English Studies in Canada Volume 43 Issue 2–3 June/September 2017

esc

An official publication of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English

Volume 43 Issue 2–3 June/September 2017

Special Issue Transition Edited by Michael O’Driscoll and Mark Simpson

1 Michael O’Driscoll and and Mark Simpson Introduction: In Transition: Passages

7 Allan Pero Transition: A Fugue

13 David W. Janzen Potential Unfettered: Narrative Transformation as Historical Transition in Ulysses

33 Carolyn Veldstra Transition as Impasse: Critical Neoliberal Realism and the Problem of Agency 51 Laura Schechter Not a Transition but a Pivot: Public Engagement and Claiming Space as an Alt-Ac

56 Ernst Logar Oil and Water

65 Craig Patterson Shoring up Fragments: Resisting “Change”

69 Aubrey Jean Hanson Reading for Reconciliation? Indigenous Literatures in a Post-trc Canada

91 Shama Rangwala Race and the Thickening of Mediation in Repetitions of The Great Gatsby

117 Evelyn Deshane A Trans Tipping Point

121 Cecily Devereux Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition”: The Cultural Logic of Reproductive Fetishism in the Representation of Erotic Dance 149 Adam Dickinson ∆ 163 Nandini Thiyagarajan Is Care Enough?

167 Lynn Wells Through a Glass, Darkly: An English Scholar’s Vision of University Transition

171 Heather Murray And All the Arts of Peace: Phonography, Simplified Speling, and the Spelling Reform Movement, Toronto 1883 to 1886

205 Joel Katelnikoff Fred Wah Remixed: “where you are is who you are”

215 Jason Camlot Robert Creeley in Transition 1967/1970: Changing Formats for the Public Poetry Reading

In Transition: Passages Michael O’Driscoll Mark Simpson University of Alberta

n 1 july 2017, esc: English Studies in Canada officially moved from Oits long-time home at the University of Alberta to its new residence at Western University, under the editorship of Allen Pero and his colleagues in the Department of English and Writing Studies. This move marked an historical moment for esc, which since its arrival at the University of Alberta in 2002, at that point under the keen guidance of Editor Jo-Ann Wallace, has gone through dramatic and successful changes in mandate, format, scope, and international reach that have brought the journal to a point of global prominence in the field of literary and cultural studies. The nine thousand or so pages produced by the journal’s contributing authors during those fifteen years bear witness to an evolving discipline, shifting institutional contexts, and changing academic priorities that are oft remarked in the journal, not only in its scholarly articles and reviews, but also in the Readers’ Forum section that so often has captured the spirit of the passing moment. Consider, for example, the Keywords Collective of issue 30.4 that, on the occasion of the journal’s thirtieth anniversary, re-examined the definitions of Raymond Williams’s landmark 1976 publication in order to track the fate of concepts such as “community” (J. Hillis Miller), “equality” (Frank Davey), “individual” (Judith Scherer Herz), “lit-

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 1–6 erature” (George Elliot Clarke) and “taste” (Marjorie Perloff). Or consider the more recent foray of “The Forty on Forty Project” in issue 41.4 that asked prominent scholars from across Canada and around the world to Michael O’Driscoll “identify, in no more than 150 words, a work, idea, or event of the past forty is Professor in the years that has been key to the project of literary, cultural, and theoretical Department of English inquiry.” The result of that experiment was a free-form collective narra- and Film Studies at the tive that traced the ebb and flow of critical discourse from multiple and University of Alberta, sometimes competing vantage points. where he is also Vice- Such dynamic scholarly contributions exemplify as they situate the Dean in the Faculty place of esc at the leading edge of literary-cultural inquiry in Canada of Arts. He teaches and, increasingly, beyond. Thus the momentous occasion of its move and publishes in the from Alberta to Western provides a chance to celebrate the journal as a fields of critical and vibrantly transitional force within and across the capacious disciplinary cultural theories with formation of English Studies today. At the same time, the journal’s change a particular emphasis in address also invites engagement and reckoning with transition as a on deconstruction and concept of departure and change but also of continuity and sustenance. psychoanalysis, and his What transitional energies will esc conjure, at this threshold and against expertise in twentieth this horizon, as it continues to thrive in its fifth decade? century American In marking the occasion of esc’s geographical and institutional shift Literature focuses on in locale, the essays and creative works that follow likewise provide some poetry and poetics, answers to this question. They do so by reflecting on the concept of transi- material culture, and tion itself, the theme that we—the outgoing Co-Editors—decided to select archive theory. He served when, in a parting editorial gesture, we assumed the new and curious on the esc Editorial role of Guest Editors for this special issue. We were initially attracted to Board from 2002 to the idea of transition on multiple levels: as a theoretical problem, transi- 2017, the last ten years tion invites consideration of becoming, causality, the trace, and dialec- in the role of Editor and tical movement; as an historical category, transition invokes paradigm Co-Editor. shift, periodicity, disruption, and continuity; as a political goal, transition requires we think more carefully about agency, calculation, efficacies, and outcomes. Seemingly without limit, the concept of transition avails itself of multiple disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, cultural, political, historical, and other contextual investments. In recognizing such broad applicability, our capacious understanding of the term that shaped the call for papers was designed to invite widespread and diverse interest. The effect of that understanding follows in these pages in a manner that we predicted to some degree, but as we got into the project we became ever more aware of the volatility, density, and ambiguity of the concept of transition, in part from meditating more fully on the term and in part from engaging with the contributions we received, contributions that come at transition from diverse perspectives and along divergent paths.

2 | O’Driscoll and Simpson From the Latin transitus—meaning to cross or pass over—“transition” tends to connote gradual, smooth change. Think, for example, of the expected orderly transition of government in democratic societies. The synonyms of transition tell us much: changeover, conversion, development, evolution, growth, passage, progress, shift, transformation, altera- tion, metamorphosis, metastasis, passing, transit, transmutation, turn, Mark Simpson, realignment. The duration, speed, character, force, and torsion of transi- Co-Editor of esc: tion varies from, or is opposed to, other modalities of change. And further- English Studies in more, transition in all of its controlled progress implies agency, wilfulness, Canada from 2013 to purpose, and a teleological clarity of direction. The antonyms of transition 2017, teaches in English are thoroughly negative in value: decline, decrease, idleness, stagnation, and Film Studies at the stoppage, end. In this sense, transition is normative, and when it happens, University of Alberta. it is understood to happen for the better. Indeed, transition might be An energy humanist, thought of as a regulatory ideal within the larger category of change, and he specializes in U.S. if change is characterized by rupture or break (indeed, by revolution) it culture, particularly is understood to be other than transitional. Transition, in this sense, is a in the decades around state of exception: transition is a sovereign form of programmatic change 1900, and also in that in its self-regulating ipseity stands outside the everyday chaos of the material culture studies, quotidian. materialist theory, and At the same time, and somewhat against this definitional tendency, mobility studies. Recent transition as a problem and a motivation underwrites some of the most contributions include the pressing matters of cultural critique today. The politics of sexuality and multi-authored volume gender, social justice, revolution, climate change, the anthropocene, car- After Oil (West Virginia bon dependency, global migration, decolonization—the most critical up 2016), the collection intellectual commitments of the academy are predicated on the matter of (co-edited with Corrinne change. And however tradition-bound (and even politically conservative) Harol) Literary/ the university may be as an institution, the work of academics (research, Liberal Entanglements analysis, teaching, and, of course, professing in a public manner) as much (University of Toronto seeks to understand historical change as it looks forward to, even antici- Press 2017), and essays on pates, new and better futures of the students whose lives are transformed David Peace’s Red Riding by education and the collectives and communities with which we are in quartet (in Negative dialogue. Research and teaching are aspirational—they cannot be other- Cosmopolitanisms, wise. One does not enter a classroom or embark on the publication of an 2017), “Lubricity” (in article without the presumption that something, or someone, to whatever Petrocultures, 2017), minor or major degree, will have been transformed, will have changed, on “Kerosene” (in Fueling the far side of that endeavour. Culture, 2017), and Such presumption might suggest that transition is, academically- “Sabotage” (co-authored speaking, the air that we breathe: the atmosphere and climate of learning with Jeff Diamanti, as such. These atmospherics may underscore the necessity of transition— forthcoming in Radical do they likewise indicate its ideology? The intellectual genealogy of the Philosophy).

In Transition: Passages | 3 Western academy would certainly suggest that—unwittingly or unwill- ingly (or not?)—we are the inheritors of a whole suite of grand theories of transition that signal the onset of modernity and demarcate the critical ground on which we stand. For what else but theories of transition might be Darwin’s natural selection, Marx’s dialectical materialism, Freud’s psychic economies, Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, and all the other world-shaping paradigmatic claims of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European men whose ideas so thickly populate the space of contemporary thought in the humanities and social sciences? These are the sweeping theories of transition—generally unremarked as such—that underwrite the modern institution of the academy, and regardless of where one stands in relation to them, such unquestioned figurations of transition most certainly enable certain kinds of power and perpetuate certain kinds of political relation. Transition as ideology operates personally, politically, socially—and in its various tropes enables certain forms of thought while foreclosing others. At issue in this understanding is a worry, and a risk: that the ideology of transition might operate by masking a tireless reproduction of the same— that, in other words, theories of transition only conserve by dissimulating crises that are not, despite superficial appearances, transitional at all. Is transition, perhaps, a kind of phantasm (neither true nor false, yet at the origin of all political power, as Derrida tells us)1 or indeed a form of what Lauren Berlant has taught us to understand as cruel optimism?2 Mindful of such possibility, we retain and advocate a necessary suspicion of transition as the name for presumptive, self-evident good. Such suspicion leads us to desire instead an attunement to the contingencies, the undecidabilities, the indeterminacies that transition can entail. Valuable, here, is another formulation from Berlant, this one having to do with impasse. “Perhaps,” she writes, “in the impasse of the transitional present, where situations unfold in ongoing crisis, what were rhetorical questions become genuine ones” (195). Thus understood, impasse as transitional—transition as impassive—can countervail the normative, orderly rhythms of transition such that unanticipated possibilities begin to emerge. Against the rhetorical questions posed by transition’s ideology stand the genuine questions posed by its potentiality.

1 For more on Derrida’s “phantasm,” see Naas, 187–212. 2 “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1).

4 | O’Driscoll and Simpson What mode, prospect, or practice could best serve to materialize this shift in interrogatory perspective? One answer, we suggest, will involve thinking and deploying transition less as noun than as verb. Doing so can take us away from transition as settled state and attune us instead to transition as unsettled, unsettling process. In Veer Ecology, a remarkable recent addition to the canon of keyword volumes, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert mine the etymology of “environment” to order to locate at the heart of this overloaded term the French virer, to turn. “To veer,” they write, “is to enlarge, to break closed circles into spirals, to collect for a while, to dwell in revolution” (11). Thus imagined, veering evokes the processual energies of transition-as-potentiality. Though “transition” is the most current and familiar verb version of our concept, we prefer the older “transit”—and still more the obscure “transire,” with its denota- tions of passage and transversality and its near-rhyme evocations of desire. Might transiring, like veering, enlarge and break closed circles into spirals? Might it help us dwell in revolution? The brilliant, bracing contents of the volume to follow supply numerous and diverse ways of approaching such questions. Our contributors enlarge the orbits we share, opening spirals again and again. Across a striking array of topics and concerns—poetic performance and spelling reform; racialized repetitions and reconciliation after the trc; modernist narrative, erotic dance, and realist film; fragments, pivots, and tipping points; dark glasses, remixes, and fugues; unmixings and admixtures—the pieces in this issue mediate transition as a matter of becoming more than being: as the tissue through which it becomes possible to make judgments about the world. In so doing they indicate and manifest that every act of writing involves its own forms of transition—and therefore opens onto the future, onto incalculable possibilities. All of which will affirm that, at this moment of transition in which esc finds a new address, its future is open: it moves on to an open future.

Works Cited

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke up, 2011. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Lowell Duckert, eds. “Introduction: Welcome to the Whirled.” Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 1–15. “The Forty on Forty Project.” esc: English Studies in Canada 41.4 (Decem- ber 2015): 1–22.

In Transition: Passages| 5 “13 Retro Keywords … and why they’re worth a second look.” esc: English Studies in Canada 30.4 (December 2004): 1–65. Naas, Michael. Derrida From Now On. New York: Fordham up, 2008.

6 | O’Driscoll and Simpson Transition: A Fugue Allan Pero University of Western Ontario

f anxiety is the last word in certainty, then transition has the last Iword in uncertainty. Transitivism—like the child slapping the left side of another’s face, only to touch the right side of his own in imagined pain—is the betrayal of transition by the mirror. To be in transit is a question of ontology and agency, not of identity. To be in transition is to recognize that identity, however convenient, however comforting, however orienting, is not being. To be in transition, in transit, lays bare the otherwise naturalized, Oz-like mechanisms of identity, of language, of gender, sexuality, ethnicity that surround us. When we are in transit, we often experience anxiety, confusion, obstruction, and, occasionally, violence—emotional and sometimes physical. At moments like these, transition becomes intimately linked to metonymy—in order to travel, say, we experience an uncanny relation to our names—that is to say, our names—our identities—the things, the papers, the laminations we are asked to provide, to prove in order to keep moving—become strange on the tongue.

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 7–11 Transition is a sign of love; it is a change of discourse. It places what it doesn’t have in a space that will have none of it. Transition is fetishized at our peril. Allan Pero is Transition makes a puzzle of the drive, as the farmer, the fox, the goose, Associate Professor and the grain will attest. of English and Acting Transition is a metonymy; as such, it is a problem of desire. Director of the Centre Transition is the condition for metaphor. Metaphor is transition’s for the Study of Theory vehicle. and Criticism at Western Transitioning is a deeply Brechtian gerund. University. He is the To be in transition is to watch Casablanca for the thirty-seventh time new Editor of English and be relieved that Ilsa goes off with Victor. Studies in Canada. Lacan’s notorious formulas of sexuation, occasionally misread as pre- He is co-editor and scriptions for, or re-inscriptions of, masculine and feminine identity, are contributor to The much more engaged with the question of ontology than with gender or Many Façades of Edith the politics of sex as we generally name it. (We get the first hint in the Sitwell (up of Florida). phrase “there is no sexual relationship.”) If gender is a performance, one Recent publications that changes over time, no matter how discursively naturalized through include articles and repetition, then it is also the medium that is its message; it is an ontology— chapters in The Journal but marked by an agency borne of appearances, rather than of substances. of Wyndham Lewis Love, by the way, understands this—that’s why it plays with gender so Studies, The Virginia fiercely and so wittily; love shows us how gender is an ontology of appear- Woolf Miscellany, ances by occupying the gap—by revealing the hidden, repeated transitions, Modernism/modernity, the hidden iterated transiting—between gender as identity and ontology Katherine Mansfield as substance. Studies, and Ford Madox Gender acts like it is, in Lacanian terms, a singularity, what he calls Ford’s The Good Soldier. a “One” that generates, adds onto itself, that supplements the symbolic He is currently working reality we call gender roles (Encore 5–7). But the problem is that gender as on An Encyclopedia One also produces the very effect that undermines its claims to purity, to of Cultural Theory nature, to its so-called intimate link to heterosexuality: the Real. The more (University of Toronto we signify gender, the more we generate the Real of sexuality. So, when we Press), with Dr Kel say “sexuality is of the Real,” it’s not that the Real generates or stands met- Pero, and a book-length onymically for sexuality’s being. Instead, the gap between sex and sexuality project on Camp and or, if you prefer, between sex as purely reproductive act and what we call Modernism. sexiness points up a whole field of possibilities for jouissance that cannot be contained by the “One” of gender. If it could, then the “One” of gender would simply be “masculine” and would, in libidinal terms, not require the supplement “feminine” at all—and Freud of course told us that, in terms of libido, there is no such thing as two sexes (“Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” 140–41). For example, the psychotic policing of the feminine, the queer, and the trans in different reactionary cultures betrays the way in

8 | Pero which the masculine “One” perhaps unconsciously knows that the sexual difference, or the gender binary, or, in another register, the straight/queer binary reveals something much more disturbing: sexuality has nothing to do with nature at all. Indeed, gender (as sexual difference) has no ontology—masculinity and femininity is both spectrum and spectral and has no ontological consistency. This is why gender is completely irrelevant to sexuality as ontology. To call gender fluid is always already redundant and plays into the hands of fascism and its contents. That is, if bodies matter, gender does not. The Real of sex has, in itself, no ontology, no being; rather, our ontology resides in the effects of the Real on being—that we are split, other to ourselves. In its effects, the Real shows us the distinction between the nothing that is not there—the gap in being—and sexuality—the meddling nothing that is. And the effects of the “nothing that is” are forever busy, forever moving, forever in transition. But they also remain stubbornly transformative; this is what feminism, trans, and queer theory continue to teach us. At its best, transition shows us how the big Other is an idiot. In 1969, Brigid Brophy published a novel called In Transit. It is a witty, strange text—replete with lost identity, gender confusion, linguistic calis- thenics, anxiety, terrorism, even thoughts of suicide. As you have already guessed, it takes place in an airport. That said, there is hope—a lesbian revolution occurs in the baggage section. As testaments to transition, airports are the only revolutionary archi- tectural form of the twentieth century. Airlines and airport security are fascism’s revenge upon transition. Against United we stand; divided, we are beaten and dragged off the plane. Transformation has gone condo. Hegel loved transition so much that he doubled it. In order to reconcile analytical reason with intuition, Hegel requires a “double transition” that simultaneously offers a mediating space for thinking of something as “x and non-x” at the same time, even as it strives toward a kind of synthetic unity. Double transition is paradox’s rehearsal space. Every thing’s beginning is, in transit, also a prophecy. A circle of speech on a boundary, held in the mouth, swelling with time. Transition is preservative rather than conservative. Transition is Tilda Swinton’s ecstatic rending of her wedding dress in Derek Jarman’s The Last of England. Transition is the triumph of uselessness over utility. Transition jams culture, even as it jams with it.

Transition: A Fugue | 9 Transition was one of the original authors of the Port Huron Declara- tion. Not the compromised second draft. (Apologies to the Dude.) Transition is neither productive nor creative; it is, as Simone Weil might put it, decreative. The resistance to transition is often an attempt to claim the intransi- tive as transitive. We often confuse transformation with transition. This is no accident. Transformation, like neoliberalism, is simply the accident we’re planning to make happen. Nietzsche thought that the transition from savagery to civilization produced the violence of the bad conscience, of the unconscious; by that logic, civilization is not a goal but a way of being. Our current devolution back into savagery is precisely the result of calling civilization an end and not a means. When Freud was once in Rome, busily mapping the history of our discontent, of civilization’s war on love, he enjoined us to wander about that city of eternity, around the havoc of the Roman quadrata, to pace the teeth of the Aurelian wall, and the Servian rampart of regression; each of them broken, burnt, rebuilt dozens of times, ruins piling upon ruins, the bleached stones of the mind. We search, with the gaze of Morpheus, the pentimento of its every architecture, in which the Palatine, the Sabine, the Latins, the Etruscans, the Goths, Augustus, Nero, Hadrian, and Agrippa occupy the same ring as the angling Peter; he asked us to hover over its metonymies, its strange contiguities, the legends of its unforgotten desire, ever deferred by the hive of culture. And then he stopped. Hesitating, he threw away his allegorical prize, and warned us to turn back, to remember time from space, history from geography, and (of course) ego from unconscious—for we rebuild both by destruction and design. He abandoned the art of memory and its ancient identity to have us float in the driving ocean and breathe, like Schiller’s diver, the rosy ether of guilt encircling this painful, pleasing world. And this hesitation in wandering is transition’s compass. One is orienting oneself in hesitation. Ambiguity is just the trade name of the firm. This extravagant (that is, to wander beyond) ambiguity, if I can call it that, shapes the relationship of history to nature. If, as Benjamin tells us, history merges into its setting, it does so as citation; history marks nature with its presence in letters of transience, as it were; it both announces and stages ruins. In the Trauerspiel, History is not eternity, Benjamin says; it is the inevitability of decay. This is why he can famously say that “Allegories

10 | Pero are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (178). If reaction is nothing but the production of ruins, transition meditates upon the ruins reaction has made. After all, decay too is a form of progress. And the acoustics of ruins are marvelous. Transition is a beautiful lounge in the passage from sublimity to freedom. Transition really ties the room together.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. 1925. New York: Verso, 2009. Brophy, Brigid. In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009. Coen, Ethan, and Joel Coen. The Big Lebowski. Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Perf. Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, and Julianne Moore. Working Title, 1998. Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1973. 59–148. ——— . “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.”On Sexuality: Pelican Freud Library 7. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. 140–41. Hegel, G. W. F. The Science of Logic. Trans. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2010. 279. Jarman, Derek. The Last of England. Dir. Derek Jarman. Perf. Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, Jonathan Phillips, and Spencer Leigh. Derek Jarman, 1987. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar xx, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love, and Knowledge. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. 5–7, 78–80. Weil, Simone. “Decreation.” Gravity and Grace. Trans. Arthur Wills. New York: Putnam, 1952. 78–86.

Transition: A Fugue | 11

Potential Unfettered: Narrative Transformation as Historical Transition in Ulysses David W. Janzen

mbedded in a moment in which upheaval permeated Irish society, EUlysses maps structural transformations in the colonial world of Ireland. Such transformations are arguably a concern throughout Joyce’s work; yet, Ulysses marks a turning point. Compared with Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses is less concerned with historical par- ticulars (political figures, places, and symbols) and more concerned with interrogating the formal conditions of politico-historical change. This interrogation unfolds through a dialectic of structure and movement. On the one hand, Ulysses fastidiously maps the material and symbolic worlds of Dublin, delineating the modes of time and space that structure this world, as well as the changing constellations of concepts used to interpret these structures. On the other hand, Ulysses constantly transforms the structures it maps, creating movement that resonates with—but also, I will argue, intervenes in—the socio-historical transformations that were taking place, including the emerging capitalist modes of circulation and exchange; the changing forms of social and political power; and the kinds of social relations made possible (and impossible) by these forms of movement and power.

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 13–32 Focusing on the opening episodes of the novel I argue that Stephen Deda- lus provides a constellation of insights that provide a reflexive (if shifting) perspective for understanding how Ulysses both maps and transforms its David W. Janzen is a historical context. Significantly, Dedalus signals the ways in which the recent doctoral graduate world of Ulysses is defined by a tension between two waning masters—the of the University of Catholic Church and the British Empire—and an emerging master—mod- Alberta. His research ern capital and its concomitant cultural dimensions (which include Irish examines the political political and literary nationalism). Within this social transformation, the and cultural theories of colonized Irish subject is indebted in multiple directions—a servant, in crisis. He is currently Dedalus’s words “of two masters … an English and an Italian … And a third completing a book on … who wants me for odd jobs” (U 1.638–41). theories of crisis and These historical assertions are mapped on a more abstract level by event and has published Dedalus’s repeated allusions to dunamis and, in particular, to the dual on diverse interests, nature of this concept. For Aristotle, dunamis refers, on the one hand, including Mayan anti- to the capacity to produce or form a change, the exercise of which is mining movements, movement or kinesis: a carpenter has the capacity to build a house, a the political economy musician to make music (146a 1–2). On the other hand, dunamis names of crisis, and literature, a potentiality which, related not to movement but to actuality (energeia), as well as more refers to the potential to exist in a more completed state (Ide 2–4). The experimental work on distinction between the two forms of dunamis is important in Aristotle rhythmanalysis, sound, because it allows for a conception of potential that is not immediately and ecology. determined—practically or logically—by the actual.1 In Ulysses, I argue this form of potential structures a transformative relation between literary and historical forms. If potential persists independently of its actualization, then actuality—what can be seen, symbolized, acted upon; in short, what is presented—is necessarily contingent and overdetermined at every moment.2 In Aristotle, this distinction already implies that no actuality is a totality; in every situation there is a remainder, an unactualized potential that persists alongside the actual. Ulysses enacts a specifically modern permutation of this distinction. It does so by developing a literary structure (as well, I will argue, as a historical intervention) in which the remainder—potential that is not only unactualized but unactualizable— determines the actual.

1 In exploring this notion, it is difficult to escape the influence of Giorgio Agam- ben’s work on potentiality. While a critical comparison of Joyce’s and Agamben’s understanding of this concept is not necessary, I will flag points of overlap; those familiar with Agamben’s work will recognize in my argument an implicit critique of the latter. 2 This idea, I will suggest, frames Dedalus’s hypothetical musings on historical contingency; what if Pyrrhus or Julius Caesar had not been killed?

14 | Janzen Developing this idea, I argue that Ulysses’ engagement with social transformation is not merely representative—Ulysses does not merely describe historical changes. It also intervenes in this change. By making present what I describe as the unactualized remainder of language, Ulysses transforms how change is represented in its own context. This intervention is premised on an historical disjunction between form and content. Put simply, content changes more rapidly than form such that content over- loads and overdetermines existing forms. Ulysses renders such historical overdetermination within the novelistic tradition by generating a dialectic between realism’s descriptive accuracy and modernism’s formal innovation; by meticulously mapping the material world of Dublin and the modes of circulation and exchange that take place therein, Ulysses demonstrates that the existing orders (novelistic and historical) are saturated to the point of crisis. By demonstrating the overdeterminacy of the historical situation, the text exacerbates this crisis by producing an excess of potentiality.3 My examination of the ways dunamis organizes the reflexive logic of Ulysses develops two assertions. The first describes how Ulysses maps the historical transition from the waning masters of Irish Catholicism and traditional British colonialism to the emergent master of modern imperial capitalism. Analyzing of the notion of dunamis in relation to the concept of the master-signifier, I argue that the gap between the waning and emergent master-signifiers is, at the level of experience, imperceptible; it is only once the old master-signifiers have been subsumed by the new that the transition becomes intelligible. In this sense, historical transformation reveals a political impasse: the historical novelty of modern social, economic, and technological innovation (such as mass communication, reification of the commodity and labour, further automation of production, the value form) subsume and reproduce, rather than destroy, colonial domination.4 The nightmare of history continues. Yet, while historical crisis is only belatedly intelligible, it nonetheless provides openings for mediation and intervention. In this sense, Ulysses

3 For example, Ulysses itself was deemed excessive in the sense that it presented content that exceeded what was permitted; however, attempts to censor this excess not only failed, but they revealed the fundamental impotence of the increasingly anachronistic powers attempting censorship: the more conservative powers tried to ban Ulysses, the more Ulysses (and similar texts) circulated, the more such “excess” became permissible. 4 There are limitations to generalizing these processes under the abstraction “modern capital”; at the risk of eliding historical specificity, my aim is to develop a general framework to account for these processes, specifically as framed by Dedalus.

Potential Unfettered | 15 mediates between belatedness and possibility through an intervention that develops three elements. One, through its scandalous (for the time) content and innovative form Ulysses provokes the existing masters, challenging them to actualize their potential. Two, Ulysses anticipates the response of the emergent masters—those of modern capital—to this provocation, resisting subsumption both by anticipating interpretation and by project- ing its own existence as a commodity within the capitalist order of things. Three, this dual shift makes possible an account of the historical opening—the space between old and new masters—within which potential is dispossessed however fleetingly from existing world systems. Based on this analysis I draw several conclusions about the anti-colonial politics of Joyce’s modernism. I suggest that while Ulysses resists any immediate correlation between literature and politics—it does not make political arguments or resolve socio-historical contradictions—it nevertheless intervenes in the structures and processes by which domination takes place. Ulysses exemplifies a literary potential to map and exacerbate crisis—to make crisis intelligible in the present—to signal potentialities not fully subsumed under existing masters—and, hence, to locate fissures where new configurations or actualizations might emerge.

Dunamis, mastery, and the nightmare of history Stephen Dedalus has little pedagogical potential. In the opening of “Nestor” he is giving a lesson in ancient history. Scattered and desultory, the lesson begins with a question about the identity of Pyrrhus but meanders as Dedalus, instead of correcting his students’ mistakes, follows them through misrecognitions and logical errors, creating a web of associations in which the symbolic excess of words and ideas constantly intervenes, divides, and defers. The text toys with both the metonymical and metaphorical axes of language: some interruptions are based on contiguity—both literary (details from the legend of Pyrrhus) and nominal (Armstrong, a student, lives on Vico Road and Vico’s ideas are implicitly central to the discussion at hand) (U 2.24); others are based on substitution—comically, Pyrrhus is substituted with the phonetically similar “pier” (U 2.25), which is then substituted for the conceptually similar image of a “disappointed bridge” (U 2.38). The prose, too, meanders through various orders of signification: the habitus of the schoolroom, Dedalus’s half-hearted attempts to carry out the tasks demanded of him, and detached internal monologue. Moreover, each of these orders is haunted by symbolic excesses legible as material traces. The habitus of the classroom, for example, is haunted by socio-economic class. The expectations of “well off” parents are legible

16 | Janzen materially both in what is presented—Armstrong’s “sweetened breath” and the crumbs on his lips—and also in what remains hidden—the bag of fig rolls in Armstrong’s satchel (U 2.14–21). While Dedalus might be expected to bring unity to both the symbolic excesses of the novel (as the protagonist) and the classroom (as a teacher), he does neither, instead functioning as a lieu-tenant, a place-holder that facilitates the propagation of words without meaning. Indeed, it seems the delimitation of material space—in terms of form, the space of the chapter, in terms of content, the space of the classroom—is the only thing that holds the scattered significations together. The overdetermined and self-interrupting poetics of Dedalus’s classroom, as I will suggest further on, is an analogy for Ulysses’ broader experiment with historical contingency. More immediately, though, Dedalus reflexively muses on the nature of contingency: Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilitiesthey have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass. Weave, weaver of the wind. (U 2.47–52, emphasis added)

What, Dedalus asks, is the nature of historical and narrative possibility; in particular, what is the relation between those possibilities that were actualized and those that are ousted? In what sense are possibilities “fettered” rather than simply existent and non-existent? Put another way, can a never-actualized possibility be regarded as a possibility at all? The more general issue, implicit in these questions, regards the process of actualization: how does potential become actual? In the paralyzing world of Dublin, how might the impotentiality of colonized subjects become actual? Dedalus introduces these questions in relation to the Aristotelian concept of dunamis, most immediately through a remembered citation: “It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristo- tle’s phrase formed itself” (U 2.66–7). Recognizing that this is a conclusion (“It must be a movement then”) we are compelled to ask, “movement” as opposed to what? For Aristotle there are two forms of dunamis. The more basic form is the capacity to produce change. Something has a dunamis insofar as it acts as “an originative source of change in another thing or in the thing itself qua other” (Aristotle 1046a 12–13); the exercise of this capacity is movement or kinēsis. For example, the carpenter’s capacity is

Potential Unfettered | 17 actualized in building (actualizing the form of a house), the teacher’s in teaching students (actualizing the mental capacities of learners), and so on. The second form of dunamis, potentiality, refers to the possibility or In Ulysses potential to exist in a more fully developed state. Dunamis in this sense is not a capacity to produce change but a way of being something (Ide 3). this notion of Instead of defining this distinction, Aristotle outlines it by way of analogy, suggesting that actuality is to potentiality as “building is to that which potentiality is is capable of building, and the waking to the sleeping, and that which is seeing to that which has its eyes shut but has sight, and that which has framed, at the been shaped out of matter to the matter” (1048a38–b3). Whereas the first three examples are closely related to capacity—the capacities for building, level of content, wakefulness, and sight—the third suggests, as Thomas K. Johansen argues, that potentiality refers to the way “the matter of the substance relates to in the the substance itself” (209). In this sense, it may be that potentiality (which is tied to substance) is distinguishable from actuality (which is tied to juxtaposition form) not only diachronically—that is, when someone capable of making music is actively doing so—but also synchronically, as a remainder that of Dedalus to persists alongside the actual whether or not it is being actualized (see also Agamben 183). Just as a builder can be said to retain the capacity for Deasy. building whether or not she is activating that capacity, Aristotle’s distinction suggests that the matter (say, for example, wood) retains a kind of potential not reducible to its formal existence (as a table, an oar, a bowl). In short, potential is not only that which could become actual; it is equally, as potentiality, a way of being that exists alongside, or as a remainder of, the actual. In Ulysses this notion of potentiality is framed, at the level of content, in the juxtaposition of Dedalus to Deasy. For Deasy, the relation between the possible and the actual, the ways in which actualization becomes intelligible to human beings, and the politics of such intelligibility, are easily explained away: “The ways of the creator are not our ways … All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God” (28). History is actualized by an omnipotent, transcendent God; unfolding on a metaphysical plane of being, history can be neither understood nor influenced by humankind; and the political is rendered a mere effect of this transcendental movement.5 Dedalus, including for example his suggestion that non-actualized possibilities are not destroyed but “fettered,” resists an immediate logical 5 For example, Deasy acknowledges that the English “have treated [the Irish] rather unfairly,” but subverts the political dimension of colonialism by concluding that “history is to blame” (U 1.307).

18 | Janzen opposition between possibility and actuality, positing instead that potential is immanent to the historical situation6 and that historical transformation occurs not as a succession of events directed from without but as an actualization of internal potentiality. This is perhaps clearest in Dedalus’s claim that, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (U 2.59). This assertion repeats Aristotle’s analogy for potentiality7 but also, more explicitly, Karl Marx’s claim that, Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. (146)

Insofar as Dedalus frames how we understand Ulysses, history is both contingent and radically overdetermined (Eagleton 35). In other words, in the logic of Ulysses it is not only that things could have been otherwise, what is (what is actual) is inescapably tied to a form of potentiality that is neither reducible to the actual, nor separable from it. If Ulysses follows Marx in asserting that the material conditions of possibility are always determined by the past from whence they are inherited, the former magnifies the degree to which historical inheritance is grounded not only in material facticity but also in the “nightmare” itself— that is, in the structures of visibility that determine the kinds of material facts that appear. Such structures are never simply given; they must be actively received, and reception can never account for the infinite particularity of history.8 Put another way, there is no simple cause and effect relationship between the actuality inherited from the past and the future possibilities proffered thereby, for there is always the contingent and overdetermined present—the space in which actualization takes place—which mediates consciousness, both of the past and of the future. We arrive, then, at two related sets of questions. First, what is the nature of the potentiality of language in Ulysses? Through Dedalus, “Nestor” suggests that just as the potentiality of matter (wood) is not reducible to its

6 In response to Deasy’s transcendental teleology, for example, Dedalus declares God’s material immanence: “That is God,” he remarks, “A shout in the street” (U 2.382–5). 7 For example, actuality is to potentiality as “the waking to the sleeping” (see page 8). 8 Such inheritance, in Derrida’s words, is the “reaffirmation of a debt, but a critical, selective, and filtering reaffirmation” (91–92).

Potential Unfettered | 19 actualized form (a table), the potentiality of language is not reducible to its actualized form (including, no doubt, the actualized form of the novel). Second, if actuality must be actively inherited, then, in light of the concept of dunamis developed so far, how does Ulysses inherit its actuality?

Servant of two masters (and a third) The question of the historical relation between potentiality and actuality raised by Dedalus is worked through in the poetic logic of the text. Ulysses performs—as, for example, in Dedalus’s history lesson—the idea that there is no necessary or natural connection between language and the objective reality to which it refers; in other words, the poetic mode in which words are related to things influences the nature of both words and things.9 Moreover, there is no a priori way of justifying the legitimacy of one mode over another.10 As Lacan argues, signifiers are not discreet units that correspond directly to objects in the world; rather, “only signifier-to- signifier correlations provide the standard for any and every search for signification” (“Instance of the Letter” 415). In other words, signifiers take on meaning through their differential relations to other signifiers. Thus, meaning is never fully present in the signifier but is always metonymically deferred elsewhere such that the relationship between signifier and signified is never, in itself, stable (Psychoses 268). The “quilting point,” what Lacan later names the “master-signifier,” is the point that stops the infinite deferral from one signifier to another, conditioning the symbolic such that “[e]verything radiates out from and is organized around this signifier” (Psychoses 268). In doing so, the master- signifier determines how signifiers relate to one another and, hence, how they map a world. The nature of things depends upon the world in which they appear. Thus, the institution of a new master-signifier realigns the way signification maps onto the real of the material world; such a realign-

9 For example, insofar as “Oxen” contemplates the ways in which the “ends and ulti- mates of all things accord … with their inceptions and originals” (U 14.386–8), it surely suggests that any teleological development is actualized through rupture, accident, and contradiction, all of which fundamentally alter the structures by which development itself takes place. 10 Worth keeping in mind is the fact that the disconnection of word and meaning operates in opposition to (and what, in the next section, I will call the “provocation” of) Catholic doctrine, in which truth can be immediately revealed through language. Ulysses instigates one of the foundational distinctions of modern Christianity: the distinction, with all its political weight, between Catholic revelation (in which truth is eternal, transhistorical) and Protestant interpretation (in which truth is historically situated).

20 | Janzen ment changes the structure of experience, determining anew what kinds of perceptions, significations, and actions make sense. As Shelly Brivic notes, the irreducibility of languages structured by different master-signifiers is already present in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; in the dinner scene, the signifier “Parnell” is, in the religious language of the women, a “sinner” and, in the political language of the men, a “king” (53–54). This kind of shift is central to Ulysses’ Dublin, a city caught between two waning masters—those of Irish Catholicism and British colonialism—that are being subsumed by an emergent third—modern capitalism.11 Formally, it is less a modern city than a “great village” (Jameson) in the sense that the infrastructure, streets, and pubs, as well as the modes of discursive and economic circulation, remain traditional. Yet, as represented by the newspaper format, Bloom’s reflection on foreign customs, and the foreign cultural objects that float through the text, these traditional forms are assimilated into, and saturated by, broader modes of circulation that proliferate new forms of desire, communication, economy, and so on. The saturation of old forms produces not only a shift in the distribution of power but also a change in modes of power. While the old ecclesial and colonial masters dominate from an external position—literally, for Deda- lus, Italy and England—modern capitalism dominates by intervening in the possibilities, immanent to all social structures, of circulation and exchange. It changes and multiplies how humans are responsible to one another; how, in other words, human beings are indebted, economically but also socially, to one another, to the state, to social institutions, and so on.12 Perhaps more than any other character, Dedalus is indebted in all directions. If the world of Ulysses’ Dublin is caught between emergent financial technologies (modern advertising, commodification, life insurance) and established forms of exchange (gambling and buying rounds at the pub), Dedalus seems least capable of navigating it. As Mark Osteen points out, within the single day Dedalus spends over half his monthly salary: “he cannot (or rather will not) balance debit and credit and seeks to escape from

11 Some readers interpret this “third” master in political and cultural terms, specifically in terms of Irish Nationalism, which Joyce himself rejected (see for example, Nolan’s James Joyce and Nationalism). While my analysis deals more directly with the critique of capitalist political economy, rather than Irish literary and political Nationalism, the two are inseparable. 12 See, for example, Richard Dienst’s account of how “In capitalism debts finally break free from the authority of the state and circulate across the whole social surface … Henceforth there will be countless ways to be in debt, in all directions and according to various codes and protocols” (124).

Potential Unfettered | 21 history through expenditure” (386).13 Indeed, at various points Dedalus experiences this tension at an immediate, affective level. When he states that he is a servant to two masters (and a third), Dedalus both identifies with his own heretical situation14 and reveals that he is unable to escape the belief system that names his identification as heretical; the basic signifier of money, coins, are “symbols soiled by greed and misery” (U 2.225–7), and the exchange thereof is a site of embarrassment. In short, Dedalus experiences economic indebtedness as moral indebtedness in the form of shame.15 This is not, however, confusion on Dedalus’s part. Rather, the doubling is constituted by a transition from direct to indirect domination. In theoretical terms: the master-signifier, the force that founds the symbolic order through domination of the other, is an extension of Hegel’s conception of the master. In the latter, the master dominates the slave without killing him (absolute domination—destruction of the dominated, the death of the slave—would dissolve the relation of domination). At the moment in which the slave-to-be, under threat of death, cedes to the dominance of the master-to-be—for Lacan the moment of “symbolic castration”—the structure of possibility changes. Potential (the mere threat of death) thus becomes foundational to the production of actual consequences (the subservience of the slave to the desires of the master). In this framework, Dedalus and Bloom indicate opposing ways of relating structure and movement. For Dedalus the structure of indebtedness—the condition of being caught between masters—of experiencing economic indebtedness as moral indebtedness, for example—takes priority over the process or movement from the old masters to the new. For Bloom, however, it is the opposite. As movement, the modes of relation and circulation institutionalized by Irish Catholicism and British colonialism retain their dominance over the actual social situation but, by expending their potential, increasingly evacuate their material force.

13 Osteen further points out that even Bloom’s charity toward Dedalus comes with a form of debt or even “ownership”; Bloom envisions Dedalus’s talent in terms of “investments” that might produce economic returns (387). 14 Dedalus is alluding to Matthew 6:24, which states that “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other” (King James Bible). In this sense, one might argue that the colonized subject is, by definition, a heretic. 15 Famously, it is Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals that argued that the concept of guilt (and, we might add, the affect of guilt) is derived from the concept of debt.

22 | Janzen This tension plays out, as well, in the fact that the Blooms can neither inhabit nor abandon marriage as a social form. It is clear that the content of their marriage is in crisis: marriage no longer organizes mutual indebtedness and fidelity. This does not imply that the institution has no force. On the contrary we get the sense that, for both Blooms, the pleasure of extra- marital pleasure is derived not only from the act itself but also, perhaps primarily, from transgressing the old moral code; pleasure, in this sense, still depends on the institution but indirectly in a negative sense; this is, of course, not a modern phenomenon. The traditional form of marriage, as portrayed in Ulysses, maintains a “ban” on infidelity by channeling infidelity through mechanisms of control (including prostitution and confession) that preserve the form of fidelity.16 In other words, so long as transgression remains within the sphere of the master (the Catholic Church) the master appears as benevolent, understanding, and human: forgiving a visit to the brothel might preserve a marriage, but it also preserves the master’s power insofar as the latter is not required to actualize its potential (Žižek, Tarrying 160–61). When controlled infidelity breaks down, however, the notion of fidelity does too. In the world of the Blooms, the implication is direct. As the fable goes, only the naive child would risk social collapse (and the master’s wrath) by pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Bloom is not naive. To demand Molly’s fidelity would be to make the crisis of marriage visible—to signify the known unknown, to inscribe infidelity into the symbolic order—without the traditional mechanisms of stability and control. Accountability would mean recognizing (or, at least, risking the recognition) that the marriage no longer forms the content of desire. Bloom understands this crisis but only insofar as this understanding is already impossibly mediated. Signification circulates, again, not through direct speech but through material traces, both visible—pieces of Molly’s clothing arranged such that their objective presence signifies the lack of fidelity—and invisible—the outline, imagined or real, of a male body on their bed. In the movement from the old master-signifiers to the new, the face to face is impossible: only objects speak. The force of the transcendental, moral ban on sexual pleasure erodes only to reveal that intercourse is already impossibly mediated.17 The master exists only as non-actualized

16 See, for example, Bloom’s reflections on confession: “Wonderful organization certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants to … Then out she comes. Repentance skindeep. Lovely shame” (U 5.425–30). Also see Collen Lamos’s relevant argument in Deviant Modernism (151). 17 As Lukács argues, the basis of the commodity structure is “that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom

Potential Unfettered | 23 potential: it maintains its force—it organizes the visible form of the Bloom’s marriage—only insofar as it is not called upon to actualize that force. In other words, the process of the liberation of sexual desire from one form The master is (the organic family) is premised upon the emergence of a new form of mediation that makes this emancipation impossible; insofar as sexual always desire is liberated from the family form, it is already determined by a new form in which human relations are fundamentally mediated by objects. fraudulent, an The experience of the gap between the dissolution of one master-signifier and dominance of the next cannot be made intelligible. The subject rec- imposter by ognizes the collapse of one master only to find it is already indentured to another. The nightmare invariably continues uninterrupted from one definition. master to the next. More broadly, however, this conception of dunamis presents a historically new relation between master and potentiality, one in which the master retains potential that effectively cannot be actualized but does not need to be actualized in order to produce actual consequences (Žižek, Tarrying 160). In terms introduced in the first section, unlike the carpenter, musician, and teacher who retain potential whether they are or are not actualizing it, the modern master’s capacity persists as non-actualized potential. In other words, while the master-signifier provides the sense of stability that makes meaning possible, the former takes place as self- referential lack.18 This suggests that the initial Aristotelian distinction between capacity and potentiality is insufficient: it is not that the master’s power persists alongside its actuality but that it is ultimately effective only as non-actualized potential. The master is always fraudulent, an imposter by definition (160). It is not actually in possession of the power it claims for itself but, instead, retains symbolic authority by continually deferring

objectivity’ ” (83). On Lukács and reification in Ulysses see Keith Booker’s “In- tercourse Had Been Incomplete.” 18 For example, money is in and of itself useless (it has no “use value”), yet it refers to value as such; although entirely self-referential—it has no necessary reference to anything else and no inherent use value—it becomes the nexus through which all other forms of value are mediated and take on meaning. Money is an imaginary representation of value, but it is precisely because of (not in spite of) its imaginary nature that money can stand in for value as such and thus enforce a very real ordering of the material world. Bloom toys with this idea when he compares the shredding of a romantic letter to the shredding of a cheque. The letter documents and signifies a social bond that persists outside of the document itself. The value of the cheque (an abstract document) stands in for material objects (“barrels, or is it gallons,” of porter) such that its destruction is the destruction of a bond—that is, a claim to the exchange (U 5.300–12).

24 | Janzen the moment of reckoning so as to retain (the illusion of, the potential for) power. Such deferral founds the historical transition from direct domination by the master to the indirect domination that determines the actual by organizing signification in a particular way. For Hegel, the slave, indebted to the master, provides the force for actualization, while the master retains a monopoly on the process of actualization. This monopoly is maintained by systematizing the slave’s indebtedness, covering over the fact that master does not retain the force it claims for itself. To elaborate the specifically modern form of systematization, there are a number of significant examples that could be developed from the world of Ulysses (not only the institution of marriage but also the reification of commodities, global forms of circulation, and so on). However, I will argue in the following section that the most immediate example is provided by the circulation of the book itself and, in particular, by the way Ulysses anticipates its own circulation and interpretation.

Provocation, anticipation, and aesthetic dispossession How does Ulysses anticipate and intervene in its own interpretation? Again the opposition of Dedalus to Deasy helps to formulate the question. For Dedalus’s students the content of the ancient history lesson exists only in its bare facticity; these disjointed facts have no bearing on the present or on each other because they have no orientating fixed position, no quilting point. Instead of placing the content in its proper narrative form by reinforcing such a point (as a proper school-“master” should do), Dedalus allows the content to circulate freely, to develop its own non-form. In itself, this is a kind of resistance: caught between three masters, Dedalus uses his own position as master to perform a kind of self-erasure that resists the very idea of mastery. In doing so, Dedalus experiments with the potentiality of language, permitting poetic assertions to form outside of any prescribed order, save for the spatial limit of the classroom itself.19 As the exchange immediately following the lesson makes clear, in Deasy’s transcendental teleology only order counts. Deasy—who, as both creditor and colonizer, speaks from a dual master’s position—recognizes not only that money comes to stand in for value but also that exchange- ability is precisely what grounds the value of money. Insisting upon the usefulness of a savings box, Deasy says, “These are handy things to have.

19 I will suggest shortly that by allowing symbolic circulation to expand to its material limit, the history lesson acts as synecdoche for the novel as a whole.

Potential Unfettered | 25 See. This is for sovereigns. This is for shillings. Sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See” (U 2.219–20). Here, “sovereigns” is a multivalent signifier in which the symbolic order of the economic (wherein “sovereign” signifies a coin) stands in for the master-signifiers of religion (God as sovereign), imperialism (British Crown as sovereign), and humanism (man as sovereign individual). In other words, Deasy recognizes (however unconsciously) that the master-signifiers of religion, imperialism, and humanism are subsumed, measured, and indexed under the symbolic distinctions of capital, even while he continues to identify with the old masters. This substitution is made more complex by the fact that Deasy’s explicit identification with the colonial master—what he calls “Old England”—in fact depends, in a negative sense, on the figure of the Jew. Grounded in the assertion that the Jew has “turned against the light” (U 2.361), Deasy’s proto-fascist logic performs two functions. First, it re-creates symbolic unity. The rise of modern capitalism is premised on the destruction of a unified framework of experience; under modern capitalism there is no longer a sense in which economic, political, and psychological turmoil can be experienced and understood within a unified sense of reality. Against this destructive force, the figure of the Jew serves, for Deasy, to reunify the diverse kinds of instability and the anxieties, albeit in a negative sense.20 In other words, Deasy’s implicit and explicit racism inverts the form of the master-signifier: all forms of instability—the potential cattle embargo, Deasy’s unspoken but obvious sense of emotional insecurity, and most importantly the fall of “Old England”—are not unified by a positive master-signifier, a defining and overarching principle or idea. Rather, they are unified insofar as they all result from a single (imaginary) cause. In short, if the world of Ulysses is defined by the absence of a single dominant master-signifier, Dedalus’s and Deasy’s responses to this absence are directly opposed. Whereas Dedalus seeks to maintain and extend the absence—letting it circulate aimlessly through the classroom—Deasy’s discourse attempts to reign in this lack, placing it within a racialized transcendental structure. In this regard, Bloom functions as a kind of third term, intervening more explicitly in the logic of mastery itself. Bloom’s intervention has three interrelated aspects or moments: provocation, anticipation, and dispossession. Although as a subject Bloom cannot escape the bounds set by the existing master-signifiers, he nevertheless provokes the master by defying those bounds in ways that make them visible. In other words, 20 For a broader discussion of this form of reactive anti-Semitism, see Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do 18.

26 | Janzen in the face of competing masters Bloom cannot escape symbolic castration; yet, grasping his own absent signifier—his “phallus”—Bloom taunts and provokes, daring the master to censor his desire. Realizing that his marriage, already in crisis under the emergent master-signifier of capital, affords satisfaction that “had been incomplete,” Bloom literally takes matters into his own hands. The gaze and autoerotic touch cannot replace intercourse, but pleasure is not entirely the point. Rather, in plain view of the beach, Bloom makes of a little sin the most public spectacle,21 taunting the master, as if to say, “I know you’re powerful, but everyone’s in on it so just you try and stop me.” In his bedroom Bloom is trapped in the ironic structure of dunamis that affords two options—continued im-potentiality or the dissolution of his marriage. On the beach, this structure is inverted. By publicly acting out his desire, Bloom is baiting the master. His taunting turns his own dilemma back upon the master. On the one hand, if the master does nothing to end Bloom’s defiance, the impotence of the former is immediately apparent; on the other hand, insofar as the master attempts to act his potential is actualized, ultimately revealing the groundlessness of his power (Žižek, Sublime Object 207–08). The old masters did of course act, not so much in the book but certainly on the book. Ulysses was banned in most of the English-speaking world. Bloom’s masturbatory scene was central to these bans, which on a number of occasions played out as public spectacle in juridical contexts. Attempts to have Ulysses legally censored did indeed reveal the impotence of the old masters, if not immediately then over time. Most famously, of course, the American obscenity trial “United States v. One Book Called Ulysses” led to the revocation of the U.S. ban on Ulysses, demonstrating that the ideals of morality, insofar as they referred to the representation of action, were no longer in and of themselves sufficient to censor expression. One master had receded; another had emerged. The new basis for discernment—the standard on which the American trial was judged—assessed “obscenity” not in terms of the text as such but, rather, in terms of the text’s capacity “to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts” (Fargnoli and Gillespie 250). In other words, according to the new law Ulysses’ obscenity was judged on the basis of the capacity of the text to produce specific kinds of responses. Ulysses, the trial concluded, may be sold to the public because it can be judged not

21 “O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold” (U 13.38–9). Literally, the “everyone” refers to those watching the fireworks, who are probably oblivious to Bloom. But, of course, the public constituted by the text itself—its readership—is “watching” Bloom and Gerty.

Potential Unfettered | 27 to actualize the potential for “impure and lustful thoughts.”22 Of course, this criterion is itself a form of dunamis; exactly the kind of Aristotelian dunamis that Dedalus defines in his internal musings; the kind that Bloom is responding to within the logic of the text itself. Thus, the circulation of Ulysses enacts a double-edged historical irony. First, the socio-historical life of the book actualizes its own premise: traditional cultural-moral master-signifiers have been subsumed by the juridico-economic ones of capitalism. Under the masters of modernity, the ideas of ownership and free enterprise—in Ulysses’ case, those of the publishing company—take precedence, subsuming the institution of the church, the traditional ideal of the harmonious community, and the interests of traditional colonialism. The decision to lift censorship of the text marks an emancipation of art from the strictures of traditional morality; yet, the text is liberated into subsumption under another master. In short, the social life of the book plays out the transition that the novel itself maps. The second historical irony derives from the text’s capacity to anticipate its subsumption under the new master-signifier. At the level of the symbolic the book’s legality is ultimately judged on the basis of a concept—dunamis as capacity—that the text itself deconstructs. In other words, Ulysses (which itself has a proclivity for the future-perfect tense) counteracts in advance the symbolic framework by which it will have been judged. In Ulysses the material real is asserted through a mode of representation that incorporates both realism and modernism. I have gestured toward the idea that, against the transcendent conception of history (presented in its most banal formulation by Deasy), Ulysses asserts an immanent, materialist conception of history—one that can be understood in relation to Aristotle’s notion of dunamis as potential and to Marx’s assertion that history is produced out of material conditions inherited from the past. The realist aspect of Ulysses is founded on the work’s materialist mapping of the modernizing city, which situates geographical points (specific sites in Dublin) and events (historical, remembered, and current) in a series of the interrelated trajectories of movement (Dedalus’s walk with Buck Mulligan and Haines, Bloom’s morning walk, the convergence of Dedalus’s and Bloom’s movements in the cab ride, and so on). Within this framework the simple metonymy of contiguous time—the time in which one moment pre-

22 As Žižek suggests in Tarrying With the Negative, such concession is central to the maintenance of the master’s power. By permitting conditional devia- tion the overall structure of power is stabilized without the master having to actualize force.

28 | Janzen cedes the next—is multiplied such that the language of description moves with the circulation of bodies, commodities, rumours, desires.23 Where we would expect, in traditional novelistic form, a world of distinct characters, objects, and trajectories—each with a function prescribed by an overall Ulysses representational coherence—Ulysses presents a sphere of circulation in which the essence of things multiplies, is overloaded, and, because of the permanently shifting nature of poetic form, remains in constant flux. In Ulysses the representational forms that normally organize narrative—what we might destabilizes the call the narrative quilting points—characters, places, setting—are divested of the capacity to produce a stable signifying structure. quilting points Yet, this point is not reducible to “postmodern” cliché, because ultimately Ulysses accomplishes what its “characters” qua subjects cannot: the that gave the proliferation of potential beyond the bounds set by the master. If Bloomian provocation makes the master’s lack visible at the level of content, it also novel an ideal challenges idealizing forms of narrative coherence, including the assumed relationship between the “subjects” external to the text, that is, the author structure. and the reader. As Jameson writes, Joyce completes: Flaubert’s programme of removing the author from the text— a programme which also removes the reader, and finally that unifying and organizing mirage or aftermirage of both author and reader which is the “character,” or better still, “point of view.” What happens at that point can perhaps oversimply be described this way: such essentially idealistic (or ideal, or imaginary) categories formerly served as the supports for the unity of the work or the unity of the process. Now that they have been withdrawn, only a form of material unity is left, namely the printed book itself, and its material unity as a bound set of pages. (146) Ulysses permanently destabilizes the quilting points that gave the novel an ideal structure; this destabilization is most immediate in the logic of the novel itself—in the eradication of “characters” and “points of view” as unifying signifiers—but its effects supersede narrative logic, eradicating in turn the ideal relation between author and reader. Dedalus-as-didact refuses to reproduce an ideal educational form—one in which the master 23 Consider, for example, Bloom’s simple act of turning on the kitchen faucet—an action immediately followed by a description of the circulation of water—in relation to the foresight of Paul Valery’s well-known analogy: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign” (quoted in Benjamin 253).

Potential Unfettered | 29 unifies knowledge for the student—thus letting free-floating associations fill the material space; similarly, Ulysses refuses to reproduce an ideal novelistic form—one in which it can be imagined as the communication of meaning from author to reader. By refusing the kinds of abstraction that traditionally lent a novel narrative coherence, Ulysses intervenes in the modern processes by which historical change continually emancipates potential only to reinscribe that potential under a new master-signifier. By overloading the moment of crisis and transition with material potential the text reveals the overdetermination of any material situation. Perhaps more importantly, it presents the non-actualized potential of language. To return to the metaphor with which I began: just as the potential of the wood persists as remainder, even while actualized as table, the potential of language persists as remainder, even while actualized as novel. To present this remainder is to specify the excessive potential of language—to give particularity to the ways in which things not only could be otherwise but, in a significant sense, are simultaneously otherwise. Through provocationUlysses catalyzes the dissipation of the waning master; through anticipation it resists subsumption by the emergent master; through overdetermination it makes visible the remainder that exceeds the master’s grasp. To use a temporal metaphor, by holding apart the past, present, and future—by refusing the collapse of history and futurity into the present—Ulysses dispossesses the master’s monopoly on actualization. Ulysses does not attempt to replace existing master-signifiers. Yet, its interventions—historical and aesthetic—are not purely deconstructive, and its sole aim is not to destabilize; Ulysses makes assertions too by constructing new quilting points. Based on what I have argued, the notion of potentiality would be one such quilting point. Creating a dialectical tension between the descriptive accuracy of realism and the invention of modernism, Ulysses aligns the notion of potential with historical excess. It ties potential to that which is presented but not represented within a situation. In doing so, it demonstrates the potential of the novel to acceler- ate the destruction of the old masters. But it also makes visible forms of possibilities not determined by the modes of actualization prescribed by the current masters. Although fettered, possibility persists in the present.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Robert Brazeau and Norman Mack for feedback on this article.

30 | Janzen Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities. Stanford: Stanford up, 2000. Aristotle, Metaphysics ix 1, 1046a 1–2. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Trans. and ed. Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro- ducibility: Third Version.”Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003. 251–83. ——— . “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illumi- nations. New York: Random House, 2011. Brivic, Shelly. Joyce Through Lacan and Žižek. New York: Palgrave Mac- Millan, 2008. Booker, Keith. “Intercourse Had Been Incomplete.” Ulysses, Capitalism, and Colonialism: Reading Joyce After the Cold War. Santa Barbara: Group Publishing, 2000. 39–66. Dienst, Richard. The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good. London: Verso, 2011. Derrida, Jaques. Spectres of Marx: The state of the Debt, the Work of Mourn- ing, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Rout- ledge, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment.” Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Ed. Seamus Deane. Minneapolis: Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 1990. 23–39. Fargnoli, Nicholas, Michael Patrick Gillespie. “Appendix II. Ulysses.” James Joyce A–Z: Reference to his Life and Writings. Oxford: Oxford up, 1996. 247–50 Ide, Harry A. “Dunamis in Metaphysics ix.” Apeiron 25.1 (1992): 1–26. Jameson, Fredric. “Ulysses in History.” The Modernist Papers. London: Verso, 2007. Johansen, Thomas K. “Capacity and Potentiality: Aristotle’s Metaphysics θ.6–7 From the Perspective of De Anima.” Topoi 31.2 (2012): 209–20. Joyce, James. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. London: Bodley Head, 1986. Lacan, Jacques. “Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud.” Ecrits: The Complete Edition. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2002. 412–41.

Potential Unfettered | 31 ———. The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Russell Grigg. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. London: Routledge, 2013. Lamos, Collen. Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1998. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dia- lectics. Cambridge: mit Press, 1972. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, vol. 2. Ed. David Fern- bach. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. Oxford: Oxford up, 2008. Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995. Osteen, Mark. The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet. Syracuse: Syracuse up, 1995. Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 2008. ——— . Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke up, 1993. ———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2009.

32 | Janzen Transition as Impasse: Critical Neoliberal Realism and the Problem of Agency Carolyn Veldstra

etween late 2008 and early 2009, political rhetoric in the United BStates and the United Kingdom emphasized a new spirit of responsibility as essential for citizens concerned to ease the recessions in those countries sparked by the 2008 financial crisis. For instance, in a campaign speech on 26 April 2009, future uk Prime Minister David Cameron warned that “the age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.” The latter era would usher in what Cameron called “responsible politics” that, he specified, would entail a significant burden of “personal responsibility” for citizens. Similarly, on 8 January 2009, in his speech on the economy, then President-elect Barack Obama declared an era of “profound irresponsibility” as at the root of the financial crisis and called for “a new spirit of responsibility” from Americans. As if anticipating the political rhetoric to come, the 2008 animated summer blockbuster WALL-E—which follows an anthropomorphized trash-compacting robot tasked with cleaning up an abandoned Earth overwhelmed by garbage—depicts some futuristic remainder of the human species evacuated to giant starliners sponsored by the megacorporation Buy-N-Large. Having succumbed to the weightless- ness of space, their bodies soft, obese, and confined to hovering lounge chairs, humans have become lazy, complacent, and live only to consume.

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 33–50 It is not until humans can, quite literally, stand on their own two feet and regain the value of hard work that they can reclaim Earth and begin the project of renewal. The confluence of political and pop cultural discourses Carolyn Veldstra highlighting responsibility speaks to a transitional moment in which the recently completed a effects of the financial crisis were beginning to be felt and understood. sshrc postdoctoral In each case, these narratives claim a certain version of capitalism as at fellowship in the the root of current problems: for Cameron and Obama, the capitalism Department of English of “Wall Street wrongdoers,” to use Obama’s phrasing, and for Pixar, the and Film Studies at the excess of consumer capitalism, variously construed as the material waste University of Alberta. accumulated as trash and the flabby excesses of the consuming subjects’ Her work takes up affects bodies. Each discourse is an oversimplification—to say nothing of WALL- and experiences of E’s glib fat phobia—of both the sense of crisis and the availability of tran- impasse and stuckness sition, particularly in light of the complexity of the financial crisis that under neoliberal forms in many ways remains ongoing. In their speeches, Obama and Cameron of capitalism and imply hubris not only on the part of banking executives but also among governance. Carolyn is the public, imprudently lured to live beyond their means by promises the co-editor with Nick too good to be true. If capitalism is posed as a problem, then, it is only Holm of a special issue because we allow it to become a problem by succumbing to the dreams of Comedy Studies on of ease that represent its obscene edges. In this way, each of these texts the topic of seriousness imagines responsibility as crucial to solving crisis. Individual responsibil- and humour and ity is framed as the ground on which a transition out of crisis will be built, serves as Associate and, by contrast, impasse is regarded as a failure of will, giving in to the Editor with Reviews in promised ease of the Buy-N-Large or the mortgage broker, without con- Cultural Theory. She has sidering the deleterious effects that will almost inevitably result from such published in esc, jac, promises. It is not coincidental, then, that the future humans populating and the Nordic Journal WALL-E’s starliners live immobilized in self-propelled easy chairs. Tran- of English Studies and sition, responsibility, these entail movement, standing up, taking action, co-authored a chapter reclaiming Earth from piles of garbage through hard work. Impasse, on in After Oil with the the other hand, is prefigured as human stasis. Petrocultures Research But have impasse and transition remained such clear-cut antonyms Group (West Virginia up, in the near-decade that has passed since the onset of the financial crisis? 2016). On the one hand, as its seeming opposite, the assumed threat of impasse as stasis lends urgency to transition and justifies an insistence on taking action, staying in motion. As such, one might seek transition to avoid or escape impasse. In a moment of impasse, transition can be a dream, a horizon on which hopes can be placed or dashed, a vague future promise of an exit or escape route. On the other hand, this imagined segue into something else is mirrored by another kind of transition, a perpetual and ongoing transition in a cyclical present in which one is continually moving but not getting anywhere. In this sense, the movement of transition detaches

34 | Veldstra from momentum and transition is experienced as a kind of impasse, not quite stasis but stuckness, suggesting a life caught up in repetitive rhythms that individual will is relatively powerless to change because such transitions capitalize on the subject’s willingness. The recourse to a rhetoric of responsibility in such a context misrecognizes impasse and transition as easy opposites and presumes a model of unproblematic and readily accessed sovereign agency. In what follows, I explore representations of neoliberal experience that foreground the capacity of and for individual agency, particularly that characterized as responsibility, in the wake of the financial crisis. By neoliberal experience, I mean to capture a sense of what it is like to live in proximity to the logics that define neoliberal political, social, and economic shifts in the U.S. and uk. The works that I take up—recent films I, Daniel Blake and The Big Short—focus on protagonists and situations that directly engage with particular consequences of neoliberalism: austerity measures and the privatization of social assistance in the uk and the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and the free market financial logics that normalized it. Although focused on protagonists from very different class positions and with likewise divergent concerns—an ill benefits seeker in I, Daniel Blake and speculative financial investors in The Big Short—these films come together in terms of what I am calling here the genre of critical neoliberal realism, a generic attempt to critically account for the realities of neoliberal experience from the perspective of those embedded in its systems. Although each of these films offers a different critique of life under neoliberalism, key to this genre—and both films—is the question of subjective agency. Each film grapples with the neoliberal individual caught up in an impasse sanctioned by structural forces and yet remaining the sole locus of agential capacity. These films engage with the rhetoric of responsibility in order to challenge it, demonstrating the fraught terrain of agency in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In this terrain, agency itself comes to constitute an impasse from which it is difficult to imagine meaningful transition. However, in their respective critiques, these films also foreground the urgent need for change, each thus raising—if not answering—questions around how, or even whether, we might reimagine agency as other than an individual capacity easily co-opted and reinscribed in a neoliberal social fabric. Lauren Berlant’s theorization of the contemporary moment of late or neoliberal capitalism notes a breakdown in the binary between impasse and transition. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant posits “the impasse of the transitional present” (195), by which she seeks to capture one sense of living

Transition as Impasse | 35 in a situation of paradoxical or oxymoronic “crisis ordinariness” (10). She describes living in this context in terms of adapting to a perpetual sense of precarity that cannot be entirely explained through class, gender, race, privilege, or skill; rather, precarity is suffused as a structure of feeling. This adaptation, she argues, produces a “new precarious public sphere,” which is defined by debates around how to live with the insecurities of the present (195). Whereas the rest of her book is interested in the role played by cruel optimism in maintaining a status quo that is failing to meet the needs of many, her chapter “After the Good Life: An Impasse” focuses on a sense of confusion about how to adjust to ongoing, ordinary crisis. Berlant writes, There has been a mass dissolution of disavowal. The promise of the good life no longer masks the living precarity of this historical present. This is evidenced in the emergence of a new mask, a precarious visage that now graces myriad accounts of how people are living the end of both social and market democracy in Europe and the United States: a recession gri- mace has appeared, somewhere between a frown, a smile, and a tightened lip. (196)

There are several senses of transition operational in Berlant’s assessment of the present moment: she argues for a transition from faith in capitalist promises to a moment in which good life dreams have shattered and questions of equilibrium and adjustment emerge as urgent; she describes a transitional visage, between a smile and a frown; and, finally, she characterizes the present as transitional, defined by uncertainty and tenuous- ness. Moreover, it is precisely these transitional conditions that constitute impasse for Berlant: a struggle to maintain oneself, not knowing how to adjust or find one’s footing (195). Berlant, then, names a transition experienced as impasse; a transition into a kind of holding pattern, not stasis but, rather, lacking in definite or deliberate momentum. Berlant’s description sits alongside a wide variety of accounts describing subjectivity, experience, and/or sovereignty under neoliberal capitalism, a set of political-economic practices that prioritize free markets, private property, and free trade (Harvey). The broader discursive formation, neoliberalism, refers to a range of ideas that cohere around the ascendance of competitive individualism (Beck, Sennett, Davies), encouraged by state and corporate policies that encourage self-sufficiency and self-interest (Boltanski and Chiapello, Papadopoulos et al., Elliott), and cultivated by an entrepreneurial attitude toward the self (Gill, McRobbie). Although above all neoliberalism celebrates the freedom and creativity of the indi-

36 | Veldstra vidual (Dean, Elliott, McRobbie), Jeremy Gilbert notes that it does not necessarily indicate a laissez-faire relation between the subject and state. Rather, neoliberal governments intervene to encourage particular kinds of entrepreneurial, competitive, and commercial behaviours in citizens What becomes (9). However, these interventions often take the form of a reduction in the state’s provision of welfare, effectively outsourcing the responsibilities of of the neoliberal governance to the market. As neoliberal economic and social shifts erode state and communal structures of responsibility, insecurity and precarity subject hemmed become a fact of life for many (Neilson and Rossiter, Papadopoulos et al., Berlant, Cruel Optimism). Thus, at the heart of neoliberal logics lies a in by such particular kind of problem: while individuals are called upon to cultivate their own well-being as market-driven subjects—to take responsibility contradictory for their own capacity to live and thrive—the state actively dismantles or reduces programs or services that might formerly have aided in this demands? endeavour, resulting in, perhaps at best, the kind of circulatory precariousness Berlant describes and, at worst, a necropolitics with outcomes like the recent Grenfell Tower fire in London (Mbembe). This contradictory, and in some cases deadly, logic of responsibility is normalized in part through what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism,” which he describes as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2). In the context of a neoliberal form of this realism, precarity and insecurity are not necessarily considered unaccept- able ways in which to have to live but facts of life to be endured responsibly. What becomes of the neoliberal subject hemmed in by such contradictory demands? The question of agency sits uneasily at the intersec- tion of capitalist realism, the hegemonic formation of neoliberalism, and the spread of precariousness. Obama and Cameron call for individual responsibility—a familiar neoliberal value—in the face of the crisis conditions they admit in their respective states, but what might it mean to act responsibly in the face of forces that are not only much larger than one’s capacity to act but also, in some cases, working actively to undermine that capacity? In such a moment, meritocracy—or the notion that upward mobility and economic momentum can be earned through hard work and merit—masquerades as responsibility, as those who maintain the capacity to act and appear responsible often do so on the basis of relative, often unacknowledged, financial, social, or class-based privilege (Littler). In the shadow of the meritocratic subject lies what Jane Elliott terms “suffering agency,” a modality of agency that reflects the existential impasse implied by neoliberal capitalist realism and precarious living conditions.

Transition as Impasse | 37 Elliott argues that, even in critical accounts of neoliberalism’s influence, the notion of agency is often retained as a positive locus of human potential (87). Challenging this view, Elliott theorizes suffering agency as a mode of domination unique to neoliberalism and effected through personhood itself, specifically through self-interest, choice, and agential action (84). Suffering agency imprisons the subject in the inexorability of their own “self-preservation instinct” in contexts in which the only possible choices made in the pursuit of self-preservation are “both imposed and appall- ing” (84). In other words, suffering agency refers to situations in which an individual must make choices that determine life or death, whether their own or another’s, in situations where any kind of social or communal support has vanished. To this end, her essay focuses on survival narratives, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi,1 that offer imaginative and speculative horizons from which to test what she identifies as limit-cases of neoliberal rationality. While Elliott focuses on speculative and future-based survival narratives, I argue that the imaginative horizon of suffering agency she locates in the early part of the twenty-first century has shifted toward the quotidian in the years since the financial crisis. In recent years, a mode very similar to Elliott’s suffering agency has emerged in realist works set in contemporary times, what I have termed here the genre of critical neoliberal realism. This genre grapples with a sense of transition as impasse, as a mode of subjective experience proliferating alongside neoliberal responses to the financial crisis. I turn now to the film I, Daniel Blake, directed by social-realist filmmaker Ken Loach, to consider a critical representation of the way in which suffering agency masquerading as responsibility has become an acceptable expectation of certain neoliberal subjects in the wake of the financial crisis and alongside the growth of austerity projects. The film follows Daniel Blake (Dave Johns), a widowed, fifty-nine-year-old carpenter, through his recovery from a heart attack suffered on the job. Despite the fact that both his doctor’s and cardiologist’s assessments declare him unfit to work, he is ruled ineligible for employment support because he does not meet the minimum requirements mandated by the system’s standardized assessment criteria. Without savings or a pension, Daniel tries to figure out how to launch an appeal, but he is stymied by an online system with which he is unfamiliar, an endless series of bureaucratic quagmires, and unhelp- 1 The one exception is her description of suffering agency as key to understanding the responses demanded of citizens affected by Hurricane Katrina in the absence of adequate governmental support (85–86).

38 | Veldstra ful agency employees who seem to seek any reason to penalize benefits seekers. As he vainly attempts to secure financial support, he meets Katie Mason (Hayley Squires), a single mother of two, more familiar with the system but equally struggling to survive its machinations. Through the film, the two offer each other a modicum of support but are limited in their capacity to do so by their systemic precarity. I, Daniel Blake stages encounters with a benefits system that exemplifies a model of neoliberal governance initiated under Thatcher and strengthened by New Labour in which bureaucracy in the form of quasi- autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos) determines the lives of the precarious yet does not offer secure support. Instead, scarcity of resources and the complete exposure of benefits seekers to the technological machinations of the system and the will of its representatives enforce compliance (Leys 38–39). As the film’s opening credits roll over a black screen, we hear Daniel interacting with an assessor from the Employ- ment and Support Allowance Office.2 Although he has already filled out a fifty-two-page questionnaire, the assessor persists in asking him questions unrelated to his heart and Daniel becomes increasingly frustrated. When Daniel begins to question the assessor’s medical qualifications, she will only describe herself as a “health care professional.” He asks her to clarify whom she works for, since he’d heard it was an American company from someone in the waiting room, but she will say only that her company has been appointed by the government (00:00:44–00:03:25). Loach thus situates the film in a post-Thatcher, post-Blair Britain in which the state has become nearly indistinguishable from the quangos that run its public functions. Bureaucracy in such a context is enmeshed with corporate profitability, raising questions about the aims of such a bureau: to save money and cut costs by finding reasons to deny benefits or to provide to those in need. The former is suggested when the assessor admonishes, “Mr. Blake if you continue to speak to us like that, that’s not going to be very helpful to your assessment” (00:02:13–00:02:24). The assessor’s warning against the possible consequences of Daniel’s noncompliant attitude is soon borne out as Daniel receives a notice saying he has been deemed ineligible to receive employment support assistance. In the context of a systemic opacity that makes it impossible to understand the justification for such a decision, Daniel’s affect bears the weight of this rejection.

2 Employment and Support Allowance is a uk benefit system designed to offer financial support to those who are unable to find or continue work because of a long-term illness or disability.

Transition as Impasse | 39 The affective expectation of the benefits seeker—an expectation Daniel fails to meet—is further exemplified by Katie’s encounters with the system. For instance, in the scene in which the two meet, a Jobcentre Plus3 These scenes employee tells Katie that, because she arrived late for her appointment, she will not be allowed to sign on for benefits but will instead be referred to a demonstrate decision-maker who may decide to sanction her benefits as a result of her tardiness. The agent is unmoved by Katie’s apologies and her explanation the transition of that she arrived late because she had only just moved to Newcastle from London and made a mistake navigating public transit. When Katie tries suffering agency to speak to a manager, he explains that the agent is in the right and that Katie has “a duty to be there on time,” nearly parroting Cameron’s call for from responsible citizenship. Daniel, who witnesses the scene from the waiting area, tries to intervene, asking those waiting if they will let Katie jump the imaginative queue; he is reprimanded for his trouble, and the two are escorted from the building by security (00:15:10–00:17:57). Through these encounters with horizon into Jobcentre Plus employees, the film details an affective economy underpinning the system of social benefits in which those who fail to express the everyday appropriate gratitude and obsequiousness are penalized. In a Guardian article responding to the film, Frances Ryan supports this view, quoting experience. Oxford researcher Daniel Edmiston, who observed in interviews with Jobcentre Plus claimants an expectation for “subservient, compliant and grateful” attitudes (quoted in Ryan). Some of Edmiston’s interviewees were so concerned about the decisive control Jobcentre Plus staff had over their benefits that, he notes, “they actively moderated their behaviour to be more pleasing” (quoted in Ryan). On the other hand, those who refused to engage in the requisite affective tailoring and instead confronted their advisers were sanctioned, he says, in some cases severely exacerbating their poverty (quoted in Ryan). This is true for Katie who, after her encounter at the Jobcentre Plus, goes without food for days in order to ensure her children can eat, until she nearly collapses from hunger in a food bank, saying she feels like she is “going under” (00:52:01–00:56:11). These scenes demonstrate the transition of suffering agency from imaginative horizon into everyday experience through not only a ruthless bureaucratic/corporate approach to social welfare but also the natu- ralization of an affective logic that assumes affect as wilful. Elliott opens her article by demonstrating that the language of freedom and choice celebrated by Thatcher and Reagan worked to usher in a neoliberal ratio-

3 Jobcentre Plus is a quango used by the uk Department for Work and Pensions to administer working-age support, such as jobseeker’s assistance.

40 | Veldstra nality that celebrated choice without considering the contexts in which choices were made. When one must choose between paying to keep the gas on in one’s house or buying groceries to feed one’s children, as Katie eventually must, choice is experienced as punitive rather than liberatory. In such a matrix of choice, as Rosalind Gill writes, “the neoliberal subject is required to bear full responsibility for their life biography no matter how severe the constraints upon their action” (436). I, Daniel Blake’s focus on individuals disciplined by the social security system in austerity-era Britain suggests that such assumptions about agency include both tangible choices made between material needs and intangible choices made in tailoring one’s affective demeanour, as implied in Cameron and Obama’s calls for citizens to respond to neoliberal constraints responsibly. If Jobcen- tre Plus staff determine an applicant to have responded irresponsibly—a determination that can rest on the affective impression gleaned from an applicant’s demeanour—they are empowered to cut off essential benefits funding. Katie and Daniel’s confusion and frustration over a bureaucratic response that refuses to recognize either the urgency of their need or the veracity of their suffering is reduced to an issue of bad attitude. Sara Ahmed argues that wilfulness operates in part as a judgment that validates exclusion based on what is determined to be an error in affective judgment. In I, Daniel Blake, Loach demonstrates the twin functions of the presumption of wilfulness on the part of benefits seekers. Not only does wilfulness become an excuse for exclusion and ostracization from the very agencies set up to offer support, but it is also a lens by which the impasse of neoliberal logic, in which one must bear responsibility for oneself in a system that works to erode supports for the individual, is oversimplified as a question of agency. In this way, suffering agency is naturalized as the end result of a wilful bad attitude rather than as an inevitable outcome of austerity measures and the slashing and outsourcing of social support. The parallel questions of agency and impasse operate somewhat differently in the film The Big Short, adapted from the novel of the same name by Michael Lewis. Where I, Daniel Blake is interested in lives lived in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and British austerity measures, The Big Short takes up the determining structure behind these shifts. As such, if I, Daniel Blake focuses on a sense of impasse created through an overwhelming burden placed on the individual subject, then The Big Short questions whether or not meaningful action is even possible in the context of hegemonic neoliberal capitalism. In The Big Short, impasse is figured as a structural situation largely beyond the scope of human will; its impasse is thus a condition imposed on individuals through their embeddedness

Transition as Impasse | 41 in the structure of neoliberal capitalism. Directed by Adam McKay (best known for comedies like Anchorman and Step Brothers), The Big Short follows three different groups of what it describes as “outsiders and weirdos” on the fringes of Wall Street who anticipate the housing market crash and work to set up new financial instruments—credit default swaps4—so that they can cash in when it does. For the purposes of this paper, I want to focus on one of these groups, a small team of investors called Frontline and, in particular, their leader Mark Baum (Steve Carrell), who is initially skeptical about the rumoured crash, but, after investigating the state of the housing market in Florida, realizes the situation is dire. Throughout the film, and not unlike Daniel Blake, Mark expresses a combination of incredulity and rage over the actions and ideologies guid- ing Wall Street. Early on, he describes the situation as he sees it to his wife over the phone, shouting: It is a shit storm out here, sweetie! You have no idea the kind of crap people are pulling and everyone is walking around like they’re in a goddamn Enya video! They’re all getting screwed you know, and you know what they care about? They care about the ball game or they care about what actress just went into rehab. (00:17:19–00:17:40)

It is in this sense of a shit storm going largely unnoticed that the film identifies capitalism’s impasse: an urgent or dangerous structural situation—in which banks are profiting in unchecked and nearly unbelievable ways—that recedes to become the status quo. Mark’s interest in setting up his swap position betting against the market is portrayed in the film as a kind of moral crusade, seeking to disrupt this impasse by taking it down on its own terms. This characterization comes to the fore when Mark meets with Wing Chau (Byron Mann), a synthetic cdo5 broker and a man the film’s narrator describes as a “solid gold asshole,” at the American Securitization Forum in Las Vegas (01:22:53–01:22:55). As Wing smugly explains his business, Mark becomes increasingly agitated, eventually asking whether or not Wing is worried about rising default rates. He responds, 4 A credit default swap is a financial instrument based upon a third party debt in which the seller agrees to compensate the buyer if the underlying loan is defaulted upon (by the debtor). In exchange, the buyer makes a series of agreed- upon payments to the seller as long as the debt is not in default. 5 A synthetic cdo, or collateralized debt obligation, is an investment in credit default swaps. In other words, it is a bet on the swaps themselves, rather than on the mortgage market, and therefore is a kind of bet on a bet. In the context of the U.S. mortgage crisis, synthetic cdos vastly extended the scope of the bubble.

42 | Veldstra “I assume no risk for these products myself,” and then adds, “It’s funny, huh?” (01:22:57–01:26:00). In this line, the smirking Wing articulates what might be described as the “killing joke” of the housing crisis (Lewis 2006): that it is built on a structure set up by those who assume no risk while profiting from a considerable cost extracted from those who can least afford to pay. Paul Lewis uses the phrase “killing joke” to describe a form of humour popularized in 1980s horror films in which viewers are invited “to be amused by images of bodily mutilation, vulnerability, and victimization” (24). It is the “unbridled and extreme cruelty” that he says distinguishes this kind of humour from other aggressive forms (24), and he connects its emergence to growing anxieties about the real possibility of human annihilation through climate change, nuclear war, or pandemic disease. The killing joke, Lewis argues, allows respite from existential anxieties by allowing us to detach ourselves from terrifying conditions and stand alongside a perpetrator and thus gain a sense of power by exploring, or laughing at, our own fear. McKay’s film offers a different kind of killing joke in which life itself comes to resemble a joke. Instead of bloody serial killers, the jokers in his film are only cogs in a seemingly impenetrable system of solid gold assholes backed by a series of corporations the machinations of which are nearly invisible; they are more banal, perhaps, but against these foes the localizable terror of Freddy Kruger comes to seem almost nostalgic. If McKay’s realist comedy portrays the structure of contemporary neoliberal capitalism as a kind of killing joke then it also raises another question: Who is the butt of such a joke? At the end of their exchange, Mark responds sarcastically to Wing’s declaration of his lack of responsibility for the risk of products he sells. Deadpanning, “That’s hilarious,” he instructs his team to “short everything that guy has touched,” saying he is “going to find moral redemption at the roulette table” (01:27:54–01:28:52). In shorting Wing’s position, or, in essence, in taking out a bet on the assumption that the underlying system will fail, is Mark any different than Wing, or is he merely adding to the complex structure of financial instruments built like a house of cards around the mortgage crisis? Is Wing the subject or object of the joke, or is Mark? Or does the joke have another target altogether? Mark returns home from Las Vegas wracked with guilt over his complicity in the system. As the housing bubble begins to burst and the other outsiders begin to sell their positions and reap the profits, Mark delays, believing that once they sell, they “will be just like the rest of them” (02:00:55–02:01:01). However, his colleague argues with him: “We’re not the bad guys here,” he says, “We didn’t defraud the American

Transition as Impasse | 43 people and prey on their dreams of owning a home. They did. And now we get to kick them in the teeth” (02:01:04–02:01:13). The film thus presents the thesis that moral redemption can be found at the roulette table, that retribution in a fraudulent, corrupt system is justifiable, if it comes at the expense of your antagonist. Mark’s actions are thus construed as an effort to hold certain players responsible for the underlying corruption of the financial system. McKay’s reported vision for the film supports this view of its moral position around responsibility. In an in-depth article on the film, Jessica Pressler interviews McKay, asking him to respond to the ambiguous and complicit positions of the film’s protagonists. McKay declares them to be heroes, saying, “I think they did exactly what a hero would do, but they were bankers” (quoted in Pressler). In other words, McKay takes the view that it is heroic—and perhaps responsible—to profit at the expense of corrupt financial actors, even if that is the extent of one’s action, and in fact justifies the extent of that action through a view that sees agency as circumscribed by one’s socio-economic position. In the same article, Pressler also interviews the real Michael Burry, whose experiences formed the basis for the character of the same name in the novel and the film, who expresses a similar sense of limited agency: “I knew what was happening, but there was nothing I, or anyone else, could do to stop it” (quoted in Pressler). If one accepts that no further accounting of responsibility is possible, then perhaps profiting at the expense of the profiteers constitutes some small victory. However, buying into this view of a constrained heroism means that McKay can only locate a transition out of the financial crisis elsewhere. Pressler summarizes McKay’s objective in the film as a bet on the hope not only that audiences will come away from the film with “a fuller awareness of the cornucopia of shitty human behavior that led to the Biggest Finan- cial Collapse Since the Great Depression,” but also that viewing the movie and coming to these realizations “will lead to some kind of reckoning that causes us to face uncomfortable truths about responsibility and financial capitalism and our entire way of life.” This assessment of the film collapses into Obama and Cameron’s view of the financial crisis as stemming from a lack of responsibility at all levels and their further implication that transition out of crisis can only stem from “our” reassertion of a responsible attitude taken toward the entirety of the American socio-economic system. But what might such responsibility entail? And who will take it on? As reported by Pressler, McKay describes his hope that the film will, at least, reignite a debate among Americans about the housing crisis and, at best, fuel a renewed anger among the American people. In this McKay reveals

44 | Veldstra a naive faith in a critique of neoliberal ideology as the ground for oppo- sitional action. However, as Gilbert notes, “it is perfectly possible to recognize the exploitative and iniquitous nature of capitalism, and the social and personal costs of neoliberalism, without being motivated to oppose Neoliberal them” (14). In fact, as Gilbert suggests, this is precisely the relation Fisher’s notion of capitalist realism maintains, “an explicit rejection of its norms capitalism will and claims accompanied by a resigned compliance with its demands” (13). In this sense, McKay’s film risks losing its sense of critique altogether and continue instead aligning itself with a realist genre in which capitalism comes to seem inevitable and unshakable because even those who both recognize regardless of the costs of such a system and occupy positions of immense privilege and power within it feel themselves incapable of acting otherwise. the action or I want to suggest that the film itself also offers a more ambiguous view of the possibility of transition and in so doing undermines McKay’s faith in inaction of one his own project and instead supports a reading of the film as an imperfect critical neoliberal realist text in which critique struggles to gain meaning- man. ful purchase. The last words spoken in The Big Short are Mark’s, when, finally, he quietly concedes, “Okay. Sell it all” (02:01:34–02:01:50). This line is followed by a wide shot of Mark, who sits alone hunched over a table on a rooftop patio at his Park Avenue home. He looks tiny and defeated against the skyline of New York. In this scene, Mark demonstrates a sense of agency suffered under the weight of the utter evacuation of the capacity for meaningful action. The cinematography here reveals a position contrary to McKay’s, that there is no moral high ground in the short position represented in the film but, rather, that neoliberal capitalism will continue regardless of the action or inaction of one man. In speaking his last line, Mark expresses the impasse of the system in which he operates: one can only profit at a cost, and one can either profit or suffer. The impasse is reiterated directly in the film’s final title cards, which, after offering updates on what the protagonists have done since the crash, tell viewers that, in 2015, banks started selling cdos again as Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” abruptly cuts in (02:01:55–02:03:45). Rather than reflecting on the weight of such an impasse, in which even a well-connected and highly privileged white man is incapable of ameliorative action, McKay offers a naive hope in transition coming from the precarious themselves spurred by ideological enlightenment, leading to anger and then action. In the context of McKay’s desire to provide some locus for change, it is not coincidental that those negatively affected by the housing crisis are largely absent in The Big Short. Aside from a brief scene in which one of Mark’s colleagues encounters a renter living in a home about to be foreclosed

Transition as Impasse | 45 in Florida (00:43:47–00:44:50), who reappears briefly in a final montage, living out of his van with his wife and two children (01:56:51–01:57:04), McKay does not take up the losses suffered by mortgage holders and rent- ers in the housing crisis. His failure to do so allows him to maintain his misplaced hope in this demographic as the ground for potential anger and therefore transition. It also allows him to ignore the consequences of his representation of structural impasse for those who struggle with not only circumscribed agency but also severely limited material means in such a system. At best, then, The Big Short considers the implications of living in a moment of neoliberal capitalist realism, in which agency can only move in tandem with logics already in place; at worst, it reiterates a neoliberal logic by reinforcing a structure of feeling rooted in a sense of universal powerless and conflating, and thus erasing, the experiences of those who occupy radically different economic positions. I, Daniel Blake offers a somewhat different view of this nexus of overwhelming impasse and the seeming impossibility of agency or transition. With unpaid bills mounting and having recently sold nearly all of his belongings to put some cash in his pocket, Daniel goes to another meeting at the Jobcentre Plus in which he attempts to qualify for jobseekers allowance despite the fact that he is under his doctor’s orders not to return to work. He meets with Ann, an employee who has shown him some kindness in the past. When Ann is confused as to why he has not been applying for jobs, Daniel responds, It’s a monumental farce, isn’t it? You sitting there with your friendly nametag on your chest, Ann, opposite a sick man looking for nonexistent jobs that I can’t take anyway. Wasting my time, employers’ time, your time. And all it does is humili- ate me, grind me down. Or is that the point, to get my name off those computers? Well, I’m not doing it anymore. I’ve had enough. (01:21:33–01:22:01)

Although Ann begs Daniel not to give up on job seeker’s allowance lest he end up on the street, he walks out of the office, pulls a can of spray paint from his pocket and writes on the side of the Jobcentre Plus building, “I Daniel Blake demand my appeal date before I starve, and change the shite music on the phones!” He sits below his message while crowds gather on the street, cheering, taking photographs, and applauding (01:22:40– 01:27:34). In some ways, Daniel’s assessment of his situation as a “monumental farce” in the first part of this scene mirrors McKay’s characterization of

46 | Veldstra neoliberalism. However, where Mark Baum is angry but ultimately powerless in the face of the “killing joke” of neoliberal capitalism, Daniel pushes back by taking up a can of spray paint. Moreover, in the moment he takes action, Daniel connects with a wider community who share his frustration with Tory austerity measures in Britain. In this, the film suggests a kind of affective excess burbling beneath the pressure put on subjects to conform in particular ways. Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos locate this kind of excess as a potential that emerges from the embodied experience of neoliberal capitalism, which they distinguish from the modes of behaviour encouraged by neoliberalism. The authors note that not all subjects fully adapt to the subjective demands imposed by neoliberal capitalism; rather, embodied experience exceeds the conditions in which it is produced (231). If not all subjects embody neoliberal capitalism in the same way, then, they argue, it is possible that an excess or an exit can exist at the heart of neoliberal subjectivity, even in its most precarious forms (235). Daniel exemplifies a refusal of neoliberal subjectivity throughout the film, particularly in his unwillingness to adopt the subservient affect expected of a man in his position, but it is when he publicizes this refusal by writing it on the wall of the Jobcentre Plus building that he finds connection to a community supportive of such rejection. This spontaneous and impromptu connection with a crowd of supporters mirrors his and others’ attempts through the film to find community with other precarious individuals, generating sociability—what Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos describe as “informal networks of existence, cooperation and social reciprocity” (256)—within the various regimes of precarity in which the characters struggle. This moment in the film also parallels Lauren Berlant’s identification of the “glitch” as a locus for politics in the current moment of impasse. She defines a glitch as “an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission,” suggesting that, “a glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure” (393). Berlant’s interest in infrastructure here lies with its capacity to facilitate movement. A glitch, then, interrupts the seemingly smooth systemic flow to reveal a failure in its movement. In the context of I, Daniel Blake, we can see Daniel’s stand as a visualization of his experience of impasse: he inscribes his message on the public infrastructure that has failed him, sits down beneath it, promising the angry Jobcentre Plus employees and security officers that he will return every day until he is granted a hearing for his appeal. However, it is also crucial to the film’s critique that any reading of Dan- iel’s actions as an embodied politics rooted in an experience of precarity endemic to neoliberal capitalism, and in turn as pointing to a way out of

Transition as Impasse | 47 impasse, sits uncomfortably alongside the film’s conclusion. Daniel does not go back to the Jobcentre Plus to continue his graffiti campaign. Instead, the film shows him alone in his emptied out and unheated apartment, wrapped in a blanket. When Katie’s daughter Daisy shows up with cous- cous and an offer to help, he eventually concedes, and we next see Daniel walking arm-in-arm with Katie to his appeal meeting (01:28:57–01:31:38). The meeting starts off well as a representative clearly explains the process to Daniel. When Daniel notes that he will be homeless if the appeal is unsuccessful, the representative expresses confidence, telling him that his doctors are furious and he would bet his life on the success of the appeal. Daniel looks toward the panel that will hear his case noting, “Look at them. It’s funny, they’ve got my life in their hands” (01:32:12–01:33:35). However, as it turns out, they are too late to save his life. Moments later and before the panel has a chance to hear his appeal, Daniel collapses in the bathroom and dies (01:34:03–01:35:37). Attempts to locate a politics in the essential but ephemeral social networks built by and for the precarious must also account for the very real and deadly effects that the experience of impasse can have. While Daniel is certainly relieved of his frustration through a momentary connection with a supportive crowd, he is ultimately left alone to keep afloat within a system that he suspects would rather reject than assist him. Likewise, although his friendship with Katie is supportive, as another precarious person also struggling to survive, her capacity to fill the void left by the inefficient and inhumane system is limited. While the escape routes and exit points Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos are interested in may provide spaces and strategies of survival for some, for others a glitch offers only temporary respite, while the only escape route is terminal. By attempting to grapple with the lived realities of neoliberalism, these films demonstrate a breakdown in the notion of agency couched as individual responsibility in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. While The Big Short perhaps overstates the deterministic effect of hegemonic neoliberalism and overinvests in the efficacy of ideological enlightenment as a political end, it describes a sense of living with an aimless sense of responsibility, due to an erosion of meaningful agency even among those with relative privilege. I, Daniel Blake further complicates the notion of agency, revealing both a ruthless affective economy disciplining the precarious and a necropolitics underlying the parallel occurrence of an erosion of meaningful support and heightened expectation for responsibility. The genre of critical neoliberal realism takes up the problematic normalization of discourses and assumptions about agency couched as responsibility, which

48 | Veldstra no longer adequately reflect existing opportunity. Rather, the filmic texts discussed here each differently situate agency within a particular sense of impasse. This impasse is not necessarily borne of stasis but, rather, of a demand for action in a context in which whatever momentum or direction The filmic texts the system permits can only fail to resolve circumstances of one’s suffering, in which responsibility can only mean a privatization and normalization discussed here of suffering as the purview of individual capacity. In a neoliberal moment, any conceptualization of transition must recognize the fraught, exhaust- each differently ing, and depleting situations of impasse that intersect and overdetermine agency, one of the key capacities from which transition is often assumed situate agency to emerge. For protagonists in this genre—as for many living under neoliberal forms of governance—agency is suffered, not necessarily because of within a the absence of state or corporate structures but due to their overwhelming involvement in evacuating sources of support or resistance, often particular sense indirectly and on the basis of affective logics. Critical neoliberal realism explains the defining conundrum behind the broader genre that Fisher of impasse. calls capitalist realism; if the experience of impasse affects everyone from jobseekers like Daniel Blake to investment bankers like Mark Baum, then no wonder we can’t imagine a coherent alternative to capitalism.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke up, 2014. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New York: Sage, 1992. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke up, 2011. ——— . “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34.3 (2016): 393–419. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2007. Cameron, David. Campaign speech. 26 April 2009. Conservative Spring Convention, Cheltenham, uk. Davies, William. The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty, and the Logic of Competition. New York: Sage, 2016. Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke up, 2009. Elliott, Jane. “Suffering Agency: Imagining Neoliberal Personhood in North America and Britain.” Social Text 31.2 (2013): 83–101.

Transition as Impasse | 49 Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009. Gilbert, Jeremy. “What Kind of a Thing is Neoliberalism?” New Formations 80–81 (2013): 7–22. Gill, Rosalind. “Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times.” Subjectivity 25 (2008): 432–45. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalim. Oxford: Oxford up, 2005. Littler, Jo. “Meritocracy as Plutocracy: The Marketising of Equality within Neoliberalism.” New Formations 80–81 (2013): 52–72. Lewis, Paul. Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Leys, Colin. Market-Driven Politics: Neoliberal Democracy and the Public Interest. New York: Verso, 2001. Loach, Ken, dir. I, Daniel Blake. Sixteen Films, 2016. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. McKay, Adam, dir. The Big Short. Plan B Entertainment and Regency Enterprises, 2015. McRobbie, Angela. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Indus- tries. Hoboken: Wiley, 2015. Neilson, Brett, and Ned Rossiter. “Precarity as Political Concept, or, Ford- ism as Exception.” Theory, Culture, and Society 25.7–8 (2008): 51–72. Obama, Barack. Speech on the Economy. 8 January 2009. George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos. Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Pressler, Jessica. “Hollywood’s Bank Run.” New York. 30 November 2015. Ryan, Frances. “I, Daniel Blake is a realistic depiction of life on benefits. Isn’t it?” The Guardian. 16 February 2017. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Stanton, Andrew, dir. WALL-E. Pixar Animation Studios, 2008.

50 | Veldstra Not a Transition but a Pivot: Public Engagement and Claiming Space as an Alt-Ac Laura Schechter

or more than two and a half years, while also teaching full-time Fat the University of Alberta, I’ve been moonlighting as the part-time coordinator for English Studies in Canada. When the journal moves to Western University this summer, the coordinator job will be taken up by a new person in London, so professional transitions are, of course, on my mind. My talk today will focus on the transition from PhD to alt-ac or postac employment. For me, taking on alt-ac work after the PhD wasn’t so much a transition as it was a pivot. I didn’t transform entirely from one thing to another, nor was I a liminal body that signaled change while remaining somewhat separate from it. One could note, too, that for those who fully leave academia for other forms of work, the term alt-ac only precisely applies for a brief window of time: it “really [suggests] a transitional state, one that becomes less relevant once PhDs have moved on to a new post- graduation identity” (Bowness). My move involved extension, not complete departure; it involved taking up new space while staying grounded in something familiar (hence the pivot, not the transition). In fact, I’m not sure that I would characterize my alt-ac work as “alt-ac,” or alternative to academia. Really, it has been add-ac, additional to academia, or alo-ac, alongside academia. Trademarks pending, so don’t steal those terms.

ESC 43.2–3.1 (June/September 2017): 51–55 I largely fell into my work with esc; the experience was fairly similar to the time I fell into my first official alt-ac job as the coordinator for accute. Truth be told, falling into alt-ac was fairly similar to falling more generally: Laura Schechter a moment of mild surprise, a rush of panic or exhilaration, depending on received her PhD from the fall, and an attempt to look at least slightly graceful on the way down. the University of Alberta, I had recently finished my PhD when accute arrived at the University of and she continues Alberta. The new president, Stephen Slemon, was looking for a coordina- to teach there in the tor, and he asked a friend of mine if she would be interested. She wasn’t, Department of English but she recommended me, largely because I struck her as organized and and Film Studies. Her good at multitasking. (For the record, I fit the bill on both counts.) While research focuses on employed as the accute coordinator, I had the chance to work with esc’s early modern women’s co-editor, Mike O’Driscoll, who sat on the accute board. Just as accute writing, court culture, was leaving for Dalhousie in 2014, the esc coordinator gave her notice. A theatre, and works in new job thus fell into my lap, largely because Mike had seen me in action translation, and her with a previous employer. publications include I suppose you could say that I used my networks to get alt-ac jobs, articles in Renaissance but it would be more accurate to say that my networks noticed my gen- and Reformation, esc, eral set of professional skills and sent opportunities my way when the fit and Pedagogy. She also seemed right. I was fortunate in that I happened to be in a large depart- continues to seek out ment with faculty members who were overseeing academic projects that new opportunities in needed alt-ac skills, and colleagues in the department knew from working alt-ac fields such as with me that I could successfully take on those sorts of jobs. While many coordinating, writing, other doctoral students are now taking on alt-ac employment, either dur- and editing ing their programs or after, few are likely to have the sorts of in-house opportunities that I did. Finding alt-ac employment then becomes a sort of piecemeal exercise that often operates separately from the doctoral student’s academic life. Those who are interested in alt-ac jobs look up resumé templates online, send applications into the void, and figure it all out along the way (see also Sayre et al. 107). In a 2015 piece for the popular academic blog Hook & Eye, Melissa Dalgleish cited a Statistics Canada figure that “only 18.6% of [PhD holders are] in full-time academic teaching jobs (and that includes contract work)”; while some of the remaining 81.4 percent are undoubtedly PhD holders who focus on academic life but only find part-time employment, the statistics suggest that PhD holders must also be taking on any number of other careers. In fact, people with PhDs are the least likely to be unemployed in Canada (Dalgleish). Some of those alternative industries require a departure from a life centred on traditional academic work, but some are most certainly fields that allow people to pivot, to keep one foot in the familiar while kicking boldly into some new space.

52 | Schechter The transition (or the pivot) into alt-ac is so often couched in the language of necessary skills. What practical skills does the person have, and which of those skills would they like to use on a daily basis? The actual content of my dissertation on early modern Amazon women and Eliza- bethan representation didn’t land me my job at accute, but strong communication and organizational skills were integral to both forms of labour, as was an ability to see projects through to completion. Although these capacities were improved along the way as I completed my PhD, they weren’t explicitly made a core component of any seminars that I took as a graduate student. The lack of faculty-led workshops on practical alt-ac skills isn’t the problem that I want to address, however, nor is it the problem upon which academics should focus more generally. I would suggest that the humanities professoriate is often resistant when the potential emerges to train doctoral students for alt-act employment. This resistance usually reveals itself with an argument that faculty members lack contacts in other sectors, so they can’t be sure what those sectors need, nor can they create networks for their students. Professors also regularly argue that they can’t be responsible for the practical needs of other industries and that the focus of a doctoral program should be writing a dissertation and developing the skills needed to teach and research in a university department, for those are the things that academics know how to do. Perhaps a compromise is reached and demands for more alt-ac skills training are met with an occasional workshop on editing practices. The University of Alberta recently went further and mandated that, over the course of their degrees, all new graduate students will produce an Individual Development Plan and undertake eight hours of work related to professional development (Faculty). These solutions seem misguided to me: they focus on the acquisition of practical skills without asking the doctoral student or the department itself to consider academic work within a larger public professional life. I follow Paul Yachnin in suggesting that “skills training is already an integral but usually invisible dimension of PhD programs. That dimension needs to be acknowledged, redefined, and developed.” Beyond a practical understanding of “alt-ac skills” as the qualities that will lead to employment, I would like to place these capacities in a more socially driven framework, allowing doctoral students to imagine all along that their work falls within a wider network of public relationships, if you will. Imagine the potential, should graduate students regularly conceptualize their skill set as shared by and necessary to non-academics. Imagine the potential, should those who stay in the academy also do this as part of their ongoing

Not a Transition | 53 regular employment. Could humanities departments resituate themselves to consider these “alt-ac skills” as necessary components for both PhD holders and academia “to turn outward toward the world” (Yachnin)? Could faculties work to develop “dispositional mobility” in their students, to use Yachnin’s phrase? Could faculties work to develop dispositional mobility in themselves? Dispositional mobility would allow those in alt-ac and those who stay entirely in academia “to move effectually among different fields of activity, by cultivating their public skills …; not only the ability to write academic prose for a small circle of expert readers but also the ability to write in different styles for different readerships; not only the ability to teach at a university but also the ability to teach fellow workers, senior citizens or high school students,” as Yachnin outlines. Rather than resignedly plan editing seminars that by design must appendix already full schedules of graduate courses, perhaps faculties should consider integrating new sorts of writing assignments that work alongside the traditional dissertation— podcasts, blogs, or articles in online magazines, for example—which could function as alternative modes of expression for those who want public engagement as a part of their doctoral work. The dissertation wouldn’t disappear, but the research could be presented in two very different styles and venues. Perhaps faculties could work more enthusiastically with community service learning programs that are already on campus and looking to pair students with charities and other local agencies. Presentations of research could happen monthly in public spaces, and presenters could stay to chat and network with those who come to listen. These sorts of engagements could be a way for the academy to transition (or pivot) more generally, in fact. In finding alt-ac work, I was lucky in that people I knew had jobs to spare, and these people had already noticed my abilities demonstrated through various academic and social interactions. A 2013 report by Katina Rogers suggested that, when surveyed, 78 percent of employers ranked an ability to collaborate as the most desired quality for new hires (quoted in Sayre et al. 108). Oral communication was ranked as important by 70 percent of employers surveyed, while writing and research skills were next on the list (108). These are all qualities that academics can demonstrate for their students. The key, however, is that these skills cannot simply be exercised in the academic setting if a doctoral student is serious about finding alt-ac work. I would further argue that these skills cannot simply be exercised in the academic setting if the academy is serious about imagining itself within a larger network of professions.

54 | Schechter Works Cited

Bowness, Suzanne. “What’s Up with Alt-Ac Careers.” University Affairs. 8 September 2015. Dalgleish, Melissa. “The #Alt-Ac Job Search 101: Figuring Out What Else to Do.” Hook & Eye. 19 February 2015. hookandeye.ca. Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research: Professional Development Requirement. University of Alberta, 2017. ualberta.ca. Sayre, Meridith Beck, Marta Brunner, Brian Croxall, and Emily McGinn. “Toward a Trackless Future: Moving beyond ‘Alt-Ac’ and ‘Post-Ac.’ ” The Process of Discovery: The clir Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the Future of the Academy. Eds. John C. Maclachlan, Elizabeth A. Waraksa, and Christa Williford. Council on Library and Information Resources. 2015. 103–23. Yachnin, Paul. “Rethinking the Humanities PhD.” University Affairs. 11 March 2015.

Not a Transition | 55 Oil and Water Ernst Logar

he work is based on Ernst Logar´s research trip to the tar sands of the Atha- Tbasca River region, close to Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2015. An important element of the project was the artist’s confrontation with the substances of bitumen and crude oil and their difficult properties. In the course of the project, the artist created an experimental work, which consisted of a steel tank filled with bitumen, crude oil, and water. A photo series (C-prints) represents the socio-economic and environmental impacts of the tar sands industry on Aboriginal communities and the land exposed to the bitumen, crude oil, and water mixture. Projected onto the steel tank is a video image of a documentary of an “Oil Sands Discovery Tour.” The video shows a drive through the Suncor Energy upgrader and is accompanied by the voice of an Oil Sands Discovery Centre tour guide. By executing a symbolic experiment, this specific approach to the subject leads to a strong aesthetic transformation that adds the sense of smell and thus creates new layers of perceiving the problematics of tar sand extraction.

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 56–64

58 | name section or short title | 59 60 | name section or short title | 61 62 | name section or short title | 63 Steel tank, water, crude oil, bitumen, “Tar Sands” photo series, “Oil Sands Discovery Tour” video image—Fort McMurray 2015 Dimensions: 20 x 1500 x 2200 mm Ernst Logar 2015

64 | Logar Shoring up Fragments: Resisting “Change” Craig Patterson Humber College

n the dismal gloom of the present historical moment, it’s hard not Ito be ambivalent about change. Change, itself, has become a commodity; Change Management is an academic discipline. Certified Change Management Professionals implement “strategies and plans that maximize employee adoption and mini- mize resistance.” They work to “drive faster adoption, higher ultimate utilization of and proficiency with the changes that impact employees” (“Change Management”). This makes them sound a bit like overseers in a neoliberal re-education camp, but clearly they are needed since, as the internet confidently asserts, people resist change. Many claim that there is some genetic predisposition for this intransigence, or, more precisely, they claim that “fear of change is evolutionary in humans” (“Fear”). Very many claim this, since that exact phrase yields almost four hundred Google hits, which either says something about the strength of the endorsement or about how “facts” proliferate on the internet. But there may also be other reasons for our fear of change. Anywhere between five and twelve other reasons, depending on which internet list-maker you consult. There is considerable variation among these, but most agree that our reluctance stems from what the listers consider irrational human weaknesses, like

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 65–68 the desire for a secure job whose terms of employment aren’t constantly shifting, which is apparently something “low performers” want (Torben). In the world of “disruptive innovation,” change, especially technologi- Craig Patterson cal change, is figured as a necessity: as a Reuter’s “Report on Innovative teaches in the Division Universities” puts it, “In the fast-changing world of science and technology, of Liberal Arts and if you’re not innovating, you’re falling behind” (Ewalt). Thus, anyone not Sciences at Humber subscribing to the Facebook doctrine of Move Fast and Break Things is a College, Toronto. weak pathetic creature apt to be swept aside by the relentless tide of history. His previous work To make matters worse, the rate of change, according to Google futurist has focussed on such and business guru Ray Kurzweil, is fated to become “exponential”: “We subjects as eighteenth- won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century,” Kurzweil century mollies, serial informs us, “it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).” killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and A Google search of this exact statement (“We won’t experience 100 years”), Ford Madox Ford and in all its defiantly flagrant hyperbole, yields more than ten thousand hits, sexology. making it as close to a truth universally acknowledged as … well, as anything really. In this world of inevitable and ever-increasing change, “transition” colludes in a kind of ideological skulduggery, coating a bitter change in a sweeter, more palatable euphemism. It belongs in that mental universe, over the rainbow, where “problems” melt like lemon drops and become “issues” or “challenges.” There ought to be name for this trope. Would it be the Litotes of Human Capital Resource Management? The Meiosis of Institutional Misery? Of course, transition does denote a major transformation, “a passing … from one condition to another” (“Transition”). But it can be used to suggest something more evolutionary: a slow easy slide rather than an abrupt shift: a smooth transition, a gradual change. Thus the need for “strong transition assistance,” recommended by the Harvard Business Review, to mitigate the pain of a layoff, to smooth over what is no mere transition at all, because “Sometimes the threat is real: Change … can hurt” (Kanter). So, to summarize, change is inevitable and potentially painful; its pace, ever-accelerating, and our fears of it, natural. In other words, we are doomed to live in a constant state of increasing distress about something potentially very unpleasant that we are powerless to control. With such a future, and with the present full of ever-diminishing expectations, resistance seems limited to a doomed-to-fail attempt at shoring up whatever fragments we can against the ruins of a grim, inevitable progress. Against this model of change, I would like to offer a counter example, one less bleakly determinist. In a recent issue of English Studies in Canada, forty scholars were asked to identify “a work, idea, or event of

66 | Patterson the past forty years that has been key to the project of literary, cultural, and theoretical inquiry” (O’Driscoll and Simpson 1). The results, “The Forty on Forty Project,” paid tribute to the seismic shifts that have taken place in what we study, how we study it, and how we approach the act of study itself, and included, among other things, deconstruction, feminism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, indigenous literatures, cultural studies, and the Internet. None of this change seems to conform to axioms of the business world. There was certainly nothing inevitable about any of these developments. They were the result of the complex interplay of forces both from within and outside the academy, but none of it had to happen. Many of these innovations were accompanied by considerable resistance; many remain unwelcome today. Some think the changes have come too slow and been too superficial; others see them not as the vigour and strength of the humanities but the as end of civilization as we know it. (The fear of change, if not biological, is at least omnipresent.) While people have worked hard to change the way we think and read, I doubt that many felt compelled to deconstruct or worried that they better get queer or they’d fall behind (although perhaps I underestimate the compulsion exerted by the desire to get hired or promoted). And while these changes have transformed our disciplines, there are few signs they are increasing at an ever-accelerating rate. This is not, then, change as modeled by business schools and as beloved by academic administrators for its cost-cutting efficiencies. But it is change that has both inspired and been inspired by transformations outside the academy. These are not “merely” ideas. They have changed lives. At a time of political uncertainty, as we march toward the Uberization of Everything, we can find at least some consolation in knowing that change remains possible—even when its possibilities seem remote. I guess the questions I’m left with are how do we encourage the change we want, at the pace we can control, and avoid the other sort? How do we rescue change from the change industry and disconnect it from some sort of bogus technological imperative? And how do we continue to redefine our disciplines to reflect and direct changes in the outside world? But this forum is on transitions, words that “help the reader progress from one significant idea to the next” (“Transition Words”)—the howevers and moreovers and therefores. How is an adverb—and thus the subject of another forum.

Shoring up Fragments | 67 Works Cited

“Change Management Job Description.” Prosci.com. 24 November 2017. Ewalt, David. “The World’s Most Innovative Universities—2016.” Reuters. 28 September 2016. “Fear of Change Phobia.” fearof.net. 24 November 2017. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. “Ten Reasons People Resist Change.” Harvard Business Review. 25 September 2012. Kurzweil, Ray. “The Law of Accelerating Returns.” 7 March 2001. kurzwei- lai.net. 24 November 2017. O’Driscoll, Michael, and Mark Simpson. “The Forty on Forty Project.”Eng - lish Studies in Canada 41.4 (December 2015): 1–22. Torben, Rick. “Change is not the Problem: Resistance to Change is the Problem.” 8 March 2013. torbenrick.eu/blog. 27 November 2017. “Transition Words.” msu.edu. 28 November 2017.

68 | Patterson Reading for Reconciliation? Indigenous Literatures in a Post-trc Canada Aubrey Jean Hanson University of Calgary

n december 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada I(trc) released its final report, and since then people in Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts (literary and otherwise) have been working to understand that report’s implications. As a Métis scholar whose work bridges the fields of Indigenous literatures and Indigenous education, I have been making connections between the report’s recommendations and my ongoing scholarship on Indigenous literatures and learning. These connections raise generative questions about the educational aspects of reading literary texts and about the framing of social and political change between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. In this paper, I focus on connections between Indigenous literatures and learning in order to better understand the reimagining embodied by the trc’s transformative Calls to Action. I draw on perspectives from my current research on Indigenous literatures and resurgence—including conversations with teachers and with Indigenous writers—to ask what it means to read for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. What might it mean, instead, to read for resurgence? By interrogating the framework of reconciliation, I argue that, while the literary arts may be inspiring and reflecting Indigenous communities’ resurgence, a great

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 69–90 deal of learning is required by the rest of Canada to develop responsive relationships with this work. In order to make this argument, I bring together examinations that Aubrey Jean Hanson occur across the distinct sections of this article. The catalyst for my con- is a member of the Métis siderations here—my starting point—is an example of public discourse Nation of Alberta and around reconciliation, education, and Indigenous literatures—namely a an Assistant Professor conversation that occurred in the winter of 2015–2016 on Canada’s public at the University of broadcast radio, the cbc. Specifically, I develop my argument in rela- Calgary’s Werklund tion to a suggestion for Canadian learning made by Canada’s Minister School of Education. for Indigenous and Northern Affairs in a cbc interview and then look Spanning literary studies at Indigenous writers’ responses to that suggestion in a subsequent cbc and education research, interview—responses that challenge the discourse surrounding reconcili- her work investigates ation. Second, I build upon those responses to analyze the relationship, the importance of implied in the minister’s suggestion, between non-Indigenous readers’ Indigenous writing for engagements with Indigenous literatures and the learning precipitated the self-determination of by those engagements. Third, I read the trc’s Calls to Action in order to Indigenous communities, highlight the educational dimensions embedded in that document’s vision as well as for teaching for reconciliation and to consider their implications for literary scholars. and learning. Aubrey Fourth, I examine perspectives from my own research with writers and has previously published teachers in light of these understandings of reconciliation. Finally, I explore work in the Canadian the possibility of reading for resurgence through a reading of Cree author Journal of Higher Tracey Lindberg’s novel Birdie. In concluding these arguments about lit- Education, Studies eratures and learning, I seek to contribute to stronger understandings of in American Indian what it means for non-Indigenous people to read Indigenous literatures at Literatures, and The this particular moment in Canadian public consciousness. Reconciliation, Walrus. in my argument, is not only fraught: it has the potential, if not carefully theorized, to be mobilized by official discourses in order to reinscribe Indigenous expression within the norms of the settler state.

Reading for reconciliation and Indigenous book club month Shortly after the trc’s Calls to Action were released in 2015, the Hon- ourable Carolyn Bennett, Minister for Indigenous and Northern Affairs, was interviewed on the cbc radio program The Current. She was there to elaborate on the new Liberal government’s commitment to renewing relationships with Indigenous peoples. The federal election, with its dramatic shift in leadership, took place shortly before the trc’s conclusion. In addressing the Liberal Party’s plans for renewing relationships, Bennett celebrates the feeling that things are changing for the better, while also pointing out the continuing prevalence of racism and hatred aimed at Indigenous people. She suggests in the interview that many Canadians are

70 | Hanson indeed ready to step up and contribute to change but reiterates the responsibility of non-Indigenous people to educate themselves about Indigenous issues and connect with Indigenous communities. This learning is necessary, she emphasizes, to the work of reconciliation, in order “to eliminate the ignorance that we all had because it wasn’t taught to us in school.”1 As a scholar of Indigenous literatures, I was particularly interested when the Honourable Ms Bennett, as part of this call, suggests that June could become “Indigenous book club month.”2 The possibilities and challenges bound up in her proposal warrant further examination and provoked my considerations in this article. My own life trajectories, as an urban Métis woman and an avid reader, have led me to spend a great deal of time reading Indigenous literatures. This reading fed into my professional efforts as a scholar and educator in literary studies and educational fields. However, my reading of Métis poetry, fiction, and memoirs, as well as other Indigenous literatures, was also a way for me to build understanding of my experiences and those of my kin. On the one hand, then, the suggestion that non-Indigenous people can also educate themselves by reading Indigenous literatures seems like an excellent one. I do believe, to respond to the minister’s suggestion, that Indigenous literatures can be one powerful way to learn more about Indigenous people. Alongside many scholars working in the bourgeoning field of Indigenous literary studies, I believe that Indigenous literatures have a lot to contribute to the work that Canada needs to do to relearn, reimagine, and re-story its relationship with Indigenous communities. On the other hand, however, I must interrogate the assumption that I make in comparing my own experience—namely that I learn about Indigenous people when I read Indigenous literatures—with that of others, particularly readers outside of Indigenous circles. It is important to point to the community-oriented concerns at play in the creation, sharing, and celebration of Indigenous literatures. I point to this tangle not to be divisive but to open up possibilities for nuancing considerations of readerships, learning, and reconciliation.

1 This “we” is, of course, important to catch: Bennett is explicitly addressing the learning of non-Indigenous people in this section of the interview. 2 Allied scholar Pauline Wakeham offers a richly contextualized reading of Ben- nett’s book club proposal and its evolution into the #IndigenousReads campaign. I agree strongly with her contention that the terms of engagement through which readers understand Indigenous literatures in Canada must be examined; I also greatly appreciate her argument that the #IndigenousReads campaign is an example of the settler state relying upon Indigenous intellectual labour.

Reading for Reconciliation? | 71 I was not the only one interested in Bennett’s suggested Indigenous book club month. cbc’s The Current ran a segment ten days later in which three Indigenous writers—namely Salish and Métis writer Lee Maracle, Cree writer Tracey Lindberg, and Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor— respond to the notion that Canadians should read more Indigenous literature. These three are keen proponents of their fellow artists’ work and have important things to say about why encouraging Canadians to read Indigenous writing is a worthwhile project. However, they are also careful to insist upon the broader contextual questions underlying such reading. The conversation on The Current shifts rapidly, stepping away from what it is about Indigenous literature that can inspire change to focus on what the nature of that change might be. This insistence upon the terms of engagement, upon the nature of the goal itself, is an important one that necessarily infuses conversations around what Indigenous artists are doing. What is it that Indigenous literatures are contributing to? Is it resistance, decolonization, Indigenization, reclamation, regeneration, resurgence, reconciliation, or some combination of these? When people are talking about creating change in Indigenous communities and in relations with settler Canadians, the nature of that change must enter into the conversation. This insistence comes up in the discussion with the authors on The Cur- rent. The interviewer, Cree journalist Connie Walker, phrases the pertinent question as follows: “I want to ask about the role that literature … can possibly play in helping to bring about a reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Tracey, what effect do you think that it can have?” In responding, Lindberg not only answers but also addresses the question’s assumption that reconciliation is what Indigenous writers are hoping for: I came to this as a person who tried to listen to people tell stories through the law, and telling law stories proved quite impossible to have a conversation about reconciliation.… I’m not even certain that I’m ready to talk, broach the term reconciliation so much as renewing relationships, building relationships.… I think that poetry and literature and fiction and Indigenous stories in the first person allows us the possibility to touch not just people’s heads, which I think law can do, but touch their hearts.… I also think that there’s something so intimate about having that in your home and in your space that it’s a reciprocal intimacy that can facilitate some of that relationship building.

72 | Hanson While acknowledging that literatures can influence people, Lindberg also undermines the ground on which the question stands by backing away from the notion of reconciliation, bringing this assumed outcome into question. Following Lindberg’s response, Lee Maracle enters the conversation, providing her analysis of reading for reconciliation. “We’re talking about two different things,” she says: one is that piece about emotional relationships, which literature can foster—but requires Canadians to unlearn racism—and the second is the interrogation of reconciliation as a framework. Maracle makes two arguments in this segment: that reconciliation requires making restitution, which “only Canada as a governing body can” do; and that the reconciliation framework in Canada right now, as articulated through the work of the trc, even if fully implemented, is a response only to residential schooling. It is not, she emphasizes, a response to the wider issues of settler colonialism in Canada. Building upon Lindberg’s push away from the term “reconciliation,” Maracle interrogates the framework attached to the interviewer’s question. For these two authors to insist on interrogating the question of what literature can contribute to reconciliation is a crucial act of remembering.

Reading for reconciliation, or reading for resurgence? Remembering is necessary to countering conceptions of reconciliation that are premised upon a forgetting of difficult colonial realities, past and present—or what Paulette Regan calls the “cheap reconciliation that is the hallmark of denial” (185). I see Regan’s critique of “cheap reconciliation” as an important contribution to her overall contention that settler Canadians, like herself, must engage in more substantial ways with Indigenous people and perspectives if they seek to position themselves as allies. I agree with her premise that significant change in that relationship requires some unsettling of the narratives that shape Canadian public consciousness, such as the national myth that Canada is a country of peacemakers (Regan 14). As Regan’s critiques illustrate, reconciliation discourse is contested territory.3

3 I focus on Regan’s and Martin’s interventions here, but a much broader discourse surrounds the notion of reconciliation. See, for instance, Henderson and Wakeham’s edited collection Reconciling Canada, which emerged out of a spring 2010 special issue of esc. See also Margery Fee’s article on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Matthew Dorrell’s article on Canada’s residential schools apology.

Reading for Reconciliation? | 73 Allied scholar Keavy Martin, importantly, has argued that the concept of reconciliation relies upon a form of amnesia. She argues that reconciliation entails “a fixation upon resolution that is not only premature but problematic in its correlation with forgetting” (49). She contends, “The danger is that the discourse of reconciliation—though rhetorically per- suasive—can at times be less about the well-being of Aboriginal peoples and communities than about freeing non-Native Canadians from the guilt and continued responsibility of knowing their history” (49.) Martin argues that one of the functions of Indigenous literatures in retelling stories of colonial experiences is to contradict this problematic fixation on resolution by insisting that healing is an ongoing process, and it is one that needs to be understood in Indigenous terms. She shows how stories like Robert Arthur Alexie’s novel Porcupines and China Dolls, along with the personal testimonials embedded in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation process, counter the amnesia and ensure that “scars remain visible—that historical wounds continue to seep” (63). I agree with Martin here that the trc, while operating within a state-sponsored reconciliation framework, incorporates truths from Indigenous communities that transcend that framework. Interrogations of reconciliation discourse by Martin and others insist on the complexity and breadth of the issues that Indigenous communities and artists are working to address. Challenging reconciliation as an end goal for Indigenous struggles is about remembering the deeper histories and the broader contexts. It entails pushing further into what is possible for Indigenous communities when it comes to self-determination. Indigenous communities and movements characterize Indigenous people’s struggles for justice in different ways: resurgence is one that I employ. Resurgence, unlike reconciliation, is a socio-cultural movement and theoretical framework that concentrates on regeneration within Indigenous communities. It validates Indigenous knowledges, cultures, histories, ingenuity, and continuity.4 Resurgence is an Indigenizing impulse; it acknowledges colonialism and domination through resistance but it does not focus solely on colonialism as the most important concern. Instead, resurgence insistently focuses on Indigenous communities as sites of power and regeneration. In the words of Leanne Simpson (who is of Nishnaabeg ancestry), resurgence

4 In pointing to broader scholarship on resurgence here, I am thinking in particular of the work of Leanne Simpson. Those interested in education may also want to look at how it is taken up by Tracy Friedel, Jo-ann Archibald, Ramona Big Head, Georgina Martin, and Marissa Muñoz in their 2012 editorial on Indig- enous pedagogies.

74 | Hanson is “a flourishment of the Indigenous inside” (Dancing on our Turtle’s Back 16). Unlike reconciliation, resurgence does not focus primarily on relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Resurgence is an organizing principle that can be tremendously useful In in understanding the significance of Indigenous literary arts to the communities that create and celebrate them. Thinking through resurgence understanding is useful, for instance, because it requires attention to the specificity of Indigenous cultures and contexts: resurgence is about people in their own the communities nourishing their own traditions, languages, worldviews, stories, knowledges, and ways of being. In understanding the significance of significance of Indigenous literatures to Indigenous communities, resurgence is a vitalizing and important political framework. Building on the work of scholars Indigenous like Simpson, I am working to understand how literary writing is a space in which Indigenous communities can imagine and enact resurgence. My literatures to research on this question suggests that there is a continuing gap between national discourses that promote reconciliation and Indigenous com- Indigenous munities’ turn toward resurgence. As allied scholar Pauline Wakeham so cogently argues, the settler state can appropriate Indigenous creative communities, labour, setting out paradigms for understanding them that do not work in Indigenous communities’ interests. What happens at this point of tension resurgence is a demonstrates a great deal about how scholarship in Indigenous literary studies can inform the political work that is being done today. vitalizing and Indigenous literatures and communities, non-Indigenous important learning What, then, is the difference between reading for reconciliation and read- political ing for resurgence, when it comes to Indigenous literatures and learning? I am interested in how learning through Indigenous literatures, as Minister framework. Bennett suggests Canadians can do, is connected to the resurgence of healthy Indigenous communities. To examine this dynamic, I turn to the belief, reflected in contemporary Indigenous literary studies, that literatures can have powerful impacts on people’s lives. Indigenous literatures can enable healing, carry forward histories, embody ways of knowing and ways of being, envision better worlds, facilitate memory, inspire social change, foster empathy, and encourage relational understandings.5 These possibilities, in my view, rely upon the reciprocity and intimacy entailed in the relational processes of creating and reading literary works. A growing 5 For deeper exploration of the issues I am summarizing here, see writings by Jo-ann Archibald, Renate Eigenbrod, Jo-Ann Episkenew, Daniel Heath Justice, Sam McKegney, and Leanne Simpson, for example.

Reading for Reconciliation? | 75 body of strong critical scholarship explores why Indigenous literatures matter for Indigenous communities. Métis scholar Jo-Ann Episkenew’s scholarship, for instance, shows that Indigenous literatures have a profound impact on the real world (“Socially Responsible Criticism”) and that they can enable healing and decolonization (Taking Back our Spir- its).6 How critics and educators read Indigenous texts is consequently not only a methodological or disciplinary question but, rather, a question of responsibility. When it comes to changing teaching to better engage with Indigenous content, I am inspired by the creative practices of artists who bring out stories that serve their communities and that connect with wider audiences. However, I am interested in if the power of Indigenous stories is able to manifest in the learning that non-Indigenous readers do in classrooms. Are settler-Canadian learners able to identify with and respond to those creative practices? Is learning situated in relation to the complex questions around readership that inevitably arise with mixed audiences? I focus upon non-Indigenous readers and their learning in this section in order to unpack the assumptions at play in Carolyn Bennett’s book club proposal. If she is right that non-Indigenous people can engage in important learning by reading Indigenous literatures, then it is vital for literary scholars to understand why that is so—perhaps most significantly because that learning connects to the learning that goes on in their classrooms. Within the big picture of non-Indigenous Canadians engaging with Indigenous literatures, literature classrooms hold some responsibility for leadership. At present, such classrooms are often institutional spaces that include a large proportion of non-Indigenous students, a non-Indigenous instructor, and an epistemological framework largely rooted in Eurocentric traditions. While there are important exceptions to these generalizations, and while Indigenizing shifts are now afoot across education at all levels, I think it is fair to suggest that Indigenous literatures often enter largely non-Indigenous spaces. Such mixed spaces offer pedagogical challenges for reading Indigenous literatures. Indigenous literary studies as a field has established that literary arts matter to Indigenous communities, and I agree with the belief, inherent in the Indigenous book club month idea,

6 I focus on Episkenew’s work here to honour the respect she has earned within the Indigenous literary arts community, which is mourning her recent passing, and because her contributions as a scholar and community member have shaped so much of my own thinking around what it means for literatures to have an impact.

76 | Hanson that they have a huge amount of potential when it comes to learning for non-Indigenous people. However, is that potential being realized? I do not take it for granted, for instance, that teaching Indigenous literatures in Canadian classrooms will inevitably be positive. I echo this caution from Métis writer Sharron Proulx(-Turner) and Aruna Srivastava, which continues to be salient: It is perfectly possible … to teach Aboriginal literatures in deeply racist, colonialist, ahistorical and disrespectful ways— often unintentionally—and … it is possible for students and teachers … to read the literature and to take in the knowledge of Aboriginal and Indigenous people in such disrespectful and close-minded ways that it is … more harmful … to read these texts … than not to. We must pay attention to the how, the process and the pedagogy and not the what, the curriculum, the texts, the course outline. (189) It takes good intentions on the part of teachers and educational authorities to engage with Indigenous texts in open-minded ways. However, intentions, as Proulx and Srivastava contend, are not sufficient enough, just as the so-called inclusion of Indigenous content within existing frameworks is not sufficient enough, to creating significant change in colonial dynamics. Just as it is important to critique superficial conceptions of reconciliation by contrasting them with resurgence, it is necessary to critique the superficial inclusion of Indigenous content in Canadian classrooms—the what—by contrasting inclusion with possibilities for transformation in teaching—the how. Scholarship across Indigenous education and literary studies offers strong foundations for considering such possibilities.7 From the existing scholarship I see, for instance, that pedagogical transformation relies upon non-Indigenous readers’ willingness to engage substantially with Indigenous literary texts. Allied scholar Sam McKegney’s formulations are instructive in articulating what substantial engagement entails. McKegney argues that ethical engagement as a critic and instructor entails stepping up to read, discuss, and respond in rigorous ways, rather than disengag- ing from or deferring endlessly to Indigenous writers (“Writer-Reader Reciprocity”). I also see that Indigenous literary pedagogies must follow carefully in the footsteps of the past few decades in Indigenous literary criticism. Anishinaabe scholar Kimberly Blaeser argued more than twenty years ago that readers of Indigenous texts must look to the literature and

7 See, for instance, Marie Battiste, Susan Dion, and Jo-Ann Episkenew.

Reading for Reconciliation? | 77 its community specificities in order to build understanding, not to a Euro- centric literary tradition. Likewise, Indigenous education scholars, such as Mi’kmaw scholar Marie Battiste, have argued for decades against assimila- tive, Eurocentric approaches to pedagogy and in favour of teaching that, in Battiste’s words, “values and respects Indigenous ways of knowing” (180). Fundamental understandings like these call for engaged and Indigenous pedagogies—not for learning through conventional institutional norms. Questions remain for me as to how educators might continue to build upon such understandings in order to further enable the power of Indigenous stories to manifest in classrooms. I believe, for instance, that teaching Indigenous literatures works best when educators demonstrate a willingness to attend carefully to the voices in the text and to unlearn racist, colonial, or Eurocentric perspectives that impose prior understandings. How might such attention be deployed to transform how teaching and learning take place rather than just what is taught and learned? Likewise, I believe that more engaged learning can occur when non-Indigenous readers are willing to face difficult truths about colonial violence and injustice in Canada and to connect to people in contemporary Indigenous communities. How can educators integrate such confrontations and connections, perhaps building upon promising practices for community-engaged pedagogies?8 Indigenous literary arts and the accompanying body of critical and theoretical scholarship are flourishing, vibrant spaces with long histories; they have gathered a great deal of momentum. Now is a good time to build upon connections between criticism and pedagogy in literary studies. In the wake of the trc’s Calls to Action, now is a very good time for educators to bring their non-Indigenous students to engage in this challenging but necessary learning in Canadian classrooms.

Education for reconciliation In order to further examine the relationship between reconciliation and learning, I look next at how educational work is embedded within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. One of the remarkable things about the ninety-four recommendations in this document is that they do not limit the mandate for teaching and learning to formal education contexts: the educational scope is much broader. Certainly it is broad enough that looking to implement or interrogate the Calls to

8 I would point, as one example, to the discussions on teaching that took place during the roundtable on community-based scholarship at the Indigenous Liter- ary Studies Association’s gathering in October 2015, featuring Tasha Hubbard, Tenille Campbell, Adar Charlton, and Nancy van Styvendale.

78 | Hanson Action in the context of literary studies requires that learning be brought into the conversation. The Calls to Action include a specific section on “education for reconciliation” that calls for curricula and teacher training so that it will be mandatory for kindergarten to grade 12 students to learn about “residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada” (7). Necessary to this work is also a call for “postsecondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigen- ous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms” (7). This shift in K–12 and postsecondary education entails a purposeful expansion of the persistent work that Indigenous education scholars have been doing for decades and of newer initiatives, such as the installation of mandatory course requirements on Indigenous histories and perspectives in teacher education programs like the one that my institution has had since 2013. However, the ways in which the Calls to Action invoke education are not limited to this emphasis on k–12 curricula or, indeed, to formal education. Very shortly after they were released, I conducted a close reading of the ninety-four recommendations in order to identify any that address the education of non-Indigenous people in Canada about Indigenous perspectives. In setting out to do this analysis, I was curious about the extent to which the Calls to Action addressed the need for the broader population to learn more about colonialism; about systemic forms of violence; about Indigenous communities, cultures, and knowledges; and about shared and divergent histories and narratives and worldviews. Did the trc report limit the importance of education to children and youth in schools, or did it consider adults and scholarly or artistic audiences as well? My examination turned up numerous examples of recommendations related to education; I will point to a few of them here. First, several of the ninety-four recommendations directly encompass educational imperatives. The Calls to Action include explicit calls for education and training for “social workers and others who conduct child-welfare investigations” (1), for “students” in “medical and nursing schools in Canada” (3), for “lawyers” and “all law students” (3), for “public servants” (7), for “management and staff” in “the corporate sector” (10), and for “newcomers to Canada” (10). The document includes a call for a “National Action Plan for Reconciliation, which includes research and policy development, public education programs, and resources” (6)—an explicit educational mandate. It also includes a call “for church parties … to develop ongoing education strategies” and for “denominational schools … to provide an education on comparative religious studies, which must

Reading for Reconciliation? | 79 include a segment on Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and practices” (7). Such calls are explicitly about educating various groups in Canada in ways that will enable the trc’s recommendations to be realized. Recognizing Second, an educational mandate is implied within or requisite to a wide number of other recommendations for implementing culturally appropri- the educational ate programming or services. Take this example from within the sections related to the justice system: “We call upon the federal, provincial, and dimensions of territorial governments to work with Aboriginal communities to provide culturally relevant services to inmates on issues such as substance abuse, the ninety-four family and domestic violence, and overcoming the experience of having been sexually abused” (4). Educational imperatives are embedded within recommenda- this recommendation. The provision of “culturally relevant services” in this context requires some degree of communication, collaboration, edu- tions fits with cation, awareness raising, and/or learning between the various parties involved (governments, communities, service providers within the justice recognizing that system, and inmates) in planning and implementing the services. Along these lines, some kind of education will be requisite to or a consequence movements of many other recommendations, such as the development of programs at community-based youth organizations (8), research and commemora- for change rely tion initiatives (8–9), news coverage and media programming (9–10), and community sports programs (10) that are culturally relevant or aimed at upon shifts in fostering reconciliation. Particularly noteworthy for literary scholars is the suggestion that the understanding. arts have a role to play. The document makes this suggestion through the following statement: “We call upon the Canada Council for the Arts to establish, as a funding priority, a strategy for Indigenous and non-Indigen- ous artists to undertake collaborative projects and produce works that contribute to the reconciliation process” (9). The educational dimensions of such artistic initiatives are important to consider. The notion that art could contribute to a social agenda in this way might be interpreted, for instance, as relying upon art’s didactic capacities. This reading of thetrc ’s Calls to Action suggests that education, or learning, is essential to working for reconciliation. Recognizing the educational dimensions of the ninety-four recommendations fits with recognizing that movements for change rely upon shifts in understanding. Bringing about reconciliation as envisioned in this document relies upon challenging ignorance, certainly—to reiterate the words of the Honourable Carolyn Bennett. However, more than that, it requires an active opposition to that erasure or forgetting, that “amnesia” Martin describes (49). How can education in literary studies contribute to shifts in understanding

80 | Hanson that push beyond Regan’s “cheap reconciliation” into something more substantial (185)? To describe this shift in thinking in another way, I will draw upon the work of Susan Dion, who is Lenape and Potawatomi. Dion considers what it takes for non-Indigenous Canadians—in this case education students planning to be teachers—to really “hear” what they are learning about Indigenous people and histories (Dion 56). Dion argues that Canadians’ thinking about Indigenous people is dominated by the trope of the “romantic, mythical Other,” a static conception that relegates Indig- enous people firmly to the past, to unrecognizability, and to elsewhere (5). According to this perception, Indigenous people do not exist in relevant ways or time frames or, even if they do, they exist outside of contemporary spaces. Cherokee writer Thomas King has also pointed out this dynamic in his much-cited essay “You’re Not the Indian I Had in Mind,” arguing that colonial expectations of what it means to be “authentic” reduce the possibility for Indigenous people to exist in real ways: “In the end, there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian simply has to exist in our imaginations” (54). This elision of real Indigenous people perpetuates mainstream Canada’s ability to forget difficult histories and realities in favour of the status quo. How to challenge these static imaginings of Indigeneity, to learn something deeper, is a hefty question, and one of course that many scholars and practitioners are working on across many disciplines. As scholars in the literary arts seek to disrupt colonial understandings of Indigenous communities, it is vital to examine the educational dimensions of their undertakings. The recognition inherent in theCalls to Action that learning is necessary to social change is an important reminder that scholars and educators in literary studies have an opportunity to formulate conceptions of learning through literature that facilitate significant change—change that respects the resurgence of Indigenous communities that is represented in Indigenous literary arts.

Writers’ and teachers’ perspectives on literatures and communities This point about connecting literatures and learning brings me back to the concept of Indigenous book club month and the role that literatures might play in classrooms and houses across Canada. I have suggested that literatures have the capacity to be a powerful catalyst for change and for the learning that change entails. This belief led me to into my current research program: given the positive potential of Indigenous literatures

Reading for Reconciliation? | 81 for learning and for relationship building, and given how powerful stories can be, I have been investigating how people who work with Indigenous literatures conceptualize the impact they can have. Understanding the meaning and significance of an Indigenous text is important to me, but I am often just as interested in what happens outside the text: in how texts impact the people who read them, teach them, study them, create them, celebrate them, and connect around them. Why are Indigenous literatures significant? Why, for artists, for pedagogy, for learners, and, particularly, why for Indigenous communities? To pursue such questions, I recently conducted a study in which I spoke with Indigenous writers and with teachers who take up Indigenous literatures in their classrooms. During the course of this research, I spoke with more than a dozen people who write and/or teach Indigenous literatures about why Indigenous literatures matter to communities. These conversations contribute to my considerations in this paper on what it means to read for reconciliation or resurgence. While it is beyond the scope of this article to engage with those interviews in depth, I examine two specific passages here in order to develop my considerations of literatures and learning. As a first example, I spoke with a teacher who is convinced that Indig- enous literatures can spark students to engage with the work of learning but who runs into systemic challenges in her attempts. I share this example because it shows how, unfortunately, the inspirational potential of Indigenous literatures and literary studies can be difficult to realize in mainstream institutional settings. This teacher, whose chosen pseudonym is “Alice Curtis,” expresses her conviction that Indigenous literatures can help to break down stereotyping and discrimination against Indigenous people and foster social change. Curtis is frustrated at the pace of change in schools, in her experience, where departments tend to spend limited budgets on books that are canonical and that any teacher will be able to work with—as opposed to investing in initiatives by newer, often precari- ously employed teachers to teach what are perceived to be riskier texts. I believe that the following passage illustrates her belief that literatures can help to draw educators and students into relationships and learning, as well as her frustration over this issue of institutional support. Curtis says, I think that is so important for students to learn and see the background of, okay, well here’s this whole culture reeling and trying to come to grips with what happened to them. They haven’t had parents for generations … they’re trying to cope

82 | Hanson with all this abuse … and trying to figure out how to live as they want to live. … So I think by teaching Indigenous literature, you look at, okay, well how can we help this to heal? How can we understand someone else’s perspective?… And what a shame, that, I think, so many people don’t have that experience … Education should be on the forefront of saying this is important, but instead we’re like, we don’t know how to deal with this, so let’s just teach this American author who everyone knows, and your parents’ parents’ parents read it.

According to this teacher, a number of factors combine to work against her when she wants to teach Indigenous literatures in her K–12 context: lack of funding for new books, conventional genre-based teaching practices in English, the weight of the Euro-American literary canon, the lack of resources and supports for teaching and studying Indigenous literature, the likelihood that new teachers are on temporary contracts and have little say in how department budgets are spent, and the feeling that toeing the line instead of sticking your neck out—as she puts it elsewhere in the interview—is a better way to land a permanent job (something that might also be possible in a postsecondary context). However, she is also very enthusiastic and dedicated and is making strong strides as she pursues this area of learning for herself and her students. As a second example, Dogrib writer Richard Van Camp spoke to me about how inspired he is to be able to see the growth in Northern and Aboriginal literatures. Richard’s discussion expanded my considerations of literatures and community beyond what happens through the reading of texts to what happens around the creation of literary texts. In the following passage, he expresses his enthusiasm for a recent graphic novel he has written: What I love about Three Feathers … is it is based on a true story that happened in Fort Smith, but I changed the ending, and we’re working with our official languages. So it’s in Bush Cree and in English. Next month it’ll be in Chipewyan and in English. In two months it’ll be in South Slavey and in English. We’re using the translators that we all know and grew up with … I think that’s really important. We shouldn’t discount locally produced books … if it means that our community is reading the stories where they can see themselves in it.… People are going to see Fort Smith in the graphic novel. And that’s what I’m so excited about, is being able to tell stories from the North, with Northern artists, from a Northern perspective,

Reading for Reconciliation? | 83 with Northern editors and Northern translators. I think that’s what’s going to get our community members reading.

What Van Camp says here demonstrates that communities are not only represented in Indigenous literatures but that they can also be generated, connected, and strengthened through the creation and consumption of literary arts. I contend that resurgence is fostered by these material aspects of how texts are put together, shared, and celebrated. Such cultural work is rooted in community: honouring places, regenerating stories, connecting people, and using Indigenous languages. Understanding the significance of such community processes is an important task for the classroom and is one that might—as Lindberg and Maracle suggest in their discussion on the cbc—mean reading for more than reconciliation. What might it mean, instead, to read for resurgence?

Embodying resurgence: Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie To carry forward this question, I will provide one promising example of the type of reading I am invoking. Given the material I have already drawn from Cree author Tracey Lindberg, I turn to her bestselling first novel Birdie, which has attracted a good deal of critical and public attention since its publication in 2015, including being taken up as a nominee in the Canadian-awareness-fostering Canada Reads competition. In relation to the understandings I have outlined thus far, this novel enables me to explore, in practice, what it might mean to read for resurgence. Lindberg, in other talks and interviews since the conversation with her fellow authors in January 2015, has further pushed back against the notion of reconciliation. She has spoken about other processes that need to take place before Indigenous peoples might be ready to reconcile with a colonial nation-state, such as reconciliation with self, with family, or with community (“Cree Academic and Novelist”). Looking at the broader landscape of Canadian conversations about reconciliation following the release of the trc report—which coincided with the release of her novel— Lindberg suggests that Canada cannot rush reconciliation, rather that a great deal of truth needs to be dealt with first (“Tracey Lindberg on Telling Indigenous Stories”). For instance, she points to the fact that gendered violence within Indigenous families and communities, like that depicted in her novel, is an ongoing form of colonial violence: without a recognition of how such dynamics originate in colonial histories, reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is not yet possible, in her view (“Cree Academic”). Lindberg’s perspectives on Birdie make useful

84 | Hanson contributions to ongoing conversations on reconciliation: I respect how the author has leveraged her time in the public eye to shift the reconciliation conversation toward such necessary considerations. However, in this reading, I want to extend her critique of reconciliation in order to show Birdie, I argue, how Lindberg’s novel enables the conversation to shift toward different terms entirely. Birdie, I argue, demonstrates possibilities to read for resur- demonstrates gence rather than reconciliation. Bernice, or Birdie, Meetoos is not looking for reconciliation with those possibilities to who have wronged her. She has set fire to the house that was unable to be a safe home to her and burned to death the man (one of the men) who read for should have been family but was instead a predator. She has opted out of external expectations governing reality, sanity, time, and living in general. resurgence As she enters the transitional state-time that is the present tense of the story, Bernice knows that “she is somehow becoming. Something. Else” rather than (Lindberg 6). She has taken refuge within her body, distanced from the world by layers of flesh and “scarred and cut scabby” skin (5). She is “travel- reconciliation. ling” (18): while she is literally “taking to her bed,” she is also “on a voyage,” although unsure at first whether it is “to someplace or from it” (18). This liminal experience is entirely necessary for her being: “Her un/conscious decision was one her spirit made. When it was time, and when the fury of her past began to race ahead of her future, she simply lay down” (18). She lies down, shuts down, breaks down, retreating into herself to grapple with her memories, supported by the women who watch over her: “The three women moving around her generate some sort of resistance that allows her to travel back and forth (Now and Then, Here and There)” in her own experience (157). Bernice’s experience could be read as one of reconciling with her past: she returns to living after confronting her own full story. This process enables her to “find the space where her memory could live peaceably with her body” (232). However, I contend that what Bernice does can also be seen as more than reconciliation: it is a re-emergence, a resurgence. What Bernice immerses herself in and re-emerges from—her relative Freda thinks of it as “a fast, a vision, a change” (135)—is transformative. She feels she is “cocooning” (68)—a feeling that I see reflected in the layers that surround her: flesh, scaly skin, sheets, bed, room. The “women moving around her” (157) are surrounding her with further layers: smoke, talk, silence, care, prayers, watchfulness, memory, love. Her movement toward this cocooning has been steady, and this is not the first time she has experienced something extraordinary. Through Bernice’s memories, the text describes her longstanding ability to experience more than the

Reading for Reconciliation? | 85 here and now, including her sense of shifting at Christ’s Academy, where she could not hear the prayers being recited over “the quiet murmur of iswewak” that she could hear inside her (80). Further, the night of the fire was a time of change, in that she could no longer withstand the sexual attacks of her uncles: “her ability to numb herself to what the uncle did was closed … her eyes were wide open” (176). However, Bernice’s breaking down, cocooned in her bed over Lola’s bakery in Gibson’s, is marked as a turning point in her story. Freda recognizes that, “Bernice may be, for the first time, making a choice” (136). Bernice stays in bed until she is able to feel she is renewed, re-strengthened: even from the outside it is visible that, while the fasting Bernice “looks like she is melting. Dimming. Half gone,” she also “looks gorgeous.… Like her body fits her spirit” (234). With her cryptic, magical ingredients gathering on slips of paper around her— channeled from the television chef to whom she listens so raptly—Bernice prepares for a future life in which she can feast on wellbeing. In her defiant renewal, Bernice embodies resurgence. During her time in bed, she recognizes that she needs things to be different: She is so hungry. Not for food, not for drink, not for foreign skin.… She is hungry for family. For the women she loves. For the sounds of her language. For the peace of no introduction, no backstory, no explanation. She misses her aunties, her cous- ins and her mom.… She misses the Cree sense of humour. (102)

Having metabolized her past—“Living through recall. Feeding herself memories” (162)—Bernice climbs out of the bed ready to begin in a good way, a sacred way. It is beyond the scope of this paper to treat with sufficient care the steps that Bernice takes when she leaves her bed—I look forward to future readings of this book by strong Cree women—but it is vital to note the ceremony, the relatives, the Pimatisewin, the feasting, the Maskihky, the Cree language. It is vital to note the loving “women- family, Lola, Val and Skinny Freda” (245) that Birdie has drawn together around her. I agree with Lindberg’s assertion that, not having grown up with a home that was safe or a family where reciprocal obligations were lived out between the people around her (“Tracey Lindberg on Telling”), Bernice has built home and family for herself by the end of the story. She has “freed” herself to a new extent (233) and can now embody and inspirit herself differently, more lightly—“she feels rather like a bird” (233). Birdie has reclaimed herself and shifted what is possible for her future.

86 | Hanson Not just another night at the book club It is clear to me that Indigenous writers like Tracey Lindberg are making integral contributions to the vitality and continuity of their communities, bringing community members together and storying their communities forward. However, the gap between resurgent writing and dominant Canadian understandings persists. While Indigenous literatures may have the capacity to change how Canada is understood, enabling that capacity to materialize in classrooms and across the colonial nation-state is no small undertaking. Birdie, the example I have explored here, offers ample opportunity to practise reading for resurgence, rather than for a reconciliation that perpetuates Canadian colonialism. It is vital for educators, along with their students, to work to understand the ethical underpinnings of the relationships entailed in such readings. When it comes to reconciliation, the role of schooling holds a particular ethical dimension: as Chief Justice Murray Sinclair said during the trc’s process, “Education is what got us into this mess—…at least in terms of residential schools—but education is the key to reconciliation” (Watters). Learning from and demonstrating alliance with the resurgent practices of Indigenous writers requires non-Indigenous readers to unsettle colonial frameworks and to build responsive relationships with Indigenous communities. I insist that this work can, and must, be done in classroom spaces where literatures are taught. As I conclude this article, I want to provide questions extending beyond the discussion that I have been staging here. First, what framework for understanding change in the relationships between Indigenous and non- Indigenous peoples is appropriate, or possible, given the extensive scope of colonialism in Canada? I have pointed to some interrogations of reconciliation discourse and some suggestions for deeper engagement: Where do they lead? Second and subsequently, how is the role of non-Indigenous Canadians who are—as Minister Carolyn Bennett phrased it during her interview on The Current—“people who want to help” to be understood? Particularly, how does that role exist in relation to the kinds of change that Indigenous communities are working for, if what Indigenous communities are working for is resurgence, not reconciliation? Third, how is the educational mandate embedded in the trc’s Calls to Action relevant for writers and scholars of Indigenous literatures? The field of Indigenous literary criticism has grown immensely and continues, at present, to do so. More work needs to be done, I believe, in order to translate that scholarship into the material contexts of classrooms and reading practices. Finally, what possibilities and problems arise when the literary arts are examined

Reading for Reconciliation? | 87 for what they offer to learning? For instance, what can happen when a text like Birdie is asked to do educational work? Questions like these open up directions for future scholarship and pedagogical practices. Questions like In closing, I return to the suggestion that an Indigenous book club month could bring Canadian readers to engage in some of the learning these open up necessary for reconciliation to proceed. I believe that, if readers can learn from literary texts in ways that impact social change, it is important for directions for literary scholars to investigate what such learning entails. Further, it is vital to interrogate if reading for reconciliation is the best way for non- future Indigenous Canadians to read toward better relationships with resurgent Indigenous communities. scholarship and pedagogical Works Cited practices. Archibald, Jo-ann. Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008. Battiste, Marie. Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit. Vancouver: Purich, 2013. “Carolyn Bennett Pledges Better Education for First Nations, Water Safety on Reserves.” The Current. cbc Radio-Canada, 29 December 2015. “Cree Academic and Novelist Tracey Lindberg on Reconciliation before Reconciliation.” The Current. cbc Radio-Canada, 21 June 2017. Curtis, Alice [pseudonym]. Personal interview. 26 May 2015. Dion, Susan. Braiding Histories: Learning from Aboriginal Peoples’ Expe- riences and Perspectives. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009. Dorrell, Matthew. “From Reconciliation to Reconciling: Reading What ‘We Now Recognize’ in the Government of Canada’s 2008 Residential Schools Apology.” English Studies in Canada 35:1 (2009): 27–45. Eigenbrod, Renate. “ ‘For the Child Taken, for the Parent Left Behind’: Residential School Narratives as Acts of ‘Survivance.’ ” English Studies in Canada 38:3–4 (2012): 277–97. Episkenew, Jo-Ann. “Socially Responsible Criticism: Aboriginal Literature, Ideology, and the Literary Canon.” Creating Community: A Roundtable on Canadian Aboriginal Literature. Eds. Renate Eigenbrod and Jo-Ann Episkenew. Penticton: Theytus, 2002. 51–68.

88 | Hanson ———. Taking Back our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009. Fee, Margery. “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.” Canadian Literature 215 (2012): 6. “First Nations Authors Discuss Carolyn Bennett’s Proposed Indigenous Book Club Month.” The Current. cbc Radio-Canada, 8 January 2016. Friedel, Tracy, Jo-ann Archibald, Ramona Big Head, Georgina Martin, and Marissa Muñoz. “Editorial—Indigenous Pedagogies: Resurgence and Restoration.” Canadian Journal of Native Education 35.1 (2012): 1–6, 221–24. Henderson, Jennifer, and Pauline Wakeham, eds. Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Hubbard, Tasha, Tenille Campbell, Adar Charlton, and Nancy van Styven- dale. “The Place of Community-Based Scholarship: Ethics, Location, and Academic Limitation.” Indigenous Literary Studies Association Inaugural Gathering: The Arts of Community, Six Nations of the Grand River, 3 October 2015. Justice, Daniel Heath. “ ‘Go Away, Water!’: Kinship Criticism and the Decol- onization Imperative.” Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective. Eds. Craig S. Womack, Daniel H. Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton. Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. 147–68. King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003. Lindberg, Tracey. Birdie. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2015. Martin, Keavy. “Truth, Reconciliation, and Amnesia: Porcupines and China Dolls and the Canadian Conscience.” English Studies in Canada 35.1 (2009): 47–65. McKegney, Sam. Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Commu- nity after Residential School. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2007. ——— . “Writer-Reader Reciprocity and the Pursuit of Alliance through Indigenous Poetry.” Indigenous Poetics in Canada. Ed. Neal McLeod. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2014. 43–60.

Reading for Reconciliation? | 89 Proulx, Sharron, and Aruna Srivastava. “A Moose in the Corridor: Teach- ing English, Aboriginal Pedagogies, and Institutional Resistance.” Creat- ing Community: A Roundtable on Canadian Aboriginal Literature. Eds. Renate Eigenbrod and Jo-Ann Episkenew. Penticton: Theytus, 2002. 187–208. Regan, Paulette. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010. Simpson, Leanne. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2011. ——— . “Our Elder Brothers: The Lifeblood of Resurgence.” Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations. Ed. Leanne Simpson. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2008. 73–87. “Tracey Lindberg on Telling Indigenous Stories.” The Next Chapter. cbc Radio-Canada, 1 February 2016. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Truth and Reconcilia- tion Commission of Canada: Calls to Action. 2015. trc.ca. 26 July 2016. Van Camp, Richard. Personal interview. 29 April 2015. Wakeham, Pauline. “#IndigenousReads, Public Pedagogies of Reconcili- ation, and the Transformative Labour of Indigenous Communities.” Indigenous Literary Studies Association 2017 Conference: “Ethics of Belonging: Protocols, Pedagogies, Land and Stories.” Stó:lō Nation Teaching Longhouse, Chilliwack, B.C., 20 June 2017. Watters, Haydn. “Truth and Reconciliation Chair Urges Canada to Adopt un Declaration on Indigenous Peoples.” cbc News. 1 June 2015. cbc.ca. 26 July 2016.

90 | Hanson Race and the Thickening of Mediation in Repetitions of The Great Gatsby Shama Rangwala University of Alberta

he cultural relevance of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s canonical novel The TGreat Gatsby persists as an examination of a singular figure who embodies the foundational myths of the American nation. The narrative of the novel reifies the logic of hegemonic structures, and thus the titular character’s desires have their source in the greater American mythology. As American myth, the Gatsby narrative must contend with the policing and maintenance of the primitive accumulation—the theft of land and bodies—that is foundational to the nation in terms of the perpetuation of capitalist exploitation and white supremacy. While the Jazz Age setting ostensibly implies a revolutionary modernity—that is, a moment of transition—what matters in the novel is not the break from what comes before but the persistent repetition of that before—famously, “borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald 176)—and the erasure or expulsion of deviance from that trajectory. Gatsby’s function in the novel is to expose the limits of this mythology by being punished for fulfilling its promise greatly, excessively: the exception to the limits of structural oppression must be made visible in order to simultaneously disavow and shore up that oppression. Greatness as a category here is fantastical and ideological and must remain in that realm; thus, the narrative logic necessarily punishes Gatsby’s excessive

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 91–116 desire for legitimacy under capitalist white supremacy via Daisy precisely because he mimics it from a system that fundamentally excludes him. The project of The Great Gatsby is to narrativize the containment of racialized Shama Rangwala threats to the futurity of the white nation. is a doctoral candidate Various iterations of this narrative expose the tension between indi- and instructor at the vidual agency and oppressive social structures in their manifestations of University of Alberta different aspects of the Gatsby figure: the faithful dreamer whose desire whose work focuses on produces a spectacular palace and the deluded social climber destroyed interrogating American by his own ambition. The adaptations under consideration here, Nella mythologies through the Larsen’s Passing (1929), Christopher Scott Cherot’s G (2002), and Baz repetition of narratives. Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013), contend with the excessively desir- Her writing has appeared ous figure against a structural context of racialization and reproductive in Scope: An Online futurity. Anti-Blackness has been necessary to the existence of whiteness Journal of Film and as a category—consider the white working class agitating against their Television Studies, economic interests from postbellum to the present day—but manifests Reading Harry Potter in multiple forms throughout American history. In The New Jim Crow, Again: New Critical Michelle Alexander examines the reproduction of forms of anti-Blackness, Essays, Rabble, Public, arguing that slavery, then Jim Crow, and now police violence and mass and Jacobin. She is the incarceration require increasingly ideological and rhetorical justifications. substantive editor of It is no accident, then, that the move from the 1920s novels to the twenty- Imaginations: Journal first-century films gets further away from overt critique. of Cross-Cultural Image Passing explicitly realizes the racial implications of The Great Gatsby Studies and founding by bifurcating the figure into two Black women who appear white. Com- editor of the culture paring the two texts and highlighting the idea that critical reworkings and politics website produce new readings of their antecedent texts, Charles Lewis asks, “Could Pyriscence. Fitzgerald have borrowed from the African-American tradition of the ‘tragic mulatto’ narrative? Has Fitzgerald committed a kind of literary plagiarism by taking possession of the trope of racial passing, or might we describe it instead as something more like a blackface forgery?” (84). This question brings up the process of infiltration, appropriation, and containment: the threat to colonial whiteness as manifested in miscegenation and illegibility is contained through its appropriation.1 What Passing reveals through adapting the Gatsby narrative is that Gatsby’s class passing was always-already racialized. G takes the form of the narrative of The Great Gatsby and transposes it into the Hamptons, from the Jazz Age to the hip-hop age. The film

1 Countless examples abound, from the long history of minstrelsy to the more recent transposition of slave narratives into white feminism in The Handmaid’s Tale. As we shall see, Baz Lurhman’s adaptation intensifies this blackface forgery in its dehistoricized use of jazz and hip-hop.

92 | Rangwala was a critical and commercial flop, which makes sense given its narrative incoherence; that is, the film takes the basic narrative structure of the Gatsby love triangle but engages unevenly or not at all with the critical implications of what those conflicts represent systemically. Alexander points to the cultural consequences of the age of mass incarceration when colourblindness shores up racialized oppression, arguing that the conflation of gangsta culture and hip-hop, as a way of reclaiming the stigma of Black men being labeled as criminal, has resulted in a genre of Black culture that reproduces that very stigma: “The worst of gangsta rap […] is best understood as a modern-day minstrel show […]. It is a for-profit display of the worst racial stereotypes and images associated with the era of mass incarceration […]. Like the minstrel shows of the Jim Crow era, today’s displays are generally designed for white audiences” (173). The Daisy figure, here a Black woman named Sky, ultimately dies because of her association with hip-hop; G foregrounds Black culture only to condemn it as responsible for the attrition of the Black community. Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby maintains the novel’s Jazz Age setting but adds a hip-hop flavour, collapsing the period of its production with the period it depicts. Joseph Vogel notes, “Jay Gatsby signifies in numerous ways as a racial outsider. Luhrmann’s film mostly closes off this possibility, but in Fitzgerald’s novel, it is almost impossible to ignore” (40). The film contends with the racial politics of the novel through co- opting Black culture: as “[w]hite interest in black art, entertainment, and culture in the Jazz Age […] was often grounded in primitivism, voyeur- ism, and exploitation” (Vogel 47). In this hip-hop-era adaptation of The Great Gatsby, Black art is evacuated of its political critique and subsumed under consumer capitalism. Luhrmann’s film foregrounds the love story as the pure kind of romance only possible in a film industry that pack- ages and sells romance, with Gatsby’s dream as the expression of a kind of productive desire rather than an investment in reproducing the norms of patriarchy and white supremacy; here the love story is a way to sell American capitalist fantasies. The Gatsby of the film is glorified for his faithful dreaming, but the film does not critique the structures of what Lauren Berlant terms cruel optimism. It is the film that Gatsby would make about himself—the fulfilment of his investments in the power of his dreaming—without any interrogation of the systems that impinge on individual agency. In other words, the film reproduces Gatsby’s vision, not Fitzgerald’s critique. Examining these adaptations together demonstrates how hegemonic forms are reproduced across historical periods that, on the surface, seem

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 93 to have undergone some transition or reformation, hinging on the Civil Rights movement that occurs between the 1920s and early twenty-first century of these texts. Yet the circulation of Gatsby indicates that a change in visibility is not a change in power structures and, indeed, reveals the thickening of ideological mediation. The myth of a colourblind postracial America in fact functions to maintain and reproduce white supremacy while obfuscating its operation.

Passing: agency and legibility While Passing is not an explicit adaptation, many scholars note similarities and Larsen’s likely familiarity with Fitzgerald’s text.2 Both Clare and Gatsby transgress and both die; yet the novel presents alternative trajectories and posits different possibilities for agency in the figure of Clare, in the ways that she makes herself readable or not. The Great Gatsby foregrounds Gatsby’s agency to make himself legible in ways that conform to oppressive systems—and ultimately the limits of this agency—while Passing shifts the focus to how the illegibility of the feminized figure can facilitate transgression. Clare’s desires are not something that the text can make legible; Irene notes that “Clare always had a—a—having way with her” (22), the dashes indicating the unutterable, desire without the specificities of what that having entails. Clare contrasts with Gatsby through her assertion of a radical agency outside the systems that would otherwise limit her, even if that agency is to extinguish her own life. Indeed, what it looks like for that subject to claim some kind of radical agency is, ultimately, death. Gatsby is positively invested in convention—he wants houses, cars, commodities, and the whiteness and class position that Daisy would bring—but Clare desires the negation of conventions and limits. The problem of passing, whether it is Gatsby’s passing as someone with an aristocratic history or Clare’s passing as white, is ultimately about legibility, which involves both inscription and reception. Charles Lewis writes, “Passing is […] not so much just what we read as it is a trope for how to read […]. [P]assing invites us to read race as something more like a final twist: a trope for the difference that is figuration itself” (73). Indeed, from the first page of the novel, Clare is associated with textuality and reading; before she is even named, she appears in the form of a letter, “the long envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl […]. A thin sly thing which bore no return address to betray the sender. […] Furtive, but yet in some peculiar, determined way a little flaunting” (3). Clare is hypervisible

2 For example, see Meredith Goldsmith, Charles Lewis, and Sinéad Moynihan.

94 | Rangwala but illegible; she commands attention but does not reveal. Irene notes that Claire takes pleasure in her unreadability: “[Irene] studied the lovely creature […]. And through her perplexity there came the thought that the trick which her memory had played her was for some reason more gratify- Working- ing than disappointing to her old acquaintance, that she didn’t mind not being recognized” (18–19). On a practical level, of course, it makes sense class maleness that Clare would not want to be read as Black. On the specific level of Clare’s legibility, though, what matters here is that Clare does not allow a signifies reading of her body as anything more personally intimate or historically grounded than this default reading based solely on her appearance. That differently than is the limit of her legibility. What differentiates Gatsby and Clare is, of course, not just race but also white gender. Working-class maleness signifies differently than white womanhood regardless of class. The specific position of white women in repro- womanhood ducing the white nation allows Clare to transgress in ways that Gatsby cannot. Passing foregrounds the protection and passivity of white women regardless of in Irene’s recollection of the day she first re-encounters Clare in Chicago, with echoes of Daisy in Louisville. It is an expressionistic scene, with the class. scorching heat—“a brutal staring sun pouring down rays that were like molten rain” (9)—standing in for larger, less natural forms of oppression, where what should be respite actually intensifies its severity: “What small breeze there was seemed like the breath of a flame fanned by slow bellows” (9). Irene is navigating the city, shopping for her children when: [R]ight before her smarting eyes a man toppled over and became an inert crumpled heap on the scorching cement. About the lifeless figure a little crowd gathered. Was the man dead, or only faint? someone asked her. But Irene didn’t know and didn’t try to discover. She edged her way out of the increasing crowd, feeling disagreeably damp and sticky and soiled from contact with so many sweating bodies. (10)

White Irene is a Black woman by the terms of white-supremacist rules; she is a white woman by her appearance and is treated as such in this public space; she does not have to do anything except refrain from revealing her history. At this moment, too, the novel has not revealed Irene’s Blackness. People mobilize for her protection. She starts to faint and has “a quick perception of the need for immediate safety” (10–11), meaning to get away from the urban rabble. A cab stops and the driver “almost lifted her in” (11) and suggests a fancy hotel rooftop to cool down. When they arrive, more than one person mobilizes to meet her needs before she expresses them:

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 95 “The driver sprang out and opened the door before the hotel’s decorated attendant could reach it” (11). An elevator takes Irene to the roof: “It was, she thought, like being wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world, pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote from the sizzling one that she had left below” (12). Here we see an echo of Gatsby’s recollection of young Daisy before telling Nick he “loves” her: “Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” (Fitzgerald 153). Irene, from her elevated position, “had been gazing down for some time at the specks of cats and people creeping about in streets, and thinking how silly they looked” (12); a person could have died in front of her on the street, but it does not matter from her position. The magic carpet that Larsen evokes is in fact the quite material system of patriarchal white supremacy. This scene functions as a model for how white-coded women, from Daisy to Irene, are protected under this system and how the mechanisms are made to appear incidental or magical rather than structural. Clare too marshals the white nation’s desire to protect white women and thus the reproduction of the white nation in order to transgress both race and class without having to prove herself in the same way as Gatsby. It is not by accident that her husband Jack Bellew, the facilitator of her class ascension and reproduction of white Margarey, is not just any white man—such as their childhood friend Gertrude’s husband Fred, who does not care about colour—but, rather, a strident patriarchal white supremacist who throws into relief the historical contingency of race. For Jack Bellew, the protection of white women and the white nation supersedes the burden of documentation: the visibility of Clare’s white aunts is sufficient. That is, as Clare puts it, “there are so many more of them, or maybe they are secure and so don’t have to bother” (31). Clearly, this kind of security does not apply to the threat of a male infiltrator such as Gatsby, who threatens Tom in a way that Clare, showing the bare minimum of proof, does not threaten Jack. Clare mobilizes white supremacy’s protection of white women rather than using economic capital or documents as Gatsby does, which demonstrates a different relationship to visibility and proof. In her study of racialized surveillance, Simone Browne argues that “how things get ordered racially by way of surveillance […] most often upholds negating strategies that first accompanied European colonial expansion and transatlantic slavery that sought to structure social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness” (17). The surveillance of Blackness in policing race is

96 | Rangwala fundamental to the origins of America, and narratives of passing trouble this order by belying the “epidermalization” of race: “Epidermal thinking marks the epistemologies concerning sight at the site of the racial body” (Browne 26). Documentation becomes important when epidermalization is secondary to the historical and social construction of race. Browne bor- rows from Frantz Fanon the concept of the “mise en fiches de l’homme”: “the records, files, time sheets, and identity documents that together form a biography […] of the modern subject” (5). If the body cannot provide proof, then the modern subject must marshal documents. Consider how Gatsby’s recounting of his history is accompanied by documentation. Nick doubts Gatsby’s fantastical story until Gatsby shows him his medal from Montenegro and a photograph of his Oxford days; the material proof turns the fantasy real: “Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart” (Fitzgerald 95). The objects of proof—the fiches—transfer Gatsby’s fantasy into Nick’s belief. Clare, by contrast, does not need to provide proof of herself; she has to present as a white woman and withhold information, rather than providing any, and secure a marriage to a white man: “In the end I had no great difficulty in convincing him that it was useless to talk marriage to the aunts. So on the day that I was eighteen, we went off and were married. So that’s that. Nothing could have been easier” (35). While Gatsby has to mobilize documents and build a chateau in order to prove his (self-created) background, Clare’s proof is negative: not telling, not showing, keeping him away from any knowledge of her background. Wayde Compton’s theory of pheneticizing is a useful framework here in examining the phenomenon of passing in relations to agency and legibility: The essential problem with the term [passing], however, is that it illogically implies that what a viewer sees is the responsibility of the person being seen. That is to say, this term we have for phenomena of misrecognition always implies deception on the part of the individual viewed. At its root, the term is about getting away with it, going underground, and intentionally escaping an oppressive racializing order. (21–22)

In comparing Clare and Gatsby, this difference between passing and pheneticizing helps tease out the relationship between self-construction and how one is perceived; both characters are examples of transgressive desire, but the ways in which they are read are different. That is, Gatsby engages in active passing but Clare can be passively pheneticized; she does not

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 97 disabuse her readers from their assumption that she is a white woman. Gatsby as a man needs to prove himself by being active and gaining material wealth; he needs to be able to support Daisy and show his masculine prowess. Clare wields agency to create a passive feminine surface, which makes her attractive to a patriarch such as Jack—her cultivation of a mysterious air works in her favour because of Jack’s wilful ignorance. The fear of the colonizer to be themselves colonized is expressed in both novels through the figure of the upper-class white male: Tom Buchanan and Jack Bellew. Bellew’s white nationalism makes clear that the colour of skin is not what is at stake—that is, epidermalization—but rather whiteness as a social category. He calls Clare “nig” in front of Irene and Gertrude, and Clare slyly makes him explain the arbitrariness of white supremacists’ conception of race by asking, “What difference would it make if, after all these years, you were to find out that I was one or two per cent coloured?” (56). His reply indicates that once he believes that Clare is a white woman nothing would prevent him from protecting her; the joke of “nig” references visibility in that she is hiding in plain sight: “I know you’re no nigger, so it’s all right. You can get as black as you please as far as I’m concerned, since I know you’re no nigger. I draw the line at that” (56). That is, she can be black but not Black. He can name her as black as long as he can still read her as white and she has no proximity to Blackness, not even a Black maid: “She wouldn’t have a nigger maid around her for love nor money” (57). Furthermore, Jack declares, “No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be” (56)—an impossible historical claim, considering the institutionalization of rape in slavery, and a demonstrably untrue present claim, as his daughter’s mother is not considered white according to the white-supremacist policing of race. Bellew’s claims are only true if family is defined not as blood relation, just as his definition of race overlooks Clare’s darkening skin. Thus, the very definitions he uses underscore the limits of those definitions: they are necessarily contingent and unstable. Bellew’s claim that, despite never having known any Black people, “I know people who’ve known them, better than they know their black selves. And I read in the papers about them” (57) echoes Tom reading Goddard’s pseudo-scientific argument for racialized threats: both operate on the level of white-supremacist discourse rather than anything material or corporeal. Thus, the threat of white-presenting Gatsby is a racialized one, but since Clare’s racialization is hidden she can be protected as a white woman despite her actual skin darkening. Sinéad Moynihan’s comparison of Daisy and Clare is an incisive analysis of what adaptation can make visible. Moynihan parallels Clare’s trans-

98 | Rangwala formation into a white identity and Larsen’s critical reworking of a white text: “By rewriting Gatsby in Passing, the white-authored text becomes the passer and Passing becomes the text that unveils the ‘truth’ about the original” (47). She argues that through a reading of the policing of white femininity in Passing, which is explicit about the arbitrariness and contingency of racial categories, Daisy’s status in the anterior text as the vector for the futurity of the white nation is destabilized: “Larsen questions Daisy’s whiteness, thus exploding the idea of normative whiteness altogether. Larsen’s allusion to Gatsby make apparent the contradictions in Fitzgerald’s representation of Daisy, in which her whiteness is both questioned and unquestioned” (42). Moynihan argues that it is notable that, while Pam appears in The Great Gatsby to prove Daisy’s whiteness, Clare’s child Margery remains invisible: “while in some ways Clare’s role as race mother to Margery troubles racial categories by having the act of ‘passing’ inevitably reproduce itself from generation to generation, it also reveals their tenacity” (47). Gatsby can hardly believe that Pam exists, as she is the proof of the reproduction of the white nation that excludes him, but in Passing it is as if Clare herself can hardly believe Margery exists, or, at the very least, her existence impinges on her radical agency in the way that Pam limits Gatsby’s ambition; indeed, Clare tells Irene that “being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world” (101). Margery represents the always-already miscegenated futurity of Jack and Tom’s white nation, the simultaneously invisible and hypervisible haunting that indicates its precariousness. Clare must disavow Margery as the novel does in order to sever herself—eventually, through death—from race and history and the reproductive imperative. On the other hand, Pam makes her first appearance directly before the confrontation in the Plaza Hotel, a reminder of Daisy and Tom’s futurity in contrast to Gatsby’s necessary death. While Moynihan focuses on comparing Daisy and Clare, which is important to a consideration of reproductive futurity, a comparison between Clare and Gatsby can reveal lateral possibilities and threatening transgressions of agency. As Adam Meehan suggests, Gatsby’s “association with itinerant farmers may imply a family lineage that could potentially be perceived as non-white” (79); however, what matters is not if Gatsby himself is passing or not but, rather, the structure of racialization. To racialize the main character—here, Clare—is to show how the myth of the self-made radically free agent is not just a classed myth but a racialized one, which must remain in the realm of myth to legitimize the reproduction of the white nation. Clare makes visible the vagaries and unevenness and arbitrariness of racial order where whiteness is default but the racial threat is always present; indeed,

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 99 Gatsby too is coded as white, but the logical extension of his masculine threat is racialized in Tom’s fear of miscegenation. The contradictions within Gatsby are sharpened by reading Irene and Yet the Clare as the bifurcation of Gatsby’s desire as indicated by the term “dream”: dreaming is at once a kind of excessive, destabilizing desire but also points American to the American Dream as a sanctioned lie. Within Gatsby is both the “infinite hope” that Nick identifies as his greatness and “everything for Dream is which I have unaffected scorn” (Fitzgerald 49). The dreamer is on the one hand constructed as a figure of desire, a romantic and creative visionary definitively who looks beyond convention; yet the American Dream is definitively conventional and sets the parameters for the cruel optimism that sustains conventional hegemonic structures. Gatsby’s paradox is also located in the term “great”: he is exceptional in his achievements but what he wants to achieve is the and sets the opposite of exceptional, the culturally determined version of the good life. While Clare is an obvious analogue to Gatsby in her transgressions, Irene parameters for also reflects Gatsby in her bourgeois investments. Like Gatsby, Clare produces her own world and disavows the old the cruel one. Gatsby’s “parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never accepted them as his parents at all” (Fitzgerald 118). optimism that Regarding family, Clare has “no allegiance beyond her own immediate desire” (5), and when her father dies Irene remembers that Clare’s weeping sustains “had more the appearance of an outpouring of pent-up fury than of an over- flow of grief for her dead father” (6). Clare gets everything she could want hegemonic but then she wants more—to go back to the Black community—because her desire is a continual productive force in itself. Irene, on the other structures. hand, is heavily invested in respectability politics; her marriage to Brian gives her bourgeois legitimacy in the way that Gatsby sees a marriage to Daisy. Moreover, marriage to Brian contains Irene’s homoerotic desire for Clare in heteronormative futurity, with their children forming a nuclear family; indeed, she refuses to talk to her children about “queer ideas” (87). Gatsby is certainly not trying to help the white working class—Wilson or Myrtle—or white farmers; his achievements are individual, and what he wants most is to be accepted into patriarchal capitalist white supremacy. Irene cares more about normativity and respectability than any kind of racial activism; indeed, at the Drayton when she worries about them eject- ing her, she is not upset about segregationist policies, but, rather, “It was the idea of being ejected from any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton would probably do it, that disturbed her” (17). When she calls her Black servant, Zulena, “a small mahogany-coloured creature” (79), she dehumanizes Blackness. She takes great pride in her relationship

100 | Rangwala to the Carl Van Vechten stand-in, Hugh Wentworth; when he calls, Clare overhears and asks, “ ‘Not the Hugh Wentworth?’ Irene inclined her head. On her face was a tiny triumphant smile. ‘Yes, the Hugh Wentworth’ ” (103); she then spends the fundraiser for the Negro Welfare League talking to him rather than discussing politics or activism with other Black people. Passing separates Gatsby’s excessive desire and the containment of that desire in conventional forms into two characters. Indeed, many points throughout the novel construct Clare and Irene as doubles, uncanny in their simultaneous threat and attraction. Sigmund Freud defines “the uncanny [as] something which is secretly familiar […], which has undergone repression and then returned from it” (947). Clare returns to Irene’s life years after their shared past and desires a return to that previous time and her former community. Irene repeatedly tries to resist Clare’s intrusion into her superficially perfect world but, at the same time, is inexplicably drawn to her. In reading this text as an adaptation, they function here as two sides of Gatsby; just as the uncanny double is unsustainable—and in Passing results in Clare’s death—Gatsby himself must die.

G: Black legitimization of white supremacy, or, hip-hop will get you killed The overall message of G wholly embraces Irene’s respectability politics, pretending to care about the Black community but shoring up white normativity. Blair Underwood—shortly before his representation of acceptable Blackness in Sex and the City—plays Chip Hightower, the Tom Buchanan character. He is firmly against hip-hop culture, and when his white friends express confusion about hip-hop he dismisses the entire culture as “bouncing cars and doo-rags” (00:5:37–00:5:40). When Chip asks Tre, the Nick character, to come meet his mistress, he frames it as a way to give himself racial bona fides in the black community: “Just come along so that I can show her that I know some ethnic people” (00:7:44–00:7:47), not including himself in these “ethnics.” A question the film repeatedly asks through Tre is, “Does hip-hop have heart?” (00:19:02–00:19:04). Hip-hop here is constructed through Black community and vilified for that very reason: in Chip’s words, G’s house, a Black space, has “all these rough- necks around, rapper types” (00:8:59–00:9:06). Missing from this film is the long history of hip-hop as political critique; the genre and culture is reduced to its gangsta and hypercapitalist elements, which is basically a caricature of hip-hop from the perspective of mainstream white culture for white audiences. Moreover, to acknowledge that activist history would be to follow the Black people in the limousine on the bridge in The Great

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 101 Gatsby, “driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl” (Fitzgerald 97), and to imagine possibilities outside of hegemonic capitalist white supremacy; the effacement here functions to shore up that power by using Black characters to reinforce their own oppression. The conflict between Sky, Summer, and Chip is reduced to respectability rather than futurity; this adaptation has no Pam or Margery. When Sky uses profanity confronting Chip about his affair, he tells her, “Could you not use profanity? You are my wife and you’re too beautiful for that. My wife does not use profanity” (00:34:05–00:34:12). He has an image of what his wife should be that does not include profanity, which belongs in the hip-hop realm. Sky and Summer G broke up not because of a structural relation to the state—in the novel Gatsby was “at the whim of an impersonal government” (Fitzgerald 153) and went off to war—but because Summer G was hustling in the hip-hop world. She asks him, “Why were you so angry all the time?” (00:42:58–00:43:01), reflecting the belief that Black men should not be angry because it is not respectable. When Sky and Summer start hanging out more, Sky’s wardrobe becomes more colour- ful and she wears a head-wrap, as if she is getting Blacker by association. She tells Summer, “If I leave my world, can you leave yours?” (00:59:57– 1:00:00). Sky and Chip have a violent confrontation, but Chip’s apology and Summer’s hesitancy to leave the hip-hop empire he built leads Sky to reconcile with her husband. Unlike in the novel, what forces the reconciliation is not a shared investment in their own futurity but, rather, respectability politics that are ultimately oppressive. Indeed, Chip, despite his wealth, still needs to appeal to white offi- cials to help rid himself of Summer G. At Summer G’s party, a white representative from the homeowners’ association complains about the loudness of the party, but G shows permits; later, Chip goes to this same person to get legitimacy for his campaign to eject Summer G from the Hamptons. Chip tells him, “Gene, this motherfu—, this guy, he’s coming on to my wife!” (00:56:22–00:56:32). He struggles to control his polite veneer and makes up a story about how Summer threatened him and that his mansion is a fortress. Gene tells him that he is friends with the chief of police, also in the homeowners’ association, and that Chip just has to get Summer to threaten him in front of them and they will take care of him. Here Chip allies with the police against the Black community of hip-hop culture, fabricating a story in order to have the police eliminate his rival. A concurrent storyline involves Summer telling his apprentice Craig to assert his masculinity through gun violence—to eliminate his rival

102 | Rangwala through what racist mainstream culture terms Black-on-Black violence. These storylines converge at the end, with Summer announcing that he is leaving hip-hop for Sky and Craig showing up with a gun, blaming Summer for his violence: “Summer, you told me to handle my business” (01:27:58–01:28:01). The police conduct surveillance from the bushes as Craig shoots into the crowd and ends up killing Sky. Sky’s return to Sum- mer is a return of Blackness, regardless of her reconciliation with Chip; she is already doomed by her Blackness, just as Daisy’s white femininity saves her from prison. The message here is that hip-hop, and by extension Black culture and community, will get you killed, even if you repent and (re)invest yourself in white respectability politics. It is in the structure of the white nation to eliminate Blackness. Whereas Passing turns a critical eye to its characters’ investments in excessive desire (Clare) or respectability (Irene), G unreservedly privileges respectability politics in order to show the attrition of Black futurity if it does not conform to white conventions. Indeed, adhering to white conventions is ultimately another way to reinforce the no-future of Blackness, through its subsumption or effacement. In many ways here, Chip could also be read as the Gatsby figure in his desire to legitimate his promixity to whiteness. Unlike Clare, he cannot transition, but he can side with white supremacy against hip-hop culture. Chip falls into the trap of believing that supporting structures of oppression will save him from them; Sky’s death exposes this belief as fantasy. Climaxing with a police presence in a party full of Black people recalls the power of the state over marginalized people. Through Chip’s alliance with the police and white homeowners’ association, the film presents the ways in which white supremacy uses Black people to support the repressive and legal apparatuses of a state whose purposes across history include the attrition of the Black community. That is, if Black culture can be critiqued by Black people, then white supremacy can maintain itself through ideology along with force. Like Tom, Chip uses his affair as a way to assert his superior position—he is not that kind of Black person. Gatsby, in the singular, is a classic example of cruel optimism, but Chip in this film—because racialized people are forced to represent the race in addition to themselves3—is working not only against his own thriving but also that of the Black community.

3 A point Chip disavows but one Irene knows well: “[S]he was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well” (152).

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 103 At the end of the film, Tre asks Summer, “one more question for the road, G, does hip-hop have heart?” (01:31:52–01:31:58). G replies, “I don’t know, we’re a bunch of heartless bastards” (01:32:09–01:32:13). Heart, here, is meaningless enough that one could inscribe almost anything on to it, but considering the narrative, “heart” could mean a kind of authenticity: does hip-hop believe in anything or is it just about violent competition and hustle? Certainly, to ask this question outside of a film that caricaturizes hip-hop culture is absurd, given the history of the genre and culture. Yet that is precisely the point: in its promotion of white-supremacist respectability politics, the film must neutralize the threat of hip-hop’s political critique. Both adaptations that switch white characters to Black change the ending to the death of a Black woman, positing a no-future for Blackness that correlates to The Great Gatsby’s alliance with Tom and Daisy and Nick rather than the racialized Wolfsheim or the Black people on the bridge. Here the text puts forth the white supremacist worldview that argues that hip-hop culture, continuing the freneticism and disorder of jazz, has no future within the dominant structures of the nation.

The Great Gatsby: desire dreamed into spectacle Baz Luhrmann’s commercially successful film takes the Gatsby narrative from the Jazz Age into the postcrash 2010s, adhering to the novel much more closely than the other adaptations. Hip-hop mogul Jay-Z is the executive producer of the soundtrack, which was successful as its own commodity. His oeuvre is a celebration of individual agency, with lyrics tracking his rise from “I used to move snowflakes by the oz / I guess even back then you can call me / ceo of the R-O-C” to “the dude with the Lexus, fast-forward the jewels and the necklace” (“Public Service Announcement”).4 Contrast Jay-Z to Kanye West, another artist on the soundtrack, whose work includes lines such as, “Even if you in a Benz / you still a nigga in a coupe [coop]” (“All Falls Down”).5 These two models 4 Consider how in Jay-Z’s song “99 Problems” he gets pulled over by a cop who wants to search his car and raps, “I ain’t passed the bar, but I know a little bit / Enough that you won’t illegally search my shit.” He acknowledges being tar- geted as a Black man but his response is not resistance to the system but rather demonstrating facility with the system, not about being a revolutionary but knowing how to hustle within existing structures. That is, hip-hop here is not N.W.A.’s “Fuck the Police” but, rather, Gatsby showing a card from the police commissioner to get out of a speeding ticket. 5 The pun here points both to the car and to the trap of a chicken coop. Indeed, Kanye’s oeuvre contains several gestures to Gatsbyesque cruel optimism. In “You Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” he raps, “I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven / When I woke I spent that on a necklace,” here showing an awareness

104 | Rangwala of individual agency within hip-hop culture point, on the one hand, to the aspiration to infinite capability within consumer capitalism and, on other hand, to the limits of individual agency within hegemonic structures. The latter is what the critique of the novel exposes and the former is what Luhrmann’s film promotes: [Jay-Z] said: “This story is not about how Jay Gatsby made his money; it’s ‘is he a good person or not?’ ” “[Jay-Z] totally nailed that the book was aspirational,” [Luhrmann] added. “That the book was really about, if you’ve got a cause, you can move towards a green light. That you don’t reach it isn’t the point; that you aspire is.” (nme)

This interpretation of the novel maps fairly clearly onto Berlant’s cruel optimism; what Luhrmann identifies that Jay-Z “nails” is precisely the opposite, that is, the structure that the novel critiques. Regarding the hip-hop mogul specifically but also a more general American ethos, Christopher Holmes Smith argues that, “in order to escape the jeremiads against the ‘fabulous life’ of greed and excess, one must view individual wealth and the con- sumptive practices that accompany it as a legitimate outcome of strenu- ous striving to succeed, and representative therefore of an unexpected (almost divinely ordained) social mobility” (80). Gatsby in this hip-hop film is valorized for his dreaming and infinite desire, and the structures that result in his death are incidental rather than systemic. The result is a film that fetishizes Gatsby’s achievement and individuates his downfall as a thwarted romance, where Tom and Daisy are merely bad rich people rather than a part of a structure that polices and reproduces itself. The specific Americanness of the Gatsby narrative is exported through cinema—particularly a blockbuster high-budget film such as Baz Luhr- mann’s—as a spectacle of expanding American domination, which in this case flattens the critique of its antecedent. Bruce Cummings characterizes the period of the novel: “The ‘Roaring 20s’ were not just an era of flappers and the Charleston, but years of pioneering innovation when Americans first sampled the seductive possibilities of mass consumption and mass culture that the rest of the world now absorbs as part of its own lifestyle” (275). Luhrmann’s adaptation takes the novel from a period of burgeoning

of the disparity between aspirational desire and the trap of consumerism. After narrating a rags-to-riches tale of a Black man and the Black woman whom he supports financially, he ends “Gold Digger,” “But you stay right girl / And when you get on he leave your ass for a white girl,” pointing to the white woman as the ultimate achievement.

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 105 mass culture and machinic production to our current moment, paralleling the 1920s to our own period of consumption and technological acceleration. In “The Greatness of ‘Gatsby,’ ” a special feature on the Blu- It is no surprise, Ray release, Luhrmann notes all the care that went into making sure the costumes were authentic to the period, but it is precisely this fetishization then, that the of authenticity here that evacuates the historical critique. The film may very well have clothing that is specific to the 1920s, but in paralleling the political critique two historical moments the film collapses these different moments. It is no surprise, then, that the political critique is obfuscated by romantic is obfuscated by mystification. Moreover, this investment in authenticity—that it can be reproduced, repeated—is yet again another indication that this is Gatsby’s romantic film, not Fitzgerald’s. The very concept of authenticity is essential for the policing and reproducing of racial and other categories, as Fitzgerald’s mystification. novel and especially Passing interrogate so thoroughly and Luhrmann’s film mechanically accepts. While the novel reaches nostalgically into the past and projects the future of the white nation through Tom, Daisy, and Pam, the film is excessively present in its spectacle. Indeed, contra the “tenacious hold that Puri- tan emphasis on the future has on the American imagination” (Barnhart 36), the film attempts to reproduce a jazz temporality. Bruce Barnhart outlines how white modernists “heard in [jazz] syncopation the death knell of traditional culture and learned from it that the aesthetic forms that would reign in the emerging landscape would not be the future that had been dominant in the past. […] Jazz signified that the future could no longer dominate the cultural imagination as it once had” (33). The ways that jazz manifests in the film form is through frenetic, syncopated editing, saturated colours evoking the textures of different instruments, and, of course, the jazzified versions of contemporary hip-hop music. The film was marketed as an innovation in cinematic spectacle with its use of 3D, transposing the consumerist spectacle of the novel into an imagistic medium. Barnhart complicates the temporality of consumer capitalism: Despite the ideological portrayal of commodity consumption as an enjoyment of the present, such consumption is an activity with both imagined and actual ties to the future. Imagined because capitalism invites the purchaser of a commodity to see himself as transformed or completed by the object they purchase. The measure associated with each purchase is the pleasure of believing that what is being purchased is entry into an ideal future. (36)

106 | Rangwala Yet while the novel has a temporality that reconciles both its nostalgia and its future orientation, the film posits a kind of perpetual present, collapsing the 1920s and the 2010s. The film opens with a fake old-timey black-and-white cinema and low-fi music from the 1920s; the art-deco film logo has scratches and artifacts. The logo then transitions to colour and 3D, explicitly drawing a connection between the time periods through technology: the cinema as time machine. This simulated pastness of this image correlates to the superficiality of the film’s treatment of history- as-past and its reductive paralleling of the 1920s and 2010s. In making this connection without acknowledging the historical specificities, the film has a confused temporality, reducing itself to what can be sold as a timeless love story—which as a genre has a broad stake in reproductive futurity—rather than a critique of American hegemony. One of the major changes from book to film involves the narration, with the effect of collapsing the distinction between inherited class and acquired wealth as well as the temporality of the traditional West and modern East. Bruce Jackson outlines the problems of filming the narration of The Great Gatsby: “The ‘I’ and ‘eye’ of the novel are coterminous […]. The eye of the film, on the other hand, […] is the lens.” Luhrmann’s film cinematizes this coterminous I and eye by making the image explicitly writerly through taking phrases from the novels and displaying the words themselves on the screen with voiceover narration. As Dana Polan notes, “the visuals also have a quotational quality: we’re not so much seeing ‘real life’ on screen but a set of notations that refer us back to the novel and stand as rote citations of it. This film of The Great Gatsby is not so much adaptation as taxidermy” (399). This rendering has the function of drawing attention to the film as adaptation without actually transposing the function of that narration into the film. By incorporating Nick into the narrative as a character with particular stakes, Luhrmann evacuates the class politics of the novel by making him a lower-class alcoholic. The director aligns Nick with Gatsby, not through what Maggie Gordon Froehlich terms their “queer relations”6 but, rather, through the outsider status they have in common in relation to upper-class characters such as Daisy, Tom, and Jordan. Indeed, an upper-class man tells Nick, “rich girls [such as Jordan] don’t marry poor boys, she’s mine” (00:29:20–00:29:24), whereas Jordan and Nick have a romantic relationship in the novel. Moreover, Nick ending up in a sanatorium as an alcoholic changes the temporality of the

6 Indeed, the film takes out all homosocial overtones—including the homosexual implications of Nick’s encounter with McKee—in service of its overarching investment in heterosexual romance.

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 107 narrative: in the novel he berates Tom and Daisy for retreating into their money even though he does the same, retreating to the Midwest. Thus the novel shows the ubiquitous American narrative of the powerful sucking the vitality of the lower classes and continuing their futures. In the film, Nick is forever changed by his experience, painted instead as another victim of the “Jazz Age” like Myrtle and Gatsby. While Nick in the novel begins by establishing his family history and thus his authority to tell this story and then retreats to his family after his New York adventure, film Nick writes this story as a form of therapy in a sanatorium and repeatedly emphasizes his lack of wealth or class, the two conflated here. Luhrmann explains his reasoning: he wanted an interlocutor for Nick’s story and researched that psychoanalysts in the 1920s would ask their patients to paint or write; he took the idea of the main character in a sanatorium from Fitzgerald’s posthumous novel, The Last Tycoon (“The Greatness of ‘Gatsby’ ”). Yet again, this impetus to be authentic to particular details has the function of changing the broader temporality and class critique: Nick’s encounter with Gatsby and urban life changes him irrevocably, resulting in a romanticized alcoholism that requires therapy. What appears to be pathologized here is the abstract freneticism of a dehistoricized view of the Jazz Age, rather than any specificity of the 1920s. The order imposed by Nick’s narration—rendered formally as jumbled letters on the screen assembling into words—does not come here from any authority but, rather, as a kind of exorcism; the film severs the connection between the organization of narration and the organization through capital of the novel in favour of a romanticized individual tale of witnessing a doomed romance in a changing world. The film thus natural- izes romance as ideological smokescreen in the tradition of melodramas during the Civil Rights movement.7 The film posits desire not as the molar kind of respectability politics of Irene or Chip or, eventually, Summer G, but as productive desire, one that generates real materiality. Through its use of 3D, the film gestures to the instability and possibility of molecular desire in the Deleuzian vein, which produces more desire: molecules of light and ash and even letters flow multidimensionally, pointing, of course, to the essential molecular constituents of cinema itself. Deleuze takes Kant’s conception of desire as producing hallucinations or fantasies from the realm of psychic reality into material reality: “Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the

7 For a recent film that makes this connection explicitly by juxtaposing scenes of police brutality against Black activists with clips from Hollywood romances, see Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016).

108 | Rangwala machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it” (Anti-Oedipus 26). The spectacle of Luhrmann’s adaptation draws attention to its own technology, to itself as a desiring-machine. Gatsby’s motivations are cinematic—to get the girl—without the class aspirations that are so explicit in the novel. In flashback, the film deliberately leaves out, for example, that Gatsby desires Daisy more because others have been with her, or that he was attracted to the coolness of her house, and focuses instead on the saturated colours of memory and their archetypically cinematic kiss. The film formally presents itself as a celebration of a particular kind of desire—one contrasted to the cruel optimism of the novel—that is, the molecular desire of the cinematic machine rather than the molar desire of the social climber. In a line that does not appear in the novel, Daisy wonders at Gatsby’s estate and asks, “Is this all made entirely from your own imagination?” (01:13:23– 01:13:26). Conceiving here of desire being the cinema itself, and not Gatsby as subject, the telling word is imagination: Luhrmann is renown for his spectacles, and this film assembles the images of a cultural and social imagination, the dehistoricized “Jazz Age” in quotation marks. Gatsby here is a machine that is part of the assemblage of the desiring-machine of cinema itself. Because the film can show the material products—the images themselves—of desire via the spectacle of its cinematic world, it throws into relief how Daisy herself is connected to a specifically cinematic desire. Deleuze posits that every film frame signifies money: “what defines industrial art is not mechanical reproduction but the internalized relation with money. […] Money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place” (Cinema 2 77). The desiring-machine of cinema is the machine of money. In the novel, Nick and Gatsby discuss the charm of Daisy’s voice: “She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I hesitated. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl. (Fitzgerald 133)

This exchange does not appear in the film, where, if the flip side of every frame is indeed money, it would be redundant: “films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film. This is the

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 109 true ‘state of things’: it is not in a goal of cinema […] but rather […] in a constitutive relation between the film in process of being made and money as the totality of the film” Cinema( 2 77). Daisy and the cinema are in identity here, representing and producing desire, aspirational in the Mulveyan sense of ideal ego in the figure of Daisy-as-movie-star but also in the ways that cinema more generally functions to produce cultural desire. The film makes clear that Daisy is a flat image of money and desire—the flows of various forms of capital. The dream of Daisy is the dream of cinema: this is how the classic Hollywood romance functions. Gatsby and Daisy are machines of desire, subject and object collapsed, in a film that constantly draws attention to itself as machine through its innovations in 3D technology. Gatsby as an aspirational figure in this film is explicitly connected to the contemporary figure of the hip-hop mogul, with the concomitant racial erasure and co-optation. The melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s—to which the film gestures through its romance—present white futurity in the heterosexual couple-form, in stark contrast to their historical moment of civil rights activism, and this film similarly presents a contrast with its spectacle of consumer capitalism and hip-hop aesthetics in the wake of the Occupy Movement. Gatsby here is more accurately a hip-hop mogul than the incoherent Summer G, but his whiteness8 evokes Charles Lewis’s questions of whether or not Fitzgerald re-writes a passing narrative in a kind of “blackface forgery” (84). Hip-hop in this film, in contrast to G, does not have no future. Instead, it is taken out of history and co-opted by the spectacle of consumer capitalism—it has a future insofar as it par- ticipates in consumer capitalism rather than critiques it. The hip-hop soundtrack and Gatsby’s gangsterish lifestyle present a world where infi- nitely upward individual achievement is not only possible but valorized as a common goal. Hustling is a patriotic duty foundational to the nation, one that bypasses Puritanical moralizing. Smith’s examination of the hip-hop mogul presents parallels to Gatsby that help understand him as the white version of this Black male figure. Gatsby’s house and parties are required conspicuous consumption in order to make his wealth visible; contrast this visibility with Clare’s self-display that requires only a presentation of white femininity. Smith connects the exchange, or zero-sum, of this visibility: “The hip hop mogul is not intelligible without credible accounts of

8 While whiteness is historically contingent, including the whiteness of Italians in America, Leonardo DiCaprio’s golden visage here is clearly meant to signify whiteness; contrast his presentation to recognizable Bollywood superstar Am- itabh Bachchan playing the racialized Meyer Wolfsheim.

110 | Rangwala the lavish manner in which he leads his life, nor is he intelligible unless his largesse connotes not only his personal agency but also a structural condition that squelches the potential agency of so many others” (71). Gatsby’s parties do not bring about any sense of community; no one knows him or comes to his funeral: the “mogul’s typical dreamscape is individualistic rather than communal” (Smith 82), that is, Gatsby’s success comes at the expense of others. While in the novel there is plausible deniability as to the violence behind Gatsby’s shady business, the film shows a man being beaten, presumably at Gatsby’s command, as the camera moves from the beating to Gatsby’s crest on the top of the iron gate to his estate. The film here literalizes how at the margins of his luxury is always some kind of gangster violence. Reading Gatsby as a white hip-hop mogul in relation to gangsterism also relates to the racialization of legitimate and illegitimate hustle.9 Smith elucidates how gangsterism affords a sense of freedom outside the official systems of capital and exchange: Frequently, moguls […] will depict themselves as “gangsters” […] in the mafioso tradition […]. A major aspect of the mogul’s utopian sense of freedom is one of identity shifting, or at the least, identity “layering.” In other words, while hip-hop moguls can never be said to deny their racial and ethnic heritage, they are encouraged to use the material aspects of gangster social formations […]. Moguls use “gangsterism,” then, as a trope for escaping the limited “place” afforded minority men of color in American society. (82)

When Gatsby takes Nick to see Meyer Wolfsheim, the soundtrack plays Jay-Z’s “Izza (hova)” over the bridge and then “Hundred Dollar Bills” once they arrive at the speakeasy, explicitly connecting hip-hop to the kind of business that Gatsby and Wolfsheim do. Indeed, we have two gangster moguls here: Gatsby, who presents as white, and Meyer Wolfsheim, who does not. Gatsby’s whiteness provides some legitimacy to his dealings as well as the possibility for solidifying his class position and futurity with Daisy—and the futurity of the white nation. Wolfsheim, on the other hand, has no aspirations to the future nor nostalgia for the past—indeed, his racialization precludes him from the particular future posited here—and

9 As Eithne Quinn points out, “A central theme of gangsta rap had always been the levelling out of ethical hierarchies between legitimate and illegitimate business dealings in the age of inequality: both are ‘stealing’ ” (92). Indeed, the age of inequality encompasses the entirety of American history.

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 111 thinks only in terms of the present: “ ‘Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead […]. After that my own rule is to let everything alone’ ” (Fitzgerald 170). While this scene The relationship between Nick and Wolfsheim is not in the film, the hip-hop gangsterism of the film throws into relief the differences of racialization and futurity of the film to in the narrative. Along with the attrition of the white working class and the futurity of the white upper class, we also have a persistence outside of hip-hop culture, that system of whiteness, here embodied in Wolfsheim and his racialized presentist temporality.10 Gatsby to the The relationship of the film to hip-hop culture, Gatsby to the hip-hop mogul, and indeed that of whiteness to Blackness more generally, paral- hip-hop mogul, lels the relations of the film to the novel in terms of co-optation. Smith argues that the hip-hop mogul “never had to sell his customers on any- and indeed that thing other than his belief in his own fantasies. […] [H]e can continue to be representative of mass expectation of the good life without being of whiteness to responsible for its fulfillment” (80). Certainly, this emphasis on desire and fantasy fits the figure of Gatsby in Luhrmann’s film, but the film itself Blackness more sells both the vision and itself as commodity. Eithne Quinn’s study of the hip-hop mogul in the wake of Occupy is useful here in examining how generally, emancipatory discourses get co-opted by consumer capitalism and evacuated of their critique—arguably, in the way that the novel is co-opted by parallels the the film to sell itself. Using Mark Fisher’s term, Quinn “describes rappers like Carter [Jay-Z] […] as prime ‘capitalist realists,’ who help shore up the relations of the notion that there is no alternative to the brutalizing market” (76). In this way, any kind of revolution or critique, such as the Occupy Movement, is film to the novel necessarily absorbed and commodified by the capitalism system. Quinn argues that the hip-hop mogul, in the form of commoditized “racial dif- in terms of ference,” “has served to consolidate contemporary capitalism, both by disavowing structural inequalities through enticing bootstrap personal co-optation. advancement narratives and by rearticulating collective, emancipatory notions of black freedom as individualist, consumerist ones” (77). Indeed, this move occurs not only in Luhrmann’s film but also in G. In both cases, oppressive structures are effaced as the radical critical communal aspects of hip-hop culture are absorbed into narratives of individual achievement. Quinn points out Jay-Z’s co-optation of Occupy Wall Street in selling T-shirts that say “Occupy All Streets”: “by stripping out the symbolic locus (Wall Street), with its focus on financial inequality, Carter’s slogan suggests

10 Consider also how the conflation of jazz and hip-hop in the film as racialized forms is all about frenetic pleasure in the present.

112 | Rangwala a probusiness dissipation of the movement’s specificity—a literal, graffitied neoliberal correction” (87). Luhrmann’s film reproduces this structure on the scale of cultural narrative; rather than disavowing the racialized aspect of the Gatsby narrative, he co-opts it through his dehistoricized and commoditized conflation of Black music, jazz, and hip-hop, concurrently dehistoricizing and conflating the 1920s and the Occupy moment of the film. Indeed, Quinn further identifies how “the incorporation of protest currents has been one of the key cultural trends in the strengthening of corporate capitalism” (87). Co-optation is not merely one tactic of many but is a key feature of colonial and consumer capitalism: the theft extends beyond land and bodies to culture and ideologies. Co-optation is more successful than disavowal, as it leaves no room outside and makes it seem as if capitalism is totalizing, the only system. Gatsby’s desire is idealized—his will to create an empire with his sheer imagination—and his failures are individuated into mere romance. Barn- hart writes of novel-Gatsby, “with this ending [Gatsby] is transformed into one of the discrete commodities in which he always had such faith” (126). The film, materializing his vision of himself rather than Nick’s judgment or Fitzgerald’s critique, is one of those commodities. Smith writes: [T]he American postmodern cultural logic of empire is one whereby (1) conditions arise that are ripe for the incorporation of the people’s rhetoric of emancipation within the normalizing tenets of the capitalist world system and (2) narratives of utopian impulse found within many forms of black expressive culture, and particularly hip-hop culture, have helped supply the specifically American discourse of empire with the necessary manna of “performativity” it needs to sustain itself as global Leviathan. (74)

If every frame of the film signifies money, then the film must recuper- ate that money by selling itself, exporting through cinematic spectacle the values that make consumer capitalism possible: infinite desire and dreaming as a goal in and of itself, with failures that are individual rather than systemic.

Conclusion Reading these four texts together reveals how multiple facets of Gatsby manifest in different forms and historical contexts, throwing into relief the tension between individual desire and agency and systemic oppression, through the organization that is narrative. Fitzgerald’s novel contains

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 113 paradoxes and complexities that the adaptations tease out; Gatsby circulates through its making visible of limits, conflicting models of desire, and textual poaching. Passing foregrounds legibility and bifurcates the Gatsby figure through doubles with the threateningly desirous figure inevitably dying. G rewrites the characters as Black people in the contemporary Hamptons, privileging respectability politics and romance over any kind of extraordinary hope; the film vilifies hip-hop culture and by extension Black solidarity as violent, killing the Black woman because she associates with Summer G. Baz Luhrmann makes Gatsby an infinite dreamer and achiever, whose failures are as individual as Citizen Kane’s—Gatsby’s final gasp of “Daisy” a clear Rosebud moment—and co-opts hip-hop culture to subsume it under consumer capitalism. Indeed, the Gatsby figure circulates through narratives that may have little resemblance to the plot of Fitzgerald’s novel, but all contend—through critique or effacement or co-optation—with how American myths of meritocracy and agency reinforce the oppression of capitalist white supremacy. The entrenchment and saturation of hegemonic power structures over time leads to an increasingly invisibility or wilful blindness to their operation. The 1920s texts are explicit about racialized structures and institutional racism, but the recent adaptations either have Black people vilifying other Black people or the erasure and co-optation of Black culture altogether. Indeed, it appears that the Gatsby figure will continue to re-emerge in various forms—reproducing the different manifestations of the policing of capitalism and whiteness—as long as the American nation exists.

Works Cited

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114 | Rangwala Cumings, Bruce. “Still the American Century.” British Journal of Interna- tional Studies, Winter 1999: 271–99. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo- phrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2007. Froelich, Maggie Gordon. “Gatsby’s Mentors: Queer Relations Between Love and Money in The Great Gatsby.” The Journal of Men’s Studies 19.3 (Fall 2011): 209–26. G. Directed by Christopher Scott Cherot. Performances by Richard T. Jones, Chenoa Maxwell, and Blair Underwood. Sony Pictures, 2002. Goldsmith, Meredith. “White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby.” Modern Fiction Studies 49.3 (2003): 443–68. The Great Gatsby. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Carey Mulligan. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. I Am Not Your Negro. Directed by Raoul Peck, narrated by Samuel L. Jack- son. Velvet Film, 2016. Jackson, Bruce. “Nick’s ‘I’/Nick’s Eye: Why they couldn’t film Gatsby.” Senses of Cinema 52, September 2009. Jay-Z. “99 Problems.” The Black Album. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2004. ——— . “Public Service Announcement.” The Black Album. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2004. Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York: The Modern Library, 2002. Lewis, Charles. “Babbled Slander Where the Paler Shades Dwell: Read- ing Race in The Great Gatsby and Passing.” Critical Insights: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Morris Dickstein. Ipswich: Salem Press, 2009. 72–92. Luhrmann, Baz. “The Greatness of ‘Gatsby.’ ” The Great Gatsby. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. Blu-Ray release. Meehan, Adam. “Repetition, Race, and Desire in The Great Gatsby.” Jour- nal of Modern Literature 37.2 (Winter 2014): 76–91.

Race and the Thickening of Mediation | 115 Moynihan, Sinéad. “Beautiful White Girlhood?: Daisy Buchanan in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” African American Review 47.1 (Spring 2014): 37–49. Polan, Dana. “The ‘Great American Novel’ as Pop-up Book: Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.” Adaptation 6.3 (2013): 397–99. Quinn, Eithne. “Occupy Wall Street, Racial Neoliberalism, and New York’s Hip-Hop Moguls.” American Quarterly 68.1 (2016): 75–99. Smith, Christopher Holmes. “ ‘I Don’t Like to Dream about Getting Paid’: Representations of Social Mobility and the Emergence of the Hip-Hop Mogul.” Social Text 21.4 (Winter 2003): 69–97. West, Kanye. “All Falls Down.” The College Dropout. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2004. ———. “Gold Digger.” Late Registration. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2005. ———. “You Can’t Tell Me Nothing.” Graduation. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2007. Vogel, Joseph. “ ‘Civilization’s Going to Pieces’: The Great Gatsby, Identity, and Race, from the Jazz Age to the Obama Era.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 13.1 (2015): 29–54.

116 | Rangwala A Trans Tipping Point Evelyn Deshane University of Waterloo

n what follows, I want to consider gender transitions and cultural Itransitions, how these interlock, and how they also seem to defeat one another. As an English literature PhD candidate examining transgender storytelling, I spend a lot of time examining transgender representation in film, television, novels, and news media. Most of my work right now focuses on certain tropes we use to express transgender identity—think of those metaphors and analogies like being born in the wrong body or going on a gender journey. A major tendency recently is that more people, both inside and outside of the trans community, are using the language of gender transition more than gender transformation. Let me explain further. The 1950s was when North America really became aware of transgender identity, mostly through a figure like Chris- tine Jorgensen suddenly appearing on the front of a newspaper after a trip overseas to have her final surgery. Trans identity in this context was a sudden and overwhelming change; it was, to use an actual quotation from a medical document from this time period, to “go abroad [...] and come back a broad” (Benjamin 43). The distance between the points of man and woman, woman and man, was sudden, stark, and noticeable. This sudden overnight change was then replicated in media that covered the

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 117–119 story. Think of the before/after photograph so common in trans storytelling, even nowadays. The distance between the before and after photo is small, but it represents an overwhelming change. Similarly, think of the Evelyn Deshane’s analogies often used to represent transgender people: the cocoon and creative and nonfiction blooming butterfly, the phoenix being reborn from the ashes. All sudden, work has appeared in all stark, all overwhelming. Plenitude Magazine, And mostly fictional. The space between the before and after photo- Briarpatch Magazine, graph is supposed to stand in for surgery; it’s supposed to be the magical Strange Horizons, transformation which suddenly changes a man into a woman. But chang- Lackington’s, and Bitch ing genders is something that happens over years, sometimes decades, Magazine, among other by sheer necessity. Hormones take a long time to manifest secondary sex publications. Evelyn characteristics and must be closely monitored. Even surgery, which can (pronounced Eve-a-lyn) seem like a quick overnight change, actually happens over weeks and received an ma from sometimes even years—especially if financial saving, recovery time, and Trent University and is the multiple surgeries some people choose to have are taken into consid- currently completing a eration. Nothing here is a sudden transformation. PhD at the University of Transgender narratives are often presented as a one-way trip; a teleo- Waterloo. Evelyn’s most logical progress narrative constructed around certain steps and with a des- recent project #Trans ignated closure. It’s pristine, it’s perfect—and it’s a myth. Most transgender is an edited collection people, if they experience gender as binary, don’t see it as a sudden move about transgender and from one to the next but as a gradual transition. For many others, gender nonbinary identity is nonlinear. It can’t happen teleologically because they must go backward online. Visit evedeshane. and forward; they may stop transition halfway through and resume it later. wordpress.com for more Even their own memories, which now present a fragmented life full of so information. many different selves, are split and ruptured. The split self is what doctors try to solve when they perform surgery; it’s the trauma that therapists and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual label “gender dysphoria.” But the more time I spend in transgender communities, the more I realize that the split self isn’t something to fix. It is oftentimes the goal of transition itself. Gender transformation, like that of Jorgensen, is all but forgotten; it’s the gradual transition which can be a-linear and non-teleological which often presents a better option. The split self doesn’t provide trauma but is an inspiration to keep moving and keep figuring something out. By denying an ultimate ending to the gender narrative—surgery—transition as a methodology but also an ideology and narratology stays around, and so do the experiences that go along with it. Transition, rather than transformation, seems to be the key to understanding transgender identity. But then someone uses a metaphor of transformation on the news or in a recently released film like The Danish Girl, and I realize that we’re

118 | Deshane still thinking in older terms. In 2014, Time Magazine said there was a “transgender tipping point,” meaning that we have somehow done another transformation overnight, only this time it’s cultural. Our attitudes about transgender people have suddenly become more accepting, but, of course, like the magical transformation that trans people are expected to go through, it’s only cosmetic in nature. There are still several caveats to this tipping point acceptance, one of which is that in order for trans people to exist in the public field, they must look and act in certain ways. Effectively, the transgender tipping point is a transformation about transformations, none of which has any substance. It is an ouroboros, a snake eating itself at both ends, and so much of the rhetoric I study involving transgender people seems like a tautology, defining itself with itself. Sometimes I get dizzy going around in so many circles, while at the same time I understand why these metaphors and analogies repeat. The poetic power of the transformation is so much more potent—not even just for transgender people, but for everyone involved. We want to believe that we—along with our political systems and social circumstances—can change overnight. But to configure transgender people as transformation embodied is to rob them of interiority and the ability to reflect and adapt, which robs us of our ability to do the same. Only when we let go of these rigid ideas of binaries—not just of male/female or cis/trans but of progress/failure as well—can we start to see more malleability in others and maybe have something else tip the other way.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Harry. The Transsexual Phenomenon: A Scientific Report on Transsexualism and Sex Conversion in the Human Male and Female. New York: The Julian Press, 1966. Steinmetz, Katy. “The Transgender Tipping Point.” Time Magazine. 29 May 2017.

A Trans Tipping Point | 119

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition”: The Cultural Logic of Reproductive Fetishism in the Representation of Erotic Dance Cecily Devereux University of Alberta

he gospels of Mark (6.14–29) and Matthew (14.1–12) both tell similar Tstories of the dance of Salome for her stepfather Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee and Perea between 6 and 39 ce, in exchange for the head of John the Baptist. In the Gospels, that demand, while expressed by the dancer, is made at the behest of her mother Herodias, who “had a quarrel against [John the Baptist], and would have killed him” (King James Bible Online, Mark 6.19) because he had told Herod it was “not lawful” for him to marry his brother’s wife (Mark 6.18). According to Mark’s text,

when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. … And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist. …

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 121–147 And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath’s sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her. And immediately the king sent an executioner, and com- Cecily Devereux is manded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded a Professor of English him in the prison, and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. And brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother. (6.22–8) Her research focuses on questions of femininity Saliently “the daughter of the said Herodias,” Salome, as many observers in the imperial context have noted, is unnamed in the biblical texts and is identified first as Salome, across a range of Megan Becker-Leckrone points out, in historian Flavius Josephus’s Antiq- categories, including the uities of the Jews, a “first-century source nearly contemporary with Mat- maternal body, ideologies thew and Mark” (244).1 of imperial motherhood, Represented in Judaeo-Christian visual arts, as Udo Kultermann has eugenics and eugenic observed, from at least the ninth century ce (188), around the middle of feminism, the figure the nineteenth century the image and the story of the dancer would be of the “white slave,” “rejuvenated” (Kultermann 189) not only in visual arts but in literature, the “Indian maiden,” and a new history of the representation of the dancer Salome began to hysteria, and the business take shape in a proliferation of works by European artists and writers. The and performance of dramatic increase in the number of representations of the figure of Salome erotic dance from the in late nineteenth-century European culture is by now well documented. nineteenth century to the Helen Grace Zagona (1960), Anthony Pym (1989), and Rosina Neginsky twenty-first. (2014) as well as Kultermann (2006) all note a significant expansion in the production of Salome works around 1850 or shortly thereafter, when what Pym describes as a new secular “corpus” took shape (311). That “corpus,” as many studies have affirmed, includes a number of texts by influential authors and artists of the period. Heinrich Heine’s 1841 epic poem Atta Troll is usually positioned as the earliest work in the “rejuvenation” of Salome in the nineteenth century. Gustave Flaubert’s 1863 novel Salammbô, for what would be its influential representation of a dancer and, more specifically, his 1877 novella Hérodias perhaps even more clearly signal a cultural turn to a “new” representation of Salome. Flau- bert’s works are followed by—and, as has often been observed, profoundly influence—Stéphane Mallarmé’s dramatic poemHérodiade , begun in 1864 and, in 1898, his poem Les Noces d’Hérodiade; Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884

1 In that account, however, as Becker-Leckrone also indicates, while Salome is named by Josephus as the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod, there is no description of the dance that is her defining act in the Gospels (244). As Becker-Leckrone puts it, “whereas in the Gospels, we had a deed without a name, [in the Antiquities] we have a name without a deed” (244).

122 | Devereux novel Against Nature (À rebours); Jules Laforgue’s 1886 story “Salomé”; and Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé, published in French in 1891 and in English in 1894. A number of lesser-known or shorter texts have also been noted by many critics: these include works by poet Théodore de Banville (1823 to 1891), especially his 1870 poem “La danseuse,” dramatic poems published in 1862 and 1867 by Joseph Converse Heywood (1834 to 1900), and works by John Arthur Symons (1865 to 1945), including a “partial translation of Mallarmé’s dramatic fragment” (Hérodiade) in 1896 (Dijkstra 385) and “The Dance of the Daughters of Herodias” (Dijkstra 385) in 1897, as well as a later series of poems in 1924. A renewed impulse toward the visual representation of Salome is also clearly evident in the later nineteenth century, and these literary works are linked to a significant number of paintings. The most prominent and frequently cited of these are three works by Gustave Moreau—his Salome Dancing (Salomé Dansant, sometimes called Tattooed Salome) of 1874 and a pair of paintings exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1876, The Apparition (L’Apparition) and Salome Dancing Before Herod (Salomé dansant devant Hérode). Moreau would paint Salome repeatedly through his career: Fran- çoise Meltzer makes the point that “[o]ut of [one hundred and twenty] … drawings on the subject [of the death of John the Baptist], [seventy] are of Salome alone” (18–19). While his paintings are central to the texts of the Salome corpus, Moreau was certainly not alone in the field of visual representation with regard to Salome in this period. Kultermann notes that French artist Henri Regnault (1843 to 1871) exhibited his painting Salomé (sometimes also called Hérodias) in Paris in 1870; Kultermann also draws attention to works by Odilon Redon (1840 to 1916), also of France, who painted Salome in around 1880 to 1885 and again in 1893. In Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986), Bram Dijkstra considers many more visual representations produced in later nineteenth-century Europe, including works by French painter and illustrator Édouard Toudouze (1848 to 1907) (383), German Impressionist Max Slevogt (1868 to 1932) (386), Hugo von Habermann (1849 to 1929) (387), also of Germany, Hungarian painter Otto Friedrich (1862 to 1937) (387), Austrian Symbolist Gustav Klimt (1862 to 1918) (388), and Ger- man painter and printmaker Lovis Corinth (1858 to 1925) (388). Rosina Neginsky considers still others (71–90). British writer and artist Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for the English translation of Oscar Wilde’s play in 1894 have been well established as central works in the visual representation of Salome in this period. And there is more, across other media and genres. In 1881, French composer Jules Massenet’s (1842 to 1912) four-act

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 123 opera Hérodiade, with a libretto by French dramatists Paul Milliet (1848 to 1924) and Henri Grémont (1843 to 1900), and influenced, according to Kultermann, by Flaubert’s novella (192) (although its story notably diverges from that of Hérodias), was first performed in Brussels. Richard Strauss’s opera Salomé, which used German author Hedwig Lachmann’s 1900 translation of Wilde’s play as its libretto, was first performed in Dresden in December 1905 when, although the later nineteenth-century “corpus” had pretty much taken its shape and done its work, and although dance was on the brink of becoming the dominant medium for the representation of Salome, verbal and visual texts were still proliferating, as they would until well into the twentieth century. The works of the “corpus” mark their separation from pre-nineteenth- century Salome representations not only by volume but by important shifts: in addition to the turn to the secular and to verbal representations,2 the works of the “corpus” are characterized by their almost exclusive production by European or Euro-imperial male artists; their more easily perceptible and often fearsome eroticism—or a growing disposition to represent Salome as a figure of “monstrous” sexuality (Wilde, Salomé 66); their reference simultaneously to a Euro-imperial discourse of Oriental- ism and to what is emphatically marked as the dancer’s white skin; and, finally, and most significantly for this paper, their constitution of Salome as a figure who stands for or represents her mother Herodias. Many critics have noted the disposition in many texts of the “corpus” to make, as Susan Jones puts it, “the names of Salome and Herodias … often interchangeable” (33). Gustave Flaubert (1821 to 1880), for instance, names his influential 1877 Salome novella Hérodias; although the story differs from Flaubert’s, Jules Massenet (1841 to 1912) also calls his 1881 Salome opera Hérodias; Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 to 1898) names his 1864 to 1867 Salome poem Hérodiade.3 The frequent interchange of names, or what Pym refers to both as a “problematic transfer” and a “curious

2 The turn to the secular in the “new” Salome “corpus” has often been noted. See, for instance, Helen Grace Zagona’s “Heine’s New Secular Approach: Salome’s Emergence as a Heroine” (The Legend of Salome 23–40). 3 Neginsky suggests that Mallarmé did not “confuse” the mother and daughter, as Meltzer argues, but that “by renaming Salomé he hoped to set his character apart from the biblical story and the legends built around the biblical Salomé” (127). Mallarmé wanted, as she notes he explains in his preface to the poem, “to be able to make her clearly different from Salomé whom I would call modern or exhumed with her archaic crime” (Mallarmé cited in Neginsky 127). It should be noted, however, that he does not make the renamed figure “clearly different” from Hérodias, who is, rather, explicitly invoked in the renaming.

124 | Devereux transition” (316) in the nineteenth-century representation of Salome, is often regarded as a mistake. Françoise Meltzer, for instance, suggests that “during this period … [Salome’s] name becomes confused with that of her mother, Herodias (a confusion that persisted: [Heinrich] Heine [1797 to Salome stands 1856], Mallarmé, and [Theodore de] Banville [1823 to 1891] all write of ‘Herodias’ when it is clear that they are referring to Salome)” (emphasis for her mother, added 16). I suggest, however, that it is not confusion but something more like disavowal that underpins the slippage between the daughter and the I suggest, by mother. Making their names interchangeable is an affirmation that the one signifies the other, the daughter representing or standing for the mother. design. This is not “confusion” at all but, as the texts of the corpus demonstrate, deliberate. Salome stands for her mother, I suggest, by design, and the “curious transition” thus indexes not a mistake but the pathologized representation of femininity as always signifying—and always valued, at least in the eugenicist Euro-imperial context in which these representations of Salome and her mother would proliferate—as a medium for the reproduction not simply of babies but of Euro-imperial industrial capitalist patriarchy itself. This paper is concerned with this later nineteenth-century patriarchal pathology as it subtends the development and establishment of the business of erotic dance. Although the art of erotic dance is certainly centuries old, the business that has grown in the early twenty-first century to immense proportions does not begin to take clear shape as a business until around the middle of the nineteenth century, when the record first becomes evident of women taking off their clothes and dancing in theatres and other public spaces for money and celebrity. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, in the context of what Jayna Brown refers to as “all things Salome” (175), the image of the dancer that was proliferating in art and literature was taken up and embodied in performances by women whose Salome dances served, as many historians have suggested, as a crucial “turning-point” in the history of the business of erotic dance. That is, these dancers served to establish an idiom of skin-baring and undress performance that, in its ubiquity by 1908, when the theatrical “craze” for Salome dancers would be named “Salomania” by the New York Times, would provide a ground for the development and emergence of what would be called “striptease” by the 1930s. That early twentieth-century “Salomania” is grounded in the representations of the later nineteenth-century secular “corpus” is certainly well known, but the implications of that grounding for the history of women’s erotic performance from the early twentieth century to this moment have

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 125 not been closely considered. This paper returns to the representation of Salome in the works of the secular “corpus,” focusing on the operation Pym describes as a “curious transition” in which the mother Herodias and the daughter Salome are brought into convergence by name or gesture and undertaking to trace what is at stake in the invocation of the mother in a performance in which, as in much erotic dance, what is salient and central is the sight/site of the dancer’s genitals. In his influential 1993 essay, “On ‘Seeing’ Salome,” Brad Bucknell traces a significant structural principle in the earliest Salome texts: in each case (Matthew, Mark, Josephus) there is a gap in representation or a missing piece that itself operates, in effect, to draw attention to the fact of absence. In the Antiquities, for instance, the absence of the dance is made evident by the fact of its presence in the contemporary texts of the Gospels. Con- versely, in the Gospels, what is missing is signaled in the daughter/dancer, whose “namelessness and subsequent lack of identity establish her as a kind of blankness in the text” (505). This “blankness” is made even more emphatic, Bucknell suggests, by the biblical texts’ in each case providing a set of images—the daughter, the dance, the head on a charger—with very little description or detail, in this way constituting what he refers to as an “absent visuality” (506). This figure of the visual representation of what is unseen or unseeable or of the simultaneous marking of absence and visuality in the referentiality of the image is, he suggests, the central and defining element in the story of Salome, perceptible not only in the earliest texts but also those of later artists and writers: “it is,” Bucknell writes, “precisely this absent visuality which is made present as the story is reshaped in verbal and visual forms” (506). It is this “absent visuality” that Bucknell suggests also accounts for the story’s reshaping in the later nineteenth century that, I suggest, explains the particular relation between that moment in the verbal and visual histories of the story of Salome and the rise of erotic dance as both take shape around an absence that I hope to demonstrate is comprehensible as the unseen maternal in the genital spectacle. I interpret—or diagnose—the “curious transition” that Pym sees in the works of the later nineteenth- century Salome “corpus” as symptomatic of an anxiety I characterize as “reproductive fetishism,” a pathology that becomes evident in the nineteenth-century representation of Salome, that underpins the performances of Salome dances by enormous numbers of—it is important to note, largely white—women in the first decade of the twentieth century, and that accounts for the commercial value of erotic dance in the Euro- imperial context where it can be seen to have taken shape as a business.

126 | Devereux Because the “rejuvenated” Salome “corpus” is so extensive, I consider only a very few texts from that body of works, focusing on Gustave Flaubert’s 1877 novella Hérodias as a case in which the “problematic transfer” between mother and daughter is foundational. I position this novella in relation to the “castration anxiety” it, like so many later nineteenth-century Salome texts, is often seen to affirm, and to what Sigmund Freud would develop almost contemporaneously in the late nineteenth century as the theory of the Oedipal complex, not to affirm the logic of female “lack” that is seen to be an effect of not having a penis (and in that “absence” to be both “castrated,” or not having a penis, and “phallic,” or having it by virtue of the fact of the possibility of castration indexed by the vaginal “lack”), but to reconsider the Oedipal and its maternal with particular reference to Freud’s suggestion that “the penis … owes its extraordinarily high narcissistic cathexis to its organic significance for the propagation of the species” (257)—or, in other words, to the grounding of Freud’s theory of psychosexual identity in familiar late nineteenth-century Euro-imperial ideologies of reproduction. Finally, because I am interested in tracing the logic that accounts for the business of erotic dance not only as it takes shape in the nineteenth century but as it continues to operate, I turn to the representation of a complicatedly maternalized erotic dancer in the hbo television series The Sopranos (1999 to 2007), in order to affirm the cultural logic of reproductive fetishism at work in this moment and in relation to the contemporary business of erotic dance.

The case ofHérodias Flaubert’s 1877 novella Hérodias, well established as a significant influence upon later works by Jules Massenet (1842 to 1912), Jules Laforgue (1860 to 1887), and Oscar Wilde (1854 to 1900), among others, is a case in point of the centrality of Salome’s mother in texts of the later nineteenth- century “corpus.” In this short narrative, notably named for the mother of the dancer rather than the dancer herself, Herodias appears early in the story. Not in this instance “confused” with the daughter, Herodias is nonetheless represented as more or less youthful and, as is also the case in the 1842 long poem Atta Troll of Heinrich Heine (1797 to 1856), as herself an erotic figure: in her first appearance in Flaubert’s novella we are shown that “a plait of her black hair fell over one arm, its end plunging between her breasts” (74). When she first appears, she enters Herod’s room and speaks to him to communicate information she is pleased with herself for having uncovered:

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 127 Her flaring nostrils quivered; her face lit up with triumphant joy; she shook the Tetrarch as she cried loudly: “Caesar is our friend! Agrippa is in prison!” … Then she revealed what measures she had taken: clients bribed, letters disclosed, spies at every door, and how she had man- aged to seduce Eutychus the informer. (74–75)

Appearing first as a figure defined by her commitment to the state (if Herod’s domain can be characterized in that way), Herodias is also identified at that point explicitly as a mother. After she tells Herod about her accomplishments, including the attempt to seduce Eutyches, she speaks again somewhat defensively: “I did not count the cost! For your sake have I not done more?... I gave up my daughter” (75).4 Herodias’s invocation here of the child she had abandoned (in Flaubert’s version of the Salome story) to make way for Herod’s future children marks her framing as a saliently maternal—if not necessarily “motherly”—figure. Indeed, Herod “wonder[s] what had caused this sudden rush of affection” (75) in referring to her child, drawing pointed attention to her “sudden” constitution of herself as mother; and she herself turns away “in tears” for a short time (75), presumably belatedly (or strategically) grieving for the daughter she had left twelve years earlier in Rome. What we do not know at this point in the story is that that daughter is not in Rome at all anymore, but in Machaerus with Herodias, who, we subsequently learn, has brought Salome to the palace and has hidden her there. One of what we have already seen are her political machinations, the point for Herodias of thus recovering her abandoned daughter is not maternal love but the “intrigues” that Herod recognizes are “in the nature of things, inevitable in royal houses” (75). Herodias’s “intrigues” have to do broadly with her relationship with Herod and specifically with John the Baptist, here, as in Wilde’s play, named Iaokanann, “Hebraic name of John the Baptist” (Neginsky 151). She has, it is made very clear, a vendetta against Iaokanann, who is imprisoned in a cistern beneath the pavement of the palace courtyard that is concealed by—and accessed—through an elaborately decorated cover. She tells Herod a story we are told she has told before about her “humiliation” (77) at the hands of the prophet: 4 Flaubert provides some background in the story to explain this statement of Herodias: “After her divorce she had left the child in Rome, expecting to have others by the Tetrarch. She never spoke of her” (75).

128 | Devereux “There were people on the river bank putting their clothes on again. On a mound to one side, a man was speaking. He wore a camel skin around his loins, and his head was like the head of a lion. As soon as he saw me he spat out at me all the curses of the prophets. His eyes flashed; his voice roared; he raised his arms as though to pull down a thunderbolt. There was no way to escape. My chariot wheels were in sand up to the axles; and I moved off slowly, sheltering beneath my cloak, chilled by these insults pouring down like rain in a storm.” (77)

The knowledge that this man who has thus insulted her was still living poisoned, we are told, her very life, and she is sufficiently enraged by the tetrarch’s refusal to execute Iaokanann not only to express that anger clearly but to devise a plot to secure that execution. That plot is foreshad- owed when, after Herodias turns on Herod and harangues him for his failure to defend her, he sees “a young girl” standing on the flat roof of a house, “dressed like the Roman women” and surrounded by the contents of “a huge travelling hamper” (78); it is now evident to us, if not yet to Herod, that this figure is the daughter abandoned in Rome. It is also evident that Herod is already beguiled by her: even from a distance he glimpses her hand and hair, “the slant of an eye,” a “delicate neck,” “a small mouth” (78); “He could see, from her waist to her neck, her whole torso bending and straightening again as flexibly as a spring ... [H]is breath came faster; his eyes began to blaze” (78–79). That Herodias has brought her daughter for political work is suggested again here in her watching Herod narrowly while she tells him that she does not know who the girl is. Herodias’s desire to be rid of Iaokanann, already intense in the first of the novella’s three chapters, is made more urgent in the second, when the Roman Vitellius, Herod’s guest, locates the prison and demands that the lid be lifted. Iaokanann begins to speak, condemning the Romans and others and decrying again Herodias’s actions in marrying her brother-in-law and, in this version of the story, abandoning her child. He sees Herodias among the throngs of men and, pressing his face against the bars of his prison, cries: “Ah! It is you, Jezebel! “You won his heart with the tapping of your shoe. You whin- nied like a mare. You set your bed up on the mountains to offer your sacrifice. …

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 129 “Lie in the dust, daughter of Babylon! Grind the meal! Undo your girdle, take off your shoe, pull up your skirts, pass across the rivers! Your shame will be laid bare, your dishonor will be seen! Your teeth will break with weeping! The Eternal One abhors the stench of your crimes! Be cursed! cursed! Die like a dog!” (90) Burdened in the story with Herod’s wrongs, and undefended by him or anyone else, Herodias walks away. When she does so, those who have heard Iaokanann’s denunciation of her demonstrate its influence on their perception and thus its danger to her—and potentially Herod’s—power. Eleazar, for instance, notes that, while it was appropriate for Herod to marry his brother’s wife, the fact that “Herodias was not a widow, and [that] she had a child” was “what constituted the offence” (90). The Phari- sees, we see, are likewise “scandalized” (90). Although Herodias disappears briefly from the scene of her humiliation by Iaokanann, she quickly reappears, entering again into what is becoming a scene of growing turmoil among the hordes of guests and of unrest produced by the imprisoned prophet. She reappears first almost immediately after her initial departure to forestall Herod’s attempt to shrug off Iaokanann’s condemnation of his marriage to Herodias as “unfair” (91), given the marriages of others to the wives of brothers, sons, or fathers, and “nonsense” (91), at that point reminding Herod that Iaokanann was not only critical of him but potentially dangerous, since he had “order[ed] the people to withhold their taxes” (91). Shortly thereafter she counsels Herod when he comes to her chamber for advice and “courage” (92), a point at which her machinations around Salome are made once again evident when Herod sees a “youthful” “bare arm” reaching under a door- hanging for “a tunic forgotten on a stool by the wall” (93) but receives no explanation from Herodias about the woman whose arm he sees. Finally, and climactically, Herodias makes a spectacular entrance into the hall where the men are gathered. Into a scene of “uproar” about the imprisoned Iaokanann, we are told, Herodias appeared; on her head an Assyrian mitre held fast by a chinstrap; her hair coiled down to spread out over a scarlet peplum, with sleeves slit from top to bottom. With two stone monsters, like those from the Atrides’ treasure, standing against the door, she looked like Cybele flanked by her lions; and from the top of the balustrade above Antipas, holding a libation bowl in her hand, she cried: “Long live Caesar!” (100)

130 | Devereux Herodias’s entrance, while it draws spectacular attention to herself— and, notably and simultaneously, as her identification with Cybele, mother of the gods, makes clear, as a maternal figure, and, as her “Caesar” procla- mation suggests, an agent of empire—is also carefully staged to set up her Herodias’s daughter’s dance. In the midst of the lull Herodias creates in the gallery, a “young girl” enters, drawing the attention of the spectators who have entrance, while just been looking at Herodias. Salome begins to dance, her performance “inflaming” not only Herod but the male audience in the gallery: she is it draws described as bending spectacular over in every direction, like a flower tossed by the storm. The jewels in her ears leaped about, the silk on her back shim- attention to mered, from her arms, her feet, her clothes invisible sparks shot out, firing the men with excitement … Opening wide her legs, without bending her knees, she bowed so low that her herself … is chin brushed the floor. (102) also carefully When she “[o]pen[s] wide her legs” and “bow[s]” low, the suggestion is that Salome brings the sight of her genitals (what Judith Lynne Hanna staged to set up refers to as the erotic dance spectator’s act of “ocular penetration” [Hanna, “Empowerment” 200–01]) to the climactic centre of her performance. her daughter’s Hanna, an expert witness in many erotic dance cases in U.S. courts and a leading scholar of contemporary erotic dance, has assembled an impor- dance. tant taxonomy of contemporary erotic dance movements. What Flau- bert’s Salome does is comparable to the gestures Hanna charts in which a twentieth- or twenty-first-century erotic dancer might “bend [her] torso perpendicular to [the] ground” (Hanna, “Undressing the First Amendment” 46) and/or do a “spread show (open legs to reveal vagina, ‘go pink’)” (47). In Flaubert’s representation, it is implicit when Salome “[o]pen[s] wide her legs” and “bend[s] her torso,” that she is in principle “going pink” (although she is, as is evident when she stands on her hands, wearing “silken skirts” that still cover her and, in fact, fall around her head in a way that suggests the genitals themselves). Certainly, in his travel notes from his journey to Egypt in 1849 with Maxime Du Camp—notes whose accounts of dancers mark them, as I am not the first to observe, as foundational to his representation of dancers in his fiction and whose relation to the Salome of Héro- dias is evident (Kultermann 191; Steegmuller 221–22)5—Flaubert describes

5 Francis Steegmuller notes that “echoes of Egypt” and in particular of dancers “are heard throughout [Flaubert’s] mature writings. In this third, final, published version of The Temptation of St Anthony (1874), the Queen of Sheba tempts the saint

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 131 the undressing of women when they dance and draws attention on one occasion to a woman on her hands showing him, as he puts it, her “arse.”6 He also recounts the Egyptian dancer known as Kuchuk Hanem doing a dance in which she “falls on her knees” before a cup of coffee, bending her torso, until “gradually the head is lowered, she reaches the cup, takes the edge of it between her teeth, and then leaps up quickly with a single bound” (Steegmuller 118), a gesture not dissimilar to Salome’s forward bend in Hérodias. Given Flaubert’s repeated and detailed descriptions of Kuchuk Hanem’s “cunt”—its shaven exterior and interior “like rolls of velvet” (Steegmuller 117)—Salome’s gesture of bending, it might be suggested, as he represents it, always evokes her genitals. The sight of the genitals is central here; what, however, is also crucial in this scene is the alignment of the eroticized Salome and her mother. Positioned opposite her mother in the gallery, with the male audience in between, Salome, when she approaches the pavilion on which the tetrarch is seated, removes her veil. She seemed then, we are told, to be “Herodias, as she used to look in her youth” (101). More than simply “her mother’s child,” Salome’s effect on Herod here is to remind him of his wife when she was younger: as he watches her he becomes lost in reverie and “forgets about Herodias. He thought he saw her, over by the Sadducees. The vision receded” (101). Herod’s confusion at this point is made even clearer in another translation: as he watches her he becomes “lost in a voluptuous reverie, and thought no more of the real Herodias. In fancy, he saw her again as she appeared when she had dwelt among the Sadducees” (Flaubert, Herodias, Gutenberg). As Herod sees Herodias in “fancy,” in fact, he loses sight of what is “real” and what is “vision”; the images of Salome and Hero- dias blur and the daughter comes to be superimposed over his memory of her mother. As he thus sees Herodias in “fancy,” he loses sight of what is “real” and what is “vision”: the images of Salome and Herodias blur and the daughter comes to be superimposed over his memory of her mother. In the final stage of this process, his “vision” of Salome-as-Herodias “fade[s]” and Salome herself emerges as “no vision” (101) but as a real figure who

by saying: ‘I dance like a bee’; and in his tale Hérodias, one of his latest works, he describes Salomé as dancing ‘like the Nubian women of the Cataracts’ ” (221). 6 In his travel notes on the Civilian Hospital of the Ezbekiyeh, Flaubert describes a “woman, [who] catching sight of [him] in the courtyard, began to do handsprings and show [him] her arse; she does this whenever she sees a man” (Steegmuller 68). He also describes the “Nubian” dancer Azizeh, who “bent completely over backwards, supporting her hands in the position of the dancing Salomé over the left portal of the Rouen cathedral” (155).

132 | Devereux is explicitly identified: the dancer was Salome, we are told (although we already know), the daughter of Herodias. At this point, Salome comes literally to represent or stand for her mother. She is doing her mother’s will, her dance the culmination, we are told, of instruction “in dancing, and other arts of pleasing” (Flaubert, Herodias, Gutenberg) undertaken by Herodias with the sole idea of bringing her daughter to Machaerus so the tetrarch would fall in love with her (101–02). In Flaubert’s story, unlike in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play (although it engages foundationally with this earlier work), Salome is notably not motivated by her own desire for Iaokanann nor by vengeance. When, at the height of her dance, Herod promises her whatever she wants and she asks for the head of Iaokanann, she does so in a way that returns our attention to her mother as the agent behind the demand. In what is represented as an almost Pavlovian response to the sound of “[s]omeone … snapp[ing] their fingers” (102) that comes from the gallery where Herodias is standing, Salome approaches the tetrarch and, “lisping slightly pronounced these words, with a childlike expression: ‘I want you to give me on a dish the head …’ She had forgotten the name, but then went on with a smile, ‘Iaokanann’s head’ ” (102–03). Evident in Salome’s unfamiliarity with even the name of Iaokanann, the identification of Herodias as the agent of this intrigue is emphasized when she responds to Herod’s initial resistance to Salome’s demand with “a torrent of … abuse” (103) and a rage in which she grips the railing of the balcony so fiercely that she breaks her nails. It is further emphasized by the description, following Ioakanann’s beheading, of his head in a charger, carried from one table to another by “the same old woman whom the Tetrarch had noticed that morning on the terrace of a house” with the young girl who was Salome, and later in Herodias’s room. In thus doing her mother’s will and representing her interests, Salome does not only stand for her mother, she also stands, as we have seen, between her mother and Herod. She is now what he sees. In fact, she has become indistinguishable from the young Herodias of Herod’s memory, and the older Herodias is thus obscured, constituted as an absence—or, since her presence behind the image of Salome is insistently marked with visual detail, an “absent visuality”—in the story. When Herod looks at Salome, then, what he does not see is Herodias. Flaubert’s text significantly brings Herodias—eponymous figure of the novella—to the centre of the story of Salome’s dance and the beheading of John the Baptist. Herodias plays a prominent role from the beginning, shapes the narrative, and engineers the outcome. It is her fearsome power that Salome’s dance stages. She has, after all, brought her daughter from

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 133 Rome and had her trained to do a work that is intended to fulfill her own desires and her own “political intrigues.” Moreover, Herodias achieves through Salome’s dance what she had wanted from the beginning: that is, the head—and the life—of the man who had humiliated her twice in public and, we are told, a new certainty of “retaining her power over” Herod (Flaubert, Herodias, Gutenberg). On these terms, what Salome evokes for—and what both excites and, as Flaubert’s description suggests, endangers—her male spectators, when she bends low to the ground and brings her genitals into sight, or when she engages in a performance of erotic dance, is that power, clearly represented here, and, as many critics have suggested, across the later nineteenth- century Salome “corpus,” as phallic. It is not, that is, represented as what Pym characterizes as “female power” (315) per se but with reference to matters of “male identification” (Pym 315) and male “power”; that her power is conceived as phallic works to (undertake to) affirm the site of power as always male, and the danger to men is thus evident when women can be seen to have that power or to have—or be—the phallus. Flaubert is not alone among later nineteenth-century Salome artists in representing the dancer and her mother as phallic. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848 to 1907), for instance, when in his 1884 novel À rebours (Against Nature) he represents his hero Des Esseintes meditating on Gustave Moreau’s mid-1870s paintings of Salome, explicitly invokes the phallic. Des Esseintes notes the artist’s “dressing [Salome] in sumptuous, fanciful garments,… crowning her with a kind of diadem shaped like a Phoenician tower, like that worn by [Flaubert’s] Salammbô, and finally … placing in her hand the scepter of Isis, the sacred flower of Egypt and India, the great lotus” (46–47); he thus notes her constitution, in his view, as a figure of enigmatic “phallic significance” (47). But that “phallic significance” is significantly situated in the body of the mother, as Huysmans’s Salome here merges with the figure of Hérodias in Flaubert’s 1877 text. Crowned with “a kind of diadem shaped like a Phoenician tower,” she echoes the image of Herodias standing in the gallery. The 1894 illustration entitled “Enter Herodias” by Aubrey Beardsley (1872 to 1898) for the English edition of Wilde’s play would visually constitute the mother on these same terms. In this image, an enormous Herodias stands like a column among three male figures, her uncovered breasts erupting from a waistband that is tellingly echoed—affirming the association between the mother and her child—later in the volume in Salome’s costume in the illustration called “The Stomach Dance.” In this earlier image, the male figures framing Herodias are much smaller than she is

134 | Devereux and are further diminished by what is certainly her august presence. On her left stands a naked male figure holding a mask in his hand.7 On her right a toothless, bald creature with talons rather than fingers and toes holds the train of her gown. At her feet is a jester wearing an owl cap and gesturing toward her, his hand just touching the flame of one of three candles standing in holders shaped like claws at the front of the illustration. Powerfully eroticized, her long black hair cascading over her shoulders, Herodias here has more phallic presence than is suggested, we are to see, in the pointedly small organ of the naked figure or the evocatively but diminutively phallic creature who serves here to hold her gown. The sweep of the jester’s arm toward Herodias is matched in the line of her gown: her hand is out of sight, the line of her robe leading below her navel, which is marked, to her genitals, which are covered. We do not, it is implicit, need to see the genitals whose signifying of lack or absence this figure already embodies. To see Herodias, that is, is to see what is not there. Indeed, the title of the illustration itself suggests that the sight of Herodias is the sight of the phallic mother and thus of the lost phallus, something Flaubert’s 1877 text also suggests when Herodias enters the pavilion and sets up the sight of her daughter’s genitals as a performance that will obscure her own machinations and her own desire for the head of Iaokanann. That Herodias has (or is) the phallus is powerfully suggested by her representation when she appears on the balcony. She is crowned, as we have seen, with “an Assyrian mitre,” wearing a “scarlet peplum,” and takes the stage between two “stone monsters.” It is not hard to see her posture here as the embodiment of what can be understood to terrify the male spectators. Embodying the phallus, she suggests that she has already got and has already incorporated it and is thus comprehensible as what Freud would theorize as the phallic mother when, only a few years later, he developed the theory of the Oedipal complex around the little boy’s relationship with his mother and the sight of her genitals, a problem to which I will return shortly. That it is the sight of the phallic mother that will fill the male spectators with fear is emphasized in Flaubert’s story not only in its representation of Herodias as, like Beardsley’s figure, embodying the phallus—thus marking it as already lost—but in its representation of male responses to the severed

7 According to Elliot Gilbert, “ ‘Beardsley divined the autobiographical element in Herod,’ Richard Ellmann remarks, “and in one of his drawings gave the tetrarch the author’s face’ ” (Ellmann cited in Gilbert 147). He also notes “Wilde’s face … self-referentially brooding over so many of the pictures” Beardsley produced for the play (147).

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 135 head. Less horrifying here than the phallic mother, the head is nonetheless an index of castration: it marks what the mother has. Thus, when the head is taken by Mannaeus from Herodias’s elderly female slave and Herodias at the carried from table to table for inspection, what is described most closely is the separation wound or the fact of its severing: “The sharp blade of the centre of the weapon, slicing downwards, had caught the jaw. The corners of the mouth were drawn back in convulsion. Blood, already clotted, lay sprinkled on the Salome corpus beard. The closed eyelids were as pale as sea-shells; and beams from the candelabras all around shone on them” (104). Although an object of hor- is an effect not ror, the male spectators regard it only “curiously” and even with what the Roman Vitellius shows is a kind of “indifference” (104). The head ends up of “confusion” taken away toward Galilee, saliently identified as “heavy” (105) for the men who are carrying it—or, in effect, a sign that communicates with “terrible but precisely distinctness” (Flaubert, Herodias, Gutenberg) the danger Herodias (the phallic mother, the daughter, “woman”) can be seen (because she already of the value has it) to represent to men. and the control The case of Freud It is not new or unusual to read castration anxiety in the representation of biological of the phallic Herodias or, for that matter, in the figure of Salome who stands for her, or, for that matter, in the decapitated head of John the reproduction Baptist. Indeed, it is arguably conventional to see the texts of the Salome corpus marking this anxiety and operating in anticipation of the theorizing that is at the of the castration complex by Sigmund Freud at the fin de siècle. I would like, however, to push at these conventions of reading in a couple of ways, heart of first by bringing the mother back into the centre of the scene of what Pym calls “male identification” (315), where she is, of course, for Freud patriarchal when he theorizes the formation of the male subject around the event of the Oedipal crisis, and, second, by suggesting that castration anxiety is a representation. symptom of the late nineteenth-century imperial ideology of maternal- ism. That is, the “curious transition” (Pym 316) that has Herodias at the centre of the Salome corpus is an effect not of “confusion” but precisely of the value and the control of biological reproduction that is at the heart of patriarchal representation. Although couched by Freud in the terminology of the universal and timeless (this is what always happens when a little boy sees his mother has no penis), the psychoanalytic constitution of the Oedipal boy and his mother and the configuration of a scene in which the absence of a penis—“the fact of being castrated” (Freud, “Some Psychical” 253, emphasis added)—for women is comprehensible as loss is itself one sign of a late

136 | Devereux nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Euro-imperial cultural anxiety about reproduction and a disciplinary measure reminding women of the necessity—here framed as psychosexual and genital—for them to have babies. Indeed, Freud demonstrates that the anxiety he is theorizing is rooted in contemporary concerns about population and power, mobilizing as he does the discourse of Euro-imperial race culture. In his description of the Oedipal in the essay “Some Psychical Consequences of the Ana- tomical Distinction between the Sexes” (finished in 1925), he suggests that “the catastrophe to the Oedipus complex (the abandonment of incest [and desire for the mother and fear that she will take—has already incorporated—what he has] and the institution of conscience and morality) may be regarded as a victory of the race over the individual” (257, emphasis added). That is, the “catastrophe” is also the point at which the young man turns his sight to women other than his mother and his interest to non-incestuous sex for the purposes of reproducing, it is suggested here, “the race.” While Freud’s mobilization of the term “the race” can be seen to be intended to refer largely to the human race, it is important to keep in mind the hierarchized and exclusionary nature of European conceptions of humanness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of the inevitable Eurocentrism of that conception as it is mobilized in Freud’s writing. As Edward Said observed in a 2003 lecture at the Freud Museum in London, “Freud’s was a Eurocentric view of culture” (16). His conception of identity, it might be added, was oriented toward a Westernized universal in which “the past” and “the East” acquired mythic proportions and a value to the construction of the (male) European subject by virtue of their exclusion (or repression), rather than operating as sites for the formation of identity itself, which, despite its associations with pastness and Eastness, remained contemporary, scientific, “civilized,” and European. The framing of the castration complex with reference to the myth of Oedipus produces a certain anachronistic effect, but it also situates the psychosexual development of identity in relation to myths of European origin. Said accounts for Freud’s Eurocentrism, suggesting that his “world had not yet been touched by the globalization, or rapid travel, or decolonization, that were to make many formerly unknown or repressed cultures available to metropolitan Europe” (16). However, he also acknowledges that the human race at this point, in imperial Europe, was not a monolithic and capacious category but a register along which ethnically and nationally identified constituen- cies were stacked in hierarchies that shifted according to the location of their construction. While Freud’s reference to “the species” might, then, appear to encompass “humanity,” its resonances into the twentieth cen-

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 137 tury bespeak its particular focus on European humans—specifically male European humans.8 Freud’s suggestion that one of the “consequences” of the anatomical distinction between the sexes is “the propagation of the species” thus compellingly situates psychoanalysis as yet another discourse of Euro- imperial race reproduction in which women are reminded of the necessity to have babies to ensure the future of “the race.” Here, that necessity is constituted as “psychosexual”: women must want babies in place of the unattainable penis if they are to develop normally. If, as Freud suggests, “the penis … owes its extraordinarily high narcissistic cathexis to its organic significance for the propagation of the species” (257), the construction of the female reproductive organs in psychoanalysis must likewise be understood to operate in the same frame, as the obverse of what is here positioned as primarily responsible for “the propagation of the species.” Thus, only when the “normal” girl “gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child” does she “turn into a little woman” (256); the little boy, conversely, who “permanently” relates to women through either “horror of the mutilated creature or triumphal contempt for her” (252), understands her only always to desire what he has—another “victory of the race” in its hierarchizing of organs in reproduction (the penis wins) and its normalizing of the girl’s “wish for a child.” What is significant in the psychoanalytic discourse of race reproduction and what aligns it with the many representations of Salome that appear in the late years of the nineteenth century is its constitution of the female genitals as simultaneously the sign (the “fact”) of castration and the site of the loss of the mother. That is, the little boy must give up his incestuous desire for his mother in order to “propagate[e] the species”; in doing so, he loses his relationship not only to the site of his potential castration but also to the site of his origin, “that unheimlich place [that] is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning” (“Das Unheimliche” 368). “[W]e may interpret that place,” Freud suggests, “as being [the] mother’s genitals or her body” (368), the one, Freud’s “or” indicates, operating synecdochically to represent the other. Psychoanaly- 8 Said cites Frantz Fanon, who implicitly “extend[s] not just Freud, but all the scientific achievements of European science, into the practice of colonialism” (20), the salient gesture of the nineteenth-century Euro-imperial context within which Freud produced his work. This Eurocentrism has of course been well charted with reference to the psychoanalytic conception of male subjectivity not only in the work of Said but in the important delineation by Fanon of the exclusion of black men from the system of white male subject formation.

138 | Devereux sis, in constituting the little girl as castrated, constitutes her as the site of power as well as loss: she always has what he wants; she always stands for the mother whose embodiment of loss and possession she keeps in sight as an “absent visuality.” If the texts of the Salome corpus are understood as indices of castration anxiety, they should also be understood to index castration anxiety not as a universal and timeless phenomenon but as a cultural phenomenon of the nineteenth century that would culminate in the claiming of this anxiety as a universal condition of masculinity in process and in the concomitant formation of the discourse of psychoanalysis in the 1890s. Castration anxiety, in other words, also and foundationally indexes other anxieties—about the future of Euro-imperial “races,” about patriarchy and industrial capitalism, about empire and the mobility of racially identifiable bodies, about the fixity and impermeability of national boundaries, about labour and gender. If Salome in representations such as Moreau’s or Wilde’s stages a fear of castration for the male artist, then, that fear should be understood not as a universal condition but as an effect of patriarchal ideologies of race and reproduction in the Euro-imperial context of competition for territorial and political dominance through population and settlement in the nineteenth century. The maternal conceived as genital is not inher- ently powerful: motherhood is arguably both less consistently horrifying and less beatific in representations prior to the later nineteenth century; Salome is not represented as an erotic dancer prior to the later nineteenth century. Rather, the maternal takes on power as it is needed and valued, as it is in the imperial context in the later nineteenth century; that power is denied or disavowed in order to maintain the “extraordinarily high” value of the paternal conceived as genital—or of reproduction conceived in patriarchal terms as reproduction by and for its own propagation and the sustaining of its particular economy. Such a gesture of disavowal is evident, for instance, in the shift between the two paintings exhibited by Gustave Moreau in Paris in 1876: Salome dansant devant Hérod and L’Apparition. As Bucknell points out in his analysis of these two works, when the lap of Herod is significantly replaced in the second painting by the floating head of John the Baptist, the decapitation is marked as an act of castration. At the same time, I suggest, the head is marked as a sign of that castration as it is staged in the conception of the mother’s body as phallic (as an effect of the “extraordinarily” or even pathologically “high narcissistic cathexis of the penis”). The glow- ing head (the “apparition” of the title) effectively illuminates the dancer’s body, which, Bucknell notes, “is turned toward the viewer, and her remain-

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 139 ing ornamentation has the effect of drawing the viewer’s attention to her genitals and breasts, thus outlining what they would conceal” (513). The jewels and the head reveal (and obscure) the same thing, the head arguably marking its cost and the jewels its value. In this representation, reproduction conceived in patriarchal terms as reproduction by and for its own propagation and the sustaining of its particular economy is assigned to the (white) female body as its meaning and (as is also made evident in, for instance, the rise of anxiety in Euro-imperial contexts about what would be called white slavery seen as the seizure and ruinous use and circulation of white female bodies in a traffic usually framed as “foreign”), the white female body is constituted as a commodity. Huysmans describes Moreau’s Salome in “The Apparition” thus: She is almost naked; in the heat of the dance, the veils have come undone, the brocaded draperies have fallen, now she is clad only in the creations of goldsmiths and silversmiths, and in pellucid precious stones; a gorgerin encircles her waist as would a corselet, and, like some magnificent fastener, a marvellous jewel flashes with light in the cleft of her breasts; further down, round her hips, a girdle embraces her, conceal- ing the upper part of the thighs where a gigantic pendant hangs, spilling over with rubies and emeralds; finally, on the now bare flesh between the gorgerin and the girdle, her belly swells, dimpled by a navel whose hollow resembles a medallion carved in onyx, a navel that is milky white, tinted with shades of fingernail pink. (48) The ornamentation on Salome’s genitals and breasts in this representation, as in so many others, in “outlining what [it] would conceal” (Bucknell), operates to mark the genitals and sexual characteristics as the focus of the viewer’s attention (and the artist’s anxiety) and also, importantly, to suggest that it is not what the viewer sees (the dancer, the head) but what is not seen that is the source of that anxiety. The body that is thus fetishized is reproductive, the head, like and with the dancer’s jeweled genitals, standing not for the “fact” of castration but for the fact of the little girl and the mother as they are constituted as simultaneously having and not having power and value (the extraordinary value of the penis). The head is aligned with the dancer’s genitals, its function as it stands for the absent mother and the missing penis compellingly reinforced in this painting in its positioning not only in the place of Herod’s lap in the first painting (pre-decapitation, that is, if not necessarily first for Moreau) but on a medallion that visually echoes the jeweled medallions covering her vagina

140 | Devereux and centred between her bare breasts. Salome here reaches for it as if for another jewel for her to take, but she already has it. Thus the ambiguity Bucknell observes as she can be seen to be “reaching out toward (or repel- ling) the dripping head” (513). The fetish thus If what is not seen in Moreau’s L’Apparition is also what is fetishistically “outline[d]” in ornamentation on the dancer’s body and represented by the works, in effect, fetish of the decapitated head, it is the missing mother who is at the centre of this and so many other late nineteenth-century representations. Indeed, to affirm that such an absence would seem to be salient in the case of Moreau’s paintings, which depart from the work of so many of his contemporaries in not focus- what was never ing on Herodias, the (named) mother who in the New Testament accounts of her (unnamed) daughter’s dance demands the head of the man who there was never has objected to her marriage to her late husband’s brother. Let me briefly explain what I want to mean here by this. Salome’s operation as fetish has there. been noted by many critics, notably Charles Bernheimer, Elizabeth Grosz, and Amanda Fernbach, all of whom have attended to the ways in which Salome’s jeweled and highly visible body becomes a shiny object whose affirmation of the threat of castration—through the demand for and gaining of the head of John the Baptist—affirms her function as what Freud characterizes in his essay on “Fetishism” as “a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in—and for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up” (152–53). Salome, represented, as Bernheimer reminds us, in nineteenth-century visual and textual art such as Moreau’s, as a glittering object, thus stands, as Freud defines the fetish, not “for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost” (152) when the little Oedipal boy recognized the fact of his mother’s “lack.” What is important, however, for Freud, is that it is not the penis at all that is at stake here, but the “lost” penis that only comes into being at the sign of the absence of the penis in the mother’s body. To think about it another way, castration anxiety always returns to the site of absence, the hole where what had been “lost” is marked as absence. The fetish object defined in this way by Freud serves both to stand for what had been “lost” and to cover it up or veil it or, in the case of this dance, literally to cover with a veil, the hole replaced by the object that replaces the penis that was “lost” but that was, in fact, as Fernbach observes, “never present” (197). The fetish thus works, in effect, to affirm that what was never there was never there—that is, the “lost” penis or the “fact” of castration in women, the mother’s phallus that, Marjorie Garber notes Lacan suggesting, “can play its role only when veiled” (343).

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 141 This, Freud suggests, is “what the fetish achieves … It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. It also,” he writes, “saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endow- ing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects” (154). In its always referencing female genitals—what erotic dance puts on display—the fetish is arguably always a reproductive fetish, substitute for the uncanny function in psychoanalytic theory, at any rate, of the site of birth and the mother’s genitals, profoundly and contradictorily both heimlich and unheimlich, familiar and unfamiliar, present and absent. At least, in the context of a culture within which women are called upon to be mothers, to reproduce for the “race” (or the future, or the “species,” or the good of humanity), and whose identity, not only in Freud’s theories but across cultural registers, is concentrated and synecdochically constituted in the genital, such is its inevitable meaning, its representation, and the value it thus confers upon female bodies. Salome’s shiny surface (her jewels, her veil, the sheen on her skin like the Glanz or shine on the nose of Freud’s patient in the 1927 essay on fetishism), like the lid on the cover of the cistern in Flaubert’s novella, both covers and reveals a hole at the centre of this signifying economy, a gap in meaning, and the fact of the insistent construction of women as mothers and their simultaneous disavowal, something that is evident across Freud’s theories as well, for that matter, as contemporary theories such as Lee Edelman’s influential account of reproductive futurism. In order to clarify this point, I will conclude by turning away from later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century representations of Salome dancers to some more recent representations of erotic dancers, looking first to the resonantly Oedipal scene of the hbo television series The Sopranos. In this series, which aired between 1999 and 2007, erotic dancers figure as seeming backdrop for the actions, lives, desires, and business of the men who are the fathers and sons of the narrative’s fictional mob families. But the Bada Bing club—the real-life New Jersey club Satin Dolls and the actual location for the filming of scenes in the series, which shared the space of the club for the duration of its run (“The Sopranos,” Wikipedia)—is much more than backdrop. The club—which was always really there and always more than “set”—is at the heart of the series, the location from the first episode to the last of crucial transactions and exchanges between men, including transactions and exchanges specifically involving women, one of which I will focus on here.

142 | Devereux The case of Tracee In season 3, episode 6 (2001), entitled “University,” twenty-year-old Bada Bing dancer Tracee expresses her gratitude to Tony Soprano, who had suggested she take her son to the doctor, by giving him a loaf of homemade date bread. The scene is an awkward one: Tony does not know how to respond to this gift that associates Tracee with domestic femininity, home, kitchens, and with the maternal she has already invoked when she talked to him about her son. Tracee with her loaf of homemade bread confuses—at least for Tony and arguably for the audience—her connection with the club and the ways in which she performs femininity there, in dance and in what is sometimes represented as coercive and exploitative sex with men who are shown to have far more power than she does (owners, their friends, the police). Tracee, bearing this gift from her kitchen into the club to thank Tony—a father—for having given her—a mother—advice about her son, is saliently identified as someone’s mom, her maternity operating in a disturbing friction against her dancer’s performance and bringing into alignment—indeed, into the same body—what the club, its owners, and its patrons work to keep separate. This separation is reinforced throughout the series but is emphasized in this episode’s juxtaposing of Tracee’s story with that of Tony Soprano’s daughter Meadow, living in residence and losing her virginity in her first semester at Columbia. Tracee’s experience of sex in this episode—being penetrated from behind by the violent and volatile Ralph Cifaretto while being cautioned by the police officer whose penis is in her mouth to take care with her new braces—is, at one level, miles away from Meadow’s. Although Tracee’s new orthodontia sugges- tively evokes Meadow’s privileged teenage daughter status, the device of the braces effectively highlights what we see is the distinction being made between Meadow’s first experience of sex and Tracee’s ordinary labour in the Bada Bing. In both cases that distinction is due to the intervention and control of Meadow’s father Tony, who works to keep women separated along the axis of the familial and the “official” maternal of both the mob wife and the daughter who must be protected in order to ensure the continuation of the patriarchal family. Tracee, conversely, is shown working between a patriarchal businessman (the boss’s colleague) and a figure of institutional authority, both of whom exploit (or capitalize on) rather than protect her. Tracee’s identity as a mother continues to generate friction and anxiety in this episode, as she goes again to Tony for advice when she learns she is pregnant with Ralph’s child. Although Tony advises her not to tell Ralph and to terminate the pregnancy, what ends up happening is an encounter

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 143 in which she taunts Ralph in front of other men in the club, he follows her into the Bada Bing parking lot, and after telling her he will marry and support her, instead beats her, killing her by driving her head into a metal guardrail at the edge of the parking lot. Ralph, who is protected in the mob as a “made man,” gets a little punishment from Tony at this time, although more will come later. When Ralph is suspected of killing the race horse he and Tony own, Tony beats him to death and subsequently (and significantly) arranges his decapitation. In that later episode (“Whoever Did This,” season 4, episode 9 [2002]), Tony sees a photograph of Tracee when he looks at himself in the mirror after killing Ralph, belatedly but significantly aligning Ralph’s decapitation with the sight of the absent dancer/mother. In the earlier episode, however, Tony overcomes the death of Tracee, getting only a little upset over the whole messy situation and bringing his grief and anxiety to his mother-figure therapist Dr Melfi. When he tells Dr Melfi the story of the death, however, he replaces Tracee with a young male colleague; thus, like other women in the series, she is symbolically disposed of and replaced. In the meantime, another dancer, a co-worker who suspects what has happened (that is, that Ralph killed Tracee) is advised not to talk about it; a duplicate bejeweled, luminous, and glittering dancer is brought in; and Tracee is effectively erased from the scene that is constructed as an effect of her having brought into distressing union the bodies of the erotic dancer and the mother. The story of Tracee in the episode “University” draws attention to both the centrality and the proscription of the maternal in the body of the erotic dancer. That is, the point is made that Tracee is a mother—this is where the episode begins—and that her maternity must be denied—literally, here, on pain of death. That acknowledgement is fundamental: this erotic dancer is a mother, but she can never be identified as a mother. What this episode suggests is that what is perverse about erotic dance as it is constituted for primarily male spectators is this insistence that the mother is not there, despite the fact that the spectators are looking at reproductive organs and secondary sexual characteristics, at the parts of the body intimately associated with the maternity that is elsewhere rendered as sacred and is valued and hidden in order to protect that value in patriarchal culture (thus the protection of Meadow and her mother Carmella). The point of this episode, or what we learn in “University,” is not only that any dancer is actually or conceivably someone’s mom but that the maternal is rendered as fetish in the smooth, shining, jeweled body of the erotic dancer, as much in late twentieth-century strip culture in North America as in

144 | Devereux the later nineteenth-century Salome “corpus” and the theorizing of the Oedipal where, I suggest, this pathology of the maternal as it subtends erotic dance takes foundational shape.

Works Cited

Becker-Leckrone, Megan. “Salome©: The Fetishization of a Textual Cor- pus.” New Literary History 26.2 (1995): 239–60. Bernheimer, Charles. “Fetishism and Decadence: Salome’s Severed Heads.” Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Eds. Emily Apter and William Pietz. Ithaca: Cornell up, 1993. 62–83. Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham: Duke up, 2008. Bucknell, Brad. “On ‘Seeing’ Salome.” English Literary History 60.2 (1993): 503–26. “The Call of Salome.” New York Times. 16 August 1908, SM4. Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de- Siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford up, 1986. Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Fernbach, Amanda. “Wilde’s ‘Salomé’ and the Ambiguous Fetish.” Victo- rian Literature and Culture 29.1 (2001): 195–218. Flaubert, Gustave. Hérodias. Three Tales. Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer. Oxford: Oxford up, 1991, 1999. 71–106. ———. Herodias. Project Gutenberg. 11 February 2006. gutenberg.org. 15 February 2018. Flavius Josephus. The Antiquities of the Jews. Trans. William Whiston. Project Gutenberg. 4 January 2009. gutenberg.org. 15 February 2018. Freud, Sigmund. “Das Unheimliche” [1919]. Freud: Art and Literature. Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey. Ed. Albert Dickson. London: Penguin, 1985, 1988. 335–76. ———. “Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes” [1925]. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho- logical Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. 248–58.

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 145 ——— . “Fetishism.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hog- arth, 1961. 147–57. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gilbert, Elliot L. “ ‘Tumult of Images’: Wilde, Beardsley, and ‘Salome.’ ” Vic- torian Studies 26.2 (1983): 133–59. Hanna, Judith Lynne. “Undressing the First Amendment and Corsetting the Striptease Dancer.” The Drama Review 42.2 (1998): 38–69. ——— . “Empowerment: The Art of Seduction in American Adult Entertain- ment Exotic Dance.” Music, Dance, and the Art of Seduction. Eds. Frank Kouwenhoven and James Kippen. Delft: Eburon Academic Publishers, 2013. 15–42. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature. (À rebours.) Trans. Margaret Maul- don. Ed. Nicholas White. Oxford: Oxford up, 1998. Jones, Susan. Literature, Modernism, and Dance. Oxford: Oxford up, 2013. Kultermann, Udo. “The ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’. Salome and Erotic Cul- ture around 1900.” Artibus Et Historiae 27.53 (2006): 187–215. Meltzer, Françoise. Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Neginsky, Rosina. Salome: The Image of a Woman Who Never Was; Salome: Nymph, Seducer, Destroyer. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publish- ing, 2013. Pym, Anthony. “The Importance of Salomé: Approaches to a Fin de Siècle Theme.” French Forum 14.3 (1989): 311–22. Said, Edward. Freud and the Non-European. Introduction by Christopher Bollas. Response by Jacqueline Rose. Brooklyn: Verso, 2003. Steegmuller, Francis. Flaubert in Egypt. A Sensibility on Tour. A Narra- tive drawn from Gustave Flaubert’s Travel Notes & Letters translated from the French & edited by Francis Steegmuller. London: The Bodley Head, 1972. “The Sopranos.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org. 15 February 2018. “Whoever Did This.” The Sopranos, season 4, episode 9. Directed by Tim Van Patten. hbo, 2002.

146 | Devereux Wilde, Oscar. Salomé. A Tragedy in One Act: Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas: Pictured by Aubrey Beardsley. 1984. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1967. “University.” The Sopranos, season 3, episode 6. Directed by Allen Coulter. hbo, 2001. Zagona, Helen Grace. The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art’s Sake. Genève: Droz, 1960.

Salome, Herodias, and the “curious transition” | 147

∆ Adam Dickinson Brock University

at is an organ. It echoes with music and memory. Fat is a slowly Foscillating wave. It embodies the constancy of transition, clinging as a perpetually updated fuel reserve, an accumulation expressing—through hourglasses, pears, and apples—the energy balance of a life being lived. Fat is a metaphysics conditioning experiences of reality. It regulates hormones and directs the transitional modalities of metabolic processes. Fat provides stability, padding, and insulation to equip a body in transition, moving through climates and calories, catastrophes and capitalism. Fat feeds us, but Western-style commerce has afflicted many parts of the world with obesity. Children fill with accelerated derivatives of excavated sunlight and profitably supply-chained processed foods. Fat is an archive of this historical moment. Military, industrial, and agricultural history bioaccumulate in adipose tissues. I know this because I have tested my blood and urine for chemicals. I found phthalates, perfluorinated compounds, organo- chlorine pesticides, organophosphate insecticide metabolites, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, flame retardants, triclosan, parabens, bisphenol A, and heavy metals. I also found one of the most widely distributed environmental contaminants on the planet: polychlorinated biphenyls, pcbs. Principally manufactured by Monsanto for industrial and commercial

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 149–161 applications, these highly persistent organic pollutants are lipophilic, collecting like comment sections in the fat of creatures everywhere. Where we test for them, we find them. pcbs constitute a form of writing in the Adam Dickinson Anthropocene, a recursive script where industrial innovations find their has published three way back into the metabolic messaging systems of the biological bod- books of poetry. His ies that have created them. As edits, as subtle revisions to the hormonal most recent book, cascades that precipitate bodily morphologies and affective experiences The Polymers, was a of the world, pcbs are messages in the fat of our humanity. My work, a finalist for the Governor metabolic poetics, attempts to take into account a broader conception General’s Award for of writing that includes the rewritten fat of a species in anthropogenic Poetry and the Trillium transition. The epigraphs to the sections in the following poem “Lipids” Book Award for Poetry. indicate my blood plasma levels of various pcb congeners. Depending on He teaches poetics your age, Dear Reader, you may have slightly more or slightly less than and creative writing at me. But they are in you. Brock University in St Catharines. LIPIDS

Polychlorinated Biphenyls, # 146 Plasma 0.014 ug/L

Angular arches. Inwardly curved, short final stroke compulsively avoids responsibility.

Open top, stabbed. Two parts hypocrisy tight-fisted. Loops in the oval deceptive.

Wide, wakefully streaked. Selfish with hands inhibited by persistent tapering at reversal.

150 | Dickinson Watchful and hooked. Start with secretive sharp-tongues. Selfish figures arc or claw.

Whether right or wrong, emphatically squared. Avaricious finish at the double knot gossip close.

Wide, wakefully streaked. Selfish with hands inhibited by persistent tapering at reversal.

Split stem whip-like long bar mimicry. Self-protective pressures disloyal.

Open top, stabbed. Two parts hypocrisy tight-fisted. Loops in the oval deceptive.

Note on the poem: The first section of “Lipids” uses language fromThe Handwriting Ana- lyst’s Toolkit: Character and Personality Revealed Through Graphology by Peter West (New York: Barron’s Education Series, 2004). Each of the eight stanzas successively treats the eight letters in the word “Monsanto,” using language associated with the graphological analysis of each letter. Until it ceased production in 1977, Monsanto was the source of approximately 99 percent of the pcbs used by U.S. industries.

Δ | 151 Polychlorinated Biphenyls, # 153 Plasma 0.11 ug/L

When my mother’s breasts were building my brain, her milk sent me a postcard from the postwar boom. The message was scrambled. Propri- etary. Windborne elsewhere’s outfall spikes. Face-swirled factories with disjunctive hair loss. Heat-waved skin. Malignant neoplasms of indefinite dose. Headquartered in the subtext were inscrutable companies conflicted with interest, like urban forests or chlorine, sending people to work under crumbling narrative arcs. Smoothing their loose leaf, they made us believe we were victims of atmosphere. My jaw owes its plot lines to my mother’s breasts, even as they are ghost written by power grids redesigning sensoria from a diaspora of unseasonal thunderheads. In a world that persists on bottles of cabin pressure, her milk beaded my lips with formulas.

152 | Dickinson Metabolic Typeface (My urine photographed through a microscope)

Δ | 153 Polychlorinated Biphenyls, # 183 Plasma 0.011 ug/L

baby fat blood fat butter fat

milk fat fatalist fatigue

fat lip fatherland fatuous

fat city fat cheque kill the fatted calf

fat as a beached whale fat as a pig the fat lady sings

chew the fat fat cat fatwa

fat day prefatory fat chance

fat farm puppy fat fat fuck

indefatigable fatuity the fat is in the fire

infatuate unfathomed fat of the land

154 | Dickinson Metabolic Typeface (My hair photographed through a microscope)

Δ | 155 Polychlorinated Biphenyls, # 118 Plasma 0.042 ug/L

Before entering the Zone, the writer, the professor, and their guide fell asleep beside a river. The surface of the water was obese with lather. Waves slurred beneath a heavy blanket while a strong wind picked at the fire- extinguished foam. Tarkovsky filmed Stalker here near Tallinn, Estonia. A chemical plant emptied its effluent just upstream near a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Allergic reactions climbed the faces of the crew. Tarkovsky, his wife Larisa, and actor Anatoli Solonitsyn all died from cancer of the right bronchial tube.

156 | Dickinson Metabolic Typeface (My blood photographed through a microscope)

Δ | 157 Polychlorinated Biphenyls, # 170 Plasma 0.023 ug/L

adhesives and tapes arrive

bushings arrive

cable insulation sets foot

capacitors set foot

carbonless copy paper muscles

caulking muscles

cork breaks in

electromagnets break in

felt worms

fiberglass worms

floor finish creeps

fluorescent light ballasts creep

foam insinuates

hydraulic oil insinuates

motor oil colonizes

oil-based paint colonizes

plastics horn

switches horn

transformers leak

158 | Dickinson Polychlorinated Biphenyls, # 156 Plasma 0.01 ug/L

In Aamjiwnaang First Nation only a third of all babies are boys. The hockey team has disbanded. Girl’s softball was added. Refineries wrap the community in smokestacked train wrecks. Cholera, smallpox, the British, and French split piles of young Anishinaabe men. In unceded lipidscapes, offspring now flare with feedback. Injuries take their course like conclusions draw baths. Boilerplates rust in jurisdictional prudence. The air is enciphered with egg.

Δ | 159 Polychlorinated Biphenyls, Aroclor 1260 Plasma 0.92 ug/L

The real star is the food. It’s attached to every period theme, slicing through herbivores and spinach dip with the heartburn of a meteor. Trenchant and toothsome, huge platters of fowl. The taste excuses representational behaviour, but every crater in the mouth is a landing pad for the unmanned messianism of hormones. Nostalgia for the first bite of prepared predator. Heat hangs sentimentally in the electrical grid’s unpublished correspondence, abbreviated by unreliable litters of pack ice. It’s so obvious in the face and neck that choice means more often superior. Feel the taste of it.

160 | Dickinson What makes them so attractive makes them hard to destroy.

Δ | 161

Is Care Enough? Nandini Thiyagarajan New York University

hen i started to consider the idea of transition, I saw how it Wfunctions both on small and large scales. In so many ways, our everyday lives fit the ebb and flow of transition and change as day turns into night, as we move through our many different selves who we become in different contexts at home, work, play, as our habits (eating, leisure, professional) shift to fit how healthy or unhealthy, productive or unproductive we feel like being. Transition also shapes the bigger picture of our lives as we age, as relationships shift and change either with or without us, as jobs move us around the world, or as the lure of putting down roots inspires us to stay in one place. It would be dishonest of me, however, to wax nostalgic about how much transition means, how wonderful it can be, or how it is something that I have whole-heartedly embraced. To be honest, when I started thinking about change, it scared me. I am not good at changing. I don’t grab any and every opportunity “by the horns.” My approach to change is more akin to a turtle slowly peering one or maybe two eyeballs out of my shell to see if the threat of change was still around and to assess what to do next. I might try to appear carefree, relaxed, calmly able to take on any changes that come my way, but realistically when it comes to change my inner self is a small child clinging desperately to a hoard of

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 163–165 apparently beloved (but mostly unnecessary) teddy bears that I may or may not have played with or even seen in the past few years. I am someone who seeks stability, and, frankly, I don’t like change. Nandini That’s why when I found myself in the second year of the PhD consid- Thiyagarajan is a ering a complete overhaul of my project I was overwhelmed by the ques- Faculty Fellow in nyu tion, What am I thinking? But, after proposing a PhD project on critical Animal Studies. Her race theory, I was thinking about animals. During my master’s degree, I doctoral dissertation, had taken a course on critical animal studies and it changed my life. That “The Animals in course offered one of those precious light bulb moments that shape our Our Stories: Reading early academic careers and that we search for later on. What I learned, Human-Animal History, which can be briefly summarized as an awareness of and indebtedness Kinship, and Inheritance to animals, moved me. So, I changed the most intimate details of my life, in Asian Diasporic from what I ate and what I wore to the products I used to clean my house, Literature,” focused on my makeup and skincare, and how I interacted with my pets. And yet, I the intersections and spent almost two years of studying, writing proposals, grant applications, tensions between animal and papers on my previous topic, trying very hard to resist a change that studies, literary animal was already in motion. studies, postcolonial Don’t worry, this is not a treatise on why you should all care about studies, and Asian animals in ways that overturn your lives. I always find myself prefacing diasporic studies as they my interest in animals with a comforting assurance that I am not “that manifest in stories and kind” of animal rights person. I am skeptical of—if not hostile to—peta’s storytelling. Following various projects, I do not claim that my way of living and caring is superior these lines, her current to yours, and I certainly won’t shame you for wearing leather or eating research looks at the (most kinds) of meat. If I continue with this honesty, I would have to tell relationship between you that my animal politics and how I enact them are in a constant state of grief, animals, the transition as I negotiate my concern for animal welfare with my concern environment, and stories. for human rights and environmental concerns. Although we are taught to welcome change and that our ways of thinking should unsettle and shift, the obstacles to changing academic projects can be daunting. It is not easy to start studying animals within an inher- ently human-centred discipline. How can we learn to start thinking and caring differently? Where do we start? In my research on literary animals specifically, I am constantly followed around by the question, In the face of amassing and urgent political concerns across the world, why are literary animals important? I don’t have easy answers. The assertion that animals are densely entangled in the stories of the diaspora in ways that demonstrate how they move alongside us throughout our histories drives my research. It is crucial to see the interconnectedness of human and animal lives, deaths, and oppressions because we do not live in isolation. Animals live and die

164 | Thiyagarajan in our stories, memories, and histories, and we draw them close to us in so many ways that extend but are not limited to how we read, write, and study literature. We come to know ourselves and our place in the world in relation to animals, and I would argue that we owe them attentiveness at least and reciprocity at best. But, whatever conviction and drive you put behind it, rearranging and redistributing attention and care is tricky. How do we organize care when what we care about is constantly shifting? Especially when thinking about animals, we need to learn when to let that focus come to the fore and when it has to recede. How can we learn to care about something without leveraging it off of something else? Changing attentiveness and interests can and should challenge ways of thinking that we hold dear, but what do we do when our interests collide, challenge each other, and don’t fit together? In a world that is constantly in flux, for better or worse, as we watch the anthropocene unfold into species extinction, seemingly endless environmental degradation that stretches across land, forest, and oceans, and climate change it is tempting to ask, Is care enough? This world that we have inherited challenges us to complicate and overturn old patterns of thinking to see how it bears down significantly—but differently—on humans, animals, insects, plants, trees, and water. Even though it can (and should) be scary, learning to think and care differently is certainly a good place to start.

Is Care Enough? | 165

Through a Glass, Darkly: An English Scholar’s Vision of University Transition Lynn Wells First Nations University of Canada

n their invitation to participate in the annual English Studies in ICanada Congress roundtable, the journal’s editors asked contributors to consider the statement that “some of the most critical intellectual commitments of the academy are predicated on the matter of change.” As someone who has spent her career with one foot in the world of the literary scholar and teacher and the other in the sometimes murky land of university administration, I have had the advantage of dual positions from which to observe the changes that have defined the Canadian academy over the past decade, and I continue to do so today. Many of the transitional aspects of current academic life in Canada see us returning to the contemplation of ideas that have fascinated humankind for centuries: the nature of truth, the value of critical thinking and free expression, the intersections of culture and identity. These ideas are at the heart of some of the most quickly moving debates in the contemporary university: the needful defense of facts, scientific and historical, in a climate seemingly determined to render them powerless; the increasingly troubled conflicts around who can speak and what gets spoken on our campuses; and the complex negotiation of inter- cultural understanding in an era of indigenization and urgently needed national reconciliation. While I have had the opportunity to respond to

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 167–170 these issues in my various roles as a university leader, I have found that my formation as a scholar of contemporary fiction has provided me with a distinct way of seeing that helps to make sense of the rapid and often Lynn Wells is a incomprehensible changes manifesting themselves in the academy today. Professor of English at Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we have all been consumed First Nations University with the contemporary moment in which we are living, trying to under- of Canada, where she stand its significance. Some literary writers take on the role of interpreters recently served as Vice- of the present, reflecting the world as it happens. There are necessary blind President Academic spots, however, in writing about the “now,” since novelists are limited in for six years. She is their perspectives and must operate without the benefit of hindsight or the author of two retroactive meaning. In his essay “On the Present in Literature,” Ernst books, Ian McEwan Bloch writes, “For without distance, right within, you cannot even experi- (2010) and Allegories ence something: not to speak of representing it, to present it in a right way of Telling: Self- which simultaneously has to provide a general view. In general, it is like Referential Narrative in this: all nearness makes matters difficult, and if it is too close, then one is Contemporary British blinded, at least made mute” (2). In his 2016 novel Nutshell, Ian McEwan Fiction (2003). Her literalizes Bloch’s argument through a parodic retelling of Hamlet from interests include urban the point of view of a fetus who must try to secure his own survival by fiction and ethics in blindly deciphering the actions of his murderous mother and the mores of literature. the rotten state in which she lives. This intrauterine narrator, who receives all of his information by eavesdropping on his mother’s conversations and the podcasts to which she listens, symbolizes the limited and necessarily distorted perspective of our efforts to understand the contemporary world, including the constant changes in the academy. McEwan’s improbable conceit gives us a model for how to think about the public assault on truth that has unfolded over the past year and the role that universities can play in serving as a bulwark against it. While the transition to the world of fake news and alternative facts has happened swiftly before our mostly uncomprehending eyes, the academy, like McE- wan’s fetal narrator, should survive the swirl of confusing developments by sticking to the first principles that define its being: the creation and dissemination of knowledge, which should be objectively obtained, freely shared, and openly debated. As Peter B. Kaufman argues in The Chronicle of Higher Education, we are “descending into a post-truth age” in which “information is being weaponized” (2 April 2017). Universities have the power to resist this dangerous devolution by serving as the inviolable space in which truth, however contested and threatened, still matters. In recent days, the defense of truth has become complicated by highly fraught discussions of freedom of expression on our campuses, which seem, at times, to lead to the curtailment of speech in apparent con-

168 | Wells tradiction of our academic mission. The well-publicized case of Lindsay Shepherd, the teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University who was reprimanded for showing a video of controversial psychology professor Jordan Peterson that was offensive to some transgender students, was an object lesson in the tensions between free speech and the need to create safe and inclusive learning environments. Although Ms Shepherd was later exonerated, this issue exposed a growing tendency on campuses in Canada and across the world to put freedom of expression under pressure when it has the potential to cause harm or even outrage. In my graduate class on McEwan’s work, for example, a passage in Nutshell in which the narrator mentions trigger warnings occasioned an impassioned dispute, which ended amicably but with no agreement, between students over whether or not such special precautions are appropriate or necessary. As academics, these sorts of dilemmas will be a real test of what we believe the university as an institution should be in the twenty-first century. Appreciating the intent behind gestures that seem to limit expression will require us to pay careful attention to our students, whose views of the world and how it treats certain groups and individuals may be very different from those of faculty. Again, the study of literature provides us with a method for confronting these difficulties; as “readers” of the current dialogue in the academy, we should follow the counsel of Martha Nussbaum, who advocates for ethical reading as “a relation characterized by true altruism, and by genuine acknowledgement of the other as other” (48). While we may not ultimately support the impetus to restrict speech in the academy, we will gain a greater understanding of the situation by listening attentively to all of the voices involved. Finally, the Canadian academy is undergoing a massive transformation in its efforts to include the worldviews of indigenous peoples, whose perspectives have been muted or missing for far too long. In my home institution, First Nations University of Canada, I have been privileged to work in an environment where First Nations and other indigenous perspectives have been given primacy for over forty years. But other Canadian universities are just now engaging with the project of “indigenization,” working to find ways of bringing together indigenous cultural values with the traditional “Western” approach that has dominated the European academy and its followers since the Enlightenment. For non-indigenous faculty and administrators (of whom I am one), the challenge remains to incorporate indigenous knowledge while avoiding cultural appropriation, a destructive impulse vividly demonstrated by the concerns raised about the heritage of Canadian fiction writer Joseph Boyden and the ensuing

Through a Glass, Darkly | 169 controversy with the Writers’ Union of Canada magazine. Like so many other momentous changes in the contemporary university system, this necessary metamorphosis will call on our skills to think critically, to imagine the minds of others, and to open our hearts to new narratives in the context of an expanding but always defensible concept of truth. As English scholars, we have much to offer Canadian universities in the current and perpetual work of transition.

Works Cited

Bloch, Ernst. “On the Present in Literature.” 1956. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Cambridge: mit Press, 1988. Kaufman, Peter B. “In the Post-Truth Era, Colleges Must Share Their Knowledge.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2 April 2017. McEwan, Ian. Nutshell. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford up, 1990.

170 | Wells And All the Arts of Peace: Phonography, Simplified Speling, and the Spelling Reform Movement, Toronto 1883 to 1886 Heather Murray University of Toronto

n entering the large front room, which is on the Osecond flat, we were almost overwhelmed with the witchery of the scene. The brilliant electric light, shining through the glass front, and casting its silvery sheen over the statuary, house- plants, and pottery with which the room was decorated, with the parlor furniture strewed among these decorations, and the gay throng of ladies and gentlemen moving about at ease; it needed no lively imagination to make one feel that he was enjoying a moonlight ramble in some horticultural paradise. Three fine transparencies on the large panes, symbolizing respectively music, literature and shorthand, added to the beauty of the scene. On a pleasant summer evening in 1883, Toronto was treated to a gala con- versazione and a celebration of modernity, as Thomas Bengough moved his offices across the street to larger premises at 29 King Street West and launched the Shorthand Atheneum. Electric floodlights blazed in the street (a standard feature of any grand opening today, but a novelty in Toronto then), illuminating the entire city block and shining, symbolically, through the images of the three sister arts on to the gathering within. The crowd was treated first to refreshments—cake and strawberries, since it was June,

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 171–204 as well as temperance drinks—and then to a “feast of reason” opened by John Taylor, a former city alderman who was a leading proponent of the free library movement. Taylor—himself one of the “old-time phonogra- Heather Murray phers” (Bengough’s Cosmopolitan Shorthand Writer 3.6 [October 1882]: teaches in the 61)—praised the “winged art” of shorthand and stressed the increasing Department of English at importance of its practice but also indulged in a moment of levity, ribbing the University of Toronto the proprietor for his inconsistency: “He only wondered that the leader and is an affiliated faculty of Phonetics did not spell his name phonetically, so that we might know member of the Graduate whether it was Bengo, Bengow, Bengof, Benguf, or Bengup” (“Opening” 6). Collaborative Program in The phonetically-minded audience greeted the joke with laughter, for the Book History and Print family name could well be one of the examples of spelling irrationality Culture, as well as a past- that reformers like Bengough were fond of employing. Richard Lewis, president of accute. She the well-known elocutionist and reading promoter, also was a platform has published articles speaker, along with “Professor” Samuel Clare, a teacher of penmanship. and books on topics such They were speaking in their respective roles as the president and the secre- as the history of English tary-treasurer of the Canadian Spelling Reform Association, an organiza- studies, the history of tion founded only weeks before, which now would meet at Bengough’s new reading and readership, premises. Thomas Bengough himself closed the proceedings, mentioning and Canadian cultural the approaching International Congress of Shorthand Reporters to be organizations, with held in Toronto in August and expressing hope for the effect that meeting especial focus on the would have “upon our shorthand and phonetic organizations” (“Opening” relationship of literary/ 7). It appears to have been a most satisfactory evening, at least accord- cultural organizations to ing to this account, which was drawn from the journal launched almost populist and progressive simultaneously with the Shorthand Atheneum and the Canadian Spelling social movements. She Reform Association: The Atheneum: An Advocate and Exponent of Edu- is writing a book on cational, Literary, and Social Progress; or, as it was called in its expanded the early years (1925 to and even more utopian title, The Atheneum: A Nineteenth-Century Journal 1950) of the Gerrard of Progress; Devoted to Literature, Journalism, Science, Shorthand, Type- Street Village, Toronto’s Writing, Simplified Speling, Penmanship, Music, and all the Arts of Peace. bohemian artistic “Speling,” it should be noted, is not an error in the title; rather, it flags a enclave. new direction that many spelling reformers were about to take. While the opening of the Shorthand Atheneum may seem to twenty- first century eyes like the launch of a business school, the account makes it apparent that the goals were further-reaching. The elevated title of “atheneum” signals this as well, as does the grouping together of music, literature, and shorthand in an illuminated tableau. In 1883, “shorthand” and “atheneum” did not create an oxymoron; neither did penmanship and peace, spelling and music, sit uneasily together for the progressive viewer, who would have discerned the relationship of these seemingly disparate elements. Indeed, then, to see their relationship was a particularly modern

172 | Murray thing to do; modernity was signaled, too, by the technological élan of the electrically-lit opening and by the “nineteenth-century” of the Atheneum journal title. To increase the flow and speed of human communication, to develop transcription systems that were accurate and not susceptible of misunderstanding, to make information widely available and easily intelligible: in all these ways could typewriting, or shorthand, or the development of new spelling systems be considered (like literature and music) the “arts of peace.” In keeping with the new spirit (and taking liberties with the well-known lines from Sewell’s epilogue to Addison’s Cato) the Atheneum editorialized in a lightly amended spelling, urging all “progressiv people” to give consideration to the cause of educational and communicative reform: No pent-up school-room shall confine our powers— The whole unbounded universe is ours. (Atheneum 1.1: [1])

Bengough and his audience members were by no means alone in their vision of the socially transformative potential of spelling reform and in their understanding of its place within a network of related causes (temperance, political suffrage, educational enfranchisement, Canadian nationalism). In assessing the phenomenon of spelling reform in the 1880s, there are multiple roads of approach for the later cultural analyst: to contextualize the movement and its promoters in relation to the “new” communications and information technologies, for example, alongside telegraphy, typewriting, sound recording, photography, and developments in mass printing and print distribution. A related line of analysis is to consider spelling reform as one of a number of nineteenth-century efforts to establish uniform systems of measurement for weights, distances, international time, and monetary currency (an endeavour that brought academics and scientists into the spelling reform fold). Alternatively, one could situate it within the evolution of nineteenth-century studies of languages, of their histories and etymologies, and the fields of linguistics and ethnography as they were developing at the century’s end, particularly with reference to the debates over how many signs were required to accurately encode human speech sounds and the attempts to develop an internationally-recognized system for doing so. In a related, fourth context, spelling reform (and phonography in particular) bore upon nineteenth-century attempts to develop artificial languages (what are now often called conlanguages) of which there were many examples, Esperanto being the best-known survivor. A fifth context could be supplied by the emergent field of sound studies, and here the relationship of late-century spelling reform to the acoustic theories being

And All the Arts of Peace | 173 developed by Alexander Melville Bell and his son, Alexander Graham Bell, are of especial Canadian importance. All five of these contexts will be relevant, from time to time, in the narrative to follow. However, for the purposes of this piece, I will attempt to place the efflorescence of spelling reform activity, in one particular city and within the compacted space of a few years, into the context of English-Canadian social reform movements. Who was drawn to the cause? Why did the goals of the movement seem exciting to—and plausible to— its adherents? What were the external pressures determining the course of spelling reform, and what were its internal debates? What were the Canadian antecedents to the spelling reform movement of the 1880s, and what were the eventual impacts? In taking on these questions, and placing spelling reform into the interlinked frames of cultural, educational, and intellectual history, this essay will focus on the work of one set of reformers and their coordinating organization of the mid-1880s, located in Toronto and its environs but strongly oriented to the movement as it was developing internationally, and hopeful that their endeavours would inspire others across the Dominion. Given some substantial and, in some cases, surprising gaps in the archival and print record (very little in the way of personal papers for a number of prominent reformers; only one surviving issue of The Ath- eneum; no minute book and, it seems, almost no newspaper accounts for the Canadian Spelling Reform Association), this research has involved a transecting of material from various sources. It relies to a large degree on the vociferous exchanges in letters-to-the-editor columns and on newspaper coverage of public lectures, conventions of teachers, scholarly meetings, and the like, as well as the minutes and reports of other organizations with an interest, whether enduring or passing, in the cause. Particularly useful were the copious letter books of William Houston to which I was given generous access (now publicly available, they then were in family possession); and I had the unique privilege of interviewing someone who personally knew this important social reformer. Given that Houston was born in 1844 and flourished most as a writer and as a reformer in the 1880s and 1890s, this opportunity testifies eloquently to the vagaries, and serendipities, of primary source research.

174 | Murray Pitmanite pioneers The interwoven enterprises of the summer of 1883—the opening of the Shorthand Atheneum, the launch of the new Atheneum journal, the foundation of the Canadian Spelling Reform Association, preceding the Third International Congress of Shorthand Reporters—were in many respects a continuation of the mission of the mid-century phonographers, who promoted, albeit in various ways, the phonetic transcription system first developed by Isaac Pitman and who advocated the use of phonotype for printed materials as well. (Pitman initially described his invention as “stenographic sound-hand,” to differentiate it from the many shorthand systems based on abbreviations, efficient pen-strokes, or signs for letter clusters [Pitman Stenographic].) A purely phonetic system for reading and writing, with each sound signified by one symbol and each symbol representing one sound only, would, they believed, resolve the irregularities and mystifications of English spelling, place language usage on a rational basis, make near-universal literacy possible, facilitate commercial transactions and legal proceedings, and lead to political transparency. (Hansard, the transcription of parliamentary debates and procedures, was made possible only through the development of advanced shorthand systems; the same is true of accurate verbatim political and legal reporting.) To use terms in common circulation at the time: such a system would be a “steam writing” or a “railway writing,” powerful and technologically advanced. In the 1850s and early 1860s in Canada West, phonographer William Orr promoted just such views through his journal The Canadian Phonetic Pioneer and other publications, while his fellow Pitmanites used local newspapers to publicize the cause and created correspondence circles to transmit phonographic skills (see Murray and Portebois). Although the Pitmanite movement was increasingly fractured as the century progressed, and the decades had revealed the insufficiencies of the system, many still held to those views. But by the early 1880s there were additional ways of thinking about English language reform, and these are indicated most economically by the slightly differentiated mandates of the three new institutions being launched in 1883, although on first glance they seem almost indistinguishable in their purposes and personnel. Thomas Bengough, who had been part of that early generation of phonographic pioneers, had remained faithful to the “original” system of Isaac Pitman, advertising that his Shorthand Atheneum would teach the “original Phonetic Shorthand, of Isaac Pitman—the leading system of the world” (advertisement Canada Citizen and Temperance Herald 4.45 [9 May 1884]: [540]). (Paradoxically,

And All the Arts of Peace | 175 the “original” system no longer was directly connected with Isaac Pitman himself, for he had tinkered so continually with the system of his devising that his current scheme was more or less unworkable; an earlier version of The Pitmanite shorthand, now known as the “original,” still flourished in the United States and had achieved acceptance in Canada.) That Bengough braiding intended to make a living from a Shorthand Atheneum shows the degree to which stenography was becoming accepted as a business skill, and also together of its importance in government and legal sectors, but this acceptance came at a cost. Phonography, once classed by its adherents with the other liberal phonography, and communicative arts, and viewed with political optimism by those who saw it as a route to educational enfranchisement, now was, increasingly, phonotypy, and seen as a vocational attainment.1 The new journal The Atheneumseems to have been intended to keep the metaphor of the “winged art” alive spelling reform, and to reinforce the connection of shorthand to other reform currents of the day. Evidence for this must rest on its first issue and ambitious title, which however. While the magazine is listed in Toronto directories for several years, and may or may not have continued to be published, only the first characterized issue is extant. Most significant of all is the establishment of a separate spelling the endeavours reform association, indicating the degree to which the causes of Pitman shorthand and of phonographic spelling no longer were synonymous. of mid- Some Pitmanite practitioners, while keen proponents of the system, were skeptical as to whether or not Pitman phonography ever could achieve a century broadly-based acceptance and whether or not it was practical on a mass scale for educational purposes. Further, a number of rival schemes for reformers, phonetic reading and writing had developed as the century progressed (Deseret and Romic, for example, succeeded in turn by the ur-version of by now was the International Phonetic Alphabet). And, perhaps most significantly, by this point, many (but not all) spelling reformers had abandoned the becoming vision of a fully-phoneticized transcription system, convinced that there were too many obstacles to its adoption, and had turned their hopes to unraveled. a new scheme, the simplified spelling or “simplified speling” listed in the Atheneum’s full title. In other words, the braiding together of phonography, phonotypy, and spelling reform, which characterized the endeavours of mid-century reformers, by now was becoming unraveled. But what path,

1 In 1886, for example, the British American Business College advertised that it was teaching phonography (Toronto World 6 January 1886: 3), and in the same year phonography was being taught (presumably as a useful skill) at the Girls’ Industrial Institution, a place for “friendless girls” (Toronto World 17 April 1886: 1). Toronto World, henceforth tw in citations.

176 | Murray then, should the language reformers pursue? The initiatives of the summer of 1883 marked the beginning of a period of intensive spelling reform activity on several fronts. But even as they devoted revitalized energy to the cause, spelling reformers were at considerable variance as to what was to be achieved and how to go about it.

All the arts of peace Thomas Bengough certainly had earned the sobriquet of the “leader of Pho- netics,” at least in Toronto, and he also enjoyed a reputation as a businessman, a court and political reporter (that is, recorder), and as a publisher, the latter through intermittent involvement with the family firm Bengough and Co. (see Spadoni). In our day, however, he is lesser-known than his illustrious brother, the editor, publisher, political humorist, and cartoonist J. W. Bengough. (If the reader tries to think of a comic image of Sir John A. Macdonald, it is the Bengough cartoon that has sprung to mind.) But Thomas Bengough was a significant presence in his own time, often in the avant-garde of the new communications technologies. He is credited with bringing one of the first typewriters into Canada, and he offered early instruction in its use. He convened a conference of Canadian shorthand reporters in 1882 at which a number of the new typewriting machines were on display, and at the international conference he hosted in 1883, not long after the opening of his Atheneum, there were demonstrations of the new Stenograph, a stenographic recording machine. The city recorder for the county of York for several decades, he developed principles for civic and court reporting that were adopted more widely. Indeed, his name still is commemorated on the website of the National Court Reporters Associa- tion in the United States, for his early efforts to standardize and regulate the profession and its practices. In his bold commitment to technological progress, and his continuing faith in the utopian elements of the Pitmanite project, Thomas Bengough stood out from the proprietors of the commercial colleges springing up in Canadian cities and mid-sized towns. In the early 1880s, he still was on the stump for the “art phonographic,” giving platform performances reminis- cent of those of United States phonographers Stephen Pearl Andrews and Oliver Dyer some thirty-five years before, designed to demonstrate to audiences the ease with which Pitmanite skills could be acquired and to dazzle them with displays of lightning-speed transcription (see Stern 60–61). In one presentation at the Shaftesbury Coffee House (a temperance restaurant and meeting place intended for working men), twenty lads from the newsboys’ lodging were in the audience, and Thomas Bengough showed

And All the Arts of Peace | 177 how even these “street arabs” could be taught to read phonographically in just half an hour (TW 2 December 1882: 1). In another introductory lecture on phonography, drumming up interest for his winter evening shorthand course, a class of boys from the Model School performed the same feat in half the time (TW 13 October 1883: 1). But it must have been becoming apparent to Thomas Bengough that the moment of phonography was passing and that the energy no longer was there to push for a universal adoption of phonography and phonotypy and of the specialized transcription and typesetting skills and equipment they required. Thomas Bengough had used his earlier papers, the Canadian Illus- trated Shorthand Writer (1880 to ?) and Bengough’s Cosmopolitan Short- hand Writer (1881 to 1883?), to test different schemes for the achievement of phonetic spelling, even as he continued to teach and to promote the Pitmanite system. He wondered if the early Pitmanites had been too radical in their ideas and too impractical as to the difficulties of widespread implementation of their scheme (Bengough “Fonetics” 14). Challenged on this point by another Pitmanite, he justified his position from “a Cana- dian or American point of view”: since North Americans generally were uneducated about phonics in the first place, a purely phoneticized alphabet would in all probability fail to take hold. Perhaps it would be better, then, to settle for an enlarged alphabet, using the current roman alphabet with some key additions, at least as an interim measure. And it might be prudent to wait until learned philologists had the opportunity to judge which Pitmanite system was superior: phonography as altered over almost fifty years by Isaac Pitman or the “original” system, from the late 1830s, as preserved and promoted in the United States by brother Benn Pitman and by Elias Longley (Bengough Editorial 92). In the early 1880s, prior to the founding of his Atheneum and the similarly-named journal, Thomas Bengough seemed to have had a strong sense of the problems and the missteps of the past, but the way forward was not as apparent. Writing in 1880, he surveyed the state of affairs: What shall we do with our English language? The majority of people are content to allow the “arbitrary spelling” to remain. A considerable number would strictly oppose any interference with the much-loved forms of words, however unphonetic and misleading they may be; while a determined majority [sic] are bent upon the destruction of current forms. Every month brings us a new “phonetic alphabet.” Some are elaborate com- plications that can never become popular; others differ from ordinary spelling mainly in the inversion of the ordinary letters,

178 | Murray insertion of small capitals, and similar expedients; while the American Philological Society [sic] asks only for the omission of superfluities. The question of phonetics is one of curious interest now, but will probably be of importance to all literary men and educators in the near future. (Bengough “The Spell- ing Reform” 103–04) Within three years, a number of Toronto men and women—educators, writers, reporters, and cultural reformers of various inclinations—indeed had become drawn to the topic; a new direction forward had appeared, not only as a result of the reflections in which people like Thomas Bengough engaged but as a result of dramatic developments in England and the United States. For the spelling reformers, on or about April 1883 everything began to change.

The “violent clash ov orthografical worlds” In April 1883 the Philological Society, of England, unanimously approved a set of rules for simplified spelling developed in concert with the American Philological Association and already adopted by the United States association. It was a watershed moment, setting the practical and ideological course for spelling reformers throughout the English-speaking world and marking the culmination of some eight years of renewed interest in the topic, after the interregnum of the 1860s and early 1870s once the initial excitement over Pitmanism had subsided. In 1875, a committee of the American Philological Association had been struck to investigate the issue of spelling reform, and it reported favourably on the question the next year; in 1876, the American Philological Association hosted an Interna- tional Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography, designed to coincide with the centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. (An immediate result of the Philadelphia convention was the establishment of a first Spelling Reform Association in the United States, with a young Melvil Dewey elected as its president; a British counterpart would commence in England in 1879 [see Tauber 92–95].) The American Philo- logical Association, proceeding cautiously at first, developed in 1878 a list of eleven words that its members felt could achieve ready acceptance in amended form (hav, giv, for example), while the Philological Society approved its own set of amendments in 1881 which were, in turn, approved in part by the United States association (March, Spofford et al. 140–43). But in 1883 the philologist and Anglo-Saxonist Henry Sweet was deputized to be a bridge between the two scholarly societies, which in consequence issued a set of ten agreed-upon principles, or “Partial corrections jointly

And All the Arts of Peace | 179 recommended for immediate use,” to be employed in achieving a consistent and intelligible amended spelling (dropping e or u when silent [hav, color]; changing s to z when so sounded [abuze]; changing ph to f when so sounded [fonetic], and so forth). The two bodies would continue to develop and to clarify these principles, later expanding the principles to twenty-four, and the United States association, feeling that illustrative lists were needed, also developed a roster of a thousand amended words and, in 1886, an expanded list of some thirty-five hundred. More significant than the word choices, however, were the principles developed in tandem by the two groups, for the existence of a consensual, and clarified, set of guidelines galvanized future efforts. After an initial organizing meeting in Toronto to consider the feasibility of a national organization for Canada that would accomplish similar work, a published announcement invited interested men and women to an open meeting for the third week in June (TW 20 June 1883: 4) Reaction to the recommendations of the two philological associations, and to the plans for a Canadian organization, was immediate, and it is worth taking a detour through one such debate, as enacted in the letters to the editor columns of the Toronto World—a paper of liberal inclinations, sympathetic to the spelling reform cause—to see the initial contours of the arguments both pro and con, as the spelling reformers and anti-reformers expressed them. There had been some letters to theWorld on the issue prior to these events. Indeed, in response to an (unpublished) complaint about spelling reform from a Montreal group self-described as “the English phonetic society for Canada” (the Phonetic Society for Canada, proponents of the “English” style associated with Isaac Pitman [Phonetic Journal 14 February 1885: 73]), the editor of the World already had cautioned correspondents that specialized letters on technical points should be sent to the phonographic journals for publication, even though the World put its weight behind the movement (TW 27 July 1882: 2). The editor clearly was aware of the tendencies of phonetic reformers to detailed and sometimes hair- splitting discussion, and perhaps in order to forestall such debates the World had printed an excerpt from The American Short-Hand Writer titled “Wherein Spelling Reformers Agree” (TW 17 July 1882: 4). But a flurry of correspondence appeared in the spring of 1883 nonetheless, involving more fundamental disagreements. In an opening salvo, an irate Mr Crook- enden accused the spelling reformers of being the “most extraordinary and unabashed crotchet-mongers” and of being “conceited vandals” intent on ruining “our beautiful mother tongue.” (The term “crotchet” is perhaps an unintentionally felicitous choice, simultaneously referring to a cause which

180 | Murray was thought crankish by many and to the hooks or “pot hooks” for which the stenographic system popularly was known.) More crudely, the letter- writer accused the spelling reformers of committing an “outrage” upon authors and of taking a scalping-knife to the language (issue not extant; cited A. Hamilton letter TW 24 May 1883: 2). In return, Dr Alexander Hamilton of Port Hope, a physician who had trained as a phonographer in his youth, provided a measured response, citing respectable public personages in support of the cause—he had received, that very day, a letter from Dr Dawson, the principal of McGill, writing that he felt very strongly “the evils of our defective alphabet”—and noting that Mr Crookenden appeared “to reverence the printed form of the language, and even make a fetish of it”(TW 24 May 1883: 2). (Here Hamilton makes the familiar phonographer’s point, that it is the written form that should adapt to the oral manifestation.) W. W. Watson of Seaforth, declaring himself a spelling reform advocate for more than thirty-five years, and clearly still of the old school, was gratified by the formation of the new society, but he urged the intended association to print all of its materials in phonotype and suggested that the World also publish a regular half-column in the Pitman type (TW 13 June 1883: 3). A pseudonymous anti-spelling reformer, soon to be revealed as Reverend J. Carry from Port Perry, already had published a letter to the editor expressing concern that the “classics” would become obsolete if the spelling reformers had their way, to which a first response was made by William Houston, an editor at the Globe who was actively involved in the organizational work for the new association. In fact, wrote Houston, the spelling of authors in the past already was variant—Milton wrote both winds and windes, for example—so spelling reform would interfere not with the “original” Milton but, rather, with the regularization that was a later superimposition. Such editorial amendments, Houston further argued, had obscured the fact that the earliest English spelling was intrinsically phonetic, as W. W. Skeat’s Specimens of English Literature amply had shown. He gave assurances that spelling reformers did not seek a major “upheaval” but, rather, an adoption of changes that were receiving acceptance elsewhere (TW 15 June 1883: 2) Dissatisfied, the reverend correspondent reasserted his belief that the earliest English authors were not phonetic in their spelling and demanded again what was to be done to protect the literature of the past from tam- pering (TW 12 June 1883: 2). In reply, Dr Hamilton took a turn at shooing- away the spectre of literary obsolescence, noting that texts constantly were being reprinted and most readers encountered them in new editions anyway. To further rebut the idea that reformed spelling would separate

And All the Arts of Peace | 181 readers from their literary heritage, Hamilton wrote his letter in sentences alternating between traditional and reformed orthography, to demonstrate that “Ther need be no violent clash ov orthografical worlds.” Just as What is more Canadians had moved from a jumble of regional shilling systems to the current dollar system in 1859, so too, he wrote reassuringly, could they revealing is the adapt to a regularization of spelling (TW 18 June 1883: 2). Indeed, Wil- liam Houston already had availed himself of the World’s letters column demonstration to provide a detailed exposition of the new amended spelling principles (issue not extant, presumably 5 June 1883), but lest readers be alarmed by of the degree to the technicalities, Samuel Clare hastened to add that Houston’s letter also demonstrated that much could be accomplished by way of simplification which spelling even with the current “imperfect” alphabet (TW 21 June 1883: 2). With this letter—and with the announcement, signed by William Houston, of a pub- reformers of the lic meeting the next Saturday for “those interested in the reform of English spelling” (TW 20 June 1883: 4)—the correspondence drew to a close. day, including Some of the possible points of objection to spelling reform emerge strongly enough in the exchange in the World. The opponents worry that the founders of a reformed spelling, if widely adopted, would sever contemporary readers from the heritage of the past, obfuscate the stylistic nuances of important the new spelling writers, blur the language’s etymological traces, or otherwise vandalize the cultural treasure that is the English language. (These are common reform points of contention if somewhat erudite, but there are other criticisms that could be made, and often were: for example, the inefficiencies or association, expenses of a transition from one system to another, such as producing new school textbooks or new sets of printing type.) The reformers, in turn, were at rested their argument upon their long-standing belief that language, like any other system of human devising—linear and weight measurement, for variance among example—should be based on rational principles and regularized. More recently, the work of A.J. Ellis and, particularly, of W. W. Skeat, on the themselves pronunciation of early English, fueled the reformers’ contention that in the past, usually dated to the age of Chaucer, English spelling reflected even at the the speech sounds of the day but subsequently had drifted away from that halcyon moment through centuries of superimposition of Latinate rules, very moment during which written English became continually more irregular and more difficult to learn. The points being made in the World, on both sides, are that they were representative rather than novel. What is more revealing is the demonstration of the degree to which undertaking a spelling reformers of the day, including the founders of the new spelling reform association, were at variance among themselves even at the very unified effort. moment that they were undertaking a unified effort. Thomas Bengough

182 | Murray assumed the broad church view, as was clear from the portmanteau title of his Atheneum publication, intended to promote phonography and simplified spelling simultaneously, despite their incompatibilities. Of course there still were some who clung stubbornly to the Pitmanite vision, like Mr Watson from Seaforth. Samuel Clare, who had cut his phonographic teeth during the 1850s and who, like Bengough, continued to teach phonography along with penmanship and other business skills, also envisioned an expanded transcription system, although he believed it should take the roman alphabet as its base. Dr Alexander Hamilton, who was developing expertise in audiology, and following with keen interest new developments in the field of acoustics (as being undertaken by Alexander Melville Bell and Alexander Graham Bell, for example), also assumed the eventual need for new phonographic symbols. William Houston, on the other hand, was a convert to the simplified spelling initiative and, while he supported in principle the idea of an improved or expanded alphabet, also was a gradualist and therefore (despite being at this point a Cana- dian cultural nationalist) would lean toward “American” forms of spelling simplification, along the lines laid out by Noah Webster. (Was he the “H” who had written to the World somewhat earlier, in response to a report of one of Thomas Bengough’s platform performances, wondering if Ben- gough’s phonography was “too innovative” to win ready acceptance and suggesting that the time had come for a new type of reform [TW 8 July 1882: 2]?) There are points, too, in this correspondence, where a spelling reformer might seem at odds even with himself, as can be seen in the mixed metaphors of Dr Hamilton’s letters: will there continue to be two coexistent orthographical worlds or will one linguistic “currency” replace the other? Does spelling reform represent the technologically new or the etymologically old, or some combination? A few months after the debate in the World, a cogent essay in the Canada School Journal advising teachers to pay close attention to spelling reform—an issue upon which they would inevitably be called upon to take a stand—outlined the three “classes” of spelling reformers in a useful way. The first class is spelling regularizers (such as Noah Webster), a class, which comprises those who seek to correct such anomalies as now may be corrected without any change of alphabet. They admit that such a measure of reform would not be thorough, but they contend that it has the merit of being feasible. Words similarly

And All the Arts of Peace | 183 pronounced should, in their view, be similarly spelled, as far as our present defective alphabet will admit of it. There also was a second class, of alphabetic amenders, which “embraces those who wish to retain our present alphabet and add to it new characters enough to make it perfect.… The introduction of new letters to the number of from fifteen to twenty causes the commonest words to take on a foreign look, which must prove an obstacle in the way of the advocates of this method.” The third class, most commonly associated with the Pitmanites, is composed of “those who seek to dispense altogether with the present defective alphabet” and instead would substitute a new one which would combine the quality of simplicity of form with that of constancy in the use of the letters.… They allege that the confusion caused by these new marks would be no greater than that caused by necessary additions to our present alphabet [as in the second scheme], and they contend that the new marks might be made very much more simple in form than those which have come down to us from sources some of which are now of great antiquity. (“English Spelling”)

The new spelling reform association, then, would be brought into effect at a time of well-defined divisions, and the exchange of letters in the World shows people central to the association—Bengough, Hamilton, and Hous- ton, and others—holding different allegiances, even as they launched the new organization, clearly hopeful that the guidelines of the philological associations would provide a common point of departure. While there is little evidence about the operations of the spelling reform association after its initial meeting, such schisms may be the clues to understanding the subsequent course of the movement in English Canada in the 1880s and to reconstructing the history of the association dedicated to the cause.

A “permanent” association Despite the run of letters in the World, the first account of the new association appeared in the Globe, since William Houston assumed the role of corresponding secretary at that first public meeting. The headline read, “Spelling Reform. Organization in Toronto of a Permanent Association” (Globe 25 June 1883: 6). Few details are given of this gathering at the premises of Thomas Bengough, but the list of selected officers speaks to the association’s inclinations and its reform orientations. Richard Lewis, the teacher and elocutionist, who had introduced classes on phonography

184 | Murray to the Toronto Mechanics’ Institute some twenty years before, became president, and Samuel Clare, the professor of penmanship, was made secretary-treasurer, as has been seen: both were identified as being with the Toronto Normal School (that is, the higher teacher training institute). William Houston ma, the new corresponding secretary, is identified only by his location in Toronto: presumably readers of the Globe would recognize an editor of that paper. These three officers would retain their places for the life of the organization, according to the annual listings in the Toronto directory. There were nine vice-presidents, apparently chosen for gender or geographic representation, with the list headed by Mesdames Curzon and McEwen. Sarah Anne Curzon, the poet, playwright, and pioneering woman journalist, was an assistant editor at the Canada Citizen and Temperance Journal, for which she penned regular notes on women’s organizations including suffrage news (see McMullen).2 Most recently, she had been involved with the Toronto Women’s Literary Club, founded by Dr Emily Stowe, which had played a pivotal role in forcing the admission of women to the University of Toronto (see Murray “Great Works”). The Toronto Women’s Literary Club now had transmuted into a new organization, the Canadian Woman’s Suffrage Association, the first national suffrage association in the country, and Jessie (Turnbull) McEwen was the inaugural president. McEwen’s involvement with the spelling reform association would have been brief, however; in 1884 their family moved west to homestead, and she continued her feminist and social reform work in Manitoba (see Fast). The remainder of the vice-presidents were men. A. Andrews ma, from Niagara, remains unidentified; J. H. Brown was from the Deaf and Dumb Institute in Belleville. (To gloss Brown’s involvement: while it might appear that a system of sound-based transcription would have little to offer the hearing-impaired, many believed that phonetic regularization could provide the underpinning for a system of “visible speech”—the term is Alex- ander Melville Bell’s—that would codify the tongue, throat, and lip place- ments required for pronunciation.) R. Fiedler from Montreal was possibly connected with newspapers in some capacity. The physician Alexander Hamilton, from Port Hope, has appeared above in the letters columns of the World, and Mr Hope from London presumably was the A. Hope who also wrote to the World, seconding the suggestion that the newspaper print

2 Issues of the Canada Citizen prior to autumn 1883, also the time period of Cur- zon’s involvement, are no longer extant, although Curzon may well have covered the opening of the Atheneum and the founding of the spelling reform association in that journal.

And All the Arts of Peace | 185 some materials phonotypically (tw 18 June 1883: 2).3 W. H. Huston ma (not to be confused with William Houston) had been a talented student at the University of Toronto and now was the instructor for both classics and phonography at Pickering College, a co-educational institution founded by progressive Hicksite Quakers, of which he would become principal the following year. In 1881, he had prevailed on the authorities to let him start a phonography class, which soon numbered twenty-five students (Varsity 2,7 [25 November 1881]: 68). W. W. Tamblyn ma (not to be confused with his son W. H. Tamblyn, later head of English at the University of Western Ontario and later also connected to the spelling reform world), having been a medalist in the modern languages at Toronto, now was a high school principal in Bowmanville. The educational credentials of this group are unusual, including three masters’ degrees, a rarity at the time. More expected are the already-existent connections among this group. Hamilton and Tamblyn were in the same cohort at University College and Houston overlapped with them as well (University of Toronto Class and Prize Lists); Huston also was a University College graduate. Clare, Ham- ilton, and Lewis had long-standing associations, in some cases as far back as the 1850s, through the phonographic community; Houston, Curzon, and MacEwen had been actively involved in women’s suffrage issues, and Bengough and Curzon through an earlier club devoted to liberal thought, also called The Atheneum, and so on, in a spiderweb of prior and current connections. Given their locations across (and, in several cases, out of) the province and their professional commitments, it is not clear how involved the vice-presidents were intended to be: their roles may have been supportive or symbolic. Steering of the organization was provided by a committee of five Toronto members, of whom Thomas Bengough was one. The other members are more obscure but are indicative of the constituency for spelling reform: William A. Douglass, ba, then was an accountant and soon to be an assistant manager at a loan and savings company; he appears, slightly later, in the 1889 Toronto directory as the president of a new Anti-Poverty Society, a group that espoused the principles of the radical economist and “single-taxer” Henry George. Another member, J. J. Pritchard, was teaching reading and pronunciation, phonographically, to inmates of the Central Prison (Atheneum 1,1 [August 1883]: 7) and probably was the John J. Pritchard identified in the city directory as a clerk and, later, as a com- 3 The not-always-accurate tw gives the name of the letter-writer as Wn. Hope, but in a later letter W.N. [sic] Watson refers to that correspondent as A. Hope (tw 21 June 1883: 2).

186 | Murray mercial agent. S. Smith was likely the Samuel Smith also listed as a clerk in the same source, although E. Barker remains unidentified. Seemingly, it was an auspicious start, with competent organizers and high-profile supporters. However, this is the only report of a Canadian Spelling Reform Association meeting that has come to light so far, and its records, if they were kept, cannot be located, although the association appears in the Toronto directories for 1885, 1886, and 1887, with the address given as the Parliament Buildings for the latter two years.4 In a time when corresponding secretaries regularly sent reports of meetings to the press and when the recording secretary characteristically took assiduous minutes, the absence of both are worth remarking. In only a few months, Houston would leave the Globe to take up the position of the Legislative Librarian (thus the mailing address for the association), while the librarian would switch to the Globe, in a swap that illustrated why both positions were regarded as Liberal sinecures. As a result, the association may have lost its assurance of coverage in the Globe—there is some evidence that Houston’s parting with the Globe was not, at least initially, a happy one, although he would retain a life-long association to the paper—but the absence of items in the World is more puzzling, given that newspaper’s interest in the spelling reform cause. Perhaps there were no further public meetings outside of the initial organizational one: the division into honorary vice-presidents and a small working group suggests that the purpose was to provide an initial imprimatur to the cause, with actions undertaken by a smaller and efficient core of members. Judging from the course of spelling reform events in the next few years in Toronto, it is possible that the role of the Canadian Spelling Reform Association was not to function as an association qua association but to do its work through other standing bodies, by persuading them to action. But it is possible, too, that dissent was caused by bringing together such a variety of spelling reform proponents under one umbrella, even though the adoption of simplified spelling rules by the Philological Society and the American Philological Association suggested a way that congruence could be achieved, however temporarily. As always, the personalities of the participants may have affected the association’s rise and its fall. In the next few years, although he never was represented in the newspaper reports as acting on behalf of the Canadian Spelling Reform Association, its corresponding secretary would become the most public face of the 4 The association is listed as the Canadian Spelling Reform Society (rather than Association) in the 1886 Polk directory, but this may or may not indicate an actual name change.

And All the Arts of Peace | 187 movement, at least in central Canada. A persistent and polymathic cultural reformer, William Houston had taken up spelling reform with the same energy he devoted to co-education, women’s suffrage, university reform, and the Chautauqua movement, and his advocacy of the spelling reform cause was, for good or ill, wound up both in his personal relationships and in his involvement with other issues.

Improvable English and how to improve it William Houston pronounced his name as “how-ston” and this appears to have been a departure from family practice, undertaken either for spelling reform or philological reasons.5 His insistence upon this says much not only about his life-long preoccupation with linguistic matters but his perpetual tendency to walk the idiosyncratic path. In constructing this portrait of William Houston, I have had access to family records, some of which still remain in private hands, and the extraordinary opportunity, in 2000, to interview a family member who remembered him well.6 Dr Eila Hopper Ross, a former associate professor of medical illustration at the University of Toronto, was the great-niece of William Houston, who in his later years lived with her family in Burlington, Ontario. Ever the news- paperman, he would spend much of the day with the Globe, she recalled, of which they needed to take two copies so that he could annotate his: a linguistic reformer and an educator to the end, he would correct his own copy and fulminate about the spelling and grammar. Even in his eighties, he was intending to write a pamphlet on “Improvable English and How to Improve It” (Globe 3 February 1927: 13). The title could serve as a slogan for Houston’s spelling reform career. He was a man of strong constitution, a formidable long-distance walker, eclectic in his interests, tenacious in his commitments, and sometimes, as even family members would admit, abrasive and dogmatic. But his eye was fixed firmly on the common good and his sympathies were large: according to family lore the alfalfa still

5 Information on the pronunciation was provided by the late Dr Eila Hopper Ross. He may have adopted this pronunciation for phonological reasons or because he felt this was more consistent with a derivation from (what the family believed to be) the original Norwegian “Hourston.” 6 An important figure, Houston appears in most biographical dictionaries of the time, but an especially useful source is the clipping file for him in Graduate Records utarm. After the period described here, he continued to serve as the provincial (legislative) librarian, for nine years in all, and then began an illustrious career as a school superintendent and inspector, responsible (among other innovations) for the introduction of kindergarten classes to Toronto schools.

188 | Murray growing on Manitoulin Island comes from the sacks of feed he took for the starving deer, on his trips there as an inspector of schools. Originally from the Orkney islands, the Houston family settled first in Lanark County and next near the present-day town of Paisley, Ontario. William The father, James Houston, a sailor and then lumberman, had been the beneficiary of a strong Scottish education, and William received a solid Houston, with training in his turn, including Greek and Latin. James Houston built the first school in the Paisley area, and William, like his brothers, taught there his strong before going to the Normal School for formal teacher training and, then, in William’s case, to University College at Toronto. Here he was a prize-win- connections to ning student and also the president of the University College “Lit” in 1875 (a position he would hold again in the 1880s, as an alumni member), reading the fourth estate, in the subjects of English language and literature and history and political science. (His degree of ma would have been bestowed ad eundem.) On to government, graduation he worked first as a reporter for the Globe, then with the St John Telegraph and the Toronto Liberal, before returning to the Globe. (Sent to to teachers, and cover the Philadelphia exposition of 1876, coinciding with the American Philological Association’s international convention on problems of English to university orthography, he may well have received his first exposure to the idea of spelling reform when there.) Especially in the 1880s and 1890s, Houston students and retained a continuing and complex involvement with his alma mater, making several high-profile but unsuccessful applications for appointments to alumni, was university chairs at Toronto. With his endless senate resolutions, schemes for reform, and criticisms of the administration, he appears to have been particularly well a perpetual thorn in the side of the university’s president Daniel (later, Sir Daniel) Wilson. Turning to Daniel Wilson’s diaries and reading his placed to act. fulminations about the provocative Houston, one wonders whether the steadily moral Scot, gazing upon the towers of University College, ever was tempted to thoughts of defenestration. They would war over spelling reform as over many other matters, locking horns throughout the spring of 1884, in an exchange of letters in Goldwin Smith’s The Week, in which a thinly disguised Wilson, Houston, Alexander Hamilton, an unidentified “Senex,” and Goldwin Smith himself, all participated with vigour. Houston’s campaign to allow simplified spelling on university examination papers would prove especially galling, as shall be seen. William Houston, with his strong connections to the fourth estate, to government, to teachers, and to university students and alumni, was particularly well placed to act on behalf of the new spelling reform organization. Apparently he took the title of corresponding secretary quite literally: while he was indeed a voluminous letter writer, Houston did much

And All the Arts of Peace | 189 of his “corresponding” in person and went on the stump. He campaigned on three fronts—teachers’ associations, the Canadian Institute, and the University of Toronto Senate—first lobbying with lectures and addresses, public and private correspondence, and published essays, and next placing resolutions before these bodies, asking them to accept spelling reform in principle, to devote further attention to the question, or, as in the text of his resolution to the University of Toronto Senate, “to accept words spelt in accordance with rules recommended by the English Philological Society” on the written examinations. However, Houston was not simply furthering reforms that had been undertaken elsewhere or promoting principles that had received United States and British endorsements. Both his devotion to the cause of spelling reform and the arguments he made on its behalf were deeply determined by the sort of historical training he had received in English language and literature at Toronto in the 1870s, as well as the efforts to reform the study and teaching of English literature, at all curricular levels, in which he played a leading role throughout the 1880s. He promoted the modernization of the curriculum and of pedagogic practices and also argued forcibly for the inclusion of older English texts, and the study of Anglo-Saxon, in the program at Toronto (“Old English in the Universities”; and see wh to Hon George Ross [Minister of Educa- tion] 19 May 1884; and wh to Dr Beattie 16 May 1886, both Letterbook 1). These initiatives, which might seem at first glance somewhat contradictory, were unified within a fully elaborated programmatic for literary study on a rational, historically based, “inductive” model, which Houston both developed and publicized and within which his support for spelling reform may be understood.

“A Much Needed Reform” Houston already had been speaking to teachers on the topic of spelling reform, and it seems effectively so: his address to the Ontario Teachers’ Association the preceding fall had been lauded in the Toronto World with the favourable headline “A Much Needed Reform” (tw 30 October 1882: 1). Within two months of the Canadian Spelling Reform Association’s formation he returned to the Ontario Teachers’ Association annual meeting, informing them of the existence of the new organization and delivering an address devoted to etymological topics. He illustrated the movement’s goals by contrasting English to Italian, where every letter has a corresponding sound, and rebutted the argument that spelling reform would destroy the historic etymology of words, in this case drawing upon Max Müller to support his view that the present state of words was a false indication of

190 | Murray their origin. Spelling reform, he said, was “simply trying to return to Old English,” although by this Houston meant something different from our current use of the term: by “Old English” Houston is referring to the spelling of Chaucer’s, or even Shakespeare’s, day (“Spelling Reform”). Clearly he was a skilful communicator and canny, too, at handling critics: when queried why he did not use reformed spelling in his own correspondence, he replied that spelling was a convention and solely for communication among members of a community; thus he would use it when others agreed to do so (tw 15 August 1883: 1). A missionary of the cause, Houston advertised himself as willing to address regional, even local associations, on “a subject which has so intimate a connection with the teacher’s work” and which, for most of the audience, would have the further “charm of novelty” (wh to Alex Campbell mp, 26 January 1884, Letterbook 1). By his own account, he addressed nearly a score of such associations (wh to Dr Beat- tie, 26 May 1886, Letterbook 1). But he was sometimes tempted to incau- tion, as witness his response to Principal George Munro Grant of Queen’s, who remarked on the importance of good spelling in his address to the Ontario Teachers’ Association the following year. In a letter to the Globe. Houston queried whether spelling—traditional or reformed, simplified or simply “incorrect”—should ever be taken as an index of someone’s educational achievement. “I challenge Dr. Grant, or any other person, to give a single good reason for regarding a man’s mode of spelling English words as a proper criterion of his literary or professional attainments” (Globe 30 August 1884: 9–10). It was enough to be arguing for reformed or amended or simplified spelling, and it was a bold move to argue, as Houston often did, that spelling could simply be variant, a reflection of the pronunciation particular to a time or place, or a matter of rules whose application was a question of personal judgment. But to come out saying, as he did here, that spelling simply didn’t matter—and this, from a university man and former teacher—must have seemed like heresy to some. Nonetheless, his arguments were taken seriously: in 1886 the Ontario Teachers’ Association struck a committee of seven (of which Houston himself was the secretary) to investigate the question, and their report was presented the following year to the Minister of Education and then to the provincial legislature by means of the minister’s own report (“Report of the Committee”). The committee stuck with fidelity to its somewhat narrow mandate, survey- ing actions taken by government bodies and educational authorities, in the United States principally, following from the recommendations of the British and the American philological associations, but offered no recommendations or suggestions for further action. The report was, however,

And All the Arts of Peace | 191 suggestive in showing the degree to which the new simplified spelling guidelines had mobilized educational reformers to the south. The Canadian Institute, a scientific society founded in 1849 (now the Royal Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Science) was a further focus for Houston’s efforts. Houston presented his first paper to the institute on the related topics of spelling reform and Old English spelling and pronunciation in the spring of 1884, a somewhat more technical address than those to the teachers’ associations, drawing upon the recent scholarship of both Skeat and Ellis. A version of his paper, “Old English Spelling and Pronunciation,” reached a wider audience under the title “Old English Spelling” in the Canada School Journal, but the précis provided in the institute’s minutes is both brief and detailed, and so worth citing almost in full: Mr. Houston dwelt for sometime [sic] on the changes which have taken place in the pronunciation of English words since Anglo-Saxon, in its various dialects, was the spoken language of the common people of England. The principal authority cited was Mr. A. J. Ellis, who has established by a wide induction from a variety of sources a considerable number of indisputable conclusions, though there are still many points left doubtful. As pronunciation changes, spelling should have changed also, and, as a matter of fact, it did so to some extent before the invention of printing, and to a less extent since.… The reader of the paper cited numerous instances of old spelling from Milton back to Chaucer to show (1) that spelling in Old English was more phonetic, and therefore better than now; (2) that spelling varied with pronunciation in the use of words by the same writer; and (3) that so far from adherence to a uniform system of spelling being regarded as a chief criterion of scholarship, old writers allowed themselves a great deal of latitude in their modes of spelling words.… In conclusion, Mr. Houston contended for greater freedom of orthography, not in the interest of diversity, but in the interest of simplicity of spelling. (Proceedings 1883–1884: 219)

Houston elaborated his conception of the relationship between oral and written forms, arguing “that as a written language is but the dress of spoken language, spelling ought to change as pronunciation changes” (tw 10 March 1884: 1). Houston’s argument to the institute may seem somewhat uneven. On the one hand, he recommends altering spelling backwards, to reflect its

192 | Murray etymological roots and to get closer to the phonetic spelling that, so spelling reformers believed, characterized both Old English and Old French. On the other hand, he suggests attuning spelling to reflect the pronunciation of the current day. (The bogey of pronunciation bedevils Hous- ton’s argument as it would the spelling reform movement more generally: which national, or regional, or dialectical variant would be selected as the norm?) And, as always in Houston’s career, his ability to promote any one cause was affected by the public view of his personality and his politics. The Toronto Daily Mail gleefully seized on Houston’s Canadian Institute address. He surely was correct to complain about the prevalence of bad spelling, mocked the Mail, for this was amply evidenced in any number of Liberal papers: “The methods of Grit orthography are truly incomprehensible.” And as to Houston’s comment that “spelling is a superstition,” he doubtless would think so, continued the Mail, as a member of the party of reformers equally prepared to repudiate the law of right and wrong, the Ten Commandments, and the principle of “truth and decency in political matters” (Daily Mail 11 March 1884: 4). TheMail ’s opportunistically satiric report shows where spelling reform could be placed on the political, and party, spectrum.7 The interest of the Canadian Institute in this and other etymological questions was strong, and in the spring of 1886 Houston brought forward a resolution asking the institute to establish an investigatory committee, including himself of course, “appointed with instructions to ascertain and report what steps have been taken by Governments, Universities, Colleges, and Learned Societies to secure the general introduction of a more simple and phonetic system of spelling English words than the one at present in force.” Speaking to introduce the resolution, Houston recapitulated a long history of spelling reform efforts and referred to current initiatives in Spain, Germany, and Holland. While one member felt the resolution did not go far enough, and preferred that the institute take a more active role, and while another expressed concern that he would need to learn to spell all over again, and perhaps restudy his favourite authors if their style appeared differently, the resolution passed with the one recalcitrant exception (Proceedings 1886–87: 188–89; tw 19 April 1886: 4). This committee appears not to have reported back to the membership, however, perhaps due to the shifting philological interests of the institute members,

7 Items in the Daily Mail provide a good sampling of the arguments and rhetoric of anti-spelling reformers: in addition to the items above, see 7 March 1886: 5; 30 April 1886: 5 (about Houston); 15 May 1886: 10; 25 May 1886: 6.

And All the Arts of Peace | 193 or perhaps because their commission would have duplicated the efforts of the committee convened by the Ontario Teachers’ Association at the same time and with a similar mandate. Milton and The irrepressible W. H. Shakespeare Houston had encountered friendly, albeit occasionally skeptical, audiences at teachers’ conventions and at the Canadian Institute but would face a would have far tougher opposition at the University of Toronto, when he introduced two different motions pertaining to spelling reform into the senate in the failed an spring of 1886, among a barrage of other motions. In this instance, he did not intend to ask the provincial university to lend support in principle, or Ontario junior to investigate, or to keep an open mind. Rather, Houston now attempted, at least initially, to intervene in the university’s own practices and stan- matriculation dards, for spelling was held to be important in the university of the nineteenth century, as Houston himself would be the first to admit. (Milton exam. and Shakespeare would have failed an Ontario junior matriculation exam, as he was fond of quipping [tw 19 April 1886: 4].) Even his supporters may have been concerned that more serious reform measures currently before the senate—regarding scholarships, residence halls, and others—risked being devalued by association with Houston and his latest hobbyhorse. The university administration, too, had reached the end of its tolerance for Houston’s constant schemes for improvement on matters, such as the design of courses, that they would have considered internal. Having achieved some success among educators in the primary and secondary schools, Houston must have felt that the initiative for spelling reform could be logically extended to the university sector: not only were important philologists supportive of the cause (Henry Sweet and Max Müller along with Skeat and Ellis, for example) but also weighty professorial figures: “Lounsbury of Yale College, Professor Childs of Harvard, Professor Cor- son of Cornell, Prof. March of Lafayette, and the late Prof. Halderman of Pennsylvania,” as he enumerated them (wh to Dr Beattie, 26 May 1886, Letterbook 1). But it would be almost impossible for Houston’s Senate resolution to be heard on its merits, given the history of his dealings with the university. Further, apart from his antipathy to the resolution’s proponent, university president Daniel Wilson already was of decided views on the topic. Printed under a thinly disguised “D.W.,” his attack on the spelling reformers had started the chain of correspondence in The Week, satirizing Houston’s presentation to the Canadian Institute and commending the Fonetic Nuz (a journal of the English Pitmanites) for its comic value. More seriously, Wil-

194 | Murray son rebutted two of the fundamental premises held by the reformers with arguments that may be referred to his joint background as an antiquarian (with a strong interest in hieroglyphic systems) and as an ethnologist and anthropologist (of evolutionary tendencies). The reformers are in error, he writes, in believing that the sole function of the alphabet is to represent sound; rather, it is a conventionally understood “device intended to represent the word, and its meaning or idea, to the eye.” Further, orthographic reform need not be taken up as a cause since it already was happening, over generations, through an “almost unnoted process.” Of course, such change occurs “happily not at the mad rate,” Wilson finished with a flourish, “that the advocates of advanced views, communism, agnosticism, and all the other nostrums of the restless lovers of change for its own dear sake would have us resort to” (The Week 27 March 1884: 264). Indeed, the spelling reform resolution was swiftly sunk, but as usual Houston was undeterred. At the senate meeting of 11 March 1886, Hous- ton gave notice of his future motion: “That the University Examiners in all Faculties be instructed to accept words spelt in accordance with the orthographical rules recommended by the Philological Association of England [sic] and the American Philological Association,” and at the Sen- ate meeting two nights later this motion was placed on the floor and lost (Minutes for Senate, 11 March 1886; 13 March 1886). Daniel Wilson, who was in the chair, recorded his relief after the mammoth session: “A session of University Senate … and so an end, having negatived, withdrawn, or otherwise disposed of eleven statutes, motions, etc. of the irrepressible W. H., including one that ‘phonetic spelling be accepted at University examinations’! I had to preside; so could not escape” (Daniel Wilson Diary, 13 March 1886). Whatever the merits of the proposal, the spelling reform resolution must have been diluted amidst this barrage of business (and Houston may have lost the patience of even the more sympathetic sena- tors with another motion of that day, that the senate should conduct its meetings with “open doors”). Indeed irrepressible, as the president said, Houston had a fallback position and gave notice of a future motion, “That a special committee composed of [the names were to be later specified] be appointed to ascertain and report to the Senate what action had been taken by State authorities, Universities, Colleges, and Learned Societies to secure the general adoption of a method of English spelling more simple and phonetic than that in common use” (Minutes for Senate, 13 March 1886). Perhaps feeling even this wording was too strong, Houston changed “adoption” to “introduction” when the motion went on the floor. But the

And All the Arts of Peace | 195 motion was ruled out of order, presumably on the grounds that the striking of such separate committees lay outside the Senate’s normal tasks. With hindsight, it is unlikely that Houston’s spelling reform efforts ever could have succeeded in the Senate. Indeed, in contrast to his proposals to reform the curriculum in English, which were widely discussed and received strong support from the undergraduates, the spelling reform initiative failed to take hold (and was “chaffed” by the campus paper the Varsity (7.4 [13 November 1886]: 41). He may have been strategically out- manoeuvred as well—the university registrar may have deliberately misled the university alumni by reporting that Houston’s resolution was for “phonetic” (rather than, as was the case, simplified) spelling—or so Houston later alleged (wh to Dr Beattie, 16 May 1886, Letterbook 1). But Houston’s own tactics also seem to have been particularly maladroit on this occasion. The very characteristics that made Houston a forceful crusader for spelling reform—his doggedness, his outspoken nature, his strong connections to other organizations—may have caused other reformers to view him as a liability, at least by 1886. Or so it may be inferred. In Toronto and by extension in Ontario, Houston now spoke for the spelling reform movement somewhat monologically and represented only one of a multitude of possible positions; he presented the arguments for spelling reform eclectically and sometimes inconsistently. Interested primarily in the cause of education, and the place of reformed spelling in schools and academic institutions, he paid less attention to the new scholarly work on languages and linguistics that some spelling reformers felt could more strongly undergird their position. While he gestured to Skeat and Ellis, and avowed that his goal was to unite phonetic to philological questions, the academic study of language had moved into a new phase, with philology no longer at the forefront, and Houston was not entirely au courant with those views. But Houston, along with other spelling reformers, had effected a substantial shift: “spelling reform” by now was equated, at least in the public view, with “simplified spelling,” while more radical proposals for phonographic writing, amended spelling, and new alphabets had dropped by the wayside. It would be some decades before they would be fully revived.

A plant of slow growth There were, of course, reformers who kept alive the vision of language reform on a more sweeping scale. This became the life work of Dr Alex- ander Hamilton, who launched his monthly magazine The Fonetic Her- ald Devoted Tu ɵrthoepi and ɵrthografi in 1885. The Herald, stated the

196 | Murray prospectus of the initial issue, “shal not be the organ ov any party, sect or society; nor advocate any particular alfabet or other views, but wil treat the whole subject az one ov linguistic science, and therefore tu be approacht in the spirit ov general science, always unbigoted and cosmopolitan.” Further, the journal did not intend to focus narrowly on the question of spelling alone: “Orthoepy, a sister subject ov orthografy, shal receiv a larj shar ov atention,” with due interest also paid to etymological issues (Fonetic Herald 1.1 [January 1885]: 1). Hamilton started the journal in the small town of Port Hope, to the east of Toronto, but moved it to Toronto the following year. Intended to ally the spelling reform movement to the newest forms of linguistic scholarship, his journal—now renamed the Herald Devoted to Pronunciation and Amended Speling—would provide a new forum for discussions of phonetics, acoustics, sound transcription, and related considerations from the point of view of “linguistic science” and would keep readers informed of international developments on those fronts. It also presented materials in both the “popular stage” of amended spelling (of which samples appear in the quotations above) and the more advanced “educational stage” in which specialized orthographic symbols were more intensively deployed. Quite remarkably, the journal published regularly until 1906 and appeared at least occasionally, probably annually, as late as 1920. The establishment of a philological section in the Canadian Institute in 1889 also allowed the members of the Canadian Institute to commence more specialized discussions (in which Alexander Hamilton played a key role), but the interests of the members in spelling reform was fairly short- lived, and over time the philological section was more concerned with developments in the new science of linguistics and in debating the merits and demerits of recent artificial languages such as Volapük and Esperanto. Simplified spelling, on the other hand, by now was well entrenched, at least conceptually, and it fell largely to teachers and teachers’ organizations to carry the project further. Educators had been interested in the topic of spelling reform as early as William Orr’s first phonographic pronouncements in the 1850s, looking for ways to expedite onerous reading and writing instruction, and Houston ably had represented the cause of simplified spelling to them. But he was not the only proponent in the period. The Educational Weekly (a journal published, not coincidentally, by the Grip Publishing House which the Benough family controlled) frequently featured transcribed speeches, essays, and excerpts on both phonography and spelling reform, and there was a long run of letters throughout 1886 (in which Richard Lewis, the phonographer and teacher,

And All the Arts of Peace | 197 also participated, among others).8 The year 1886 also saw the foundation of the Modern Language Association of Ontario, a convention of university and public school educators, and a sister organization to the mla in the United States, whose members also showed a keen interest in the topic (see Murray “ ‘Adjusting’ ”). The topic also appeared regularly on the programs of the Ontario Educational Association, which would establish, in 1909, a separate simplified spelling section. In the period preceding the First World War, simplified spelling achieved some forms of official acceptance (allowed on some provincial school examinations and to a limited degree on federal civil service examinations, for example), and simplified spelling, reformed spelling, and even phonography received renewed attention from the administrators of western territories and provinces, especially in Manitoba, faced with an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Ukraine, a population with high rates of adult illiteracy. But Daniel Wilson, who was, after all, an evolutionist, may have been correct: that spelling simplification over time is achieved not through the exertions of individuals and organizations but through the steady gravitational pull of modernity. The demise of the Canadian Spelling Reform Association sometime in 1886 or 1887 was by no means the death of the spelling reform movement in English Canada, but it does seem to represent the necessary end of the eclecticism celebrated at the opening of Thomas Bengough’s Atheneum only three years earlier, where phonography, Pitmanite shorthand, and simplified spelling all were to be celebrated as “Arts of Peace.” By now, there was a stronger division of interests, between those who were dedicated to the development of new transcription systems, either phonographic or amended (with reference to the residual Pitmanite paradigm, or to newer scientific and linguistic scholarship, or to some combination), on the one hand, and those who embraced simplified spelling for its pedagogic potential, the latter being by now the majority view. And while reformers like Thomas Bengough and William Houston continued to promote spelling reform in its various guises—Bengough through international shorthand circles, Houston as an educator and through his Globe connections—new

8 See, for example, the two-part essay on “Spelling Reform” by Peterborough Col- legiate headmaster J. H. Long; and letters and related excerpts throughout the Educational Weekly in issues 25 February 1886; 15 July 1886; 5 August 1886; 12 August 1886; 23 September 1886; 7 October 1886; 28 October 1886; 16 December 1886; 27 January 1887. Interestingly, the editor appointed in mid-1886, T. Arnold Haultain, took a more skeptical view than did his predecessor John E. Bryant, wondering whether spelling reform was simply “the recreation ground of a few literary athletes” (ew 4.82 [12 August 1886]: 465).

198 | Murray proponents came along to replace those of the 1880s. The Nova Scotian biologist A. H. Mackay, for example, well-positioned as Principal of Pic- tou Academy and then as Superintendent of Education for the province, considered spelling reform along with other forms of standardization in While the his widely-circulated book Three Great Reforms—How May We Hasten Them? (1895). University College Anglo-Saxonist and philologist David R. Canadian Keys worked through the Modern Language Association of Ontario, the Ontario Educational Association, and later as Prezident of the Canadian spelling reform branch of the Simplified Speling Society, which was founded in England in 1908 (Minutes, Spelling Reform Section; also see Murray “Doubled”). movement The 1890s also marks what is, in all probability, the first sustained analysis of orthographical reform produced in francophone Quebec, with the had become publication of J. C. Bérubé’s La réforme de l’orthographe: nouveau système d’écriture (1895). After the turn of the century J. Bruce Walker, Commis- more focused sioner of Immigration for the Western Provinces, began to consider simplified spelling as the key to linguistic assimilation for new settler populations in the schemes (“Nyu Speling Out West”). In the years prior to the First World War, while the Canadian spelling reform movement had become more focused in the advanced, it also schemes advanced, it also had become more geographically dispersed. But that is not the end of the story. The First World War, in English had become Canada as elsewhere, kindled renewed hopes that a rationalized or “simplified” English could work as a medium for international communica- more tion, just as Thomas Bengough had classified phonography and simplified spelling among the “arts of peace” some thirty years before. In the postwar geographically period, Canadian spelling reformers continued to steer among movements as they developed (now, more divergently) in the United States and in Eng- dispersed. land, as well as in Canada, debating and testing systems such as “American” style simplified spelling (which had been given an imprimatur by Theodore Roosevelt for use in all White House correspondence), the Basic English scheme as developed by I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden, and homegrown plans such as the spel-ríd-ryt (later spel-ríd-ruit) “commonsense” system developed in Toronto by Ernest B. Roberts throughout the 1930s and 1940s. More radical phonographic systems made a return in the 1960s and the 1970s with the development of the elaborate and somewhat impractical “Shavian” alphabet, designed by Kingsley Reed under the conditions of the will of George Bernard Shaw, and the experimental introduction of the Ini- tial Teaching Alphabet into Canadian primary schools (especially in British Columbia and Ontario). Even accute (then acute) was drawn into the fray, when asked by the educational think tank the Canadian Conference on Education to examine the more promising spelling reform systems of

And All the Arts of Peace | 199 the day. Working jointly with the Canadian Linguistic Association, the committee took almost two years to reach its somewhat agnostic conclusions as to the merits and demerits of New Spelling/Nyu Speling and the Initial Teaching Alphabet/Augmented Roman Alphabet (Some Argu- ments; see Murray “Archives”). Spelling reform considerations were not the province of anglophone social and educational reformers alone, and provincial education ministries and francophone school boards recently have adopted or adapted a list of more than two thousand “simplified” words mandated for the use of students in France and find themselves debating current, and controversial, pressures to reduce use of the cir- conflexe. While there is a legacy, it is broken one, meaning that spelling reformers often have been unaware of the efforts of their predecessors and have acted in the belief that they are pushing forward the car of human progress when they might just be reinventing the wheel. This seems to be the invariable condition of social reformers, and the inevitable result of intense attunement to the social and political exigencies of their own historical moment. The spelling reform movement of the mid-1880s may have been pulled apart due to incompatible views or personalities, or it may simply have collapsed under the weight of its compendious mandate. But, from a slightly different angle, spelling reformers like Thomas Bengough and William Houston had suited their tactics well to the time and place. Having learned through precedent and experience that the opposition to spelling reform could be strong, that resistance was greatest when the familiar alphabetic framework was under attack, and that implementation could only be gradual were it to occur at all, they made it their mission to educate key sectors of the public on the question and to ask them to keep an open mind. Whatever their more radical convictions or practices, whether they believed simplified spelling was an end in itself or a bridge to greater change, they saw in simplified spelling a practical and perhaps workable scheme that enjoyed (at least temporary) consensus in the spelling reform community and that might well prove acceptable to the general public. Reporting in the summer of 1887 on the work of the committee of the Ontario Teachers’ Association that had been asked to investigate the issue, the Globe looked forward to the release of their report at the next annual meeting of the provincial teachers, although the Globe was not anticipating any immediate action: “Spelling reform being a plant of slow growth, no decision of the association can be looked for this year, but the embodying in the minutes of such a report as this will not only furnish most valuable information, but will stimulate thought upon the question in

200 | Murray Ontario” (22 July 1887: 3). The item was titled ota“ Investigating Simplified Spelling,” and the choice of term is symptomatic of the way the grounds of the discussion had shifted, with “simplified spelling” now standing as a synecdoche for spelling reform. The flurry of activity of 1883 to 1886 had resulted in a more general diffusion of the spelling reform ideal and of a scheme that many found intelligible, even workable. But something may have been lost, too, in the abandonment of more radical schemes and the diminishment of the visionary zeal of the “progressiv people” who had attempted to consolidate the movement.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Daniela Janes and to Kailin Wright for research assistance at an earlier stage of this project and to Yannick Portebois (fellow collabo- rator on projects relating to the history of phonography in Canada) for continuing enlivening discussions. Thanks to the two anonymous readers for English Studies in Canada for detailed reports and very useful suggestions.

Primary Sources

Interview with Dr Eila Hopper Ross, 16 May 2000, with subsequent conversations May and June 2000. Miscellaneous materials and clippings, consulted courtesy of Dr Eila Hop- per Ross, retained in private hands.

University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Graduate Record Files A73-0026-158: Alexander Hamilton ( /135); William Houston (/158); William Huston (/165); W. W. Tamblyn (/460). William Houston Letterbooks (originals and transcripts), then in private hands, now William Houston fonds, B2004–002. Minutes [for 1886] Senate, University of Toronto A202-004/002 mfm. University of Toronto Class and Prize Lists 1852 to 1861; 1863 to 1887. Faculty of Arts Class and Prize Lists, P78–0159 (01)–(02). Daniel Wilson Diary and diary transcript, B65–10014/004.

And All the Arts of Peace | 201 Western Archives, Western University Minutes, Spelling Reform Section, Ontario Educational Association, 1909 to 1926. John Dearness fonds AFC72 B 4030-001-12; other records various files same fonds.

Works Cited

Bengough, Thomas. [Editorial]. Bengough’s Cosmopolitan Shorthand Writer 3.7 (November 1882): 92. ——— . “Fonetics.” Bengough’s Cosmopolitan Shorthand Writer 3.1–2 (May/ June 1883): 14. ———. “The Spelling Reform.”The Canadian Illustrated Shorthand Writer 1.7 (November 1880): 103–04. Bérubé, J. C. La réforme de l’orthographe: nouveau système d’écriture appli- cable à toutes les langues, à la sténographie, à la clavigraphie et pouvant s’apprendre en quelques heures. [Joliette Quebec], s.n., 1894. “English Spelling.” Canada School Journal 7.65 (November 1882): 238. Fast, Vera K. “Jessie (Turnbull) McEwen.” Dictionary of Canadian Biog- raphy 14. biographi.ca. Houston, William. “Old English in the Universities.” Educational Weekly 1.40 (1 October 1885): 636–37. ———. “Old English Spelling.” Canada School Journal 9.5 (May 1884): 109–10. ———. “Old English Spelling and Pronunciation.” [précis of paper] Proceed- ings of the Canadian Institute 1883–84: 219. ———. “Spelling Reform.” Canada School Journal 8 [issue 74] (September 1883): 193–94. Long, J. H. “Spelling Reform.” Educational Weekly 1.9 (26 February 1885): 134–35; 1.10 (5 March 1885): 150–51. MacKay, A.H. Three Great Reforms—How May We Hasten Them? [Toronto?: s.n., 1895?] March, F. A., A. R. Spofford, et al. “Simplified Spelling.” American Anthro- pologist 6.2 (April 1893): 137–206. McMullen, Lorraine. “Sarah Anne (Curzon) Vincent.” Dictionary of Cana- dian Biography 12. biographi.ca.

202 | Murray Murray, Heather. “Adjusting the Scale of Values: The Modern Language Association of Ontario, 1886–1916.” English Studies in Canada 33.1–2 (March/June 2007): 29–51. ——— . “Doubled Lives: Florence Valentine Keys, David Reid Keys, and the Work of English Studies.” University of Toronto Quarterly 74.4 (Fall 2007): 1007–39. ———. “From the Accute Archives.” accute Newsletter. September 2008: 12–15. ——— . “Great Works and Good Works: The Toronto Women’s Literary Club 1877–1883.” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 11.1 (Spring 1999): 75–95. Murray, Heather, and Yannick Portebois. “Steam Writing in the Urli Daze: William Orr, the Canadian Phonetic Pioneer, and the Cause of Pho- nographic Reform.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada/ Cahiers de la Société bibliographique du Canada 54.1–2 (2016): 57–92. “Nyu Speling Out West. Intervyu in Winnipeg with the Comishoner ov Imigraishon.” Pioneer ov Simplified Speling 2.8 (October 1913): 123–24. “Opening of the Shorthand Atheneum.” The Atheneum: An Advocate and Exponent of Educational, Literary, and Social Progress 1.1 (August 1883): 6–7. Pitman, Isaac. Stenographic Sound-hand. London: Samuel Bagster, [1837?]. Proceedings of the Canadian Institute, Toronto, Being a Continuation of “The Canadian Journal of Science, Literature, and History.” New series, vol. 2. 1883–84. Toronto: The Canadian Institute, 1884. Proceedings of the Canadian Institute, Toronto, Being a Continuation of “The Canadian Journal of Science, Literature and History.” Third series, vol. 4. 1885–86. Toronto: The Canadian Institute, 1887. “Report of the Committee on Spelling Reform,” [under Appendix E: Teach- ers [sic] Institutes] in Report of the Minister of Education, Sessional Papers, vol. 20, part 3. Second Session of Sixth Legislature of the Province of Ontario. Session 1888. Toronto: John Notman, 1888. 89–94. Roberts, Ernest B. Spel-ríd-ruit; Notes on Spelling Reform. [Toronto]: s.n., 1940. Some Arguments For & Against Reforming English: A Report Prepared for the Canadian Conference on Education by a Committee Representing the Canadian Linguistic Association and the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English. Kingston: Canadian Conference on Edu- cation, 1962.

And All the Arts of Peace | 203 Spadoni, Carl. “Grip and the Bengoughs as Printers and Publishers.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada/Cahiers de la société bibliographique du Canada 27.1 (Summer 1988): 12–33. “Spelling Reform” [precis of W. J. Houston speech to Ontario Teachers’ Association] Canada School Journal 8.[74] (September 1883): 193–94. Stern, Madeleine B. The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrew. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1968. Tauber, Abraham. Spelling Reform in the United States. Diss. Columbia University, 1958. The Toronto City Directory of 1883. Toronto: R. L. Polk, 1883.

204 | Murray Fred Wah Remixed: “where you are is who you are” Joel Katelnikoff University of Alberta

he following essay is a work of Recombinant Theory. The essay Tremixes the work of Fred Wah, rearranging his critical and poetic writing in new patterns, producing original aphorisms that are directly indebted to Fred’s own concepts and style. The essay might also be considered a “fake” essay; all of its contents have been produced through a set of artistic constraints rather than being composed in the style of a conventional academic essay. The recombinant essay is not a straightforward expression of my own beliefs; it does not use conventional citation; it is not a report; it is a demonstration. The idea of this being a “fake” essay corresponds with Fred’s own concept of “Faking It” (also the title of his collected critical essays). Fake Language is the language of the outsider; it is accented language; it is language that doesn’t pass as institutional, or as an authoritative vessel of meaning. It is an alternative form of discourse for those unable to speak in the discourse of the insider. Fred dramatizes this concept by showing how his father, a Chinese immigrant, inadvertently mispronounced the word “soup” as “sloup,” then fabricated an elaborate explanation for how his pronunciation could actually be correct. Fakery is an intuitive and creative relationship with truth, and Fred says, “I guess I picked up on that sense

ESC 43.2–3 (June/September 2017): 205–214 of faking it from him, that English could be faked, and I quickly learned that when you fake a language you see everything else is a fake.” Outsiders have a distinct vision of languages, cultures, and institutions. Without being at home, without belonging or acceptance, everything looks Joel Katelnikoff particularly false, including and especially the outsider’s own attempts has been working to participate. In my own experience, I know this fakery well, because I on Inhabitations: A have never really had a role model for the proper use of language, and, for Recombinant Theory the most part, I’ve only ever been able to speak and think in fragments, Project since 2015. The like my own father, first-generation literate, who was never able to finish project of recombinant his sentences in speaking, who would forfeit his own words even as he theory is to “collaborate” produced them. Fragmentary speech and thought hasn’t been amenable (in a non-traditional to writing (poetry or cv lines), but, like Fred, I’ve developed tactics for sense) with key poets Faking Language to fill or mask the gaps in my literacy. and theorists, radically In the introduction to Faking It, Fred says that, to write critically, he’s re-imagining the always written poetry. This hybridization of genre is a double fakery, both activities of reading of theory and of poetry: it’s fake to infuse poetry with philosophical for- and writing, inventing mulations, and it’s also fake to bring poetry’s perceptual practices into the strange new paths critical writing process. Fred says the act of faking language “is not so much and configurations fraudulent as generative,” producing new possibilities of thought through within the critical and new possibilities of language, while also calling out the artificiality that poetic oeuvres, and motivates every practice and product (even, and perhaps especially, in producing new essays conventional theory and poetry). Fakery is a tool for “a poet who’s never that both reflect and trusted meaning and its prior constructions.” refract these non-linear If conventionally formal writing is orchestral (expertly adhering to reading practices. These sheet music), Faking It is improvisational jazz (generating spontaneous recombinant essays variations on riffs and techniques). Faking It doesn’t perform with its mas- are produced with tery already-in-place, doesn’t transcend its situation, doesn’t know what the permission of the it is until it is. Faking It is a fast-access brain activity, continually seeking writers whose oeuvres methods for assembling diverse techniques in inventive ways. The result they inhabit. Micro- may be euphony or a vast clatter. As Fred says of the jazz influence in reports are regularly Faking It, “a freely moving line playing off of and against the bound chord published on Twitter: @ progressions showed me the delight of distortion and surprise.” Faking It remixtheory. invents what it is as it becomes it. During my recombination of Fred’s writing, his jazz-inspired techniques have had a potent influence on my own critical methodology: specifically, in remixing Fred’s work I’ve developed a syntactic device capable of synthesizing the flow of a run-on sentence and the concision of the fragment, yoking these elements together under a third technique: that of repetition. Fred discusses each of these elements in his work; of the run- on sentence, he says: “That long, compounding sentence is both a nod to

206 | Katelnikoff the basis of my poetry writing, jazz improvisation, as well as an attempt to dislodge the privilege of the (complete) sentence.” Of the fragment: “disruption, paradoxically, does move the poem forward.” Of repetition: “Any coherences in the story are due to resonance and iteration.” The compounding of these techniques now seems to be a necessity of Recombinant Theory, but I only learned it through the process of working with Fred. During the five recombinant essays preceding the Wah Inhabitation, I’d been searching for permutations in a stubbornly linear manner, scanning only left-to-right, only combining phrases that appeared on the same horizontal axis. I was still thinking of the cut-up process as syntagmatic reading, when it is in fact paradigmatic. The vertical axis of the page is the key to stockpiling excessive permutations, progressively torqueing the music of the text: My first year at ubc was full of opacity—after a while opinion becomes fantasy and longing; after a while opinion becomes poetry and fiction; after a while opinion generates methods of resistance; after a while opinion becomes a knife, the exploration of identity that locates his heart, a jagged blue heart, carried around in the bottle: this calculated boldness between the two of us, freely moving while drunk. Love is an exercise in syntax.

In the first line of this paragraph, there is an immediate trailing-off of language; in what sense might a university, or one’s time at a university, be opaque? The line is a spliced-together aphorism, a material construct, so the answer to the question needs to be directed inward; to rephrase: what is the range of signifying possibility for each of these words, and how does their specific combination seem to favour certain possibilities, while drawing back from others? The solution is perceptual; each engagement says more about a reader’s relationship with language and discourse than it says about a real university. Instead of working toward the solution of the opaque university, the paragraph proceeds to drop in an em-dash, a signal of elision, signifying a particularly rough relationship between the two halves of a syntactic formulation. And here, we leave the subject of the opaque university, entering into the repetition of a phrase. Multiple instances of the syntactic fragment “after a while opinion becomes” compound, transforming from an opinion-inspired fantasy to an exploration of “his” heart with a knife. Because there is no stable pronoun, the first-person of “my first year” may

Fred Wah Remixed | 207 or may not be the third-person of “his heart.” Our perception here will determine something about “the two of us.” The paragraph has been assembled in this way as an intuitive montage of diverse cut-up lines. The texture of the paragraph indicates a rough assemblage, a visible fakery, but it’s a texture with depth. The method of composition isn’t geared toward clarity and closure but toward openness and unpredictability. And this is particularly significant because Recom- binant Theory is in fact critical writing, although not bound by technical conservatism. Here, we have an overtly fraudulent essay that is actually a textual mechanism by which we may search for what is meaningful, profound, or even beautiful. Recombinant Theory marks several new transitions in critical writing: a transition from writing-as-report to writing-as-experience; a transition from writing about art and theory to writing with art and theory; a transition from stylistic transparency to stylistic productivity. Recombinant Theory doesn’t assume that its writer begins from a starting point of in- tergenerational privilege or has an interest in preserving the status quo of traditional scholarship and institutional power structures. Recombinant Theory shakes up the technical conformity of conventional academic writing, and this shaking up is necessary, because our tactics are the primary signifying component of our work. When you fake a language, you see that everything is a fake. Certainty is a fake. Meaning is a fake. The transcendence of the poet and of the theorist is a fake. But this fakery can be made honest by putting itself on display. Instead of speaking from a distance, we can participate in the ensemble of textuality, and discover the music at the heart of thinking. The junctures where our writing seems to break down aren’t failures, but features, leaving the rough syntactic traces of our own processes for our readers to listen to. There’s “no other way to be in language, but to bluff your way through it, stalling for more time.” To acknowledge this fakery may be the accompanying inflection of truth.

208 | Katelnikoff maps don’t have beginnings, just edges. Those rocks this morning on the way up appeared full of signs and messages. Rocks tell a story I haven’t heard before—like a root is moving though the darkness of the soil—is not the string of words a sentence. This is a hard

Trees keep being pictures of themselves: writing is sometimes remember- language to ing this image, and sometimes it has to make it up. You walk on the stones of the earth, each day of your life stone after stone, to look into the green work out. mountain valleys.

This action is not so much fraudulent as generative. Rather, it is noisy, frequently illegible. This is a hard language to work out. Some things get through and when they do we see the opening. The difficulty is literal and intentional.

The world needs to be talked to. At noon, the blue above turned to a green blur of moving trees. Now what is more present than a memory. Some frayed and hazy margin of possibility, absence, gap. And your eyes looking through the winter air.

“my words keep meaning pictures of words meaning tree”

As I am slow in my experience of myself (a man who is a tree and rivers and creeks), I see things on the ground. Landscape and memory as the true practice of thought. Pictures of words meaning something of themselves.

Among the spruce I admit there is a moon at night. Somehow these pieces of driftwood are everywhere, foregrounding the materiality of the Koote- nay River. The most important cipher in branches of driftwood. There is a moon among the spruce.

But the more I write the more meaning has slipped—of my own absolute plateau. The mind wanders in green mountain valleys, a mountain dispersed in a scatter. To write in poetry is to move among the spruce, through a muffled dialogue of moving trees.

Fred Wah Remixed | 209 “no other way to be in language but to bluff your waythrough it”

I was driving across the most important cipher, trying to figure out something serious in one night. I get so worked up about it while drunk. To move into a poetry beyond sensation and memory, bluff your way through the blank white page and that unquestioning syntax and the opacity at the centre of our life.

To write in poetry is to move past your own language. Your own language cannot be a closure. To move into a poetry beyond property, your own language must be disturbed.

We are firmly encoded in our compositional stance: fake language gnaws at sensation and memory, fake language covers the university in Vancouver. When you fake language, you see your own language. I have discovered a language beyond itself.

“do you know where I was before I came here”

Now what is more present than a conference. The conferences zigzag through the centre of our lives. A vortex of conferences. Spiritual conferences. Mysterious conferences. Invisible experimental conferences. We talk mostly through the dream.

My skull holds the whole thing it is a part of: the potency of the morning that is still night. A physical space arises within the poetics of the prose, real streets and buildings full of opacity. Vancouver is a simple sentence. Rather, we are firmly encoded in Vancouver.

We’re all landscape and memory, and I guess I picked up on that opacity. I’ve spent all day on the hotel steps. The silence itself needs to be talked to.

I’ve come to adopt a position of authority. Inside myself I feel every possible inhabitable body as in a zigzag through myself. I fade into words, talk to myself. Dreamt last night about this method of composition. Fake language flows down from the sky.

210 | Katelnikoff “the heart carries this calculated boldness outside”

When you fake language, you fill halls and talk about our own production, and talk in a fragmentary collage, and talk for a total of seven and a half hours; this calculated boldness opens and closes.

We seem to be at the university, the hotel steps at the heart of thinking. The crowds appeared full of signs and messages, a labyrinthine network of incomplete cars parked along the streets. Coffee and cigarettes appeared to be full of signs and messages. It’s noisy—sometimes you disappear.

My first year at ubc was full of opacity—after a while opinion becomes fantasy and longing; after a while opinion becomes poetry and fiction; after a while opinion generates methods of resistance; after a while opinion becomes a knife, the exploration of identity that locates his heart, a jagged blue heart, carried around in the bottle: this calculated boldness between the two of us, freely moving while drunk. Love is an exercise in syntax.

We’re all transparent, sometimes opaque—I think that I have discovered the university.

“though I’ve tried not to repeat myself”

My urgent life was full of repetition: such devices as repetition, open texts, and your eyes looking through the ice and snow. Snow falls into the rough opening.

Snow covers the university in Vancouver; snow falls into real streets and buildings; snow falls into the real world; snow falls into the silence itself.

Snow covers this method of composition. Now what is more present than snow. The page becomes repetition of the body. Words freeze over the ice.

So what good is it to make such a noise; so what good is it to speak; so what good is my own thinking—at the same time anything of value will repeat.

Fred Wah Remixed | 211 “he’s stopping in order to continue”

The axe keeps You’re all alone across from me. A text is ourselves, words to hang onto silently. The language between the two of us becomes difficult or impos- splitting a jagged sible. We seem to be pictures of words. The language implodes breaking up below the surface. blue desire. I never knew writing was impossible—imagine how difficult it might be to be the reader. This method of composition is noisy, frequently illegible. Our desire was full of opacity.

So we could share the silence itself—it’s a text that interrogates the gap between writers; it’s a text that interrogates not the target but the gun. I’ve come to adopt a text that interrogates its roots. The imposed interruptions and silences lead us on.

The imposed interruptions and silences of intention: a boy stands balanced on a ball as a way of seeing; a boy stands balanced on a language; a boy stands across from me we face the quiet pool of memory; a boy stands balanced on a dirty summer skyline; a boy stands where I am; a boy stands balanced on the bridge; a boy stands balanced in this drunken christmas night; a boy stands balanced on each sentence; I’m writing this book and he’s strong; a boy stands balanced on still warm ashes. Now what is more present than my own anger. The blank white page gnaws at sensation and memory.

“lines can be cracks, as in an avalanche”

The veins are filled with branches of driftwood. The veins are filled with cold glass surfaces. Fields and visions in the veins. My veins are filled with words. The veins are a listing device. My urgent life was a cortex of scars. A cortex of scars that comes to life.

The axe keeps splitting a jagged blue desire. Reading and writing keeps splitting whatever this is. The most important cipher in the actual incisions you make. The actual incisions you make articulate a manifesto. The actual incisions you make on me.

212 | Katelnikoff There is a rock slide at the bottom of the path—now what is more present than a rock slide. We’re all chipped up into the language. We’re all chipped up into the world. We’re all chipped up into one another. On the hotel steps, fragmented. We are firmly encoded in the actual incisions you make.

“some part of myself left behind there”

I fade into many of the conferences; the conferences fade into everything around me. I fade into real streets and buildings; real streets and buildings fade into everything around me. I fade into landscape and memory; landscape and memory fade into everything around me. I fade into words themselves; your own language falls into the world.

We start to feel the spread of the world: the world in your own language. The world is who you are when you get there. Now what is more present than the blank white page.

I’m left holding the physical melting edge. You look up at a very real world where you are writing. The spaces between here and there include the discontinuous world. The spaces between here and there are part of myself. The spaces between here and there have become one. The towns become rivers and creeks. The page becomes a place I fade into.

I’m writing this book violently, with all that angry talk to myself. The text is the shape of a bird in flight. I point to my own absolute centre, to move into a poetry beyond discourse. Formally, these pieces break my heart. I’m writing this book and it dissipates. this essay is a cut-up/remix /montage of the work of Fred Wah. It is a recombination of materials from his critical and artistic publications, including Lardeau (1965), Mountain (1967), Among (1972), Tree (1972), Earth (1974), Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975), Owner’s Manual (1981), Breathin’ My Name With a Sigh (1981), Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985), Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987), So Far (1991), Alley Alley Home Free (1992), Diamond Grill (1996), Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity: Critical Writing 1984–1999 (2000), Isadora Blue (2007), is a door (2009), and Permissions: Tish Poetics 1963 Thereafter– (2014). The section headers are all direct quotations from Wah’s texts, as are the individual sentences

Fred Wah Remixed | 213 in the essay’s first section. All other sentences are splicings-together of syntactic fragments from his texts. This essay is part of Inhabitations: A Recombinant Theory Project. Micro-reports from this project are regularly published on Twitter: @remixtheory.

214 | Katelnikoff Robert Creeley in Transition 1967/1970: Changing Formats for the Public Poetry Reading Jason Camlot Concordia University

ow is a poet, stepping up to the podium, affected by the “format Hof the poetry reading” as a generic event built upon presuppositions of performance? Alternatively, how might a poet affect, resist, or even transform the format of the poetry reading by challenging such presuppositions? The present essay will pursue answers to these questions by focusing on some of the more common features of the poetry reading as it existed in the late 1960s—what I have just called the format of the poetry reading—and the poet Robert Creeley’s reflective, artistic relationship to that historically specific format at a key transitional moment in his approach both to writing and performance. Working with the contents of an archive of audio materials that partially documents the Sir George Williams Poetry Series—a sequence of poetry readings that ran in Montreal from 1966 to 1974 and featured over sixty poets from across North America—my essay will listen closely to two recorded readings of Creeley, in particular, for answers, to show how these reading events worked to stage and model the format of the 1960s poetry reading and to present an account of Creeley’s resistance to the “standardized and university-accredited poetry reading” at this transitional moment in his career (Lazer 119).

ESC 43.2–3 (June/December 2017): 215–245 A project that aims to analyze the poetry reading event as a formal literary entity, even the modest, focused version of such a project that this essay represents, would not have been possible twenty years ago in Jason Camlot’s the manner that it is today. We work at a moment of significant transi- most recent book, tion in literary studies, a moment when core ideas about what comprises Phonopoetics: the literary archive and the “the literary” itself are in a state of productive Interpreting Early expansion and flux. The conception of the archive has broadened beyond Literary Recordings, traditional models of authorial structure and provenance to be rediscov- is forthcoming with ered as a wide range of actions and entities: as a repertoire of gestures that Stanford University Press hold “traumatic flashbacks,… hallucinations” and other “ephemeral and in 2018. He is Associate invalid forms of knowledge and evidence” (Taylor 193), as “new genres of Professor of English expression” in which difficult “feelings are deposited” despite the record’s and Associate Dean in inherent ephemerality (Cvetkovich 1, 7) as conceptual instantiations of “an the Faculty of Arts and entire spectrum of broadly conceived collections” (Eichorn 18). Feminist Science at Concordia scholars have played a particularly important role in this recalibration of University in Montreal. our understanding of the discernibility of accumulations of artifacts and actions in archival terms. Ephemeral traces of artistic and political collective actions and events have accrued new discernibility and meaning as a result of recently developed models of interpretation and theorization and because of a massive migration of materials into digital environments. The literary reading series has become increasingly discernible to us as a potential object of study due to the rise of networked digital media and the associated development of online repositories of literary recordings transferred from an array of analogue sources (Camlot and Wershler). Collections of sound recordings previously held as relatively inaccessible analogue media artifacts within institutional special collections, or just as often in shoeboxes in the basements of community organizations and individuals, are appearing as audible digital artifacts through a variety of interfaces. The readings of Robert Creeley I will discuss are one case in point.1 Their initial instantiation on tape transformed an ephemeral event into a temporal media artifact. The eventual digitization and online presentation of those analogue artifacts has allowed me to consider these events in terms of their temporal scope and detail, thus discerning their larger shape as discrete and related events, and to identify moments as critically significant with time stamps in reference to the digitized media artifact. The media formats, past and present, of the recorded events have afforded new possibilities for providing a critical account of the poetry 1 For a longer account of the “discovery” and digital migration of the Sir George Williams University Poetry Series tapes, see Camlot and Mitchell, “The Poetry Series.”

216 | Camlot reading as it concerned a particular writer during a particular historical period. In telling a story about Creeley and poetry readings, I will be honing in on a specific case study that will serve to illustrate wider possibilities for a critical approach to the poetry reading event as a field of interpretation. Much as one might consider the implications of how poems are ordered within a book, as opposed to approaching individual poems as monadic units of integral value unto themselves, I will approach the architecton- ics of the poetry reading as a larger structure of meaning.2 This method entails some understanding of the context that informed the production of the event in the first instance, as well as critical attention not just to the poems as discrete entities but to their relational resonances, to the introductions and extrapoetic speech surrounding the poems that were read, and to aspects of the poet’s reading style as it develops and shifts over the course of the reading program. In effect, I will be upping the ante on this approach even further by considering two reading events that together, within my critical narrative, represent an even broader, meaningful field of interpretation, one that communicates a significant transition in Creeley’s conception of the poetics of performance. In considering the meaning of these two readings in relation to each other, I will first interpret Creeley’s 1967 Montreal reading as a performance that was deliberately designed to resonate with a more formally concise mode of North American, modernist lyric practice that he associated with his host and introducer Irving Layton’s work and poetics. By contrast, for his second appearance in the series in 1970, Creeley would return to Montreal under a different conceptual rubric, as “a colleague of Robert Duncan’s and the late Charles Olson’s” and as “a man whose poems are close to the process of living.”3 In short, I will show how these recorded Montreal poetry readings document the re-categorization and movement across time—the transition in performance—of Robert Creeley from modernist “craftsman” to “process” poet. But before I proceed with this particular story it will be useful to take

2 In making this analogy between the book and the poetry reading as fields of interpretation, I have in mind James H. Averill’s study of the arrangement of the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads which reveals Wordsworth’s “considerable interest in how poems are ordered within the book” based upon the poet’s “ambition to structure the reader’s experience of a collection of discrete poems” (388). 3 Cited from Frank Davey’s introduction of Creeley before his 1970 reading at Sir George Williams University (Creeley 1970, 00:00:10, 00:01:09). Timestamps (as above) for key quotations from the recordings will henceforth be cited in parentheses in the text, with the temporal categories separated by colons indicating hours:minutes:seconds.

Robert Creeley in Transition | 217 a step back and discuss further what I mean by poetry reading formats and how our mediated access to historical reading events may inform our understanding of the shape and meaning of the reading event as a field of interpretation.

Historical poetry readings and their media Poetry readings have existed in different forms and toward a variety of cultural ends for centuries. In the nineteenth century they consisted primarily of elocutionary interpretations of texts by actors and elocutionists as a regular part of cultural improvement lectures (“Rev. Canon Fleming” 581–83), variety stage shows (“Foresters’ Palace of Varieties” 7), touring costume recitals (“Theatrical Gossip” 8), benefit entertainment programs, recitations staged before or following dramatic productions, and anniversary reminiscences (“The Brixton” 18, “The Britannia” 15). A Victorian reading program was often developed according to a pedagogical format that combined lecture and recitation. For example, Canon Fleming, a renowned preacher and public speaker, delivered “An Evening with Ten- nyson” under the auspices of the York Church of England Union of Young Men at which he discussed Tennyson’s biography, critical reception, and his own personal appreciation of Tennyson’s poetry over the years. The evening concluded with Fleming’s reading of a selection of poems designed to illustrate the lecturer’s critical and appreciative observations about Ten- nyson’s work. As an 1878 article in The York Herald reported, Fleming’s argument that “there was in Tennyson a wonderful study of melody and music,… was illustrated in ‘The Bugle Song’ from ‘The Princess,’ which the lecturer read with fine effect” (“Canon Fleming on Tennyson” 2). In some instances, Victorian authors would perform their own work before large audiences as well. Tyler Hoffman has recently chronicled the prevalence of Walt Whitman’s “desire to declaim in public” (6), and Charles Dickens delivered close to five hundred readings from his work in Britain, France, and the United States during his lifetime, enacting the cultural codes of celebrity and authorial intimacy with his readership through such performances (Collins, Andrews). The documentary record of literary readings in the nineteenth century consists primarily of news reports, printed programs, first-person accounts, and, occasionally, the recitation texts used by a performer. Even with the introduction of viable sound recording in 1888, the audible records we have of such early elocutionary performers are studio-captured re-enactments of the kinds of readings they delivered in situ during public reading events and are not documentary recordings of the readings as they

218 | Camlot had been performed before live audiences. So, while Fleming’s release of his reading of Tennyson’s “The Charge” on the hmv label in 1910 gives us a good idea of how he interpreted the poem in performance, such a recording does not document the nature of a soiree like Fleming’s “An Evening with Tennyson” (“Charge of the Light Brigade”). Even if acoustic phonographs and gramophones had been well suited to live, documentary recording, limitations in the storage capacity of early wax cylinders and shellac flat discs (which held between two to four minutes of audible content) would have limited the possibility of capturing the sound of a long, continuous event with any practical ease. In effect, our access to the audible form of the nineteenth-century reading event is limited by historical media technologies and formats. Extended recordings of authors reading their own work began to materialize with electrical (transcription) disc recordings, often made in radio studios. Transcription discs were the primary medium used to record radio broadcasts before magnetic tape became the norm. Some of the first extended recordings of poetry readings made between the 1930s and 1950s were captured on aluminum or shellac disc, either through a radio amplifier and receiver or through a more portable rig set up in a recording laboratory or studio. Again, these were usually not documentary recordings of live reading events, although, technically, live readings in a room before an audience could be captured from a portable broadcast unit. Even disc cutting units developed specifically for field recording weighed in the range of one hundred pounds and required a reliable power source, which in the field would entail a heavy battery. Sta- tionary units could weigh as much as three hundred pounds (Mustazza). T. S. Eliot’s Harvard Vocarium recordings released in the late 1940s were made with disc recording machines (Davis), as were a series of recordings made by modern poets including Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Edgar Lee Masters as part of a National Council of Teachers in English poetry recording project that predates the better known Library of Congress and Caedmon literature recordings that would soon follow (Greet 312–13). The Frost recordings and three by Stein were made commercially available for use by teachers in the classroom as early as 1936 (Pound 98). Electrical disc recording technology employed a mixture of mechanical and electrical components. It was based on the principles of electromagnetic transduction and functioned practically through the use of electrical microphones, signal amplifiers, loudspeakers, and electrical disc cutting and playing machines (Rumsey and McCormick 169). Steve Wurtzler has

Robert Creeley in Transition | 219 succinctly summarized the phases of electrical acoustic and playback technologies as “collecting/encoding, storage/transmission, decoding/ reproduction” (3). The microphone is an electromagnetic transducer used Singers could to convert acoustic sound waves into “analogous” electrical signals. Sig- nificantly increased amplitude (due to the amplification of the electronic now croon, signal prior to cutting) and a much wider frequency spectrum were just two of the numerous changes that differentiated electrically recorded discs actors could from acoustically recorded discs and cylinders. From the perspective of vocal performance, the electrical recording whisper, and process, with the microphone in front of it, suddenly allowed for far greater subtlety in the use of volume, affective tone, and timbre in vocal delivery, readers could so singers could now croon, actors could whisper, and readers could emote with new kinds of un-melodramatic nuance.4 And yet, while electrical disc emote with new recording could afford the capture of more subtle kinds of performance in reading, it was the new storage medium of tape that had a true impact kinds of un- upon our subsequent access to the sound of the poetry reading event. Magnetic tape recording applied the same transduction principles as melodramatic electronic disc recording but removed the step of mechanical disc cutting from the storage process. Rather than convert vibrations into magneti- nuance. cally structured signals so that they can be engraved on a flat disc, this technology stored the electronic signals on a length of tape coated with ferric oxide (Crawford 3–4). Of signal importance for the present essay is the fact that the affordances of tape recording as delivered in its multiple hardware technologies and media formats enabled new literary uses of sound recording. Tape recording machines were comparatively portable and flexible as compared to earlier recording technologies, enabling the documentation of literary events and conversations, both public and private. This portability extended the reach of capturing literary occurrences, and consequently it transformed our understanding of what comprised a literary occurrence. Further, for transforming the audio document after the live performance, tape could be edited, cut, spliced together, rearranged, and erased and was easily reused by erasure or taping over a previous recording. The storage capacity of tape was also more flexible than that of cylinders and discs because recording and playing at different speeds easily extend the recording and playback duration of a length of tape. Tape recording as an electronic process with an extendible storage media format afforded the capture of the subtleties in amplitude and timbre that we 4 For an extended discussion of the differences between melodramatic and modern vocal performance styles in relation to the advent of electronic sound media, see Smith, Vocal Tracks 81–162.

220 | Camlot can hear in the Creeley recordings I will consider, with the added benefit of our being able to hear such nuance over a significant duration of time. Tape expanded the generic range of literary audio through its ubiquity, portability, and flexible applicability and also functioned as an important medium of literary creation itself.5 Most importantly, for our purposes, it was the primary medium for documenting the poetry reading in the 1960s and 1970s. This period saw a significant proliferation of readings by poets of their own work. As Robert McCormack noted in a 1962 article devoted to the poetry reading phenomenon in Canada (and North Amer- ica): “Across the country—and up and down the continent—the poets have been coming out of their lairs to read their works in all kinds of likely and unlikely places. University lecture halls, libraries, art galleries, coffee houses and night clubs have all seen them reciting their verses to sizable crowds” (28). According to McCormack, the key benefit of these readings was their ability to render complex modern forms of poetry accessible and intimate, due to the authority of the poet/reader over the delivery of the work and the kind of “emotional interaction” that the public reading allows between poet and audience (29). Formats for such readings evolved during the 1950s through the beat performances of Jack Kerouac (reciting with jazz accompaniment),6 Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and many others recorded in clubs, coffee houses, in studio, and on radio.7 Community poetry scenes in the 1960s, like that of New York’s Lower East Side, gave opportunities to poets of different schools to experiment in the presentation of their work (Kane 1–3). As contemporary literature and creative writing entered university curricula in the late 1950s, the poetry reading/roundtable or conference, consisting of a combination of public discussion about poetics and poetic practice with actual poetry readings, became an increasingly common

5 Examples of literary creation with magnetic recording tape include the reel-to- reel tape poems of Jackson MacLow and the audiocassette recorded talk poems of David Antin. For a discussion of MacLow’s use of tape media in the creation and performance of his poetry, see Nardone. For a discussion of Antin’s use of tape as a medium of poetic creation, see Smith and Dean. 6 Kerouac’s two lps with readings and jazz accompaniment, Blues and Haikus and Poetry for the Beat Generation, informed one format for reading poetry in the 1960s. Canadian poet George Bowering, who was a member of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series committee for several years, recalls having seen Kenneth Patchen read with a jazz ensemble at the University of British Columbia when he was an undergraduate student in the early 1960s (00:05:53). 7 For examples of 1950s poetry readings and discussion on radio see Ginsberg, Poetry Reading, kpfa Pacifica Studio Recording (1956) and Ginsberg, Corso and Orlovsky, Interview by Studs Terkel (1959), both available via PennSound.

Robert Creeley in Transition | 221 phenomenon on university campuses. Readings, interviews, artists’ statements all functioned in relation to poetry as part of what Stephen Fredman has identified as an emerging “existential practice—an art of contexts” (182). Within this format of the poetry reading, poets were expected to construct narratives of development and articulate theories of poetics in relation to the poems they read. Such expository forays represented an important opportunity for poets to work out narratives and theories about the purpose and significance of their own work. In the early 1960s, funding for such events and series became available in Canada through the Canada Council and in the U.S. through various state and federal envelopes aimed at supporting the dissemination of high culture to the general public (Anstee; New York State Council 57–58). Event initiatives like the San Francisco State University (sfsu) Poetry Center reading series founded in 1954, the ubc-sponsored “Vancouver Poetry Conference” of 1963, and the source of my own primary audio materials, the Canada Council-sponsored Sir George Williams Poetry Series, provided a new and specific format for the working poet to perform his or her identity as an artist. Poets were collected on stage, seated next to each other, and asked to interview each other or simply discuss aspects of their process. A good audible example of such discussions can be heard in the recordings that Fred Wah made of the Vancouver Poetry Conference panels, now available through the Slought Foundation website and PennSound.8 Such discussions were often then transcribed and published in collections of interviews that functioned as supportive companions to the poet’s published work; for example, the Ginsberg/Creeley discussion of 1963 appears in Creeley’s Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961–1971 (1973). There is a discernible continuum, I think, connecting tape recorded readings within university contexts, from an event like “The Vancouver Poetry Conference,” where poets were scheduled to read poetry and talk poetics for a university audience, and David Antin’s self-conscious transformation of the poet’s “talk” itself into the substance of a poem, emergent from a scheduled poetry occasion. In the case of Antin’s talk poems of the 1970s and 1980s, the prompt for the poem that would emerge from his in situ talking before an audience would sometimes come to him in the mail on a university voucher he had to sign in order to collect his cheque from the institution that had commissioned his performance, and then the cassette

8 One of the interviews from the conference was transcribed (by Wah) and published in Creeley, Contexts of Poetry. For the Wah recordings available from the event, see Wah, “Vancouver 1963 Poetry Conference,” and “Vancouver 1963 Poetry Conference and Miscellaneous Recordings.”

222 | Camlot recording of that talking event would be rendered into “talk poem” through an act of creative transcription (Antin 55). Within the format of the single-author poetry reading that I will be discussing, poets were expected to construct narratives of development and articulate explanations of their poetic techniques in relation to the poems they read. One useful early example of the university-situated poetry reading is preserved in the recording of Allen Ginsberg’s performance at the sfsu Poetry Center, 27 April 1959. In this reading event, Ruth Witt-Diamant, sfsu professor and founding director of the centre, introduces Ginsberg with remarks that demonstrate her awareness of a possible rift between the innovative impulses of contemporary poetry and a traditional academic environment, inciting the visiting poet to demonstrate and articulate how his poetic practice works while rebuffing any claim by the author that he is not capable of critical reflection upon his own poetics. As she says: [Allen Ginsberg] has made a plea for a poetry that has a direct contact with the living, instead of being in some way sifted through and residually presented through the academic censorship, shall we say. Or standards. … He understands exactly what he is doing, although he says in his program that he doesn’t. I don’t believe him. (Ginsberg, Poetry Reading, sfsu Poetry Center, 00:00:01) In the reading, Ginsberg fulfills Witt-Diamant’s mandate to perform and explain, as he provides brief thoughts on his poems before reading them, as when he explains the meaning of “Kaddish” as a mourning service and illustrates the poem’s relationship to “some of the rhythms of the Hebrew service” by reciting portions of the Kaddish prayer in the original Aramaic (Ginsberg, Poetry Reading, sfsu Poetry Center, 00:24:41). Many readings from this period as measured in temporal segments on the magnetic tape that preserves their sound reveal that one third or more of the total time of a reading was devoted to explanatory discussion of the kind expected by Witt-Diamant, rather than to the actual reading of poetry. This is exactly the ratio of literary to expository speech in Creeley’s first Montreal reading, where twenty-four of the eighty minutes of the event consist of non-poetic speech. Creeley’s 1970 reading in Montreal is weighted even more heavily toward expository explanation, with forty of a total seventy-four minutes spent reading poetic texts and thirty-four minutes spent talking about them—a set of numbers not easily arrived

Robert Creeley in Transition | 223 at given how often Creeley interrupts his own readings in this event with additional comments, glosses, and anecdotes. As the format developed, these expository forays represented an important opportunity for poets to work out narratives and theories about the purpose and significance of their own work, and, again, this seemingly extemporaneous banter would eventually find its way into published artist statements and essays on poetics.9 The format of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series reading was for- malized in ways that exceeded the reading event itself. This particular series was organized by a series committee comprised of faculty members from Sir George.10 Poets were promised an honorarium (usually of $100) plus travel, accommodation at the Ritz Carleton Hotel, and meals (Fink).11 A series committee representative would retrieve the visiting poet from the airport or train station and immediately bring him or her to the Ritz Carleton Hotel bar for drinks. Cocktail hour would be followed by an elaborate dinner involving all committee members at a Chinese restaurant near the downtown reading venue. Readings would usually begin at 9 p.m. with introductory remarks by one of the committee members and would last approximately sixty to ninety minutes (“Poetry Readings Resume Tonight” 2).12 There would be limited time for mingling with the audience after the reading (usually without a formal question and answer segment), and then

9 This is clear in the case of at least one lengthy discourse from Creeley’s Montreal readings, where elements from the poet talk delivered during the 1967 reading are later found in a published essay, this being the “Feedback” article on the Contemporary Voices in the Arts tour, to be discussed further below. 10 Over the course of its decade-long existence, the series involved more than sixty poets, mostly from Canada and the United states. For details concerning the membership of the committee, organization of this series, and how the readings were recorded, see Camlot, “The Sound of Canadian Modernisms.” For an extended collection of critical readings surrounding the audio of the series, see Camlot and Mitchell. 11 Some examples of letters to poets from the series committee, and the terms offered for the visits, can be found in Roy Kiyooka’s Transcanada Letters, in particular, letters to Margaret Atwood (10/19/’66), Earle Birney (5/1/’67), Paul Blackburn (2/8/’67) and John Newlove (5/17/’67). Consider for example Ki- yooka’s letter to Earle Birney in which he writes: terms $100, honorarium plus air-fare Toronto/ return and a nite at the Ritz meals and all the booze you can stomach . [sic] (Kiyooka, n.p. [5/1/’67]) 12 The late start time of these events, as documented in this summary article published in the Op-Ed and similar advertisements, would have left ample time

224 | Camlot the poet would be escorted to an invitation-only after-party that would run late into the night at one of the committee member’s homes (Fink). As with many such reading series that occurred during this period, the Sir George poetry events were structured to allow for meeting and exchange The between the visiting poets and members of the local arts community. One self-conscious goal of the committee in creating such encounters was to generous length measure, compare, evaluate, and understand the import of the local scene against current trends in North American poetry. Another was to incite, and structure of inspire, and transform local poetic practice through the organization of such encounters (Camlot, “Sound of Canadian Modernisms” 31). The the pre-reading drinks and dinner and the postreading party ensured that such exchange between members of Montreal’s English-language literary reading event community and representatives of a wide range of contemporary poetic philosophies and practices would occur under the warming influence of itself was personal hospitality, shared food, and libations. The generous length and structure of the reading event itself was designed to allow for the extensive designed to presentation of a mixture of poetry and talk so that the local poetry community could witness such contemporary poetic philosophies in action. allow for the 1967: politely transitioning from the past extensive If the Poetry Series represented a public forum inciting the transformation of the Montreal poetry scene in the 1960s and 1970s, 1967 repre- presentation sented a transformative year of sorts for Creeley personally, as well. In an early study of Creeley’s poetry, Cynthia Edelberg notes how this period of a mixture of of Creeley’s writing, and the publication of The Charm and the writing of “In London” in particular, mark a significant shift in Creeley’s attitude poetry and talk. and approach to poetic composition. While Creeley may have spoken about free form and form functioning as an extension of content as early as the late 1940s, it took until the late 1960s for him to realize this idea by moving from conceiving of the poem in terms of concision and selection (or what Denise Levertov called “evidences of intelligence” and a will to “ravishing perfection”) to embracing a far more sprawling, open, inclusive kind of poem that captures the sequential process of composition and the diversity of registers that the immediate situation (with its temporal and spatial specificities) demands (Edelburg 137–43). This less didactic approach (as Creeley would call it) to the poem underpins Creeley’s prefatory rationale for publishing all of his previ-

for the ritual, pre-reading dinner. Op-Ed was a weekly supplement to the Sir George Williams university student newspaper, The Georgian.

Robert Creeley in Transition | 225 ously excised poems in one volume as The Charm in 1967. In the preface, Creeley recounts the attitude he had to overcome in order to publish such a volume: “whenever there was a chance to publish a small pamphlet or book, my temptation was to cut from it any poem that did not seem to me then and there to make adamant sense as a poem, and consequently I tended to ignore a kind of statement in poetry that accumulates its occasion as much by means of its awkwardnesses as by its overt successes” (Creeley, Introduction, The Charm 3–4). Creeley goes on to attribute his new application of an increasingly spontaneous, inclusive, and accepting approach to composition to discussions he had with Ginsberg at the Van- couver Poetry Conference in the summer of 1963. Ginsberg had arrived at the conference from India (via Saigon, Bangkok, Japan, Europe, and Moscow) having renounced metaphysics for an ethos of the body, and, in the words of Barry Miles, “jubilant in the knowledge of his new realization and clearly in a delicate emotional state, crying all the time and fondling people, demanding to be loved for what he was and loving everyone in return” (cited in Faas 291–92). Creeley attributes his own shift in attitude toward composition to a moment when Ginsberg told him “you don’t have to worry so much about a bad poem” and to Robert Duncan’s insistence “that poetry is not some ultimate preserve for the most rarified and articulate of human utterances, but has a place for all speech and all occasions thereof” (Creeley, Introduction, The Charm 4).13 Beyond these changes in Creeley’s compositional strategies that were now taking full hold, Creeley’s approach to disseminating his work was also in the process of being challenged in ways that were exciting for him, through his participation in a series of collaborative, multimedia artistic performances across New York State titled the “Contemporary Voices in the Arts” tour, which involved seven artists (John Cage, Creeley, Merce Cunningham, J. Wilhelm Kluver, Len Lye, Jack Tworkov, and Stanley VanDerBeek) touring colleges and other venues under New York State Council sponsorship (New York State Council 36). In fact, Creeley’s appearance in Montreal was sandwiched between the last two performances in the series. The very next night he would be on stage for the penultimate performance at the ym-ywha in New York City, “the tv dinner” performance, with Cage, Cunningham, et al., eating at a table without paying attention to their audience while contact mikes captured the clinking of cutlery, the sipping of wine, and whatever dinner conversation ensued, 13 Edelbeg makes an interesting case for the influence of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs upon Creeley’s intensified investment in spontaneous composition at this time (138–40).

226 | Camlot while a closed circuit television fed different angles of the event back to the (less than pleased) observers in attendance (Horrocks 323). So this is where Creeley was headed by (if not at) the time he had come to Montreal to read at the end of February 1967. While he was not quite ready to be the full-fledged slurring Id on stage, inciting an occasion of affective and reflective exchange between the poetic work and its receiving audience that he would become by the time he returned to Montreal in 1970, he was certainly in transition as far as his compositional strategies went and was engaged in the process of re-examining what he could accomplish within the format of the public poetry reading. It must have been a bit unsettling for Creeley to arrive to the impos- ing hospitality of Montreal’s Irving Layton after spending time with John Cage and that crew, a bit like traveling back in time. Layton had assumed the post of Poet in Residence at Sir George in 1964, and in this, his final year in the position before taking a leave of absence on a major Canada Council grant, Layton jumped at the chance to introduce Creeley as a reader in the poetry series (Fink). Creeley’s reading took place on 24 Feb- ruary, and Layton would read in the series less than a month later (18 March 1967), suggesting that, in addition to serving as Layton’s “farewell” performance, this segment of the series was also a staging of the significance of the Layton/Creeley relationship.14 As is well documented, the two poets corresponded regularly in the 1950s. Beginning in 1953, Layton was a contributing editor for The Black Mountain Review, and Creeley published Layton’s first non-self-published book, In the Midst of My Fever, with Divers Press in 1954. Overall, the reading Creeley planned for that winter night in 1967 generously enacted his transitional development from the 1950s, when he was in communication with Irving Layton and writing concise modern lyric poems, to a new attitude of literary creation and reading in the present. This curated selection of poems designed to enact a narrative of development is interspersed with extrapoetic digressions about poetic exchange and community. Creeley read from For Love and Words, the two volumes of his collected poems published up to this point, as well as from his new novel, The Island. In listening to the introductory speeches of Layton and Creeley, one hears an articulation of mutual admiration but without the acknowledge-

14 After a decade-long correspondence, Creeley and Layton finally met in the autumn of 1962, when Layton came to give a reading at ubc, where Creeley was then teaching (Faas 288). Victor Coleman and George Bowering were paired for a reading that took place between the 1967 Creeley and Layton readings, on 3 March (Simco 6).

Robert Creeley in Transition | 227 ment of extensive influence on either side. Layton remarks in his introduction that “Mr. Creeley is one of the most honest poets writing today, and a very brave man, who knows the price that has to be paid for a good poem certified to endure” (Creeley 1967, 00:02:02). Further, he depicts Creeley as a poet who works on a small scale, quietly, with attention to silences and with precision, compactness, and power. As Layton paints his portrait of Creeley for the audience: “One critic has said that his poems are min- iatures, but there’s nothing miniature about the power that they release. I have said somewhere that he has written skinny poems that miraculously grow in length and breath, one’s air absorbed into one’s consciousness. Slender firecrackers that explode with the power of a bomb” (Creeley 1967, 00:02:48). In short, Layton casts Creeley as a craftsman in control of his materials, a poet invested in the composition of formally polished, enduring poems, an investment that characterized Layton’s own poetic ethos. While this idea of poetic form was never really one to which Creeley necessarily subscribed, by 1967 it pitched the relationship between form and content in a way that he was quite explicitly working against. That said, Creeley proved himself a polite, patient, and somewhat accommodating guest to his old acquaintance. In his own pre-reading speech, Creeley thanks Layton for his portrait and tries to pay homage to the significance Layton had had in his own development as a poet. However, while he acknowledges that he and Layton “have had a very long association,” Creeley ultimately seems unable to articulate the significance of that association in relation to the practice of writing. If Layton’s characterization of Creeley seems at odds with the process-oriented poetics for which was Creeley becoming known, Creeley’s attempt to characterize Layton in relation to the kind of poetry community Creeley had been working to build with the Black Mountain Review is vague and truncated: “I think that the kind of community that say either Irving or myself in this way were involved with was …,” Creeley begins to explain, but the sentence is never completed. Instead he simply states that Layton “was a very decisive contributing editor for the Black Mountain Review and was really a very decisive friend all those fifteen years” (Creeley 1967, 00:04:10). Layton’s contributions to Creeley’s poetry community, or even to his own developing poetics, lack specific points of reference or concrete evidence in retrospect. Instead, we have repetition of the adjective “decisive” used to describe Layton as editor and friend, suggesting Layton as a figure who knew what he liked and knew already who he was. Layton was less a community member than a fully-formed autonomous entity, the kind of entity Creeley was himself trying not to be.

228 | Camlot In describing Layton primarily as a decisive editor, he is acknowledging, again, the value for some (and for some of his past work) of a determined control over a poetics of process. And, indeed, Creeley’s reading is structured as if to ease the transition from Layton’s vision of him toward what he was now in the process of becoming. He does not disprove Layton’s portrait of him but acknowledges it early in the reading as something that existed in the past. “Let me read now. Let me start from back then,” Creeley says, after he has said his piece in response to Layton’s introductory tribute. He then selects “A Song” from the volume For Love, a poem that seems to underscore all of the poetic values that Layton had just articulated and ascribed to Creeley, qualities of quietness, perpetuity, and carefulness. These qualities are further underscored by the quiet and emotive timbre of his voice in the delivery of such phrases as: “I had wanted a quiet testament / … A murmer of some lost / thrush … / A Song … / Which one sings, if he sings it, / With care” (Creeley, “A Song” 112). Creeley proceeds to read a further series of short poems from For Love, all underscoring the poetic values and interest in concise form that characterized his communication and exchange with Layton in the 1950s. In providing a reading performance that allows this narrative about poetic form and community, the first portion of Creeley’s 1967 reading in Montreal functions as a personalized version of the rather common model for the poetry reading as a combination of lecture and recitation.15 Creeley is performing a narrative about his relationship to Layton not only by providing recited examples of the poems about which Layton would have been “decisive” in his praise during their period of friendship and correspondence but also by peppering his readings with explanations about what poetic friendship and community meant during that early period, when Creeley, as he says, “wanted to know where the world was, and Irving seemed to be very much, very much part of any world I certainly could respect” (Creeley 1967, 00:04:56). Literary exchange and influence is described both as social and, especially, as the result of transmission through sharing, reading, editing, and publishing each other’s work. In this sense there is no articulation of an abstracted poetic philosophy that is shared and no claim that Layton and Creeley were ever of the same “school” of poetry, but, rather, an acknowledgment that one’s own writing and perception is inevitably affected by encounter and exchange of that kind. As Creeley describes Paul Blackburn’s influence on his poem “A

15 For a discussion of the historical precedents in performance for mixing poetry recitation with expository lecture, see Wheeler 8–9.

Robert Creeley in Transition | 229 Form of Adaptation” that resulted simply from his having read some of the Proensa translations of Provencal poetry as Blackburn was composing them: “this poem … would be a poem not written by Paul Blackburn, but a poem much informed by his way of perceiving.”16 In this model of influence Creeley refers to the effects of friendship and “a common situation” as the defining factor. In other words, artistic influence is not unidirectional or causal but is affective, relational, and situational. Creeley does his best to cast his relationship to Layton in similar terms, despite Layton’s inclina- tion toward a model of poetic influence that is more Oedipal (à la Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence) than communal. In his opening remarks, Creeley is trying to say that Layton must have had an influence on him somehow by mere virtue of the fact that they exchanged work and opinions about poetry for over a decade. And yet, the nature of that influence is never articulated in an explicit way during the reading. Instead, as the reading progresses, Creeley locates the poems he had been reading as representative of sometime “back then” and gradually turns his focus upon the import of the now. As I mentioned earlier, Creeley came to Montreal between participat- ing in events of the “Contemporary Voices in the Arts” tour (New York State Council 36; Creeley 1967, 00:43:11). In his brief feedback essay, published in Arts Magazine (Summer 1967), on this series of performances, Creeley describes how the effect of a collaborative, interactive, and situational approach taken by the other participants quickly eliminated the possibility of his delivering anything like the usual poetry reading while he was working with them: Reading poems, as I’d known it, with the discreet placement of the audience, the fixed focus, the single term of the reader’s voice and image, all seemed to make an impossibly static circumstance. Consequently I never made use of it during any of the eight evenings we had together. Instead I tried to project

16 As the longer speech runs: “So the title is actually Paul’s title, I can’t now remember what—I don’t think he ever published the poem it was the title for, but I was struck by it, and you know, you take things, obviously, from friends, it was not that you were stealing, but that it was always a common situation. It’s “A Form of Adaptation,” and I think a young friend now at Buffalo where I’m presently working was telling me that I am in the courtly tradition which is confusing to me, but I can see what he means simply that I did pick up a lot through Paul Blackburn and writers in this way using a vocabulary or sense of possibility involved with that kind of writing. So this poem, for example, would be, would be actually a, would be a poem not written by Paul Blackburn, but a poem much informed by his way of perceiving” (Creeley 1967, 00:10:47).

230 | Camlot voice into the simultaneity of the multiple occurrences much as Stan was in fact doing with his battery of projectors and view-o-graphs. I was very curious to discover what kinds of hearing were actual in such a multiplicity of event. (Creeley, “Feedback” 387) Similarly, as we arrive at his reading of the poem “Anger” from Words, Creeley provides us with a lengthy discourse on the significance that this recent experience of communal performance and spontaneous composition has had for him, leading him to lay claim to the timely value of a community of collaboration without prescriptive or dominating influence. Here, Creeley begins to articulate a model of poetic community and the multidirectional possibilities that the occasion of a poetry reading can afford, despite the more unidirectional, pedagogical model that informs Layton’s introductory portrait of his friend and, indeed, that informed Layton’s own approach to reading, which focused on pristine delivery and confident explication, as is audible in the recording of the reading he delivered in the series the following month (Layton, Poetry Reading). In moving into his reading of this longer poem, “Anger,” Creeley articulates a very self-conscious analysis of the format of the poetry reading that had occupied him up to this point in his life and up to this point in his reading within the Sir George Williams series. He then declares that he might be at the end of his engagement with this form of self-consolidating, public performance. He depicts the “traditional” poetry reading as a format that is designed to reinforce the agency and control of the artist over his work. And he expresses his present discomfort with that format of performance because it runs counter to an artistic practice that embraces the idea of poetry as emerging from “a situation of process and activity” as opposed to “a singular isolation of person.” At this transitional moment, a pivot point in the reading, Creeley officially bids adieu to Layton’s version of him as a brave solitary agent producing meticulous, enduring individual poems and to the format of the poetry reading that corroborates that version of the poet. As he says, to audience laughter, but in all seriousness: “So, I may be reading these poems for the last time in that sense. I’m certainly prepared to do so. I’m not at all interested in continuing an activity that maybe, you know, maybe have much more experience or much more range of possibility than say contemporary habits about it seem to imply” (Creeley 1967, 00:47:20). The habitual format of the poetry reading against which Creeley was thinking implied a kind of univocality and coherence of self in relation to experience which he could no longer abide. His recent attempts “to project voice into the simultaneity of … multiple occurrences”

Robert Creeley in Transition | 231 suggest a more accurate account of what the poetry reading was becoming for him, even in the case of a solo reading. As Creeley bid adieu to reading publicly “as a singular isolation of person” he would develop new strate- The Robert gies for rendering his readings as polyvocal experiences. While he would not perform his poetry as a monopolylogue in the traditional, mainly Creeley we hear nineteenth-century sense (as an actor performing multiple voices on stage), he would explore ways of destabilizing and proliferating his expressive in his second registers and generating diverse situational contexts for his delivery of written work before an audience. Montreal 1970: fully present, situated, and in disruptive process reading is a Three years later, Creeley would return to Montreal to read in the Poetry Series again, this time from new work in progress and from Pieces and wilder, more In London, the two books that he had been composing during his previous visit to Montreal. These new materials and his attitude toward their devil-may-care, presentation very explicitly allow him to stage his investment in process and serial writing rather than in discrete poems, and they serve as textual more in the prompts for a mode of reading that challenged the format of the poetry reading he felt had become “an impossibly static circumstance” entrenched moment, more according to “contemporary habits.” It should be noted that within the larger context of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Creeley was not dialogical, alone in challenging the more habitual format of the poetry reading. To mention just a few examples of other performances that worked to disturb drunker, the more static format that focused on “the single term of the reader’s voice and image,” as Creeley described the habit in 1967: On separate occa- slurrier, more sions—bpNichol/Lionel Kearns (22 November 1968) and David McFad- den/Gerry Gilbert (15 January 1971)—two poets paired for an event chose foul-mouthed, to interweave their readings rather than read in sequence, thus creating a format that hinged on relational rather than solitary performance. And in and shocking his “reading” of 21 March 1971, Jackson Mac Low decentred the occasion of the scheduled event by reading along with tape recordings of readings he performer than had delivered at other times and places and by inviting multiple members of the audience to participate in the reading of some of his poems.17 Moti- the one heard in vated by a similar aim to disturb the static poetry reading format, although deploying alternate techniques of disruption, the Robert Creeley we hear 1967. in his second Montreal reading is a wilder, more devil-may-care, more in the moment, more dialogical, drunker, slurrier, more foul-mouthed, and shocking performer than the one heard in 1967. This was a Robert 17 The above-mentioned readings can be found by searching by the poet’s name at “sgw Poetry Reading Series.”

232 | Camlot Creeley prepared to deliver upon the introducer Frank Davey’s account of what the reading would promise to be, that is, a public performance of the relational and situated activity that characterizes the poetic process and the act of living itself. As Davey said in his opening remarks, which bear certain phrasal resemblances to Witt-Diamant’s characterization of Ginsberg at The Poetry Center reading in 1959: What has really introduced Robert Creeley to me, however, was something I heard him say back in 1963, to the effect that when a man begins to love himself, love himself, to be in the world as he is in it, then things begin to happen to him that are interesting. Now, this is a statement which is enigmatic in its syntax and yet still spells out what I think you will find interesting about Robert Creeley tonight, that is that he’s a man whose poems are close to the process of living. He will be able to give you information in his poems about this process, his poems are about someone who, no matter how difficult this process has become, has loved the particular moments of if. Now that Robert is supplied with cigarettes for the evening, he may as well begin. (Creeley 1970, 00:00:15) The reading begins thus: “Lemmee. Lemmeeee. ‘On Vacation.’ Thinks. Thangs. Things seem empty [pause] on vacation if the labors have not been physical” (Creeley, 1970 00:01:48). An inauspicious beginning? A false start? One might think so given that the reader questions and undercuts himself upon uttering the very first words of his performance, a declared request for permission—Lemmee, Lemmeeee [“Let me”]—permission to speak, to read, to exist, somehow, before them. And then undercuts himself again with the first word of the poem he is trying to read, “Thinks”, “Thangs”, “Things seem empty”—a vocal tuning, a Tourette’s moment, a series of attempts? From the very opening moments of this reading nearly through to the very end, the simplest of utterances from the poet demand reiteration, as if any attempt to speak authentically is compromised through the fact of sounding like something else, a television broadcaster, a cartoon character, a country bumpkin, a voice from another discursive context that has already spoken this very phrase in this very way, in some other time and some other place, that is, upon some other occasion. Creeley’s reading of the next poem repeats this process of mispronun- ciation as misrecognition—on the word poem, po-Em, itself—and then moves into the halting, syllabic reading style that dominates the performance as a whole—a performance style that most often suggests reading as a naive, even remedial process, an ongoing process of decoding for the

Robert Creeley in Transition | 233 purpose of sonic articulation. This is a method of performance that often suggests the text is in the process of being experienced for the first time, as a text would be in the earliest stages of literacy, but then is supported with contrapuntal bursts of masterful, breathless fluency. Consider my transcription of Creeley’s recorded performance of the poem, wherein a line break represents a caesura, a slash represents a hesitation in the act of the articulation of a vowel or consonant, and the absence of slashes in a span of text represents accelerated fluency, as an attempt to provide an example of what I am describing:

“DO YOU THINK?” [shouted] Do you think that if you once / do what you want / to do you will not you will want not to do it? Do you think that if / there’s an apple on the table and somebody eats it it won’t be there anymore? Do you think that if two people are in love with one another one or the other has got to be / less in love than the other at / some point in the otherwise happy relationship? Do you think that if you once take a breath / you’re by / that / committed to taking the next one and so on until the very process of breathing’s an extreme and endlessly expanding [breath] need almost of its own necessity forever? Do you think that if noone knows then / whatever it / is / noone will know and [turn of sheet] that / will / be / the / case like they say for an indefinite / period of time/ if such time can have a qualification of such time? Do you know anyone / really? Have you been / really / much alone? Are you lonely now for example? Does anything really matter to you / really? / Or has anything mattered? Does each thing tend to /be there/ and then not/ to be there just as if that were it? Do you think that if I said I loved you or anyone said it or you did? Do you / think that if you had all such decisions to make and / could / make them Do you think / that / if / you / did / that you / really / would have to think / it all into / reality / that world / each time / new? (Creeley 1970, 00:03:03)

234 | Camlot

2 | name This at times nearly monosyllabic dis-fluency deployed in Creeley’s performance of his poems instills regular intervals of suspense at the level of the syllable (or phoneme) and, consequently, in the regular intervals of semantic discovery for the listener, so that the text is articulated before the audience’s ears as a process of assembly, demanding that they listen to the sounds much as a reader must decipher printed text. Another effect of this manner of reading is a regular fluctuation of the relationship between the reader’s voice and the signifier in the course of the performance of a phrase, line, or entire poem. As Mladen Dolar has noted in his analysis of “The Linguistics of Voice,” the voice, in its quotidian presence, “functions as the bearer of an utterance, the support of a word, a sentence, a discourse, any kind of linguistic expression” and seems to disappear “like a vanish- ing mediator” in its success in fulfilling this function. In Dolar’s words, “it goes up in smoke in the meaning being produced” (15). In the context of semantic communication, “the voice appears as materiality opposed to the ideality of meaning” (Dolar 15). But insofar as Creeley’s halting method of delivery displays, at times, the reduced, distinctive features of phonemes—ever so temporarily—without the “differential oppositions” and relational values that give them fluid, semantic significance, it also reveals the voice itself as a material presence, a “material modality” on view through its engagement in “the very process of enunciation” (Dolar 22–23). Not quite a cough, hiccup, sneeze, or laugh—powerful disruptors of vocal articulation that have been fruitfully analysed by David Appelbaum and Jacob Smith, among others18—this aspect of Creeley’s reading does invoke (in periodic, asymmetrical intervals) the “salient presymbolic manifestation of voice” that Dolar associates with the vocal action of “the scream.” I am thinking, in particular, of a vacillation between the scream as pure sound (cri pur) and discursive, instrumental appeal (cri pour, to complete the Lacanian pun). As Dolar explains it, “the voice is transformed into an appeal, a speech act, in the same moment as need is transformed into desire; it is caught in a drama of appeal, eliciting an answer, provocation, demand, love” (15). While Creeley is not, literally, screaming his poetry to an audience, the segmented nature of much of his delivery enacts an ongoing performance of this conversion process as an ever vacillating relationship between the expression of pure need, on the one hand, and the contractual provocation of an informative speech act, on the other. His performative practice of lingering repeatedly upon moments of sonic transition from sound to

18 See Appelbaum, Voice; Smith, Vocal Tracks.

Robert Creeley in Transition | 235 signifier, voice to speech, phoneme to recognizable word, represents in microcosm the broader transitional situation he is enacting within the context of the format of the poetry reading as a situation of communication and an occasion of self-articulation. Yes, this manner of reading is partly the result of the fact that Creeley is too drunk to see straight (or read straight), an effect of the larger libational aspects of the Sir George reading format (there is a reference to an empty glass early in the reading), but it is also a deliberate process of his delivery, congruous with the broader ethos and actions that inform the contours of his performance, which I will list at the conclusion of my essay. For now, I would like to pick up on Dolar’s idea of the conversion of need into desire— scream into appeal, the materiality of voice into a functional speech act, through the process of directing it at an interlocutor, or interpolating a listener—by stressing the significance for Creeley’s 1970 performance of a declared scenario of reception for his reading. This reading is shaped by Creeley’s articulation of a specific context of communication, one that evokes constellations of other intimate occasions of interaction. Following his performance of the opening poems I have just discussed, Creeley identifies a significant other in the audience. The poet Robin Bla- ser is in town, and here, much as Creeley did with Layton in 1967, but to a significantly alternate effect, Creeley narrows the scope of his reading from poet in a hall to poet before a friend from his recent past. (Blaser and Creeley met in 1965.) In Creeley’s recognition of Blaser as the primary recipient of a series of poems now to be read, he notes the spatial accident of Blaser’s presence at the time of the reading and the temporal ambiguity of the significance of this presence: “I want to read, frankly an old and dear friend Robin Blaser, an old and dear friend, a man I much respect and care for just happens to be in the room, I haven’t seen him since, like, almost it feels like 20 minutes ago. But I want therefore to read a few poems that are more recent in composition” (Creeley 1970, 00:05:12). Years and minutes (increments of time) and space seem to collapse in Creeley’s reflection upon the temporal distance that informs his relationship to Blaser, who is now figured as a kind of ghost listener in the room and for whom in particular the most intimate, rough, and immediate poems will be read, specifically, as Creeley qualifies this section of the reading with comments like “I’m going to read a few more for Robin” and notes specifically that Robin Blaser will “know,” in listening to these poems, what others cannot be assumed to know: “frankly Robin is a very particular friend, and not [only] will know simply the information I’m try-

236 | Camlot ing to get clear, but will know the, you know, you like to read for people, shit, you know.” No, we don’t know. And that is part of the point of the occasion that Creeley is making of his reading. But we can venture to elaborate further upon a model of communication that seems to be at work in Creeley’s ongoing attempt to prevent the poetry reading from ever becoming “an impossibly static circumstance.” Creeley is trying to make clear “the information” of the poem, and for this goal it helps to have “a very particular friend” present who will quickly grasp, from experience, the details and complexities of “the information” he needs to communicate in order for the poem to be received. And then, quite beyond the wish to communicate “the information,” Creeley especially wants to communicate that unarticu- lated, perhaps non-verbalizable “you know” aspect of the poem, let us call it, within Dolar’s vocabulary, the “need” of the poem, the urgency, beyond signification, of the information provided. This aspect of the poem, the ultimate, true point of the poem for Creeley at this time in his creative process, is why “you like to read for people”—not because it represents the receipt of a plea (converted from scream), the interpolation of an auditor, the substantiation of a fixed or contractualized circumstance of communication, but because it suggests the presence of a second witness outside any such fixed, socially-prescribed contract, of an equally untethered cor- roborator of the affective noise of a circumstance emanating from beyond the “information” of the poem. The presence of such a second witness to the expressive process also functions as a safeguard against the kind of discursive oversaturation that inhibits the location of a vocal register for reading that does not sound false and overdetermined in an attempt to communicate the full significance of a situation that is impossible to communicate in fixed form. This power of corroboration to that non-informational “reality” of the poem is articulated in Creeley’s introduction to his poem “An Illness.” Near the end of the three-minute introduction, he begins to describe what the poem was about and, consequently, addresses Blaser directly about their shared relationship to the primary subject of the poem, before he embarks upon a powerful reading in a voice that is no longer floundering in an exercise of tuning for the correct register, but that is deeply grounded in an immediate occasion of communication: I wrote, my, Bobbie who is a friend indeed of Robin’s and myself, I’m literally her husband and Robin is a friend in that, what am I? I’m not going to propose that we’re—no, but I think

Robert Creeley in Transition | 237 it’s true. It has nothing to do with fucking, it has to do with the ambience and reality of another human being. I think we share that reality in her. And she had gotten ill, unhappily and in some unexpected manner and then happily is now okay, but it was a crazy moment of dilemma. “An Illness.” (Creeley 1970, 00:12:14) Everything I have described thus far has occurred within the first fifteen minutes of the 1970 reading, and yet my two main points of focus—Cree- ley’s un-fluid, phonetical manner of reading, combined with his gesture of articulating an intimate inner circle of reception for his poems, within the larger public auditorium in which he is consciously performing—reinforce the ethos and performative actions of the bulk of the reading as it unfolds. These actions include: • regular self-interruption during the course of reading a poem; • extensive and sometimes excruciatingly detailed digressions concerning the personal relationships that informed the compositional contexts of the poems; • the physical display of the manuscript in hand with explanations of the compositional strategies deployed in the writing; • the reading of redacted or crossed out parts of the poems after the un-redacted version of the text has been read; • regular, affectively intoned non-verbal cues of “commentary” on the text being read (especially in the form of laughter) during the process of reading; • the denial of generic distinction between all of these non- poetic verbal contributions, and the poems themselves.

In addition to these disruptive actions and, most importantly, I think, for much of the reading is Creeley’s ongoing public declaration of a narrowed communications circuit for his public attempt to read his poetry out loud. I underscore the importance of this last technique of performance again because it works powerfully to ground the presentation of the already dis- articulated text as read in the ever-transitional experience of the drama of human interaction, thus enacting a conflation between the occasion of the public poetry reading and lived experience subsequently marked as occasions fleetingly captured in the fixed traces of the process of writing, namely, the written serial poem.

238 | Camlot Such a combination of actions adds up to a performance that undercuts the format of the poetry reading modeled on the idea of a coherent self articulating a delineated process of expression with coherent meaning to a public audience. Where my story of Creeley’s transition in performance There is also a began with an account of his polite resistance to a model of poetics that enacted a faith in the possibility of the polished poem as a crystalliza- discernible arc tion of lived experience, by the time we arrive at the 1970 reading we can hear Creeley enact a full-fledged anti-performance, where poems are no or architecture longer obviously poems, the voice of the poet is no longer singular, fluid, or even a consistently viable apparatus for semantic communication, and that informs the poet as a publicly discernible and available entity is no longer a ten- able expectation, except, perhaps, as a responsive subject entangled in an the reading as a endless series of poetry occasions that spill over, indiscernibly, into the ongoing occasions of life. whole. Finally, even as the actions and effects I have just named are deployed and realized throughout Creeley’s performance, there is also a discernible arc or architecture that informs the reading as a whole, suggesting that the message of anti-performance I have just described can be delivered in different registers and different tones of voice. There is a distinctive tenor of gravity, a depth in vocal timbre that grows as the reading progresses and a concomitant quietness in the room that takes hold toward the reading’s end. The more manic, disruptive techniques already described accrue into a new kind of soberness—registered for us in retrospect with the advantages of the condenser microphone, on tape—that focuses on the writer’s primitive and ineffectual attempts to capture moments of time and the implications of an awareness of such ineffectuality for the practice of acting, speaking, thinking, and knowing. While the denouement into a register of greater seriousness and sobriety, which may indeed have coincided with an actual experience of sobering up on Creeley’s part, is audibly gradual and fluid as the reading moves forward, the moment in the recording where this calmer register seems to realize itself with some solidity emerges just following the one detectible edited cut in the sound recording tape itself (see over).

Robert Creeley in Transition | 239 Digital waveform visualization of tape edit at 00:45:16

At precisely forty-five minutes and sixteen seconds (00:45:16) into the recording that lasts one hour, seven minutes, and forty-nine seconds, there is a cut in the tape, resulting in a truncation (of unknown duration) of Creeley’s last expository discourse before he proceeds to close with the reading of two final poems. The speech that has been interrupted and omitted by the taping process and consequently begins in medias res addresses (as if with an appropriate temporal karma) the impossibility of ever rendering a situation with any kind of completion other than in pieces. Creeley is specifically discussing his recently published book, the long poem Pieces, and refers to a suggestion made to him by Ed Dorn to “think of a situation where the pieces do not compose that possible containment, the parts that do not necessarily relate and or have the substance of the whole thus to inform them” (Creeley 1970, 00:46:50). This challenge, posed by Dorn to Creeley as he was completing a serial poem, articulates the key problem Creeley had been attempting to wrestle with in performance throughout his reading (and within his recent writing process), that is, how to communicate ephemeral moments as part of a larger process and make them meaningful in relation to each other. Creeley goes on to describe the rudimentary notation system he used in Pieces to indicate when the sections of text in the book were written in relation to each other, three dots between textual passages indicating the interval of a day, and

240 | Camlot one dot indicating passages of time between “a particular sitting” within a single day. From this discussion, he moves into the delivery of a poem about cutting film and the temporal juxtapositions that arise from the film editing practice. At last, he skips to a sequence entitled “Mazatlan: Sea,” which he reads using some of the same techniques of alternating phonetic hesitation and fluency he had used earlier, but this time he reads as a means of articulating the musical concordances between the words he is delivering and as a way of making his voice sound more solitary in its situation of articulation, as if to express frankly the odds against which his project as an author and performer had been battling throughout the past hour. It is a long piece, over fifteen minutes of reading time, delivered, for once, without self- interruption but instead with attention to rendering with accuracy the process the poem documents. It is also delivered with a commitment to the message of the poem itself, which seems, in this sober and committed delivery, to articulate in candid and philosophical terms the nature of the condition of writing, reading, and being that the reading event as a whole was designed to convey. This closing phase of the performance does not answer the problems of identity and connection as they pertain to the format of the poetry reading that Creeley had been raising prior to this movement toward an end, but it aptly rephrases scenarios and poses questions he had been acting out in his reading, this time in a serious and sober manner. The final episodes in the sequence move from accounts of dreams of encounters and sounds—a man falling “spread-eagled on the sidewalk,” hearing his “dog yelp … so vividly”—to an account of “he and I / he / and / I / after drinking / and talking” approaching a woman, to an account of having sex with the woman they had approached, to an account of “the mystery” he had come to, described as “all manner / of men, / a throng, / and bodies / of women, / writhing / and a great / though seemingly / silent sound,” in effect, an orgy he now hears as laughter in the distance (Creeley 1970, 01:05:18). All kinds of possible encounters with individuals and groups are described, culminating in the speaker’s solitary reflection upon the meaning of the great silent sound of the orgy of men and women he has left behind and a closing set of questions, a full second of silence between each one, posed, with simple, genuine interrogative inflection, at once to himself and to the intimates, the acquaintances and the strangers in the audience before him:

Robert Creeley in Transition | 241 What do you do? What do you say? What do you think? What do you know?

No additional words of comment from the poet. Just a few seconds of silence, the sound of the microphone being jostled, probably to be removed from his person, and applause from the audience for five seconds before the tape recording abruptly cuts out.

Works Cited

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Robert Creeley in Transition | 243 Ginsberg, Allen. Poetry Reading. The sfsu Poetry Center (27 April 1959). ———. Poetry Reading. kpfa Pacifica Studio Recording (25 October 1956). Ginsberg, Allen, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky. Interview by Studs Terkel. wfmt Chicago (1959). Greet, William Cabell. “Records of Poets.” American Speech 9.4 (1934): 312–13. Hoffman, Tyler.American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Horrocks, Roger. Len Lye: A Biography. Aukland: Aukland up, 2001. Kane, David. All Poet’s Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Kerouac, Jack. Blues and Haikus. With Al Cohn and Zoot Zims. lp Record. New York: Hanover Records, 1959. Kerouac, Jack. Poetry for the Beat Generation. With Steve Allen. lp Record. New York: Hanover Records, 1960. Kiyooka, Roy. Transcanada Letters. Vancouver: NeWest Press, 1975. Layton, Irving. Poetry Reading at sgwu. Montreal. 18 March 1967. Lazer, Frank. “Thinking Made in the Mouth: The Cultural Poetics of David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg.” Picturing Cultural Values in Postmodern America. Ed. William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. McCormack, Robert. “Unspeakable Verse.” Canadian Literature 12 (1962): 28–36. Mustazza, Chris. “Provenance Report: William Carlos Williams’s 1942 reading for ncte.” Jacket 2 (21 May 2014). Nardone, Michael. “LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN!: Jackson MacLow’s Pho- nopoetics.” Amodern 4 (March 2015). New York Council on the Arts Annual Report 1966–67. New York: New York State Council on the Arts, 1967. “Poetry Readings Resume Tonight.” Op-Ed (13 December 1967): 2. Pound, Louise. “Phonograph Records of Robert Frost.” American Speech 11.1 (1936): 98. “Rev. Canon Fleming.” The Sunday at Home: Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading. London: Religious Tract Society, 1881. 581–83.

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