Random Responses to Wai Chee Dimock's Recent Work

Wai Chee Dimock is visiting Fredonia this week as the keynote speaker for "Remapping World Literature," the 4th annual Mary Louise White Symposium organized by the English department. I'll be on a roundtable with her and several of my colleagues in a few minutes, as we examine together the implications of her work for teaching strategies, course design, curriculum, professional development, and strategic planning in English at Fredonia. Although I'll be improvising my comments, I thought I'd better take a shot at organizing them, however haphazardly, here first. But first some ideas that aren't going to be making it into my talk. Better to get them out here so I'm not tempted to use up my 5-7 minutes on them.

Free Association

For much of my first year in grad school, I was so overwhelmed by all that I was trying to take in that I could only think associatively. It was actually a pretty pleasant experience, if exasperating, mostly because it was a shared one: all my friends in the entering class had the same condition. We'd get together and start making whatever random connections between literature, theory, music, video games, tv, film, and sports came to our minds. It was our way of making sense of what we were learning and living through, I guess. Group brainstorming, or something. Sometimes we'd even come up with good ideas, but that wasn't exactly the point.

Reading Dimock's Through Other Continents brought to mind that time in my life, but also reminded me how much had changed since then. I read it in airports and on airplanes on my way to the Reworking the University conference in Minneapolis--and I read it in one gulp, with the excitement and pleasure I associate with reading really good science fiction. And, indeed, I was reminded of science fiction on almost every page, whether it was Neal Stephenson's blend of Sumerian mythology and cyberpunk in Snow Crash, Kim Stanley Robinson's exploration of an alternate history in which Chinese and Islamic civilizations rose and fell in the centuries after the plague depopulated Europe in The Years of Rice and Salt, or efforts by Guy Gavriel Kay, Dan Simmons, and Samuel Delany, in their very different ways, to combine myth, literature and fantasy and/or science fiction. And more: I was reminded of Neil Gaiman's graphic novel series Sandman, Amitav Ghosh's mix of memoir and history In an Antique Land, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's unclassifiable Dictee.

I'm forgetting what other works I wanted to remind myself to let Dimock know about or find out if she knew about, mostly because I was borrowing a colleague's copy of her book and didn't write in it or take any notes on it. Instead, I was revelling in the feeling of witnessing ideas I'd been working on over the past decade precipitating in somebody else's solution--ideas I never would have come up with on my own, but which shared a family resemblance to those of the many writers I've been tracking whom I've been connecting to debates over globalization and literary studies. I hadn't experienced such an intellectual rush since I read Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations--a feeling of things falling into place, things I had figured out taking on a new significance or relating to new context, things I had never considered before taking on a new interest and urgency. So while both works inspired all kinds of free associations, they also helped me identify large-scale patterns I had been groping towards, sharpen points I wanted to make, and imagine new possibilities for connections between times and places we usually think of as disjunct.

Teaching/Curriculum

In my contribution to today's roundtable discussion, I'm going to be highlighting some of the unexpected ways the courses I'm teaching this semester connect with issues raised by Bender's and Dimock's work. Of course, I taught Bender in my American Identities course, but it was actually the juxtaposition of class discussions on Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land and Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues that I'll be focusing on as a counterpoint to and way of looking differently at a key moment at the end of Samuel Delany's Atlantis: Model 1924 from my Harlem Renaissance course, which in turn will lead into a consideration of why I organized my Black Women Writers course the way I did and what it was like teaching it. My goal will be to raise the question of what we consider to be the ends of teaching world literature and make a case for a modest, minimalist starting point.

I'll use that starting point as my entry into a more programmatic proposal to reexamine the Fredonia English department curriculum, specifically the way we bridge our introductory-level world literature core (all of which is in Fredonia's general education program) with our required and elective upper-level courses, many of which are in national literatures.

But more on that later! Time to head out for the roundtable....

How to Do Things with Ghosts: Student Web Projects, Fall 2008

Thought for QSMS I'd pass along links to the web projects some of my students chose to do as an option for their final research project in my introductory/general education world literature course, Novels and Tales. Our focus this semester was on How to Do Things with Ghosts. Here's what they came up with:

Two Cultures of Ghosts
The Uses of Ghosts

Ghosts in Comfort Woman
Ghostly Hearn

Concepts of Death
Beyond Mortal

So, what's your verdict?

Fantasy Bleg

So I'm doing one of my favorite things this year, which is mentoring an honors thesis on a topic I'd be focusing on if I were starting over as an undergrad doing an honors thesis right about now. No, it's not science fiction, comics, or video games, but fantasy. The student is interested in the ranges of the rules and functions of magic in fantasy, figuring that it may not be that dissimilar to the rules and functions of (new) technology in science fiction. The larger project is to make a case for the scholarly study of fantasy.

Not only does this give me a chance to introduce her to some of my favorite writers--Steven Brust, Neil Gaiman, Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles de Lint, and Sherri Tepper--as well as others I respect but don't like as much yet should be crucial to her project--Piers Anthony, Lloyd Alexander, Ursula Le Guin, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and of course J.R.R. Tolkien. But, most important, I get to read some George R.R. Martin and Irene Radford--not to mention finally finish the last three books of the Harry Potter series! What's more, this is work, or should I say guilt-free pleasure?

So, keeping the former part of the last sentence in mind, is anyone out there aware of good scholarly studies of fantasy? Lucie Armitt's Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction is our entry point, but she's a bit too hung up on the fantastic and the possibilities of Lit-ah-rary fantasy, for my taste at least.

Somebody Tell Neil Gaiman

Thanks to the brilliant Bill Benzon, Gojira's telling Tie-Dye Hana Kuma onechan adventure stories over at Mostly Harmless. Reminds me of certain Sandman issues!

P.S.: Somebody (else?) tell me how to get real titles for my posts!

We Take Requests Here at CitizenSE

A Japanese colleague of mine whom I've responded to here before recently asked me what I had on the sketch "The Intelligence Office." I emailed him back with some quick ideas and promised an update here. This is it (or maybe the first part if I can't finish it between classes today!).

As you can see here, the only time I've previously blogged on "The Intelligence Office" is to link it to Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen in an aborted larger argument aiming to show Hawthorne's intimate knowledge of the importance of international trade (including the slave trade) on the fortunes of Salem, colonial New England, and the northeastern United States. The narrator's comment, "Judging from its description, it was beautiful enough to vanish like a dream, yet substantial enough to endure for centuries," could apply to the idea of America as easily as it could to the estate of the "man of deplorable success." And indeed there are several sharp ripostes at American politics and imperialism sprinkled throughout the sketch.

But as you can see from the following excerpt from my email response to my colleague--

I think "The Intelligence Office" is a very interesting sketch. If you have time, I strongly recommend Kristie Hamilton's arguments on the importance of Hawthorne's sketches in general, in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004) or in her book America's Sketchbook (1998).

My own interest in the sketch is different from her emphasis on Hawthorne's anticipation of modernist (and even postmodernist) aesthetic and social issues. I'm interested in the 19th C and earlier resonances of his emphasis on "proper place" (which I use to investigate Hawthorne's ideas on race, class, and gender politics).

--what I am most interested in is the way "The Intelligence Office" provides evidence that Hawthorne in the early 1840s was engaging his culture's interests in the relations between the external and the internal, the material and the spiritual, the physical and the psychological, the real and the symbolic, between manners and morals, appearances and essences, in everything from transcendentalism and romanticism to phrenology and physiognomy to the American School of Ethnography. If you read the sketch alongside such earlier meditations on these subjects as "Fancy's Show Box," "Roger Malvin's Burial," and "Young Goodman Brown," you'll see it reworking that earlier interest in the relations between thoughts and actions. And if you read it alongside contemporary or later tales and sketches like "A Virtuoso's Collection," "The Procession of Life," "The Birth-mark," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "The Christmas Banquet," "Earth's Holocaust," and "The Custom House"--or novels like The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun--you'll see Hawthorne's abiding interest in classification schemes of all kinds.

The scholarly work I'd most recommend for understanding the context for Hawthorne's engagement of these issues is Samuel Otter's brilliant study Melville's Anatomies--I can't think of a better evocation of the times or investigation of an author's engagement with them than any other recent work except Eduardo Cadava's Emerson and the Climates of History, and Otter more systematically analyzes the various attempts to know (human) nature in the antebellum period than Cadava.

As for myself, I find Hawthorne's suggestion at the beginning of the story and confirmation at the end that the agent of the sketch's "Central Intelligence Office" to be the "Recording Spirit" a fascinating anticipation of Destiny in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series of comics and graphic novels. Certainly Hawthorne is engaging religious themes that energized the Puritans--the difficulty of reconciling God's omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence--when he has the agent reveal

"My agency in worldly action--my connection with the press, tumult, and intermingling, and development of human affairs--is merely delusive. The desire of man's heart does for him whatever I seem to do. I am no minister of action, but the Recording Spirit!"

Thus the opening simile--"He looked like the spirit of a record--the soul of his own great volume--made visible in mortal shape"--and the intermediate elaboration of the book of life metaphor within it--

Human character in its individual developments--human nature in the mass--may best be studied in its wishes; and this was the record of them all.... It would be an instructive employment for a student of mankind, perusing this volume carefully, and comparing its record with men's perfected designs, as expressed in their deeds and daily life, to ascertain how far the one accorded with the other. Undoubtedly, in most cases, the correspondence would be found remote. The holy and generous wish, that rises like incense from a pure heart toward heaven, often lavishes its sweet perfume on the blast of evil times. The foul, selfish, murderous wish, that steams forth from a corrupted heart, often passes into the spiritual atmosphere, without being concreted into an earthly deed. Yet this volume is probably truer, as a representation of the human heart, than is the living drama of action, as it evolves around us. There is more of good and more of evil in it; more redeeming points of the bad, and more errors of the virtuous; higher up-soarings, and baser degradation of the soul; in short, a more perplexing amalgamation of vice and virtue, than we witness in the outward world. Decency, and external conscience, often produce a far fairer outside, than is warranted by the stains within. And be it owned, on the other hand, that a man seldom repeats to his nearest friend, any more than he realizes in act, the purest wishes, which, at some blessed time or other, have arisen from the depths of his nature, and witnessed for him in this volume. Yet there is enough, on every leaf, to make the good man shudder for his own wild and idle wishes, as well as for the sinner, whose whole life is the incarnation of a wicked desire.

--allows the story to be read as a gloss on abstract, even universal problems of theology and ethics. But I think even this version of the sketch is an interesting anticipation of Gaiman's Endless.

Now, the classic take on the sketch is Melville's claim in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" that the seeker after Truth is Hawthorne's own self-portrait, although I wonder whether the person the narrator jokes is "invariably out of place" and who cries in anguish--

"I want my place!--my own place!--my true place in the world!--my proper sphere!--my thing to do, which nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought, all my lifetime! Whether it be a footman's duty, or a king's, is of little consequence, so it be naturally mine."

--might be an ironically distanced sketch of a younger self. Of course, it's also possible to see in the figure of the Recording Spirit himself Hawthorne's own wishes for his art, or to argue that Hawthorne dispersed his own wishes and desires throughout a range of characters, so I'm not sure how productive this line of argument ends up being. The seeker after Truth's comment to the Recording Spirit could well be Hawthorne's commentary on the sketch itself:

"And what are you?" said he. "It will not satisfy me to point to this fantastic show of an Intelligence Office, and this mockery of business. Tell me what is beneath it, and what your real agency in life, and your influence upon mankind?"

So the sketch could just as easily be linked with Hawthorne's exploration of various writer analogues--whether artist or scientist--in his fictions of the 1840s and 1850s, and thus be autobiographical at a remove, in the sense of exploring the functions and powers of literary texts and the roles of authors in the antebellum U.S.

In the end, though, I would emphasize that Hawthorne's idea of the Intelligence Office is connected to the Herald's Office that runs throughout his writings in this same period. I've blogged on heraldry in Hawthorne's and others' fiction a little bit here already, so I won't say too much more right now. But it would be both interesting and informative to explore the ways the Intelligence Office discloses Hawthorne's interests in subjectivity (a la Pfister, Gilmore, Goddu, and others who look at the emergence of the middle class and domestic/affective life in this period) and the Herald's Office in genealogy (a la Bentley, Yellin, Carton, and others who look at the emergence of whiteness and classification schemes/racial sciences in this period).

"Death Is a Nice Sandman"

Thanks to Gillian Brown's wide-ranging reading of Hawthorne's histories for children, particularly Grandfather's Chair, in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004), I was reminded that Neil Gaiman's Sandman draws its inspiration from all over the map--including Hans Christian Anderson's "The Sandman." It was a nice touch to turn the original Sandman's brother Death into Dream's gothy sister--wondering if the specific quotation that supplies the title to this post inspired Gaiman's characterization of Death. Seems spot-on to me.