OUR KIND OF SERIOUSNESS:

THE REINTEGRATION OF JUDGMENT IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE

By

Andrea Camille Actis

B.A., Simon Fraser University, 2007

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in the Program of English at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2017

© Andrea Camille Actis 2017

This dissertation by Andrea Camille Actis is accepted in its present form by the Department of

English as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date:______Jacques Khalip, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date:______Deak Nabers, Reader

Date:______Ada Smailbegović, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date:______Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School

iii

VITA

Andrea Camille Actis lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded territories of the

Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She teaches writing and literature courses at Capilano University and Emily Carr University of Art + Design. From 2015–17 she edited the triannual literary and visual arts journal The Capilano Review while overseeing its extensive community programming. Andrea obtained her B.A. (Honors) in English and Humanities from

Simon Fraser University in 2007 and received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

(SSHRC) Doctoral Award upon beginning her graduate work at Brown University. In 2012 she received a Tuition Fellowship Award from Brown’s Cogut Center for the Humanities to attend the

School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, where much of her initial research and thinking toward this dissertation took shape. Her criticism and poetry has been published in World

Picture, Pelt, The Poetic Front, and Fence.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

On December 13, 2007, I woke up at 5:00am to put the finishing touches on my applications to Ph.D. programs. My father, Jeffrey, a brilliant cook and heavy drinker recently evicted from his one-room apartment above a car dealership at the bottom of the mountain on top of which I’d completed my B.A., had been living with me since the beginning of November. He’d been sober since moving in and had just started working as a delivery driver for a print shop down the street. In the month and a half he’d been around, he and I had done many normal and weird things together: invented soups, sung along at the top of our lungs to Something Else by The Kinks, gotten each other caught up on our favourite conspiracy theories, and watched a twenty-minute real-life autopsy video on YouTube, aghast yet full of cackles at the absurdity of everyone becoming just meat eventually. My dad struggled with insomnia and hadn’t yet been to bed when my alarm went off that morning, so he made me a coffee and we sat together at the kitchen table. I had my

A4 envelopes scattered all over the place and a list of addresses I still needed to transcribe to them.

“You’re applying to Brown University?” he asked, looking over my list.

“Yep,” I said, “but I barely know why.”

“But Rhode Island,” my dad chirped, “is the likeliest of any of these places to get me on an airplane!” The man had refused to travel by anything except automobile since the last time he’d been flown back on a tiny jet from his oil-rig job in northern Alberta, which had been, if I remember correctly (and if he remembered correctly), in 1975. There was also the fact that, for at least as long as I’d been alive, my dad had never been able to afford something like airfare. With my applications

v not even sent off into the world yet, I was already nervous of what it would mean and how it would feel to leave my dad behind.

“I have no idea why you feel that way about Rhode Island,” I said to him, finishing off my coffee, “but I’ll keep it in mind! You’re definitely coming to my graduation and to visit me a bunch, wherever the hell I end up.”

I had my day, and my dad had his day. I went to the post office and then went to the dentist.

It was a Thursday. It was strangely mild out for the middle of December, gray but with hints of purple and even a bit of green in the clouds. I felt good about getting to relax and breathe a bit now that my applications to grad school were signed, sealed, and out of my hands. I got home around

6:00 that evening and found my dad at his computer, writing an email to his new boss to thank him for the holiday steakhouse-gift-card he’d just received with his first paycheck. My dad hadn’t been used to that sort of gesture at work and was touched. We headed to the bank to deposit his check.

He dropped me off at a book launch, and I told him I loved him and that I’d be home in a few hours. A few hours later my friend drove me home and I entered the apartment to discover my dad facedown on his bed, sunken deep into his red wool blanket in a way that no living person sinks into a wool blanket.

I dedicate this first, long attempt of mine to write about seriousness not only to my sweet, smart, sneaky dead dad, but to everyone who has helped me stay alive over the last nine years. I thank my mother, Katalin, one of the most resilient, spirited, selfless women that anyone I know has ever met. (I’m excited to stop being cranky and start having fun with her again.) I thank my hilarious and angelic grandmother, Marta Horvath, who passed away unexpectedly only a month after my return to Vancouver in 2014, devastating about six different communities in the Lower

Mainland and several more across the globe. I also thank my talented and humble grandfather,

vi Stefan Horvath, for showing me how little choice there is in life but to love books, help neighbors, work hard on your projects, and be a communist. For the unconditional support and all the many kinds of generosity they’ve shown me and my family over these last few years, I thank Patricia and

Colin Godwin. And I thank Dylan Godwin, my driver and my very funny and forgiving partner, for his singular power to rescue me from my own kind of seriousness in all the ways and moments I most need rescuing.

It scares me to think what varieties of nonsense this dissertation would be if it weren’t for the friendship and conversation of a few people in particular: Timothy Terhaar, John Mac Kilgore, and Natalie Knight. At the heart of my project are the energies, visions, and senses of justice I share with these three humans, and I’m grateful to each of them for the kinds of connections they help me see and for the being-better-in-general they make me strive for. To all my other beloveds here at home and in many elsewheres—there are too many of you for me to try to name without having an anxiety attack—I hereby renew my vow to being a good and present friend to you.

Finally, I’m grateful to my dissertation committee—Jacques Khalip, Deak Nabers, and Ada

Smailbegović—for trusting me to follow every hunch I’ve ever had and for pushing me to complete a project that at many turns threatened to run me over. I can’t imagine having written a dissertation like this one under any other conditions or with any different kind of permission. I’m also grateful to Professor Meghan Sutherland, editor of the journal World Picture: we still haven’t met but it was thanks to her encouragement and patience over many emails that I was able to finish a version of my first and most challenging-to-pull-off chapter. And a thank you, lastly, to Elizabeth Friedmann, for taking me through Laura (Riding) Jackson’s house in Florida a couple of years ago and for always taking my work on her so seriously.

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CONTENTS

Vita………….…………………………………………………………………………………………………..iv

Acknowledgments………….………………………………………………………………………………….v

Introduction

Beyond the Boundaries of Limited Seriousness……………………….……………………….…………. .1

Chapter One

Notes on Seriousness: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Refeminization of Judgment………………. .14

Chapter Two

Candor Has Whiteness: Audre Lorde and the Racialization of Difference…………………………… .62

Chapter Three Unrevolutionary Suicide: David Foster Wallace and the Problem with Dead Hypotheses…………102

Volta

One Poem……………………….……………………….…………………………………………………. .145

Coda Experimentalism Was Never Enough………………………………………………….…………………151

Bibliography………….…………………………………………………………..………………………… .168

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The old fortune teller lies dead on the floor Nobody needs fortunes told anymore The trainer of insects is crouched on his knees And frantically looking for runaway fleas

—The Kinks, “Death of a Clown”

INTRODUCTION

Beyond the Boundaries of Limited Seriousness

My kind of seriousness, in my looking to poetry for the rescue of human life from the indignities it was capable of visiting upon itself, led me to an eventual turning away from it as failing my kind of seriousness. —Laura (Riding) Jackson1

I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died.

2 —Audre Lorde

Poetry and the other arts must return to a place of being useful.

—CAConrad3

In 1980, some forty years after having “reached the limit,” as she put it, “in what the poetic way of using words could provide for the saying of what needed saying with truthfulness,” Laura

(Riding) Jackson was asked by publisher Herb Yellin at Lord John Press for a recent poem he might include in a limited-edition broadside series.4 Taken aback by the request—“feeling some surprise

1 Laura (Riding) Jackson, introduction to The Poems of Laura Riding (New York: Persea Books, 1980), xl, emphasis added.

2 Audre Lorde, “My Words Will Be There,” interview by Mari Evans, in Conversations with Audre Lorde, ed. Joan Wylie Hall (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 75, emphasis added.

3 CAConrad, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Seattle: Wave Books, 2012), 176, emphasis added.

4 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “A Poem: ‘How A Poem Comes To Be,’” in The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language, ed. John Nolan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 241.

1 that Mr. Yellin, the Press’s director, should not have been aware that for forty years there had been no new poems of mine”—(Riding) Jackson explains, in a dense column of prose flanking the left of the finished broadside, that it had been “within a very few years” of the publication of her Collected

Poems in 1938 that she “renounced further trying the way of poetry for the attaining of whole saying: I would write no more poems—and I wrote no more poems” (ibid.). Yet (Riding) Jackson did eventually supply Yellin with the poem featured on the broadside, which she reports to have written just a couple of years earlier, “in the 1978 Christmastime,”5 for a friend “whose interest in the difference between a poem and the possible ways, generally, of using words was free of categorically literary conceptions” (241)—a friend she could therefore meet “with expectation of trustful attention” (242). And she would go on, despite her forswearing of poetry, to write several more poems, these in what she described as “brevities of incidental emergency…as a person committed to peaceful procedures may on very rare occasions use his fists.”6 That (Riding) Jackson continued to write poems up until her death in 1991 is a fact habitually overlooked by her critics, yet it tells us something crucial about the nature of her renunciation: that it wasn’t necessarily poetic language itself but rather the conditions under which she found herself writing poetry that had come to fail what she called her “kind of seriousness.”

(Riding) Jackson elaborates more extensively on the social and philosophical context for her judgment of poetry’s inadequacy in her introduction to a 1980 edition of the collected poems.

Reflecting on what had been for her a long period of reckoning with the strata and stakes of

American poetry and poetic discourse through the 1920s and ’30s, she writes:

5 (Riding) Jackson, “A Poem,” 242.

6 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Laura (Riding) Jackson in Conversation with Elizabeth Friedmann,” by Elizabeth Friedmann, PN Review (Mar./Apr. 1991), 74.

2 While other poets were endeavoring to fashion poetry into a compromise between an adapting of the historical conception of human spirituality to modern humanistic sophistication and a preservation of the historical identity of poetry as a highly honored literary function, I had not the least difficulty in uniting the traditional character of poetry as an active literature of spirituality with the dignities of modern intellectuality. But these were attached, for me, to scruples of linguistic verity, not to doctrinaire enlightenment-opinion.7

A number of important distinctions and revisions of terms take hold in this passage that I argue must be seen to resonate far beyond what most have judged to be (Riding) Jackson’s own idiosyncratic, “over-serious” position.8 Indeed, a good part of what I wish to show in this dissertation is how we both miss the point and forgo the usefulness of (Riding) Jackson’s critique of poetry as a critique of judgment—one that might even be activated against (Riding) Jackson herself—if we stop short of apprehending the larger critiques of “humanistic sophistication” and

“doctrinaire enlightenment-opinion” of which the critique of poetry was just one strategic part.

How can we further illuminate the differences so subtly articulated above—differences between spiritualities, humanisms, enlightenments, and poetries, but also between a cultural acceptance or even valorization of “compromise” and a counterintuitively simpler, more accessible practice of

“uniting” supposedly irreconcilable spiritual and intellectual realities? And how can the more fundamental “kind of seriousness” that (Riding) Jackson invoked across her seven decades of writing—alongside her insistence that all qualities of difference be judged by kind rather than degree in the first place—offer us more than a hermeneutic for better understanding the work of one exceptionally serious writer?

Taking as its starting point (Riding) Jackson’s guiding clarification that “there is not real duality of selfhood, only a difference between limited seriousness and whole seriousness of being”

7 (Riding) Jackson, introduction to The Poems of Laura Riding, xxx.

8 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Introduction for a Broadcast: Continued for Chelsea” (1962), in The Failure of Poetry, 25.

3 (28), Our Kind of Seriousness is motivated by what I propose is the need to distinguish between

“limited” and “whole” kinds of seriousness in our readings and understandings not only of

(Riding) Jackson but of contemporary American culture at large. Attending both conceptually and historically to the affect of seriousness in these terms to better draw out the meaningfulness of

(Riding) Jackson’s distinction, my analysis highlights expressions and performances of seriousness, of being serious or of taking something seriously, that either evade or exceed the generic, social, and sensual limitations of Matthew Arnold’s famous ethos of “high seriousness”9 and the Kantian formulation of disinterested judgment that underwrites it. I am interested, as such, in how post-

WWII liberal-democratic valuations of spectatorship, cosmopolitanism, humanism, and secularism—all axiological offshoots of what Kant’s “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere

Reason” (1793) upheld as the virtue of “incessant laboring and becoming”10—are discovered or proven to be inadequate to the tasks of justice once envisioned for them. And I am interested, by extension, in how writers inhabiting what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have recently termed the undercommons—a “ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts,…the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back”11—become sensitized to the limited seriousness of ostensibly or officially serious forms of aesthetic and political life insofar as these forms come to a) repress the role of emotions and bodies in the very idea of critique; b) enclose, deauthorize, and often discipline the deeply gendered and racialized emotion of anger in particular;

9 Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in English Literature and Irish Politics, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 177.

10 Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the boundaries of mere reason,” in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68.

11 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013), 28.

4 c) all too easily shore up the euphoria of liberal or neoliberal individualism; and d) deny their own fallibility by overstating, and rarely testing out, their promises for the upkeep of the common good.

I offer a story of seriousness, in other words, told by subjects and embodied in forms not traditionally entitled to or represented by the cultural idiom of seriousness.

My first chapter, “Notes on Seriousness: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Refeminization of

Judgment,” sets up most of the scaffolding for my dissertation’s later analyses by outlining both a genealogy and a method of reading for the kind of seriousness that I aim to demystify. Closely mirroring the form and discursive moves of Susan Sontag’s 1967 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” it weaves together fifty-eight fragments of definition, rumination, and close reading to uncover, at one level, moments in Sontag’s text that have typically gone unremarked but that I suggest uphold an emergent, reconstructed, and vital notion of seriousness as much as they contribute to a new theory of camp. The chapter also establishes the general mood, or what I try to characterize as an enlivening state of risk, into which each of the dissertation’s chapters will seek to situate aesthetic judgment in order to more effectively test the conditions under which it might remain, or return to being, what the Pragmatist philosopher William James would call a “live hypothesis,”12 a concept to which my study will repeatedly return. As (Riding) Jackson would convey the process and the promise of such a procedure in her 1964 essay “Then, and Now,”

The reader may anticipate difficulties; but what I present concerns serious difficulties we are all in, whether we are poets, or persons otherwise oriented to poetry, or persons to whom poetry is just something “there.” The total import of what I have to say is a happy one. It is, that truth—the speech of truth—is a real and immediate possibility. But the poetic shadows that veil it must be torn away before it can be seen to be so.13

12 William James, “Lecture Two: What Pragmatism Means,” in Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin, 2000), 27.

13 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Then, and Now,” in The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language, ed. John Nolan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 54, emphasis added.

5 To contextualize (Riding) Jackson’s renunciation of any and all “poetic shadows” as betokening a comprehensive rejection of what she criticized as the “sacred apartness” (xl) of

“elevated humanism” (88) and of “masculine moral optics” more broadly,14 as well as to start to register the vocabulary of religion as germane to considering seriousness as a sensibility, my

“Notes” commence with a brief reference to (Riding) Jackson’s unfinished story “The Serious

Angels: A True Story” (1966). But here I’d like to offer a fuller summary. “Whether you believe that there are or ever were such things as angels, or not,” (Riding) Jackson begins, “when you say the word ‘angel,’ or think about such things as angels, you have to think about the best kind of being that could be” (ibid.)—not unlike reaching for some kind of categorical imperative. The story then observes how “to some people, as you know, the name of ‘saints’ is given. These are mostly people who suffer for their goodness,” it clarifies, “and so become to other people an example of goodness.

It is thought that after their death, as beings made up all of spirit, they have powers to help the living, each a special power; and many people still pray to saints, asking their help” (21). By contrast, the story continues, “Some people pray to angels to do things for them. But that is almost like praying to someone in the same room as you. Saints are in heaven—are in heaven, if they are anywhere. But angels are everywhere—are everywhere if they are anywhere: they walk beside you, come and go freely between where you are and somewhere else, anywhere else—if they are” (ibid.).

What therefore becomes important to recognize about (Riding) Jackson’s serious angels—these

“livest” and “most quick-moving and quick-acting beings that can be thought of” (ibid.)—is that their goodness is immanent, adequate, literal, and readily available; there is nothing supernatural about them whatsoever, and no imagination or suffering is required on our parts if we wish to

14 Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman” and Other Related Writings, ed. Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark (New York: Persea Books, 1993), 201.

6 perceive them or receive their guidance. As (Riding) Jackson puts it, “Angels are beings who are enough, as beings. Nothing is missing from them. They will not come apart. They are like the

World, they fit perfectly into the world; they are true citizens of the world, they are good” (24).

And in fact, the story will come to reveal, not only are “angels and people…related,” but we might even more precisely think of an angel as simply “a person united with his or her teaching soul”

(ibid). Having begun her story of the serious angels with the intention of writing it for children—in whose “toys,” “stories,” and “explanations” more generally she’d felt there to be “something lacking”—(Riding) Jackson reports how it then dawned on her that “most of what grown-ups give to one another for best is also a best cut down from whole-best. It is not so much cut down from whole best as children’s best is,” she allows, “but it is not quite the same as whole-best” (20). This distinction resonates strongly with a remark made by (Riding) Jackson in her 1972 “personal evangel”15 The Telling: that although “poetry has seemed the guardian angel of our words” (65), since “the late-modern era” it has been, she judges, “reduced to verbal theatrics and separated from its identity as literature’s fountain-head of spiritual seriousness” (168). It is this kind of encouragement to not settle for half-bests—to instead seek figures of judgment and action that are integrated, non-aspirational, and open to all—that both my “Notes on Seriousness” and my study as a whole will everywhere attempt to locate and reaffirm.

The chapter itself proceeds by traversing an array of texts and histories that in various ways either reinforce or challenge the kinds of binarisms that (Riding) Jackson’s visionary “style of truth”16—of which I propose her revelation of the “true” nature of the serious angels is a key example—sought at every opportunity to either dismantle or recalibrate. An especially important

15 Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling (London: Athlone Press, 1972), 4.

16 (Riding) Jackson, “Introduction for a Broadcast,” 28.

7 cultural phenomenon I dwell on is the publication and reception of Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and

Authenticity (1972) and what I argue to be the limited seriousness of each of its eponymous “moral idioms.”17 What I highlight in particular are the ways in which Trilling’s and his colleagues’ fumbling suspicions of the inadequacies of both sincerity and authenticity—which I suggest represent a rhetorical attachment to the genre of the novel and an ontological attachment to the genre of poetry respectively—were themselves emblematic of half-best knowing and of a legibly masculine ambivalence toward the feminized category of affect. Although they longed, I observe, for something that “used to be called seriousness” (178) as a mode of critique that might both better ground them in the present and help rescue art, morality, and politics from a perceived

“weightlessness” (158), what Trilling and his interlocutors failed to see is that they were already practicing the kind of effortless, embodied, liberated form of intuition that their very own liberalism had been working so long and anxiously to sacralize. Consigning this kind of seriousness to allegedly outdated, “dark,” and “archaic” models of “categorical judgment” (79)—most readily discoverable, Trilling maintained, in the novels of Jane Austen—their investment remained firmly in what Trilling characterized, by contrast, as dialectical judgment. It is thereby to (Riding) Jackson’s widely disregarded account of gender identity and difference in The Word “Woman” and Other Related

Writing (1992) that my “Notes” then turn to help shed light on how, as she reads it, “what man thinks and has thought about woman helps us to estimate the degree to which he avoids thinking about her, to which his thought about her is merely a reflection of his opinions and ambitions for himself.”18 In this way putting pressure on the book’s seemingly essentialist distinction between so- termed “man-nature” and “woman-nature” (198), and in emphasizing (Riding) Jackson’s overall

17 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 2.

18 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 38.

8 thesis “that the compulsion to integrated activity should be judged a weakness can only mean that the standard of judgment is a male one” (58), what I aim to disclose is how the “refeminization” of judgment her work enacts is actually of an anti-formalist and anti-naturalist kind. Foregrounding no more and no less than the many ways in which women and their labors have been taken only half- seriously yet nevertheless endlessly exploited by patriarchal cultures, the kind of refeminization I ascribe to (Riding) Jackson’s kind of seriousness is thus in some sense as genderless, or degendered, as her serious angels themselves.

My second chapter begins to complicate matters, however, by bringing the question of race to bear upon (Riding) Jackson’s commitment to the “serious simplicity of truthfulness” that she located in practices of woman-oriented telling.19 In “Candor Has Whiteness: Audre Lorde and the

Racialization of Difference,” I reveal how Lorde’s relationship to poetry—and her judgment of its limited capacity for whole seriousness in any patriarchal context—manifested very similarly to

(Riding) Jackson’s as a refusal to celebrate “basically uncreative victories.”20 In her 1977 essay

“Poetry is Not a Luxury,” for example, the self-described “black-lesbian-mother-warrior-poet” would clarify that she “speak[s] here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.”21 And in “The Uses of Anger: Women

Responding to Racism,” Lorde would distinguish anger from hatred in much the same way (Riding)

Jackson does in her 1936 essay “In Defence of Anger,” of which my chapter provides a lengthy comparative reading. For Lorde, as for (Riding) Jackson, I show how “anger is loaded with

19 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 144, emphasis original.

20 Audre Lorde, “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 51.

21 Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider, 38.

9 information and energy,” how “anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.”22 Yet only Lorde, I observe, affords her refeminization of judgment—along with the demands she would put upon poetry—the historical and political content of a systemic racism, and homophobia, that she struggled her whole life to survive. As she puts it bluntly, “Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.”23 As such, my chapter concludes, the crucial difference between (Riding) Jackson and Lorde will be in how they contend with difference itself—in how Lorde’s kind of seriousness can and must differentiate between “whole” and “limited” kinds of difference whereas for (Riding) Jackson, for whom all isms were equally inadequate, an account of racism never seemed especially useful or necessary. This blindness robs her project of the kind of seriousness, I argue, that her commitment to candor could have enlivened if it had even begun to question its own privilege—whiteness lurking etymologically at the root of “candor” itself.

My dissertation’s third chapter considers similar limitations of whole seriousness in the work and life of the novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace. Its title, “Unrevolutionary Suicide:

David Foster Wallace and the Problem with Dead Hypotheses,” riffs on the title of Black Panther

Party co-founder Huey P. Newton’s autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, which has at its heart a distinction between two forms of suicide analogous to my project’s central distinction between

22 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” in Sister Outsider, 127.

23 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider, 119.

10 limited and whole versions of things that, formally or superficially, may very closely resemble each other. In “reactionary suicide,” Newton posits, a person “takes his own life in response to social conditions that overwhelm him and condemn him to helplessness”;24 “revolutionary suicide,” by contrast, “has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have” insofar as it corresponds to or directly results from the risk undertaken in “such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible” (3). And Newton reminds us, critically, of how “Black revolutionaries in America, whose lives are in constant danger from the evils of a colonial society,…are different from white radicals. They are not faced with genocide” (4). So it is from this starting point that my analysis of Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, whose own writing often characterized depression as the worst kind of solipsism, and for whom I suggest poetry itself was a dead hypothesis, begins. The main sources for this chapter include Wallace’s stylistically postmodern novel Infinite Jest and its representation, in particular, of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as a site for authentic, anti-consumerist social encounter (“The thing is it has to be the truth to really go over, here. It can’t be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified…[An] Irony-free zone. Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo- sincerity”25); his early essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (observing that “no guides to why and how to choose among experiences, fantasies, beliefs, and predilections, are permitted serious consideration in U.S. culture”26); his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address (advising hundreds of graduates and their families to consider the urgency of things like

“compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things”—“Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily

24 Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Penguin, 2009), 2.

25 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 2nd ed. (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 369. 26 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (New York: Little, Brown, 1997), 75.

11 true,” he’ll backpedal, but that what’s “capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it”27); and “Consider the Lobster,” an essay written for Gourmet magazine chronicling a

2004 visit to the Maine Lobster Festival and the moral crisis that unfolded for him there.28 But it is my secondary sources for this chapter—including essays by Lee Konstantinou, James Santel, and

Samuel Cohen on Wallace’s formalism, conservatism, and voyeurism, respectively—that are arguably just as if not more important for my purposes, since what I’m most interested in taking to task in my analysis is the whiteness with which so many readers, including me, have tended to consecrate Wallace’s kind of seriousness.

My coda follows my bold inclusion in this dissertation of the first poem I myself have been moved to write in close to seven years, which in retrospect I’m pretty certain I wrote in order to test out whether the insights I’ve gained in assembling my study of seriousness would lead me back into or further away from seeing poetry as a live hypothesis. That it is first poem I’ve maybe ever written in which I am “able to hear myself saying something,” and that its lines emerged, moreover, in an unfamiliarly yet nonsuspiciously effortless way, is evidence enough for me that the lessons of my dissertation have been at least personally useful. The coda itself, entitled “Experimentalism Was

Never Enough,” is also written from a personal perspective, narrating what I’ve witnessed over the last decade or so as a series of limitedly serious debates about poetry and politics that, in my own failures to take certain kinds of seriousness wholly seriously, have seemed to leave little room for the kind of seriousness I’ve really ached for in the things I read, make, and do. What I might characterize as my “confession” follows an overview I provide of the event and aftermath of

27 David Foster Wallace, “Kenyon Commencement Speech,” in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006, ed. Dave Eggers (New York: Mariner Books, 2006), 362.

28 David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster” (2004), in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 354.

12 conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown,” an aggressively “uncreative” remix of Michael Brown’s autopsy report performed at my own university in the spring of 2015.

And my confession obtains, in part, in my interwoven account of how I and many others have come to put trust in a very different kind of poetry. Here I focus, namely, on the poet CAConrad, who I contend belongs to a wholly serious tradition of writing and rabble rousing that unapologetically weds spiritual, political, and erotic enthusiasms. Terming his main body of work “Soma(tic)

Exercises,” Conrad characterizes his project as “a praxis I’ve developed to more fully engage the everyday through writing,” as one in which “the goal is to coalesce soma [the divine] and somatic

[the body], while triangulating patterns of experience with the world around us.”29 Describing himself at every available opportunity as “the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift,”30 Conrad’s kind of seriousness both loudly and compassionately speaks to the struggles of being not only poor but also queer and traumatized by a lifetime of violence and loss. He sees poetry as Lorde does: not as a “luxury” but as a simultaneously visionary and pragmatic means of survival, joy, and anger in the midst not of perpetual peace but of America’s perpetual war. But what I nevertheless insist that those of us who worship Conrad keep in mind are the limits of seeing him, or any other one poet or kind of seriousness, as miraculous.

29 CAConrad, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Seattle: Wave Books, 2012), 1.

30 CAConrad, The Book of Frank (Seattle: Wave Books, 2009), author’s bio, n.p.

13

CHAPTER ONE

Notes on Seriousness: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Refeminization of Judgment

All has been consecrated. The creatures in the forest know this, The earth does, the seas do, the clouds know as does the heart full of love.

Strange a priest would rob us of this knowledge and then empower himself with the ability to make holy what already was. —Saint Catherine of Siena

Most things in the world have by now been denaturalized; and most things, once they have been denaturalized, will register to us as insufficient or pernicious until all of our new things themselves become naturalized and we are compelled to begin taking some of the old ones seriously again. One of these is the sensibility—both possible and impossible to periodize, a variant of aesthetic judgment but necessarily discrepant from it—of “seriousness” itself.

A “sensibility (as distinct from an idea),” as Susan Sontag posited in 1964, is no longer “one of the hardest things to talk about.”1 On the contrary, it has for many begun to seem like one of the easiest.2 But there are special reasons why seriousness, in particular, has been for the most part

1 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1966), 275.

2 See, for example, Dierdra Reber’s critique of “the concept of affect-as-episteme,” which, in her analysis of its discursive privileging of “homeostasis” in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, “allows us to understand that this project may contest capitalist empire, but…in no way moves outside its epistemological logic.” Dierdra Reber, “Headless Capitalism: Affect as Free-Market Episteme,” differences 23, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 88.

14 passed over in silence. It is neither a categorically positive nor a categorically negative sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of seriousness is its apolarity: its availability to any and every charge. And seriousness is generic—an apparatus, even, of generification. We have just one recent study of it, Lee Siegel’s Are You Serious?: How To Be True and Get Real in the Age of Silly (2011), a cultural history of seriousness’s idioms and an elaboration of its most basic virtues that some reviewers have still found to be too serious.3 But to talk about seriousness is precisely to risk embodying it inadequately. If a certain kind of seriousness can be defended, it will be for the light it sheds on our processes of distinguishing between “inadequate” and “adequate” things in the first place.

For myself, I plead the goal of a more adequate vision, and the goad of something both more and less than sincerity in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to seriousness, and almost as strongly deterred by its demand that I think about it as a sensibility belonging especially—both culturally and natively—to women. That is why I don’t really want to talk about it, and why I’m going to adopt the ambulatory, epigrammatic style of Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” in my initial efforts to do so. For no one who shares in seemingly essentialist ideas will feel comfortable speaking wholeheartedly about them; she can only, through some attempt at a “methodological atheism,”4 try to show how they can be taken as wholly seriously as other ideas depending on

3 As Donna Rifkind puts it in a review of Siegel’s book for the New York Times, “Reading him is a bit like observing the perfervid forays of a Victorian gentleman collector who’s on the hunt through every corner of Western culture for serious and unserious specimens. His book would be a charmingly old-fashioned effort, if it were charming.” She adds that Siegel “hasn’t yet developed a style that rises above truculence or condescension. Until he does,” she concludes, “he’ll remain the grain of sand in the oyster that never quite becomes a pearl.” Donna Rifkind, “The Age of Anti-Serious Seriousness,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, July 29, 2011, http://www.nytimes. com/2011/07/31/books/review/are-you-serious-by-lee-siegel-book-review.html?_r=0, par. 10.

4 In the 1960s, Peter Berger identified (but did not necessarily recommend) what he called “methodological atheism” as the most common contemporary approach to studying the role of religion in society. See The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

15 when, by whom, and with what motives they are used. To rematriate a sensibility, to “draw its contours and recount its history”5 while allowing it to annunciate itself as something universally and distinctly feminine, requires a deep revulsion modified by sympathy.

These “Notes” are for Laura (Riding) Jackson.

But suddenly it seemed to me that angels had for a long time been left out of people’s conversation, as if there were no more angels, just as there are no more birds of certain kinds that there used to be—or as if there had never been any angels, and people had invented them, for stories, and then grown tired of them. Suddenly I felt that angels ought to be brought back into people’s conversation.

—Laura (Riding) Jackson, “The Serious Angels: A True Story”6

1. To start very generally: seriousness is, as Siegel’s study begins by postulating, “the modern person’s soulfulness.”7 It is one way of seeing the world as still requiring, as he puts it, “the ballast that religion once provided” (5). That way, the way of seriousness, is understood not in terms of doctrine, but in terms of the degree of “Attention, Purpose, and Continuity” we are able to obtain and sustain in our lives” (46). Siegel refers to these secularized precepts as “the three pillars of seriousness” (47).

2. To emphasize “soulfulness” is to slight religion, or to introduce an attitude that is neutral and potentially skeptical with respect to religion. The Dutch-Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza was banished from own his religion and community for having thought of things in this way. “By

‘God’s direction,’” he explains in his Theological-Political Treatise (published anonymously in 1670),

5 Sontag, “Notes,” 276.

6 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “The Serious Angels: A True Story,” Chelsea 69 (2000): 19.

7 Siegel, Are You Serious?, 2.

16 “I mean the fixed and unalterable order of nature or the interconnectedness of all natural things.”8

His crime—a challenge to the powers of both Church and State—was that this is all he meant by

“God’s direction.”

3. Transcendentalist and Pragmatist thinkers in the United States would take on a similarly subtractive relationship to religion, influenced in part by an emergent liberalism within

Christianity. It was the signal purpose of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), for example, to draw out and rescue the “experience” of religion from religion’s cultural identities and political institutions (a gesture that would be turned into a program and in turn woven into the very text used by Alcoholics Anonymous members beginning in 1939, with the publication of Bill

Wilson’s Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from

Alcoholism).9 John Dewey’s A Common Faith (1934), a slimmer and more forceful volume than

James’s Varieties, sought essentially to do the same: “I am not proposing a religion,” Dewey asserted, “but rather the emancipation of elements and outlooks that may be called religious.”10

Dewey was particularly suspicious of “the identification of the ideal with a particular Being, especially when that identification makes necessary the conclusion that this Being is outside of nature” (28).

More pointedly, he argued, “A humanistic religion, if it excludes our relation to nature, is pale and thin, as it is presumptuous, when it takes humanity as an object of worship” (54).

8 Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 44.

9 See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Random House, 1994) and Bill Wilson, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous, 1939).

10 John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), 6.

17 4. There can be no formally predictable canon of seriousness if, in James’s words, “‘religion,’ whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a serious state of mind”11—or if “the divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest” (44–45). In her elaboration of “attachment as a structure of relationality,” Lauren Berlant notes that “the experience of affect and emotion that attaches to [our] relations is as extremely varied as the contexts of life in which they emerge.”12

Attachments “might feel any number of ways,” she insists, “from the romantic to the fatalistic to the numb to the nothing. I therefore make no claim about what specific experiential modes of emotional reflexivity, if any, are especially queer, cool, resistant, revolutionary, or not” (ibid.).

Something analogous could be claimed of the expressive varieties of serious experience: seriousness might look any number of ways; it might even look like “a curse” or “a jest.”

5. In the nineteenth century, serious individuals did find themselves developing an affinity for certain cultural forms over others, and a taste for the historically marginalized form of poetry in particular. As the English critic Matthew Arnold urged his fellow Victorians, “We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto.”13 Of “our religion” and “our philosophy,” he would ask, ruminating on a passage from Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, “what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at

11 James, Varieties, 43.

12 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 13.

13 Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in English Literature and Irish Politics, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 161.

18 ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize ‘the breath and finer spirit of knowledge’ offered to us by poetry” (162).

6. In the substance of Arnold’s claims on behalf of “culture” at large, there may be nothing too much for us to wish to remedy. He defined culture as merely the “free speculative treatment of things,”14 very much like how Immanuel Kant defined “mere reason” itself.15 And he saw it, moreover, as correspondent with “the view,” articulated in Culture and Anarchy (1869), “in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,—motives eminently such as are called social,—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part.”16 Culture was, in this formulation, a “social” aspiration as much a spiritual one, and did not necessarily require a popular devotion to one manifestation of it over all others. Siegel’s study appropriately begins with an account of Arnold’s particular kind of seriousness: “Understanding that religion was under siege by Darwinist ideas and the forces of science and technology, Arnold prescribed a substitute for the waning faith in God. He called it ‘high seriousness.’”17 The clearest description of high seriousness yielded by Arnold’s “The Study of Poetry” (1880) is of something,

14 Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 42.

15 Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the boundaries of mere reason,” in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31–191.

16 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, 59.

17 Siegel, Are You Serious?, 2.

19 anything, but poetry especially (from Arnold’s vantage), “which gives to our spirits what they can rest upon.”18 For his part, Siegel objects to two things in Arnold’s conception of high seriousness: that “it abided only in culture” and not in everyday life,19 and that it “left out the importance of levity” (4).

My kind of seriousness, in my looking to poetry for the rescue of human life from the indignities it was capable of visiting upon itself, led me to an eventual turning away from it as failing my kind of seriousness.

—“Author’s Introduction,” The Poems of Laura Riding20

7. A common account of the American writer Laura (Riding) Jackson will present her as a one-time avant-gardist, a prolific poet of the 1920s and ’30s and, with her then-collaborator Robert Graves, an intellectual forerunner of the New Criticism who would ultimately disavow poetry and abandon her talents to archaic, totalizing, and totalitarian conceptions of world renewal. As Ella Zohar Ophir has remarked on what became, in her estimation, (Riding) Jackson’s increasingly “apocalyptic vision”21 after World War II, “Here we find Lewis with his proposals for the disenfranchisement of the masses, Pound with his fascistic radio broadcasts, and Eliot with his Christian Society. Here too is Riding, imagining away the ‘ordeal of Difference called the ‘universe’” (108). One of two post- renunciation texts of (Riding) Jackson’s tends to figure in such a reading: either The Telling (1972), with its meditations on modern society’s deficiency of “faith” in what is variously invoked as “the

18 Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” 177.

19 Siegel, Are You Serious?, 3.

20 Laura (Riding) Jackson, introduction to The Poems of Laura Riding (New York: Persea Books, 1980), xl.

21 Ella Zohar Ophir, “The Laura Riding Question: Modernism, Poetry, and Truth,” Modern Language Quarterly 66, no. 1 (Mar. 2005): 106.

20 Whole Story,” “the One Story,” or “sheer one-being”22—the book characterized by (Riding) Jackson as “a personal evangel” (4)—or her and her husband Schuyler B. Jackson’s posthumously published

Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words (1997), with its equally anachronistic

“purpose of mind to make manifest possessed awareness, productive of complete rightness of expression.”23

8. Ever alert to the ways in which she was read, (Riding) Jackson was accustomed to this kind of characterization of her non-poetic work. She lived until 1991, which meant that her “career,” as

Jo-Ann Wallace points out in a 1992 article, “rubbed against the three most important literary critical movements of the last sixty years: New Criticism, feminism, and deconstruction.”24 In what would have been an introduction to a new collection of her poems and essays (had the project not been cancelled by two separate publishing firms, first in 1964 and again in 196625), she offered a long disclaimer: “I digress a little here to give a warning that may be useful to readers. My being prompted to do so I owe to the pious disgust felt towards my terms of discussion by one who, priding himself on being the salt of modern poetic criticism, was put by chance into contact with some of my unpublished writing on poetry, and could not resist casting progressivist scorn on my thought, as of antediluvian date-quality. Particularly, among my terms of discussion, did the word

‘spiritual’ excite froth of repugnance in his critical mouth. Therefore I say to readers, Be prepared to find that word here! May the warning forestall the shock the word apparently produces in the

22 Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling (London: Athlone Press, 1972), 28.

23 Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson, Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words and Supplementary Essays, ed. William Harmon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 379.

24 Jo-Ann Wallace, “Laura Riding and the Politics of Decanonization,” American Literature 64, no. 1 (Mar. 1992): 111.

25 John Nolan, “Note on the Text,” in The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language, by Laura (Riding) Jackson, ed. John Nolan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 246–47.

21 Darwinian sensibilities (which I had thought had become somewhat antediluvian themselves). For, in the case of the person in question, the shock caused so much confusion, in conjunction with others produced in other sets of educated sensibilities by such words as ‘truth,’ ‘perfection,’

‘goodness,’ that what I said with these and other (not yet obsolete) despised words apparently swam like a scene seen through sea-sickness before his eyes: he read nothing straight. Perhaps readers, forewarned, will bear with me better in my use of old-timer words. Looming up immediately, additional to those already mentioned, is ‘ideal.’”26

9. As a taste for seemingly “antediluvian” notions, (Riding) Jackson’s kind of seriousness obtained in a logic she unapologetically called “the straight.” In a 1990 conversation with her biographer

Elizabeth Friedmann she elaborates as follows: “The principle of the straight line is the principle of vision. There is a self-repetition in a straight line, productive of continuity, self-renewal. Vision perceives in a straight line.”27 Nothing too queer, cool, resistant, or revolutionary so far in (Riding)

Jackson’s valuation of straightness, perhaps. Yet she goes on to observe how, “in the writings of

Dürer, you find his conception of a straight line expanding itself into a cone. The terminology used by Dürer in his notebooks is this: ‘The painter…draws all seen things into one cone towards the eye, whose point is in the eye and whose base or foundation is the seen thing, and the measure of this, as persons experienced in geometry and perspective know, cannot be attained without special trouble.’ The principles of my writing,” she concludes, “are the principles of vision” (ibid.). In Dürer and (Riding) Jackson’s vision of vision, then, vision itself is no more than a kind of measurement. The self, a given set of conditions, and the apperceived object do not actually compete for power or special

26 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Then, and Now,” in The Failure of Poetry, 55–56.

27 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Laura (Riding) Jackson in Conversation with Elizabeth Friedmann,” by Elizabeth Friedmann, PN Review (Mar./Apr. 1991), 74.

22 privileges; there is no “apocalyptic” final judgment or revelation to hope for in the objective unfolding of their relationship with one other. Vision “extends the range of viewing experience,” as she puts it elsewhere, yet has “the virtue of an incursion made in depth, rather than just in imaginative sprawl.”28 From (Riding) Jackson’s perspective, the poetry critic’s charge of antediluvianism in her thinking would have been missing the whole point if it mistook for the real flood—the discursive and contextual waters that were its own job to navigate—some imaginary Biblical one.29

10. (Riding) Jackson’s kind of seriousness, what she aimed to delineate not as the truth but as a

“style of truth,”30 took special trouble to remove the quotation marks, the “scare” quotes, from those concepts central to the admittedly “spiritual lexicon”31 that she found her contemporaries had lost their willingness to reckon with. For example, “In the word ‘spirit,’ there is no moral tyranny,” she would offer, “though it has old favor among us as a moral preen-word…worn meaning-thin from bold use, timid use, division between contexts of evil and contexts of goodness; but we must save it from ourselves for ourselves” (23).

28 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Looking Back, Looking Forward,” Stand 17, no. 3 (1976): 41.

29 In her analysis of (Riding) Jackson’s Rational Meaning, Carla Billitteri distinguishes between what she reads as the writer’s Cratylism—her apparent commitment to “perfect naming” hearkening back to Plato’s dialogue Cratylus— and an “Adamic” worldview. Billitteri observes how these positions “differ profoundly in their temporal orientations. The Adamic is primordial, hence backward looking; it refers to nature before the fall, and to a language adequate to that uncorrupted state. In Cratylism, there is no fall; nature persists notwithstanding corruption, and language can be adequate—indeed, perfect—without having to return to a prelapsarian condition.” Carla Billitteri, Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson: The American Cratylus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 11.

30 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Introduction for a Broadcast; Continued for Chelsea,” in The Failure of Poetry, 28. In her introduction to The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader, Friedmann concurs that for (Riding) Jackson, “truth is not a metaphysical mystery to be pursued but the natural expression of human consciousness. As she herself once put it to a student of her work, ‘Truth cannot be stated; it is a kind of statement.’” Elizabeth Friedmann, introduction to The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader, by Laura (Riding) Jackson, ed. Elizabeth Friedmann (New York: Persea Books, 2005), xix.

31 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 138.

23 11. Over the course of her writing life, (Riding) Jackson reports, she was occasionally “accused, with teasing intent, of endeavoring to renew the poetic gospel of Matthew Arnold. The accusation,” she would hold, “has serious point.”32 In her introduction to the 1980 edition of her collected poems, she addresses Arnold explicitly. By her lights, “He was right in judging human sensibility, the integrity of human mentality itself, to be in a crisis condition. But what he prescribed was only an athletically earnest, a vigorously sincere, version of literary gospel. It perpetuated an aristocratic tradition, a higher-lower level-distinction in human aspiration and attainment, a superiority in human mentality and sensibility that should be capable of determining the dominant trend in human behavior by standards of custom” (xxxvii). For all the democratic openness of Arnold’s definition of culture as the “free speculative treatment of things,” his increasing investment in the canonicity of a given genre would inevitably see him claim, as he does in “The Study of Poetry,” that “if we conceive thus highly of the destinies of poetry, we must also set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be capable of fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of excellence. We must accustom ourselves to a high standard and to a strict judgment.”33 Though

(Riding) Jackson acknowledged that Arnold “had a real cause, a cause outside of himself” to which she could relate her own project, it was impossible for her kind of seriousness to take seriously his kind of seriousness once she saw it congealing, in the postwar decades especially, into a particular aesthetic ideology—into a “Cult of Failure” (as she had already begun to read the symptoms in the late ’30s)34 that was failing to adequately judge itself. In The Telling she would pause to invite her own readers to enact a reflexive judgment of this sort, writing, “It is for each to find or not find

32 (Riding) Jackson, introduction to The Poems of Laura Riding, xxxv.

33 Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” 162.

34 See Laura Riding and Madeleine Vara, “The Cult of Failure,” Epilogue 1 (Autumn 1935).

24 good what I have been saying, and even if it is found good, the judgment itself must be put under judgment.”35 What reasons have we, her work tried to make people ask themselves, for continuing to take seriously a form whose current cultural conditions all but deny it the honor of fallibility?

12. As (Riding) Jackson had framed the problem more broadly, “Though literature has been important to men, we have no way of assessing its specific effects for good or evil” (95). Largely reduced, she felt, to a “disorderly experimentalism”36 that no longer recognized the need to test its own hypotheses, literature unmoored from “any comprehensive basis of judgment”37 had become, in her view, a “fictive spiritual feat,” an activity performed in “a spiritual theatre or fairground”38 to feed “the contemporary appetite for religion without religion.”39 In a 1975 article originally published in Modern Language Quarterly, (Riding) Jackson observed how “the word ‘ambiguity’ has become, in less than fifty years, a banner word in a certain kind of poetic criticism in which there presides a thematic justification of ambiguity as a central, necessary, fundamental device of poetry.”40 Here her objection wasn’t to linguistic ambiguity itself, but to how the fathers of contemporary literary criticism had “converted and borrowed the method into an imitative exercise” (511) and come to present it as “a gospel of ambiguity” (512). As Siegel speculates, “It could be that seriousness is vulnerable to physical laws, like bread. It grows stale when left out too

35 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 93

36 Thomas Matthews and Laura Riding, “The Idea of God,” in Essays from ‘Epilogue’: 1935–1937, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, ed. Mark Jacobs (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2001), 7.

37 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “The New Immorality,” in Under The Mind’s Watch: Concerning Issues of Language, Literature, Life Of Contemporary Bearing, ed. John Nolan and Alan J. Clark (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2004), 253.

38 (Riding) Jackson, “Introduction for a Broadcast,” 25–26.

39 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 178.

40 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “On Ambiguity,” in Rational Meaning, 510.

25 long.”41 Or as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment might put it more aggressively: “For enlightenment is totalitarian as only a system can be. Its untruth does not lie in the analytical method, the reduction to elements, the decomposition through reflection, as its

Romantic enemies had maintained from the first, but in its assumption that the trial is prejudged.”42

13. Siegel’s study of seriousness, similarly dissatisfied with the aesthetic circumscriptions and seemingly ineluctable arrogance of Arnoldian high seriousness, will likewise find it necessary to distinguish between two kinds of seriousness. Siegel begins etymologically, reporting that in Old

English the word meant “‘heavy’ or ‘sad.’”43 He then offers his own “fanciful origin of the term,” explaining how, in Spanish, “You use estar to describe a mood or an emotion” but “use ser to describe identity or the particular traits that make up the essence of a person. Estar implies temporariness; ser connotes permanence” (ibid.). In his extrapolation, “You might say that estar is an artificial state of being because it is contingent on the forces that create our moods and cause them to change. Ser, on the other hand, is wholly natural. It is how we live in clarity and conscientiousness. Ser is organic seriousness” (11–12). It should go without saying that the kind of seriousness endorsed by Siegel is that of the “organic” variety, which he opposes to a caricatured or

“official” sort.

14. A pocket history of organic seriousness, Siegel notes, might begin with Socrates, who, as

“Athens’s gadfly philosopher, made it his job to puncture such official seriousness, all in the name

41 Siegel, Are You Serious?, 62.

42 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 18.

43 Siegel, Are You Serious?, 11.

26 of being serious” (59). In Book X of Plato’s Republic, we can observe, Socrates famously warns

Plato’s brother Glaucon that if they allow poets to remain in their hypothetical polis, “pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead of law or the thing that everyone has always believed to be best, namely, reason.”44 What a careful reading of Socrates’s dialogue with Glaucon really shows us, though, is that when poetic language becomes aware of itself as a rhetorical negotiation between imitative and ideal forms—or, more specifically, when “its defenders, who aren’t poets themselves but lovers of poetry, [can] speak in prose on its behalf…to show that it not only gives pleasure but is beneficial both to constitutions and to human life” (ibid., 608d)—then imitation and pleasure, which humans cannot help but commit and seek, and reason, which in fullest adequacy belongs to the gods and which humans must ceaselessly work to access, are restored to a kind of symmetry, if not a kind of parity. “We’d certainly profit,” Socrates admits, “if poetry were shown to be not only pleasant but also beneficial. How could we fail to profit?” (ibid.). When Socrates notes that “the love of this sort of poetry”—what would have been lyric and epic poetry, ca. 380 BCE—“has been implanted in us by the upbringing we have received under our fine constitutions” (ibid., 608e)—the love not of poetry-in-general but of a specific ideological trend in poetry is judged inadequate. It is only when a form of rhetoric becomes hallowed beyond all reason, Socrates suggests, that “we are well disposed to any proof that it is the best and truest thing” (ibid.). Without evidence of its specific effects for the present, he insists, we must “go on chanting that such poetry is not to be taken seriously or treated as a serious undertaking with some kind of hold on the truth, but that anyone who is anxious about the constitution within himself must be careful when he hears it and must continue to believe what we have said about it” (ibid.).

44 Plato, “Republic,” in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 1211, 607a.

27 15. In fact, (Riding) Jackson did write the occasional poem after World War II, much as Socrates himself, under certain conditions, would make use of rhetorical tactics more frequently deployed by his usual adversaries, the sophists. Foreshadowing his own trial and execution at the end of Plato’s

Gorgias, Socrates submits that “it wouldn’t be at all strange if I were put to death” for practicing what he wagers to call “the true political craft” and “the true politics. This is because the speeches I make”—“speeches” typically represented in Plato’s dialogues as the formal antagonist to Socrates’s concise, dialectical method of elenchus—“on each occasion do not aim at gratification but at what’s best. They don’t aim at what’s most pleasant. And because I’m not willing to do those clever things you recommend,” he admits to his interlocutor (here the sophist Callicles), “I won’t know what to say in court.”45 As (Riding) Jackson clarifies for Friedmann when asked to speak to the apparent contradiction between renouncing poetry and continuing to write poems: “I have not immured myself in a monastic commitment to self-abnegation in regard to the trial of poetic possibilities to a straightness of utterance. I give way in these ins2tances to a free-will impulsion to take advantage of the special potency of poetic speech as allowing a forceful avoidance of the delay in communicative advance, the circuitous linguistic spaciousness of which prose allows. This potency inheres in poetry.”46 As for the poems themselves, she maintains, “I wrote them as poetic brevities of incidental emergency…as a person committed to peaceful procedures may on very rare occasions use his fists” (ibid.).

16. In her “Introduction for a Broadcast,” a statement aired by the BBC in 1962 and afterward published in the New York journal Chelsea, (Riding) Jackson for the first time explicitly addressed

45 Plato, “Gorgias,” in Complete Works, 864, 521d,e.

46 (Riding) Jackson, “Conversation with Elizabeth Friedmann,” 74.

28 what she called “the question of seriousness.”47 For her it had become the only adequate question, a golden compass of intuition and response by which everyone, regardless of their coordinates, might apprehend more widely-felt inadequacies in “the human-world environment”48 than an

Arnoldian faith in culture, let alone a single category of literature, could enable one to apprehend.

But it was a question around which the coordinates of judgment—of the imagined moral capaciousness of spectatorship, of the “free speculative treatment of things”—themselves needed to shift. “The apparent contradiction,” she would thereby proclaim, “between the concept of the self as the animate essence of individuality and the concept of self as the spirit of responsibility, or soul, dwelling in individual being and making it act with supra-individual reference is a reflection of a false dilemma. There is not real duality of selfhood, only a difference between limited and whole seriousness of being.”49

17. We hear an echo of this philosophical shift in Sontag’s “Notes.” As the piece will come to reveal, “Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. It doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different—a supplementary—set of standards.”50 We also observe how Sontag actually requires, as her essay develops, a certain kind of seriousness, something other than

“traditional seriousness” (287), to undergird her elucidations of the camp sensibility. “There is seriousness in camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist’s involvement),” she suggests (288).

The “pure examples” of it are “dead serious” (282); and although camp may be “playful, anti-

47 (Riding) Jackson, “Introduction for a Broadcast,” 25.

48 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Prospectus,” in Under The Mind’s Watch, 26.

49 (Riding) Jackson, “Introduction for a Broadcast,” 28.

50 Sontag, “Notes,” 286.

29 serious,” it “more precisely…involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious” (288). As (Riding) Jackson herself telegraphs out to us from the margins of her heavily annotated personal copy51 of Emily Dickinson’s

Collected Poems:

Yet there would remain something necessarily “limited” for (Riding) Jackson in any epistemological picture that upheld, as Sontag’s theory of camp does, a fundamental opposition between “a sensibility” and “an idea.” In Sontag’s analysis, “Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment” (ibid). And there would remain something necessarily “limited,” too, about any reconstructed seriousness that, like Siegel’s formulation of “organic seriousness” as

“clarity and conscientiousness”—or at most as “doubt”52—falls short of ever needing to use its fists.

Anger is noble and whole-hearted, as judgment is noble and whole-minded. We should greet its appearance in ourselves as a sign that thought has made its way into our very bones. Indeed, I should be inclined to make the bones, rather than the heart, the seat of anger. Is this not what we have meant, and laboured, to be: all-of-a-piece beings? That which distresses the mind should make the very bones —our mutest parts—protest? Since what rejoices the mind gives the bones peace, this is surely not too much co-operation to expect from them.

—Laura Riding, “In Defence of Anger”53

51 (Riding) Jackson’s copy of Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems is held in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, where I stumbled upon this bit of marginalia during a visit in 2012.

52 Siegel, Are You Serious?, 59.

53 Laura Riding, “In Defence of Anger,” in Essays from ‘Epilogue,’ 97–98.

30 18. One might distinguish between a kind of judgment that is experienced transcendentally and one that is felt, so to speak, “in the bones.” In her influential lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgment held at the New School in 1970, Hannah Arendt spoke of the first kind. “The advantage the spectator has is that he sees the play as a whole, while each of the actors knows only his part or, if he should judge from the perspective of acting, only the part of the whole that concerns him. The actor is partial by definition.”54 For (Riding) Jackson, the actor is whole by definition.

19. One of Arendt’s fellow contributors to Partisan Review, Lionel Trilling, offered his own series of lectures at Harvard on broadly related matters, also in 1970. These Norton Lectures were published two years later as Sincerity and Authenticity, which would turn out to be Trilling’s final book. A dense, undulating tract on the history of its eponymous “moral idioms,”55 the study eloquently restages the putative epistemic shift in post-Enlightenment Western culture from values and expressions of “categorical judgment”—exemplified for Trilling by the philosophy of Rousseau, the figure of the “honest” soul, the 18th- and 19th-century English working classes, and the trope of sincerity—to values and expressions of “dialectical judgment,” exemplified by the philosophy of

Hegel, the concept of disintegration, the European and American bourgeoisies, and the trope of authenticity. Trilling had spent most of his career (a career launched by the publication of his doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold) determined to carry some kind of torch for what he claimed was the “more strenuous moral experience” at least “suggest[ed]” by “the word

‘authenticity’” (11). But he had come to find, in more recent times, that the terms of discourse around authenticity’s “originative power” (12)—a power he’d tended to ascribe to certain kinds of

54 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 68–69.

55 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 2.

31 novels—had largely descended into “an intellectual mode that once went under the name of cant”

(169). As he would speak of it later, “Where I reject the idea of authenticity and seek to bring it into discredit is, how shall I put it, in its deteriorated form.”56

20. A symposium was held at Skidmore College in 1974 to discuss Trilling’s study. About halfway through, the psychologist and social critic Leslie H. Farber turned to his five fellow panelists and remarked: “I like what I’ve been hearing, but I’m a little perplexed. I don’t use the words ‘sincerity’ and ‘authenticity’ very often in my speech,” he explained, “yet I’m so taken by Professor Trilling’s descriptions that I’ve wanted to make up words for them myself. For example, I thought about

‘sincere’ for a while and decided that a word I’m more apt to use is serious. I don’t know just what to use for ‘authenticity’” (97). Irving Howe, another of the symposium’s participants, then proposed the word “Genuine,” which also palpably missed the mark. “Genuine, yeah,” Farber responded.

“But I do want to preserve in this if we can the view that there is such a thing, suggested by sincerity, as telling the truth, honesty. Fair enough?” (ibid.). “Oh, fair enough,” Trilling agreed

(ibid.).

21. According to Trilling’s study, which had itself registered the very impasse in sensibility that the current roundtable of distinguished New York intellectuals was struggling to synthesize into a legible third term, the discourse of authenticity and its attendant mode of dialectical judgment—of

“being” and “becoming” as opposed to “having”57—appeared to have entered a stage of acute

56 Lionel Trilling et al., “Sincerity and Authenticity: A Symposium,” Salmagundi 41 (Spring 1978): 96.

57 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 124. Here Trilling quotes Arnold directly: “‘Culture,’ said Matthew Arnold, ‘is not a having but a being and a becoming.’ And Oscar Wilde, in his great essay, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism,’ echoed Arnold: ‘The true perfection of man lies not in what man has but what man is.’ But it was of course not enough,” Trilling’s study would here begin to intervene, “to simply set being over against having and to assert that the one is to be preferred to the other” (124–25).

32 “weightlessness” (158). This manifested variously, Trilling argued, in an increasing valorization of the “spirit of play” and of play’s imagined equivalence with “truth” (131); in a “drastic reduction in the status of narration, of telling stories,” or in “the act of telling” more simply (134); and in “a sudden impatience with the idea of the organic” (128). According to Trilling, these weightless or

“deteriorated” iterations of authenticity, rather than compelling the social superego into a mode of restorative guilt over such misroutings of its own desires, had instead been sublimated into a pious, individualistic privileging of “an upward psychopathic mobility”: “the view that insanity,” so to speak, “is a state of being in which an especially high degree of authenticity inheres” (167). In

Trilling’s analysis, the only possible antidote to these widespread forms of aesthetic idolatry would have been a necessarily melancholic or tragic reckoning with the “falsities of an alienated social reality” (171). Yet contemporary society, he complained, had “rejected” this antidote in favor of a false religion of “madness (to use the word cant prefers),” the latter compensating for the former with moral and political deferrals promising something like “divinity, each one of us a Christ—but with none of the inconveniences of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished” (171–72).

22. Toward the end of the symposium at Skidmore, Trilling would boldly locate “the great sin of the intellectual” in the charge that “he never tests his ideas by what it would mean to him if he were to undergo the experience that he is recommending.”58 Yet his own study, despite its stated desire to resurrect an “archaic” mode of judging, one which “knows that things are not what they

58 Trilling et al., “Sincerity and Authenticity,” 109.

33 become but what an uncorrupted intelligence may perceive to be of them first,”59 is itself exquisitely dialectical in form, adhering precisely to the mode of critique it seeks to dethrone and laboring only to do it masterfully well. It keeps safely at arm’s length, that is, the “militant categorical certitude” and “immediate and pragmatic judgment” that Trilling permits himself to appreciate through a lengthy close reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (a passage so central to his study that he will be moved to read it aloud at Skidmore) but that he nevertheless subordinates to his own writing’s reliance on a Hegelian model of history and a Freudian model of the mind— wherein a restored authenticity, he contends, may yet lie in wait for us.60 As Amanda Anderson’s recent appraisal of Trilling alongside his peers at Partisan Review concedes, Trilling was a thinker whose “own form of liberalism was a forceful rejection of progressivism, and who typically worked through stronger, tragic, religious visions without endorsing them directly.”61

I composed The Telling not so much from a height above as a position of temporal levelness with my contemporaries. I felt, speaking there, on time. The others? The most I felt to be hiding from the common immediateness in little evasive immediacies of their own, all pledging community in a vague language of self- concern while defrauding one another of it.

—Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling62

23. In dialectical judgment, the essential element is what Kant terms “moral feeling.”63 It is a common sense for the good arrived at from outside or above, as we see in the third Critique’s

59 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 80.

60 See the final part of Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity, “The Authentic Unconscious,” for an elaboration of this thesis (134–72).

61 Amanda Anderson, “Character and Ideology: The Case of Cold War Liberalism,” New Literary History 42 (2011): 217–18.

62 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 102.

63 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 128.

34 analysis of the dynamically sublime in nature and its potential for stirring in us “an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature” (120–21). In categorical judgment, the essential element is intuition. It is a sense for the common good arrived at immanently that does not depend for its moral power on the “apparent contradiction” between nature and freedom. Trilling can be seen to be speaking intuitively when, in the closing paragraphs of Sincerity and Authenticity, he offhandedly calls for something that “used to be called seriousness” as an activity of judgment that might simply yet reliably prevent us from “assent[ing]” to certain fetishizations of either sincerity or authenticity too “facilely”64—as his colleagues at Skidmore seem to be doing as well.65

24. (Riding) Jackson’s The Telling is an exercise in intuition. More specifically, it is a testing-out of intuition’s capacity to communicate in “serious simplicity of truthfulness”66 without defaulting to traditional humanism’s more privatized versions of seriousness, truth, and subjectivity. In a later section of the book entitled “Extracts from Communications,” she extends a note of encouragement to one of her more intuitive correspondents: “You are not afraid of meeting a circumstance, or a possibility, in the simplicity of unguardedness of spirit. Some, capable of such simplicity,” she ventures to compare, “are diffident in it (there being much in the sophistications of their social environment to make them so), and seek backing for it in what seems its like in the notions of others” (112). In a letter reproduced in her memoirs, (Riding) Jackson urges another correspondent

64 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 171.

65 As Robert Boyers, another roundtable participant, will ruminate toward the end of the symposium, “Perhaps we can fix responsibility on an important class in contemporary culture, on the academic intellectuals Lionel addresses at one point. In Sincerity and Authenticity he writes that ‘it is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence.’ That seems to me to describe better than anything I’ve read the besetting sin of the academic life,” Boyers avers. “And I wonder if you could say something about the fundamental absence of what you call seriousness that so impoverishes discourse among intellectuals in our culture?” (106–7).

66 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 144.

35 to encounter her work with a similar “unguardedness of spirit”: “I judge that for a study of my work to be useful for you, you need to develop a point of view about it that is simple, and that is so by being a point of view that takes its cues from the work. If you get that,” she suggests, “then you will move naturally into a capability of seeing the work in its complexities within a firm frame of understanding.”67

25. A wholly serious encounter with intuition will perceive intuition to be, in and of itself, wholly serious. In Berlant’s account of it, “Intuition is where affect meets history, in all of its chaos, normative ideology, and embodied practices of discipline and invention.”68 In this particular understanding of intuition—as “the contact zone between the affects and their historical contexts of activity, a zone of inference that, as it encounters the social, will always shift according to the construction of evidence and explanation” (79)—there is nothing facile about intuition.

26. Although we may experience intuition as “a zone of inference,” the hallmark of whole seriousness is actually the spirit of hypothesis. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935, 1959), Karl

Popper defined “the empirical method” as “a manner of exposing to falsification, in every conceivable way, the system to be tested.”69 As he states at the outset of his study: “The theory to be developed in the following pages stands directly opposed to all attempts to operate with the ideas of inductive logic. It might be described as the theory of the deductive method of testing, or as the view that a hypothesis can only be empirically tested—and only after it has been advanced” (78). This

67 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “To Someone Engaged Upon A Study Of My Work,” in The Person I Am: The Literary Memoirs of Laura (Riding) Jackson, Volume 2, ed. John Nolan and Carroll Ann Friedmann (Nottingham, UK: Trent Editions, 2011), 280.

68 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 52.

69 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 1992), 20.

36 book was Popper’s major contribution to the philosophy of science, but it also offered an implicit critique of the ways in which the ostensibly scientific methods of Marxism and psychoanalysis had often seemed, in his own early enculturation to them, to evade historical testing as they themselves slowly gained in cultural capital of their own. Put simply, he writes, “The point is that, whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than defend it” (ibid.).

27. In an essay written in the late ’70s, (Riding) Jackson reflects on an ambitious project undertaken four decades earlier. As she narrates it, “I crowned my years of industrious literary idealism with the composition of a series of moral determinations that became the substance of a pamphlet of the title The Covenant Of Literal Morality.”70 This “Covenant,” published in 1938 by her and Graves’s Seizin Press, had begun as a signature-seeking document circulated to roughly seventy of their peers around the world shortly after their return to England from Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. “With this Protocol,” it asserted, “we institute a plenary action of judgment against evil. The action starts within us, in the mind; and, as it spreads personally from one to the other of us, our individual condemnations of evil will become a compact power to incapacitate the evilly disposed.”71 Yet this exercise in applied cosmopolitanism was also one of the last things that

Riding, the poet, would publish for almost twenty years. In what reads very palpably like an

Augustinian confession, (Riding) Jackson writes, “I erred. I presented them, each, with the opportunity that the Covenant voiced as with a book, to keep, if they wished, closed except to their

70 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “A Covenant,” Chelsea 69 (2000): 81

71 Laura Riding, A Covenant of Literal Morality: Protocol 1 (London: Seizin Press, 1938), 11.

37 own eyes. And they at once retreated with it into their privacies.”72 Further, she discerns, “I used a leniency of literary pattern, literary orientation, because of my having judged the terrain of literature to be the ground on which the explicit realization of the goodness of being I felt to be vested in the human form of being as a destiny both personal and universal must be initiated.”73

And finally, she determines, “What I did, in formulating the Covenant, was to offer an opportunity to some of those with whom I had encounter, and to them the opportunity of offering the like to some of those with whom they had encounter, a way to put themselves to the test of moral effectuality—to test the moral effectuality of their being human beings. Yet they were not confronted with any ultimate reckoning of their success or failure in the experiment. There were no risks written into the opportunity. No records would be kept. The commitment to the formulations carried no necessary consequence of disgrace for evading entire conforming to them in personal action” (84).

28. Although (Riding) Jackson’s The Telling will ultimately urge its readers to “beware of parting from the religions”74 and consider itself to be “spiritually a finality” (84), it nevertheless begins with a statement on the value of scientific objectivity. Here we might think of objectivity as the

72 (Riding) Jackson, “A Covenant,” 85. See also Laura (Riding) Jackson, “A Reading by Laura (Riding) Jackson for recording by the Library of the University of Florida,” Chelsea 69. It is in this 1975 statement that (Riding) Jackson explicitly likens the terms of her renunciation to those of Saint Augustine’s some 1,588 years before her. Insisting on “no claim of grandeur in the comparison” (52), she cites the Bishop of Hippo’s Confessions as “dramatically suggestive of the kind of difference I feel there to be between commitment to a career of poet and the alternative commitment to a career of labor for the release of the generality of human beings” (51). In her account of Augustine, (Riding) Jackson draws particular attention to the linguistic implications of his conversion in the garden at Milan: “Saint Augustine renounced the grave responsibilities of a professorship of Rhetoric, having decided ‘gently to withdraw’—‘not tumultuously to tear’—‘the service of my tongue from the marts of lip-labor.’ He wanted to transpose heart and tongue both from the literary skirmishings of academic Law to a conspectus of the nature of truth and its laws unbounded by prescriptions of utterance-forms, and forms of reasoning, to which the concerns of truth were subsidiary, if not altogether disregardable” (51–52).

73 (Riding) Jackson, “A Covenant,” 85.

74 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 39.

38 “epistemic virtue”75 historicized by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison as a “form of unprejucided, unthinking, blind sight” (16) that initially gained ground in the 1890s and that, like (Riding)

Jackson’s “style of truth” or “straight” principle of vision, is not “the same as truth or certainty” but, on the contrary, “preserves the artifact or variation that would have been erased in the name of truth” (17). As The Telling’s “Nonce Preface” puts forward, “The power of scientific criticism lies in the effect of its master-accusation ‘Nonsense!’ on the intellectual conscience of those whose thinking it is, actually, powerless to evaluate” (3). (Riding) Jackson invokes this “Science fiesta” anthropomorphically, referring to it as an “unpleasant personality,” but characterizes its presence as

“a gift to all who operate, or think of themselves as operating, on the ground of general knowledge with better than commonplace knowledge of it. ‘Have I checked the results of my operations for nonsense?’ is the question it makes one rudely ask oneself” (ibid).

29. Popper admits that he is “inclined to think that scientific discovery is impossible without faith in ideas which are of a purely speculative kind, and sometimes even quite hazy; a faith which is completely unwarranted from the point of view of science, and which, to that extent, is

‘metaphysical.’”76 For Pragmatism, too, the religious mood and the scientific mood were seen to

“work hand in hand.”77 But there would be different categories of seriousness to consider. James lays out one of his leading distinctions in “The Will to Believe” (1896): “A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the

Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature—it refuses to scintillate with any

75 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 18.

76 Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 16.

77 William James, “Lecture Two: What Pragmatism Means,” in Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin, 2000), 27.

39 credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.”78

30. A live hypothesis is wholly serious both ontologically and behaviorally. It presents as what

James’s Varieties calls “a total reaction upon life.”79 And it will, when necessary, present as unpleasant. As James asks the question elsewhere, “Is all ‘yes, yes’ in the universe? Doesn’t the fact of ‘no’ stand at the very core of life? Doesn’t the very ‘seriousness’ that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup?”80

31. In the context of her cultural and intellectual environment, (Riding) Jackson’s kind of seriousness can be read as spectatorship alive to the optic and motivational force of affect—whereby

“the mind,” Spinoza writes in the Ethics, “as far as it can, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the body’s power of acting.”81 But it can also be read as spectatorship alive to an affect of enthusiasm in particular. In his recent study Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of

Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War, John Mac Kilgore observes that a literature inflected

78 William James, “The Will to Believe,” in Essays in Pragmatism, ed. Alburey Castell (New York: Hafner Press, 1948), 89.

79 James, Varieties, 40.

80 James, “Lecture Two,” 129.

81 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (New York: Penguin, 1996), 77.

40 with “enthusiastic affect corresponds to the essential historical presupposition of enthusiastic society: ‘immanence of spirit’ among a revival public,” as he paraphrases from Richard Lovejoy’s

Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (1985).82 Kilgore elaborates that

“enthusiasm, as played out in historical instances, forces a response that results in a unique kind of script, not in an absolute way that one might call a genre, but rather in a way that makes enthusiastic use of any given genre, metamorphosing it” (24). And he concludes that enthusiasm’s “convulsive address” will call “not for a disinterested public of readers, but for a collective (popular) conversion of the immediate context, which presupposes the constitutent power of subjects to alter their reality without recourse to any authority other than a democratic imperative” (25). An

“enthusiastic affect” might therefore commit minimally, as (Riding) Jackson’s kind of seriousness would have it, to “temporal levelness” and to “common immediateness” with its object(s), neither of which can begin to cohere through thinking or feeling alone. “Our feelings supply our minds with information about what is,” as she would articulate her position in 1936, “and out of this information our minds make a knowledge of what should be. Our minds then educate our feelings, giving them the only kind of knowledge which is emotionally intelligible: a knowledge of what should not be.”83

82 John Mac Kilgore, Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 25.

83 Riding, “In Defence of Anger,” 98. See also Howard L. Parsons, “Reason and Affect: Some of Their Relations and Functions,” The Journal of Philosophy 55, no. 6 (Mar. 13, 1958) for an example of work contemporaneous to (Riding) Jackson’s that was likewise seeking to link (or relink) the operations of reason and affect. “The work of Peirce, James, and Dewey,” Parsons notes, “has already laid the groundwork for a logic rooted in feeling-response. So far as future developments go, we may anticipate that both logic and psychology, each in its own way elaborating the concept of unitary organism, will converge in their studies, and so reveal a much more intimate relation between reason and affect than we have heretofore imagined” (221).

41 32. We note across her body of work that Spinoza was one of the only philosophers for whom

(Riding) Jackson ever expressed any enthusiasm. It was his treatment of intuition, in particular— what he alternately termed “intuitive science” and an “intellectual love of God”—that spoke most convincingly to her notion of whole seriousness. “Spinoza especially recommended the cultivation of what he denominated a ‘third kind of knowledge,’” she relates in a later essay, “beyond the illuminations of imagination and those of reason, drawing on intuitive speeds of direct penetration of the essence of the knowable.”84 What she valued in Spinoza’s thinking was not only its heretical philosophical orientation, its substance monism, but its situated “attempt to introduce spontaneities of the human intellect into static philosophical and doctrinal pieties” (312). She rejected, by contrast, “the dialecticians of the false historical truth…(this humanitarianism of a procrustean male sort),” those who “avail themselves of our silence to make their noise of argument-stimulating-the-sound-of-reason.”85 It can be no accident that the bulk of The Telling is formatted to mirror the numbered, propositional structure of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, a text whose most basic thesis is that, in Spinoza’s words, “True joy and happiness lie in the simple enjoyment of what is good and not in the kind of false pride that enjoys happiness because others are excluded from it.”86 It is likely no accident, either, that the three very different kinds of writing that comprise the three sections of The Telling would seem to enact Spinoza’s triumvirate of knowledges—imagination or superstition (the first kind), intellection or common notions (the second kind), and intuition (the third kind)—in the degrees to which they do or do not rely on gestures of cultural citation and reference.

84 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Body & Mind and the Linguistic Ultimate,” in The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader, 311.

85 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 21.

86 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 43.

42 33. In a recent study of Spinoza, Hasana Sharp offers a helpful breakdown of the tenets of

Spinoza’s “parallelism,” which her book argues “sets the stage for a radical naturalism that redefines human existence and agency in several ways: a) thought is irreducible to matter, and yet does not have a unique spiritual logic that distinguishes it from (other attributes of) nature; b) mental life is not confined to human, rational, or spiritual beings; and c) thought and extension, mind and body, are not involved in a struggle for control.”87 Sharp’s book, Spinoza and the Politics of

Renaturalization, borrows the term “renaturalization” from Elizabeth Grosz but begins by taking stock of the importance of denaturalization as a critical methodology that can “reveal how power structures depend upon their ability to mystify their historical and bloody origins. Occluding the contested processes by which capitalism, bourgeois sexuality, European superiority, or patriarchy is constituted,” Sharp acknowledges, “naturalistic ideologies represent such systems as unalterable expressions of human nature” (6). It is her “conviction,” she adds, “that we cannot advocate the naturalization of humanity without taking the history of naturalistic ideology seriously…I cannot simply bring ‘nature,’ ‘the body,’ or ‘matter’ back without reworking them in response to the concerns of feminists, race theorists, or the Marxist traditions of critical theory” (7). Nevertheless, her work contends, although “appeals to nature are never without risks, the critical impulse of denaturalization has generated a set of polemical binaries that, even if necessary in certain contexts, merit challenge and reconceptualization” (ibid.).

I think a large part of the work will prove to be the mere learning not to set limits… The task is not to install stronger lights, so as to see better in the same places. We must put in an entire new lighting-system, one that covers more ground, illumines places we have treated as not there. —Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling88

87 Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3.

88 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 125.

43

34. A renaturalized seriousness turns its back on the pendulum swing of conventional critique. It doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that weight must acquire weightlessness, that weightlessness must acquire weight. What it does is to offer for judgment a different—an

“infinitely demanding”89—set of standards.

35. Sharp’s recourse to the concept of renaturalization finds its justification in both the theoretical and the practical benefits to which Spinoza’s thought can lend itself if we begin with the understanding that “Nature, on Spinoza’s model, is not opposed to history.”90 In one of her stronger articulations of this position, she suggests that “understanding humanity as vulnerable to the same determinations as beasts, rocks, and vegetables facilitates harmony and political emancipation. Only when we consider ourselves to be constituted by our constellations of relationships and community of affects can we hope to transform the forces that shape our actions and characters. When we regard ourselves as being within nature, we affirm the passionate basis of activity and respond more effectively and knowledgeably to harms, sorrows, and threats, as well as to pleasures, joys, and promises” (ibid.). In a chapter on Althusser’s theory of ideology renaturalized through a closer correlation (closer than it already admits to having91) with Spinozist

89 See Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007). “The hypothesis here,” he writes, “is that there is a motivational deficit at the heart of secular liberal democracy,” one that “is also a moral deficit, a lack at the heart of democratic life that is intimately bound up with the felt inadequacy of official secular conceptions of morality” (8–9). This is a hypothesis further explored by Critchley in his follow-up study, Faith of The Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2012).

90 Sharp, Spinoza, 8.

91 Sharp notes that Althusser himself cites Spinoza as “the inventor of ‘the matrix of every possible theory of ideology’” (58). In a passage on the character of ideology appearing in his most famous essay, Althusser will even suggest that, in the critique of ideology, to be “a Spinozist or a Marxist…in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing” (Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001], 119).

44 precepts, Sharp emboldens us to “imagine our ideas as living, growing, and changing things that may also require revision, critique, or pruning. The project of ideology critique, from a renaturalist perspective, is not content to recognize pernicious or damaging ideas and affects circulating in one’s environment. It requires an ongoing practice of sustenance and attention to new insights, promising ideas, and counterhypotheses, seeking amenable ambient forces that might allow them to take root and become adequate for increasingly many thinking powers.”92

36. Though James and Dewey did not explicitly align their own interventions with Spinoza’s, they did, by comparison, aim to reassign to human thought and action a lens wider than that of empiricism or rationalism alone. They sought what Hent de Vries has called “a nonbisected rationality”93—“a minimal theology,” he terms it interchangeably—which, in de Vries’s formulation,

“would have to do justice both to the accumulated wisdom of the world and to the ever weaker, yet ever more demanding, appeal of the infinite” (55). For James, it was precisely some degree of belief in an “unseen order,” an “overbelief,” that he felt could stimulate the most morally strenuous of characters and lead not only to the most “robustious type of thought,”94 but more radically to what he described as a potentially “infinite scale of values.”95 And Dewey’s project was even more

“robustious.” As he would conclude his lecture that became A Common Faith, “Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith

92 Sharp, Spinoza, 74.

93 Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 63.

94 James, Varieties, 428.

95 James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in Pragmatism, 261.

45 that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.”96

37. Though (Riding) Jackson did explicitly align her own interventions with Spinoza’s, her theorizations of affect differed from his in at least one important way. Whereas Spinoza judged anger to be a unilaterally passive or inadequate emotion—“a desire by which we are spurred, from hate, to do evil to one we hate”97—(Riding) Jackson judged there to be more than one kind of anger. Her finding it necessary to distinguish between the two is what allowed her to take anger more seriously on the whole.

38. “Anger is a precious emotion,” Riding would first propose in a 1936 essay written for her and

Graves’s periodical, Epilogue. “It is perhaps the only critical emotion.” But “by anger,” she clarifies,

“I do not mean the fury of hate. I mean that spontaneous rejection of something which is an act of solemn, not vindictive, dissociation from it.”98 Whereas hatred indexes “a sense of outraged privacy” she notes, anger indexes one of “outraged affinity” (89).

39. What Riding will eventually be moved to call “true anger” is different from “any other counterfeit anger” (97) in its temporal disposition especially. Anger “is precious,” she contends,

“because it is momentary: it is a momentary act of dissociation which makes a basic review of an association possible—compels a basic review” (88). And “the kind of association in which anger occurs may vary: it may be a close personal relationship, or an association through assumed membership in the same social or professional body, or one based on an axiomatic assumption of

96 Dewey, A Common Faith, 87.

97 Spinoza, Ethics, 111.

98 Riding, “In Defence of Anger,” 87–88.

46 membership in humanity, or on a courteous assumption of membership in a liberally inclusive order of intelligence and decency. But anger can only occur where some association exists. Its occurrence precipitates a re-evaluation of the association,” and “it is precious because it makes the association severely immediate, bringing it out of the kindly past or the lazy future and setting it on the work-table of the present” (ibid.).

40. In this treatment of anger’s potential for whole seriousness—for adequacy, in the Spinozist sense—anger is welcomed as “a concrete and natural gesture; it is no mere speculation, but something we do” (99). It is in this way that Riding’s early “Defence of Anger” flies in the face of both Spinozist and Kantian ethics by insisting on the powerful organicism—on the wholeness as much as the interconnectedness—of the angry person or the otherwise implicated actor. “To foreswear anger, and with it, necessarily, the right of protest,” it concludes, “is to sacrifice one’s critical sensibilities to an ideal of genial vagueness with other people—in which there can be no real pleasure, only a feeling of temporary security from irritation” (88). Riding’s formulation of anger’s adequacy for moral feeling is particularly at odds with Kant’s vision of sublime experience and the preeminent moral power it locates in the individual mind’s a priori “strength (which does not belong to nature…)”99 to observe and judge the world from what Kant calls “a safe place” (120). As

Rebecca Comay has glossed it, “Revolution is in this way relinquished, mourned, and resurrected.

Renounced at a local level, no longer constrained by national frontiers, partial interests or partisan commitments, or trivialized by the contagious effects of fanaticism or empathy, the event is reinstated in the spectator’s surge of moral self-exaltation.”100

99 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 121.

100 Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 34.

47 41. A renaturalization of judgment in postwar American culture thus quickens with the conversion of seriousness into a certain kind of anger. We see an example of this quickening in Angela Y.

Davis’s decision, for instance, to return to the U.S. in 1967 after two years of graduate school undertaken in Frankfurt. As a pamphlet circulated in 1972 by the National United Committee to

Free Angela Davis describes it, Davis was beginning “to formulate the topic for her doctoral thesis—Kant’s philosophical concept of freedom, as it related to the Black liberation struggle,” when “what had begun as an escape from racist America grew to seem to her an exile from the struggle of her Black brothers and sisters in America.”101 In a 1970 letter to his former pupil,

Herbert Marcuse would acknowledge Davis’s brilliance as a scholar of French and German intellectual traditions but note that he reserved his deeper admiration for how she had brought these traditions to bear on her own social and political activities. He quotes directly from her dissertation prospectus—Davis’s insight that “‘the notion (in Kant) that force provides the link between the theory and practice of freedom leads back to Rousseau’”102—in order to highlight what he sees as the corresponding link between Davis’s own theory and practice. In Marcuse’s words,

“you took seriously what they said, and you thought seriously about it, and why all this had remained mere talk for the vast majority of men and women. So you felt that the philosophical idea, unless it was a lie, must be translated into reality: that it contained a moral imperative to leave the classroom, the campus, and to go and help the others, your own people to whom you still belong— in spite of (or perhaps because of) your success within the white Establishment. But you fought for

101 National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, “A Political Biography of Angela Davis” (Los Angeles, 1972), 2.

102 Herbert Marcuse, “Dear Angela,” in Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume Three: The New Left and the 1960s, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 2005), 49.

48 us too,” the letter concludes, “who need freedom and who want freedom for all who are still unfree.

In this sense, your cause is our cause” (50).

42. One is drawn to the renaturalization of seriousness when one realizes that the liberalization of seriousness is not enough. Siegel’s study of seriousness, while it succeeds in pluralizing the forms that seriousness can take, will ultimately claim that “wholly natural” or “organic” seriousness must be “free from the pressures of necessity, utility, or duty.”103 This description is one of many that keeps pale and thin what almost but never quite becomes the whole seriousness of Siegel’s study.

43. Siegel’s means for going beyond limited seriousness would seem feeble to (Riding) Jackson if we consider, especially, her particular kind of feminism and the inextricability of this feminism from the seriousness with which she pursued the rescue of human life beyond “the streets of masculine humanism”104 and its poetries. In her 1989 foreword to The Word “Woman” and Other

Related Writings (1993), published two years after her death, she introduces the book “as a work of thought on the question of the essential, or the cosmic, nature and functionality of woman identity in human identity” (9)—a “nature and functionality” that she will characterize repeatedly as both witness and corrective to the “blindness” and the “dumb, helpless anger” of man (162).

44. Included in The Word “Woman” is (Riding) Jackson’s 1935 short story “Eve’s Side of It,” originally published in her 1936 collection Progress of Stories and here appearing with additional commentary. The story undoes what (Riding) Jackson refers to as the “masculine concomitants of the Creation” (165) in two ways. First, it has Eve retell the Christian creation story as an

103 Siegel, Are You Serious?, 52.

104 Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman” and Other Related Writings, ed. Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark (New York: Persea Books, 1993), 184.

49 unadorned story of production, dramatizing an important claim made elsewhere in The Word

“Woman” that “it is man’s will which obscures the fact of production in the idea of creation, and not only makes production the accessory process but even obscures the female character of production in a comprehensive male notion of creation” (35). Eve’s telling of the story therefore begins not with God the father but with “Lilith”—not exactly her “mother” (“for I had no father”) but

“entirely her own idea” (160), a feminized concomitant of the history of humankind who has produced Eve “especially to see the whole affair through” and to do so precisely by becoming angry for “good cause” (164). Lilith made her, Eve explains, “because she was irritated with herself, and she was irritated with herself because she was so good. She knew that there were going to be men and that they were doomed creatures—creatures with hopeless ambitions and false thoughts. Yet she could not prevent their being” (160). Thus second way in which “Eve’s Side of It” undoes the masculine concomitants of Biblical telling is by registering the clarity of Eve’s motivation and refiguring the quality of her action in the Garden of Eden as more than the results of an experiment in free will. “The men who were going to be,” she recounts, “were angry with me: it was my job to be, so to speak, a chopping-block for their anger,” to do “the dirty work” in becoming “Lilith’s eyes and ears and mouth, and then her whole body” (163). But “it must not be thought that I was tempted by the Serpent,” Eve insists, upholding the necessity of her intervention in the transformation of one kind of anger into another: “the serpent was Lilith’s way of encouraging me to do what I would have done in any case. I was fully aware that the fruit was unripe and therefore not good for the health. But things could not go on being lovely for ever when they were going to be very difficult—to say the least. Indeed, the ripe fruit was going to be much worse for the health”

(165). Eve ends by maintaining that she “never had any illusions” in “tak[ing] the first bite” toward

50 upsetting the half-joys of a paradise built in man’s image. “I do not see,” she adds, “how anyone can be either blamed or pitied who never had any illusions” (ibid.).

If you ask, “Why not God the Mother?” he will think you are joking, because he himself does not take his mother as seriously as his father; his mother has undoubtedly cared for him more painstakingly than his father, and his mother, moreover, bore him, but surely everyone thinks of the father as the protective head of the family—and it is the father, after all, who generally makes all the money.

—Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman” (29)

45. Begun sometime in the early ’30s but left behind in Majorca when she and Graves fled in 1936, the manuscript for The Word “Woman” wasn’t returned to (Riding) Jackson until 1974. “I had kept only fragmentary recollections of it,” she explains in the foreword, “yet it was the first substantial record of the development in my thinking, in the early thirties, of conceptions of the nature of the woman element in human identity. Those conceptions seemed to spring as new in my thinking of those years, although I now see them to be a destined, a necessary, outcropping from the general ground that my thought made its home” (11). Here she maintains, crucially, that the subject of woman, of “the importance of the fact of Woman in the history of human existence” (13)—a subject “integral with the general course of my thought”—has never been and never should be seen as “reducible to a separate truth-essence of its own” (11). Elsewhere, in an undated letter included in her memoirs with the title “To Someone Seriously Concerned With My Work,” (Riding) Jackson indicates that it is precisely “this cutting me up into periods viewed as in themselves finalities of thought of mine, when there is on record further, more, [that] can prove obstructive to the full understanding of what I have been all this while doing, continuingly into what I am doing.”105

105 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “To Someone Seriously Concerned With My Work,” in The Person I Am, 286.

51 46. (Riding) Jackson’s foreword to The Word “Woman” and Other Related Writings also notes, perhaps as crucially, that her manuscript, “along with some other portions of material left behind,” were

“treated by Robert Graves as automatically passed into his possession” when in 1940 she deeded to him their shared Majorcan properties.106 She tells the relevant history of their relationship, which began in the early ’20s, as the history of his limitedly serious interest in her subject: “When Robert

Graves and I first came into work-association, the subject woman figured in his consciousness only in terms of the ideas of his wife, Nancy Nicholson, on the position of women in society” (10).

Nicholson was, she explains, “a staunch proponent of the simple feminist principles of personal independence and political and social equality” (ibid.). But Graves, she asserts, had “no instinctive feelings”—resembling either Nicholson’s or her own—“on the subject. His interest in the subject, after our association began and throughout its duration, was as a subject for professional literary treatment” (10–11). Castigating the use, which she observes in his 1948 study The White Goddess especially, of “great padding of mythological and ethnological lore, and of general wide-ranging pickings of a reckless scholarship to give the thing in gross the identity of a work of individual inventive genius,” (Riding) Jackson charges that no less than “everything [Graves] has put forth in this guise of male pioneer in new thinking on Woman and Women is derived appropriatively from my thinking” (ibid.).

47. Graves’s most famous description of the poet’s muse was by all accounts inspired by the physical attributes, as well as by what he perceived to be the metaphysical attributes, of (Riding)

Jackson herself. As he writes in The White Goddess, “The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she

106 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 11.

52 will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. Her names and titles are innumerable. In ghost stories she often figures as ‘The White Lady,’ and in ancient religions, from the British Isles to the Caucasus, as the ‘White Goddess.’ I cannot think of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experiences of her.”107

48. (Riding) Jackson’s manuscript and other materials, it turns out, were returned to her in 1974 not by Graves himself but by his second wife, the poet and editor Beryl Graves, whose 2003 obituary for The Guardian, penned by a University of Roehampton Professor of Modern Literature named Paul O’Prey, lends a disturbing amount of copy to contrasting the two women. “Beryl and

Laura were alike,” for example, “in that each had a sharp intellect and formidable strength of character, but where Laura could be delusional and judgmental, Beryl was the embodiment of sanity and tolerance. She was also young, strikingly beautiful and had a playful sense of humour.”108 Five paragraphs later in what readers might have easily forgotten is supposed to be Beryl Graves’s obituary: “Whereas Laura had tried to create a community firmly in her own image, with herself as its centre, Beryl was unassuming, with a tendency to put others, and especially Robert, before herself” (par. 10).

49. To the extent that her account of Graves’s covetousness of her kind of seriousness and of his failure to wholly manifest it himself functions metonymically in her work for a larger critique of man’s “conquest”109 of woman—and as a critique of how, in nearly every performance, “there is just

107 Robert Graves, The White Goddess (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 14.

108 Paul O’Prey, “Beryl Graves,” The Guardian, Nov. 1, 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/nov/01/ guardianobituaries.booksobituaries, par. 5.

109 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 50.

53 so much capacity in man for good behaviour toward woman, and just so much incapacity for better”

(58)—(Riding) Jackson would not have been surprised by The Guardian writer’s judgment of her kind of seriousness, nor by his terms of adulation for Beryl Graves.

That the compulsion to integrated activity should be judged a weakness can only mean that the standard of judgment is a male one.

—Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman” and Other Related Writings (ibid.)

50. Inasmuch as there is “not real duality of selfhood, only a difference between limited seriousness and whole seriousness of being,”110 there is analogously for (Riding) Jackson a difference between “man-nature” and “woman-nature” in human beings.111 In its simplest formulation: “Woman is wholeness, man partialness” (78), and we can therefore “get truth—how things are as a whole—only from woman” (40). Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark are right to anticipate, in their introduction to the book, the degree to which The Word “Woman” “is likely to encounter critical resistance from—and perhaps even to shock—conventional feminists.”112 But they are also right to wager that “for very many women its message will come as a clear and welcome substantiation of what they have always known” (ibid.).113

51. A feminist’s ability to take The Word “Woman” seriously, the work itself suggests, will depend first and foremost on her ability to tell the difference between a “whole [that] is massive with all-

110 (Riding) Jackson, “Introduction for a Broadcast,” 28.

111 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 198.

112 Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark, introduction to The Word “Woman,” by Laura (Riding) Jackson, 4.

113 Apart from Elizabeth Friedmann, Alan J. Clark, Jane Malcolm, and Susan Schultz, no readers of (Riding) Jackson’s have yet insisted on the importance of her theories of gender difference in the context of her work, and apart from Friedmann and Clark, none have read it outside the established discourse of “women in literary modernism.” See Jane Malcolm, “‘That breeding silence she’: Laura Riding’s Gendered Ethics and the Limits of the Word ‘Woman,’” Arizona Quarterly 65, no. 3 (Autumn 2009) and Susan Schultz, A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).

54 masculine reference”114 and “an obtaining whole” (202)—a processual “Foresense of Being-made- whole-in-us”115—that (Riding) Jackson ascribes to woman-oriented telling, to practices of speaking against “man’s universalizations”116 and instead toward “a multiple one” (36). It will also depend on her distinguishing her own intuitive and historical sense of difference from “the standard of humanity, or maleness” (28), and then determining the various “manipulations of this sense of difference by man’s will” (37). It will depend, in other words, on her distinguishing between limited and whole kinds of difference—between what The Telling refers to as “false differences of understanding,” propagated by “inventors of difference, bent greedily on having their own say,” and what it invokes, by contrast, as “true differences of understanding,” wherein “by speaking out of their different story-sense of human-being to one another, the differers can learn their life- sameness, and the different understandings be loosed to join.”117

52. Although man’s understanding of woman, (Riding) Jackson posits, “is in large part either inadequate or mistaken”—“an irreconcilable jumble of reactions and prejudiced meanings”—it is nevertheless “in these reactions that we must look for the sense of difference which alone can accurately direct meaning.”118 She observes, for instance, how “men are annoyed by women’s insistence on well-defined codes of behaviour and standards of beauty, order, and precision. It would not occur to men,” however, “that women are continually practicing judgment while men are continually experimenting with ideas” (23–24). Another generalization she rehearses: that women

114 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 178.

115 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 46.

116 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 40.

117 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 55.

118 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 38.

55 “are difficult to please” or “difficult to satisfy.” Here again, she points out, “it would not occur to men to make the generalization, from the available evidence, that women have high standards of adequacy where men have only prejudices founded in egotism” (24).

53. The lines of observation and demarcation that build and unfold across The Word “Woman” are consistent with those established in Riding’s 1930 book Though Gently, which opens with a series of postulates that would in turn come to correspond with the differences between “limited and whole seriousness of being”:

There is a no-sense and a corresponding sense.

There is an irresponsibility and a corresponding responsibility.

There is a question and a corresponding answer.

There is an equality between sufficient opposites.

There is an approximation and a corresponding exactness.

There is a scripture and a corresponding authentication.

There is not God because he does not correspond. He only refrains from discrepancy. He differs, but he does not differ sufficiently to agree with all that he differs from.

There is T and ⊥.119

A page later, Riding provides a key: “Let the sign ⊥ stand for that which all understand and express differently,” and “T stand for the interpretive world of leverage. ⊥ is that which is,” she states, while “T is that which is going on” (2). Following this formula, we may infer that “man” is that which is going on and “woman” is that which is.

An advent of truth will not provoke wonder, admiration, forcefully seize attention. Truth’s nature is to fill a place that belongs to it when the place becomes cleared of

119 Laura Riding, Though Gently (Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press, 1930), 1.

56 a usurping occupant. It slips into place, then, with a quiet of natural fitness, perfectly not-astounding in the rightness of its being there.

—Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling120

54. (Riding) Jackson’s methodology—what we might accurately call her practical philosophy—very closely aligns with Spinoza’s in these moments and returns us to her clarification of method in The

Telling. “That the subject of the creation should be treated,” she writes, “without leave from the theologies or sciences or philosophies, and bare of the benefit of narrative symbolism and the decoration of known names, and the protection of a Name of names, may seem a rash simplicity to you who read here. However,” she reminds the reader, “I am not endeavoring to excite belief, or regale the reading imagination, only to tell what I find to see where my thought takes me” (30). In his introduction to the Theological-Political Treatise, translator Jonathan Israel explains how Spinoza

“revolutionized Bible criticism by insisting on the need to approach the subject free of all prejudgments about its meaning and significance, eyeing every chain of tradition and authority whether Jewish, Catholic, Protestant or Muslim with equal suspicion and, above all, by stressing the importance of the distinction—never previously systematized in the history of criticism, between the intended or ‘true’ meaning of a passage of text”—which he glosses as its ideological or dogmatic meaning—“and ‘truth of fact.’”121 Very much like the distinction between T and ⊥. As

Spinoza observes, most aptly, in his chapter “On Miracles”: “It happens very rarely that men report something straightforwardly, just as it occurred, without intruding any judgment of their own into the telling. In fact,” he concludes, “when people see or hear something new, they will, unless very much on their guard against their own preconceived opinions, usually be so biased by these that

120 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 149.

121 Jonathan Israel, introduction to Theological-Political Treatise, by Benedict de Spinoza, xi.

57 they will perceive something quite different from what they actually saw or heard had happened, especially if the event is beyond the understanding of the reporter or his audience, and most of all if it is in his interest that it should have happened in a certain way.”122 To put pressure on “what man thinks and has thought about woman,” (Riding) Jackson will thereby summarize of her own exegetical approach, “helps us to estimate the degree to which he avoids thinking about her, to which his thought about her is merely a reflection of his opinions and ambitions for himself.”123

55. “Woman” is a live hypothesis, a “total reaction upon life,” in the way she is drawn to “exercise the whole force of her being” in whatever she is inclined to say and do (176). And it is the “whole force” of woman-nature generally, The Word “Woman” suggests, that can most reliably activate

“loopholes in our social thinking by which new light and air might be introduced into it— sensibilities, and qualities of thought, not native to the masculinized social norm of human perception and intelligence” (ibid.). It is woman-nature generally, in other words, that most reliably counters “the conventionally serious attitude” (75) of man-nature—articulated in modern Western intellectual history as, for instance, the spiritually and politically incomplete rhetorics of sincerity or authenticity—with a different kind of seriousness altogether: a third kind of knowledge. And so it is woman-nature, most likely, that Trilling and his cohort would find both threatening and irresistible in Jane Austen, in the categorical judgment of her writing, in what Trilling longed for as what he called “the old visionary norm,”124 and in what he refers to more broadly as the simultaneous

“pain” and “comfort” of that sense of being “left with the person we really are,” without deferral to

122 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 92.

123 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 38.

124 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 41.

58 “future developments” or “the exculpations of causalities.”125 “I come out for categorical judgment,” Trilling confesses to his peers only at the end of his life: “confront[ing] myself in my dark hours, or possibly my bright hours, I find that I am an essence, I am there, I am as it were a completed thing, for good or bad—not a completed thing really, but I am as I am” (ibid.).

56. The Word “Woman” thus illuminates the difference between man-nature and woman-nature not through any species of biological determinism but through a strategy of taking wholly seriously certain kinds of knowledge, expression, and production that patriarchal cultures have treated as unserious (to the point very often of having treated not there) or have otherwise found complex ways to exploit. As Riding explicitly argued in the late ’30s, “The terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ must be understood as representing no mere primitive opposition of sex to sex; but as defining two worlds of differing quality, in either of which men and women may jointly move and live.”126 In this she would actually be in close keeping with a feminist like Sontag, who in her 1973 essay “The Third

World of Women” insisted not only that “the ‘femininity’ of women and the ‘masculinity’ of men are morally defective and historically obsolete conceptions”127—that we must “erase as far as possible the conventional demarcation lines between men and women” (189)—but moreover that

“a nonrepressive society, a society in which women are subjectively and objectively the genuine equals of men, will necessarily be an androgynous society” (188).

57. The very tendency to invest in models of biological determinism is a peculiarly masculine one,

(Riding) Jackson seems to suggest. In her 1934 story “Emmie,” also included in The Word “Woman,”

125 Trilling et al., “Sincerity and Authenticity,” 89.

126 Laura Riding, “A Personal Letter, With a Request for a Reply” (1937), Epilogue 4 (1938): 16.

127 Susan Sontag, “The Third World of Women,” Partisan Review, Spring 1973, 182.

59 she invokes the character of “a famous surgeon,” the husband of one of the story’s menagerie of socially, intellectually, and spiritually frustrated woman-characters, “who conscientiously transformed people of ambiguous sexual characteristics into formal sexual beings. His decision as to whether a patient was preponderantly male or female was determined,” (Riding) Jackson narrates, “by what he called ‘the rational balance of pretense.’”128 Bad enough, in this scene, is what we could call the false sense of difference informing the two available gender categories and the caricaturish predictability, or formalism, of their respective accoutrements: “if a young patient had certain indubitably female characteristics, some such presupposition as a fondness for dolls—or, as it might be, for air-guns and gruesomeness—indicated the rational balance of pretence” (ibid.).

Even worse in this allegory of how patriarchy performs the biopolitical work of gendering is the complete lack of agency on the part of the patient to assign themself, or not assign themself, a particular gender—that here the “decision” to render a body strictly male or female is the (male) medical professional’s to make.

58. An illuminating insight into the genealogy of whole seriousness in our time: that Sontag herself took (Riding) Jackson wholly seriously. As Chelsea editor Sonia Raiziss would relate in a letter to (Riding) Jackson in 1968, “Here is something that might matter! Susan Sontag—whose name you must surely have seen here and there (she’s smack in the middle of today’s literary world, such as it is) became an enthusiast of your work, especially from the day she found your story ‘A Last Lesson in Geography’ in Art and Literature. She was so excited by it that she took out your Progress of Stories and xeroxed the whole of it…She is interested in all your work,” the note

128 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 131.

60 ends, “every phase of it, past and present; and she may be in a position to do something concrete.”129

129 Sonia Raiziss, personal correspondence to Laura (Riding) Jackson (April 1968). Held in the Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson collection, 1924–1991, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Transcription provided by Elizabeth Friedmann.

61

CHAPTER TWO

Candor Has Whiteness: Audre Lorde and the Racialization of Difference

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying. —Audre Lorde1

In 1981, Audre Lorde presented her keynote paper “The Uses of Anger: Women

Responding to Racism” at the National Women’s Studies Association Convention in Storrs,

Connecticut. Speaking to an audience primarily of white feminists, Lorde posited that an adequately metabolized form of anger, one distinct from silence, guilt, or hatred, could and should serve the creative and political work of women regardless of their coordinates or particular struggles in the world. As she put it:

Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.2

1 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Racism,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 121, emphasis added.

2 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” in Sister Outsider, 124.

62 As Laura (Riding) Jackson’s 1936 essay on anger had held, “To forswear anger, and with it, necessarily, the right of protest, is to sacrifice one’s critical sensibilities to an ideal of genial vagueness with other people—in which there can be no real pleasure, only a feeling of temporary security from irritation.”3 Like Lorde, (Riding) Jackson had perceived anger to be “a precious emotion”—indeed “perhaps the only critical emotion” (87), igniting “a momentary act of dissociation which makes a basic review of an association possible—compels a basic review” (88).

And like Lorde her affirmation of anger had been enabled by a recognition of its capacity for whole seriousness or adequacy, of a necessary difference between “true anger” and “any other counterfeit anger” (97). “By anger,” (Riding) Jackson had clarified in her analysis, “I do not mean the fury of hate. I mean that spontaneous rejection of something which is an act of solemn, not vindictive, dissociation from it” (88). Whereas hatred had indexed for her “a sense of outraged privacy” (89) incapable of circumventing or rewriting the “procrustean male”4 scripts of human judgment and relationality in the twentieth century, true anger, by contrast, indexed a feeling of “outraged affinity,”5 “combin[ing] judgment and emotion in a single impulse” (90) more akin to the religiosity of democratic enthusiasm in excess of the spectatorship of Kant’s “mere reason.” In

Lorde’s experience and understanding of it, too, the action of anger would need to be rescued from its many near enemies in order to be taken seriously—to quicken into more than a “useless” state of individual reactivity.6 As “The Uses of Anger” would invoke the distinction, “Hatred is the fury

3 Laura Riding, “In Defence of Anger,” in Essays from ‘Epilogue’: 1935–1937, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, ed. Mark Jacobs (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2001), 88.

4 Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling (London: Athlone Press, 1972), 21.

5 Riding, “In Defence of Anger,” 89.

6 Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” 127.

63 of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change” (ibid.).

Yet Lorde’s valuation of anger as an emotion “loaded with information and energy” (127), while closely resonant with (Riding) Jackson’s formulation of it as “an incidence of communication” that “must look toward a possible next step of repair,”7 was also firmly grounded in historical, social, and personal exigencies of kinds and degrees that (Riding) Jackson’s “In

Defence of Anger”—and (Riding) Jackson herself—had never felt the need to be. One way to consider these exigencies is alongside what Christina Sharpe has termed “Black being in the wake,”8 which she elaborates as “a kind of blackened knowledge” that doesn’t merely consign Black thought to “seeking a resolution to blackness’s ongoing and irresolvable abjection” but that allows it, as “a form of consciousness”—as indeed a kind of wakefulness—“to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (13–14). Lorde’s speech on anger began, significantly, with a bracing definition of racism: “The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied.

Women respond to racism,” her speech continued, leavening the official topic for that year’s NWSA conference, “Women Respond to Racism,” with Lorde’s embodied account of it as “a Black,

Lesbian, Feminist, warrior, poet, mother doing my work” (as she would describe herself in a 1990 interview9): “My response to racism is anger. I have lived with it, ignoring it, feeding upon it,

7 Riding, “In Defence of Anger,” 89.

8 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 13. Sharpe’s study engages closely with the work of poet Dionne Brand, whose 2001 book Map to the Door of No Return is directly referenced when Sharpe speaks of “blackened knowledge.”

9 Audre Lorde, “Above the Wind: An Interview with Audre Lorde,” by Charles C. Rowell, in Conversations with Audre Lorde, ed. Joan Wylie Hall (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 195. “I underline these things,” Lorde notes, “but they are just some of the ingredients of who I am. There are many others. I pluck these out because, for

64 learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence,”

Lorde explained, “afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.”10

Thereby obligated and determined, in a way Riding wasn’t, to broach more than “a theoretical discussion” about “the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation”

(ibid.), Lorde proceeded in her speech by recounting eight specific examples of anger-provoking racism to which she had been subjected as a Black writer and activist in the women’s movement.11

By and large these examples bespoke occasions of what the critical discourse analyst Robin

DiAngelo has termed “white fragility,” referring to “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves” amongst members of a

“white dominant environment.”12 For instance, Lorde offered, “I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, ‘Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.’ But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing,” Lorde challenged her latest listeners, “or the threat of a message that her life may change?”13 Another example: “At an international cultural gathering of women, a well-known white american woman poet interrupts the reading of the work of women of Color to read her own poem, and then dashes off to an ‘important panel’” (126). As Lester C. Olson points out in an article on the context and

various reasons, they are aspects of myself about which a lot of people have had a lot to say, one way or another” (ibid.).

10 Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” 124.

11 “In the interest of time,” Lorde noted of these examples, “I am going to cut them short. I want you to know there were many more” (125).

12 Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2001): 57.

13 Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” 125.

65 genealogy of Lorde’s NWSA keynote, many of the examples Lorde included in her talk were taken from her experiences during and following a conference on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex held at New York University two years earlier, at which Lorde had presented her landmark essay “The

Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” There, Lorde had sought to illuminate the importance of honestly and fearlessly considering differences of “race, sexuality, class, and age” in “any feminist discussion of the personal and the political”: “Difference must not merely be tolerated,” she had insisted, “but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening.”14 Yet in a lengthy letter sent afterward on behalf of eight of the conference’s organizers, Lorde had been accused of various forms of derailment and, as the letter phrased it, of

“‘the kind of vindictive and guilt-provoking politics that so often arise from powerlessness.’”15

Olson notes that photocopies of the letter “abound in Lorde’s papers” and that she had transcribed parts of it verbatim for inclusion in “The Uses of Anger” (293). Her poem “Who Said It Was

Simple” (1973), published a decade earlier, conveys just as powerfully the intricacies of oppression and the corrosiveness of unmetabolized anger experienced by a multiply-minoritized feminist in the

1970s. It also resonates with Lorde’s famous remark, made elsewhere, that “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives”:16

There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear.

14 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider, 111.

15 Lester C. Olson, “Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde’s 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women’s Studies Assosciation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (Aug. 2011): 294.

16 Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s,” in Sister Outsider, 138.

66 Sitting in Nedicks the women rally before they march discussing the problematic girls they hire to make them free. An almost white counterman passes a waiting brother to serve them first and the ladies neither notice nor reject the slighter pleasures of their slavery. But I who am bound by my mirror as well as my bed see causes in colour as well as sex

and sit here wondering which me will survive all these liberations.17

Deliberately subtracted, by contrast, from all personal content and sociohistorical citation,

(Riding) Jackson’s “In Defence of Anger”—philosophically abstract in its very title—had gone no further in its identification of anger’s sources or targets than to say that “the kind of association in which anger occurs may vary: it may be a close personal relationship, or an association through assumed membership in the same social or professional body, or one based on an axiomatic assumption of membership in humanity, or on a courteous assumption of membership in a liberally inclusive order of intelligence and decency.”18 Though it could keenly witness how “people with a capacity for anger are undoubtedly a problem to people who do not like to be exposed to observation and judgment and yet wish to circulate freely in the world” (95)—and although its author could claim to “love seeing a person in anger as I love hearing a person think: we do not often so honour one another” (96)—neither this nor any other of (Riding) Jackson’s writings would be able or willing to recognize, let alone seek to creatively activate, those many crucial differences

17 Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: Norton, 1997), 92.

18 Riding, “In Defence of Anger,” 88.

67 additional to gender that Lorde’s work was everywhere committed to articulating. As Lorde presented the situation to her audience at the NWSA conference, “We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea.”19 But the anger of black women was not the sort of material that (Riding) Jackson, as equipped as her theory of whole seriousness might have been to countenance it and as far and wide into the twentieth century as her life and work would take her, ever even began to approach.

So strategically determined was her kind of seriousness—her kind of telling aligned with a Spinozist

“intuitive science”—to avoid lapsing into other orders of knowledge that even when she did want to address something like race and racial (in)equality she would have to use another word for it: “If we are all of one breed, as the name ‘human’ hypothesizes, and this is the breed of creatures that can achieve by exchanges of mind one understanding, as our being makers of words to mean out meaning to one another claims for us, should you not be to me, each one of you, each one of us besides myself, as one of my own? And should I not be to each one of you as one of your own?”20

(Riding) Jackson admits a certain privilege of distance in her “Defence”: “One is…only hypothetically angry with those who commit offenses against others, if one has no personal contact with the offending and offended persons. One judges,” she observes, “but one does not feel. The judgment is consciously applied to the situation from without, as to history; it is not unexpectedly and immediately provoked in one” (89). And she furthermore confesses: “I do not get angry often, but sometimes; because, of the difficult occasions which compose my experience, there are many

19 Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” 128.

20 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “The Answer,” in Under The Mind’s Watch: Concerning Issues of Language, Literature, Life of Contemporary Bearing, ed. John Nolan and Alan J. Clark (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), 516.

68 more which satisfy than which do not” (96). Although (Riding) Jackson convinces us, then, to view a particular kind of anger as “a concrete and natural gesture” (99) in the service of her kind of seriousness, her experience and presentation of it would remain limited to that of a racially unmarked, heterosexual subject whose critiques of the women’s movement—of what she judged in the 1960s and ’70s to be “the propagandistic swelling of feminist activity taking its cue of self- assertive individualism” from men and “their maleness”21—suggest that (Riding) Jackson’s engagement with the feminist movement was itself limited to feminism’s whitest and most reformist expressions. That her single reference to Black culture in The Telling (1972), moreover, does nothing but vaguely and cynically proclaim that “some American negroes” were just as guilty of producing “anti-visionary” “clamor-philosophy” as were the counter-culture’s “light-faced clamorers” shows just how narrow her engagement with Black thought and struggle through the

’60s must have been.22 And that it is none other than a white Danish storyteller who comes along in one of (Riding) Jackson’s early parable-fictions, “A Crown for Hans Andersen” (1935), to liberate “the tales of bemused black people”23 from their superstitious withholding of “‘the secrets that are not spoken of except by the initiated dance-men’” (256) shows just how stealthily a racist fear of difference can subsist in an otherwise radical feminist project through a laziness of encounter and a Eurocentric desire for taxonomic definition.24 “As white women ignore their built-

21 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Body & Mind and the Linguistic Ultimate,” in The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader, ed. Elizabeth Friedmann (New York: Persea Books, 2005), 300.

22 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 89. “Professional revolutionaryism, historic liberalism, typical modern radicalism, have all become assimilated to the feeble intellectual motivation that characterizes the agitated contemporary pursuit of change,” (Riding) Jackson protested, “—and assimilated to one another, in their adapting themselves to its emotional mood, which is anti-visionary, not visionary” (88).

23 Laura Riding, “A Crown for Hans Andersen,” Progress of Stories (New York: Persea Books, 1994), 255.

24 I’m grateful to my friend Aisha Sasha John, who in re-reading Laura Riding’s Progress of Stories with me a couple of years ago helped me better attend to some of the serious shortcomings of one of our mutually-favorite writers. As

69 in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone,” Lorde would maintain in a 1980 essay, “then women of Color become ‘other,’ the outsider whose experience and tradition is too ‘alien’ to comprehend.”25

It is thus through Lorde’s correspondent but more ample form of attention to what she calls

“the danger inherent in an incomplete vision”26 that this chapter brings the question of difference to bear more substantially on the question of seriousness—on (Riding) Jackson’s fidelity to the

“serious simplicity of truthfulness”27 that she determined could obtain in an act of woman-oriented

“telling,” as elaborated in my first chapter, but that she falsely believed needed to overwrite the politics of identity beyond that. In what follows, I will show how Lorde’s own praxis of telling shared with (Riding) Jackson’s what editor Nancy K. Bereano, in her introduction to Lorde’s Sister

Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), aptly characterizes as an anti-dualist “impulse toward wholeness”28 and what Adrienne Rich, in a well-known interview with Lorde, describes as a project of “rejecting the distortions, keeping what we can use.”29 I will reveal how Lorde’s relationship to poetry operated and expressed itself very similarly to (Riding) Jackson’s as a refusal to settle for what Lorde deemed “basically uncreative victories” in both art-making and everyday social life.30 I will reaffirm, throughout, how both writers upheld faculties of intuition and feminine memory as tools for truth-telling—how for neither writer would the master’s tools ever dismantle the master’s

Aisha put it in an email in late 2015, “She chooses to dismiss African storytelling instead of entering it—how much racism is laziness and want for order, easy category.”

25 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” 116.

26 Audre Lorde, “Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response,” in Sister Outsider, 77.

27 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 144.

28 Nancy K. Bereano, introduction to Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde, 8.

29 Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich,” in Sister Outsider, 108.

30 Audre Lorde, “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” in Sister Outsider, 51.

70 house. But I will argue, ultimately, toward two related theses: first, that despite the remarkable number of points on which Lorde’s and (Riding) Jackson’s visions converge, Lorde’s intimacy with the need for such Black-feminist lenses as intersectionality and “multiple jeopardy”31 render her whole seriousness more whole than (Riding) Jackson’s; and second, that it is Lorde’s investment in a particular sense of “the erotic”—as “not just sexual” but “as a force of life which courses through all the ways that we experience life”32 and which literally aids survival—that most definitively exposes the limits of (Riding) Jackson’s candor.

candour | candor, n. Etymology: 17th cent. candor, < Latin candor (-ōrem) dazzling whiteness, brilliancy, innocency, purity, sincerity, < root cand-of candēre to be white and shining, ac-cendĕre to set alight, kindle: compare candid, candle. French candeur (16th cent. in Littré) may have aided; the 14th cent. example is properly Latin. †1. Brilliant whiteness; brilliancy. Obs. †2. Stainlessness of character; purity, integrity, innocence. Obs. †3. Freedom from mental bias, openness of mind; fairness, impartiality, justice. †4. Freedom from malice, favourable disposition, kindliness; ‘sweetness of temper, kindness’ (Johnson). Obs. †5. Freedom from reserve in one’s statements; openness, frankness, ingenuousness, outspokenness. 33

I enter Lorde’s writing, and her particular inhabitation and amplification of the vision of whole seriousness, with a premise afforded by the work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in their

31 See Rudolph P. Byrd’s “Create Your Own Fire: Audre Lorde and the Tradition of Black Radical Thought,” his introduction to I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), for a summary of Lorde’s relationship to the work of critical race theorists Kimberlé Crenshaw and Deborah K. King, among others (29).

32 Audre Lorde, “Poetry and Day-By-Day Experience: Excerpts from a Conversation on 12 June 1986 in Berlin,” by Karen Nölle-Fischer, in Hall, Conversations, 156.

33 OED Online, s.v. “candour | candor, n,” accessed Apr. 5, 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/27009? redirectedFrom=candor.

71 collaboration The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013). The premise is that a difference exists, has for centuries existed, and must continuously be looked and listened for between a commons of the Enlightenment and what Harney and Moten call “the undercommons of enlightenment”34—“the nonplace that must be thought outside to be sensed inside, from which the enlightenment-type charade has stolen everything for its game” (39). While many other scholars have offered accounts of Kant and what one of these scholars, Irene Tucker, has termed the

Enlightenment’s “moment of racial sight,”35 Harney and Moten’s distinction between a commons and an undercommons of enlightenment is singularly useful for my purposes. Architecturally and as a poetics, it reflects my dissertation’s operative distinguishing so far between two kinds of seriousness: one with Kant, Arnold, Arendt, and Trilling in its lineage, the other emerging from a modified, feminized reading of Spinoza that makes better room than Spinoza himself did for the adequacy of anger in the task of critique. Harney and Moten deepen the history and raise the stakes of this key distinction, more specifically, as I argue Lorde does when she speaks of “spirituality,” for example, not as “an easy, surface spirituality that comes along with the American desire to trivialize and oversimplify so much of our existence” but as “that very deeply rooted consciousness that we are part of something that didn’t start with us, that came from before and will continue after we

34 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 26.

35 See Irene Tucker, The Moment of Racial Sight: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), for an analysis of how black bodies (or racialized skin, in particular) come to represent in Kant an ineluctable “opacity”—a limit to the moral usefulness of “the disinterested body’s presumptive futurity” precisely due to that body’s “vulnerability to (contingent) pain and injury in the present” (60)—that compensates, Tucker argues, not only for Kant’s “excising of the Terror” in his late writings but also for his own conscious confrontation with death toward the end of his life. Another important offering in recent years is Jon M. Mikkelson’s Kant and the Concept of Race (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), a compendium of newly translated works from Kant’s oeuvre preceded by a clear introductory overview of the field’s contemporary debates that contributes productively to conversations around what Mikkelson cites as many scholars’ proposition of “‘the German invention of race’” and more broadly to those concerning “Kant’s importance for the development of modern of biology” (17).

72 have gone”;36 when she speaks of love not as “wishy-washy flowery love” but as a revolutionary orientation “that requires the nitty gritty alterations of institutions into our dreams”;37 when she speaks of the erotic not as “the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation… misnamed by men and used against women,” but as “a source of power and information”;38 or when she speaks, finally, of “poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.”39

At the heart of Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons we find, more or less in keeping with my elaboration of whole seriousness via (Riding) Jackson, a judgment against Kantian judgment itself—against what Moten describes, in an earlier article of his, as “that Kantian notion of freedom that depends upon smooth containment”40 or what Winfried Menninghaus, a Kant scholar cited by

Moten, refers to as a “‘politics of curtailment’” (269). Fundamentally informing his later argument developed with Harney in The Undercommons, however, Moten’s article, “Knowledge of Freedom,” extends and sharpens the critique of such “containment” by emphasizing how “the regulative discourse on the aesthetic that animates Kant’s critical philosophy is inseparable from the question of race as a mode of conceptualizing and regulating human diversity, grounding and justifying inequality and exploitation, as well as marking the limits of human knowledge” (270). The crucial starting point for Moten, in other words, isn’t simply that the sensus communis of Kantian judgment

36 Audre Lorde, “Audre Lorde: A Radio Profile,” by Jennifer Abod, in Hall, Conversations, 162.

37 Audre Lorde, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” by Susan Cavin, in Hall, Conversations, 107.

38 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider, 53.

39 Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider, 37.

40 Fred Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” CR: The New Centennial Review 4, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 273.

73 is inadequate because it must “severely clip the wings”41 of the human imagination by bifurcating body and mind, but that it is also ideologically and structurally white insofar as the human imagination itself is always already racialized in Kant’s apprehension and taming of it—is always already “the moment,” as Alexander G. Weheliye suggests in his recent study Habeas Viscus:

Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, “in which blackness becomes apposite to humanity.”42 As editor Patrick Frierson admits in his introduction to Kant’s

Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), a text that anticipates Kant’s more entrenched scientific racism in “Of the Different Human Races” (1777), “Of the Use of Teleological

Principles in Philosophy” (1787), and parts of the third Critique, Kant’s “discussion of non-

European peoples contains some truly horrific mischaracterizations,” all reducible, we find, to the judgment that non-white nations and races are themselves incapable of disinterested judgment and the virtue of “moral feeling” that ostensibly accompanies it.43 “When Kant turns to ‘the Negroes of

Africa,’” Frierson notes, “his descriptions are truly reprehensible” (ibid.).

A brief summary of Kant’s Observations will suffice. Undertaking what Frierson cites as “a classic eighteenth-century taxonomy of human temperaments” (xxvii), this early text of Kant’s sets out to elaborate the ways in which a taste for the beautiful and sublime, as the “finer feeling” of human beings, “presupposes…a susceptibility of the soul which at the same time makes it fit for virtuous impulses”44—for reflective aesthetic judgment, as the Critique of Judgment will eventually

41 Kant, qtd. in Menninghaus, qtd. in Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” 269.

42 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 19.

43 Patrick Frierson, introduction to Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, by Immanuel Kant, ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xxvii.

44 Immanuel Kant, “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,” in Observations, 14.

74 formulate it. Just as he does in his later work, Kant here reads the promise of virtue in both the beautiful and the sublime but ultimately privileges the force of the sublime: “The sublime touches, the beautiful charms” (16). And here he explicitly observes that “the mien of the human being who finds himself in the full feeling of the sublime is serious” (ibid.). Some things that are sublime and therefore serious, according to the Observations, include “the simple” as opposed to “the decorated and ornamented” (17); “night” as opposed to “day” (16); “friendship” as opposed to “sexual love”

(19); “understanding” as opposed to “wit” (18); the “deeper understanding” of men as opposed to the “beautiful understanding” of women (36); and “the Germans, the English, and the Spaniards” as opposed to “the Italians and the French” (50). Upholding the Spanish as especially “serious, taciturn, and truthful” (52), Kant begins to register a significant moral declension—a deficiency of feeling for the beautiful and sublime as an available orientation for “the soul”—once his analysis departs from the aforementioned European nations. “The Dutchman,” for starters, “is of an orderly and industrious cast of mind, and since he looks only to what is useful, he has little feeling for what in a finer understanding is beautiful or sublime” (55). It is at this moment in the text that Kant most efficiently determines a person’s capacity for seriousness to be at odds with any requirement of usefulness, associating the latter with the characterological flaw he terms “conceitedness.” Note the attendant ascription of anger and emotional excess to this particular flaw, as well as an inability or unwillingness to read the potentiality for seriousness in persons regarded as in any way Other:

The conceited person is a haughty person who expresses distinct marks of the contempt of others in his conduct. In behavior he is coarse. This miserable quality is the most distant from the finer taste, because it is obviously stupid; for challenging everyone around one to hatred and biting mockery through open contempt is certainly not the means for satisfying the feeling for honor. (56)

Kant then moves on to “take a quick look through the other parts of the world”: “the

Arabs” he casts as “the Spaniards of the Orient,” “the Persians” as “the Frenchmen of Asia,” “the

75 Japanese” as “the Englishmen of this part of the world,” and “the Indians” and “the Chinese” as irremediably enthralled by the “ridiculous grotesqueries” of their respective religious, cultural, and linguistic practices (58). Certain “savages” of North America Kant sees as demonstrating “a sublime character of mind,” with “the Canadian savage” in particular assessed to be “truthful and honest” (59); “the other natives of this part of the world,” however, “show few traces of a character of mind which would be disposed to finer sentiments, and an exceptional lack of feeling constitutes the mark of these kinds of human beings” (60). But it is indeed “the Negroes of Africa,” as Frierson has warned Kant’s readers, who turn out in the Observations to “have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous” (58). Kant approvingly cites Hume in this passage for Hume’s notorious challenge to his contemporaries, in his 1748 essay “Of National Characters,” “to adduce a single example where a Negro has demonstrated talents…, has accomplished something great in art or science or shown any other praiseworthy quality” (58–59). Like Hume, Kant surmises “the difference between these two human kinds,” black and not-black, to be “essential,” and characterizes the difference to be “just as great with regard to the capacities of mind as it is with respect to color” (59). He adds, in wrapping up his moral survey of Africa and its diasporas, that

“the blacks are very vain, but in the Negro’s way, and so talkative that they must be driven apart from each other by blows” (59).

As Harney and Moten, extending their critique of “enlightenment self-control”45 to a critique of more contemporary expressions of racial capitalism, might just as neatly summarize

Kant’s Observations: “The ones who survive the brutality of mere survival are said by policy to lack vision, to be stuck in an essentialist way of life, and, in the most extreme cases, to be without

45 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 51.

76 interests, on the one hand, and incapable of disinterestedness, on the other” (77). Yet to dwell any further on the specifics of Enlightenment inventions of race (or practices of racism) would be beside the larger point that Harney and Moten are making. For their work doesn’t simply or even precisely articulate an opposition to Kant; it is in and of itself, more vitally, a performance and a reminder of the fugitive life and lives that the black radical tradition, “in apposition to enlightenment,”46 has always been able—has always had—to accommodate and nurture. They speak, therefore, not of or to the “common sense”47 of the commons nor any other aspirational community-to-come, but of and to “the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back” (28). Insisting on the immanence of such an ensemble—what Moten’s earlier article would call an “improvisatory whole,”48 what

Weheliye could call racializing assemblages, or what Sharpe would call being in the wake (“in the no- space that the law is not bound to respect”49)—Harney and Moten write:

We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic. We surround democracy’s false image in order to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a decision, we’re undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, we’re unwilling. Every time it tries to take root, we’re gone (because we’re already here, moving). We ask and we tell and we cast the spell that we are under, which tells us what to do and how we shall be moved, here, where we dance the war of apposition.50

46 Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” 274, emphasis mine.

47 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 51.

48 Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” 282.

49 Sharpe, In the Wake, 16.

50 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 19.

77 (Riding) Jackson danced a war of apposition, I’ve suggested, in her lifelong project to unsettle poetry’s false image—this to reveal the inadequacy of “masculine moral optics”51 and

“masculine humanism” (186) more broadly—and in her accompanying disappointment in modes of feminism that “striv[e] for complete social liberation” on what could only be men’s terms, in her wanting “a different kind of complete liberation” instead (203). She danced a war of apposition through a form of telling whose “conditions of discovery are…very bare, of an utmost simpleness”52—a strategy of “treating the Subject,” as she writes in The Telling, “in its simple nakedness as ours—not covered with the traditional discourse in which it has been jealously sheltered, nor displayed in shameless caricatures, such as those with which the intellectual bazaars are now overstocked” (59). Yet with her persistent identification of the vision of whole seriousness and “woman-nature” with attributes all too consistent with the Kantian sublime—with attributes of exactness, demarcation, and both linguistic and sexual austerity, the latter aggressively manifesting in a late essay as outright homophobia53—one suspects that the author of Rational Meaning: A New

Foundation for the Definition of Words would have failed to tell the difference between the “disorderly experimentalism” she rejected in her day and what Harney and Moten, in a more recent collaboration, describe as the “contact improvisation” by which some “survive genocide.”54 One

51 Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman” and Other Related Writings, ed. Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark (New York: Persea Books, 1993), 201.

52 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 108.

53 In her short essay titled simply “Homosexuality,” drafted in the late ’70s and eventually published in Under The Mind’s Watch, (Riding) Jackson cast the same culturally-skeptical eye on her topic as she would on any other: “Generally,” she writes, “where homosexuality has been a tolerated behavior mode in societies as a natural form of the unnatural, there attaches to it a character of superiority of some sort, in the attitude of toleration and in the view of those addicted to it” (449). It is a “vice,” she imagines, insofar as “body and mind are only formally united in homosexual activity; the body acts as the part of self to the mind, but nobody is there, the personal circumstance is soul-less” (448).

54 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Michael Brown,” boundary 2 42, no. 4 (Nov. 2015): 87.

78 suspects that some of the inadvertently formal(ist) aspects of her distinction between T and ⊥ would not, in every possible expression of whole seriousness, hold water.

The last chapter of The Undercommons is where Harney and Moten make the connection most explicit and necessary between a poetics, sonics, or “feel” of the undercommons and what its earlier chapters build toward articulating as “a global politics of blackness emerging out of slavery and colonialism” (64). More specifically, it is where they unambiguously ground and return their discourse—what might formally resemble postmodern or “disorderly” tropes and motifs of

“brokenness and crumpling, the imposition of irrationally rationalized angles, compartments bearing nothing but breath and battery in hunted, haunted, ungendered intimacy” (97)—in and to the content of a very specific historythat of the Atlantic slave trade as “the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak” (92). In thus addressing what they call “the rise of logistics” (88), or alternately “containerisation,” not only as the general mechanism of later forms of capitalist biopolitics but as the “regulatory innovation” of the economic and political systems of enslavement and colonialism that preceded them (89), Harney and Moten ask:

If the proletariat was located at a point in the circuits of capital, a point in the production process from which it had a peculiar view of capitalist totality, what of those who were located at every point, which is to say at no point, in the production process? What of those who were not just labor but commodity, not just in production but in circulation, not just in circulation but in distribution as property, not just property but property that reproduced and realized itself? The standpoint of no standpoint, everywhere and nowhere, of never and to come, of thing and nothing. If the proletariat was thought capable of blowing the foundations sky high, what of the shipped, what of the containerized? What could such flesh do? (93)

Echoing Hortense J. Spillers’s oft-cited distinction, in her 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe:

79 An American Grammar Book,” between a body as “captive” and flesh as “liberated”55 under “the sociopolitical order of the New World” and the “inveterate obscene violence” of the Middle Passage in particular (70), this moment in The Undercommons invokes “such flesh” as Spillers does. In her words, “flesh” is “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography,” but that nevertheless remains more available than the “body” does as a “primary narrative” for the thinking of anti-Western-patriarchal subject-positions precisely in its condition of “seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ overboard” (63). In her powerful theorization,

Those African persons in “Middle Passage” were literally suspended in the “oceanic,” if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not- yet “American” either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all. Inasmuch as, on any given day, we might imagine, the captive personality did not know where s/he was, we could say that they were the culturally “unmade,” thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that “exposed their destinies” to an unknown course. Often enough for the captains of these galleys, navigational science of the day was not sufficient to guarantee the intended destination. We might say that the slave ship, its crew, its human-as-cargo stand in for a wild and unclaimed richness of possibility that is not interrupted, not “counted”/“accounted,” or differentiated, until its movement gains the land thousands of miles away from the point of departure. (72)

It is through such horrific and radical dispossession, Spillers suggests and The Undercommons echoes, that “we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific” (67), with

“such flesh” essentially becoming “a counter-narrative to notions of the domestic” (72). What this opens up, post hoc, for Black subjects—and for Black masculinized subjects in particular—in an age of

55 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 67.

80 Moynihan Report-style diagnoses and lamentations of “a cultural situation that is father-lacking,”

Spillers concludes, is a form of access to “the insurgent ground” of feminized subjectivity (one that never needed a Father) instead (80).56 As Weheliye summarizes in reference to Spillers’ theoretical legacy, “The articulation of the flesh as a racializing assemblage in the world of Man cannot be apprehended by legal recognition and inclusion,”57 and it is with this verdict in mind that he can begin to answer the driving question of his project: “How might we go about thinking and living enfleshment otherwise so as to usher in different genres of the human and how might we accomplish this task through the critical project of black studies?” (2).

To an extent, Harney and Moten’s formulation, earlier in their study, of what they term “the subversive intellectual” of the undercommons can be seen to apply equally to (Riding) Jackson and

Lorde. As they elaborate in “The University and the Undercommons,” the book’s second chapter,

“the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor,” they explain (choosing their pronoun carefully), “is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings.”58 Hence in both opposition and apposition to institutional “Governance”—which they observe is “for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly,…who have opinions and want to be taken seriously by serious people” (81)—the “subversive intellectual” represents a form of energetic amplitude, of “prophetic organization” (24) and a necessarily different kind of seriousness, counterinsurgent to such forces as

56 Spillers goes so far as to affirm at the end of her essay that “the black American male embodies the only American community of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself, the infant child who bears the life against the could-be fateful gamble, against the odds of pulverization and murder, including her own. It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood—the power of ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within” (80).

57 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 73.

58 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 26.

81 “professionalization” and “policy.” Harney and Moten define the former, importantly, not “as a narrowing” of vision and resources (as “professionalization” is typically taken to do at its worst) but “as a circling, an encircling of war wagons around the last camp of indigenous women and children” (34); the latter they define, bluntly, as “baseless vision, woven into settler’s fabric” (81).

Resistant to such forces, the labors and tellings of both (Riding) Jackson and Lorde uphold something closely akin to what Harney and Moten term study, which Moten (in an interview featured at the back of The Undercommons) describes simply as “what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice” (110)—hence the subtitle of

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Both (Riding) Jackson and Lorde, we can further compare, critique the “common sense” of aesthetic judgment on the basis of its long career’s substitutions of “Man” for humanity itself. But it is only Lorde, “bound” additionally by her mirror and her bed—whose seriousness must thereby incorporate an attention to racial and sexual difference in addition to gender difference—who would perceive the ways in which “Governance,” as Harney and Moten conclude, “is the extension of whiteness on a global scale” (56), or who ought to be counted among those whom Harney and Moten call, with even deeper love than for the subversive intellectual, “philosophers of the feel” (99).

It is Harney and Moten’s “Fantasy in the Hold” chapter that attends, as Spillers’s essay and other wake work does, to the violent dispossessions and attendant forms of “possibility” that both physically and semiotically took hold in the actual hold of the slave ship and that, as they put it, “are now recomposed in the wake of the shipped” (98). In their elaboration,

The hold’s terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings in common, to create a new feel in the undercommons. Previously, this kind of feel was only an exception, an aberration, a shaman, a witch, a seer, a poet amongst others, who felt through

82 others, through other things. Previously, except in these instances, feeling was mine or it was ours. But in the hold, in the undercommons of a new feel, another kind of feeling became common. This form of feeling was not collective, not given to decision, not adhering or reattaching to settlement, nation, state, territory or historical story; nor was it repossessed by the group, which could not now feel as one, reunited in time and space. No, when Black Shadow sings “are you feelin’ the feelin?” he is asking about something else. He is asking about a way of feeling through others, a feel for feeling others feeling you. This is modernity’s insurgent feel, its inherited caress, its skin talk, tongue touch, breath speech, hand laugh. This is the feel that no individual can stand, and no state abide. This is the feel we might call hapticality. (97–98)

Thus obviating the kind of exceptionalism necessary to the categorical imperative of Kantian moral feeling—the feeling-for-the-beautiful-and-sublime of which depends on a self-possessed body, not flesh, far away enough from death (the Terror) to experience itself at a safe remove from physical suffering and pain—the “feel” of “hapticality” obtains instead in a history of bodies-rendered-flesh literally “lying together in the ship, the boxcar, the prison, the hostel” (98). Of such a-positionality,

Harney and Moten ask:

Can this being together in homelessness, this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon appositionality, be a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question? Not simply to be among his own; but to be among his own in dispossession, to be among the ones who cannot own, the ones who have nothing and who, in having nothing, have everything. (96)

It is at this point that the limitedly serious vision of cosmopolitanism and the wholly serious vision of fugitivity, while at times superficially resembling each other, most clearly announce their difference: one is occupied at a distance, invulnerable, and genealogically white

(believing itself to be transparent and universal), while the other is shared through touch and is genealogically oriented around “blackness,” which Harney and Moten note “must be understood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged insofar as they are given (to) an understanding of it” (47). Harney and Moten avoid recapitulating post-

83 modernism’s fetishizations of fugitivity, “homelessness,” or flux more generally by recognizing the gift as a “terrible” one, but also and more importantly by eschewing any a priori, essentialist equation of blackness with being thus gifted: “Because while certain abilities—to connect, to translate, to adapt, to travel—were forged in the experiment of the hold, they were not the point”

(97). In this way, like Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus, The Undercommons will seek “to reclaim the atrocity of flesh as a pivotal arena for the politics emanating from different traditions of the oppressed. The flesh,” as Weheliye argues in his reading of its valuelessness as value, “rather than displacing bare life or civil death, excavates the social (after)life of these categories: it represents racializing assemblages of subjection that can never annihilate the lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds.”59 That these “abilities” were forged, historically and economically produced, and that they continue to be socially reproduced in various zones of violence and precarity—rather than taken for granted as natural rights, as formalist entitlements, or as miraculous gifts of God’s (or Man’s) creation—is what makes the difference meaningful, if not always readily visible to those unaccustomed to taking racial and sexual difference seriously.

Harney and Moten’s formulation of hapticality aligns closely and productively with certain gestures in queer theorizing outside of black studies as well. It brings to mind rather vividly, for example, William Haver’s thesis that “the common is a fluid, not a solid; the physics of the common is a hydraulics, not a mechanics,”60 and that we access this common best, maybe only, “as utter fools”: “under bridges, in abandoned warehouses, in alleys, bars, and baths, in backrooms, dungeons, and gyms, in parks, sex shops, and bookstores: even, indeed, in bedrooms and,

59 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 2.

60 William Haver, “A Sense of the Common,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 447–48.

84 astonishingly, in classrooms.”61 Haver has long argued in defense of a better, queerer,

“pornographic” reading of the Kantian common, for “a queer aesthetics of existence” as “the work of non-transcendence” (13). As he characterizes this work in his 1999 essay “Really Bad Infinities:

Queer’s Honour and the Pornographic Life”:

A pornographic aesthetics of existence never tells a story, and it does not tell that story because it refuses (such is its honour, such is its discipline) to redeem aisthēsis in aesthetics, but remains steadfast in its attention to the material manifold in its sensuous sensuality and to the chaos of the affects and passions. Second, consequent, qualification: such an aesthetics of existence cannot be codified. It is not that there are no rules, but that by virtue of our inescapable historicity (our groundlessness), we necessarily make up the rules as we go. (ibid.)

For Haver, queer’s honour “resides entirely in this holding-fast to the flesh” (9), in what he describes as “an absolute fidelity to the fetish” (12) and hence, he claims, to the “here, now, this”

(20) of a “signifier without a signified” (12). In this his effort resembles that of a critical race scholar like Denise Ferreira da Silva: “I can’t even begin to describe the treasures The Thing hides,”62 she writes, recommending a fidelity to “The Thing”—namely G. W. F. Hegel’s “no-thing,” the slave of (no) value63—as that which, “without space/time and the categories of social scientific knowledge it sustains,…immediately/instantaneously registers (mediates without transforming, reducing, or sublating) the relationships (violent and otherwise) that constitute our conditions of existence” (58). Yet one wonders, in reading Haver’s work alongside work that bears an absolute

61 William Haver, “Really Bad Infinities: Queer’s Honour and the Pornographic Life,” Parallax 5, no. 4 (1999): 11.

62 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “To Be Announced: Radical Praxis or Knowing (at) the Limits of Justice,” Social Text 114, 31, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 46.

63 “Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America,” Hegel writes and da Silva quotes as an epigraph. “Bad as this may be, their lot in their own lands is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing—an object of no value” (Hegel, qtd. in da Silva 43).

85 fidelity to flesh in the wake of both AIDS and other forms of “cumulative and specific death,”64 if

Haver’s aversion to “story” and his sometimes-fundamentalist espousals of “chaos” perhaps run the same kinds of risk that his commitment to rescuing the Kantian common does—that of fetishizing the concept of the fetish itself and of making it a bit too easy to forget, at times, that some modes of survival rely not only on the telling of stories but on projects of reclaiming land, or ground, that became what we now call “common” only once it had been “encircled” by whiteness.

For Audre Lorde, the question not only of usefulness but of so-called mere survival was primary. As she put it in a 1982 interview, “I’m interested in survival: in your survival, in my survival, in the survival of our children, in the survival of this earth. I see nothing as really very separate from that.”65 As she would maintain a few years later, “All of my work, if you wanted to put it on a wide enough grid, this is what it’s about. It is about surviving and sharing the stories of survival; and who would ever believe our stories unless we tell them?”66 And as her “Master’s

Tools” speech perhaps best drove it home, “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women, those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill.”67 That Lorde was struggling, while writing and speaking for so many audiences on so many forms of everyday social survival, also to survive an illness she’d been diagnosed with in 1978 could only have profoundly intensified these kinds of challenges for her.

64 Sharpe, In the Wake, 7.

65 Audre Lorde, “Interview: Audre Lorde Advocates Unity among Women,” by Shelley Savren and Cheryl Robinson, in Hall, Conversations, 81.

66 Lorde, “Audre Lorde: A Radio Profile,” 158.

67 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools,” 112.

86 But in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), the fictionalized memoir she termed “a biomythography” and finished writing a year and a half after undergoing a mastectomy for the breast cancer that would eventually metastasize to her liver and end her life, Lorde remarked on her inability and/or refusal to adhere to some restful, putatively “moral” mean: “I have often wondered why the farthest-out position always feels so right to me; why extremes, although difficult and sometimes painful to maintain, are always more comfortable than one plan running straight down a line in the unruffled middle.”68 In this way I suggest that the last thing all her struggling did was keep Lorde “stuck in an essentialist way of life” among what Harney and Moten refer to as the

“Planners” of the undercommons—those whom Enlightenment would deem “static, essential, just surviving.”69 From Enlightenment’s standpoint, planners “do not see clearly”; instead, Harney and

Moten write, “They hear things. They lack perspective. They fail to see complexity. To the deputies, planners have no vision, no real hope for the future, just a plan here and now, an actually existing plan” (ibid.).

Lorde admits, on the one hand, that white people in America have, by and large, not had to be “planners” to the same degree that “outsiders” and “surplus people”70 have. White Americans are generally given “more time and space,” she notes, “to afford the luxury of scrutinizing their emotions,” whereas “Black people in this country have always had to attend closely to the hard and continuous work of survival in the most immediate and material planes.”71 But Lorde also describes it as an extremely dangerous “temptation” to slide from this fact into “the belief,” as she puts it,

68 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; A Biomythography (New York: Crossing Press, 1982), 15.

69 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 79.

70 Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” 115.

71 Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” in Sister Outsider, 171.

87 “that Black people do not need to examine our feelings; or that they are unimportant, since they have so often been used to stereotype and infantilize us; or that these feelings are not vital to our survival; or, worse, that there is some acquired virtue in not feeling them deeply” (ibid.). In “Poetry

Is Not a Luxury” (1977) she figures the dichotomy as follows: “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”72 Yet Lorde advocates above all “the fusion of these two approaches” amongst her fellow Black-mother-poets, not only identifying this fusion as “the keystone to our survival as a race,” but also insisting that “we come closest to this combination in our poetry”

(37).73 In both opposition and apposition to Kantian aesthetics, then, Lorde maintains that “social protest” and “art” are “inseparable”: “Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me,” she tells an interviewer in 1979, “but then it never did. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died.”74

One of Lorde’s early poems, from her second book Cables to Rage (1970), imagines what it would look like if its speaker didn’t believe that poetry could and had to be lifesaving:

“After a first book”

Paper is neither kind nor cruel only white in its neutrality and I have for reality now the brown bar of my arm moving in broken rhythms

72 Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” 38.

73 “I believe,” Lorde would add in a 1975 interview, “that the word ‘mother’ needs to be fed into the grinder and come out M-H-T, whatever, come out initials, or come out just pap which we can then spread, because I believe it is part and parcel of us all, and I think that it’s one of the saving principles of human relationships, that we do help each other, that we do respond in terms of survival and teaching. And that’s what motherhood is all about.” Audre Lorde, “Interview with Audre Lorde,” by Margaret Kaminski, in Hall, Conversations, 5.

74 Audre Lorde, “My Words Will Be There,” interview by Mari Evans, in Hall, Conversations, 75.

88 across this dead place.

All the poems I have ever written are historical reviews of a now absorbed country a small judgment hawking and coughing them up I have ejected them not unlike children now my throat is clear perhaps I shall speak again.

All the poems I have ever written make a small book the shedding of my past in patched conceits moulted like snake skin, a book of leavings now I can do anything I wish I can love them or hate them use them for comfort or warmth tissues or decoration dolls or Japanese baskets blankets or spells; I can use them for magic lanterns or music advice or small council for napkins or past-times or disposable diapers I can make fire from them or kindling songs or paper chains

Or fold them all into a paper fan with which to cool my husband’s dinner.75

With poetry for poetry’s sake here rendered a “dead place”—wherein its likeliest fate will be to help reproduce the terms of the poet’s domestication despite her ability, bracketed to the poem’s middle stanzas, to picture different and better uses for it—Lorde’s speaker must decide how to proceed.

How should she orient herself around or against the enforced “neutrality” of the white page? How

75 Lorde, Collected Poems, 32.

89 can she bring her own “reality”—“the brown bar of my arm,” its “broken rhythms,” her latent angers—to bear on this “unruffled middle”? How to “make fire” with her poems instead of making them easier for someone like her husband to consume?76

Lorde would go on to make much—including much art—of her “lack” of vision, in part by making much of the impaired eyesight that had afflicted her since the age of four. A particularly illuminating exchange on the topic unfolds in a 1987 radio interview:

Jennifer Abod: Those beautiful fractured forms and tumbling words happened because she could not see; and poor vision, says Lorde, accounts for the intensity with which she has learned to scrutinize things and people. Lorde has a passion for detail and can spend hours walking along a beach in search of shells, making use of them later in one of her necklaces.

Audre Lorde: I made this necklace. I don’t know if you can see the macramé stitches that hold the rocks and shells together, but they’re very very fine. I love that kind of work. When I have my glasses off, I’m functionally blind at any ten feet, but I have a focal point that’s about three inches in front of my eyes, so I have a very microscopic vision. And I love to do things. I love to see deeply into things, so when I look at you…, [when] I look at you in a way that makes you feel important, it is because I am scrutinizing you, and I am looking carefully at you because I demand of all things that I look at that I see them, deeply and clearly; and I look at you the same way I look at the rocks and the shells and the threads and the little miniature things that I put together, the mosaics…My eyes are always hungry for detail, and I think this has colored the way I write, and it’s colored the way in which I look at the world, and it’s colored my life. It is what I have come to demand of my seeing.77

The deterioration, correction, and further deterioration of her eyesight is chronicled throughout

Zami, and Lorde tells at one point of the exacerbating effect of the diagnostic process on her vision

76 Lorde was married to a white man, Edwin Rollins, from 1960–62 and had two children with him. “At this time I was a young librarian doing work that I was very involved in,” she reflects at one point in A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (dir. Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson [Germany: Third World Newsreel, 1995]). “I loved library work. I had two children. I was coming out of what was essentially a three-year depression, struggling to keep my writing going in the total absence of any kind of literary reflection—no one bought my poems, there were no readings, no one listened to them. I just wrote in isolation and raised two children, right, and warred with my husband, who did not see in many respects what I was about but nonetheless was the only man I’d ever met that I would even consider sharing life with” (17:04–17:46).

77 Lorde, “Audre Lorde: A Radio Profile,” 159.

90 as a young girl on summer vacation in Connecticut: “The dilating drops were used by the Medical

Center eye doctors to examine the progress of my eyes,” she narrates, “and since the effects seem to have lasted for weeks, my memories of those early summers are of constantly squinting against the piercing agony of direct sunlight, while stumbling over objects that I could not see, since everything was dazzled by light.”78 The implication being that the correction of her vision, repeatedly administered by enlightened (presumably white) New England eye doctors to measure her

“progress,” did more damage than good for her seeing, this “agony of direct sunlight” overtaking the “colored” vision with which she was naturally intimate and could, in fact, see more—as well as more connectively, as her description of “the macramé stitches that hold the rocks and shells together” suggests.

What Zami’s ruminations on eyesight treatment lend to a reading of the whole seriousness of Lorde’s vision—of its “objectivity” as a particular kind of “blind sight” that “preserves the artifact or variation that would have been erased in the name of truth”79 (or in the name of perfect ocular health)—also anticipates and reverberates with Lorde’s later accounts of her cancer treatment. In

The Cancer Journals she observes: “Any holistic approach to the problem of cancer is viewed by

ACS”—the American Cancer Society (“the largest philanthropic institution in the United States and the world’s largest non-religious charity”)—“with suspicion and alarm. It has consistently focused upon treatment rather than prevention of cancer, and then only upon those treatments sanctioned by the most conservative branches of western medicine.”80 Her recollections of her post-op hospital room in New York City are especially illustrative of how Lorde had to negotiate the world of

78 Lorde, Zami, 43.

79 Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 17.

80 Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Late Books, 1980), 73–74.

91 western medicine—again metonymic for Enlightenment—and its project to keep women, especially non-white women, from activating more intuitive and holistic approaches to their healing (and to their living more generally):

I was very anxious to go home. But I found, also, and couldn’t admit at the time, that the very bland whiteness of the hospital which I railed against and hated so, was also a kind of protection, a welcome insulation within which I could continue to not-feel. It was an erotically blank environment within whose undifferentiated and undemanding and infantilizing walls I could continue to be emotionally vacant— psychic mush—without being required by myself or anyone to be anything else. (46)

A similar ambivalence is apparent here, as in “After a first book,” toward what Tess Taylor has recently referred to as “forced transcendence,” this in her analysis of the myth of the postracial in contemporary American literature and culture.81 The white hospital room, like the white page, may seem safe to the extent that it successfully numbs real emotion and offers what Sara Ahmed, in her own work on Lorde and other “Feminist Killjoys,” “Unhappy Queers,” and “Melancholic Migrants,” has called “the promise of happiness.”82 But its promise is a distortion, and it is ultimately designed for profit. As Lorde observes in The Cancer Journals,

It is easier to demand happiness than to clean up the environment. The acceptance of illusion and appearance as reality is another symptom of this same refusal to examine the realities of our lives. Let us seek “joy” rather than real food and clean air and a saner future on a livable earth! As if happiness alone can protect us from the results of profit-madness.83

It is in more visionary, less fearful, and more self-consciously “colored” moments that Lorde will ask not only “How did I ever come to be in this place?” but, in the same breath, “What can I use it

81 Tess Taylor, “Of Whiteness, Obama, and the So-Called Postracial,” The Racial Imaginary, ed. Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap (Albany, NY: Fence Books, 2015), 98.

82 See Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), a book dedicated to Audre Lorde—“For teaching me so much about everything” (n.p.).

83 Lorde, The Cancer Journals, 76.

92 for?”84 Of her cancer, she concludes, “I see this as a serious break in my work/living, but also as a serious chance to learn something that I can share for use” (ibid.). This single sentence alone shows how different versions or meanings of that which we refer to as “serious” can lie in apposition to one another, simultaneously resembling each other and competing for very different kinds of holds on our attention and being—one threatening death, the other offering life.

Like most of the essays, speeches, and interviews included in Sister Outsider, The Cancer

Journals, A Burst of Light, and elsewhere, and like so many of Lorde’s poems across her ten collections of poetry, Zami works by disclosing how experiences of despair—analogously to experiences of anger—get converted into material and insights that can actually be used, whether by Lorde herself or by other women facing similar struggles. As Lorde insists in an earlier interview,

“the only kind of pain that is intolerable is pain that is wasteful, pain from which we do not learn.”85 And as she concludes in A Burst of Light, “If one Black woman I do not know gains hope and strength from my story, then it has been worth the difficulty of telling.”86 An early entry in The

Cancer Journals (1980) describes Zami and its completion as follows:

1 / 20 / 80 The novel is finished at last. It has been a lifeline. I do not have to win in order to know my dreams are valid, I only have to believe in a process of which I am a part. My work kept me alive this past year, my work and the love of women. They are inseparable from each other. In the recognition of the existence of love lies an answer to despair. Work is that recognition given voice and name.87

84 Audre Lorde, “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer,” A Burst of Light: Essays (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988), 89.

85 Lorde, “My Words Will Be There,” 74.

86 Lorde, “A Burst of Light,” 130.

87 Lorde, The Cancer Journals, 11.

93 A perfect example of what Moten’s “Knowledge of Freedom” essay would uphold as an

“autobiography of ensemble,”88 or even of what Haver refers to as a kind of “pornography” that “is not a second-order pursuit, but the very stuff of life, the bundle of the affects, passions, deliria, and so on by and as which autobiography exceeds the grasp of ‘biography,’”89 the “novel”90 to which

Lorde refers is dedicated to three women. “To Helen,” it begins, naming one of Lorde’s two older sisters, “who made up the best adventures”; “To Blanche, with whom I lived many of them,” who does not make an appearance in Zami but who battled cancer alongside Lorde and whose presence is felt in her final book, A Burst of Light (1988); and “To the hands of Afrekete,”91 the last of her lovers

Lorde chooses to name in Zami for the lesson in rebeginnings92 she helps to drive home: as Lorde relates at the very end of the book, having come a long way in her capacity to translate the devastation of failed romances into opportunities for spiritual and political extension in the world,

“I never saw Afrekete again, but her print remains upon my life with the resonance and power of an emotional tattoo” (253). A line from Lorde’s “1 / 20 / 80” journal entry would also surface on

88 Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” 286. Moten’s own reading focuses on Leon F. Litwack’s study Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery but also allows itself to be extended to other narratives.

89 Haver, “Really Bad Infinities,” 19.

90 I have chosen not to differentiate between Lorde as author and Lorde as Zami’s narrator. Though Lorde refers to the book as a “novel” in The Cancer Journals and as “a fiction built from many sources” in a 1982 interview (“Audre Lorde,” by Claudia Tate, in Hall, Conversations, 99), any possible payoff in reading Zami’s narrator as distinct from Lorde herself would be beside the point for the purpose of my analysis. Lorde’s other writings, along with Alexis de Veaux’s biography (Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde [New York: Norton, 2006]), corroborate my sense that Lorde the author and Lorde the narrator are deliberately conflated.

91 Lorde, Zami, n.p.

92 A mind and life oriented around “The Idea of Rebeginnings,” as (Riding) Jackson suggests in The Telling (82), will hold an anti-tragic, anti-eschatological worldview and an emotional constitution that sees itself entering into and leaving (and perhaps re-entering) a site of life “along the way, only,” as she puts it—or “only in a process of which I am a part,” as Lorde would have it—this “against the work of the ‘finishers’, which crowd the historical horizon” (The Telling 87). “Anywhere, anywhere, everywhere, everywhere, in a human being’s being can be a point of rebeginning so long as the false is not loved as the false,” (Riding) Jackson adds (97): “fate, I think, is honorable with us in the true difficulties, allowing us rebeginnings where they halt us” (177).

94 Zami’s dedication page, though in a slightly modified form: “In the recognition of loving lies an answer to despair,” it reads, the journal entry’s noun phrase “the existence of love” here actualized, eroticized, into “loving” in a way that would be excessive to (Riding) Jackson’s kind of seriousness but that succinctly registers the hapticality so vital to Lorde.

The telling undertaken by Zami then begins with a three-page supplement to the book’s dedication, in which Lorde answers these self-posed questions: “To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from under the bruised skin’s blister?”; “To whom do I owe the symbols of my survival?”(3); and “To whom do I owe the woman I have become?” (5).

Importantly, only a third of the people identified in this section are thanked for the things they did right by Lorde; the others—including her father (3), a few particularly memorable racist strangers

(4–5), and “the first woman” Lorde “ever courted and left” (5)—are acknowledged for the things they did wrong but that Lorde has become able to put into perspective, to somehow recover from isolated moments of grief or grievance. “To the battalion of arms where I often retreated for shelter and sometimes found it,” Lorde pledges a portion of her indebtedness, here with the first category of people in mind. “To the others who helped,” as she refers to the latter, “pushing me into the merciless sun—I, coming out blackened and whole.”93 To emerge “blackened and whole” from what she elsewhere describes, also in thermodynamic terms, as “the crucibles of difference”94—or as “the racist sexist cauldron”95 of white patriarchy—is the fundamental aspiration of Lorde’s vision. It is the teleology of her telling and of her desire, as she feels herself nearing death, “to go out like a

93 Lorde, Zami, 5.

94 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools,” 112.

95 Lorde, “Eye to Eye,” 162.

95 fucking meteor,”96 and it is the measurement for her of what makes something useful. As she writes in A Burst of Light:

It takes all of my selves, working together, to integrate what I learn of women of Color around the world into my consciousness and work. It takes all of my selves working together to effectively focus attention and action against the holocaust progressing in South Africa and the South Bronx and Black schools across this nation, not to speak of the streets. Laying myself on the line. It takes all of my selves working together to fight this death inside me. Every one of these battles generates energies useful in the others. (99)

Hence the primary dramatic foil to Lorde’s blackened-and-whole erotic knowledge in Zami is necessarily going to be the disintegrating effect of the “fumbling insights”97 of her mother, “a solid and austere” West Indian woman who would frequently pass as white on the streets of their

Harlem neighborhood and whose aggressive resolve “to make virtues out of necessities,” as Lorde states it without admiration—“to pretend,” for example, “that the only food left in the house was actually a meal of choice, carefully planned” (11)—would everywhere obscure for Lorde, growing up, the complex, systemic causes of her own and other families’ struggles.

Two key examples of Audre’s mother’s repression of “loving,” and of her mystification of adequate causes more generally, are worth highlighting in conclusion. In the first, Audre’s childhood best friend, Gennie, is being abused by her stepfather. Gennie comes over one night, obviously traumatized and in need of help, a situation to which Audre’s mother ends up turning a blind eye (for “it was not I who was in trouble,” Lorde speculates) (96). She notices her “mother’s intuitions had fastened upon something” but that “she did not examine what”—and because her mother “could not question her perceptions,” Audre explains how she, in turn, “could not utilize

96 Lorde, “A Burst of Light,” 77.

97 Lorde, Zami, 101.

96 the concern in her voice” (ibid.). When Gennie ends up committing suicide, Zami’s Audre is left to mourn the many “Things I never did with Genevieve,” beginning and ending with things erotic and animated in between with things exuberantly political:

Let our bodies touch and tell the passions that we felt. Go to a Village gay bar, or any bar anywhere. Smoke refer. Derail the freight that took circus animals to Florida. Take a course in international obscenities. Learn Swahili. See Martha Graham’s dance troupe. Visit Pearl Primus. Ask her to take us away with her to Africa next time. Write THE BOOK. Make love. (97)

A relevant and equally important scene occurs a little earlier in Zami, when Audre first begins menstruating. She is immediately warned by her mother to “watch [her] step and not be so friendly with every Tom, Dick, and Harry,” as well as to dispose of her “soiled napkins in newspaper” so her father doesn’t have to see them (77). Later that day Audre offers to “pound the garlic” in preparation for her favorite Grenadian dinner-dish, souse. Her mother leaves the house briefly to pick up some tea, and Audre “move[s] toward the kitchen cabinet to fetch down the mortar and pestle. My body,” she recounts, “felt new and special and unfamiliar and suspect all at the same time” (ibid.). Lorde recollects her surprisingly joyful task in the kitchen—“Back and forth, round, up and down, back, forth, round, round, up and down”—and remarks that during all this “there was a heavy fullness at the root of me that was exciting and dangerous” (78). One of the more sexually-explicit moments in Zami then unfolds:

As I continued to pound the spice, a vital connection seemed to establish itself between the muscles of my fingers curved tightly around the smooth pestle in its insistent downward motion, and the molten core of my body whose source emanated from a new ripe fullness just beneath the pit of my stomach. That invisible thread, taut and sensitive as a clitoris exposed, stretched through my curled fingers up my round brown arm into the moist reality of my armpits, whose warm sharp odor with a strange new overlay mixed with the ripe garlic smells from the mortar and the general sweat-heavy aromas of high summer. (ibid.)

The enfleshment of this moment is palpable—the fingers’ muscles becoming the pestle becoming the stomach becoming the clitoris, all the way back to becoming the “round brown arm and the moist

97 reality” of the narrator’s armpits. And it can be no accident that this awakening to the erotic is linked to the preparation of a meal from “home”—a word consistently presented in scare quotes across Zami’s diasporic topography. But Audre is soon interrupted by her mother’s “key in the lock”; her mother sweeps into the kitchen, “like a ship under full sail,” and impatiently takes the mortar and pestle into her own hands and begins “to grind vigorously” (79), once again leaving

Audre in the wake of her harrowing denials. An inadequate placeholder for a different kind of mother—for one invoked in A Burst of Light as the “Black mother goddess, salt dragon of chaos,

Seboulisa, Mawu,” whom Lorde asks to hold her with “muscular flowering arms” and to protect her from “throwing any part of [her]self away”98—Audre’s actual mother is everywhere depicted as

“merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”99 This is a type of anti-erotic reformism that frustrates Audre’s longing for friends, allies, and lovers, that Lorde criticizes most pointedly in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), and that virtually all of her writing in some way warns against. A moment of imagined incest with her mother (78) and her realization that she’s “almost as tall” as her mother (80) bookend Lorde’s erotic menstrual awakening across these few pages, suggesting a need for the wholly serious Lorde both to rematriate her knowledge and to commit a certain form of matricide simultaneously in order to begin to wholly inhabit her

“erotic subjectivity”—to begin to actuate what Lyndon K. Gill has described, in his account of the practices of an HIV/AIDS care group in Trinidad called Friends for Life, as “a space of fellowship ultimately in the service of collective sociosexual and spiritual well-being.”100 And it is Audre’s

98 Lorde, “A Burst of Light,” 100–11.

99 Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 59.

100 Lyndon K. Gill, “Chatting Back an Epidemic: Caribbean Gay Men, HIV/AIDS, and the Uses of Erotic Subjectivity,” GLQ 18, nos. 2–3 (2012): 287.

98 mother’s policing of the erotic both in herself and in her daughter, I suggest, that best resembles and most effectively helps us to discern the limits of (Riding) Jackson’s kind of seriousness, leading us ultimately to see how, as Gill’s article holds, “the inability to think the political-sensual-spiritual together threatens to obscure even the clearest of postcolonial visions” (280).

What I’ve tried to show in this chapter is how Lorde’s is a seriousness activated not by access to a disinterested aesthetic imperative of “common feeling” nor even to a familiarly queer common, but one that is “provoked by the communicability of unmanageable racial and sexual difference.”101 What I’ve hoped to indicate, moreover, is how forms of difference, deterritorialization, fragmentation, and flesh—or any existentialist corollary of a “standpoint of no standpoint, everywhere and nowhere, of never and to come, of thing and nothing”—must also become readable in both “limited” and “whole” terms through a consideration of not only other-than-straight but also other-than-white histories, knowledges, and logics. When James Baldwin claimed in 1984 that

“there is, in fact, no white community,” he was speaking precisely of the limited seriousness of “the

European vision of the world—or more precisely,” he writes, “perhaps the European vision of the universe. It is a vision as remarkable for what it pretends to include as for what it remorselessly diminishes, demolishes or leaves totally out of account.”102 (Riding) Jackson’s elision of the whole seriousness of hapticality, of her logocentric wagering instead on candor—marked tellingly by her disavowal of poetry but even more significantly by her inability over the second half of the twentieth century to recognize those individuals and communities for whom poetry might have

101 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 53.

102 James Baldwin, “On Being White…and Other Lies,” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 135.

99 remained both truthful and useful—is what I suggest prevented her from being able to use her whole seriousness to perceive and correct the limited seriousness of her whiteness. But of course it was

(Riding) Jackson’s whiteness, in the first place, that made it difficult—because experientially both unnecessary and uncomfortable—for her to turn to a different lens or tradition for finding truth and usefulness in the “insurgent feel,” the “inherited caress,” of flesh, or in what Omise’eke Natasha

Tinsley has referred to as the “watery metaphors” of “black queer broken-and-wholeness.”103

Rather than “strip theory” of such metaphors, Tinsley insists in her essay “Black Atlantic, Queer

Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” (2008), we might better “return to the materiality of water to make its metaphors mean more complexly, shaking off settling into frozen figures” (ibid.). It is in this way incumbent upon us to reintegrate metaphors with their material histories if we want to learn how to take them more seriously.

That Lorde never stopped seeing the ways in which poetry could persist in the twentieth century as a wholly serious mode of telling—as much more than “a luxury” or a case of only

“incidental emergency” for a good many people—is what allowed her to remain “first and last…a poet.”104 It is what obligated her, in fact, to remain emphatically and publically committed to a genre and social horizon that (Riding) Jackson had effectively come to believe would need to emerge from “a totally new concept of society”105 because she couldn’t see that it was already present, already long-awakened, in the “free radicals and virtual particles” of Black feminist thought—in the worlds such praxis constantly unsettles and produces.106 As Ahmed reminds us,

103 Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ 14, nos. 2–3 (2008): 212.

104 Lorde, “A Burst of Light,” 61.

105 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 177.

106 da Silva, “To Be Announced, 59.

100 “whiteness is an orientation that puts certain things within reach,” which “would include not just physical objects, but also styles, capacities, aspirations, techniques, habits.”107 But whiteness is just as much an orientation that puts other things out of reach, including precisely the kind of seriousness that would wholly “disarticulate the human from Man”108 in the ways that (Riding)

Jackson desired. And including the kind of anger she’d have needed to continue wholly believing in poetry. As Lorde herself tells us:

I am Black and I am a woman. I took the next step in poetry with the feeling that automatically I was committing myself to exploring a kind of fury that could be totally destructive. How to keep that alive and not be destroyed by it is a tension that runs through all of my work, and I believe the work of every serious Black woman poet, every outsider poet in America. I think that is what lends a kind of power and reality to our work. And I think we can reclaim poetry as a result.109

But nobody said it was simple.

107 Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 154.

108 “Black studies can and should take up a pivotal role in this process,” Weheliye convinces us, “because analyses of racialization have the potential to disarticulate the human from Man, thus metamorphosing humanity into a relational object of knowledge” (32).

109 Audre Lorde, “Poetry, Nature, and Childhood: An Interview with Audre Lorde,” by Louise Chawla, in Hall, Conversations, 127.

101

CHAPTER THREE

Unrevolutionary Suicide: David Foster Wallace and the Problem with Dead Hypotheses

I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of generalization of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. —David Foster Wallace1

In May 2005, the novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace delivered his now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. In his address, which would be published a year after his 2008 suicide as a standalone book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts,

Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, Wallace self-consciously and semi- apologetically upheld what he called “a standard requirement of U.S. commencement speeches” by opening with a parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s

1 David Foster Wallace, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Larry McCaffery, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 127, emphasis added.

102 the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”2

Quick to dismiss any implication that he was casting himself as “the wise old fish,” Wallace opted to explicate “the point” rather than the moral of the story for his audience, which, as he put it, is

“merely that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about” (ibid.). The most obvious, most ubiquitous, most important reality that motivated Wallace not only in this speech but in virtually all of his work was the existential threat of solipsism, which the speech glosses as “our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth,” to perceive the world and act as though we were each “the absolute center of the universe” (357).

From beginning to end of his address Wallace would simultaneously insist that he was not giving

“moral advice” (“please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura Sermon”) (361) and invoke the highest possible stakes for his simple “point”—that “in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance” (355). Taking certain banal platitudes seriously enough, he added, “will have nothing to do with “morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth,” Wallace maintained, “is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head” (363).

Wallace’s technique of putting pressure on “banal platitudes” in order to make them adequate to saving the “comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult”3 individual from despair very

2 David Foster Wallace, “Kenyon Commencement Speech,” in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 355.

3 Wallace addressed the Kenyon graduates with the assumption, perhaps justifiable, that they would very soon be leading lives resembling his own: “And I submit that this really what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out” (358–59).

103 closely resembles what my previous chapters have elaborated as a method of distinguishing between “limited” and “whole” versions of any given thing, which I’ve suggested must be done if we are to replace as many of our false or distorted cultural binarisms as possible with what Laura

(Riding) Jackson termed “true differences of understanding”4 or what Audre Lorde called “real differences” of understanding based on differences of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and age.5

Wallace distinguishes, for example, between the “material payoff” and the “actual human value” of a liberal arts education (355); he moves on to distinguish between “unconscious” and more agential, anti-dogmatic, and implicitly anti-capitalist “forms of worship” (363); and he ends by insisting on the recognition of “all different kinds of freedom,” distinguishing in particular between “the freedom all to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation,” and “the really important kind of freedom involv[ing] attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about people and to sacrifice for them in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day” (ibid.). Wallace refers to this second kind of freedom as “real freedom”

(ibid.), encouraging the Kenyon grads to see that the “actual human value” of a degree such as theirs is not in having taught them merely “how to think” (another banal platitude) but in having taught them “to exercise some control” over what to think, how to be “conscious of and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience” (358). For if you choose the right things to think about—“if you’ve really learned how to pay attention”—Wallace promises “you will know you have other options,” that “it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only

4 Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling (London: Athlone Press, 1972), 55.

5 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1985), 118.

104 meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things” (362). You will be able to choose to see the water.

Yet the whole freedom of “awareness” and “sacrifice” that Wallace here and elsewhere endorsed against the limited freedom of “the so-called real world of men and money and power”

(363) was no different in substance or seriousness, most readers will at this point discern, from the

“three pillars of seriousness”—“Attention, Purpose, and Continuity”6—that differently-serious writers would find insufficient when they insist, instead, on more shareable and testable kinds of vision, anger, and joy. Sixteen years earlier and less than two hours away by car, Lorde delivered the commencement address at Oberlin College, her speech even sharing a key conceit with Wallace’s.

“What you most of all do not need right now is more rhetoric,” she told the Oberlin grads,7 with

Wallace similarly believing that what he was offering in his speech was “the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away.”8 But whereas Wallace’s seriousness would lead him to address his audience as though they were all like him—in need of a sobering lesson on how to survive the deadly threat of self-absorption—Lorde’s seriousness compelled her to address the Oberlin grads, a very similar crowd, as if they were more like her, “a Black feminist lesbian warrior poet,”9 needing tools to navigate not the tedium of their comfortable future lives but rather “the war in which we are all engaged. A war for survival in the twenty-first century, the survival of this planet and all this planet’s people” (213). Starkly outlining several of the worst contemporary abuses of human beings, Lorde’s speech offered “facts you don’t ordinarily get to help you fashion weapons that

6 Lee Siegel, Are You Serious?: How to Be True and Get Real in the Age of Silly (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 46.

7 Audre Lorde, “Commencement Address: Oberlin College, May 29, 1989,” in I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 213.

8 Wallace, “Kenyon Commencement Speech,” 363.

9 Lorde, “Commencement Address,” 214.

105 matter” and encouraged the Oberlin grads to ask themselves “the most fundamental question of

[their] li[ves]—who are you, and how are you using the powers of that self in the service of what you believe?” (214). Wallace, by contrast, presuming his audience would continue to reap the present culture’s yield of “extraordinary wealth and comfort,”10 prescribed as gently as possible a shift in judgment that would be “hard,” that would “take will and mental effort” (361): not to ungenerously view other people as obstacles—no matter how “stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman” they might appear (360)—when “you’re tired [and] stressed out” after a long day at “your challenging job” (359) and just want to get through the grocery store checkout line as quickly as possible.

Wallace’s own kind of seriousness—the kind he explicitly recommended and tried to animate in his fiction and non-fiction over the course of his twenty-year career—is thus very legibly of Lee Siegel’s “organic” variety: it thinks it’s different, often going to great lengths to advertise its difference, from so-called “official” seriousness. But this seriousness would always remain, for

Wallace, no more than a mode of unencumbered spectatorship—a zipline, built entirely of rhetoric, between the poles of sincerity and authenticity, with “no risks written into the opportunity”11 but rather imported, metaphorically and as required, from sites and persons beyond the safety net of his own conditions and paradigms of privilege. Not despite but because of its panoramic pretensions, I would submit, Wallace’s seriousness lacked not only an availability to “outraged affinity”12 but also

10 Wallace, “Kenyon Commencement Speech,” 363.

11 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “A Covenant,” Chelsea 69: 84. See Chapter One for my discussion of how (Riding) Jackson’s “years of industrious literary idealism” eventually led her to demand some way of determining more objectively one’s “success or failure in the experiment” that is literature (ibid.).

12 Laura Riding, “In Defence of Anger,” in Essays from ‘Epilogue’: 1935–1937, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, ed. Mark Jacobs (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2001), 89.

106 a “willingness to act irrevocably”13 in accordance with any positive belief: “Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true,” he’ll be all too quick to add, in keeping with proper liberal decorum, after offering what momentarily seems to be a live hypothesis regarding “the subsurface unity of all things” (362). Even bracketing the more obvious critique of Wallace’s privileged seeing in relation to Lorde’s justice-oriented vision, we might begin to situate Wallace quite squarely at the roundtable on Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (1972): if Trilling sensed that something that “used to be called seriousness”14 could help postmodern society circumvent a grim Freudian endgame of “peace in extinction” (155), Wallace continued the search, a generation later and across no fundamentally different landscape, for something to help him fight off “the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing”15 as an aid not only to staying but also wanting to stay alive.

The presumption that this mysterious something we need has been nearly-irretrievably sublated or “lost” is of primary interest to me in this chapter, recalling as distinctly as it does both

(Riding) Jackson’s and Lorde’s accounts of masculine humanism’s tendency to overwrite, malign, or otherwise destroy precisely the kinds of feminine, racialized, and/or queer seriousness it would need in order to fulfill its own desire for wholeness or integration. That this something must represent “a dark thought, an archaic thought,”16 rather than an active moral, political, and aesthetic imperative still alive and well in communities and practices of living and telling besides their own, will therefore become in my reading not merely the most “tragic” form of blindness that

13 William James, “The Will to Believe,” in Essays in Pragmatism, ed. Alburey Castell (New York: Hafner Press, 1948), 89.

14 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 171.

15 Wallace, “Kenyon Commencement Speech,” 363.

16 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 79.

107 Wallace shared with Trilling in his respective fetishization of dialectical judgment; it will also become the most resoundingly colonial, a form of violent half-seeing analogous to what Stefano

Harney and Fred Moten’s theory of the undercommons refers to as “baseless vision, woven into the settler’s fabric.”17 As Wallace lamented in a 1993 interview when asked to speculate on the reasons for the putative waning of seriousness in contemporary fiction, “after the pioneers always come the crank-turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank.”18 But where do the pioneers get the ideas for their machines from? For the management or exploitation of which populations and energies do their machines so often tend to be built?

Like Trilling and his peers, Wallace evidently subscribed to the same “staleness” postulate that Siegel does—that like “bread” even the best, most pioneering kind of seriousness “grows stale when left out too long.”19 As such, Wallace generally went no further than to rest his critique of the novel form on its susceptibility to reification in the cultural marketplace, complaining, for instance, that “academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical advances.”20 It is for this reason that he would need to posit the figure of the uncool, ostensibly market-unfriendly anti- radical as American fiction’s last hope. As he proposed in his 1990 essay “E Unibus Pluram:

Television and U.S. Fiction,”

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single- entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions

17 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 81.

18 Wallace, “An Interview,” 135.

19 Siegel, Are You Serious?, 62.

20 Wallace, “An Interview,” 135.

108 in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels.21

In this passage Wallace could easily be describing a writer like (Riding) Jackson—her

“antediluvian”22 linguistic commitment, in particular, to what she called “a spiritual literalness in all one’s conceptual thinking that leaves no loophole for suspended precision”23—and ventriloquizing the many varieties of cynicism with which most of her readers have encountered this kind of commitment. The difference is that (Riding) Jackson, without embarrassment, envisioned her kind of seriousness as both beyond literary genre and beyond human genre—as available to everyone, past and present. Wallace, by contrast, conceived of his anti-rebel’s kind of seriousness both within the boundaries of literary fiction and as a sensibility yet to come, as something either exceedingly rare or entirely impossible: another dead hypothesis. He figured the impasse this way at the end of his well-known 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery:

For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes, and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get from my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 a.m. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans,

21 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2007), 81.

22 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Then, and Now,” in The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language, ed. John Nolan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 55–56.

23 (Riding) Jackson, The Telling, 139.

109 and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back—I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need?24

No doubt his basic onto-epistemological conviction that “true empathy’s impossible” would have been a source of suffering for Wallace; but to have been able to so vividly perceive the kind of seriousness he needed and to have been so incapable of taking it seriously, to have indeed harbored a kind of thinly-veiled misogyny for it, was probably the greater form of agony. Whereas Trilling was at least able to find, near the end of his life, “a curious power of comfort” in accommodating the “anxiety” and “unease” of “the exigent present”25—in relaxing his defenses, even if aporetically, before the “immediate and pragmatic judgment” (89) he found in Jane Austen and other allegedly

“outdated” discursive, cultural, and political models—Wallace never found such comfort. Not that we should feel too badly for a man for whom “cow-like” women and their “pussies” were such readily available ciphers—and not that the genre of literary fiction was, or is, in and of itself necessarily the problem. “Can you think of any male poets,” we might well ask with Lorde, “whose work and life are integrated to the point at which they are not using or abusing women in their poetry?”26

Given the seriousness, nevertheless, with which so many readers and critics turned to

Wallace as literature’s savior of what very much seemed like whole seriousness both while he was alive and in the few years after his death, I would argue for the necessity of carefully examining how

24 Wallace, “An Interview,” 150.

25 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 171.

26 Audre Lorde, “Audre Lorde: Interview,” by Karla M. Hammond, in Conversations with Audre Lorde, ed. Joan Wylie Hall (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 29.

110 Wallace’s particular genius came as close as it did to inhabiting a wholly serious vision if we are to be as precise as possible in our reasoning for why it fell short. The goal will be to understand how his work and the things he said about it formally approximate but never fully practice the tenets of whole seriousness that I’ve outlined in my readings of (Riding) Jackson’s practical philosophy and

Lorde’s poetics of “blackened and whole”27 expression. What I intend to dwell on especially, and with reference to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), is the “weight and color” by which Wallace always ambivalently measured the kind of seriousness he ascribed to the anti-rebel and evidently longed to inhabit himself. This will involve reading beyond the soft-Marxist terms of Wallace’s own modes of critique, for example, when his most famous fictional protagonist—Infinite Jest’s linguistically- and athletically-gifted wunderkind Hal

Incandenza—invokes “what seemed like a kind of black miracle” when attempting to name the way in which “people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable,” Hal narrates,

“and at the same time pathetic.”28 As Spinoza so aptly put it almost three and a half centuries ago,

“miracles only seem to be new owing to men’s ignorance,”29 and I posit that it is the unending hunt for a certain kind of “black miracle”—for cultural phenomena and affective material, likely appropriated from elsewhere, that might break all our self-imposed rules and heal us—that motivated both Wallace himself and those of us who have turned to him for something like

Revelation. What I’ll hope to make more visible by the end of this chapter are the consequences of

27 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; A Biomythography (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1982), 5.

28 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 2nd ed. (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 900.

29 Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 95.

111 settling for Wallace’s limited kind of whole seriousness as well as the persistence and extensiveness of our need to observe how such consequences lurk in any aesthetic or intellectual politics that perceives life to be worth living only in the negation of others or, as a last resort, of oneself.

There are three critiques of Wallace and his work with which my own analysis begins and that I’d therefore like to take some time to unpack. On their own they offer accounts, respectively, of Wallace’s formalism, conservatism, and voyeurism, but my ultimate aim will be to integrate— and argue for the need to integrate—the substance of these three accounts into a single formulation of Wallace’s limited seriousness. The first critique is by Lee Konstantinou, whose 2012 essay “No

Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief” challenges what was at one time the tendency to read Wallace’s work either as the embodiment of an anachronistic, unreconstructed sincerity—as

“some simple return to a pre-ironic sensibility”30—or as the paragon of an emergent “New

Sincerity” in contemporary American fiction.31 Konstantinou begins by situating Wallace’s career against Francis Fukuyama’s post-Cold War “End of History” thesis and its hailing of, in

Konstantinou’s summary, “the total triumph of the market, the utter collapse of all alternative visions” (83). To support his observation that “loneliness and a kind of bland sadness was all one could expect of the new world order,” he quotes a British Modern Review writer named Toby Young, writing in 1994:

It’s difficult to imagine what a post-ironic sensibility would be like. It’s a bit like finding yourself at the end of history. You’re bored because you’re not participating in any historic events but you can’t very well up sticks and go fight

30 Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 85.

31 See, for example, Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, ed. David Hering (Austin, TX: SSMG Press, 2010).

112 in a war in a less evolved society. To do so would be untrue to your own historical experience; it would require you to unlearn the lessons history has already taught you. And what would be the point? (qtd. in Konstantinou 84)

With life thus rendered “gray” by neoliberal market forces and the failures of the avant-garde and other twentieth-century utopian projects, Konstantinou argues that Wallace had to instead fight a figurative war against a social present and horizon made “listless and without flavor” (83)—that he had to “discover or invent,” specifically, “a viable postironic ethos for U.S. literature and culture”

(84–85). Although metafiction could remain part of his literary toolkit, Konstantinou suggests, a religiousish form of belief-without-content such as Alcoholics Anonymous—at the center of alienated man’s potential for personal and social reintegration across the interwoven narratives of

Infinite Jest, and evidently important for the author in his own life32—would become necessary for

Wallace to foreground in his work. What Wallace generally wanted, Konstantinou concludes, was

“not so much a religious correction to secular skepticism allegedly run amok as new forms of belief— the adoption of a kind of religious vocabulary (God, prayer, etc.) emptied out of a specific content, a vocabulary engineered to confront the possibly insuperable condition of postmodernity” (86).33

Useful in Konstantinou’s analysis is its appraisal of the ways in which Wallace’s “idea of politics—to the degree that he articulates one—rests within a tradition of symbolic action and

32 See Maria Bustillos, “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” The Awl, Apr. 5, 2011, https://theawl.com/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library-f84d5f56fccd. “For the depiction of addiction in Infinite Jest was, as many readers couldn’t help but suspect, based not on research but on experience,” Bustillos explains. “This was halfway confirmed in the cagey responses he gave regarding his personal knowledge of Alcoholics Anonymous in the wake of the success of Infinite Jest, and confirmed more clearly when ‘An Ex-Resident’s Story’ first emerged on the wallace-l listserv in February of 2004” (par. 15) bearing “the unmistakable style of his writing” and with “everything fit[ting] datawise” (par. 19).

33 Although Konstantinou does not cite Amy Hungerford and Amy Hungerford (somewhat surprisingly) does not cite David Foster Wallace, her study Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) provides a relevant overview of how a “faith in faith”—that is, “a version of religious thinking that minimizes the specificity of religious doctrine in service to usually nationalistic goals of civil connection” (3)—comes to serve certain postmodern writers in their “turn to religion to imagine the purely formal elements of language in transcendent terms” (xiii).

113 countercultural individualism” (105). This observation aligns well with my reading of how

Wallace’s practice fails to constitute what a different kind of seriousness would require as “a total reaction upon life”34 in the service not of individual liberation (or self-annihilation) but of wider forms of collective survival and justice. We might note that when something akin to being and speaking within an “exigent present” is actually inhabited by one of Infinite Jest’s characters, real truth and meaning can only possibly take hold in “some evil fucking personal detoxes” of AA enthusiast Don Gately’s and not in the simple fellowship and obligation to service provided by AA meetings themselves (859). As Wallace’s narrator recollects the ordeal and reward of Gately’s most evil personal detox:

Cold turkey. Abrupt withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for 60 or more of these seconds—he could deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second—less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he’d never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. (859–60)

Konstantinou’s was the first essay published in the field of Wallace studies driven by a reluctance to rehearse the common enthusiasms for Wallace’s supposedly redemptive anti- or non-postmodernism, and it was the first that gave me a kind of permission to trust my own nascent (though nevertheless belated) suspicions of what for quite some time I too had perceived as Wallace’s consummate seriousness. His analysis is useful, moreover, because it is the first to give itself permission to ask: “What could it possibly mean to ‘read’ a suicide?” (104). Here

34 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Random House, 1994), 40.

114 Konstantinou insists, as I do, that we likely “misunderstan[d] the intensity and seriousness with which Wallace approached his work” if we refuse to be willing to ask and attempt to answer this question (104).35

The second critique of Wallace and his work I refer to is James Santel’s “On David Foster

Wallace’s Conservatism,” a 2014 article focusing on what Santel cites as the “source” of this conservatism—namely, Wallace’s “insurmountable belief that we’re all ultimately alone.”36 Santel sets up his argument by observing how for Wallace it was almost always and most fundamentally “a short attention span”—caused by various forms of cultural and technological “distraction”—that needed to be taken to task for “America’s political malaise” (par. 1) and (by extension or precondition) “the solipsism that he felt defined contemporary American life” (par. 3). The

“organic” seriousness of the “Kenyon Commencement Speech,” as we’ve seen, is a good example of what Santel describes as Wallace’s post-Infinite Jest concern to hone in on the saving graces of such virtues as “attentiveness, empathy, and selflessness” in his writing (ibid.). Santel reminds us to make the crucial connection, though, between the speech’s insistence that “the only thing that’s capital-T true is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it”—that “you get to decide what to worship” (Wallace, qtd. in Santel par. 5)—and Wallace’s “real interest in some of conservatism’s central principals, particularly its valorization of individual choice,” as evidenced in

35 Konstantinou provides an inventory of the many suicidal and/or “cripplingly depressed” characters across Wallace’s oeuvre, keenly noting how “[t]hese characters seek philosophical and literary solutions to the problem of personal survival, and more often than not fail to find what they’re looking for. The problem then is not that ‘reading’ a life as literature debases life, but rather that to assume that one ‘merely’ reads literature without having to take its conceptual commitments seriously—to assume that writing is merely a gesture—debases literature” (105).

36 James Santel, “On David Foster Wallace’s Conservatism,” The Hudson Review 66, no. 4 (Winter 2014), http:// hudsonreview.com/2014/02/on-david-foster-wallaces-conservatism/#.WP2cflPyuuU, par. 13.

115 part by Wallace’s own decisions to vote for Ronald Reagan and to support Ross Perot in 1992

(Santel par. 5).

Santel’s article is helpful insofar as it sketches both the philosophical face of Wallace’s attitude (his penchant for locating the genesis of reality less in social matrices than within unbridgeably-gapped skulls) as well as its rhetorical one—namely, the writer’s habit of “abdication”

(par. 11) from scenes of highest moral consequence at precisely their moments of clearest articulation and problematization. “This is the real tragedy of Wallace’s conservatism,” Santel convincingly argues in a way that resonates with what we have already said about Wallace’s limited kind of whole seriousness—that “it entailed a curious blindness to the extent to which his writing, imbued as it was with the rare ability to dissect contemporary problems with humanity and humor, reached people, inspiring in his readers a rare devotion born of the sense that Wallace was speaking directly to them” (par. 17). Like Konstantinou, then, Santel enables us to see how at least one of the limits to Wallace’s “endlessly perceptive mind”—his “humorous and prismatic vision,” as Lorde would perhaps describe it37—was the fact that he “ultimately had little faith in his chosen medium”

(ibid.). But Santel pushes the critique of Wallace’s bad-faith formalism further by naming Wallace’s conservatism as such and by blaming the political content of that conservatism for Wallace’s shortcomings instead of merely blaming, as Konstatinou does, the “tradition of symbolic action and

37 Lorde, Zami, 189. “Muriel’s lyrical and revealing letters held a hunger and an isolation that matched my own, and a precious unfolding of her humorous and prismatic vision,” Lorde’s narrator recalls of the kind of language that inspired her growing emotional investment in a white woman who would turn out to suffer from debilitating schizophrenia. “I came to marvel and delight in the new view she afforded me of simple and unexpected things. Re- seeing the world through her unique scrutinies was like re-seeing the world through my first pair of glasses when I was a child. Endless re-discoveries of the ordinary” (189–90). Yet Lorde observes how this vision, this talent, was in and of itself inadequate to the task of helping Muriel metabolize “pain” and “become herself”: “I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be,” Lorde writes, “but only half-sensed” (190), quoting the following line from one of Muriel’s letters: “I feel a new kind of sickness now, which I know is the fever of wanting to be whole” (ibid.).

116 countercultural individualism” to which Wallace belonged, practically by definition, in being a postwar American novelist. No matter how faithfully “a certain segment of the population” regarded Wallace as “a kind of sage,” Santel concludes, it was Wallace’s “inherent conservatism

[that] kept him from fully inhabiting that role” (par. 8) and, by corollary, so singularly and mortally

“marooned”38 in his own skull.

The most important critique of Wallace for my purposes, however, is by Samuel Cohen, whose essay “The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace” (2015) can only conclude, as I do, that

“The Water Is White.”39 Cohen takes up his analysis where the others leave off:

It is well known that Wallace wanted to get out of his own skull (as he put it) and meet readers outside theirs, to reject what he believed was postmodernism’s cynicism about the ability of contemporary humanity to connect and feel and believe, and to create work that showed people that others felt and believed as they did, regardless of who they were and how they lived. That one of the differences his work had to contend with was that of race is (perhaps understandably) under examined. (228)

Cohen is generous in providing context for what he explains would have been fairly standard protocol “in English departments and elsewhere” while Wallace was a student and beginning to write (231). He recalls, for example, how certain anti-foundationalist gestures toward “rethinking the nature of race among African-American intellectuals” (230)—exemplified by the work of such theorists as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston Baker, and bell hooks

(231)—followed many of the same lines of postmodern criticism as did other anti-essentialist and social-constructionist theories of identity and culture. “It is hard to imagine,” Cohen writes, “that

Wallace did not encounter this turn during his years of school and in his own reading” (ibid.)—the

38 Wallace, “An Interview,” 127; also qtd. in Santel par. 13.

39 Samuel Cohen, “The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace,” in Postmodern Literature and Race, ed. Len Platt and Sara Upstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 241.

117 turn, that is, away from earlier movements (such as the 1980s had seen) to “reconnect” Black identity to African ancestry and to “emphasize Pan-African heritage” (230). This is a way of suggesting that Wallace was simply and obediently following the lead of influential Black thinkers if it appears that he didn’t want to give too much credence to the meaningfulness of race in his thinking through the problem of human difference.

Cohen’s analysis picks up some speed when it invokes Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s 2006 study

The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television in a section of his essay titled

“The Pale Kings.” Here Cohen summarizes Fitzpatrick’s reflection “on the whiteness of Wallace and his cohort in connection to that of his literary forebears, in particular [Don] DeLillo and

[Thomas] Pynchon. She reads the latter two,” Cohen explains, “—despite the expressly antiracist elements of their novels and nonfiction (such as Pynchon’s 1966 essay ‘A Journey into the Mind of

Watts’)—as inadvertently expressing ‘a set of repressed anxieties about race and ethnicity’” (231).

Cohen offers a couple of key examples of Wallace’s contribution to the “much-noted phenomenon” of “the whiteness of postmodern fiction generally,” zeroing in on a letter Wallace at one point sent to his fellow white male novelist Jonathan Franzen, who quoted extensively from it in his 1996

Harper’s essay “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels.” Neither

Cohen nor Fitzpatrick includes the entire quoted passage from Wallace’s note to Franzen, but it is worth digging up for what it reveals about how Wallace saw himself in relation to existing social and cultural formations of anger, pain, and protest:

A contemporary culture of mass-marketed image and atomized self-interest is going to be one without any real sort of felt community…. Just about everybody with any sensitivity feels like there’s a party going on that they haven’t been invited to— we’re all alienated. I think the guys who write directly about and at the present culture tend to be writers who find their artistic invalidation especially painful. I mean it’s not just something to bitch about at wine-and-cheese parties: it really hurts them. It makes them angry. And it’s not an accident that so many of the writers

118 “in the shadows” are straight white males. Tribal writers can feel the loneliness and anger and identify themselves with their subculture and can write to and for their subculture about how the mainstream culture’s alienated them. White males are the mainstream culture. So why shouldn’t we be angry, confused, lonely white males who write at and against the culture? This is the only way to come up with what we want: what we want is to know what happened, why things are this way—we want the story.40

Cohen observes that Franzen “makes the complicated stance here explicit”41 when he goes so far as to declare, after quoting Wallace’s letter, “White men are a tribe, too.”42 He rightly insists, therefore, that we hold in mind Fitzpatrick’s unsympathetic conclusion in considering the context for Wallace’s whiteness: that “in their unmarkedness, in finding themselves the New White Guys, these writers feel themselves excluded from a culture of exclusion, marginalized by a culture that is finally paying attention to the voices originating on the margins” (Fitzpatrick, qtd. in Cohen 233).

The next five sections of Cohen’s essay examine five texts of Wallace’s that show us the different ways in which, as Cohen’s thesis states it, “the water that Wallace tried to see in his work was white” (241). The texts include a 1989 essay on the topic of rap music titled “Signifying

Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present” (coauthored with Mark Costello), which Cohen describes as particularly “anxious to announce its anxiety” in relation to the subject at hand (234).

He quotes an especially self-conscious moment from the beginning of Wallace and Costello’s essay—“‘Please know we’re very sensitive to this question: what business have two white yuppies trying to do a sampler on rap’” (234)—and characterizes the work overall as a “battle…to express knowledgeable appreciation of an art form born out of an experience to which the authors feel

40 Wallace, qtd. in Jonathan Franzen, “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels,” Harper’s 292 (Apr. 1996), 51–52.

41 Cohen, “The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace,” 233.

42 Franzen, “Perchance to Dream,” 52.

119 themselves alien and to do so without falling into the numerous pitfalls that await the bumbling anthropologist with this notebook and earnest desire to understand” (ibid.). Cohen ascribes “two main emotional tones” to the essay—“enthusiasm and apology”—emphasizing the extent to which

Wallace and Costello are “at all times…aware of the fact that they are outsiders looking in at something profoundly not theirs. And they are self-consciously,” he notes, “almost proudly conscious of this” (234).

Cohen then turns to a 1994 essay of Wallace’s on the Illinois State Fair, later included in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), to begin to argue a little more firmly that no amount of self-consciousness on Wallace’s part will “exactly solve the problem” of reckoning meaningfully with racial difference (236). Cohen quotes only a few sentences, but here again I wish to include a longer passage, this time for what it demonstrates about Wallace’s ability to observe but unwillingness to condemn certain forms of white grotesquery—to perhaps make a

“point” about but not take wholly seriously the structural racism of which cultural appropriation and, according to this account, a seemingly natural kind of segregation are part:

There are no black people in the Twilight Ballroom. The looks on the younger kids’ faces have this awakened astonished aspect, like they didn’t realize that their own race could dance like this. Three married couples from Rantoul, wearing full Western bodysuits the color of raw coal, weave an incredible filigree of high- speed tap around Aretha’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and there’s no hint of racial irony in the room; the song has been made these people’s own, emphatically. This ’90s version of clogging does have something sort of pugnaciously white about it, a kind of performative nose-thumbing at Jackson and Hammer. There’s an atmosphere in the room—not racist, but aggressively white. It’s hard to describe. The atmosphere’s the same at a lot of rural Midwest public events. It’s not like if a black person came in he’d be ill-treated; it’s more like it would just never occur to a black person to come in here.43

43 David Foster Wallace, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing, 125. The last three sentences of this passage are quoted by Cohen (235).

120 Cohen doesn’t say too much except to point out that Wallace doesn’t say enough about “the absent black people” in this essay (235)—that the “Us and Themness” (236) through which his critique of the fair operates simply folds everyone who isn’t as educated and cultured as he is into the category of “white trash” (236). Here I would extend Cohen’s argument to observe that no matter how palpable Wallace’s disdain might be in this moment for the spectacle of a bunch of white folks wearing black bodysuits while dancing to black music as if they owned the stuff, his racial consciousness—his ability to see the black roots of white culture—is limited insofar as he exercises it to meagre, misanthropic ends. For a more precise analysis of Wallace’s whiteness in this particular essay, however, I suggest that focusing on Wallace’s reluctance to equate “aggressively white” modes of behavior with racism would be key.

Cohen next examines a passage of Infinite Jest that, as he puts it, “has offended many readers of the novel” and “attracted outsized negative attention” (236) despite taking up only two pages of the 1079-page book. It is a passage written in something resembling black urban dialect that, despite being “bad” for inadvertently “indicat[ing] a cognitive deficit” on the part of its speaker, is not, Cohen contends, in and of itself “proof of racism” (237). Instead, he suggests the problem with the passage’s language—“…and I go on with Reginald to his building where he live at, and Wardine be sit deep far back in a closet in Reginald crib, and she be cry” (Wallace, qtd. in Cohen 236)—in combination with the curious fact that only one other IJ character’s inner thoughts are rendered in dialect of any kind, could be chalked up to a) Wallace’s “lack of self-consciousness about whiteness and othering” or b) “a failure of that self-consciousness to lead to a more successful representation of black speech” (237). This may very well be the case. But Cohen’s analytical strategy in this moment—of looking to either the success or the failure of Wallace’s “self-consciousness”— strangely backpedals on his previous claim about the incapacity of Wallace’s self-consciousness to

121 solve any problems at all. “For later evidence of that self-consciousness,” Cohen nonetheless proceeds to argue, “we have to turn to ‘Authority and American Usage,’” Wallace’s 2001 review of

Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, where the subject of dialect returns (ibid.).

Cohen points to a passage of the review in which Wallace (indeed self-consciously) self-identifies as

“‘resoundingly and in all ways white’” before moving on to explain why, in his own classrooms, he sticks strictly to the teaching of SWE (Standard Written English) despite being able to see that SBE

(Standard Black English) “is just as good a language as SWE” (as Cohen glosses it) (ibid.). In

Wallace’s words:

This is just How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it’s racist and unfair and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I’ll tell you something—if you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself. (qtd. in Cohen 238)

Cohen characterizes Wallace’s defense of SWE as “sympathetic, to some readers, and further evidence of insensitivity to others,” situating his own conclusion directly on the fence: “it is certainly self-aware” (238). Allowing that some readers might be left “feeling a little accused” and

“a little let down” by Wallace’s criticisms of yet a third kind of English, “PCE (Politically Correct

English)”—which “‘functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker,’” according to Wallace—Cohen does not take a strong enough stand (239). What I would instead wish to argue on this point of Wallace’s “accusations of self-serving righteousness among the PCE- wielding Left,” as Cohen puts it (ibid.), is that Wallace might be right that this is sometimes how PCE functions. But he is wrong to the extent that he cannot envision linguistic gestures besides his own kind of English circulating in the world as anything like live hypotheses—as cultural, moral, and/or political undertakings that can and should, in most contexts, be taken wholly seriously.

122 Finally, Cohen turns our attention to Wallace’s unfinished last novel, The Pale King (2011),

“a Reagan-era novel about boredom and taxes” that he will maintain is in every way “a white book—that is, a book not just practically devoid of traces of African Americans but also interested in whiteness itself” (239). Cohen offers no close readings or direct quotations of The Pale King, but suggests that Wallace’s analytical gaze has somehow matured since his Illinois State Fair essay: here Wallace never once lapses into characterizing anyone as “white trash” (240). Instead, Cohen notes with approval, the “terrifying poverty- and violence-filled” context of one female character’s upbringing is very richly imagined and rendered by Wallace, and another working-class character with an “unmistakably white name”—“a devout Christian,” at that—is allowed a full chapter for

“earnest reflections on his girlfriend’s pregnancy” (ibid.). That “both of these characters are treated with sensitivity and sympathy,” that “both of their stories are about the struggle to find a way to live amid more and less trying circumstances,” is the extent of evidence offered by Cohen for what he claims is Wallace’s “renewed interest in investigating different kinds of whiteness” (ibid.). And with this Cohen allows himself to refer to The Pale King as “more particularly racialized” than any critic has yet observed, crediting “a much-toned-down Wallace voice” for having finally generated underprivileged white characters who are nevertheless understood to be fully human: “These are characters who believe in things, things outside of themselves,” Cohen concludes, “and they are presented without caricature and also without the self-consciousness attendant to Wallace’s attempts to do the same with African-American characters” (ibid.).

It is Cohen’s final analysis, then, that readers of Wallace should be able to “see without interpretive violence small portions of his work in which race was a subject”—even if these

“encounters were less than wholly successful”—and that it remains “an individual choice” whether or not “we are able to maintain our respect for the work and the man” (241). But as I’ve tried to

123 imply in my summary of Cohen’s kind of argumentation over these last several pages, there is something limited even in his analysis of Wallace’s limitations. Echoing Wallace himself in reminding us of our power of individual choice in the matter, and equating, rather too forgivingly, the “hard…daily effort” of seeing water when you’re a fish to “thinking about race in America” when you’re a white person (ibid.), Cohen stops short both here and at almost every turn along the way of where I would like to end up in claiming greater consequences for Wallace’s and our own half-seeing, as well as for the underlying question of what exactly the whiteness of David Foster

Wallace is and does. Does it matter “how Wallace’s education might have further progressed,” as

Cohen concludes his essay by “wonder[ing]” (241)? Or would a wholly serious consideration of

“the work and the man” not let itself or its subject so easily off the hook?

Wallace’s attention to racial difference is both more sophisticated and more complexly voyeuristic than Cohen contends, I suggest, but it is also somewhat challenging to map even within the most prominent account we have of how whiteness has operated in modern American literature. In her 1990 Massey Lectures published as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary

Imagination, Toni Morrison spoke of the “lobotomizing” of American literature and literary criticism that intentionally or (more likely) unintentionally operates as “not only ‘universal’ but also ‘race- free’”: “I think of this erasure as a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unnecessary surgery.”44 It’s hard not to think of Trilling’s and Wallace’s variously anguished manners of recourse to conceits of darkness, archaism, trailblazing, anxiety/unease, and the ballast of “weight and color” along similar lines. In Morrison’s hypothesis,

Black slavery enriched the country’s creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with

44 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1992), 12.

124 the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an African Americanism— a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American. (38)

Thus racializing the terms of Western culture’s most taken-for-granted existential and political dichotomy, self vs. other, Morrison’s lectures were intended to help writers and readers—especially white writers and readers (or any who have internalized their economies of value)—better see what

Morrison called “the serious consequences of blacks” across the history and field of American literature (67). One crucial reading her text performs is of Willa Cather’s novel Sapphira and the Slave

Girl (1940), in which Morrison locates a powerful unconscious connection between the slave- owning eponymous main character and Cather herself: “Just as Sapphira has employed these surrogate, serviceable black bodies for her own purposes of power without risk,” Morrison argues,

“so the author employs them in behalf of her own desire for a safe participation in loss, in love, in chaos, in justice” (28). Another reading Morrison provides is of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of

Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), whose “images of blinding whiteness,” she observes, “seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness—a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing”

(33). Morrison revisits many similar moments in the work of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Saul

Bellow, and Ernest Hemingway to corroborate her analysis of how, “for the most part, the literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man” (14–15). But she argues, against the grain of most early-’90s literary criticism, that while “the scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable,…equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters” (11–12).

125 The essential point to take from Morrison’s analysis is not that the great American classics under scrutiny, in being guilty of whiteness, are therefore bad, evil, or not worth reading. Rather, it’s that some of the most important resources available to the American racial imaginary45 have been chronically avoided or repressed, thereby limiting what might have been a different kind of seriousness in the works created. Meant to enliven racial seeing and self-seeing as possibilities for better writing and reading generally, Morrison’s critique aimed to make the seemingly automatic and irresistible activity of “playing in the dark” a live hypothesis for aesthetic vision, an opportunity for writers as much as an obligation. Since “writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists,” Morrison maintained, “it is to them, the creators of American literature, that I look for clarification about the invention and effect of Africanism in the United States” (15). And as she concludes in the preface to the book version of her lectures,

45 I borrow the term “racial imaginary” from the title of Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap’s recent anthology The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Albany, NY: Fence Books, 2015), a term also slated to name the “Racial Imaginary Institute” that Rankine has announced she will help launch with the funds from her 2016 MacArthur grant. In an article on the poet published in The Guardian last fall, Steven W. Thrasher helps readers better understand the impetus behind the project: “Rankine says she understands why people don’t want to focus on whiteness,” he writes, quoting Rankine directly: “‘I think we’ve seen whiteness centralized forever, so they’re no longer interested in making it the subject, putting it in the subject position. But I think that it’s been centralized in order to continue its dominance, and it’s never been the object of inquiry to understand its paranoia, its violence, its rage’” (“Claudia Rankine: why I’m spending $625,000 to study whiteness,” The Guardian, Oct. 19, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/19/claudia-rankine-macarthur-genius-grant-exploring- whiteness, par. 22). One of the essays contained The Racial Imaginary, Tess Taylor’s “Of Whiteness, Obama, and the So-Called Postracial,” cites Morrison’s lectures extensively. “Does whiteness have a feeling, or spectrum of feelings?” asks Taylor, who is white, of herself and her readers (103). “The discussions I want to have about whiteness are the ones that we could keep learning from,” she explains; “I want to ask how it was made, whether we want it, what purposes it serves, what it would take to undo, what parts of it do we like, what parts of it are we ashamed of. At least we could acknowledge more what is hidden in plain sight” (104–5). “[S]o hidden in plain sight all around us,” it’s worth noting, is the exact phrase Wallace uses at the end of his Kenyon speech to characterize the water we are encouraged to notice as “real and essential” (264)—just as potentially real and essential as the mystical “Eskimos” from one of his speech’s earlier parables about a “religious dogmatist” and an atheist debating whether it was God or some fortuitously-situated Alaskan aboriginals who should be thanked for having answered the atheist’s desperate prayers by rescuing him in a snowstorm (357). “‘This is water, this is water,’” Wallace tells us to remember to tell ourselves; “‘these Eskimos might be much more than they seem’” (364).

126 Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer. When this world view is taken seriously as agency, the literature produced within and without it offers an unprecedented opportunity to comprehend the resilience and gravity, the inadequacy and the force of the imaginative act. (xiii)

So what happens, we might ask in the case of Wallace, when a writer can see race—and can moreover see himself seeing race? Can see himself seeing himself seeing himself seeing all kinds of different differences, in fact, and yet cannot, as Morrison indicates he must, take wholly seriously the persistence of his society’s deepest and most violent contradictions, let alone his own “agency” therein?

I propose that Wallace’s 2004 essay on the Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster,” gives us an important key to answering these questions—as well as to understanding the operative mood of limited seriousness and of dead hypotheses in general—in its imperative to consider. As the

OED defines it, to “consider” something means to do any or all of the following:

To view or contemplate attentively, to survey, examine, inspect, scrutinize.

To look attentively.

To contemplate mentally, fix the mind upon; to think over, meditate or reflect on, bestow attentive thought upon, give heed to, take note of.

To think, reflect, take note.

To estimate, reckon, judge of.

To take into practical consideration or regard; to show consideration or regard for; to regard, make allowance for.

To hold in or treat with consideration or regard; to think much or highly of; to esteem, respect.46

46 OED Online, s.v. “consider,” accessed 2 March 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/39593?redirectedFrom= consider, emphasis added.

127 Wallace chooses to consider the lobster, in this particular essay, alongside a whole industry and set of ideologies that have been built to justify boiling lobsters alive by the thousands. And as always he brings an unmatched degree of attention, scrutiny, contemplation, estimation, and reflection to bear on his analysis. On assignment for the food and lifestyle magazine Gourmet: The Magazine of

Good Living, Wallace starts out by considering the festival’s history, location, and commercial context: “The enormous, pungent, and extremely well-marketed Maine Lobster Festival is held every late July in the state’s midcoast region, meaning the western side of the Penobscot Bay, the nerve stem of Maine’s lobster industry.”47 He then stops to consider what “midcoast” even means in this case, explaining that “what’s called the midcoast runs from Owl’s Head and Thomaston in the south to Belfast in the north”—though “actually,” he adds, “it might extend all the way up to

Bucksport,” it’s just that he and his traveling companions “were never able to get farther north than

Belfast on Route 1, whose summer traffic is, as you can imagine, unimaginable” (ibid.). Wallace reports on the extent to which lobster and tourism are inextricable industries in the region, which he evidences by relating how in addition to lobster prepared in a hundred different and often surprising ways (many of which he spells out in detail), one will also find for sale at the festival

“lobster T-shirts and lobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable lobster pool toys and clamp-on lobster hats with big scarlet claws that wobble on springs” (236). The reader senses Wallace isn’t going to be the biggest fan of the kitschy spectacle he’s been invited to survey, which is probably why the editors of a sophisticated NYC-based glossy like Gourmet have chosen him, a writer whose judgment they can trust, as their correspondent to begin with. Sure enough, despite the recent success of what Wallace refers to as the “omnipresently sponsorial Maine Lobster Promotion Council” in

47 David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 235.

128 reassuring the public that lobster can be affordable—“in the Main Eating Tent,” he notes, you can get a decent lobster meal “for around $12.00, which is only slightly more expensive than supper at

McDonald’s” (238)—readers must “be apprised…that the Maine Lobster Festival’s democratization of lobster comes with all the massed inconvenience and aesthetic compromise of real democracy”

(239). The décor is ugly, the “Disneyland-grade queue[s]” are ugly, and the festival attendees are ugly, “sit[ing] cheek by jowl, cracking and chewing and dribbling” (239). Here again Wallace demonstrates a stunningly sensitive eye for the white trash with whom he finds it so difficult to mingle, almost seeming to make his critical detachment from them the whole point of the exercise.

It isn’t until the ninth page of Wallace’s twenty-page essay that the moral question concerning the lobster is posed. Wallace refers to the question as “all but unavoidable at the

World’s Largest Lobster Cooker” and as one that “may arise in kitchens across the US: Is it alright to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” (243). In her afterword to a republication of Wallace’s piece since its first appearance in Gourmet, Jo Ann Beard similarly points out that “he doesn’t really get into boiling them alive until page eight,” and she would have us

“notice also that in the end his conclusion is so modest, and so mannerly—he is not trying to bait anyone here, he is genuinely curious—that the reader finds herself, somehow, in the position of taking a firmer and more strident stance on behalf of the lobster than our correspondent.”48 When

Wallace does approach the lobster he wants us to consider, he does so very similarly to how he would, a year after the essay’s publication, approach both all the “banal platitudes” and all the hideous half-humans with which he populates the Kenyon address. “For practical purposes,” he writes, “everyone knows what a lobster is. As usual, though, there’s much more to know than most

48 Jo Ann Beard, afterword to “Consider the Lobster,” in The David Foster Wallace Reader, ed. Sam Freilich et al. (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2014), 937.

129 of us care about—it’s all a matter of what your interests are.”49 Like “choos[ing] to look differently as th[e] fat, dead-eyes, over-made-up lady” getting on your nerves in the grocery store checkout line by forcing yourself to imagine either that her husband is “dying of bone cancer”50 or that she might be the same “low-wage” worker “who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red- tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness” (362), looking differently at the lobster will simply “depen[d] on what you want to consider,” as Wallace puts it in the Kenyon speech (361). Again, he clarifies, “if you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important—if you want to operate on your default setting”—one of believing that certain classes of either people or crustaceans are unworthy of your empathy—“then you, like me, probably will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying” (362). It’s in your own self-interest, in other words, to be able “imaginatively to identify” with the pain of others.51

At the end of “Consider the Lobster” Wallace will actually boldly expand his consideration of the lobster to address “those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and -presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, [and] chicken”:

Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)? If, on the other hand, you’ll have no truck with confusions or convictions and regard stuff like the previous paragraph as just so much fatuous navel-gazing, what makes it feel truly okay, inside, to just dismiss the whole thing out of hand? That is, is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it?52

49 Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 236–37.

50 Wallace, “Kenyon Commencement Speech,” 361.

51 Wallace, “An Interview,” 127.

52 Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 253–54.

130 While “Consider the Lobster” can be effectively read as a vegetarian provocation, Wallace himself never identified as a vegetarian, and he didn’t refrain from eating lobsters at the festival.53 What’s more troubling, however, is the way in which his powerful challenge to begin taking the lives of animals wholly seriously is repeatedly undercut by his presiding “concer[n] not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused.”54 For we all know how pointless and annoying it can be when someone asks us to consider vegetarianism, Wallace implies: it’s not just that “the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue” is “complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, any rate, uncomfortable for me,” he confesses, “and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling” (246). Thus rendering yet another live hypothesis a dead one for what might appear to be exhaustive, culturally-sensitive good reasons but what are likelier to be justifications produced at least partially by Wallace’s own form of liberal cowardice, the essay forecloses the legitimacy of any wholly serious taking of action or expression of outrage against the gratuitous suffering of non-human animals:

These last few queries,…while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality— about what the adjective in a phrase like “The Magazine of Good Living” is really supposed to mean—and these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right there. There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other. (254)

In his brief account of “Consider the Lobster” in Wallace’s biography, D. T. Max observes that

“Wallace was and had always been averse to hectoring—it seemed rude to him.”55 But any hint of tongue-in-cheek criticality we might read in Max’s statement (surely the avoidance of neither

53 D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012), 273.

54 Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 253.

55 Max, Every Love Story, 272.

131 “hectoring” nor “rude[ness]” is an especially worthy moral endeavor) is diminished by what will amount to his own implicit resignation to the “limits” upon which Wallace insists. Upholding exactly what (Riding) Jackson saw at the root of “man-nature” as “just so much capacity in man for good behaviour…, and just so much incapacity for better,”56 Max ends with yet another endorsement of Wallace’s heroic moderation: “Wallace was not under the illusion that his investigation would change anyone’s behavior,” he writes, “but there was pleasure in and of itself in expanding the fight against American complacency” (273).

At the beginning of my chapter I characterized Wallace’s mode of seeing as panoramic, and here I’d like to remark on a potentially important connection between the form and history of the panorama and the kind of consideration, or “limits,” I’m ascribing to Wallace’s seriousness in the lobster essay and beyond. In The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism (2011), a study of the origins, politics, and somatic and ideological effects of the painter Robert Barker’s late-eighteenth- century patent, Denise Blake Oleksijczuk explains how “Barker’s ambition was to create, from a given spot, a picture of every object visible within the entire circle of the horizon with such painstaking fidelity that it could hardly be distinguished from what it represented.”57 An exemplary aesthetic manifestation of the “encircling” spirit of colonization that Harney and Moten describe in

The Undercommons,58 the panorama, Oleksijczuk elaborates,

was a site for the formation of both national identities (first Scottish, then British) and different subjectivities. Over the years, the panorama’s unbounded illusion of space came to function as a metaphor both for the social reality of the British Empire and of the uncontainable singularities of the spectator’s body. By

56 Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman” and Other Related Writings, ed. Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark (New York: Persea, 1993), 58.

57 Denise Blake Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1.

58 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 34.

132 transporting its viewers to other places in the city, country, or world, the panorama created a spatial and temporal disjunction between a “here and now” and a “there and then” that became a crucial locus for forming new identities. (3)

That the panorama was instrumental in helping to foment not only a sense of nationalism but also various new “notions of ethnicity, gender, social status, and ‘race’” on the part of British spectator- subjects isn’t an entirely new argument (4), but what emerges as unique in Oleksijczuk’s account is precisely what makes it so relevant to thinking through the simultaneously enabling and debilitating effects of Wallace’s realism—that is, his “endlessly perceptive mind”59 alongside his tragic absolutism60—on both his readers and himself. “Raised up on a platform, looking outward into an all-encompassing, multiperspectival painting illuminated by concealed skylights,” Oleksijczuk writes, “spectators were invited to immerse themselves fully in the space represented,” and “in this situation they could consider themselves as being either in a separate space from, or inside, the painting” (13). There were no guarantees, in other words, that the panorama would generate spectators, on the one hand, or spectators wholly willing/believing themselves to be actors in whatever depicted elsewhere, on the other. This is why Oleksiczuk will find it necessary to devote the bulk of her study to “draw[ing] attention to the ambivalences inherent in certain aspects of the

Panorama’s material form, which, as the evidence suggests, made visiting it such a disorienting and overwhelming, rather than a stabilizing and empowering, experience for some of its spectators” (8).

When Oleksijczuk cites “three of the Panorama’s distinguishing features—its enhanced realism, multiperspectivalism, and elevated, central vantage point,” she could well be citing three of

59 Santel, “Conservatism,” par. 7.

60 Here I have in mind David Farrell Krell’s The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005), a book I haven’t actually read (and would probably no longer wish to read) but whose contents I imagine are precisely antithetical to the anti-tragic (and anti-German-idealist) orientation my dissertation has been ascribing to whole seriousness.

133 the distinguishing features of Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction; there’s almost nothing that Wallace didn’t seem to see. But here as well, even more interestingly, she might be pointing to the very loophole for aesthetic judgment—an oscillation between “confusions” and “convictions” (to use the terms from Wallace’s lobster essay)—that not once resulted for Wallace in something better equipped to transform disarticulated feeling and thought into a living “combination” or “fusion of…two approaches,” as Lorde spoke of poetry’s singular usefulness,61 but that instead compelled him to in every way give up. This oscillation, under what I would call the “encircling” control of

Wallace’s formalism, conservatism, and voyeurism, is likely what made Wallace’s prose such satisfying, pseudo-spiritually and pseudo-politically edifying reading for a generation of similarly disinterestedly-interested “yuppies, I guess, and younger intellectuals” (this is his own description of his readership in the early ’90s).62 But it is also likely this kind of oscillation that caused the work and the man, perhaps all too wisened to the artifice or inadequacy of either option under the circumstances, to so greatly suffer.

What I want to suggest the almost-whole seriousness of “Consider the Lobster” and of

Wallace’s panoramic ethos of “consideration” help confirm, therefore, is that it’s not quite right to say that Wallace failed, out of any deficit of awareness or self-awareness of differences racial or otherwise, “to comprehend the resilience and gravity, the inadequacy and the force of the

61 Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen,” in I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 186. Lorde argues the same point repeatedly in her work, articulating it this way in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”: “When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes” (Sister Outsider 37).

62 Wallace, “An Interview,” 128.

134 imaginative act.”63 If panoramic vision, one of imperialism’s most important politico-aesthetic technologies, “had a tendency to produce cognitive uncertainty and disorientation as much as a sense of domination and control”64—had a tendency, that is, to invite an unhinged oscillation between confusions and convictions—then I posit so do the politico-aesthetic contortions of

Wallace’s and our own white guilt. It is for this reason I argue Cohen mischaracterizes Wallace’s relationship to race—an even more “uncomfortable” subject for the liberal imagination—when he claims his encounters with it “were less than wholly successful.” Wallace’s failure, rather, is that he did successfully encounter otherness as “a playground for the imagination” and as literally no more than that, taking all such difference only half-seriously out of the same embarrassment, fear, and anxiety that had led him to be able to perceive the inadequacy of his own frames of reference—his own “vision of the universe”65—in the first place. Indeed, a perfect example of Wallace’s capacity to critically consider and refusal to do more than consider the smooth semiotic operation of what

Morrison describes as “the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people,”66 can be found in his very first novel, The Broom of the System (1997):

GOVERNOR: Gentlemen, something is not right. MR. OBSTAT: What do you mean, Chief? GOVERNOR: With the state, Neil. Something is not right with our state. MR. LUNGBERG: But Chief, unemployment is low, inflation is low, taxes haven’t been raised in two years, pollution is way down except for Cleveland and who the hell cares about Cleveland—just kidding, Neil—but Chief, the people love you, you’re unprecedentedly ahead in the polls, industrial investment and development in the state are at an all-time high…

63 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, xiii.

64 Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas, 11.

65 James Baldwin, “On Being White…and Other Lies,” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 135.

66 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 6–7.

135 GOVERNOR: Stop right there. There you go. MR. OBSTAT: Can you expand on that, Chief? GOVERNOR: Things are just too good, somehow. I suspect a trap.67

When Governor Zusatz is pressed by Mr. Obstat, his Gubernatorial Aide, to elaborate even further, he posits that “the state is getting soft” in its gradual transformation into “one big suburb and industrial park and mall. Too much development,” he speculates; “People are getting complacent.

They’re forgetting the way this state was historically hewn out of the wilderness” (ibid.). A lightbulb then goes off in the Governor’s head:

GOVERNOR: We need a wasteland. MR. LUNGBERG and MR. OBSTAT: A wasteland? GOVERNOR: Gentlemen, we need a desert. A point of savage reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls. An Other for Ohio’s Self. Cacti and scorpions and the sun beating down. Desolation.

Much like a handful of partying teenagers praying their parents might come home to restore some version of equilibrium to the scene—the difference here being a perfectly meaningless inversion: what “the good people of Ohio” need is precisely a good party—the men discuss where and how big this new Ohio desert should end up. A Mr. Ed Roy Yancey (“of Industrial Desert Design, Dallas.

They did Kuwait”) is yanked into the conversation seemingly out of nowhere. Now all four men are discussing the new desert, refining its specs to meet the nature of the imagined need:

MR. OBSTAT: You’ll go down in history, Chief. You’ll be immortal. GOVERNOR: Thanks, Neil. I just feel it’s right, and after conferring with Mr. Yancey, I’m just sold. A hundred miles of blinding white sandy nothingness. ’Course there’ll be some fishing lakes, at the edges, for people to fish in… MR. LUNGBERG: Why white sand, Chief? Why not, say, black sand? GOVERNOR: Go with that, Joe. MR. LUNGBERG: Well, really, if the whole idea is supposed to be contrast, otherness, blastedness, should I say sinisterness? Sinisterness is the sense I get. GOVERNOR: Sinisterness fits, that’s good.

67 David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 1987), 55, suspension points in original.

136 MR. LUNGBERG: Well, Ohio is a pretty white state: the roads are white, the people tend to be on the whole white, the sun’s pretty bright here…. What better contrast than a hundred miles of black sand? Talk about sinister. And the black would soak up the heat a lot better, too. Be really hot, enhance the blastedness aspect. GOVERNOR: I like it. Ed Roy, what do you think? Can cacti and scorpions live in black sand? MR. YANCY: No problem I can see. MR. OBSTAT: What about the cost of black sand? MR. YANCEY: A little more expensive, probably. I’d have to talk to the boys in Sand. But I feel I can commit now to saying it’d be manageable in the context of the whole project. GOVERNOR: Done.

Wallace is masterful in his ironic handling of this scene’s absurdly loaded symbolism. Even here, in a novel drafted while he was a still just a senior at Amherst College, he seems well aware of how “American Africanism” works—in this case, of how the self-identity of a state like Ohio

(incidentally the same “pretty white state” in which he and Lorde would deliver their respective commencement speeches) will obtain precisely in a bumbling, unconscious, unserious form of

“playing in the dark.” He knows his reader will pick up quickly on the racial overtones and overdeterminations of a group of fictional Midwestern leaders and bureaucrats in the ridiculous yet historically predictable process of both discovering their need for some kind of “black miracle”—“a point of savage reference” against which to feel masterfully alive—and determining the relative ease of getting their hands on one. Yet the Strangelovean satire Wallace exploits in this scene in the end does little more than keep the spectacle festering; the feeling and the vision remain, as they would remain over the course of Wallace’s whole career of experiments, unrevolutionary and apocalyptic, in denial of the possibilities that literature might be more than a luxury, that anger might become more than hatred, that pain might become more than suffering, and that the creative use of difference might lead to creative change. What Morrison’s important study of whiteness perhaps didn’t anticipate, then, were aesthetic “practice[s] of watching” (to use Wallace’s own term for

137 “spectatorial, self-conscious” voyeurism)68 that do consider “the serious consequences of blacks” but that take the consideration no further—works that understand the stakes and promises of the hypothesis but that nevertheless pronounce it “dead on the page,” “Done,” just like any other live hypothesis that would require a person to actually be, act, and write differently. As Lorde warned in

Sister Outsider, “The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion.”69 It is for this reason that Wallace—for whom we might begin to say poetry itself was a dead hypothesis—can take us only so far. His was exactly the kind of defeatism Lorde knew she needed to warn against in her address at Oberlin: “Your privilege is not a reason for guilt,” as she sought to convince her (pretty white) audience; “it is part of your power, to be used in support of those things you say you believe. Because to absorb without use is the gravest error of privilege.”70 And Wallace’s was exactly the kind of seriousness that somehow sensed but didn’t wholly believe how seriously it needed to heed Lorde’s wisdom.

In closing this chapter, I wish to focus on a single six-page text of Wallace’s that ought to demonstrate in merciless clarity the degree to which his kind of seriousness—which is also to say his kind of whiteness—must be seen to cohere through a combination or fusion of the bad habits of formalism, conservatism, and voyeurism that critics have for too long treated as separate failings and have thereby enabled themselves to continue forgiving. Described by one reader as “Wallace

68 Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram,” 34.

69 Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” 123.

70 Lorde, “Commencement Address,” 215.

138 near his nonfiction best”71 and by another reader as not merely “uncharacteristically gormless” but also “vaguely homophobic and not-at-all-vaguely sexist,”72 the 1996 essay “Back in New Fire,” exceptional though it may be in its gormlessness, is nevertheless exemplary of Wallace’s desire for the kind of “safe participation in loss, in love, in chaos, in justice” that Morrison so percipiently ascribed to the limitedly serious fictional projects of her study. It’s also exemplary, I’d argue, of what James Baldwin characterized, in “On Being White…and Other Lies” (1984), as “the kind of vision as remarkable for what it pretends to include as for what it remorselessly diminishes, demolishes, or leaves totally out account.”73 And it’s exemplary, I’d suggest, of the kind of orientation or drive toward death that Blank Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton once termed

“reactionary suicide,” this in distinction to the “revolutionary suicide” of Black radicals in America who, unlike the “white radicals,” Newton reminds us are “faced with genocide.”74

Originally published in Might magazine then republished in Wallace’s posthumous non- fiction collection Both Flesh and Not (2012), “Back in New Fire” begins by rehearsing the old fairytale-romance story in which “[a] gallant knight espies a fair maiden in the distant window of a

71 David Masciotra, “David Foster Wallace, Traditionalist?,” The Daily Beast, Nov. 12, 2012, http://www. thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/02/david-foster-wallace-traditionalist-considering-both-flesh-and-not- essays.html, par. 2.

72 Ben Mauk, “The Thrills of Miscellany: David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, and Supplemental Work,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 25, 2012, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-thrills-of-miscellany-david-foster- wallace-nicholson-baker-and-supplemental-work/, par. 12.

73 Baldwin, “On Being White,” xx.

74 Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Grace Jovanovich, 1973), 4. “Jumping off a bridge is not the same as moving to wipe out the overwhelming force of an oppressive army,” Newtown points out in introducing the two kinds of suicide his autobiography will elaborate (4), and “with this redefinition,” he explains, “the term ‘revolutionary suicide’ is not as simplistic as it might seem initially. In coining the phrase, I took two knowns and combined them to make an unknown, a neoteric phrase in which the word ‘revolutionary’ transforms the word ‘suicide’ into an idea that has different dimensions and meanings, applicable to a new and complex situation” (5). Thus insisting on making room for the consideration of a wholly serious kind of suicide, one in which defense rather than murder is the goal, Newton concludes that “only resistance can destroy the pressures that cause reactionary suicide” (6).

139 forbidding-type castle.”75 Guarding the castle, inevitably, is “a particularly nasty dragon,” and since we all know that “‘Fair maiden’ means ‘good-looking virgin,’” Wallace insinuates, “let’s not be naïve about what the knight’s really fighting for” (ibid.). The essay then jump-cuts to a moral snapshot of the array of attitudes that—in Wallace’s extremely limited purview—comprised the

American response to the HIV/AIDS crisis at the turn of the century. Never once mentioning the pandemic in the context of America’s gay communities, Wallace instead considers “the specter of heterosexual AIDS” and the perspectives of “[his] own knightly friends” (168) on this “particularly nasty dragon” now “guarding the castle” of deeply gendered sexual conquest (171). Some of

Wallace’s friends see it, for instance, “as nothing less than a sexual Armageddon—a violent end to the casual carnalcopia of the last three decades. Some others,” he explains, “regard HIV as a sort of test of our generation’s sexual mettle; these guys now applaud their own casual sport-fucking as a kind of medical daredevilry that affirms the indomitability of the erotic spirit” (ibid.). Wallace’s own hypothesis? That “some of today’s knights still underestimate both AIDS’s dangers and its advantages. They fail to see,” he wagers, “that HIV could well be the salvation of sexuality in the

1990s”; and “they don’t see it,” he surmises, “because they tend to misread the eternal story of what erotic passion’s all about” (ibid.).

Just one of the things that’s startling about this essay is how closely Wallace’s intuitive need to rescue one version of the erotic from another version of the erotic mimics Lorde’s procedure in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978). There she writes, for example, that

“[t]he erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason,” she explains, “we

75 David Foster Wallace, “Back in New Fire,” in Both Flesh and Not: Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 167.

140 have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information.”76 Wallace posits, by comparison, that “human sexuality’s power and meaning increase with our recognition of its seriousness”; like Lorde he commits to liberating the category of the erotic from that which would compromise its seriousness.77 He even suggests at one point

(although though Lorde, and most of us, might take this for granted) that “real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, to erect bridges across the chasms that separate selves”

(172). But Lorde’s distinction between the erotic and its many distortions—by implication a distinction between how men deploy it and how women use it—was necessarily a distinction of kind, whereas Wallace’s was one of degree: a matter of simple voltage. This kind of distinction is in part what precluded Wallace from being able to envision the erotic, as Lorde did, as “not just sexual”78

(and certainly not about heterosexual masculine fantasies), but about integration of all social, spiritual, and political varieties.79 According to Wallace’s formulation of wholly serious “erotic passion,”

Plain old coitus becomes erotically charged and spiritually potent at just those points where impediments, conflicts, taboos, and consequences lend it a double- edged character—meaningful sex is both an overcoming and a succumbing, a transcendence and a transgression, triumphant and terrible and ecstatic and sad. (178)

76 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider, 55.

77 Wallace, “Back in New Fire,” 181.

78 Audre Lorde, “Poetry and Day-By-Day Experience: Excerpts from a Conversation on 12 June 1986 in Berlin,” by Karen Nölle-Fischer, in Hall, Conversations, 156.

79 As Lorde writes in “Uses of the Erotic,” “The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference” (56).

141 Thus resignifying the value of the erotic in terms that would satisfy neither Lorde’s revolutionary vision for it nor any later, deconstructionist queerings of “the glad tidings of intersubjective recognition,”80 Wallace merely assigns the erotic the same kind of high-octane oscillatory power that I’ve already insisted led him astray. For him it’s “eternal” and all about “imagination,”81 whereas for Lorde the erotic is “ancient” and about fundamentally “altering your aura, your dreams, your ideas.”82 It’s no surprise, therefore, that Wallace’s operative distinction between “sexual passion” and “the biological urge to mate” will ultimately hinge on his favored offering—that of choice.83 As he would have us observe it, “Turtles and gnats can mate, but only the human will can defy, transgress, overcome, love: choose” (ibid.). It’s still a surprise, unfortunately, when Wallace then moves to lay down his essay’s main claim: that “the casual knights of [his] own bland generation might well come to regard AIDS as a blessing”—one whose “gift lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all” (171).

Wallace’s absolute evacuation of the actual content and consequences of the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s—a kind of aestheticization made possible, in my reading, by his white trinity of formalism, conservatism, and voyeurism—is obviously another startling thing about this

80 William Haver, “Really Bad Infinities: Queer’s Honour and the Pornographic Life,” Parallax 5, no. 4 (1999): 12.

81 Wallace, “Back in New Fire,” 172.

82 Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” 38. In Lorde’s understanding of it, “The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep…[And] as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes” (36–37). It’s worth noting that Lorde always refrained from using the word “imagination” except when pointing to a limited version of vision. I have on hand almost eighty pages of single-spaced transcribed quotations from Lorde’s writings, and a search for “imagination” brings the word up just once—when Lorde, also in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” “speak[s] of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight” (37).

83 Wallace, “Back in New Fire,” 169.

142 essay. But even worse, I’d argue, is where and how Wallace allocates blame for the supposed lack of erotic seriousness that supposedly preceded and now somehow vindicates, even explains, the emergence of a “new fire” that, in his appraisal, “can help us”—meaning him and his bros—

“relearn what it means to be truly sexual” (172). His argument runs thus:

History-wise, both nature and culture have been ingenious at erecting impediments that give the choice of passion its price and value: religious proscriptions; penalties for adultery and divorce; chivalristic chastity and courtly decorum; the stigma of illegitimate birth; chaperonage; Madonna/whore complexes; syphilis; back-alley abortions; a set of “moral” codes that put sensuality on a taboo-level with defecation and apostasy… (169)

…and the laundry list of “dragons” goes on. Wallace then acknowledges how, “from 1996’s perspective, most of the old sexual dragons look stupid and cruel” (ibid.). But he insists, nevertheless, that “they had something big in their favor: as long as the dragons reigned, sex wasn’t casual, not ever. Historically,” Wallace concludes in this paragraph, “human sexuality has been a deadly serious business—and the fiercer its dragons, the seriouser sex got; and the higher the price of choice, the higher the erotic voltage surrounding what people chose” (170). But here is where the hypothesis becomes even more dead, the vision even more baseless, and the whiteness even more insidious than we might have anticipated. Offering what he believes to be a reasonable justification for considering AIDS “a gift perhaps bestowed by nature to restore some critical balance, or maybe summoned unconsciously out of the collective erotic despair of the post-’60s glut” (171), Wallace narrates how

what must have seemed suddenly, the dragons all keeled over and died. This was just around when I was born, the ’60s’ “Revolution” in sexuality. Sci-fi type advances in prophylaxis and antivenereals, feminism as a political force, TV as institution, the rise of a culture of youth and its gland-intensive art and music, Civil Rights, rebellion as fashion, inhibition-killing drugs, the moral castration of churches and censors. Bikinis, miniskirts. “Free love.” The castle’s doors weren’t so much unlocked as blown off their hinges. Sex could finally be unconstrained, “Hang-

143 Up”-free, just another appetite: casual. I was toothless and incontinent through most of the Revolution, but it must have seemed like instant paradise. For a while. I was pre-conscious for the Revolution’s big party, but I got to experience fully the hangover that followed—the erotic malaise of the ’70s, as sex, divorced from most price and consequence, reached a kind of saturation-point in the culture—swimming couples and meat-market bars, hot tubs and EST, Hustler’s gynecological spreads, Charlie’s Angels, herpes, kiddie-porn, mood rings, teenage pregnancy, Plato’s Retreat, disco. I remember Looking for Mr. Goodbar all too well, its grim account of the emptiness and self-loathing that a decade of rampant casual fucking had brought on. Looking back, I realize that I came of sexual age in a culture that was starting to miss the very dragons whose deaths had supposedly freed it. (170)

That Wallace actually believes he’s proffering an expanded notion of the erotic—when he is in fact merely withdrawing into facile caricatures consigning non-normative sex acts to the dustbin of wasted life—is just half of the problem. The more important half of the problem is that both

“feminism as a political force” and “Civil Rights” are here explicitly, and yet so casually (alongside

“kiddie porn” and “mood rings”), thrown into the same dustbin—and by correlation right into the same scare quotes Wallace would forever need to place around a concept like “Revolution.” Wallace all but indicts—or is it all but thanks?—the conspicuously absent queers in this essay for bringing upon themselves and the rest of America the cataclysm of AIDS. “Fire is lethal, but we need it,” as he will self-martyringly end the piece, and eventually his life, by imagining (172). Do we as serious readers of Wallace still feel the need to canonize him for it?

144

VOLTA

One Poem

for certain poets and people

I had two options: a) kill myself; b) kill myself.

I went for neither option and instead listened to certain poets and people listened especially closely to what they were telling about the State and its epic historical distortions of miracle.

Believe it or not this is all it took— being shown how exactly precisely stupid we’ve always been to let the State fuck up our knowing better about miracle.

145 The need to kill myself could now become, at least more about people very much more about things I could see.

Phew!

So what could I see at that point you ask?

Pretty much not anything but the time: it was time-for-a-whole-new-lighting-system o’clock.

True, there’d been trauma.

I had blindness from some parts of it.

But I loved my blindness like I loved my old kind of need to kill myself and my old kind of need to kill you too by making my need a little bit more fascinating than yours my parents both uglier

146 and more beautiful than yours.

I’d always been quick to laughter quick to cackle, I mean so usually nobody could tell what a bad witch

I was, only how badly I wanted to be a good witch.

Then a different measurement for good seeing came along which is exactly the wrong way to put it.

It didn’t “come along” unless you want the old kind of miracle to start doing the talking again.

But how did I take notice, then?

As fucked up as simplicity is it was fucking simple.

It involved a stopping.

Not a suicide but that’s how it tricks you

“it” being your old self always thinking it’s your new self all ready to die for your 23 sins

147 that you fail to actually adequately comprehend.

It involved as I started to see in my stopping angels that were literal angels that are literal. Integrated.

Moving.

Do you remember when you didn’t know you were racist?

Can you predict how that question is going to tie into the matter of this one poem?

You don’t have to know for sure but you for sure have to feel it.

All that time I spent teaching myself about polyamory when I was too fucked to fuck— those years were funny.

Spiriting my way

148 in and out of AA which are my own initials, also funny.

I’d known about difference when I arrived: all 2.5 kinds of it.

I sensed my knowing was as pale as my pain was unshareable.

I wrote poetry only when I felt extremely jealous.

To be honest, this is the first time

I’ve written a poem and been able to hear myself saying something inside of it.

In listening to you, my own exactitude takes shape.

Unmiraculously.

This isn’t a prize or a price.

We are laboring together even though I owe you.

The fearlessness might be surplus itself.

We will keep renaming it.

I will keep fucking up.

149 I will keep not killing myself for fucking up; instead

I will quietly grow loud and finally learn to drive so I can wait for you in the van as you’re stealing your things back to take us wherever we need to go.

It will be a better here, but here.

150

CODA

Experimentalism Was Never Enough

The tolerant attitude to confusion characteristic of these times is favorable to experimental procedure and thinking: there shapes itself, in the confusion, the premise, inspiring faith in experimentalism, that all procedure, and all thinking, from the beginning of thinking and procedure-devising, have been experimental, for want of the possibility of their being otherwise, and that the best to be effected is, therefore, that which is the most experimental.

—Laura (Riding) Jackson1

To encounter the history of avant-garde poetry is to encounter a racist tradition. —Cathy Park Hong2

On March 13, 2015, as part of the new-media poetry festival Interrupt 3 held at Brown

University’s Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, conceptual writer Kenneth Goldsmith stood before his audience and read aloud a lightly-remixed autopsy report on the body of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old unarmed black man shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, seven months earlier by white police officer Darren Wilson in a proclaimed act of self-defense. Backlit by a large projection of the dead teenager’s graduation photo and either purposely or inadvertently dressed like a Coptic

1 Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman” and Other Related Writings, ed. Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark (New York: Persea Books, 1993), 167.

2 Cathy Park Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 7 (Fall 2014), http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/7/delusions-of-whiteness-in-the-avant-garde, par. 1.

151 priest, Goldsmith paced a small distance across the stage and read for half an hour, reorganizing the sequence of certain findings in the report, translating some of its medical jargon into plainer

English, but otherwise leaving the language unedited: “The remaining male genitalia system is unremarkable” is the line he chose to end with. Goldsmith titled his piece “The Body of Michael

Brown” and would be paid $500 for his performance. The two remaining poets who’d been scheduled to read after Goldsmith that evening agreed it would be inappropriate for the show to go on, so the floor was opened up instead.3

In one of the few eyewitness accounts of Goldsmith’s reading to emerge online in the following days and weeks, a young artist named Rin Johnson powerfully recreated the audience’s and their own initial responses to the performance:

Confused, stunned silence ensues. Some people clap.

A panel of white poets takes the stage awkwardly as the microphone gets passed around the auditorium for a Q&A. I raise my hand. After two NPR-ish listeners remark on the vivid nature of the poem and placate without provoking, I receive the mic. I immediately regret raising my hand. I have no idea what I have to say, just that I need to say something. There is a sensation you get as a black American in American academia when white Americans start to talk about black people. It’s a complicated feeling, a helpless rage that cannot be quelled unless explicitly penned in.

Goldsmith is a famous poet—he founded a whole movement in which some of my poet friends work. I can feel my anxiety rising, and I scramble to call the work a cop-out. I realize later that what I mean is there are political realities from which art cannot hide. To take a document like this and attempt to make it into a form of art is blatantly not engaging with the issues at hand. Using a white body to try to interpret and illustrate the violence wrought upon black bodies in America is lazy.4

3 See Jillian Steinhauer, “Kenneth Goldsmith Remixes Michael Brown Autopsy Report as Poetry,” Hyperallergic, Mar. 16, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/190954/kenneth-goldsmith-remixes-michael-brown-autopsy-report-as-poetry/. My account is based on several such reports published in the days following Goldsmith’s performance, as well as on conversations with two friends who were present.

4 Rin Johnson, “On Hearing a White Man Co-opt the Body of Michael Brown,” Hyperallergic, Mar. 20, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/192628/on-hearing-a-white-man-co-opt-the-body-of-michael-brown/, par. 4–6.

152 What Johnson’s article confirmed was that nobody in attendance that evening had adequately interrupted, or known how to interrupt, the spectacle of Goldsmith’s “obvious kidnapping” of a black body (par. 11) for the aesthetic production of “Shock and Blah,” as critic Sueyeun Juliette Lee had dubbed the effects of certain “offensive postures” in conceptualism in an article the year before.5 Lee’s article had quoted the comedian Stephen Colbert, who’d recently hosted Goldsmith on his show and “offered a surprisingly resonant response” (par. 23) to Goldsmith’s Seven American

Deaths and Disasters, a book built entirely out of real-time media reports, news clippings, and 9-1-1 calls transcribed verbatim then cut up and rearranged for effect. As Colbert had put it:

All these things, these seven different events—we know what’s happening when we read this. These people—who are just living their lives, thinking it’s an ordinary day—don’t know it’s coming. When I read this, I feel like I’m some sort of time traveling aesthete who is coming in to sample other people’s shock and tragedy. I’m tasting their disbelief and the way it’s changing them forever. I am tasting them while I read it. And it feels vampiric. Are you giving us a feast of other people’s blood? (Ibid.)

The seven events Goldsmith had chosen to include in his 2013 book were the assassinations of John

F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon, the Challenger shuttle explosion, Columbine,

9/11, and the death of Michael Jackson. “A quick but important side note,” Lee had spoken a little too soon: “he avoids events rooted in racialized narratives or communities—Martin Luther King

Jr.’s and Malcolm X’s assassinations are left untouched. This in itself,” she’d added, “begs the question if an ‘American death’ or an ‘American disaster’ requires ‘white’ victims” (par. 24).

Goldsmith’s own explanation, in an afterword to the book, for why he didn’t include the

5 Sueyeun Juliette Lee, “Shock and Blah: Offensive Postures in ‘Conceptual’ Poetry and the Traumatic Stuplime,” The Volta 41, May 2014, http://www.thevolta.org/ewc41-sjlee-p1.html. Citing Sianne Ngai’s formulation of “stuplimity” as an “‘aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom’” in a post-Fordist reinscription of the Kantian sublime (par. 11), Lee coins the term “the traumatic stuplime” to characterize art like Goldsmith’s that relies on materials of “cultural trauma” (par. 22). “I am shocked and fatigued by the writing,” Lee writes of her own experience of it, “and this drives me into a space where as a reader, I simply shut down” (par. 12).

153 assassinations of these two men is that “no media were present during those shootings” and that

“by the time the reporters arrived on the scenes, the language was more flatly characteristic of standard reportage: confidently and deftly delivered.”6

Yet Goldsmith’s requirement that the available language surrounding his chosen deaths and disasters be inflected with the drama of “uncertainty” (ibid.) would evidently not outweigh his impulse to frame the all-too-conclusive findings of Michael Brown’s Saint Louis County autopsy report as “the eighth American death and disaster.”7 As Goldsmith insisted in a defense of his

Interrupt performance posted on Facebook the day after, “This reading was identical in tone and intention…[and] the document speaks for itself in ways that an interpretation cannot” (ibid.). In a widely-circulated article titled “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show,” published a few months later, the poet Ken Chen would characterize Goldsmith’s Facebook post as

“humanist, defensive, and as smarmy as a commemorative 9/11 tchotchke[.] Goldsmith wrote that he had wrought a ‘powerful’ and ‘uncomfortable’ poem about American tragedy,” Chen observed,

“a poem that ‘is able to tell the truth in the strongest and clearest way possible.’ He did not apologize.”8 As for Johnson’s firsthand experience as a racialized member of Goldsmith’s mostly- white audience, the one useful thing they’d report on taking from that weekend at Brown was a reminder of the dangers—of the even worse form of suffering, as Audre Lorde might warn—of not expressing one’s anger in a context of obvious injustice. In Johnson’s words, “Goldsmith’s reading gave me a glimpse of the white supremacist patriarchy alive within me. It runs deep in my

6 Kenneth Goldsmith, Seven American Deaths and Disasters (Brooklyn, NY: powerHouse Books, 2013), 174.

7 “Much ado about Kenneth Goldsmith,” e-flux conversations, Mar. 2015, http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/much- ado-about-kenneth-goldsmith/1207.

8 Ken Chen, “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show,” The Margins, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, June 11, 2015, http://aaww.org/authenticity-obsession/, par. 1.

154 mind and stops me from defending my people and myself” (par. 12). That so many of the white artists and poets across North America paying attention to what had happened at Interrupt 3 were also compelled to recognize the white supremacist patriarchy alive within themselves and to finally stop taking Goldsmith seriously was, I suggest, the other useful thing that happened.

I’d come to Brown’s English Department almost seven years earlier with a feeling that

Goldsmith’s brand of what he termed “uncreative writing”—articulated in a co-edited 2011 anthology of his as a position of being, flatly, Against Expression9—represented exactly the kind of project or orientation that I wanted to figure out how to properly critique. I was strongly drawn to conceptualism, and just as strongly offended by its cynical, self-heroizing, end-of-literature triumphalist tendencies. In a study and defense of his practice published in 2010, Goldsmith offered this description:

For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patch-writing, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.10

Reading these words now, it’s impossible for me not to see the violence—or at least the real potential for violence—that many other critics have always seen in “the passive-aggressive, soft, naturalized imperialism running a sometimes parallel, sometimes intersected course with

9 See Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

10 See Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

155 experimentalism,” as Heriberto Yépez has put it.11 Those poor Ivy League undergrads, who until

Goldsmith’s class hadn’t had a “safe” space in which to formalize and get credit for their everyday plundering and stealing! But being the young critic brought up on death-of-the-author axioms that I was, I’d generally found just enough in conceptualism’s imagined “assassination of mastery,”12 as the poets Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place would claim for its strategies in their Notes on

Conceptualisms (2009), to keep myself believing that there was something necessary and good at the heart of the enterprise. I admit to having liked the feeling of “getting” a conceptual poem—of the conceptual mastery it afforded me in its assassination of mastery. I admit to having felt relief, as well, that I would never again have to struggle to say something unique or certain-sounding if I wished to write poetry; instead I could circumvent both my anxiety and my guilt by foregrounding existing voices and materials in what the novelist Jonathan Lethem was around that time popularizing as an “ecstasy of influence.”13 Still, I didn’t like how conceptualism was being increasingly valorized by the influential poetry critic Marjorie Perloff as the work of so-called

“unoriginal genius” (as much as I’d remain on board, for a time, with her valorization of “the poetics of indeterminacy” more broadly).14 And I knew the problem had something to do with how certain conceptualists had made so many grand, untestable claims in recent years on behalf of the ethics of “failure”—“Failure is the goal of conceptual writing,” Fitterman and Place would declare15—this despite my sensing that there had to be situations in which negative capability, as a

11 Heriberto Yépez, “Confession and Testimony: On the New Berkeley Poetry Conference,” Lana Turner, Dec. 23, 2015, http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/blog/confession-and-testimony-on-the-new-berkeley-poetry-conference.

12 Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place, Notes on Conceptualisms (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), 25.

13 See Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harper’s, Feb. 2007.

14 See Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry By Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) and The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

15 Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place, Notes on Conceptualisms (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), 20.

156 politics of historically-grounded dispossession and refusal, would always remain a live hypothesis (as the language of my dissertation would eventually come to formulate it).

Because of my upbringing, in other words, in almost entirely white Marxist poetry circles that privileged the critique of class and remained skeptical of both identity politics and all valuations of “voice,” there were at least two things I was failing to see. The first was that, as Chen observes, “our poetry wars are not really positioned around aesthetic camps (say, experimental versus mainstream poetics), but by hierarchies of racial segregation.”16 The poet Cathy Park Hong also reminds us of the nature of such divides, extending the argument in her essay “Delusions of

Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” (2014) to point out that “poets of colour have always been expected to sit quietly in the backbenches of both mainstream and avant-garde poetry.”17 And Dorothy Wang writes, by comparison, in her study Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary

Asian American Poetry, that “poetry by racialized persons, no matter the aesthetic style, is almost always read as secondary to the larger (and more ‘primary’) fields and forms of English-language poetry and poetics—whether the lyric, prosody, rhetorical tropes, the notion of the ‘avant-garde’— categories all too often presumed to be universal, overarching, and implicitly ‘racially unmarked.’”18

But for so long I just kept looking elsewhere—to the eradication of pretty much every bad “-ism” besides racism—for some kind of clarification, some different kind of intensification, of the difference between those “two camps,” as Hong puts it, “that many argue no longer exists.”19 Opposing

“avant-garde” forms and formations against “conservative” forms and formations—“‘free’ verse vs.

16 Chen, “Authenticity Obsession,” par. 41.

17 Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness, par. 2.

18 Dorothy Wang, introduction to Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), xx.

19 Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness,” par. 2.

157 traditional prosody, colloquial speech vs. literary language, America vs. England, direct presentation vs. elaborate metaphor, ‘closed’ vs. ‘open’ forms,” to borrow Eliot Weinberger’s inventory in the preface to his mostly white (and mostly male) 1993 anthology Innovators and Outsiders: American

Poetry Since 195020—the binary had been reproduced over the past sixty years most legibly and most culpably, I determined, by the genre of the poetry anthology, which will so often inflate or deflate positions in order to justify (and market) a given editorial approach. So for a while I saw some sort of saving heuristic in Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s claim, central to their polemical A Pamphlet

Against Anthologies (1928), that “the anthology meets with two different kinds of reactions in living poets”—“they will write either toward the anthology or away from it”21—though this was before I’d encountered (Riding) Jackson’s more clarifying 1962 statement on the fundamental “question of seriousness” and her explicit identification of two different kinds of it.22 The other place I looked was to Walter Benjamin’s distinction between two types of allegory. As he posits in The Writer of

Modern Life, “The Baudelairean allegory—unlike the Baroque allegory—bears traces of the rage needed to break into this world, to lay waste to its harmonious structures (149): whereas “Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the outside,” Benjamin writes, “Baudelaire sees it also from within” (163). Yet as elegant and truthful as these two distinctions felt—to this day they inform

20 Eliot Weinberger, introduction to Innovators and Outsiders: American Poetry Since 1950, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1993), xi. In a chapter of Thinking Its Presence, Wang focuses on a series of exchanges between Weinberger and his supporters and the poet John Yau, who in a negative review of the anthology published in American Poetry Review highlighted the breakdown: “‘American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators & Outsiders begins with William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) and ends with Michael Palmer (b. 1943). There are thirty-five poets in all, five of whom are women. Denise Levertov (b. 1923) and Susan Howe (b. 1937) are the only women among the nineteen active poets Weinberger has judged important enough to include. Langston Hughes (1902–1967) and Amiri Baraka (Leroi [sic] Jones) (b. 1934) are the only African-American poets. As to other Others, forget it’” (171).

21 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (London: Carcanet Press, 2002), 159.

22 Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Introduction for a Broadcast; Continued for Chelsea,” in The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language, ed. John Nolan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 28.

158 understanding of the difference between limited and whole seriousness, with Benjamin’s especially, and unfortunately morbidly, apropos to the present discussion—on their own they brought me no closer to something like a decolonial reckoning with what I’d so enthusiastically discover Lorde to reject, once I finally started reading her, as white America’s addiction to “basically uncreative victories.”23

The second thing I was failing to see in my search for something better than the kind of poetry I’d always known was the extent to which my lingering investment in basically uncreative victories—in forms (and sometimes people) that denied or ridiculed my own “impulse toward wholeness”24—was failing to save me personally from despair. There just seemed nowhere in poetry for me to put my anger, my grief, my vulnerability, my spirituality, or my “sense of difference”25—nowhere to recognize, that is, the validity or shareability of my kind of seriousness.

In Fitterman and Place’s Notes, I remember there being these two revisions of terms that particularly bothered me: the substitution of a “readership” with what Fitterman and Place call a

“thinkership,”26 and the collapsing of the subject/object binary into a “properly melancholic contemporary entity” named the “sobject” (38)—a kind of non-reading reader, according to

Fitterman and Place, better suited to “redress failure, hallucinate repair” (25). Did I really have to buy into these emotionally and socially deadening concepts in order to remain a responsible, smart poet? Would I perhaps have to convert to a belief in panoramic fiction like David Foster Wallace’s, which could at least keep colorfully animated a desire for things to be otherwise, and which could at

23 Audre Lorde, “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 51.

24 Nancy K. Bereano, introduction to Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde, 8.

25 (Riding) Jackson, The Word “Woman,” 37.

26 Fitterman and Place, Notes, 10.

159 least pretend not to take itself so seriously? To solve my problem here, I once again turned my critical eye upon what I saw to be a pernicious ideological offshoot of the poetry-anthology machine—of its “gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical advances” (as Wallace would put it).27 Specifically, I took to task Cole

Swensen and David St. John’s 2009 anthology American Hybrid to try to draw a connection between the lack of dialectical thinking present in formalist celebrations of hybridity, on the one hand, and in conceptualist celebrations of the waning of feeling, joy, and poetry as “a revelatory distillation of experience”28 on the other. As St. John writes in his introduction to American Hybrid,

I am persuaded by the idea of an American poetry based upon plurality, not purity. We need all of our poets. Our poetry should be as various as the natural world, as rich and peculiar in its potential articulations. The purpose of this anthology is to celebrate these exquisite hybridizations emerging in the work of all our poets. Let the gates of the Garden stand open; let the renaming of the world begin.29

Yet the lack of dialectical thinking behind conceptualism’s pseudo-revolutionary hailing of a

“thinkership” of “sobjects” had different consequences, I’d soon realize, from the lack of dialectical thinking behind hybridism’s naturalization of liberal values and of the Christian “Garden” that is supposedly nature itself. As politically inadequate or compromised as its framings of “the natural world” and of “exquisite” poetic forms felt, it was at least relatively easy for me to take hybridism’s particular brand of the End of History only half-seriously. And at least I wasn’t being intellectually rewarded by the ideology of hybridism, as if I’d needed any encouragement, for being “properly melancholic.” Still, it wasn’t until the optic of seriousness came to eclipse the optic of failure in my

27 David Foster Wallace, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Larry McCaffery, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 135.

28 Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider, 37.

29 David St. John, introduction to American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, ed. Cole Swensen and David St. John (New York: Norton, 2009), xxviii.

160 work that I began to sense that conceptualism was not merely dead but also “vampiric.” And it wasn’t until my terms of judgment thus shifted that I began to see that what I was really after was perhaps a kind of sensibility that both I and Poetry already had: something differently whole and differently integrated from the wholeness or integration promised by “sobjectivity”—though this

“something” was something that the experimentalism with which I was familiar had been dangerously good at pretending to be.30

It was around the time that I was starting to lean into my distrust of conceptualism that I encountered the poet CAConrad, who officially describes himself as “the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.”31 I first heard of and met him while visiting a graduate program in

Philadelphia run by a pantheon of neo-avant-garde poets whose own kind of seriousness seemed like it was maybe just beginning to take seriously the seriousness of someone like CAConrad.

“Here, meet CA, he’s something,” one such poet whispered to me as we approached this gorgeously huge petunia of a person wearing a neon-purple cape, painted fingernails, a tie-dyed headband, and heaps of quartz jewelry. I shook hands with CA and then sat down and listened to him read a handful of what he’d recently started calling “(soma)tic poetry rituals.” As he would later explain in the preface to his first collection of published rituals and accompanying poems: “(Soma)tic poetry is a praxis I’ve developed to more fully engage the everyday through writing. Soma is an Indo-Persian

30 Here I’m reminded of, and in a way can relate to, Lorde’s ambivalence toward her treatment The Cancer Journals: “I was very anxious to go home. But I found, also, and couldn’t admit at the time, that the very bland whiteness of the hospital which I railed against and hated so, was also a kind of protection, a welcome insulation within which I could continue to not-feel. It was an erotically blank environment within whose undifferentiated and undemanding and infantilizing walls I could continue to be emotionally vacant—psychic mush—without being required by myself or anyone to be anything else. Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Late Books, 1980), 46.

31 CAConrad, The Book of Frank (Seattle: Wave Books, 2009), author’s bio, n.p.

161 word that means ‘the divine.’ Somatic is Greek. Its meaning translates as ‘the tissue’ or ‘nervous system.’ The goal is to coalesce soma and somatic,” he writes, “while triangulating patterns of experience with the world around us.”32 Conrad’s poems themselves were more lyrical than the poems I’d been accustomed to appreciate, more expressive and campy than I’d thought my tastes and my politics were attuned to. Again, this was before I’d begun any serious reading of (Riding)

Jackson or Lorde—and well before I could see that the topic of my dissertation would be not competing forms of poetry but rather competing forms of seriousness and the intersectional forces of identity at work in shaping them. After hearing him read I went back to Vancouver, chose a different graduate program to attend, and for about five years forgot all about CAConrad. Then suddenly, it seemed, almost every poet and artist I knew, regardless of their respective “camp,” was talking about CAConrad, becoming friends with him on Facebook, and liking and sharing his frequently all-caps posts about everything from foreign policy and AIDS to poetry, gardening, veganism, and witchcraft. As Conrad’s old friend Eileen Myles remarks, “His kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of his exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence.”33 Here I observed how my own ambivalent interest in constraint-based conceptualism’s hallucinations of repair might come to be replaced by practices of constraint-based ritual oriented around anger, living, and healing.

The first paragraph of Conrad’s “The Right to Manifest Manifesto: Introduction to

(Soma)tic Poetry Exercises and the Resulting Poems” is exemplary of the voice he tends to project:

32 CAConrad, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Seattle: Wave Books, 2012), 1.

33 Eileen Myles, qtd. in “CAConrad,” Poets.org, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/caconrad.

162 I cannot stress enough how much this mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in ever increasing brutality, has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry. If I am an extension of this world then I am an extension of the garbage, shit, pesticides, bombed and smoldering cities, microchips, cyber, astral and biological pollution, BUT ALSO the beauty of a patch of unspoiled sand, all that croaks from the mud, talons on the cliff that take rock and silt so seriously flying over the spectacle for a closer examination and are nothing short of necessary. The most idle-looking pebble will suddenly match any hunger, any rage. (Ibid.)

When at an earlier stage of my dissertation, before the killing of Michael Brown and before “The

Body of Michael Brown,” I’d been committed more extensively to a Spinozist or “renaturalist” substance-monist lens for my study (The Renaturalization of Seriousness had been my project’s intended subtitle), it occurred to me that Conrad would be the perfect figure with whom to conclude. He is a writer, after all, who unapologetically weds “the political-sensual-spiritual”34 in everything he does and whose work is exactly about trying to forget that we were ever taught or otherwise forced to separate thought and extension, history and nature, or poetry and everyday life in the first place. “And I’m talking about truly GETTING the interconnectedness,” he’ll add, “seeing the web of life that we are a part of on this planet, forgoing the simpler Tree of Life model.”35 Like all the writers of my study, moreover, Conrad’s seriousness demands an attentiveness to, and activation within, “the exigent present”36—“an ‘extreme present,’” he calls it.37 Raised in Kansas by

34 Lyndon K. Gill, “Chatting Back an Epidemic: Caribbean Gay Men, HIV/AIDS, and the Uses of Erotic Subjectivity,” GLQ 18, nos. 2–3 (2012): 280.

35 Conrad, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon,163.

36 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 171.

37 CAConrad, “An Interview with CAConrad,” by David Buuck, Tripwire 10 (2016), 63. “One morning I made a list of the worst problems with the factory,” Conrad recalls, “and at the top of that list was ‘lack of being present.’ The more I thought about this the more I realized this was what the factory robbed my family of the most, and the thing that frightened me the most, this not being aware of place in the present. That morning I started what I now call (Soma)tics, ritualized structures where being anything but present was next to impossible. These rituals create what I refer to as an ‘extreme present’ where the many facets of what is around me wherever I am can come together through a sharper lens. It has been inspiring that (Soma)tics reveal the creative viability of everything around me” (62–63).

163 a family of coffin makers, he credits the bigotry of some members of extended family for making him seek a better kind of living—“My grandfather wanted me to become a killer,” he remarks, “but

I became a vegetarian faggot poet instead” (49)—and credits the soul-killing “assembly line” and other “factory-like structures” for necessitating his rituals (62). And although he is intimate with death, trauma, and conditions of precarity, Conrad is vociferously and in every way anti-tragic. As he recollects and instructs, for instance, in A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon,

There was an experience I had at a very young age watching a deer decay over a period of time, and this STUDY—I did make a study of it—gave me no pleasure other than the fact that we’re solidly HERE, always; kill yourself and your reproachable cells will face the miscibility of this world regardless of need. The true needs are the pulsing soil and hammering clouds around us, the needs we ignore. (Soma)tics is one possible reconciliatory motion. Don’t kill yourself! Write a poem and FIND yourself! Poems of use, here; let us defy the cranky and abysmal declaring an end to what is possible. Saying that there is nothing new to try is said by the truly stupid and lazy. You couldn’t possibly TRY EVERYTHING in one lifetime so SHUT UP and SHUT OFF that fucking television, and could we PLEASE get to work LIVING IN THIS WORLD? Poetry is living! Let’s live!38

Thus tapping in powerfully to his audiences’ longing for something more than “postironic belief”39 to guide them through the twenty-first century’s “ever increasing brutality,” Conrad upholds a queer-ecological project of survival through poetry, rejecting anything resembling the

“Cult of Failure” that Riding observed emerging in poetry circles in the 1930s, that Lorde would later critique as “an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge,”40 or that Wallace overinvested in as “a tradition of symbolic action and countercultural individualism.”41 For Conrad, poetry is the

38 Conrad, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, 176.

39 See Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012).

40 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 56.

41 Konstantinou, “No Bull,” 105.

164 furthest thing from a luxury when, as he insists we see it, “A ruthless, racist, misogynistic, / homophobic, fearful, litterbug, / wasteful, ungrateful, stingy, war / hungry, bloodthirsty, terrified / male fist is upon our world.”42 He comforts and emboldens and activates us with the reminder that

“we are not alone in our particular stew of molecules,” and that “the sooner we admit, even admire the influence of this world, the freer we will be to construct new chords of thought without fear.”43

He gives us a renewed vision for language and other arts, and the courage to take ourselves seriously as poets, as healers, and as shit disturbers.44 And Conrad demands, crucially, that we all demand something better, simpler, and more immediate than hope. “Hope is a waste of our true potential,” as he puts it,

and I remember my boyfriend Tommy in the 1990s finally surrendering to the fact that he was going to die of AIDS. I can still see his face the day he surrendered Hope and he was the most beautiful man I had ever met the day he started to fully live his remaining days. I am forever grateful to him for what he gave me in his surrender of Hope. How lucky am I to be on this planet not looking for a home but instead to be excited to be wherever I am without Hope.

Was it possible, I nevertheless had to begin to wonder in my witnessing of the wonder that is

CAConrad, for readers and fellow poets to take fully to heart Conrad’s rejection of hope when so many of us seemed to be putting all of our hope in him—like some kind of white miracle? Was there something about his miraculousness—about our way of celebrating and exceptionalizing his vision—that made it hard to see or remember other traditions and other poets we’d perhaps been

42 CAConrad, “Poetry and Ritual: An Essay in Verse,” LitHub, Feb. 5, 2016, http://lithub.com/poetry-ritual/.

43 Conrad, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, 2.

44 As Conrad writes in a section of his “Poetry and Ritual: An Essay in Verse” that addresses the rape and murder of his boyfriend Earth in 1998: “We can have poetry exactly the / way we want it, and it can do far / more than we allow ourselves to / believe it has the power to do. // Poetry saved my life and I do not / care how grand that sounds, it is / true, but in the case of Earth’s / murder it took three tries to / finally feel whole again.”

165 treating as not there? Were we at risk of a kind of risklessness with Conrad—a kind of safe or merely symbolic sex with his kind of seriousness?

In the June following Goldsmith’s performance of “The Body of Michael Brown,” it happened to be Conrad who convened a forum of responses for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog. “When I worked with Kenny at MoMA in 2013,” Conrad recounts in his preamble,

he appeared apolitical at best, but now he was in a position to be humbled and seemed sincerely sorry for causing pain. Then he regained his strength on Twitter, hash-tagging Michael Brown’s name and saying that “the left is the new right.” Hash-tagging “pen,” hash-tagging “freespeech,” spinning himself into the victim like a Bush administration Neocon deflecting attention from his actions and branding all who opposed his racist “art” enemy combatant censors.45

As someone who’d felt my whiteness palpably, scandalously interrupted by what had happened at the Interrupt festival, I’d been watching the fallout closely and was particularly eager to see how

Conrad’s generalized anger for all things ruthless, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, litterbug, bloodthirsty, etc. would in this case direct itself against a target like Goldsmith. How exactly would

Conrad’s anger, and ours, bring about “a re-evaluation of the association,” as Riding wrote of anger?46 How would it shine a different kind of light on the limitedly serious experiments of conceptualism by making our relationship to it “severely immediate, bringing it out of the kindly past or the lazy future and setting it on the work-table of the present” (ibid.)? Addressing “Kenny” directly, Conrad referred to a recent appearance on NPR during which Goldsmith had played an audio clip of bystanders and reporters responding to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Whereas the host had described the clip as “horrible,” Goldsmith had insisted it was “beautiful” and that “on

45 CAConrad, “Kenneth Goldsmith Says He Is an Outlaw,” Harriet, June 1, 2015, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ harriet/2015/06/kenneth-goldsmith-says-he-is-an-outlaw/, par. 3.

46 Laura Riding, “In Defence of Anger,” in Essays from ‘Epilogue’: 1935–1937, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, ed. Mark Jacobs (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2001), 88.

166 the page it’s more like Gertrude Stein than anything else.”47 To this, and to Golsmith’s self- valorization as an “outlaw,” Conrad replied:

If you do not understand how such trauma is anything but beautiful then maybe your racism at Brown University should hardly be a surprise. It is as if you want to embarrass those of us who give a shit about the world, like you are too cool to care and we are a bunch of losers for caring. Are you serious about being our outlaw- hero, because now is the perfect moment when we have a frightening hyper- militarized racist police force on the streets of America and a tyrannical American military on the streets of Arab nations. What we need are concepts to resolve these problems where real human bodies are at stake because the meanness you possess is a form of decadence this world can no longer afford. (Ibid.)

Here I could appreciate and identify with Conrad’s anger and with his counter-seriousness to

Goldsmith’s seriousness, and I trusted that those who took Conrad seriously in general would also take seriously, and share, his anger about this specific instance of racism. I also liked how his message to Goldsmith implied that “concepts” weren’t the problem: the dead hypotheses (and human bodies) upon which poets like Goldsmith built his conceptual experiments were. But the most important thing about Conrad’s intervention in the wake of “The Body of Michael Brown” was that it brought together thirty different witnesses to the spectacle, most of them poets of color, to foreground their anger, disbelief, or in some cases utter lack of surprise at Goldsmith’s performance.

“A clown dons a suit and reads an autopsy,” as Oki Sogumi writes in what I still find to be the most clarifying and humbling account of what happened not only at Brown but to the kind of poetry I used to take seriously:

A clown fakes a disappearance, in his clown suit, reading an autopsy. A death clown “plays,” while doctors and poets and poet doctors and doctor clowns and clown poets argue about “art.” Some people point at the clown, the autopsy he has cut up, clutched in his hand. The clown cries big fake tears that drip and soak his clown suit. The scissors still sharp and hidden in his suit. The makeup smears down his face, gets all over the doctors trying to soak them up with their sleeves. Others wait for him to melt.

47 CAConrad, “Kenneth Goldsmith,” par. 6.

167

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