Doppelgäng
er
And then later on in the ancient and deep story
Of all our nights, we contemplated,
Contemplated not the completion of our age,
But the continuance of the universe,
The traveling, not the progress,
But the humility of our being here.
Caught now, in the mist of wars
Agaisnt foreign disease, missionaries,
Canned food, Dick & Jane textbooks, IBM cards,
Western philosophies, General Electric,
I am talking about how we have been able
To survive insignificance. (Simon Ortiz, Woven Stone, University of Arizona Press, 1992, p.108)
Despite the focus on fiction in the ensuing discussion of Native American literature, I begin by quoting Ortiz’s poetry because it encapsulates the foremost concerns of many contemporary Indian writers. The term ‘veteran’ calls to mind the experiences of Indians who fought for the United States in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, while the phrase ‘I am a veteran for 30,000 years’ from an earlier stanza conveys the Acomas’ great longevity. The narrator articulates the connection between the people and the land through writing which derives from and continues the oral tradition. The word ‘insignificant’, though, refers to the ways in which Acomas, and Indians thoughout the United States, have grown socially, economically and politically marginalised. Only too aware of how his people have become ‘caught’ between competing world-views and socio-economic orders, the narrator, contrasts the symbiotic relationship between land and cultural identity in Acoma society with Western culture’s faith in the ideal of progress, technological development and, in the eyes of the narrator, superfluous production and consumption of modern commodity goods. Although the narrator points to the process which have rendered Indians ‘insignificant’ in a mass consumer society, the poem also imparts a history of endurance and continuance through which Indians have outlasted the impact of epidemic dieases, colonisation and assimilation campaigns, and characterize a present in which they continue to negotiate government bureaucracy, formal education, and the ideology and products of corporate America.[1]
Barnie’s point in ‘The City and Nature’ is that modern conditions have very much eroded any absolute distinction between country and city. But his emphasis is different from that of Barrell and Bull, for his is a moral anixety. ‘Since 1851, he reminds us, over half of the British population has lived in cities, and most of us cannot trace our families back to a pre-urban past, but ‘the grat problem is how t live with the fact of cities and the urban mentality…without it leading to a civilisation so divorced from the reality that it destroys the environment of the earth, on which we and all life depend’. For this important poet and contemporary thinker, the idea of the city still represents the a threat to the speices, even though Barnie is very far from any simplistic identification of ‘nature’ with rural goodness and integrity. It is a stance which is at base ethical and ecological, veiwing cities with anixety and suspcion, registering their tendacy to coarsen our response and induce superficiality and philistinism.[2]
Only a very prejudiced reader could fail to be persuaded that Langland does not consistently- nor, I beileve, fundamentally- feel the need to communicate as a poet; the pressure of the need to be understood comes through most urgently, but it is as a man of spirituality, with truths and experiences of truths to commit to others that he wishes to become fully articulate.[3]
‘I could put you on the ground,’ he whispered, the stink of ale coming off his breath, as easy as I could put out that lamp.’ And then, after a tense pause, viciosly, gratuitously: ‘You’ve hands like a girl’s, Mr Redbourne. I hate that in a man.’
‘You can’t threaten me like that, Blaney. The law doesn’t allow it. And no one, let me remind you, is beyond reach of the law.’
‘Just so, Mr Redbourne. No one. That’s a lesson you’ve still to learn. A lesson’- his gaze flickered briefly outward- ‘we’re here to teach you. Because there are those who won’t learn until they’re taught. And you’- he released my wrist and, before I had time to step back or even to register his intention, struck me across the cheek- ‘you need teaching.’[4]
Lights are going on
Out there a million kitchens’ busy
knives the endless declensions of
households The oedipal types
the satellite types the serial
lawns of the suburbs Down
in the street she wants to know whose
jacket’s on the back seat And somewhere
in a pub perhaps or Seico’s tin-can
caravan your man is raking back his hair
and leaning in to catch what someone’s really
Saying
Jesus is that
Only birdsong flung out
Like a pocketful of kryptonite
The rooftops quiver through it Open
windows It is all your Business
This connection This[5]
After the ridge, another ridge. After the kingdom,
another valley kingdom for you to climb down to,
a mizmae of farms, a villiage under its damp smoke.
You have seen the market, stood in the way of the rain
while gutturals were hawked in your ear. You have gestured:
Where am I? Which is the way…? Hae I been here before?
At least you can climb out. I have heard of a valley
so wedged in behind its escarpments and overhangs
that no one can enter or leave. The lost tribe live there,
scratching the tally of days on the rock till at last
a fox will find them, burrowing in from the outside.
They will follow its red through the darknes and be free.
You stand on another ridge. The far-off green dissolves
into a glare of white. You hate the worlds Inland Sea-
it is a distance that goes nowhere, like a mirror.
You have no wish to drown without leaving the mountains.
You are going to India. You will find some fox,
And work back to the Great Sea Ocean, where you can breathe.[6]
No matter how impressive your ideas are, or how pretty your essay looks when it arrive in the print tray, bad grammar and poor spelling will instantly prejudice your tutor agaisnt you- and with good reason. The days of splurging your ideas out onto the page and lettering the reader work out what you mean, are over. If all that mattered was the quality of your ideas, you need to be able to show that you can communicate them precisely and economically (one of the so-called ‘transferable’ skills you when you leave university or college).[7]
By allowing readers to see counter-arguments, you win their trust. Besides, you may find that your standpoint remains valid, or is even strengthened by comparison with others. Equally important, show your tutor that you’ve done the legwork and researched your topic thoroughly. A one-sided argument impresses no one. From the reader’s point of view it is much more exciting to see evidence for and agaisnt something. In fact, this is the only way anyone can judge how persuasive your argument really is.[8]
The gods are gone, fled
To their chamber who raised
the earth. I have pressed beyond
the perfumed lands to furthest
islands, returned with gifts
of cassia and cypress; wrangled
with tyrants, hunted the sand-
dweller. I have rested on the props
of heaven. Not even a king can sway
the days of being born or dying.[9]
Europe’s talk-
Machines to do the work
of men. Now this.
A thousand moving parts:
bone for bone, rubber tube
intestines, concealed
glob of plop
the sphincter’s fraud.
Vacanson’s androids march
on the world: flute player,
tambourine man-
clockwork harbingers of punch
cards and sightless factories.
And the duck, lifeless
and immortal, not born
for foie gras.[10]
1.
Sir,
I write from less than
ideal times to you in less than
ideal times about your plans
for the ideal city. Let me
introduce myself. Like you,
I look for the right place to break
a plane and make my lines
a habitable space. Less than
flush, these columns are
my elevation and cross-
section.
2.
I bought six bound sheets.
Fine; atlas-quarto with pull-
Outs; calf; slight rubbing to the
Spine; brown ink and pink
Wash on squared-off paper.
Very rare. You know the sellers’
speak. He didn’t if there
were more than six; were there
ideal suburbs, too?
3.
I understand July 14
Put paid to these plans.
Here’s your city, un-
furled under my light,
its two-tone vibrant,
its levelling lines amaz-
ing. These squares could
never breed unrest-
your streets wide and
shared, conduits fanning
out to cool, factories with
fronts like a grand houses.
I think nothing would ever be broken here
4.
your concaves: each unfilled niche
in the loggias, each un-
fussy arch
and
the bow
of the campo-space are
lungs and I can hear this city breathe.
5.
In this dream I was walking through fouled
Streets chainstores abutting templar churches
down cul-de-sacs Blake’s blessed twenty-
minute walk from South Molton Street
out unbelievably into fields bringing me up
short then ordinary unhurried men in suits
of light walking in and out of the ideal city.
6.
What would you have called
It, if they’d let you build? Time
ridicules promised cities
with drabness, conurbation,
violence, the vernacular- see
Radiant City, Garden City,
New Harmony, Urbs.
7.
Let me talk free-
Ly. I admire your brothel,
shockingly municipal, laid
out in that erection only
you and I can see,
shades of pink
adding to the mis-
chief.[11]
Saints and Stones! An imaginative title for an imaginative conept- the (re)creation of a pilgrimage trail linking ancient churches and emohasising the spiritual inheritance of north Pembrokeshire. This is very much the country of Dewi, Teilo and Brynach and of lesserknown saints who brought Christian Faith to a pagan people and established to llannau around which communities would settle and grow.[12]
Yet if there is one note which dominates all these descriptions of postmodernist fiction, it is exhaustion. One of the founding definitions of the term ‘postmodernism’ in relation to literature occurs in the essays of Barth, a seminal writer in the 1960s development of new modes of fiction. Using the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges as archetypes, Barth’s ‘Literature of Exhaustion’ ((in Federman, Surfiction, pp. 19-33) emphasised how literature had ‘used up’ the conventions of fictional realism. The dominant characteristic of these novels is the pretence that it is impossible to write an orginal work, and their paradoxical theme is writing about the ‘end’ of writing. Out of this yearning for silence emerges a fiction obsessively concerned with its own status as fiction. Consequently, art rathers than nature became the object of imitation, and a self-concious reflexivity emerged. Susan Sontag also argued that the fiction was concerned with silence (see Agaisnt Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York, Farrar, Straus and Girou, 1966)), while Ihab Hassan reinforced this perspective with his books The Literature of Silence (New York, Knopf, 1968) and The Dismemberment of Orpheus (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971) defining silence as the disruption of all links between language and reality. Arguing that these novelists seek silence by abandoning the traditional elements of fiction such as character, plot, metaphor and meaning. Hassan proposes that there is an inexorable movement towards silence.[13]
The postmodern purgatory of Groundhog Day, however, has none of the ominous grandeur that Nietzshe ascribes to Eternal Return, even if Phil Connors does have to endure long hours of teeth-gnashing exsistential tedium before he can accede to the ‘joyful wisdom’ that eventually allows him to form a couple with Andie MacDowell’s Rita, as the film relaxes into the reassurance of a stock Hollywood ending. And it goes without saying that the cinematic game devised by Ramis and co-writer Danny Rubin is ‘philosophical’ only in a strictly irresponsible sense, just as all of Phil’s acts on Groundhog Day are only ‘acts’, his every deed or utterance robbed by psychological depth and authenticity by being a mere citation, an empty iteration. The film thus plays fast and loose- but therein is precisely its philosophical subtlety- with a philosophical problem that, as we have already glimpsed, was the gravest signficance for Nietzche. Writing in 1888 (shortly before his terminal mental collapse), the philosophical described eternal recurrence as the ‘fundamental idea of Zarathustra’ and as indeed ‘the highest formula of affirmation that can be possible attained’. In Maurice Blanchot’s view, the affirmation of eternal recurrence corresponds to a ‘limit experience’ where thought itself becomes untenable, as the impossible affirmation of affirmation ‘itself’ sends Nietzschean thought spinning into fatal self-deconstructive turbulence. By contrast, in Grandhog Day’s cartoon topology (designed by Escher, one could almost imagine), Phil discovers that precisely nothing can be affirmed; whatever he ‘experiences’ is immediately struck out, nullified, by the iterative non-temporality in which he is trapped (and this might even, in some allegorical reading of the film, point to an implicit critique of the media industry itself, with its passive customers trapped in pointless cycles of consumption, and so on).[14]
Seen in this light, The Singing Detective’s conception of the self is perhaps more linked to elements of Romanticism than modernism or postmodernism. Romanticism can partly be seen as a reaction against the rationalisation of nature by the Enlightenment. William Blake’s illustation of Sir Isaac Newton reducing the world to a mathematical formula with his compass and map is perhaps the most famous illustration of this philosophy; science and reason tending to diminish the power of creativity and imagination. In contrast, Romantism believed in the possibility of the human spirit to break free of the confines of rationalism, and experience ‘sublimity’ through a connection with nature. As in William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Tintern Abbey’, the Romantics longed to experienced that moment when ‘We see into the life of things’, when we feel ‘…a sense of sublime/Of something far more deeply infused’ (1974: 206-7)[15]
I know why this fire. God is showing us Iraq. It is wrong to
kill and refuse to look at what we’ve done.
Kingston concludes that she must learn to rationalise her personal loss- of book, home and possessions- as a kind of ‘shadow experience’ of the war. This opening ‘burnscape sequence’ then propels us- and Kingston- into the main project, which is three fold: to reconstruct her novel, to rebuild her life and home, and to help the veterans of war, past and present, locate peace. Each strand of Kingston’s endeavour, then, which was to preoccupy her for the entire 1990s (as To Be the Poet attests), braids together to form an all-consuming, multi-faceted, search and struggle for peace.[16]
…the industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!
(‘The Garden’, II, 69-72)
the equivocal ‘but’ in the concluding line of ‘The Garden’, carrying with it the sense of ‘only’ and ‘except’, is addressed and clarified by Cornwell, who replies: ‘it is not …sweet herbs and flowers alone’ (my emphasis). The significance of this final word for Cornwell is that it is not only flora which is, or should be, awakened by spring, but also the visionary consciousness of the radical mind.[17]
In an echoing of Virginia Woolf’s plea for a ‘room of one’s own’ she also refuses to acknowledge her father’s house as her home, but searches instead for her own house and space, ‘Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own…a space for myself to go, clean as paperbefore the poem’ (Cisneros 1991: 108). With the displacement of the father as patriarch, Cisneros finally disrupts the Oedipal family romance promoted by movement discourse. Whereas Rivera’s depictions of female subjectivity and the myth of the Chicano family reflect movement ideology in a number of ways, Cisneros on the other hand portrays a dysfunctional unit dominated by the macho male who subjugates his wife and children. Recent statistical evidence supports this view. Alongside factors such as urbanisation and discriminatrion, machismo continues to rank as one of the major causes of family problems within the Mexican American community (Gonzales 2000: 239). Opinion over familia ideology, however, is deeply divided and an idealised view of the Chicano family continues to coexist alongside studies that view it less favourably (Gonzales 2000: 237-8)[18]
‘Is there life after theory?’ a major UK conference wanted to know in 2003. The book of the conference was called Life After Theory (ed. Michael Payne and John Schad, Continuum, 2003) and it contains interviews with the major participants- Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Toril Moi, and Christopher Norris. Interestingly, the title of the conference itself was a question- it had been advertised as ‘Is there life after theory?’whereas the title of the book might be taken as a profession of faith in the view that there indeed is life after theory. In the introduction to the first edition of Beginning Theory in 1995 I mentioned the common feeling even then that the real business of literary theory was already over, citing Thomas Docherty’s 1990 book After Theory. Terry Eagleton re-used the title After Theory for his own book of 2003, implying that theory was still over, so to speak, and Eagleton’s book was itself ‘post’ Valentine Cunningham’s Reading After Theory (Blackwell, 2001), which it doesn’t mention. Cunningham was thankful, on the whole, that theory had run its course, and he saw himself as beginning the process of repairing aspects of criticism which theory had damaged, and restoring them to their proper places within literary studies, rather like someone starting to tidy up after a flood or a hurricane. There have been other ‘restorative’ books, some with a more localised brief, such as David Scott Kastan’s Shakespare After Theory (Routledge, 1999). In this book ‘after theory’ is understood to mean, not the period after the passing away of theory, but the period during which theory has ceased to be news. Theory is no longer news-worthy, it might be claimed, because there has been a general acceptance of many of its key ideas, so that its impact and charisma have been ‘routinised’ (to use the terms of the sociologist Max Weber). So it has ceased to have to assert its uniqueness, and has passed into the general stream of ideas. This air of ‘non-assertiveness’, indeed, may be taken as typical of the general character of theory after ‘Theory’, that is, theory in the period when the ‘preaching’ phase is over, precisely because so many of its ideas have become the common currency of the intellectual climate we now live in.[19]
The Book Spy
[1] Padget, Martin ‘2 Native American fiction’ from Beginning Ethnic American Literatures
[2] Barry, Peter ‘Moral anxieties and the urban dissolve’ in ‘2 ‘The roads to hell’ from Contemporary British Poetry and the City
[4] Poster, Jem Rifling Paradise
[5] Atkinson, Tiffany Kink and Particle
[6] Francis, Matthew, Mandeville
[7] Turely, Richard Marggraf, Writing Essays: a guide for students in English and the humanities
[8] ibid
[9] Turely, Richard Marggraf, ‘3. Captain’s Lament’ from The Fossile-Box
[10] Turely, Richard Marggraf & Davies, Damian Walford, Whiteout
[11] Davies, Damian Walford, Suit of Lights
[13] Woods, Tim, Beginning Postmodernism
[14] Thurston, Luke, James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis
[15] Creeber, Glen The Singing Detective
[16] Grice, Helena, Maxine Hong Kingston
[17] Turely, Marggraf Richard, Keat’s Boyish Imagination
[18] Jacobs, Elizabeth, Mexican American Literature
[19] Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: An introduction to literary and cultural theory
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