abel has been taken from him. As Jews, as human beings, the poem suggests,, we continue to enact our fate on the landscape of history; but we do so on an altered stage, in a setting unanticipated by the original script. Pagis offers us a new version of scripture, a kind of counter- Genesis, a melancholy variation, documented by history, on the fate of parents and children in the world of the Holocaust. The heritage of this counterGenesis is fixed; but the sequel is still being written -by us -as readers, as audience, as heirs to the event -and the future significance of the Holocaust may well depend on how we interpret and identify with, how we complete, Eve's unspoken message to her absent son. NOTES 'Alexander Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom: A Memoir (N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), pp. 91-92. 2Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings Against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others before the Court at Frankfurt, trans. jean Steinberg (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966), pp. 294-295. 31bid., p. 295. 4Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Vedder (N.Y.: Penguin, 1967), p. 37. 5lbid., pp. 42-43. 6lbid., p. 43. 7My translation from the Hebrew.
Pattiann RogersRogers, PattiannThere is a Way to Walk on WaterVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 400-401http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:18
Page 400 PATTIANN ROGERS THERE IS A WAY TO WALK ON WATER Over the elusive, blue salt-surface easily, Barefoot, and without surprise - there is a way To walk far above the tops of volcanic Scarps and mantle rocks, towering seamounts Rising in peaks and rifts from the ocean floor, Over the deep black flow of that distant Bottom as if one walked studiously And gracefully on a wire of time Above eternal night, never touching Fossil reef corals or the backs of leathernecks, Naked gobies or the crusts of sea urchins. There is a way to walk on water, And it has something to do with the feel Of the silken waves sliding continuously And carefully against the inner arches Of the feet; and something to do With what the empty hands, open above The weed-blown current and chasm Of that possible fall, hold to tightly; Something to do with how clearly And simply one can imagine a silver scatter Of migrating petrels flying through the body During that instant, gliding with their white Wings spread through the cartilage of throat And breast, across the vast dome of the skull, How distinctly one can hear them calling singly And together inside the lungs, sailing straight Through the spine as if they themselves believed That bone and moment were passageways Of equal accessibility. 400
Page 401 PATTIANN ROGERS 401 Buoyant and inconsequential, as serious, As exact as stone, that old motion of the body, That visible stride of the soul, when the measured Placing of each toe, the perfect justice Of the feet,, seems a sublimity of event, A spatial exaltation -to be able to walk Over water like that has something to do With the way, like a rain-filled wind coming Again to dry grasses on a prairie, all Of these possibilities are remembered at once, And the way, like many small blind mouths Taking drink in their dark sleep, All of these powers are discovered, Complete and accomplished And present from the beginning.
Shu TingTing, ShuBrother, I Am HereVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 402-403http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:19
Page 402 SHU TING BROTHER, I AM HERE Coolness, like the evening tide, Covers, one by one, the steps of the twisting trail And slips into your heart. You sit on the threshold Of the dismal shack that squats behind you. Like birds, leaves drift from the locust trees And little moon-coins float On the ripple of waves. You belonged to the sun, the prairie, The dikes, the world of amorous jewel-black eyes. Then you belonged to the hurricane, To the route, the torches, the arms Supporting each other. Soldier, your life was plangent as a bell Shaking the shadows from a human heart. Now the wind steals away with alien steps; It refuses to believe That you are melancholy still. But I am with you, Brother, And the newsstand, the park benches, the apple-cores Revive in your recollection With smiles and lamps and delicate rhythms. Then they glide away on the lines of the writing paper. Only when the night wind Shifts the direction of your thoughts, Only when that trumpet of yours 402
Page 403 SHU TING 403 Is suddenly silent, craving echoes, I shall be back (with hope alive) Calmly at your side, to say Brother, I am here. Translated from the Chinese by Carolyn Kizer with Y.H. Zhao
BooksVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 404-444http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:20
Marjorie PerloffPerloff, MarjorieEssaying: Hot and CoolVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 404-412http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:21
Page 404 MARJORIE PERLOFF ESSAYING: HOT AND COOL Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984. By Charles Bernstein. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986. Pp. 465. $17.95 cloth; $11.95 paper. Travels in Hyperreality. Essays. By Umberto Eco. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Pp. 307. $15.95. Both Charles Bernstein's Content's Dream and Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality are subtitled Essays, a designation that tells us little except that both are probably found on the "non-fiction" or possibly the "criticism" shelf of the bookstore. Generically, essay is a slippery term, precisely because we take its meaning for granted. In the words of my Random House Dictionary, "A short literary composition on a particular theme or subject, usually in prose and generally analytic, speculative, or interpretative." As such, essays are all around us; all of us write them. What you are reading right now is an essay that I have written. But the word essay (from the French verb essayer, "to try") also retains its original meaning (Montaigne, Essais, first published in 1580) of "A trying to do something; an attempt, endeavor"; "a first tentative effort in learning or practice." If some of the early variants of this meaning are now obsolete-for example, OED I.3b, "Venery: The part of a deer in which trial was made of the 'grease'; the breast or brisket" (1611) - the notion of the essay as "a trying out" is nevertheless incorporated into what is the OED's central definition (No. 8): "A composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of a subject; originally implying want of finish, 'an irregular undigested piece,' but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range." The association of the essay with "irregularity" remained in 404
Page 405 MARJORIE PERLOFF 405 force until well into the eighteenth century: in Spectator 476 (1712), Joseph Addison referred to "The wildness of those Compositions which go by the Names of Essays." "Wildness," want of finish, an intentional irregularity coupled with "elaborat[ion] in style"- these qualities, ruled out of court as they have been in the case of "professional" critical and scholarly discourse (e.g. the PMLA essay with its pseudo-scientific rules of documentation), have, as everyone knows, surfaced once again in our so-called theoretical literature. We now have a large corpus of prose writings "about" literature or the other arts that are themselves structured poetically. But it is still all too common to talk about, say, Barthes' essays as "just essays" or "just critical prose," "just" signifying, in this context, that the author has somehow failed to write "real" literature, which is to say, narrative fiction, lyric poems, or plays. "One frequent criticism [of "Language poetry" in general and your work in particular]," Tom Beckett tells Charles Bernstein in an interview for The Difficulties (1982), "is that the theoretical essays you write, say, are considered to be more 'alive' than your poems" (Content's Dream, p. 401). Such criticism is indeed "frequent," but it ignores a crucial question: at what point would those "theoretical essays" become "alive" enough to be construed as the poems they are ostensibly replacing? In assessing the theory/poetry relationship, we continue to take an either/or stand. At the April 1986 CUNY symposium on "Contemporary Poetry and Canon-Formation," Robert von Hallberg raised the question, "Who makes the canon, the poet or the critic?" During the lively debate that followed, the only issue not raised was the legitimacy of the question. Yet, from at least the time of Baudelaire's Salons, Wilde's Decay of Lying, and Valery's Monsieur Teste, to Pound's GaudierBrzeska, Williams's In the American Grain, and Stein's Lectures in America, to David Antin's Tuning (1984) and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson (1985), "poetry" and "criticism" have been closely allied, even as such "essays" on art as Malevich's or Robert Smithson's are now recognized as themselves "artful." Indeed, in our own time it seems less useful to classify works according to their objecthood ("What shall I call this text"?) than to distinguish between what Roland Barthes calls, in S/Z (which, incidentally, is also subtitled An Essay), the readerly (lisible) and the writerly (scriptible). Here a comparison between Bernstein's Content's Dream and Eco's Travels in Hyperreality may be instructive. Both are collections of fugitive pieces, many first appearing in periodicals, written over a fairly long time span: 1975-84 in Bernstein's case, 1967-84 in Eco's. Both
Page 406 406 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW collections violate this chronology in the interest of thematic and formal arrangement. Further, both Bernstein and Eco regard the political as an integral part of literary or art criticism; both read signs as ideologically motivated and consider it their task to unmask these motivations. Both write on film and popular culture as well as on literature and the visual arts. Yet, when we read the two books in conjunction, we experience a curious sense of difference. Consider the long, incisive title essay (1975) of Travels in Hyperreality. Its thesis is stated on its second page in the course of a witty description of a realer-than-real image of two beautiful naked girls, an image that turns out to be a holograph: "Holography could prosper only in America, a country obsessed with realism, where, if a reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a 'real' copy of the reality being represented" (p. 4). In Barthean terms, Eco's is a "readerly" text in that "the author first conceives the signified (and the generality) and then finds for it, according to the chance of his imagination, 'good' signifiers... the best expressions for the concept he has already formed."' Eco illustrates his thesis by taking us on a journey through America's "fortresses of solitude," especially the monuments and museums of Southern California that testify to what he wittily calls the "creche-ification of the bourgeois universe" (p. 10) -the Hearst Castle, the Madonna Inn, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn Cemetery, the Palace of Living Arts at Buena Park. The American desire to create substitutes for reality that are more "real" than the originals produces, so Eco shows, a kind of Absolute Fake, the "facsimile" that is really "fac-different" (p. 11). In the paradise of consumer culture which is ours, "faked nature corresponds much more to our daydream demands" than would the real thing: the fake crocodiles and hippopotami at Disneyland don't have to be coaxed to make an appearance and yet they are quite harmless, as if to say that "technology can give us more reality than nature can" (p. 44). Or again, at Forest Lawn, with its manicured lawns, gardens, and chapels, "Eternity is guaranteed by the presence (in copies) of Michelangelo and Donatello. The eternity of art becomes a metaphor for the eternity of the soul, the vitality of trees and flowers becomes a metonymy of the vitality of the body that is victoriously consumed underground to give new lymph to life" (p. 56). In the course of his essay, Eco explains to us how to read these signs of California - which is to say the ultimate American - kitsch culture. So vivid and accurate are his descriptions, so intelligent his analyses, that
Page 407 MARJORIE PERLOFF 407 we almost forget that the "consumerism" of the text cuts two ways: the essay is not only about consumerism, but we as readers become consumers of what is, in Barthean vocabulary, an "intransitive" text, a closural structure that observes the "law of the signified." Indeed, Eco's language is intentionally transparent; he wants us to "see through" it so as to learn certain things about the relationship of sign to ideology. Hence the cool, dispassionate voice that speaks to us in these essays, the bemused inflections of the worldly and authoritative guide who knows how to lead us through the semiotic landscape. If Eco gives us a detached perspective on Disneyland and related "Cities of Robots," Bernstein wants, as he tells Allan Davies in an interview, to organize his book by "constructing a durational tunnel that the reader can ride through (sort of like riding through a multichambered House of Horrors at an amusement park).... The invention of meaning is a product of choosing specific sequences." Thus Content's Dream opens with a "Preface," whose form, far from being expository, is that of the prose poem: Night falls, is used to; when all the cues seem larks and constancy's a brocade fan. Say, contentious, each becomes logician of her argument, in turn a pearl, in turn appalled. Or amelioration- when you ask the person next-of-door to turn it down. Person? Personality is the production of a social becoming; not yet being, all the quicker bodied. And what of that undermass- as if flesh crawled or suckedsince every idea of such is, as it is, retrospeculative. Yet these conditions render a life its currency, like sugar with a spoon. The punch is already in the sock. (p. 9) This pastiche of late-Romantic prose (Poe? Swinburne?), with its references to qualities like "constancy," "logic," and "amelioration," and its images of larks, brocade fans, and pearl, enacts many of the motifs we will meet in "straighter" form in later essays: particularly the conviction that poetry differs from other kinds of discourse in denying the instrumentality of language, the ability of language to be "looked through-to the depicted world beyond the page" (p. 27). But rather than presenting these notions discursively, the Preface plays the role of a kind of switch, turning us on for the ride ahead. As Bernstein puts it, with reference to Ron Silliman's poetry, in the essay "Stray Straws and Straw Men," poetic discourse is that which "emphasizes its medium as being constructed, rule governed, everywhere circumscribed by grammar & syntax, chosen vocabulary: designed, manipulated, picked, programmed, organized, & so an artifice, artifact-monadic, solipsistic,
Page 408 408 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW homemade, manufactured, mechanized, formulaic, willful" (pp. 40-41). "Night falls, is used to." The text begins by signalling a difficult transition, one that we are used to or that usually takes place but which here creates uncertainty ("when all the cues seem larks") and "contentious[ness]." Puns, for instance, begin to multiply: it is the moment when "each becomes logician of her argument, in turn a pearl, in turn appalled." "A pearl"/"appalled" - the two are almost homonyms although the first is made of two words, article and noun, the second a single past participle. The syntax suggests opposition ("in turn... in turn") and indeed to be a pearl is the opposite of "appalling." But "appall" literally means to make pale and pearls are pale white, so why shouldn't a pearl be appalled? Next it is the turn of "turn" as the idiom "in turn" gives way to "turn it down." But "turn it down" means both to reject an offer and to lower the volume, as in the case of a radio. What is it, then, that "you ask the person next-of-door"? The archaicizing version of "next-door" is built on the analogy of "next-of-kin," the implication being that we have no real relatives, only neighbors. In a world where "Personality is the production of a social becoming," the next-of-door and next-of-kin are not, in any case, too different. The "undermass," defined only through the mediation of cliches ("as if flesh crawled or sucked") cannot be known except, so to speak, "retrospeculative[ly]." "Yet these conditions [what conditions?] render a life its currency, like sugar with a spoon." The simile supplies us with a false lead: one can measure a spoonful of sugar and know precisely how much it will sweeten one's coffee. But how much "currency" makes a life? And why is life defined in terms of money? Perhaps because the event to come is inevitable: "The punch is already in the sock." This abrupt sentence defamiliarizes such phrases as "Sock it to 'em," but we also have the image of a clenched fist or rather foot stretching inside the sock. Here is the paradigm of Barthes's writerly text, a transitive text that the reader must work at producing. There is not, as in Eco's case, a signified that stands outside and beyond the signifiers used to "express" it; indeed, it is difficult to say what Bernstein's "Preface" is "about." "The writerly," says Barthes, "is the novelistic without the novel, poetry without the poem, the essay without the dissertation." So it is here. Bernstein's "galaxy of signifiers" has no beginning, middle, and end, but images and plot-lines are charged and recharged. "The punch is already in the sock" modulates, in the next paragraph, into the citation of someone's business-speak, "I'd rather be in meats than underwear," but
Page 409 MARJORIE PERLOFF 409 also, in the last lines of the Preface, to the aphorism, "Rumination is the soul's club foot, by which it beats the rap." Again, "in turn a pearl, in turn appalled" finds its echo in "Whatever purples at times is pallid." And so on. The poet is well aware of the charges made against this kind of writing. "Such alternatives," we read in the third paragraph, "can seem more oracular, and exclusionary than 'straight' talk, so that the very process of getting away from authoritarian language use may be rejected for creating its own occult authority." There it is. Or, put more graphically, "Still, you can't dial your way out of a paper bag." Which recalls to my mind the image of the "punch already in the sock." Constriction is the order of the day but so is the desire to escape it. The writerly text, says Barthes, "has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one." In this sense, Bernstein's Preface is but one "entrance" into the dense network of signification that constitutes Content's Dream. In an essay called "Writing and Method" (1981), which deals with the relationship of literature to philosophy, Bernstein writes: "One vision of constructive writing practice I have, and it can be approached in both poetry and philosophy, is of a multidiscourse text, a work that would involve many different types and styles and modes of language in the same 'hyperspace' " (p. 227). This vision is carried out in various ways. "Two or Three Things I Know About Him" uses more or less the format of Antin's talk poems - ragged right margin, spacing between phrasal units, lower case "i" for "I" and no punctuation. "Stray Straws and Straw Men" contains eighteen Wittgensteinian propositions. "A Particular Thing" begins with prose statement ("These words, or those in poems, are not used to describe events in the world that have already occurred") and then shifts to lineation as if to illustrate the process of writing as "world generating, object generating" (p. 71). Throughout, Bernstein's prose is governed by his conviction that "the meaning sounds. It's impossible to separate prosody from the structure... of a given poem" (p. 37). Sound play, rhyming, aphorism, neologism, and especially allusion, whether in titles, as in "Two or Three Things I Know About Him" (Godard) and "Blood on the Cutting Room Floor" (Mary Shelley), or in the citations - from other poets, medical textbooks, proverbs, advertising copy-are woven into the text so seamlessly that it is often difficult to sort out the author's voice from the multiple voices of his culture. Here, for example, is a passage from "Narrating Narration: The Shape of Ron Silliman's Work":
Page 410 410 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Syntax is the order of words in a phrase or sentence (from the Greek for arrangement, to order together, as in tactics); grammar provides a set of rules that govern normative (a rule-governed normal) syntax. Or, as we like to say in the poetry business, "you broke it you bought it" i.e., you're gonna get hung with it. Which is probably fine with "you", just the ticket. You're hanging by it anyway. (" 'Better well hung than ill wed.'... Better so, better well hung than by an unfortunate marriage to be brought into systematic relation with all the world", as J. Climacus put it some time ago.) I provide this explanation to put off such inhospitable and ungrateful concepts as "nonsyntactical" as if elephants, because they have trunks, cease to use their feet for walking. (p. 306) In the "hyperspace" of Content's Dream, absurd adages like "you broke it you bought it" (a saying which is, of course, wholly inappropriate to "poetry" unless it is treated as a "business") turn out to support the poet's contention that syntax is a given, a set, so to speak, of elephant footprints, no matter what our "trunks" can sweep up. In cutting from proposition to proverb to allusion (J. Climacus) to exemplum (the elephants), Bernstein's essay fulfills Charles Olson's insistent demand that the poem (read: text) be a high energy construct. Or in Poundian terms, "a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." If Eco is a cool observer of the social and literary scene, detached from the phenomena he comments upon so incisively, Bernstein is a wholly engaged participant, everywhere "inside" the process of "sounding" the language. If Eco's essays remain discrete even when collected between covers, Bernstein's merge so as to generate a whole that is surprisingly greater than its parts. Indeed, Content's Dream is remarkable in its ability to project the actual scene of writing, the generation of a counterpoetics, whose force even Bernstein's most ardent detractors will have to take into account. One thinks of Pound's ABC of Reading or Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature-texts whose aphoristic pronouncements similarly carry conviction less by reasoned argument than by the sheer force of their passion. As a manifesto, Content's Dream calls into question some of the most entrenched pieties of contemporary American "official verse culture." For example: (1) That we can "see through" language to the "real" world beyond which is prior to it, that "thought" can exist outside language. (2) That there is no distinction between "poetry" and "life," that poetry is "natural" language.
Page 411 MARJORIE PERLOFF 411 (3) That poetry is the expression of subjectivity, of personal feeling, that "communication is a two-way wire (me you)." That the self is the primary organizing feature of writing. (4) That poetry is "private" language, that is to say, uncontaminated by the public domain in which it is formed, unmediated by a larger social production. (5) That poetry is based on speech, the Unitary Voice, rather than on writing. And the corollary that poetry is based on masculine speech ("The image," Bernstein says of Olson's Maximus, "is of men speaking to men- and all who fall outside that discourse are simply inaudible"). (6) That poetry is distinct from philosophy, that the "poem" is by definition generically distinct from the "essay" or "prose narrative." (7) That "lyric" means a musical or metric "accompaniment" to the words rather than the music built into the sequence of the words' tones. That "ideas" are anywhere but in sound. Each of these points is, of course, made in a variety of ways and from a variety of perspectives, often involving very close reading of exemplary passages. In an essay on Charles Olson, for example, Bernstein studies the syntax and prosody of Maximus, discovering that, despite Olson's innovative "reject[ion of] the rationalized narrative of conventional rhetoric," the poet's " 'humanist' claims of the heroic help evade the responsibility for creating a prosody not based on received idealizations of speech and the willful man" (p. 329). That is to say -and Bernstein's feminist thesis here is, so far as I know, entirely originalMaximus ultimately suffers from the phallacy of the heroic stance, grounded as it is in the "anthropomorphic allegory of language as the stride of a man, with all the attendant idealization of 'speech syntax' and a voice of authority" (p. 332). In thus combatting the Accepted Wisdom of the American midcentury about lyric poetry, Content's Dream marks a decisive poststructuralist turn in poetic discourse. Its demand for logopoeia and melopoeia, perhaps at the expense of a phanopoeia that has been the staple of American poetry for the past few decades, takes us to the threshold of our own fin de siecle. Thus, "There is no natural look or sound to a poem." And again, "What pulses, pushes, is energy, spirit, anima, dream, fantasy: coming out always in form, as shape.... The look of the natural as constructed, programmatic- artful" (p. 49). To which Umberto Eco might well respond, "What but the "natural as constructed," as "artful," would you expect from the culture of "hyper
Page 412 412 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW reality," of "gluttony and bricolage," from the culture so lovingly built "in the name of the Absolute Fake"? NOTE iRoland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 173.
Timothy ErwinErwin, TimothyFame and Its AudienceVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 413-420http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:22
Page 413 TIMOTHY ERWIN FAME AND ITS AUDIENCE Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity. By Richard Schickel. New York: Doubleday, 1985. Pp. xi + 299. $16.95. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. By Neil Postman. New York: Viking, 1985. Pp. vii + 175. $15.95. Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay. By Patrick Brantlinger. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983. Pp. 307. Paper, $9.95. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. By Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 649. $27.50. Everyone knows that fame ought to be the distant echo of achievement, and never the immediate aim of endeavor. Yet in a time when celebrity occupies the highest national seat of trust and virtue seems especially celebrated for being its own reward, fame becomes a matter of special interest- and also, perhaps more than ever, its own end. Which is not to say that we cannot recognize the aberration as temporary. The complaint against fame as motive is recognizably universal. With a rhyme that would become inevitable in English verse the Dido of Chaucer's House of Fame laments that Aeneas betrays her because like all men he wolde have fame In magnyfyinge of hys name. Milton scorns the mighty exploits of classical heroes as unworthy of true fame, which he understands as a quiet loyalty and righteousness: This Fame shall be achiev'd, renown on Earth, And what most merits fame in silence hid. 413
Page 414 414 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW And Samuel Johnson paraphrases fame as a psychological commonplace, a desire, literally, of renaming oneself. In a passage meant partly as self-portrait, he shows how the newly matriculated university student is poisoned by the scholar's robe, so that Through all his veins the fever of renown Burns from the strong contagion of the gown. Now it would be possible to infer a certain pattern from these quotations: as the symbolic trumpets of Renaissance fame gave way to conventional means of mass production, the eighteenth century invented the modern idea of literary fame by allowing the middle-class writer to achieve a considerable reputation for the first time. As the technology changes, the public stance of the writer changes wholesale, so that by the time of Johnson's youth the days of the diffident writer are numbered. While the calculating Boswell could practice self-promotion in a limited sphere, by the next generation Byron was able to raise the practice to an artform, and so on to the present day. Another, more credible pattern may also be found here: culture has always recognized the attractions of personal fame, and at the same time has always distinguished between mere notoriety and the legitimate excellence that deserves to be better known. At certain times the need to make distinctions seems more crucial than at others; the present day certainly seems one such moment, the early eighteenth century another. During Johnson's youth the best-known literary figures, Voltaire and Pope, learned early to fan the flames of personal renown and taught others to do likewise. Johnson generally disapproved; like Milton, he was too conscious of the difference between merit and celebrity. His short stay at Oxford, on the other hand, never rendered him immune to an occasional bout of self-promotion, and his age was tolerant of such lapses. But like Shakespeare before him and Hopkins afterwards, Johnson would have left us much the same legacy had he never met his glorifying Boswell. One offers the brief excursus into literary history because there is a contemporary wisdom more widely held than examined that the technology of television and movies, arriving at the tail-end of capitalist modernism, has radically changed the nature of fame. The notion is an instance of what Howard Nemerov calls "A Myth among the Clerisy"an esoteric myth Which is hardly heard of, and never believed Outside of universities, and that is why It is such a splendid myth
Page 415 TIMOTHY ERWIN 415 -and of what Patrick Brantlinger in a comprehensive survey of the phenomenon calls "negative classicism." Recently, it has left the college cloister and begun to make headway. While the famous are more present to us as objects of mechanical reproduction, runs the popular version of this myth, they are somehow less deserving of our admiration because they make us complicit in a false consciousness. The culture of celebrity, as Richard Schickel puts it, has created an illusory intimacy between the famous and their fans, an intimacy where fantasy and reality easily mingle. A heightened desire for recognition on the part of some of the public leads to a flurry of insane acts- an assassination attempted in order to win the regard of an actress, for instance, or mass murder committed by a would-be celebrity lawyer. On the basis of elaborate, lurid case histories like those of John W. Hinckley, Jr., Ted Bundy, and others (Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Norman Mailer, and Joseph McCarthy), Schickel suggests that "there was no such thing as celebrity prior to the beginning of the twentieth century," not at least on the scale of the dangerous call to crime that the contemporary sense of celebrity invites. The suggestion is in part linguistic - because there was no word celebrity until recently, there was never any such ideaand about as reliable as the notion that people were unable to write about their lives until the word autobiography was coined in the late eighteenth century. In fact, as a quick trip to the OED tells us, the idea of a popular celebrity has been with us at least since the middle of the last century. And a century before that Johnson makes a familiar distinction by using a related sense of the word. "Reputation I... obtained," a character in one of the Idlers tells us, "but as merit is much more cheaply acknowledged than rewarded, I did not find myself enriched in proportion to my celebrity." Laurence Sterne, incidentally, was the first literary celebrity, according to Leo Braudy, and we know what Johnson thought of Sterne. It may be unfair to bring Dr. Johnson or even the dictionary to bear on Intimate Strangers. The book is an entertainment not an argument, and like one of those collections of uncentered narrative tangents usually held together by photographs presents what is largely a nonphenomenon. Here, because the stories are embroidered from personalities and events that we already know, the mind is happy to provide the images, which illustrate how a debased fame can make a culture crazy. Indeed, the book articulates the popular ideology of celebrity so well, and so unwittingly, that the effect is a little frightening. Intimate Strangers will doubtless be the bestseller of the four books under review, because it confirms the cultural fears and uncertainties of so many
Page 416 416 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW readers. For that reason and because it provides an unconscious parody of the worries of people who are actually serious about the decline of culture, the book is worth a look. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, a wholly likeable writer whose Teaching as a Subversive Activity did much to irrigate the wasteland of the inner-city classroom almost two decades ago, inveighs against the triviality of a contemporary culture of technology and entertainment. For Postman technology as form dictates the content of culture. The news as we understand it would not exist without the various media that formed it: first the telegraph, then the news photograph, and finally the network news broadcast. Readers will recognize in the argument the acknowledged presence of Marshall McLuhan ("the medium is the message") and Lewis Mumford ("The clock is a machine whose 'product' is seconds and minutes"). But Postman has his own knack for the pithy analysis. As he puts it, our languages are our media, our media are our metaphors, and our metaphors create the content of our culture. From this point of view "television becomes nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric." While there is some affinity between Schickel and Postman in the general attitude taken toward contemporary culture and in the devices and personages used to dramatize it - McCarthy and the Kennedys reappear here, magazines with democratic titles founded on the cult of personality are again mentioned, and Truman figures notably as a national politician who avoided the transition to celebrity - the two arguments could hardly be less alike. Where Intimate Strangers celebrates the darkly powerful magic spell of entertainment, Amusing Ourselves offers a shapely indictment of entertainment culture. Postman begins by carefully defining the terms of argument: technology is another name for the increasing sophistication of the machinery of information, and the medium is the social environment where the technology operates. From Northrop Frye Postman takes the concept of metaphorical resonance, the way that technology uses media to create a culture of understanding. His argument begins in understatement and describes some sensible limitations: he doesn't believe that media can change cognitive capacity; he doesn't believe that the epistemological shift is universal; rather, he believes that the figure most touched by the tyranny of technology is the creature Richard Sennett called public man. The main arena of concern is thus public discourse, and it is a tribute to Postman to say that his study will raise its general level. In two early chapters Amusing Ourselves to Death draws a fine por
Page 417 TIMOTHY ERWIN 417 trait of printing and literacy in colonial America and describes the still surprising eloquence of the Lincoln-Douglas debates (the transcripts present the polished periods and subtly embellished argument so lacking in modern public speaking). Postman draws a sharp distinction between the typographic and highly rational politics of eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, on one hand, and on the other the minimalist visual appeal of politics today. For Postman the decline begins just before the turn of the century with the invention of the advertising slogan. But surely the distinction is too sharply drawn there, the indices of change too narrow. The argument that a more serious discourse held sway partly because colonial America had little time for casual reading is belied by the many belletristic productions of early philosophical and literary societies, and by the wide trade in imaginative literature imported from Britain. The role of the telegraph is also exaggerated, I think, while the timeless hyperbole of technological change goes unremarked. Postman quotes a Baltimore newspaper boasting of having reported a very recent congressional action, achieving thereby "the annihilation of space," without noting that mid-nineteenth century journalism clearly enjoyed its share of inflated discourse. The main fault of a culture of entertainment, according to Postman, is that it produces vast amounts of information without providing any context for understanding. Entertainment performs less selectively and less thoroughly the tasks that schooling once performed. Prior to our age of technology "the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives." "What people knew about," he goes on, "had action-value." While the remark may be true of education, it seems doubtful as a critique of journalism, for the early newspaper devoted as much space to faits divers and filler as the modern one does. Amusing Ourselves oversimplifies technological change and tends to overemphasize the importance of merely material causes; a brief history of rhetoric in America would have something more intrinsic to tell us about the formal persistence and subsequent disappearance of Enlightenment dialectic on these shores. As both educator and cultural commentator, Postman is mainly concerned about the effect of television on young people, particularly the way it can abbreviate the attention span. Interestingly, he notes that the average network camera shot lasts mere seconds and that the average length of a news story is less than a minute. As it turns with its ubiquitous "Now... this" to the task of sales commercial television thus forces upon younger viewers a fractured consciousness. Of station breaks Postman writes: "One can hardly overestimate
Page 418 418 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW the damage that such juxtapositions do to our sense of the world as a serious place." While many readers will demur from the observation, the concerns and sympathies of this prolific and always interesting writer are as knowledgeable and sincere as ever. Bread and Circuses is the history of an idea larger and more theoretical in compass, the idea of inevitable cultural decay as it has been articulated from ancient to modern times. It begins by considering the phrase panem et circenses in the aristocratic Roman context of Juvenal's tenth satire, ends with jeremiads directed at television from both the political left and right, and develops along the way the paradoxical insight that media critics from Christopher Lasch to the Frankfort theorists all assert that the public mass media "erode the public sphere by... privatizing it." Not only is the agora emptied, so are the individuals abandoning it for their private rooms, and in the process participatory democracy is damaged. In a controversy often marked by technological determinism, it seems important to separate the totalitarian capabilities of the medium in a state culture from its democratic possibilities elsewhere, neither of which, according to Brantlinger, is inherent in the technology. Brantlinger doesn't believe that culture is bound by a cyclic pattern of decline and fall, or that technology is the culprit. With Raymond Williams and others he holds out instead the ideal of a vital common culture to be created through conscious technological shaping. Bread and Circuses is especially impressive in its liveliness, and is nothing if not far-reaching. His characterization of contemporary attitudes toward media as negative classicism leads Brantlinger to explore the camp of modern classicists like Eliot, Ortega y Gasset, and Camus, for example, the first two of whom are negative classicists, the last positive, and to travel back to nineteenth-century dandyism and decadence as a reaction to mass culture. And Brantlinger himself? He's sensibly skeptical of all claims of cultural decadence, including extreme worries about the power of the visual image, and a cautious optimist about the coexistence of popular and high culture. Leo Braudy's Frenzy of Renown takes its title from a phrase in The Monk, an extravagant fiction of the later eighteenth century, an era when in the minds of some (including the author, Matthew Lewis) the burning after fame that Johnson described was considerably intensified. Although each age considers the idea of fame its own, and with good reason because each age casts the ambition in its own image, Braudy means to give us its history. Fame is neither aim nor echo for Braudy,
Page 419 TIMOTHY ERWIN 419 but a sort of cultural inheritance. He is therefore interested in figures like Alexander the Great and Charles Lindbergh, figures whose new and special kind of fame was afterwards appropriated by others seeking to become famous. As an emotional bonding, fame requires a reciprocal exchange with an audience. After showing how Hemingway shared in the kind of fame that Lindbergh pioneered-both became famous in France, both valued a certain grace under pressure, and both were to remain elevated by their craft - Braudy gauges the cost of their idea of fame. "Like Lindbergh's effort to be above it all, Hemingway's ideal literary self involved a kind of sainthood, at once demanded by the audience of modern fame and yet virtually impossible for any human being to maintain." The modern American ideal of an austere, untouchable fame is really a denial of the role of fame, and is by implication unrealizable and dangerous. Anyone's fame is composed of four elements: an individual, an achievement, an immediate notice, and the judgement of posterity. The words that have come down to us to name the idea are Roman, mainly: fama, ambitio, rumor, celebritas. And in Rome the words already carried positive and negative charges, so that to be famous (famosus) was to be notorious and to be egregious (egregius) was to be above the crowd. Fama was an ambivalent formulation and could carry either derogatory or complimentary overtones, depending upon the situation. As the matrix of the western idea of fame, imperial Rome looked back over its shoulder at the example of Alexander as his Greek successors had never done. "Once a vocabulary is created, once a group of gestures is made," writes Braudy, "they can be reproduced and refined by others," so that "Caesar, like Alexander, inspires his soldiers with the desire to be praised themselves," while Augustus remade himself twice, first in the image of the Greek hero contesting with the gods, and again as the symbol of a consolidated empire. In so doing he also remade the role of the poets Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, since each took a different attitude toward the establishment of empire, one celebrating the private freedom of the poet as seer, the other the founding of the empire and the parallel aims of poetic and political power, while the last turned away from power to the amatory and spiritual, and so was banished by power. Each left behind a kind of fame to be adopted by others, so that Pope turns to Horace and Dante to Virgil as Chaucer had to Ovid. Braudy writes on the newly opened border of history and literary criticism, a vast territory not yet much explored where the cultural context and a keen sense of ideology gently dictate new readings. He brings his own remarkable gifts of style to the text, and that he is master
Page 420 420 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW of so much that is traditional in The Frenzy of Renown, from ancient history to Renaissance notions of royal rule to changing schools of acting, and is meanwhile so persuasive in the novel connections he makes between the traditional and the contemporary, is little short of astonishing. Let me quote in closing from his analysis of Chaucer's House of Fame: Standing at a crux in the warring traditions of Roman and Christian fame, The House of Fame does attack certain kinds of fame and favor others. But its importance is larger than Chaucer's own attitude (itself very ambiguous), for it supplies a critical compilation of the thought of centuries. In every nuance, every allusion, and every reference, we can read the pressure the problem of fame has placed on Chaucer's sense of his own vocation as a writer, and in the poem's seemingly upin-the-air and unfinished finale, we glimpse his own irresolute attitude toward the issue he has helped bring to a greater selfconsciousness. Unlike earlier works, which considered fame in bits and pieces, The House of Fame is concerned less with literary fame or spiritual fame or heroic fame than with fame itself, and it thereby foretells a future where fame is not just one of the central themes of art and literature, but, in many hands, the crucial question whose nature arrays all the rest.
Herbert TuckerTucker, HerbertScholars of DecadenceVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 421-427http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:23
Page 421 HERBERT TUCKER SCHOLARS OF DECADENCE The Decadent Imagination 1890-1900. By Jean Pierrot. Translated by Derek Coltman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Pp. 309. $25.00. The Decadent Dilemma. By R. K. R. Thornton. London: Edward Arnold, 1983. Pp. 215. $39.50. Decadent Style. By John R. Reed. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985. Pp. 274. $30.00 As each of these books shows, Decadence is a term that does double duty in cultural studies. It remains our name at once for a specific movement in the arts that occurred toward the close of the nineteenth century, and at the same time for a posture of stylish enervation that may be found to occur during the latter phases of any epoch with a sense that its days are numbered. This confusion in our nomenclature seems apt. For it recaptures on the ground of cultural historiography a pair of conflicting impulses to which Decadence is no stranger: the impulse to historicize the relation of past to present, viewing them as distinct from one another (if causally related), and the impulse to synchronize the two, in an embrace of something essentially transtemporal. Decadent artists and theorists before, during and after the fin de sibcle have tended to deny their historicity; yet this denial has repeatedly served as a means of fostering the delicate flower of a vanguardism that can arise only from the rich humus of a culture in decay, and that therefore can be intelligible, even to itself, only as a temporal happening. Decadent art in the West -whether from Greek Alexandria, from Rome in its decline and fall, from the "graveyard school" of the later eighteenth century in England, or from the century-old times upon which these three studies focus-is an avant-garde art that brings its audience cultural news in the guise of the latest. Consciously contempo 421
Page 422 422 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW rary to the point of faddishness, it designs and sports the latest in artistic fashion; and its characteristic pose of knowing lassitude betokens both its hope to have the final word (where dernier cri equals last gasp) and its suppressed awareness that such hope is doomed by the very conditions of modernity that give to what is modish, in any era, its evanescent flashiness. In this regard the Decadence of the fin de siecle recapitulates a twilit moment in what several of its luminaries - Wagner in the Ring cycle, Nietzsche with his idea of eternal recurrence, the Yeats of gyring lunar phases-themselves hailed as a repeating historical pattern. It also anticipates, and sets many of the terms for, the brief if furious eddyings of the artistic avant garde from their time down to our own. The Decadents' ambivalence about their moment in history, which they repressed for the sake of a pure Augenblick of sensation or (often equivalently) spirituality, but which they also covertly required as a ground for their shocking novelty, has transmitted itself in some degree to the authors here under review. Pierrot, Thornton, and Reed all write as analytic historians for whom factual narrative and artifactual analysis seldom converge. The Decadent Imagination, Decadent Dilemma, and Decadent Style named in their titles are all modes of a spirit that abides with us still, as the authors' occasional references to phenomena as diverse as totalitarianism and punk suggest; and this spirit abides, all three authors imply, as a witness to certain unchanging universals, of transcendent ideality or its negative image the void, to which the Decadents were (like Ernest Dowson to his Cynara in a major fin-de-siecle poem) faithful in their fashion. On the other hand, as historians all three authors are concerned to put the Decade back into Decadence: to situate the movement within broad Romantic and Modernist contexts; to estimate its relation to developments in religious and scientific thought and, less enthusiastically, in social and political affairs; and to define it more snugly still within the closer frames provided on one side by its predecessors Naturalism and Aestheticism and on the other by Symbolism, the better-mannered sibling that inherited whatever Decadence did not manage to waste. The authors vary widely in the relative emphases they give to historical explanation and to critical explication. Yet they curiously agree, among themselves and with most of the artists they discuss, in practically and structurally sequestering the one endeavor from the other. Of the three studies Jean Pierrot's The Decadent Imagination 1880-1900 is the most learned and historically informative. This is the book to which a student should turn for introductions to the persons, the
Page 423 HERBERT TUCKER 423 works, the manifestos and contemporary analyses that constitute the chief phenomena of Decadence, particularly in France. And yet one does not read through Pierrot's book with the pleasure that an introduction ought to impart; it will profit most, in fact, those readers who bring to it a firm sense of what they wish to take away. First published in French as a doctoral thesis in 1974 and now unexceptionably translated by Derek Coltman, the book repeatedly risks dazzling its reader with the glitter of facts not all of which are gold. Pierrot threads his facts on themes-idealism, pessimism, imagery of water or vegetation - that are too loose and looping to permit any very cogent or cumulative argumentation. Not a sensitive reader of texts, he relies heavily on plot summary and on abstract and simple-minded image analysis as means of deriving from his texts themes that can be readily plugged into an unsurprising intellectual-historical matrix. (The admiring references he makes to Gaston Bachelard's brilliant work with images have the unfortunate effect of making one want to drop Pierrot and go back to Poetique de l'espace or L'analyse du feu.) All of which is to say that Pierrot is an intellectual historian of Decadence, and that for this reviewer the intellectual history of Decadence, at least in Pierrot's positivistic sense of the subject, proves rather thin. As a group the Decadents seem not to have had large intellectual aspirations; indeed, they seem to have aspired most largely not to have ideas, but instead to indulge and exhibit sensations, or moods, or the postures these might dictate. And, while the anti-intellectual ideology of Decadence calls without question for critical distance on the historian's part, I doubt that intellectual history like Pierrot's offers the best vantage from which to survey it. I have just implied that The Decadent Imagination suffers from its author's want of sympathy for his subjects, yet in a sense the reverse is true: Pierrot's thematic approach in its own way repeats their idealizing, elevating, and objectifying maneuvers. From so explicitly historical a study one wants to learn a little less about who said what when, or about general parallels, say, between a pervasive stance of pessimism and the respective rise and fall of nineteenthcentury scientific and religious thought. One wants instead somewhat more investigation of the social, economic, and political substrates from which Decadent art arose, with such painstaking obliviousness, into such exquisite refinement. Pierrot knows a good deal about these neglected matters: he rightly posits the political debacles of the Paris Commune and the FrancoPrussian war in the early 1870s as points of origin for the otherworldly flights of Decadence in the years to come, and his concluding chapter
Page 424 424 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW registers convincingly the role played by the Dreyfus affair of 1898 in ringing down the curtain on social disengagement among the French avant-garde. More typical, though, is Pierrot's decision to spend ten pages canvassing Decadent imagery of precious stones and minerals, without once considering how their market value may have gilded the imagination of an age whose fantasies kept betraying the very obsessions with wealth and power that Decadence was designed to escape. It is to R. K. R. Thornton's credit that The Decadent Dilemma balances a more generous argument on a more dialectically subtle pivot: Decadent artists foreknew their Icarian fall, and incorporated this knowledge into their works. Although for Thornton even more than Pierrot the ground into which Decadence inevitably relapses is not culture but a naively posited nature (sex, disease, death), its supple thesis gives Thornton's book a livelier spin. It also lets us understand the characteristic twists of the Decadent "life-style," its perversions and inversions of the normal, as not just pathological symptoms but attempts to pursue, with conscious artistry and often across the frontiers between art and life, an acknowledged cultural pathology. Physically and conceptually the slightest book of the three, perhaps because it takes itself least seriously, Thornton's work can be skimmed for its jauntier insights: that J.-K. Huysmans' A rebours is the Bible of Decadence precisely because its protagonist des Esseintes flies to extremes the novelist knows are preposterous (e.g., nutrition by meatless enemas on Fridays); that the "Dowson legend" of willed degeneration is less true or untrue than the fact that Dowson himself collaborated upon it: "he was also fundamentally involved in creating the image of himself that the mythologizers have been blamed for." Thornton attends throughout to the potential, ever present with Decadent introversion, for selfcaricature - an endearing feature of the movement, which links its lyrical fascinations to the comic genius of the French farceurs and Oscar Wilde, and which may explain the sustained pop-culture symbiosis between the Decadents of The Yellow Book and The Savoy and their parodists in Punch and the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. When not thus winningly attentive, this book for the general reader can be maddeningly arbitrary. Thornton devotes only fifteen pages to Aubrey Beardsley, and just seven to Yeats, after averaging thirty apiece on Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Arthur Symons. Elsewhere long passages of French, untranslated and sometimes ill proofread (28-29), occur in capricious alternation with different passages in indifferent translation; one of these, a discussion of style by the consummate stylist
Page 425 HERBERT TUCKER 425 Theophile Gautier, comes into the book refracted into English from the clumsy German of Max Nordau, a notorious and rabid anti-aesthete. The meandering international chapters that open the book are inferior to the studies of individual British figures in the second half and do little to introduce Thornton's close analyses there, which may be read independently with small loss. Although Thornton's lightness of touch makes for the better local exegeses, anyone wanting a thorough tour of the larger British and Continental scene should go directly to Pierrot, whose account is preferable for both depth and sweep, and who shares with Thornton a suspicious disapproval of the Decadent movement, and a manifest relief that Decadence gave way to Symbolism as quickly as it did. The most recent of these three studies, John R. Reed's Decadent Style, is the one most willing to confront the art of Decadence in its own terms and to set a high value on its achievements. This book combines an encyclopedic learning comparable to Pierrot's with an analytic subtlety that matches, and an argumentative rigor that exceeds, what we find in Thornton. Since Decadence is nothing if not a style, Reed's title appears redundant; but since writers on Decadence tend to flourish "style" as an uninterrogated term, the avowedly stylistic concern motivating Reed is welcome. It is all the more welcome for the specificity of the thesis that Reed tests against a range of works in numerous artistic genres. "The Decadent style, while retaining a realistic mode of rendering images, violated formal conventions by breaking up compositions into independent, even contending parts, the order and significance of which could be recovered only through an intellectual effort at comprehension." Here Reed is describing Decadent style in painting; but he illustrates analogous theses for Decadent fiction (where the reader's frustrated resolution of an occult pattern of motifs usurps upon the overt linearity of plot), for Decadent poetry (where formal strictness is outwardly maintained yet the poem is internally corroded by subversive subject matter), and, unsurprisingly but rightly, for the motivic compositional practice of Wagner and others in music. Reed's emphasis upon the act of intellection has the special merit of suggesting that the estranging, iconic self-sufficiency we identify in Decadent art-for-art'ssake, and the fastidiousness we customarily impute to its makers, in fact result from their consistent design not to be standoffish but to engage the audience in a newly arresting way. Here, then, is a challenging, a comprehensive, and in Reed's hands a productive thesis, which yields a number of fine interpretations of
Page 426 426 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW works by a score of contemporaries in several countries. The best of these center on work done in the English tradition, Reed's own scholarly province, by such figures as Wilde and Beardsley; though Reed has comparatist ambitions, his insights are less 'convincingly pointed as he moves into Continental materials - in part because he gets tempted into the slough of plot-summary, but also because he sometimes seems to lack basic comparatist skills in language. Knowledge of French is indispensable to a student of Decadence; but on at least three occasions (21, 95, 99) passages in French occur in mangled form or, what is worse for the general reader, accompanied by howling mistranslations. Ohio Press must bear some of the blame for this mayhem, but since Reed has so often supplied translations tacitly on his own these recurrent errors induce a certain decay of confidence in his larger project. Far more successfully than either Pierrot or Thornton, Reed takes the subversive force of the Decadent assault (as in The Picture of Dorian Gray) upon the stable bourgeois self; and he understands well how Decadent style, years before Freud, aimed to render consciousness as a fragile compromise between an unconsummated desire and an intuited core of nothingness. Almost never, though, does Reed subject either Decadent yearning or Decadent nihilism to further analysis; they remain unquestioned givens, which produce Decadent style as an effect. I wish that Reed, having done so much, had gone on to explore other possibilities: that desire and despair might be byproducts rather than sources of Decadent style, inlaid motifs (especially in the case of Beardsley's empty spaces) rather than preexistent motives; or, quite differently, that the Decadents' romance with the void may have been a fantastic projection resulting from the evacuation of social and historical contents from their work. Now and then one wishes to take as political allegory Reed's thesis about the apprehension of an occult "new order" within Decadent art; and Reed's venturesome if heterogeneous concluding chapter does much to sanction that wish, since there he incorporates much of the social and political history he has expressly bracketed at the outset. "Most Decadent artists," he finally says, "felt some interest in picturing, and even assisting into being, a new social system"- but this is an interest he has been unable, or unwilling, to integrate with what he finds most interesting in their art. In different ways each of these three books (one French, one British, one American) epitomizes our culture's common difficulty, at once intellectual and political, when it comes to relate the one to the many, the individual self or work to its constituents or contexts. Much as
Page 427 HERBERT TUCKER 427 Decadent art renders problematic the classical equilibrium between ornamental detail and whole design, so for these scholars of Decadence facts threaten to swamp generalizations, aphorisms to upstage arguments. Much as Decadence purchased its highly individualistic refinements at the cost of excluding the increasingly democratic dimensions of contemporary history, so its scholars in practice uphold a divorce between aesthetic and social modes of understanding. To some extent this symmetry between scholar and subject merely reflects the profusion of materials that a survey of Decadence confronts. But we should also note, within this symmetrical resemblance, the contingent relation between 1890 and 1990, the role Decadence played in shaping assumptions about the mutual bearing of art and life, High Culture and culture at large, that are still among us, and not least among our writers on Decadence. In owning our historical debt and allegiance to the heavylidded stranger we call by so funny a name, we may learn to behold the uncannily familiar, all but post-structuralist face of Decadence not as our own in a distant mirror but as a recent ancestor's. Or, to choose a more fitting period image, in this historical regard we may encounter a portrait like Dorian Gray's, where we can read the story of our own inherited repressions and hope to undo them, by an act of historical understanding that incorporates what is of value in the work of Pierrot, Thornton, and Reed and then goes beyond it. The alternative to such a hope remains legible in the most justly famed and prophetically haunting of Decadence's many self-representations: Beardsley's desperately exultant drawing of John the Baptist's severed head.
Lisa M. SteinmanSteinman, Lisa M.Dialogues Between History and DreamVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 428-438http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:24
Page 428 LISA M. STEINMAN DIALOGUES BETWEEN HISTORY AND DREAM The Happy Man. By Donald Hall. New York: Random House, 1986. Pp. 79. $7.95pb. The Walls of Thebes. By David R. Slavitt. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. Pp. 51. $6.95pb. Thomas and Beulah. By Rita Dove. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986. Pp. 79. $6.95pb. Dream Work. By Mary Oliver. Boston and New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. Pp. 90. $8.95pb. Ezra Pound has defined an epic as a poem containing history. The books reviewed here are not epics, but at least three of them define poetry's relationship with history, and in quite different ways. It seems no accident that the cover of Donald Hall's most recent poetry collection, The Happy Man, shows a Roman statue of Junius Brutus with his sons. Hall's book is filled with meditations on public life, on ancestors, on history, and on hardship and decay, just as the now crumbling statue comes from a civilization preoccupied with personal and public history. Whether discussing how tourists' photographs make the New Hampshire "mountains/ get paler and more distant" ("Scenic View") or moving from a childhood memory of.slaughtered chickens to "Nannie,/ who died one summer at eighty-seven, childish,/ deaf, unable to feed herself, demented..." ("The Henyard Round"), these poems are haunted by what is abandoned and desolate. Section one, "Barnyards," also explores the rhythms of New Hampshire farm life, rhythms stretching back generations. In "Twelve Seasons," for instance, we read of ninetyyear-old Martha Bates Dudley making soup, which "rolls its knuckles/ of bubble and froth and works all day without stopping." The name, as 428
Page 429 LISA M. STEINMAN 429 much as the age, of Martha Bates Dudley reminds us of the almost unspoken family history embedded in such a way of life. Moreover, this is a precise, and even loving, description of soup that is decidedly not instant. But also, both literally and metaphorically, the soup embodies the hard lives of those who make and eat it, who also work all day without stopping. The poems as a whole repeat this double focus. There are almost sensuous descriptions of people, land, and objects. For example, a cow with a "wrinkly neck,... turnip-eye" is given voice: "mm-mmmmmmmm-mmmmmmmm-ugghwanchh" ("Great Day in the Cows' House"). Yet the cow is said to be ghostly, like the ancestors whose lives are traced in the book's first section, or the multitude of speakers - "the old man in the room of bumpy wallpaper./...the girl who sits on her drunken mother's lap/ or carries her grandmother's eggs... the boy who reads/... the middle-aged man motionless in a yellow chair,/ unable to read, daydreaming the house of dying"- whose voices, lives, and intersecting memories crowd into "Shrubs Burned Away," the portion of a long poem-in-progress that constitutes section two. Increasingly, one's sense is that these people, like the over-photographed mountains in "Scenic View," are ghost-like in part because their lives have become predictable and are conditioned by their pasts. History, and even childhood, are presented here not with elegiac nostalgia but with resignation. In the third section of The Happy Man, the world of the poems expands to include less rural lives, as in "Mr. Wakeville On Interstate 90," where the speaker's vision of settling down off the road is as follows: I will work forty hours a week clerking at the paintstore. On Fridays I will cash my paycheck at Six Rivers Bank and stop at Harvey's Market and talk with Harvey. In "Merle Bascom's.22," the speaker describes how, momentarily, his and his loved ones' "lives fitted mountain, creek, and hayfield./ Long days like minnows in the pond quickened." The specific places and details, however, usually bespeak not so much lives of contentment, filled with what is known and loved, as a quiet near despair over knowing that Harvey's Market will always and only contain Harvey. To quote again from "Merle Bascom's.22," where the speaker learns his daughter-in-law is pregnant:.. One day I was walking alone and imagined a granddaughter visiting:
Page 430 430 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW She loved the old place; she swam in the summer pond with us; she walked with us in red October; she grew older, she fell in love with a neighbor, she married... As I daydreamed, suddenly I was seized by a fit of revulsion: I thought: 'Must I go through all that again? Must I live another twenty years?' The final section of The Happy Man explores the equally doubleedged lure of repose. This seems, at first, quiet celebration. The final poem, "The Day I Was Older," ends with an address to the reader: "Though we drink/ from this cup every day, we will never drink it dry." Yet the epigraph that presides over the book as a whole is from Leo Tolstoy: "Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation." Finally it is unclear whether we are offered a drink from the well of poetry or of despair. Or, perhaps, both. The voices of this book are not limited to twentieth-century American life. In poems and in epigraphs, Hall quotes not only Tolstoy, but Henry James, Matthew Arnold, Hsu Hsia-K'o, Meister Eckhart, and Plutarch. The cumulative effect is that the poems do not speak of a contemporary belatedness; rather, it is as if the weight of history is projected back in time, being repeated by an historical and multi-national chorus. Nor is this a new note in Hall's own work. If in "The Table," from The Alligator Bride (1969), his ancestors' voices "wrapped [him] around/ with love that asked for nothing," the past was already both in that volume and in the 1956 Exiles and Marriages "a country under the ground/ where the days practice their old habits/ over and over" ("The Days"). Still, the sense of being overcome by the past and by time passing is strongest in this new volume. Hall's taut language in The Happy Man also recalls the classical image presiding over the book. We think of classicism, not just the Roman variety, as involving the language of restraint; at its best, as in Jonson, for instance, the very restraint usually suggests there is something - a deeper emotion - that needs restraint. The paring down of language as if under pressure is the strength of the poems in The Happy Man. This is not to say the book has no playful moments. In "Couplet," a twenty-two line, two-stanza poem about an old timers' baseball game, the last line of each stanza forms the couplet (with past and present the "subject rhymes"). The first stanza describes an old, puffy figure, "whose body we remember/ as sleek and nervous/ as a filly's." The poem then ends with an heroic analogy, deflated-with
Page 431 LISA M. STEINMAN 431 humorous affection - as we find at an appropriately inappropriate distance that "filly's" is rhymed with "Achilles." Despite its inclusiveness and occasional playfulness, the overall effect of The Happy Man is of constraint. Hall has always revised, moving toward more and more conciseness. Yet at times these poems seem in danger of disappearing into silence. For example, in Exiles and Marriages, there is a five page "Elegy for Wesley Wells" that reappears in The Alligator Bride shortened by two pages. Wesley Wells is still around in The Happy Man, but, especially in "Whip-Poor-Will," just barely. When the poem was published in 1982 in the New Republic, Wesley Wells' life was condensed to two lines, his name merely echoed in the whip-poor-will's call. The poem reappeared in Hubbub Magazine with even fewer words, and in short, unfleshed-out lines. In The Happy Man, there is yet less of this poem about "a ghost bird" repeating a three syllable ghost name. The sense one gets is that many of Hall's poems come as close as one can, while still writing, to that not quite affirmative, two syllable, New England sound: "ay-up." The Walls of Thebes is another book by a poet who has been reading the Romans, though David R. Slavitt, who has translated Virgil and Ovid, seemed in his earlier books to be more a writer of the Empire than of the Republic. Slavitt's poetry in volumes like Child's Play (1972) or Big Nose (1983) was meticulously crafted, witty, and often satirical. His new poems, in general, have a more meditative tone. Most of the lyrics in The Walls of Thebes begin with a quotidian object or event - an eye test, a typographical error in a newspaper, an old radio show tag- and then construct its emotional or moral import. "Eye Test," for example, contrasts the individual details children see (or say they can see) with the blurrier perspective of one for whom:.. simple vision gives way to the visionary. Below that big black E, the chart on the wall turns into nonsense Belshazzar paid so richly to have explained, though a child could read it directly: you have been weighed and found wanting (Again?); and the end is near. One learns to say Amen. It is not mere cleverness to read the handwriting on the wall in this way. In "Eye Test," as in "Unveiling," "Visions," and other poems, we hear an active and questioning intelligence at work, an intelligence rooted, moreover, in everyday life. Furthermore, for Slavitt everyday life is not limited to work, domestic life, or nature, but embraces as well historical
Page 432 432 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW objects - plays, texts - as things which inform the daily life of one who reads and thinks. As the lines above from "Eye Test" suggest, for all their rootedness and intelligence, these are poems that dream about visions, but do not wholly know why, or wholly believe in the transport they often discuss. As Slavitt writes in the opening poem, "Visions," about being overwhelmed at the sight of a flock of birds in flight: "it isn't such hoarded visions that can redeem us/ so much as the hope that their like may happen again." The poem describes our love of moments where, to quote Wallace Stevens, "life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation." But, like the interpolated "(Again?)" in "Eye Test," the final couplet in "Visions" is too self-conscious, and too explanatory, as if Slavitt did not trust his readers to grasp what the first sixteen lines of the poem already, far more delicately, enact in diction and image. The same might be said of "Amphion's Lyre," the sixteen-page poem with which The Walls of Thebes concludes. Clearly the most ambitious piece of the book, there is much to admire in it. "Amphion's Lyre" retells the story of Thebes, up to Laius's reign. This is not a poet rummaging through Greek legends with an antiquarian's eye; the poem is brought into the present by tracing the ways in which the legend moves and gains meaning for a modern reader. On the persistence of the story about how Amphion's music built the walls of Thebes, even after Amphion has been ousted by his more practical twin brother, Slavitt writes: "When the world turns nasty, we turn away/ to others, better or simpler, that we invent/ in dreams or art,/ and what we flee prefigures what we yearn for./ Zetus, Amphion's twin, had imagination,/ which is dangerous with power." But the poem, again, cannot let what it suggests remain as suggestion. For instance, we are told: "And the twins?/ You recognize them too, embodiments/ of ambivalence, of double natures." If we have by this point not already felt the doubling significance of the twins, we certainly are not going to feel it embodied in these lines; ambivalence so discursively managed is laid to rest. A related complaint might be lodged against poems like "HerzWerk," about Rilke, but also, more broadly, about how Rilke's poetry moves us unexpectedly, not by the slow gathering we think should characterize wisdom. Slavitt writes: "Comes then like some tv-fitness bozo/ with a program of strenuous calisthenics, Rilke!// Did I go too far? Well, make him a music master." While the sheer technical bravado of the sounds and of the mixed diction is impressive, the poet's consciousness of his own prowess gets in the way of the poem. We are told as much in "Herz-Werk": "Stillness has its voice. One must learn to
Page 433 LISA M. STEINMAN 433 hear it.// Let it sing; it is not a trick, or rather/ the trick is for it not to be a trick." At his best, Slavitt takes his own advice, but here he seems to be trying too hard to showoff to his readers or again, perhaps, playing to an audience he underestimates. It is peculiar to complain of a lack of respect for others in this book, since Slavitt in other ways relies on a felt sense of commonality. The very fact that he can build poetry out of the particulars of ordinary life suggests a Whitmanian trust that we have experiences in common. As Slavitt says in "Parodos," "We all have had our catastrophes." Such moments keep these poems from being selfish or self-enclosed. The best passages gain our assent, and communicate the sincerity of the credo found in "Parodos," where Slavitt says: "I do not believe in heaven,/ but still pray for six or seven/ decent souls about me." In context, speaking of what moves us watching the chorus in a Greek play, these lines suggest that the poet prays both for the sake of others and that he might have others near him. Despite the reservations above, then, it is fair to say that The Walls of Thebes shows Slavitt moving toward a poetry that does not showoff, or show too much, but rather demonstrates an increasingly generous intelligence in the process of grappling with whatever crosses its - and our - path. Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove's newest book, like Hall's and Slavitt's books, engages history, in this case, personal history. In Museum, Dove's Rome was more medieval than Hall's or Slavitt's, and she moved easily through more modern history as well. Thomas and Beulah refers obliquely to twentieth-century American history, but from the family album snapshot on the cover through the appended "Chronology" (first item: "1900: Thomas born in Wartrace, Tennessee"), we read this book as a family chronicle. However, the poems themselves are not about an individual's relationship to her history, nor about the weight of history. They are, more, history allowed to speak for itself. The title page tells us that the "poems tell two sides of a story and are meant to be read in sequence." The history contained in Thomas and Beulah, indeed, is found in the unfolding story - or juxtaposed stories- told of the youth, marriage, lives and deaths of two people. We even forget that the poems are historical, in part because they mix past and present tense, in part because of the frequent use of the past and present progressive, and in part because of the vividness of the characters revealed. Dove's poems stand in stark contrast to Slavitt's: there is no editorializing, and no morals are drawn; the lives stand only for themselves,
Page 434 434 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW although through image and sound -one could say through the poetry - the reported lives are enriched and given meanings articulated more fully than they could be by the people described. For example, "Straw Hat" describes Thomas, who at age twenty-one arrives in Akron from Tennessee after a few years on riverboats where he sang to his friend Lem's mandolin playing. "Straw Hat" reads: "He used to sleep like a glass of water/ held up in the hand of a very young girl." The language is simple, but the image and alliteration capture the sense of a now-gone childhood and, by contrast, the water in which Lem drowned. The image of the girl also leads the reader into Thomas's courtship of Beulah in the next poem, "Courtship," where: King of the Crawfish in his yellow scarf mandolin belly pressed tight to his hounds-tooth vest[Thomas] wraps the yellow silk still warm from his throat around her shoulders. (He made good money; he could buy another.) A gnat flies in his eye and she thinks he's crying. Given such apparently sparse language, a surprising amount is said. Thomas's youthful cockiness is captured (in the phrase, "King of the Crawfish," as much as in the description of his clothes). We are also given Thomas's point of view; the parenthetical aside seems almost his stage whisper, telling us that the scarf is more a sign of his well-being than of love; the same is suggested when we see he is willing to use a chance encounter with a gnat to his advantage. At the same time, though, the fact that the scarf is "still warm from his throat" comments on more than Thomas's ability to talk a good line; it suggests he is sharing something of himself, as well. "Courtship" gains in meaning from the gathering sense of Thomas's character in the first half of the book, and it also resonates with the poem, "Courtship, Diligence," in the last (Beulah's) half of their volume. "Courtship, Diligence," opens: "A yellow scarf runs through his
Page 435 LISA M. STEINMAN 435 fingers/ as if it were melting." We think of the phrase, "butter wouldn't melt in his mouth," and also of how, from Beulah's perspective, Thomas's feeling he has money (and scarfs) to throw away seems more like mismanagement, or emotional miscalculation, than financial success. The poem ends with Beulah's response to mandolin music and Thomas: Cigar-box music! She'd much prefer a pianola and scent in a sky-colored flask. Not that scarf, bright as butter. Not his hands, cool as dimes. Helen Vendler has suggested that Dove offers us a poetry of "the disarticulated," of those whose lives, and therefore histories, are fragmented ("In the Zoo of the New," New York Review of Books, 23 October 1986). It is worth adding that most of the language in Thomas and Beulah could have been spoken by the people whose story is told, which is to say that the poems do not seem to impose on their subjects. Rather, they slowly build a context for the objects, images, and scraps of reported speech and song that appear and keep reappearing. This is an impressive achievement, although it also means that the poems have more power taken together than individually. To give one more example: when Thomas watches the "shy angle of his daughter's head," sees his son-in-law swallow, and feels for the first time "like/ calling him Son" ("Variations on Gaining a Son"), attentive readers confronted only with this poem will recognize the oblique reference to fishing and to the commonplace, "hooking a man." But it is only in the context of the other poems about Thomas, about his own marriage, about his more literal fishing trips (in "Lightnin' Blues" and "One Volume Missing"), and about his desire for a son that these lines have their full impact. This is, of course, an appropriate way to reimagine and re-present the lives traced in the book, since they are lives not fully examined by those who live them. The marriage of Thomas and Beulah, in particular, is clearly one where communication is tacit, contained precisely in repeated phrases and motions that have gained meaning over the years. The poems re-enact both the accretion of meaning and the taciturnity, perfectly right for this subject, although, given other subjects, one might want more. Mary Oliver's Dream Work, the last book reviewed here, stands out when placed next to the three books discussed above, precisely because it seems to take no notice of any past or history. True, the cover of one of
Page 436 436 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Oliver's earlier volumes, The Night Traveler (1978), showed a portrait of Virgil; but even there Oliver's Virgil came by way of Blake. Dream Work, in fact, opens with the poem "Dogfish" in which Oliver writes: "I wanted/ the past to go away, I wanted/ to leave it, like another country." Later in the same poem, the personal past is similarly discarded: "You don't want to hear the story/ of my life, and anyway/ I don't want to tell it, I want to listen// to the enormous waterfalls of the sun." As in American Primitive, there is a sort of trick here. In the earlier volume, the apparently unself-conscious celebrations of the present and of the natural world, presented as if in a picture with no perspective or depth, are quite self-consciously entitled primitives. In Dream Work, the past rejected is nonetheless felt loitering under the surface of many of the poems. Yet in both volumes Oliver's best poems are those of an almost romantic lyricism. There are more references in Dream Work to the nightmare side of vision, to "the dark heart of the story" ("The Chance To Love Everything"), or to "the dark song/ of the morning" after a night in which, we are told, "in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,/ and dreams do not lie" ("Rage"). But despite the number of times darkness is mentioned, the dark is less detailed, less fully imagined, and less convincing than Oliver's primary subject, namely visionary experiences. If Slavitt's response to a flight of birds is to step back and explain he does not believe in redemption, here is Oliver on "Wild Geese": Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and excitingover and over announcing your place in the family of things. One might mistrust such epiphanic moments, wishing perhaps that Oliver had a bit more of Hall's restraint and a bit less of this yearning to merge with the world. Yet the poetry, in the iambs, in the careful mixture of statement and image, avoids sentimentality and is, in the final analysis, deeply moving. Here, in an epiphany built of the loss of such moments, is another equally powerful passage, from "Whispers": Have you ever tried to slide into the heaven of sensation and met you know not what resistance but it
Page 437 LISA M. STEINMAN 437 held you back? The poem ends: S..have you stood, staring out over the swamps, the swirling rivers where the birds like tossing fires flash through the trees, their bodies exchanging a certain happiness in the sleek amazing humdrum of nature's design-... to which you cannot belong? This is clearly not the humdrum world that most of us inhabit; there is no sign of Hall's Martha Bates Dudley and Mr. Wakeville, of Slavitt's eye tests, newspapers and books, or of Dove's couple, living through the Depression and company picnics. The other poets reviewed here let other people into their poetry, people who live and have jobs in a recognizable world. Oliver's more solitary landscapes are not even wholly of the natural world. As with romantic poetry generally, Oliver's "world" is centered in the self, or in the self's quests. "The Journey" admits:..there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to save the only life you could save. Finally, the world into which Oliver descends is not the physical world these poems at first appear to celebrate. Dream Work is notable in part because it explicitly acknowledges that sensuality is not what Oliver is after. In American Primitive, perhaps disingenuously, Oliver wrote: "the only way/ to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it/ into the body first" ("The Plum Trees"). In Dream Work, we read: "The spirit/ likes to dress up... it needs/ the metaphor of the body" ("Poem," emphasis added). It is admirable that Dream Work maintains the
Page 438 438 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW visionary lyricism of American Primitive while going on to examine its premises like this. There are many ways in which Oliver's poems are the most immediately compelling of those reviewed here. And yet, by contrast, if Slavitt's over- explanatory discursiveness is irksome at times, it also seems to stem in part from an honest and tough-minded recognition, which we also admire, of what it means to be romantically inclined in 1986. The high romantic vein has always risked losing the world. For many of us, the poetry we want now will have to come (to borrow a phrase) from poets of reality. And we feel we have such poets when we read the way the seemingly unpoetic lives and language of Dove's couple or of Hall's awkwardly named, and precisely realized, individuals (Felix, Merle, Harvey) are given a place in poetry without being wrenched from history. At the same time, Oliver's poetry strikes a deep and seductive chord. It is, to quote Donald Hall from an early BBC interview,, a poetry "that, if you leave yourself open to the language of dreams, is open to everyone.... You need not translate anything... you have to float on it." Perhaps, after all, the dialogue between history and dream - and between community and self - that we find when these poets are read together is what we really want from poetry.
Geoff Eley, Claudia ThomasEley, Geoff; Thomas, ClaudiaRecent Books in Review: Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective; Alexander Pope: A LifeVol. XXVI, No.: 2, Spring 1987, pp. 439-444http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0026.002:25
Page 439 RECENT BOOKS IN REVIEW Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Edited by Geoffrey Hartman. Indiana University Press, 1986. Pp. 284. $29.95 cloth; $9.95 paper. As I write this review, a former member of the SA who served with the German Army Commando responsible for deportations of Greek Jews from Salonika to Treblinka has been elected President of a prosperous European country by a small but successful margin. The same man is a well-respected former Secretary-General of the United Nations. His loss of memory on this score-more accurately, his shifting strategies of concealment- continues to be probed by the remaining guardians of the West's anti-fascist conscience-Jewish war crimes investigators, some principled liberals, parts of the democratic press, and most of all the ever-vigilant Left. But Kurt Waldheim's personal discomfort is less revealing than the complacent insensitivities of Austrian political culture it has helped to expose; placed publicly on the defensive, such complacency has turned easily to aggression, with resentments at the self-righteous intrusions of international opinion, and not without certain intimations of recrudescent anti-semitism. In the end, whether or not and in what sense Waldheim was a Nazi is less important. As the broad anti-fascist consensus of the 1930s and 1940s knew, the Austrian clerico-conservative alternative already contained authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies enough. The more intractable problem is the deep-seated indifference of so much of Austrian society to this past. As Jiirgen Habermas says in the volume under review, invoking an earlier comment of Karl Jaspers, this is the Austrian form of a necessary German distinction, "between a guilt for which there is only individual responsibility, and a communal liability for crimes that could not have been committed without collective silence." Like the Bitburg fiasco a year before, the Waldheim affair is another reminder of the Nazi past's continuing ability to stir political passions in 439
Page 440 440 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW the present. Geoffrey Hartman's collection of writings and documents provides a valuable commentary on Bitburg and its implications, thoughtfully introduced by the editor. It falls into three parts: a series of essays on various dimensions of the occasion, on the symbolism and uses of the German past in different national cultures (German, Jewish, American, French) and the artfulness of popular and official memory, some of them specially commissioned, some reprinted (including a topical essay by Habermas and a classic text of Adorno); a wide selection of newspaper reportage and press commentary, including a wellcomposed section of photographs and cartoons; and finally, a section of documents, consisting essentially of the various addresses delivered around the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war, by Reagan, Kohl, and the Federal Republic's President, Richard von Weizsaicker. The middle of these three parts sets the collection's prevailing tone, and the more successful essays of the first part, such as Raul Hilberg's "Bitburg as Symbol," or Habermas's terse reflections, conform to the more journalistic mode (the latter appearing, in fact, in Die Zeit). But this is also the collection's weakness, not entirely mitigated by the limitations on such instant commentary on current events. It is a pity that Hartman commissioned nothing by a German historian, apart from Saul Friedlainder's useful but rather lightweight "Some German Struggles with Memory." After all, for some twenty years now the question of "mastering," as opposed to "defusing," the German past has provided terrain for bitterly contested historiographical disputes, from the famous Fischer Controversy over the nature and origins of Germany's aims in the First World War, through the debates over the so-called Sonderweg or German "special path," to the embittered controversy over "structural" versus "intentionalist" or personalized "Hitlerist" explanations for the character of Nazism. Such debates have always engaged explicitly the contemporary political questions of how exactly the recent German past is to be appropriated in official and popular remembrance, usually under some notion of continuity in German history. Some of the contributors to the Hartman volume touch on these matters, but overall it conveys little sense of the urgency and excitement of the debates. Moreover, there is a continuing connection in West German public discourse between the political design of conservative rehabilitation discussed by Habermas and the so-called Tendenzwende since the late 1970s in the historical profession-a connection nicely dramatized in Michael Stfirmer's role as Kohl's adviser and speechwriter, a feature of the Bitburg project that goes unremarked in this volume. In the meantime, the stakes of this historical contest have been
Page 441 RECENT BOOKS IN REVIEW 441 raised, with major bastions of the conservative historical establishment (Sttirmer, Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand) demanding an end to the "guilt obsession" of German historians and the "negative myth" of the German past. The excellent North American journal New German Critique continues to open a window on these unedifying developments, and a less literary editorial perspective would have broadened the interest of Hartman's volume in this respect. Geoff Eley Alexander Pope: A Life. By Maynard Mack. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. Pp. 975. $22.50. Alexander Pope's birth in May, 1688, to a Roman Catholic linen merchant and his wife, came just before the end of the Catholic Stuart James II's reign. The Glorious Revolution and accession of William III of Orange followed within the year. The political turbulence of that era- marked by confused loyalties, scheming on behalf of both the new and deposed monarchs, and fear and repression of Roman Catholicsreverberated throughout Pope's lifetime. The consequences for all Catholics included exclusion from university education and government "posts of profit or of trust," and, for Pope, repeated accusations that his writing inculcated "Popish," or even treasonable, sentiments. Handicapped not only by his faith but also by his crippled, dwarfed body, Pope nevertheless negotiated his way through these religious, political, and social hazards to undisputed eminence as "my countrey's poet." Maynard Mack masterfully relates the events of Pope's life and career to the larger sweep of national history, and the impact of both levels of experience on Pope's poetry. A superb example is the first chapter, in which, despite a dearth of information about Pope's childhood, Mack recreates vividly the virulent anti-Catholic campaigns, complete with speeches, ballads, and Pope-burning processions, that gripped London during the poet's earliest years. Mack's compelling description helps to account for the defensive attitude so marked in all Pope's works, from the declaration in the preface to his 1717 Works that "the life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth," through his Dunciad and Horatian imitations. Those previously inclined to concur with his enemies that Pope was merely "the little wasp of Twickenham" will be intrigued by Mack's
Page 442 442 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW moderating evidence, including reproductions of some of the more vile caricatures published by his enemies. (Mack includes two versions of Pope's head affixed to an ape's body, and a cartoon of Cibber's famous anecdote about pulling Homer's translator off the body of a prostitute.) Those approaching Pope for the first time, or after a cursory reading at school, will turn from this biography well equipped to appreciate the allusions to friends and enemies, as well as political and cultural events that often render Pope's poems impenetrable to uninitiated readers. Such readers will also learn from Mack the astonishing similarity of Pope's era to our own in some crucial ways. Of the great Scriblerian trio of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Gay's Beggar's Opera, and Pope's first Dunciad, Mack remarks that "Each in its own way continues to ask us questions about ourselves and the societies we have built or tolerated to which in the latter decades of the twentieth century we can make only embarrassed and sometimes shameful answers." Mack's most compelling passages demonstrate ways in which Pope's experience and poems illuminate each other. Particularly convincing is his discussion of The Rape of the Lock. Pope's first masterpiece has puzzled readers since 1714 because of its seemingly equal impulses to adore and to ridicule its heroine, Belinda. Mack argues that the poem represents, not Pope's scorn of women, but his criticism of a society which, among other shortcomings, esteemed "a nubile young woman's virginity beyond all other values." Finally, however, Mack suggests that the poem's conflicting attitudes mirror Pope's confused feelings about Martha and Teresa Blount, the eligible Catholic ladies whom he alternately teased, scolded, confided in, and courted until about 1718. As Mack concludes, "Pope never knew Arabella Fermor. It is not even clear that he had ever seen her. What is clear, in the picture of the two Blounts [reproduced in the text] is that down the fine curve of Teresa's throat, on the side turned toward us, and lying like a'hairy Sprindge' on her white shoulder, is a most beautifully displayed dark curl." At such moments, Mack's inclusive knowledge of Pope's life and milieu, his perceptions of the poems, and even his mastery of the periodic sentence, coalesce in moving and persuasive readings. Some critics have questioned the biography's length, perhaps on behalf of the general reader. In fact, many aficionados of historical novels are quite willing to plunge into even lengthier sagas, only to acquaint themselves with apocryphal heroes and a less fully realized milieu. The 812 pages of Mack's elegant narrative, in clear, large print with copious well-reproduced illustrations, move all too quickly toward the dramatic close of Pope's "long disease, my life." Some might com
Page 443 RECENT BOOKS IN REVIEW 443 plain that Mack tends to over-dramatize Pope's life, stage-managing his presentation in true Popeian style. One small but representative example is Mack's revelation of "Amica," a married lady and execrable poet, who, late in Pope's life, evidently developed an enormous crush on the aging poet. Mack infers from her surviving letters a touching relationship between the irrepressible lady and her embarrassed but forbearing idol. At the close of his discussion of her correspondence-a valuable index of the response of some contemporary women to Pope's poetry - Mack explains that Amica promised never to boast of her friendship with Pope after his death. The chapter concludes, "She kept her word. Her encounters with Pope and what she felt for him are here made public for the first time." The reader is made to feel a bit like a voyeur, or at least as if entrusted with a greater privilege than a glimpse into a 240-year-old infatuation. But as the narrative soon plunges from this amusing interlude into the distressing events of Pope's final months, Mack no doubt intended this brief titillation as fortification, much as Pope himself composed lighthearted notes for the reader's refreshment during the battle scenes of his Iliad. After a lifetime of devoted and exemplary Pope scholarship (his The Garden and the City revolutionized criticism of Pope when it appeared in 1969), Mack has emulated in his biography the attention to effect exercised by the poet himself in his editorial and poetic personae, timing of publications, and revised editions of his correspondence. In fact, many scholars, anticipating Mack's insight into every aspect of the poet's life, might well wish the biography even longer. What about Pope's eager, if cautious, investments in South Sea stock during the year of the great Bubble (1720)? Although Pope seems to have retrieved his funds before suffering any disastrous loss, a sympathetic review of his involvement could modify any conception of the poet as immune from his era's fascination with "blest paper credit." Such a discussion would have provided a better basis for studies of Pope's attitudes toward contemporary mercantilism than was evidently available for Laura Brown's Alexander Pope (Basil Blackwell, 1985), which preposterously implies that Pope should have had the foresight to be a Marxist. In fact, Professor Mack's indisputable grasp of Pope and his work appears all the more necessary as such new books appear, relating Pope to issues of modern concern, but berating him for his failure to anticipate twentieth-century attitudes. Mack's rendering of Pope's relationships with women - particularly Martha Blount - and his sympathetic readings of such poems as the "Epistle to a Lady" suggest a more subtle, personal context for interpretation than do the ideological generaliza
Page 444 444 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW tions that form the basis of Ellen Pollak's The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (University of Chicago Press, 1985). As the tricentennial of his birth approaches, Pope is once again in danger of critical condemnation, no longer by the Victorians who branded him "a liar and a hypocrite" for scheming to publish his own letters, but from scholars dismissing him as a capitalistimperialist, and male chauvinist, pig. Maynard Mack has given us a great Life, orchestrating many facets of a man as controversial among some readers today as he was in his own lifetime. We now have the foundation for sounder reassessments of Pope's poetry, and should probably be grateful that - as Mack cheerfully admits in his preface - he has left students of Pope's life plenty to do. With this achievement, however, one truth is clear: Maynard Mack is "master of the poet, and the song." Claudia Thomas
Page [unnumbered] Tr im0 awDer y Linocut by Sydney Hollow From South Africa... From South Africa-the special Spring/Summer 1987 issue of TriQuarterly (#69)-may be the most important the magazine has ever published-a special issue devoted entirely to new South African writing, photographs and art, and documents of censorship. Nearly all the contributors live in South Africa, and they include Njabulo S. Ndebele, Nadine Gordimer and many other writers, photographers and artists. Much of the work is unpublished anywhere, and even unavailable in South Africa because of the increasingly severe censorship there. And all the contents will be here published for the first time in the U.S. The collection will total more than 500 pages and will have a cover price of $13.50. We urge our current subscribers to renew in order to receive this issue at no additional cost, and we hope that TriQuarterly readers who do not currently subscribe will do so. The price of this special issue alone is nearly equal to a year's subscription, so subscribing now means a tremendous savings. Northwestern University 1735 Benson Avenue Evanston, Illinois 60201 Subscriptions: * $16/year * $28/2 years * $150/life
