Monthly Archives: January 2019

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Quentin Tarantino is an anti-black racist. Is DJANGO UNCHAINED racist? Is Quentin Tarantino racist? DJANGO UNCHAINED is a work of anti-black racism. Race Analysis. Representation of Race. Quentin Tarantino and Race. Quentin Tarantino and Racism. Django Unchained and Racism. Django Unchained Race Controversy. Django Unchained Racist Controversy

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Quentin Tarantino Is an Anti-Black Racist

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

Quentin Tarantino is a beslobbered anti-black racist who makes Blaxploitation films for hipsters.  These hipsters grow aggressively defensive whenever African-Americans stand up and denounce these very films.  (Roxane Gay, Spike Lee, Katt Williams, and Armond White are only a few of the African-Americans who have spoken out against Tarantino’s racism.)  Tarantino wishes to prove to his hipster fanatic base that he knows African-American culture better than African-Americans know their own culture.  And his hipster fanboys also desire that feeling–the feeling that they understand African-Americans better than African-Americans understand themselves.  (For an analysis of the mind of the hipster, consult Norman Mailer’s essay on this topic.)

Tarantino’s latest abomination is Django Unchained (2012), a film about a murderer-for-hire named Dr. King Schultz (Christopher Waltz) who enlists an African slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) to assist him in his mass-murdering spree.  Their journey ends at Candyland, a plantation owned by the oleaginous Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, in an amusing and impressive performance that elevates above the film and never quite descends into camp).  There is much to demur to, but I will restrict myself to three demurrals: 1.) The film is an agglomeration of plagiarisms.  2.) The film is crypto-racist garbage.  3.) The screen violence is without passion or meaning.

DJANGO UNCHAINED IS AN AGGLOMERATION OF PLAGIARISMS

Django Unchained is a pastiche of Spaghetti Westerns.  The opening song was lifted directly from the English-language version of Django (1966).  On the soundtrack is a well-known composition from Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack for Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)–an American Spaghetti Western, if there ever was one.  There is also an appearance by Franco Nero, star of the original Django, which is a pointless, meaningless cinematic reference that adds nothing whatsoever to the film, which is itself a pointless, meaningless accumulation of cinematic references.

The references are smarmily, unctuously obvious.  One thinks of the scene in which Schultz recounts to Django the basics of Das Nibelungenlied.  If Tarantino were an artist, he wouldn’t have spelled out the legend of Siegfried and Brunhilda for the benefit of his illiterate spectatorship.

Not merely does the film contain a cluster of plagiarisms; it itself is a plagiarism.  The film is an unacknowledged remake of the Mandingo films of the 1970s–in particular, Mandingo (1975) and its sequel, Drum (1976).  Tarantino steals from these sources to such a degree that his film would have been better entitled Mandingo Unchained.

Calvin Candie is clearly modeled on two characters in Drum: DeMarigny (John Colicos), connoisseur of Mandingo fights, and Warren Oates’s character Hammond, slave-owner and breeder of Mandingos.  Both characters were spliced together to create the hybrid Calvin Candie, lover of intra-racial violence.

The Mandingo-fight scene [1:05] owes everything to the original Mandingo film, although different body parts are excised.  In Django Unchained, an eye is enucleated.  In Mandingo, a jugular vein is torn out.

Quentin Tarantino isn’t very much different from Calvin Candie.  After all, they both enjoy watching Mandingo fighting.

DJANGO UNCHAINED IS CRYPTO-RACIST TRASH

On the surface, Django Unchained seems to be directed against white anti-black racism.  But it is itself a work of white anti-black racism.

Now, I like revenge-fantasies as much as the next person, but there is something more sordid, more sinister going on here than what goes on in most revenge-fantasies (“You got me!  Now I’m gonna get you, sucka!”).  Like its predecessor, Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained is a work of genocide pornography, the cruelest, most unconscionably vicious form of pornography in existence.  The crude plot of Inglourious Basterds trivializes the Holocaust; the crude plot of Django Unchained trivializes the enslavement of Africans in antebellum America.

But Django Unchained does more than merely trivialize the enslavement of Africans in nineteenth-century America.  It turns the enslavement of Africans into an object of consumption, an object of enjoyment.

To call this film “ahistorical” would be to utter a gross understatement.  The film approximates history as closely as Spongebob Squarepants approximates marine biology.  With one important qualification: The creator of Spongebob Squarepants actually knows a great deal about marine biology, even if he chooses not to exhibit this knowledge in the television program that he spawned.  This film bears no relation to history whatsoever.  It is a bombinating vacuum in which references from exploitation films resonate.

No one in the nineteenth century ever said, “Adult supervision is required.”  Nor did anyone ever use the term “***********************************.”

Slaves could not read, but Django does a pretty good job of reading aloud the text of a Wanted poster [0:57].  He doesn’t know the words “bounty,” “valet,” or “positive,” but he does know the words “antagonize” and “intrigue.”  As Katt Williams pointed out, it is odd that Django can spell his own name.

The late populist film critic Roger Ebert used the term deus ex machina (“God-out-of-the-machine”) to describe the entry of Schultz in the opening of the film.  That moment isn’t quite a deus ex machina–such a device is commonly used at the end of a work, such as when Helios transports Medea on a golden chariot at the end of Euripides’ tragedy.

However, Ebert was correct to call Schultz a “god.”  He just didn’t know the extent to which he was correct.

Schultz is a god, all right.  He is the white god who creates the black Django.  “I feel vaguely responsible for you,” he says to Django.  “I gave you your freedom.”

Yes, it is Schultz who grants Django his liberty.  The first time we see Django’s face is when Schultz shines light on him.  It is Schultz who transforms Django into a murderer-for-hire.  It is Schultz who sculpts Django into a full human being.

Django is not allowed to kill Calvin Candie.  Only the Good White Master is allowed to kill the Evil White Master.  Django is allowed to kill Candie’s minions–both black and white — but not their Evil White Master.  Django has a master, all right, and his name is Dr. King Schultz.

It is for this reason that Will Smith declined to assume the role of Django: “Django wasn’t the lead, so it was like, I need to be the lead.  The other character was the lead!  I was like, ‘No, Quentin, please, I need to kill the bad guy!'”

Will Smith’s objection to the film gets to the heart of the problem: Django is a secondary character, the Good White Master’s marionette.

Much has been made of the use of racist language in the film.  That is because Tarantino enjoys using racist language.  Racist words, evidently, are his favorite words in the English language, a language that he does not know very well.  He expresses racist words with brio, emitting them with gusto, as if such words were  shibboleths.

One recalls the infamous (I am using this word in its proper sense) scene in Pulp Fiction (1994) in which Tarantino-playing-Tarantino utters a racist word in Tourette’s-like staccato beats.  There is no point in arguing that Tarantino is playing a character and that his character is racist, not Tarantino, when Tarantino is obviously playing himself in the scene.  The delight that he feels whenever he bleats the racist word is palpable.

Django Unchained is backwater-garbage, racist filth, intended for ugly-souled, racist hipster-fanboy-cretins.  The film is regressive because it imagines that White (the presence of all color) and Black (the absence of all color) are “colors” and that races and have really existent correspondents.  Black is a shade, not a color; white is a tint, not a color, and race is not a categorical fact.  Race does not exist; only individuals exist.  The film erodes and erases so many of the steps that America has taken over the past four years.  I wrote the words above on 13 July 2013, the day on which George Zimmerman was acquitted for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

What is a racist?  A racist is someone who has nothing of which to be proud other than his or her epidermal pigmentation.  We are, all of us, out of Africa.  Anthropologists have established that Africa is the cradle of humanity and that there are only epidermal subdivisions between us.  It makes no sense to speak of “race,” since each individual “race” encompasses so many of these subdivisions.

Quentin Tarantino hypostatizes race.

THE VIOLENCE IN THE FILM IS PASSIONLESS

I don’t mind screen violence.  Screen violence can be bracing.  The problem with the representational violence in Django Unchained is that it is mechanical, spiritless, passionless.  It is difficult to understand how or why anyone would be offended by the violence in the films of Tarantino.  The violence in all of his films is automatized, transactional, emotionless.

I would like to call your attention to the moment [0:57] in which Schultz murders the alleged stagecoach robber Smitty Bacall.  Schultz snipes at his victim from a distance of about 200 feet.  Tarantino shoots the man from a distance of 200 feet, as well.  There is a complete emotional disengagement between the murderer and the murderee.  There is also a complete emotional disengagement between the film and the murderee.  We see the man’s son running to his father and hear the boy screaming, “Pa! Pa!”  But the boy and his father are no more than flecks of dust on the screen.  The father and son are hardly represented as human beings, at all.

And what about the scene that immediately follows the one that I just described?  The scene in which Django and Schultz use a band of cowboys for target practice [0:58]?  What, precisely, did these cowboys do to deserve to be gunned down?

All of the murders are filmed with the detached eye of a psychopath.

By contrast, the death scenes in the films of Nicolas Roeg are historically intense.  “A young man is cut down in the prime of his life,” Roeg said, referring to his directorial debut, Performance (1970).  “[Death] is an important thing.”

The murder of Lara Lee Candie (Laura Cayouette), Calvin’s sister [2:39], is as passionate as the deletion of an unneeded Microsoft Word document.

In Django Unchained, human characters (and horses) are eliminated with the same passion with which you would close pop-up advertisements on your computer screen.

* * * * *

The antistrophe to my arguments is quite predictable.  “It’s only a movie” comes the bleating response.  You can hear the booing, the cooing, and the mooing: “It’s only a mooooooooooooooooooovie.”  Keep on telling yourselves that: “It’s only a moooooooooooovie…  It’s only a moooooooooovie…”

Despite such zoo-noise, it can be said, without fear of exaggeration or absurdity, that Django Unchained is one of the vilest motion pictures ever made.  Not because of its violence (again, screen violence can be bracing), but because it delights in the exploitation and dehumanization of African-Americans.  Quentin Tarantino is a hate-criminal, and Django Unchained is a hate-crime.

Dr. Joseph Suglia, table41thenovel.com

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A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE by Anaïs Nin [An Analysis by Joseph Suglia]

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An Analysis of A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE (Anaïs Nin) by Joseph Suglia

A Spy in the House of Love (1959) is the beautifully poetic expression of a desire that is seldom acknowledged.  With the greatest clarity, it expresses a woman’s desire–or more precisely, a peculiarly feminine desire–to rid herself absolutely of all feminine desire, of all muliebrity.  Her desire desires nothing more than to imitate the vicissitudes of masculine desire.

The main character, Sabrina, is an actress who slips in and out of erotic relations with men–“the house of love” to which the title refers.  As Madame Bovary, she is unfaithful to her husband.  Unlike Madam Bovary, however, she is serially unfaithful and seemingly incapable of devoting herself completely to any one man.  Garbed in a cape, Sabrina races through the night from one tryst to the next.  She is by no means cold.  She is sensitive enough to bleed to death from a paper cut; one slight or insult from a passer-by would cause her to vaporize on the street.  Indeed, her emotional attachments are impassioned.  Although she reads the men with whom she couples as if they were so many books, memorizing every detail of their person, it is clear that each of these men affects her profoundly.  It would be incorrect, therefore, to say that she is, for instance, a man imprisoned in the body of a woman.  Because she is a woman whose inner world is infinitely rich and a woman who is capable of infinite passion, she longs–fruitlessly, perhaps–to become impassive; it is precisely because she burns with passion that she yearns to rid herself of all passion.

Masculine desire is (often) transient.  Once a man has what he desires, he often loses interest and turns his mind to a new object of lust.  Sabrina knows this.  In the hope of masculating her own desire, all of Sabrina’s inner activity is directed toward the point at which desire is interrupted:

The moment of non-loving, non-desiring.  The moment when she took flight, if the man had admired another woman passing by, or talked too long about an old love, the little offences, the small stabs, a mood of indifference, a small unfaithfulness, a small treachery, all of them were warnings of possibly larger ones, to be counteracted by an equal or larger or total unfaithfulness, her own, the most magnificent of counterpoisons, prepared in advance for the ultimate emergencies [59].

Because she knows the limitedness of masculine desire, she is preoccupied with desire’s finitude.  Her desire envies the evanescence of masculine desire.

How else could she inure herself to the perils of desire except by imitating the desire of men?  And how else could she imitate the desire of men except through art?  Art always compounds fakery and seduction.  Sabrina’s greatest work of art is her ability to don masks and disguises and become the person she impersonates.  As one of her paramours, Donald, writes to her in his “letter to an actress”: “I felt… as I watched you act Cinderella, that you were whatever you acted, that you touched that point at which art and life meet and there is only BEING” [121].  In order to cancel within herself all enduring attachments, she chameleonically simulates the “nonchalance” and “full assurance” [34] of men and thereby becomes thoroughly “masculinized”: “She knew all of the trickeries in this war of love” [59].  She metamorphoses herself into a woman who is indifferent to the men whom she embraces.  Because she is forever a changeling, she is never fully exposed.  Her lovers can say nothing that would injure her, for she is not.  Even her nudity is a form of concealment: “Before [Mambo, a nightclub musician and one of her many lovers] could speak and harm her with words while she lay naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgment, she was preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Sabrina he struck down she could abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had seized upon and say: ‘That was not me'” [76].  A simulatrix, she affirms the plasticity of identity.  Herself an endless play of masks, she unsettles and destabilizes the self-sameness of the self.  She is never one self and therefore is never what anyone–for instance, her husband, Alan–wants her to be (“I want my own Sabrina back” [19], Alan exclaims at one point).

Because she undoes the factitious stability of identity, Sabrina is regarded, as are all artists in the novel, as a criminal, a vagabond, a “spy,” a “gangster[-] in the world of art” [154].  Her crime is the dispersal of identity.  Indeed, she regards herself as a criminal–and this self-recognition, of course, gives way to the most painful experience of guilt.  All guilt yearns for confession: “Guilt is the one burden human beings that can never bear alone” [153], she says-and for this reason, she is drawn to her confidant: a lie detector who shadows her and prepares to bring her to justice.

It might be that Sabrina’s desire to become-someone-other, like all desire, is incapable of fulfillment.  The impossibility of her desire’s fulfillment is what gives A Spy in the House of Love its strange beauty.  Her desire is for that which she can never own–a trap that is perhaps best expressed in German: Das Mögen mag die Möglichkeit = Desire desires possibility.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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DAMNED by Chuck Palahniuk. Critique. Analysis. Chuck Palahniuk: DAMNED. Chuck Palahniuk Is a Bad Writer. Chuck Palahniuk Is Overrated.

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A Critique of DAMNED (Chuck Palahniuk) by Joseph Suglia

The English language contains approximately 600,000 words, if you believe that words are things that are housed in dictionaries.  What of neologisms?  What of inartful?  Microsoft Word underlines inartful in red, and you won’t find it in any dictionary that I’ve ever come across, but President Obama used that word (if it is one) and used it well, and it seems right.  What about sacrality?  Jean-Francois Lyotard used that “word.”  Is it a word?  What of words that are no longer in currency?  What of paleonyms?  What of sireniform and egrote?  What of names?  Are names words?  Is elbow one word or two (a noun and a verb)?  What of plurals and possessives?  Are head, head’s, heads’, and heads four separate words?  Or are they variations of a single word?  On what basis could we say one or the other?  When does a word become a word?  If a linguistic sign is spoken or written, does it then become a word?  Let us say, as a hypothesis, that a word is a word if it is articulated and employed.  If meaning is predicated on usage, as Wittgenstein believed, shouldn’t all words be used?  The English language is rich and various, full of nuance and synonymy.  Why, then, do so many English speakers limit themselves to the most common Anglo-Saxon vocabulary?  When someone employs “too many” words of French-Latin origin, that person will usually be accused of using “big words.”  There is no such thing as a “big word,” however, unless we are talking about morphology.  There are familiar words, and there are unfamiliar words.  The familiar words in English are of Anglo-Saxon origin; the less familiar ones are mostly Latinate.  You will hear simple-minded English speakers tell you that Latinate words should be avoided, as if William the Conquerer’s French Latin were somehow a corrosion of a pure and original idiom.  English, however, would not be English were it not the happy marriage of Germanic Anglo-Saxon and French Latin.

“Chuck” Palahniuk dwells within a micro-subdivision of the ever-expanding multiverse which is the English language.  He “knows” approximately as many English words as a subnormal ten-year-old American boy.  This explains why he writes on the level of a subnormal ten-year-old American boy and why he is beloved by so many subnormal ten-year-old American boys, his dwindling Hitler-Jugend.  His ovine followers are entranced, as was I, by David Fincher’s visually captivating film Fight Club (1999) and mistakenly equate Fincher’s brilliant vision to that of “Chuck” (they refer to the writer by his given name, projecting an imaginary familiarity with the Leader who has bilked them out of their allowance money).  Many of them are failed or failing elementary or high-school students, white, crypto-Christian, reactionary, American, and male.  (Yes, there are chuckettes.  But the chuckettes outgrow Palahniuk more quickly than the boychicks and the boychucks do.)  And many of them, too many of them, think of themselves as writers: “If Chuck can be a famous writer, so can I…”

And this is the most nauseating thing about “Chuck” Palahniuk: He engendered a band of adolescents who think they have facility in literature because they read Choke.  He is a slovenly, lazy writer who has given birth to a band of slovenly, lazy “aspiring writers” who think that fiction is EZ-2-write.

D. H. Lawrence once wrote of Herman Melville that his weakness as an author was that he felt his audience in front of him.  “Chuck,” non-artist, writes juvenilia to appease a juvenile audience that, as I suggested above, still misidentifies “Chuck” with filmmaker David Fincher.  If he thinks that horror fiction is selling, “Chuck” will read one book by Shirley Jackson and another by Ira Levin and upchuck what he believes to be horror fiction.  If he thinks that young-adult novels are selling, he will read one book by Dale Basye and upchuck a very bad, very inept Dale Basye pastiche.  Damned is such a pastiche, yet another atrociously written, publicly edited novel by the Tarzan of American letters.

* * * * *

Damned, it’s about a girl called Madison Spencer.  Madison Spencer’s a real bad girl.  She, like, uses big words so that people think she’s smart and stuff.  But she’s not really smart.  She just uses big words which is real dumb.  Hell is a place for people who are deluded, pretentious poseurs and use fancy words and stuff:

“Yes, I know the word excrement” [19].

“I comprehend the term passive-aggressive” [17].

“Yeah, I know the word construct” [Ibid.].

“Yes, I know the word absentia [sic]” [3].

At the end of the book, this girl, her name’s Madison, she knows that, like, she’s just like the simple people.  A simple person just like you and me.  And she learns to talk simple just like the simple people later on in the book.  A simple person.  Just like you.  Just like me.  Just like Chuck.  She’s in Hell ’cause she uses big words but at the end of the book she becomes good when she uses simple words like the simple people do:

“Even now, I hesitate to use words such as eschew and convey and weltschmerz [sic], so thoroughly is my faith shaken.  The actual nature of my death reveals me to be an idiot, no longer a Bright Young Thing, but instead a deluded, pretentious poseur.  Not brilliant, but an impostor who would craft my own illusory reality out of a handful of impressive words.  Such vocabulary props served as my eye shadow, my breast implants, my physical coordination, my confidence.  These words: erudite and insidious and obfuscate, served as my crutches” [177].

She just an idiot like us simple people too.  So, like, at the end of the book and stuff, she don’t use big, fancy words anymore and talks real simple and good like the simple people do.  She was bad when she used the big words.  Now that she don’t use the big words she real good.  Just like us.  Just like Chuck.

Groundling “lit.”

Lilliputian “lit.”

Two things in the passage cited above immediately strike the attention:

1.) Palahniuk-Howard believes that insidious and convey are “big words.”

2.) In a paragraph that denounces “big words,” the word illusory is employed–which the non-literate would consider a “big word.”

Sloshing through this slush, it is easy to see why Doubleday delayed the publication of Damned for five months.  Even after Gerry Howard edited (i.e. recreated) the manuscript, it is still unpublishable.  What we are left with is a fetid and fetal scrawl that is far below the level of your neighborhood writers’ workshop.

If Hell were a library, Damned would be burned on the ninth floor.

* * * * *

Why, precisely, is Palahniuk’s Hell a place where The English Patient (1996) and The Piano (1993) are endlessly spooling and screening?  Why are showings of THESE films considered “punitive presentation[s]” [19]?  What exactly do these films hold in common?

The answer: They both limn the elegant bodies of beautiful women.  The lovely, flowing, alabaster skin of beautiful women.  The svelte, exquisitely sculpted, rotund bodies of Juliette Binoche, Holly Hunter, and Kristin Scott Thomas.  Whereas the female body is seen by many of us as a locus of fecundity and as a wonderland of infinite delights, for Palahniuk, the body of a woman is Hell.  I am not exaggerating.  In Damned, “the actual terrain of Hell” [73] is the body of a woman, with all of its creases and crevices and folds, all of its loops and nodes and lobes.

Did you hear that?  Palahniuk’s Hell is the body of a woman.

* * * * *

The time has passed when “Chuck” could be taken seriously as a serious novelist, postmodern or otherwise (though phrases such as “attachments to a fixed identity” [179] demonstrate that he still has postmodernist aspirations).  It is now generally recognized that this forty-nine-year-old Average American Male writes insufficient young-adult fiction and that his books belong in the ‘Young Adult’ section of libraries and bookstores, or perhaps in the ‘Special Interest’ category.  It is saddening that D students wasted their youth on hasty fictions agonizingly scribbled out by a dopey yokel.

As I suggested above, the Palahniuk cult is dissolving, though there remain fanatic boys and apostolic Lumpen “writers” who still slavishly cry out their Leader’s given name in the same way that religious zealots cry out the name of their tombstone messiah: “Chuuuuuuccckkk…  I will dress up in a wedding gown for youuuuuuu…!”  At the core of Palahniuk’s die-hard following are rabid mall-rats who are ripe for fascist indoctrination.  In general, however, the Cult has moved from proselytization to disillusionment and is slowly shifting toward its eventual decontamination.

THEOREM

We live in a sad society in which opportunistic hacks are hailed as “artists” and genuine art is ignored.  It is time for the intelligent to stand up and denounce these hacks and to show them for what they truly are: money-sucking subliterate robots.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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A Critique / Refutation of OUTLIERS by Malcolm Gladwell

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A Critique of OUTLIERS (Malcolm Gladwell) by Dr. Joseph Suglia

According to Nietzsche, Kant writes what the common man believes in a language that the common man cannot understand.  Malcolm Gladwell, it must be said, vigorously reaffirms what the common man believes in a language that the common man CAN understand, thus flattering the common man and “making him happy.”  “To be made happy”: a Gladwellism for “to be satisfied with a consumer item, such as a book by Malcolm Gladwell.”

In Outliers (2008), Gladwell argues, in essence: “It is better to be mediocre than it is to be brilliant!”  Perhaps that is too blunt of a truncation, but the book seems to welcome such simplicity.

We are introduced to Chris Langen, “the public face of genius in American life” [70], who nonetheless works in construction and “despairs of ever getting published in a scholarly journal” [95].  Langen fails because he was raised in abject squalor, and his mother “missed a deadline for his financial aid” [98].  By contrast, Robert Oppenheimer, a “success” for his complicity in the atomization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was “raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan” [108].  Other actors within the community-theater proscenium include Marita, a twelve-year-old from an impoverished family who gives up her evenings, weekends, and friends to slave away in one of New York City’s most rigorous and competitive middle schools.  She will succeed, Gladwell suggests, because she “works hard” and is given a “chance.”  Indeed, Bill Gates was a “success” because he was given unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal at the age of thirteen.  The Beatles were a “success” because they forced themselves to perform eight-hour concerts in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962.  Along the way, the reader is pepper-sprayed with anecdotes about Korean aviation and Kentuckian aggression that have no apparent relevance to the thesis of the book, except to “demonstrate” that one’s “cultural legacy” sometimes has to be jettisoned in order for one to become “successful.”

Gladwell is arguing, in nuce, that success–euphemistic for “financial prosperity”–corresponds not to one’s intelligence, but rather to opportunity and social savoir-faire.  The thesis isn’t so much false as it is banal.  Of course, one must have social skills and opportunity to be “successful.”  And yet I would contend, pace Gladwell, that even social skills and opportunity are not enough, by themselves, for an individual to succeed financially.  Life never brooks such easy recipes (or follows such “predictable courses” [267], to use Gladwell’s language).

What, precisely, does Gladwell mean by “intelligence”?  The author hypostatizes the Intelligence Quotient Test and thus subscribes to the false supposition that intelligence can be quantified and measured.  If you receive 180 on the Intelligence Quotient Test, in other words, then you are a super-genius.  Now, I did score [number redacted] on the I. Q. Test, but that, in itself, is no guarantor of my genius.  Intelligence is an impalpable thing, and there is no necessary relationship whatsoever between one’s intelligence and the I. Q. examination, just as, following Gladwell, there is no necessary relationship between one’s I. Q. score and “success.”

Moreover, Gladwell ignores the temporal differences that separate his stories.  Oppenheimer lived in an America that was less intimidated by, and envious of, intelligence than the America of the twenty-first century.  I differ from Gladwell, and my counter-thesis is the following: Even if Langen possessed superior social skills, it is very likely that he still would have failed in life.

Why?  Because the culture has become a home for Swiftian Lilliputians, ever-ready to manacle down any Gulliver who comes their way.  Yes, Gladwell is correct in suggesting that geniuses almost always fail and the mediocre almost always triumph, but he completely misses the reasons.  You cannot possibly succeed if you are a genius unless you camouflage, to a certain extent, your intelligence.  We are living a culture that, instead of lionizing intelligence, disdains it.  Those who possess a higher intellect than the multitude are looked upon with acrimony and mistrust.  Such is the “leveling-off” or equalization of all distinction to which polymaths and geniuses have long since grown accustomed.

Similarly, there is the impulse in this book to anathematize genius, as if genius were some kind of cancerous polyp that should be excised.  It is not difficult to detect a certain defensiveness in Gladwell’s anti-intellectualist posturing, not merely as if the myth that genius equals success needed to be debunked, but as if genius, in itself, were something intrinsically negative, threatening–damaging, even.  Gladwell, non-genius, is content to attack genius in Outliers with the same vehemence with which he attacked critical thinking in Blink.  And for exactly the same affective reason: Gladwell is as intimidated by genius as he is cowed by critical thought, for which he substitutes anecdotes lifted, quite uncritically, from single sources: books by John Ed Pierce, Richard E. Niebett and Dov Cohen, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin…

Gladwell’s most ardent admirers–non-brilliant readers who want reassurance that their non-brilliance is a formula for success–sigh plaintively and bleat.  And the mediocre shall inherit the Earth.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Niccolo Machiavelli argued that the expansion of power comes from opportunity in the early sixteenth century.  But he qualified: from opportunity and through cleverness (virtù in Italian).

Joseph Suglia

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TREE OF CODES by Jonathan Safran Foer / WRITING WITH SCISSORS – by Dr. Joseph Suglia

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WRITING WITH SCISSORS: A review of TREE OF CODES (Jonathan Safran Foer)

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

“[Schulz’s] writing is so unbelievably good, so much better than anything that could conceivably be done with it [?], that more often than not I simply wanted to leave it alone.”
–Jonathan Safran Foer

He should have left it alone.

What does one do if one wishes to become a writer but lacks verbal talent?  If one is Jonathan Safran Foer, one mutes and mutilates magical masterpieces.  Tree of Codes (2010) is an anti-book, assaulting language, crushing words under the weight of optical imagery, a non-book in which words serve a merely ornamental function.  It is an atomic weapon that is pitted against verbality, against writing, against the Word.  It is the stifling of a book, a sequence of stillnesses.  There is more writing–more expressive language–in Max Ernst’s collage novels.

To construct this monstrosity, Foer took an English translation of Bruno Schulz’s magisterial Sklepy Cynamonowe (“Cinnamon Shops,” 1934).  (Please note: The book is NOT called “The Street of Crocodiles,” no matter what Foer might tell you.)  Foer then carved blocks of text out of the English translation, excising Schulz’s beautiful prose poetry, scissoring it up.  Anyone who finds this practice innovative should consult the work of Tristan Tzara, Brion Gysin, and Raymond Queneau.

Here are two of Foer’s vicious eviscerations:

“The demands were made more loudly, we heard him talk to God, as if begging against insistent claims” (28).

“Knot by knot he loosened himself, as unremarked as the grey heap swept into a corner waiting to be taken” (39).

SPAM poetry.

Refrigerator-magnet poetry.

The first problem with Foer’s cut-up is that he chooses the wrong object.  Knock, knock!  Schulz wrote in Polish, not in English.  What on Earth is the point of cutting up, mucking up, mashing up, and rescrambling the English translation of a Polish novel?  Polish is frightfully difficult to render into English.  If you would like evidence for this assertion, take a look at any English translation of Jan Potocki, Bruno Schulz, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witold Gombrowicz.  Consider, for instance, Alastair Hamilton’s translation of Gombrowicz’s Pornografia.  Hamilton translated a French translation of the novel into English: His is the translation of a translation.

Secondly: The ingenious Bruno Schulz–a writer more gifted than Kafka, in my estimation–did not have to dazzle his readers with glistening typographies.  He let language do the work.  He let his beautiful prose speak for itself.  If Schulz’s book is the richest book Foer ever read (it is one of the richest books I’ve yet read), why disembowel all of that richness?  We know the answer: Because Foer feels condemned by the richness, threatened by the richness, punished by the richness.  Foer the Hipster, who is incapable of expressing himself inventively in writing, chainsawed the work of a great author, an author who intimidated him.  Foer’s venomous envy and hatred of Schulz are unmistakable.

Snip, snip, snip!  Pare it down!  Tear it up!  What we are left with is an absolute abomination, something far worse than a book burning.  It is one thing to immolate a great book such as “Cinnamon Shops.”  It is quite another to replace a great book with a papier-mâché dummy, an Ersatz effigy, a kitschy replica.  Nothing more malicious in the literary arts could be imagined.

In the republic of letters, Jonathan Safran Foer will be remembered as a slicer, shearer, and shredder of literature.  He is at home in a culture that is tawdry, boring, and stupid and that is becoming tawdrier, more boring, and more stupid by the day.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

Postscript: STREET OF CROCODILES = *TREE* OF C*O**D**ES

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Chuck Palahniuk Is a Bad Writer / RANT by “Chuck” Palahniuk

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RANT (“Chuck” Palahniuk) by Joseph Suglia

Even “Chuck” Palahniuk’s most devoted followers will have a hard time getting through Rant (2007), a book about thrill-seeking that is devoid of a single thrill.  As insipid as they are, at least Palahniuk’s other books are EZ-2-Read.  Rant, however, is not merely stupid–it is also deadeningly, mind-numbingly tedious.  While trudging through its pages, the essence of boredom was revealed to me.

Rant is compact of babbling voices.  Each voice narrates a piece of Buster Casey’s life, a Typhoid Mary who has caused rabies to percolate throughout the United States.  But there is nothing to be learned about Casey after the sixth page (Pages One through Six are titled, imaginatively, “An Introduction”), and what we have already learned is never vividly or convincingly described.  To be absolutely explicit: The plot doesn’t move.  It stagnates.  There is no progression.  No motor drives the narrative.  Nothing is narrated between Pages Seven through 319 that hasn’t been narrated in the first six pages.

Anything that seems to be remotely original comes from somewhere else.  The book’s epigraph was pilfered from Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994), the oral-biographical structure was pillaged from Stephen King (Carrie), the “Party Crashers” narrative was filched wholesale from J. G. Ballard’s Crash, a narrative that dominates the book to such an extent that it would have been better titled Ballard for Kindergarteners or Ballard Made EZ.  (Casey is Vaughan from Crash.  Yes, there is repetition in Crash, but it is repetition with purpose, repetition with nuance, repetition with difference.  Here, there is only the infinite repetition of the Same.)  The Tarzanesque pseudo-sentence “How the future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday” (Pages Four and 253) was pocketed from French poet and thinker Paul Valéry (“The problem with the present is that the future is no longer what it used to be”).  The illiterately worded statement “History is, it’s just a nightmare” (p. 60) was lifted directly from Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.  (Not that Palahniuk has read Valéry or Marx, mind you. He has admitted that his information largely comes from talking to those he meets at parties and from his followers.)  Even the rabies motif was thieved.  David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1976), anyone?

Rant is littered with pop-nihilistic syllogisms, statements of the obvious that are presented as “deep truths”: “Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere” (p. 12).  Who doesn’t know that car-salesmen mimic the body-language of potential clients?

The subhuman prose is even more galling than the book’s content.  Nearly every other sentence contains a double subject.  For instance: “The flight attendant, she asks this hillbilly what’s it he wants to drink” (p. 2).  A slightly less awkward, slightly less annoying, grammatical way of writing the “sentence” would be: “The flight attendant asks a hillbilly what he would like to drink.”  Palahniuk, however, insists on multiplying the subjects in his sentences ad nauseam, with unbearably irritating results.  Palahniuk’s defendants claim that he isn’t really as dimwitted as he seems to be, that his narrators are merely functionally illiterate.  If that is the case, they must explain why Palahniuk interviews in a functionally illiterate manner, why he writes “essays” in a functionally illiterate manner, and why every character in his universe is functionally illiterate, including those who hold doctorates.  If Palahniuk is merely impersonating a lobotomized orangutan on heroin, why would he write essays and speak in exactly the same simian language?

And so we have the grating misusage of the word “liminal”–over and over and over and over again…  We have Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D., who uses phrases such as “prohibitions to [sic] bestiality” (p. 82).  We have teachers who say things such as “That Elliot girl, she told me the Tooth Fairy left [the coin] in exchange for a tooth she’d lost” (p. 52) and “Money you don’t work to earn, you spend very quickly” (p. 54).  We have Lowell Richards, teacher, who uses the phrase “indirectly and obliquely” (p. 99).  Whenever Palahniuk tries to write as “the smart people” do, he reveals himself as a half-wit.

And we have unspeakably hideous sentence fragments such as: “The ice melt and disappear” (p. 2).  Whenever Palahniuk tries to revise a cliche, such as Andy Warhol’s overly cited declaration “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” he comes up with a monstrosity: “In the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at least fifteen minutes” (p. 5).  Palahniuk’s revision makes no sense: I’m assuming that “everyone” includes “the famous,” which implies, of course, that in the future, the famous will also sit next to the famous.

Perhaps most offensively, Rant croaks out, in a particularly infantile passage, that AIDS is a “disease” that has been “spread” by a single carrier–that it is a “disease” like any other disease–when, in fact, AIDS is a syndrome of diseases, a pandemic, for which no single individual is accountable.

Allegedly, “Rant” refers to the sound that babies make when they vomit.  Now, I’ve never actually heard a baby make such a noise, but perhaps one should take the “author” at his word.  The title seems perfectly appropriate.  Simplistic, stupid, superficial, tedious, and derivative, Rant is the verbal equivalent to chunks of infantile regurgitate.

The same could be said of all of Palahniuk’s “works,” which are not based on the imagination (the “author” seemingly has no imagination whatsoever), but rather on whatever he is leafing through at the present moment.  As I stated above: Palahniuk has admitted that his books are collages of interviews he has had with random people in bars and at parties, as well as the four or five non-fiction books he leases from his local public library every time he sits down to write a “novel.”  The rest of the information is “Googled.”

Regrettably, Palahniuk is an incompetent “borrower.”  There is often the question, in his books, of relevancy. In Survivor, there is a longish passage on lobster-eating that was apparently lifted word for word from a book on dining etiquette.  What, precisely, does this passage have to do with Survivor’s narrative?  Answer: Absolutely nothing.

Palahniuk wrote Lullaby in three weeks.  I’m not entirely certain how much time it took him to disgorge Rant.  My guess would be two weekends.  I don’t say this to praise Palahniuk, as if he were capable of fashioning a well-crafted novel in two weekends with the dexterity of a Picasso, who could toss off a painting in an afternoon.  Rant is writing-workshop trash.  It reads as if it were a live-journal or Web-log written by a subnormal high-school stoner, retched out and fraught with galling errors.

Palahniuk’s followers worship their leader as if he were a god.  But God is not an artist.

Neither is Chuck Palahniuk.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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AGAINST “BIZARRO”-FICTION

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AGAINST “BIZARRO”-FICTION by Joseph Suglia

A “bizarro” is an unimportant writer of fiction who pays very little attention to language.  S/he has no literary background, is generally undereducated and semiliterate, “reads” comic books, plays video-games, and gawks at the cinema of David Lynch and Takashi Miike.  (The bizarros are ignorant of the fact that Lynch created films not out of the hunger to be “weird”–at least before he succumbed to his internet fanatic base and produced the self-parodic Inland Empire (2006)–but on the basis of an original experience.  His films were never intended to be “strange.”  They were attempted exteriorizations of dreams.)  You will never hear a bizarro intoning the name Jan Svankmajer or Fernando Arrabal (“Who?”).  Nor will you listen to them twittering over the work of any serious literary artist.  I doubt any one of them has ever penetrated the oeuvre of Jose Donoso, Horacio Quiroga, or Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio (“Who?”).  Perhaps after reading this report, they will.

Bizarro cannot be accurately described as a literary movement, since it is neither literary nor a movement, precisely understood.  The bizarros write for one another; the primary readers of bizarro-fiction are other bizarro-writers.  This, among other things, makes bizarro more of a cult than a movement.  The word “movement” is too grand, too historic in its connotations to be applied to the bizarros.

The bizarros are enjoined to write about things they consider, by mutual agreement, strange, curious, uncanny, eldritch, transmontane, ultramontane (though they do not use these words; they prefer the high-school casualisms “weird” and “bizarre”).  Self-conscious strangeness is insipid, of course, not to mention banal, especially in a culture in which bizarreness is parlayed for the sake of commercial effect.  How bizarre is the bizarre when one can see dancing lizards and city-destroying carrier pigeons in Superbowl advertisements?  Lady Gaga makes bizarro-fiction superfluous.  The bizarre is, these days, the most marketable of commodities.

Inherent to the structure of every addiction is the disavowal of that same addiction.  Much in the same way that cigarette addicts claim not to be addicted to cigarettes, the bizarros habitually claim that they are not “trying to be weird,” that their fiction is not “weird for the sake of being weird.”  But who believes them?  Firstly, it is difficult to ignore that their cult has anointed itself “bizarro.”  Secondly, they praise one another on the internet for conceiving “weird” imagery (even though this selfsame imagery inescapably turns out to be stale, boring, and derivative) and “weird” characters embroiled in “weird” situations.  Thirdly, anyone who reads a word of their fiction can perceive a fetishization of the uncommon.  There can simply be no other impulse behind so much abominably written inanity, an impetus which is a perversion of the vain desire not for innovation but for “difference.”

It would be imprecise to say that the bizarre obsesses the bizarros.  (“To obsess,” etymologically, means “to impinge on,” “to attack,” “to besiege,” “to beleaguer”).  Their interest in the bizarre is a purely formal rather than a visceral one.  To them, bizarreness is a false bizarreness, an ungenuine bizarreness, a programmatic bizarreness.  The bizarros stylize what they consider “weird.”  But nothing is “weird” anymore.  That which was once considered “weird” is, paradoxically, the ordinary and the average.

A diluted and unlettered absurdism, bizarro is a silly, infantile fetish.  Much like sexual urination, it is a fetish that I do not share and that is therefore of purely sociological interest to me.  An ornithologist is not a bird.

The bizarros ought to learn that language matters, that narrative matters, that literature is not a playground for the talentless, that writing should have to do not with the writer’s insecurities and vain desire for difference but with writing.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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THE YELLOW WALLPAPER by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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An Analysis of THE YELLOW WALLPAPER (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

by Joseph Suglia

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE FACTS ON FILE COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN NOVEL.

In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was committed to a sanitarium in Pennsylvania run by one Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the popularizer of a cure for female hysteria. Every female hysteric, according to Mitchell, should be placed under the watchful supervision of a (male) physician.  He must oversee the strict regimentation of her body’s habits.  Such vigilant monitoring is a conditio sine qua non for any physician who wishes to cure the patient of her malady.  She must submit unquestioningly to the physician’s will and obey all of his prescriptions — one of which, invariably, is the injunction to do nothing. Bed-rest is compulsory and should be vigorously enforced.  The patient is to be placed in a state of perpetual invalidism; all forms of activity to which she is accustomed must be invalidated.  Above all, she must not write.

Five years later, Gilman published the novella The Yellow Wallpaper, a slightly veiled polemic against Weir Mitchell (the physician is even mentioned explicitly in the text) and the “cure” to female depression and hysteria that he advocated.  The narrative is written from the perspective of a woman who undergoes a nervous breakdown.  What we are reading is her diary, which charts her gradual mental deterioration.  The narrator and her husband/physician, John, have rented an ancestral house for a summer.  John prescribes for the narrator a “rest cure” that is clearly indebted to the teachings of Weir Mitchell.  She is prohibited from writing; she writes nonetheless, perhaps to spite him.  Isolated in her room and completely inactive except for her writing, the narrator becomes transfixed by the sickeningly grotesque wallpaper that surrounds her.  She projects her self into the convoluted patterns of the paper and imagines a feminine figure–not necessarily a “woman,” but rather a “shape… like a woman”–entangled in the radiating network of festooning fronds and vines.  The feminine shape escapes from the wallpaper’s intricate web and is seen “creeping up and down” in the “dark grape arbors” of the courtyard.  In the final scene of the work, the narrator, who has seemingly lost her mind, tears off the wallpaper and crawls and “creeps” “smoothly” across the floor and over John, who has collapsed lifelessly after seeing his wife wriggling and writhing on the ground.  Since all of this is composed in the present tense, apparently she is writing as she is creeping.

Two orders of writing are figured in the novella.  On the one hand, there is the language of the yellow wallpaper, which spreads its sprawling patterns, its fecundating, fungoid forms, all over the room in which the narrator is confined–this is clearly representative of the language of medicine and maleness.  On the other hand, there is the ideolect of the female narrator, who frees herself by writing in defiance of her husband’s orders.  Writing is here figured as a mode of activity–which, for Mitchell, is a quintessentially male practice (women who are active, according to Mitchell, ape men).

Little known in the century in which it was written, The Yellow Wallpaper was rediscovered in the late twentieth century and has become what is easily one of the most “over-interpreted” works of fiction in the last few decades.  Most interpreters have pointed to the novella as a figuration of female liberation in modernist fiction.  Despite its seeming simplicity, they invariably point to the text’s so-called “ambiguities” and “contradictions,” the most glaring of which is the manner in which the novella ends; most seem to believe that the novella ends complicatedly and equivocally.  Does the narrator, in fact, achieve liberation?  Or does she not?  John, it is often said, faints to the floor, and fainting, as we are told too often and erroneously, is somehow “feminine.”  Therefore, the narrator has perhaps achieved a “victory” over John.  (One should also call attention to the fact that John is referred to, in the final scene, as “that man,” his proper name having been replaced by a demonstrative pronoun and a common noun.)  And yet the narrator is also reduced, at the close of the novella, to the status of a worm or a snake, crawling and creeping across the floor along a self-ordained path.  She certainly seems to have “precipitated” into what is usually described as “madness”–a “madness” that is attributed not to her “imaginative power and habit of story-making,” but rather to her husband’s profession.  Her progressive “improve[-ment]” has resulted in a regressive deterioration.  Because of this central ambiguity between “positive” and “negative” meanings, the novella seems, at once, a celebratory and affirmative “portrayal” of female liberation from a constraining, male-dominated order and an elegiac, despairing cri de coeur that proclaims the seeming impossibility of liberation from tyrannical maleness.

The notion that this is an interesting “ambiguity” or “contradiction” escapes this reader.  Far richer literary works of art were produced by women a few decades after The Yellow Wallpaper was written.  The writings of Daphne Du Maurier (born in 1907) and Shirley Jackson (born in 1916) are far richer, more macabre, and more complex than those of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  No one with a modicum of a scintilla of a tincture of a shred of a mote of a jot of an iota of rationality would deny that The Yellow Wallpaper has a didactic character, and, with the exception of a few trite “ambiguities,” its meanings are almost completely self-explanatory.  The simplicity of the work may explain the multiplication of critical discourses that it has generated.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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The Red Pig Kitchen

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THE RED PIG ASIAN KITCHEN
by Joseph Suglia

I have no idea if porcivore is a word, but it should be.  Porcus is Latin for “pig.”  And therefore a porcivore would be a “pig-eater” such as the person who I now am but once was not.

Uncooked pork is spongy, fatty, pinkish, and revolting.  For these reasons, I resolved to no longer eat pork in the year of grace 2011.  I’m surprised that I hadn’t made my resolution earlier.  Lamb seemed leaner and more toothsome than pork, and I ate a great deal of lamb and deer in 2011 and 2012.  Chicken, too.  I don’t know how anyone could dislike sweet chicken flesh and imagine that its moist tenderness tempts even the hardest-hearted vegan.  For about two years, I abstained from the meat that comes from our porcine cousins.

Now that I am giving my business to the Red Pig Asian Kitchen, I have returned to my porcivorous self.  With one qualification: The pig meat that I devour must be nuked into an unrecognizable whiteness.  I now have no qualms about eating any pig, on the proviso that it is irradiated and immersed in a lagoon of soy sauce.  The shanks of razorbacks and jungle boars will fill my plates and my mouth.  I will even consume a White-Lipped Peccary, if one is placed before me, as long as it is pervasively irradiated.

My favorite restaurant meal is now a plate of red-skinned pork in a forest of fried rice and kimchi, accompanied by a pot of Thai Iced Tea.  This is the meal that awaits me every week at the Red Pig Asian Kitchen.

If I have one criticism of the RPAK, it is that it lacks the Heideggerean Geworfenheit of the ramshackle eateries in Chinatown.  Of course, this is Thai food, not Chinese food, but I’m not sure if that makes a significant difference.  The space in which you eat is more important than the food you ingurgitate–food is only food, after all, pure nutriment.  And this space lacks the sliminess and sleaziness of Old Chinatown’s louche troughs.

Though the restaurant is pig-themed from the outside, there is very little porcine imagery within.  The kitchen is modestly hidden behind a Japanese curtain.  The curtain is brown and covered with egg-shaped robot figures–not androids, but oviforms.  Hanging on one of the walls is a steel apparatus made of nine steel bells.  There are twelve-feet-high glass panels.  Artificial bamboo trees sprouting out of a box.  A silently subtitled LED television screen.  Concaving wooden walls.  Porcelain teaware and glassware neatly placed on shelves near the counter.  Really, the interior is austere and anti-decorative.  It is internationally corporate, if anything.  There is nothing peculiarly Thai about the space.

It is easy to imagine all of the pig pieces that are stocked and stacked in the kitchen reassembling themselves into a red-scaled pig monster.  If Neil Jordan directed The Company of Pigs, he would film it here.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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EATING ANIMALS by Jonathan Safran Foer / Is Jonathan Safran Foer a Bad Writer?

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A review of EATING ANIMALS by Jonathan Safran Foer

Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Safran Foer have made a living by choosing illiterates and children as the narrators of their commercial fiction.  Such a writerly choice alleviates them of the responsibility of writing well.  Now, in his most recent offering, Eating Animals (2009), Mr. Foer writes in his own language for the first time in book-form and still sounds very much like the rather dimwitted narrators of his novelistic fabrications.

Though it never fulfills its promise, Eating Animals belongs to the genre of books that explore the ethics of meat-eating.  Foer claims that his research into food-production has been “enormous” [14] and “comprehensive” [12].  But from a philological point of view, Eating Animals is the scholarly equivalent to animal-compost.  How can the male Foer legitimately write and publish a book on the ethics of carnivory without so much as even mentioning the names of Peter Singer and Charles Patterson?  A peal of thundering silence drowns out these extremely loud and incredibly imposing references.  On Page 258, Foer eschews direct statement, but the point is clear: “It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision.  Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950s you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.”  Yes, human-rights are equated to animal-rights, EXACTLY the equation set forward by Peter Singer thirty-four years ago.  It does seem parricidal that no reference to Singer or to Patterson is made.

Even worse, Foer’s handling of sources is suspect.  He name-drops Walter Benjamin, tells us what Benjamin allegedly said, and then neglects to give us the citation-information in the endnotes (he is alluding to, but does not cite Benjamin’s 1934 essay on Franz Kafka).  He implies that Kafka felt “shame” while visiting a Berlin aquarium merely because Benjamin finds shame as a motif in Kafka’s LITERARY work.  He quotes Derrida twice in the book and gives, first, an inapplicable commentary on Derrida’s argument, and, secondly, dispenses with commentary altogether.  In his end note to the Benjamin-Kafka-Derrida passage, Foer writes: “The discussion of Benjamin, Derrida, and Kafka in this section is indebted to conversations with religion professor and critical theorist Aaron Gross” [276].  This discussion, apparently, exonerates Foer of the necessity of reading Benjamin, Derrida, and Kafka himself–and of treating their works with care.

I would never dream of suggesting that Foer should have expatiated on the groundbreaking inclusion of animality in Schopenhauerian philosophy and the exclusion of animality from the Kantian philosophy–that would be effrontery on my part.

The prose-style is not merely bad–it is abusively, appallingly, annoyingly, and aggressively bad.  Foer thinks that to aggravate means “to irritate,” that incredibly means “extremely,” that the plural of food is “foods,” and that inedible is a noun.  To aggravate [etymologically, “to make graver”] should never be used to signify “to irritate” in published prose; incredibly properly means “unbelievably” and only means “extremely” in colloquial language; those who think that the plural of food can EVER be “foods” are semiliterate simpletons and debasers of the English language.  Shall we acquiesce to the mistaken idea that inedible is a noun?  (Edible may be a noun; inedible should never be a noun.)

Is it too much to ask the writer whose second novel was described by The Times as a “work of genius” to pursue his research-questions?  And what ARE, precisely, his research-questions?  After an unhealthful serving of microwaved family-anecdotes (always an easy and smarmy introduction), we get an inkling of what Foer’s point of departure might be, and it is all pretty familiar ground: “I simply wanted to know–for myself and my family–what meat is.  I wanted to know as concretely as possible.  Where does it come from?  How is it produced?  How are animals treated, and to what extent does that matter? What are the economic, social, and environmental effects of eating animals?” [12].  Well, what we get instead are heaps of digitalized information copied and pasted from the internet and fictionalized first-person narratives written from the perspective of animal-rights activists and factory-farmers, the kind of “I-am-my-own-Greek-chorus” meta-fiction one often encounters when teaching first-year Composition at an art-school.  Excise the persona-poetry, and you have a pamphlet.

It is only at the book’s premature climax that we come by something resembling a thesis.  Foer endorses “eating with care.”  Despite what he says, Foer does not “argue” for this position.  Nor does he even explain it.  He simply advocates what seems a fairly anodyne stance.  He advocates vegetarianism and “another, wiser animal agriculture” and “more honorable omnivory” [244], without telling us what either of these last-mentioned things might be.  Don’t carnify your comestibles!: That is the extent of the “argument,” such as it is.

There is nothing revolutionary or special about vegetarianism or hoping that animals will be treated without cruelty.  Vegetarianism is surely good for animals, but does it make of the vegetarian a majestic figure?  If this book is distinctive at all, it is merely because of the prefabricated consensus that surrounds it and the writer’s desperate efforts to persuade everyone that he is holier than the rest of us.  One is reminded, in particular, of an anecdote that Foer tells of two friends who are hungry for hamburgers or for “burgers,” as Foer calls them. One man gives in to the hamburger-impulse; the other refuses to do so, for “there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment” [74; note the masculine pronoun].  In the end, Eating Animals is an auto-hagiography, the memoir of a sacrificer of hamburgers who becomes holy by refusing to give in to his carnivoracity, the story of one man’s relationship to his own viscera.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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CHRONIC CITY by Jonathan Lethem

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A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia — CHRONIC CITY by Jonathan Lethem

Creativity is a gift that Athena denied to Jonathan Lethem.  She instead bestowed upon him the ability to absorb isolated media images, though the power to meaningfully synthesize these images is another arrow missing from Lethem’s quiver.

Lethem’s latest is Chronic City (2009), and it is the worst novel that I have ever read.  Considering the fact that I have wasted much of my life reading bad novels, this is really saying something.

Our narrator is Chase, a nondescript, vacant out-of-work actor whose wife died in outer space.  Chase, it seems, has died in inner space.  He is dead inside and made of plastic.  We know nothing more about our “protagonist”–he is a cipher–and therefore it is difficult to care about what happens to him.  Chase meets Perkus Tooth, an “eccentric popular-cultural critic,” in the offices of the Criterion Collection in Manhattan, and a vaguely homoerotic friendship develops between the two characters.

Perkus Tooth, Chase discovers, is a neighbor.  Tooth burrows himself in his warren, searches for “chaldrons” on eBay, and glides through Wikipedia.  Both friends drink Coke and eat cheeseburgers.  They make rather obvious cultural references–Marlon Brando and Mick Jagger are the two names that surface most frequently in their speech.  Not much else happens–which would be fine, if this “not much else” were engagingly written.

Perkus introduces Chase to a lost, early, and completely fictitious Werner Herzog film called Echolalia, which “documents Herzog’s attempts to interview Marlon Brando…  Brando doesn’t want to give the interview, and whenever Herzog corners him Brando just parrots whatever Herzog’s said” [5].  Having seen much of Herzog’s work and having taught his cinema at a university for five years, I was very puzzled by this unrecognizable pastiche.  Herzog has ignored Hollywood and its unionized actors until just very recently, when he migrated to Los Angeles.  The idea of interviewing Marlon Brando would have repelled him.

At this point, on Page Five, it dawned on me what I was reading: Chronic City is a hipster Bildungsroman, a document of hipsterism in early twenty-first-century America that future historians will use in an attempt to understand how this malady could have infected and corrupted our already vitiated and hollow culture.

Let me explain what I mean by the word “hipster.”  A hipster is an illiterate nerd.  Neither Perkus nor Chase read very much in the book, and their references are almost exclusively cinematic or musical.  Not to mention, mostly exoteric.  The closest they come to approaching literature is by way of Kafka: Perkus recites a passage from Kafka’s “Forschungen eines Hundes” at one point (in bad English translation).  He neither discusses the story’s form nor its meaning.  This is very telling.  Both hipsters do what all hipsters do: They merely stockpile and warehouse cultural detritus without thinking about what any of it might signify or how it is constructed.  And so both characters mindlessly compile references to cultural trash, without any purpose or sense of an overarching project.  They might as well have an encyclopedic knowledge of vegetables: “Have you ever eaten a carrot?”  “Did you know that there exists an orange cauliflower? I read about it on Wikipedia.”  And so forth and so on.

The point to be made is the following: Lethem’s hipsters are not readers.  They are not thinkers.  They are not artists.  They are not creators.  They are not even scholars of cultural trash.

They are repositories of media junk.

The same could be said of our esteemed writer.  His mind has not been formed by the study of great authors, his writing is unsupported by broad learning, and he seems to suffer from analphabetism.  He produces sentences in a rattling, mechanistic, depressingly vapid style.  He lacks verbal power.  Here is Lethem’s description of a vase: “It had a translucence, perhaps opalescence would be the word, like something hewn from marble the color of a Creamsicle” [90].  Would it be too much to ask Lethem, a writer who was nominated by the Kirkus Review as one of this country’s finest, to look up the words “translucence” and “opalescence” in a dictionary before using them?  And when the nodal point of his fictional universe is Manhattan, when entry into The New Yorker is seen as a kind of transcendence, that one essential spiritual quality that all fictionists must possess is lacking: empathy.

To return to my thesis: that Chronic City is a hipster Bildungsroman, a novel of self-formation which charts the progressive hipification of its main character until he becomes thoroughly hip.  “Being hip” means being seen by the right people with the right books, the right CDs, and the right DVDs.  At the end of the text, Chase reads “Ralph Warden Meeker’s” Obstinate Dust, a faux novel inspired by that unread magnum opus of hipsterism, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.  He meets the glance of a stranger: “Once in a while on the underground trains I look up and see another rider with a copy of Meeker’s bulky masterpiece in their [sic] hands, and we share a sly collegial smile, like fellow members of some terrorist cell” [465].

Upon reading this passage, I experienced something like a vomitous epiphany, a negative revelation that powers me to refine my earlier definition of “hipster”: A hipster is a consumerist who affects a superior consciousness, who pretends to be superior to the consumerist culture that has swallowed him.  Yes, he drinks Coke and eats cheeseburgers just like the rest of mainstream America.  But he listens to Neutral Milk Hotel and buys Jonathan Lethem books, and that makes it all OK.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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GIRL GONE ROGUE: On Sarah Palin

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GIRL GONE ROGUE: A review of GOING ROGUE: AN AMERICAN LIFE (Sarah Palin)
by Dr. Joseph Suglia

The title of Sarah Palin’s martyrology, Going Rogue (2009), is richly significant.  “Rogue” can mean “renegade” and thus point to Palin’s illusory departure from the ever-redefinable “political” and “media elites,” as well as from the McCain camp.  Reactionary politicians, these days, like to style themselves as “mavericks”–when, in fact, they represent this country’s most powerful insiders.  They endorse tax cuts for the affluent; they serve the gluttonies of the wealthiest financiers, corporate executive officers, and industrialists in America.

A slight logogriphic substitution would transform “rogue” into “rouge.”  The title, then, could be rendered: The Reddening of Sarah Palin.  (“Rouge,” in particular, recalls a shade of lipstick. Would “rouge” refer to the pig’s lipstick-smeared mouth?).  Red, obviously, is the color of the Republican Party, but it is also the color of passion and evokes rage and lust.  It is, as well, the color of fury, of blood, of rapine and viciousness.  It is the color of ecclesiastics, of cardinals.  In the iconography of National Socialism, black swastikas were emblazoned on red backgrounds.

This is a book that is drenched in red.

There is discussion of the animals Sarah Palin enjoys slaughtering, the caribou and moose she takes pleasure in shooting, the salmon she skins.  A photograph of the Arctic Huntress beaming with the psychosexual thrill that comes from killing game, the bloodied corpse of a caribou under her heel.  “I love meat…  [I] especially love moose and caribou.  I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals–right next to the mashed potatoes” [18-19].  Little commentary is required; what is said is clear.  The only room for animals, even endangered animals, is inside of us.  Kill animals and then interiorize them, kill animals that prey upon those other animals we want to interiorize: “[W]e had to control predators, such as wolves, that were decimating the moose and caribou herds that feed our communities” [134].

I wish someone would tell Sarah Palin that to decimate means “to kill every tenth being.”

Sarah Palin thinks that animals exist only in order to be devoured by human beings.  That is their purpose, their end, their divinely ordained telos.  As if it were a “red kite” [83], she tells us, her mind is connected by an invisible string to the mind of God.  She has immediate access to the divine understanding: “If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?”

In other words,

1.) Animals can be meat–meat that is devoured by human beings.
2.) Therefore, animals exist only to be devoured by human beings.

We have here both a non sequitur and a teleological argument. It is equivalent to saying:

1.) The human hands may be used for strangulation.
2.) Therefore, the human hands exist only for the purpose of strangulation.

The color red may connote the blood of animals.  It may also connote shame.  One is reminded of the red face of the unnamed Alaskan politician who observes Sarah Palin with horror as she gleefully breastfeeds her daughter on a radio program: “I acted like I didn’t see the shocked look on the politician’s face as he turned red and pretended it didn’t bother him at all” [67].  In a single image, the flocculent creaminess of lactate mingles with the blood that rises to the politician’s cheeks.

Red reappears when Sarah Palin douses herself, Countess Bathory style, in the blood of political martyrdom or of “the popular political blood sport called ‘the politics of personal destruction'” [352].  Seldom has self-imposed victimhood been exploited so meretriciously as it is here.  Sarah Palin bemoans the fact that she was “slapped with an ethics accusation” [355].  And yet which “ethics accusation,” precisely?  There are many.  That she misappropriated her governorship for personal and political gain?  That she used the Alaska Fund Trust to cadge gifts and benefits?  She never tells us.  She merely dismisses all ethical grievances as personal attacks issued by the monolithic Left: “One of the left’s favorite weapons is frivolous ethics complaints” [363].

Sarah Palin’s silence over her ethical misconduct is only one of the many silences that perforate Going Rogue.  She never attempts to wash away the record of her ignorance of Africa, the Bush doctrine, or NAFTA.  Certain things are so shameful that they cannot be erased with lies.  Let me cite one more instance of this studied silence: As Mayor, our gentle authoress called for the banning of “objectionable” books from the Wasilla Public Library.  She claims to have merely asked librarian Mary Ellen Emmons, “What’s the common policy on selecting new titles?” [77].  And yet nowhere does Sarah Palin, meek and mild, mention that she fired Mary Ellen Emmons two days after this conversation took place.  So many of this book’s pages are devoted to assaulting her critics (169 out of 234, by my count), but those criticisms for which she has no rejoinder, those words and actions that are truly indefensible and cannot be mangled, are consigned to a willful silence.

The name of whoever wrote this book is unknown, but it is attributed to a ventriloquist’s doll, a cue-card reader, a red harpy, a Venus in Carmine.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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Aphorisms on Consumerism and Genius

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Aphorisms on Consumerism and Genius

by Joseph Suglia

In consumer culture, genius is reduced to the level of vulgarity.  And vulgarity is elevated to the level of genius.

Everyone gets an award, and everyone is famous, which means that no one is famous.

The real problem is this—everyone is an artist, which means that no one is an artist.  Everything is a work of art, which means that nothing is a work of art.  There is a general lack of aesthetic discrimination, and this can be seen in the rise of the hipster and in the rise of self-publication, unfortunately.  A novel is published every five minutes.

Joseph Suglia

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EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED by Jonathan Safran Foer

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EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED by Jonathan Safran Foer

Though I have no idea what he looks like, on paper, Jonathan Safran Foer is a dumpy magician garbed in a tattered black cape with a red velvet underside, waving his hands wildly, brandishing a cane purchased at Woolworth’s, a shabby magician’s hat propped on his balloon-shaped head, forever mugging and attention-grubbing, radiating spittle and a desperate need to be liked, nasalizing the same stale jokes ad infinitum, while the audience laughs wanly and with painful politesse.  His overeager face comes too close to yours, his tongue impending over his lower lip, which is bespattered with saliva.

Consider Foer’s massively popular Everything is Illuminated (2002).  While it is not the worst book that I have ever read, it is easily the smarmiest.  Nearly every page is dripping with dollops of cynically contrived pap, mawkish kitsch that appeals to the child in all of us.  You know, that child who is beguiled easily and who doesn’t know the difference between art and tripe.

The novel is structured according to two temporal continua.  The first continuum is narrated from the perspective of Alexander Perchov, The Loveable Ukrainian Tour Guide of one “Jonathan Safran Foer” (also known in the text as “the hero” and “the ingenious Jew”).  “Foer” is searching for the woman who saved his grandfather from death at the hands of the Nazis.  To create Alex’s language, the writer takes ordinary sentences in English and substitutes certain infelicitous words for more felicitous ones.  This gimmick grows tedious after the first three pages, and nothing, of course, is more uncouth than an American writer who mocks the speech patterns of those who speak English as a foreign tongue.  Alex’s malapropisms, however, are more pleasant to read than “Foer’s” prose in the second continuum, a turgidly narrated history of Trachimbrod, a Ukrainian shtetl, from its foundation in the late eighteenth century until its destruction during the Second World War.

Both continua are interlaced–as the first continuum culminates in the discovery of Trachimbrod by “Foer” and his tour guide, the second culminates in an account of the mass murder of its inhabitants; the fatality of Alexander’s grandfather is superimposed on the fatality of “Foer’s” grandfather, and so forth.  The point, plangently, is that “everything” in the present is “illuminated” by the past.  The alleged “cleverness” of this narrative device escapes this reviewer.

Every one hundred pages or so, a striking passage or sentence emerges from the thick, grey, monotonous mass that surrounds it, a passage or sentence that seems, at first glance, almost profound.  And, on further examination, these profundities reveal themselves as specious banalities.

Let me allude to two examples of Profound Truths in Everything is Illuminated:

“God loves the plagiarist…  God is the original plagiarizer… the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror” [Olive Edition, 185].

In other words, if you paint a portrait of yourself, you are “plagiarizing” yourself.  If you photograph yourself in a mirror, you are “plagiarizing” yourself.  To say that the creation of man was an act of plagiarism is to void the word “plagiarism” of all meaning.  There is, nonetheless, genuine theft in Everything is Illuminated: Foer does God’s work by pilfering the entire final section of David Grossman’s See Under: Love, “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life.”  Foer isn’t so much influenced by Grossman as he is dominated by him.

Another “profound” moment:

“The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer” [360].

Foer here forgets that active forgetting (a term taken from Nietzsche, aktive Vergesslichkeit) is the same thing as inert remembrance.

Friedrich Schlegel once said of Denis Diderot: Whenever he does something truly brilliant, he congratulates himself on his brilliance.  In my essay on Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, I write the same thing about Tom Robbins.  The term brilliant must be supplanted in the case of Jonathan Safran Foer, however: Whenever he writes something sentimental, Foer congratulates himself on his easy sentimentalism.  It is difficult to sell a crowd-pleasing novel about the Shoah unless everything is sentimentalized.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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Romeo, Juliet, and Deleuze: Together at Last! by Joseph Suglia / Romeo and Juliet / Shakespeare’s THE MOST EXCELLENT AND LAMENTABLE TRAGEDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET / The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare / ROMEO AND JULIET by Shakespeare / William Shakespeare, ROMEO AND JULIET: Analysis, Interpretation / twentieth-century French philosophy and Shakespeare / Romeo and Juliet

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Romeo, Juliet, and Deleuze: Together at Last!

by Joseph Suglia

“Zu wenig Liebe, zu wenig Gerechtigkeit und Erbarmen, und immer zu wenig Liebe…—das bin ich.”

—Georg Trakl, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficken, June 1913

THE PRODUCTIVITY OF DESIRE

One of the great lessons of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) is that most of our desires are not our own.  Despite the turbidity of their language, I believe that this is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they suggest that most desire is embedded in the social order itself: “The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions.  We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire…  There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.”  That is to say: Most desires are not individual; they are social.  They are manifest in the world; most of our desires are already part of the world as such.  Deleuze and Guattari make no distinction between social production and the production of socially conditioned desires.

It is not the case that desire is geared toward an absence.  It is not the case that we want what we don’t have.  Quite otherwise: We don’t long for what we don’t have—for the most part, what we want is already part of the really existing concrete landscapes of the cultures in which we live.  We want what others want; we want what we are prescribed to want.  Most of our desires are premanufactured and mass-manufactured; they are herd-desires, group-desires.  The Platonic-Lacanian theory of desire, which posits that desire is based on absence, is erroneous.  Desire is not empty; it is already full.  Nothing is missing from desire; it already has all that it needs.

Needs do not produce desires.  The exact opposite is the case: Desires produce needs.  Most of our desires do not respond to preexisting needs.  No one is born wanting an Automated Robotic Friend.  Desire creates the need for an Automated Robotic Friend.  Desires rapidly convert into needs; in consumerist culture, there is an infinitely accelerating and multiplying conversion of our desires into needs.  Now, it becomes a need for me to have the newest Bluetooth-compatible selfie stick.  Such things, such commodities, are appendages without which I cannot live.

There is a different kind of desire for Deleuze and Guattari, a desire that they denominate “real desire.”  Real desires would not be desires for our own repression, desires for our own persecution, desires for our own exploitation, desires to reproduce an army of docile consumer-workers, but an altogether different kind of desiring—a desiring that is not socially configured or designed.  I will use the word “love” to describe this other-desire.

Love means the undoing of the community, since love is not reducible to the norms of any community.  This thought is metaphorized beautifully in Shakespeare’s The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (circa 1591-1595).

The desire of Juliet Capulet for Romeo Montague and the desire of Romeo Montague for Julie Capulet are not herd-desires; they are not collective desires.  Both Romeo and Juliet are created by the desire that they have for each other.  It is only a social desire in the self-productive sense—for do Romeo and Juliet not form a society of two?  Though their social is desire, their desire is not the social.  In other words: The love of Romeo for Juliet and of Juliet for Romeo is not familial desire, is not collectivized desire, is not acculturated desire.  It is the subversive desire of each for the other (I will return to this subject below).

The desire of the young lovers is spontaneous (self-productive) and active: As soon as they see each other, they are transformed.  There are at least two signs of this transformation: 1.) Romeo is willing to repudiate his own birth name for the sake of Juliet.  2.) Romeo immediately forgets his erstwhile beloved, Rosaline, as soon as he fixes his eyes on Juliet.  From the moment that they see each other, Romeo and Juliet become entirely other.

Now, Romeo would not be Romeo outside of his relationship to Juliet, as Juliet would not be Juliet outside of her relationship to Romeo.  Who are they apart from their desires?  From this point forward, they do not exist apart from the desires that they have for each other.  Their amatory desire for each other gives birth to Romeo.  Their amatory desire for each other gives birth to Juliet.  The relation precedes the relata.  In other words: The impulsions and propulsions of real desire imply the loss of the self-sufficient subject.  I believe that this one of the things that Deleuze and Guattari mean when they write: “Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack an object.  It is, rather the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject.”

We see this clearly in the second scene of Act Three.  Juliet asks the maddeningly tangential Nurse: “Hath Romeo slain himself?” [III:ii].  Juliet is No One without Romeo, as Romeo is No One without Juliet: “I am not I if there be such an ‘Ay’” [III:ii].  Such is the subjectlessness of the desire, the asubjective character of all real desire.

JULIET IS A NOMINALIST

I am not the first literary critic to notice that Juliet Capulet is a nominalist: The title of Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose is predicated on this premise.  A nominalist is one who thinks that words are generalities that, in order to signify anything at all, must transcend any particular context.  (The deconstructionists are therefore nominalists by another name.)  A word is only a word—and does not refer to any being or object in the world.  My question to the nominalists would be: Can a word not also be a thing in the world?  When a word is written, is it not a thing?

Juliet refuses to accept that Romeo is defined and confined by, restricted and reducible to the name “Montague,” the name of the familial clan that opposes her familial clan.  From the window, she serenades Romeo:

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy. / Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. / What’s Montague?  It is nor hand nor foot, / Nor arm nor face nor any other part / Belonging to a man.  O be some other name! / What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet; / So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, / Retain that dear perfection which he owes / Without the title.  Romeo, doff thy name, / And for thy name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself [II:ii].

The olfactory sensation—the aroma of the rose—is independent of the word “rose.”  What is this if not nominalism?  Juliet is suggesting that the word “rose” is an abstraction that is abstracted from the referent, the physical rose, as it is from any other referent.  She implores Romeo to retain his “dear perfection”—his essence, his character, his quiddity, his haecceity, his ipseity—even if another surname were substituted for “Montague” and even if another given name were substituted for “Romeo.”  Charmingly, Juliet has an intuitive understanding of the arbitrariness of naming.  Names are artificially grafted to things and to people; they are mere universals that never touch particulars.  That it is possible to “doff [one’s] name”—this is Juliet’s charmingly naïve belief that beings are beings without language.  Endearingly, she pleads with Romeo to strip away his name in exchange for any other.  And Romeo agrees.  He hates his own name since that name is hateful to Juliet and, were it written, would rend it to pieces: “Had I it written, I would tear the word” [Ibid.].  Her distrust of language shows itself again when she implores Romeo not to swear his love to her: “Well, do not swear” [Ibid.].  A contract between them would have no more weight than the words “It lightens” [Ibid.].  Much as the lightning that ceases to be before one can say, “It lightens,” the contract between them might cease to be before the terms of the contract have been uttered.

The fact that Romeo is willing to discard—and, if necessary, mutilate—his surname implies that he does not see himself as reducible to his clan or definable by his clan.  Again, his desire for Juliet is not a communalized desire.

THE INVISIBLE CENTER OF THE PLAY IS ROSALINE

Readers should note that the seemingly minor characters in Shakespeare are often the most significant characters.  In The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, the most significant figure in the play is, arguably, Alarbus, who is a superficially peripheral character: Without Alarbus, the sequence of vengeance would never be instigated.  I believe that the key to understanding this play is Rosaline, though “key” is probably the wrong metaphor.  Better: I believe that the invisible center of the play is Rosaline.

When we first meet him, Romeo is mooning over Rosaline:

O brawling love, O loving hate, / O anything of nothing first create, / O heavy lightness, serious vanity, / Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, / Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, / Still-waking sleep that is not what it is. / This love feel I that feel no love in this [I:i].

Such is the Shakespearean paradoxology of love.  The use of antiphrasis (the combining of opposites) is remarkable: “love” blends with “brawling,” “loving” blends with “hate,” “heavy” blends with “lightness,” “serious” blends with “vanity,” “misshapen chaos” blends with “well-seeming forms,” “feather” blends with “lead,” “bright” blends with “smoke,” “cold” blends with “fire,” “sick” blends with “health,” “still-waking” blends with “sleep.”  Opposites are interlaced.  There is a coalescence or interpenetration of opposites, which means that love, for Shakespeare, is unsystematizable—for only that which is simple and undifferentiated can be systematized.

Rosaline is not named explicitly until the second scene of the first act, when Romeo recites the list of invited guests to Capulet’s feast.  She is first anonymous and then, the audience of readers / spectators only learn of her name from the recitation of the guest list, which foretokens her imminent departure from the thoughts of Romeo.  On the guest list, her name is nothing more than one name among other names.  She will quickly be replaced by Juliet Capulet, who is not listed on the guest list, since she is not a guest at all, but the only child and daughter of the great rich Capulet.

Oppressed by his love for Rosaline, Romeo cannot forswear Rosaline until he falls in love—instantaneously—with Juliet.  Sunday night, when Mercutio, Benvolio, and Romeo are masquerading themselves for the feast, Juliet will supplant Rosaline in Romeo’s mind.  This substitution of Juliet for Rosaline will take place in the span of no more than one hour—both Scene Four and Scene Five of the first act take place Sunday night, the night of the feast.  There is no more than an hour or so between the scenes.  The new beloved, Juliet, quickly kills off, interchanges with, the old beloved, Rosaline.  As the Chorus phrases it: “Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie, / And young affection gapes to be his heir” [II:0].

At the beginning of Act Two: Scene Three, it is the dawn of the day, and Friar Laurence is gathering baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers into an osier cage.  Friar Laurence sights Romeo and asks the young man if he spent the night with Rosaline.  Romeo’s response:

With Rosaline, my ghostly father?  No, / I have forgot that name and that name’s woe.

Friar Laurence is understandably shocked: “Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here!” [Ibid.].  The change that Romeo undergoes underscores the mutability and the malleability of love.  The fact that Rosaline is unnamed in the first act and is easily interchangeable likewise highlights the ductility of love—it is articulative of the thought that desire persists for as long as life persists.  If love is mutable yet ductile, it cannot be systematized and what is unsystematizable cannot be socially integrated.  Romeo’s desire is mutable and therefore his desire is revolutionary.  More precisely: The love of Romeo and Juliet issues in a revolution, literally.

DESIRE IS REVOLUTION

There is a war in the play between two Veronese families, the House of Capulet and the House of Montague, as is well-known.  The love of Juliet and Romeo is, above all, a subversive love.  The offspring of one rivaling clan falls in love with the offspring of another rivaling clan.  What is this, if not transgression / subversion / insubordination?  Juliet’s and Romeo’s transgressive, subversive, insubordinate desire remind us that all amatory desire is transgressive, subversive, insubordinate.  Romeo and Juliet are insubordinate to their respective families, transgressive of the laws of familialism, subversive to the will of their respective fathers.  For contemporary examples of this, one has only to think of current practices of exogamy, of interracial, interreligious, or transgenerational sociosexual / conjugal relationships.

No wonder that Romeo’s uninvited presence at the feast is decried by Tybalt as an “intrusion” [I:v], as the trespass of private property.  Romeo is there to seek out Rosaline, not Juliet, but no matter: He is a lover, and lovers are intrusive; they are interlopers.  No wonder that Romeo himself claims to “profane” the “holiest shrine” of Juliet’s hand [Ibid.].  Romeo’s desire for Juliet is metaphorized as blasphemy, as intrusion, as the infringement of the holy.  Desire profanes the sacred, for the sacred is nothing if not that which should not be desired.  Seconds after they fall in love at first sight and kiss at the feast, both Romeo and Juliet use the language of “trespass” and “sin” [Ibid.] to describe their mutual fascination.  And they say these words even before they know that they belong to enemy camps, reminding us that love is the transgression and profanation of the social order.

To return to Deleuze and Guattari: Real desire is revolutionary.  They argue: “Desire does not ‘want’ revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants.”  In a culture wherein citizens are labile, wherein citizens are neurotic subjects who are subject to the desires of capitalist culture, psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists are enlisted to keep them in line.  The analysand is kept in line by the psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists who direct one’s neuroses to the father or to the mother.  “What are your problems?” the psychotherapist asks.  No matter what your problems might be, the cause of your problems will forever be named “The Father” or “The Mother.”  Deleuze and Guattari are intimating that psychoanalysis supports fascism, since both systems of thought relegate singularities to authority.

Even before draining the ampoule of sleeping potion, Juliet has already infringed the social order.  Such is love’s unfettered character.  The desires of Romeo and Juliet are still social—but they are not the desires of the herd, of the family, of the clan.  Just as today, cult leaders, marketing firms, parents, teachers, bosses, psychiatrists tell you what to desire, Capulet and Lady Capulet tell Juliet who she should desire: the mediocre Paris.  For this reason, the desire of Romeo and Juliet for each other is anti-familial, explosive, liberated, and liberating and realigns the whole of the Veronese society.  Their desire for each other reminds us that desire is resistant, recalcitrant, renitent.

The Prologue summarizes the entire play:

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, / Whose misadventured piteous overthrows / Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

Romeo and Juliet’s love for each other, “their death-marked love,” a love which inescapably ends in death, is transgressive and literally revolutionary.  It effects radical political change: the harmonization of the House of Capulet and the House of Montague.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OF AGE, FEEL FREE TO READ MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION:

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Two Haiku

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Two Haiku

by Joseph Suglia

The plural of haiku is haiku.

I

The frog leaps into the water:
My inexistent wife
Plays the flute.

II

The grapes dance;
The rats are in the barn
Eating the oats.

*

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WOMEN by Charles Bukowski – A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE FACTS ON FILE COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN NOVEL

WOMEN (Charles Bukowski): A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia

The work of Charles Bukowski affirms the destruction of literature.  I am not suggesting that the author is not a literary artist.  I mean, rather, that he is actively committed to destroying all traces of literary language in his writing.  He attempts to destroy the language of literature by presenting himself as he is, without disguise, subterfuge or literary artifice–a practice of writing that places his work at the furthest distance from the oeuvre of Kafka, Mallarmé and Blanchot.  If one takes the author at his word, even in his writing, Bukowski is not a figure composed of paper and words but, rather, a real human being.  This myth–one that Bukowski supported throughout his life–is the basis of the fascination surrounding his work and the reason for its cult-status.

Generally speaking, people are attracted to books that lead them to the existence of the human being who created them.  And in no other work does Bukowski seem to exhibit himself as purely as he does in Women (1978).  Nothing else could account for the book’s enduring appeal and seductiveness.  Yes, it is true that the main character has a pseudonym, Henry Chinaski, and there is a publisher’s note that reads, “This novel is a work of fiction and no character is intended to portray any person or combination of persons living or dead.”  And yet there are seemingly no other masks or precautions.  Throughout this work, Bukowski, apparently, shows himself as himself, revealing to the reader his self in all of its ugliness and misanthropy.  Women would serve as an instance of the author’s ecce homo, as a permutation of his self-manifestation.

It is no accident, from this perspective, that Women is almost completely devoid of novelistic qualities.  What is remarkable about the work is the bluntness of its “style,” its total reliance on ordinary language and the junk that is stockpiled in its every corner–that is, the superabundance of digressions, seemingly culled from the surfaces of everyday life.  Because of its coarse and digressive character, Women doesn’t read as if it were a novel; instead, it resembles a raw document of an experience, a bloody chunk excised from the tissue of ordinary life.  Perhaps this is the reason for the work’s perpetual repetitiveness.  Each scene of the “narrative” (if the book has one) follows exactly the same pattern: 1.) Chinaski meets a woman who is invariably significantly younger than him and who, in most cases, knows and admires his work.  By having coitus with young women, Chinaski hopes to achieve victory over death, a kind of sexualized immortality.  And perhaps this is also the reason why he writes (“My art is my fear”).  (The women in the novel, in turn, are drawn to Chinaski partly because of his meta-literary reputation and partly because of the way in which he describes women in his books.  As a self-portrait, Women resembles nothing more than a literary personals advertisement–an authorial seduction tactic that is perhaps far more common than most would believe.) 2.) He has some form of sexual intercourse with the woman.  Repeat.  Intermittently, there are also poetry readings, noisy breakups, trips to a racetrack, and laconic conversations with friends, acquaintances, and strangers.  Nothing extraordinary happens.  Chinaski’s account of his life is as uneventful and banal as most lives are thought to be.  To the charge that his book is repetitive and tedious, the author could have always replied: “This is my body.”  A book that is repetitive and tedious may express a life that is repetitive and tedious, and if one accepts that the book documents an engagement with life, how could one fault the author for this?  Like the Eucharist, the book would immediately communicate the body and blood of the author; his real presence would come forth purely from the pages.  Women‘s material character as a book would disappear in order to show the life of the one who fabricated it.  There would be a sacramental communication without communication between the author and reader.

Throughout the pages of Women, the reader watches a cavalcade of women moving in and out of Chinaski’s life.  One bout of copulation is succeeded by another.  Each of Chinaski’s sexual encounters resembles a form of violent appropriation, the besmirching is what is sacred or the slaughtering or maiming of a wild beast (“one animal knifing another into submission”).  It is not fortuitous that racetracks and boxing matches serve as the backdrop for much of the inaction of Women, for sex, according to the logic of this book, is a sport–indeed, it is the bloodiest sport of all.  A confrontation in which death itself is at stake.

A man who says, “All women are *****s” or “All women are angels” usually generalizes his experience of one woman.  Misogyny and philogyny are two sides of the same envelope.  It is to Bukowski’s credit that the women he describes are heterogeneous and non-interchangeable.  They each have unique traits; each one is singular (“Every woman is different”).  The names of the women are Lydia, Dee Dee, Nicole, Mindy, Laura (renamed “Katherine” by Chinaski), Joanna, Tammie, Mercedes, Cecelia, Liza, Gertrude and Hilda, Cassie, Debra, Sara, Tessie, Iris, Tanya, Valerie, and Valencia.  We learn about their idiosyncrasies and their styles of speaking.  And yet, for Chinaski, none of them occupies a permanent place in his life.  Bukowski’s protagonist swallows every woman he meets and vomits her back up.  He then stalks and “murders” new prey.  (Or is he the one who is stalked? In this text, it is never clear who is the seducer and who is the seduced.)  Each woman belongs, theoretically, to a non-finite series.  Some women reappear in Chinaski’s life only to disappear again just as suddenly; later, they sometimes reappear again (this is particularly true of Lydia).  The series ends with an interruption that comes by way of a renunciation: Chinaski refuses a young girl named Rochelle and feeds a cat a can of tuna fish.  But the series could, theoretically, continue ad infinitum.

Although he defines himself as a writer, Chinaski prefers women to writing: “‘You’re good enough with the ladies,’ Dee Dee said.  ‘And you’re a helluva writer.’  [Chinaski replies:] ‘I’d rather be good with the ladies.'”  He disdains what is called “literature”; in fact, all literary topics disgust him.  Writing is, for him, merely a vicissitude of life; it is an addiction (“an insanity,” he says at one point), but no more gripping than any of his other addictions–such as horse-betting, drinking, and sex.  Writing is indeed a compulsion but only one compulsion among others.  All of his compulsions are variations of what Bukowski calls elsewhere the “American Wet Dream.”  That dream, of course, is to acquire and to accumulate as much of a thing as possible.  More money.  More sex.  More drink.  More of everything.  As everyone else, Chinaski is “sick on the dream”–the dream of gross acquisition and accumulation that defines American culture.

Chinaski is addicted to writing fiction in the way that an alcoholic is addicted to booze. But to what extent is his work fictive?  “I write fiction,” he says at one point.  “You mean you lie?” asks Gertrude, a member of his seraglio.  His response: “A little. Not too much.”  This statement is reminiscent of an ancient paradox: A man who comes from a city of liars claims that he is lying.  Is he telling the truth?  What is the status of Chinaski’s statement?  The first-person narrator of a work described as a “novel” claims that he lies a little, not too much, thus implying that what he writes is mostly true–this would apply, of course, to the narrative that he is composing in the literary present.  How should one read the words of a character (himself a literary fabrication) in a literary fabrication who claims that his written narrative is mostly true?  Should one regard it as a “fictive” statement?  Of course, that would be the customary literary-critical response.  But what if one takes Chinaski at his word?  What if one accepts Bukowski’s premise that the protagonist does indeed directly represent the author?

Chinaski says during the conversation quoted above, “Fiction is an improvement on life.”  Perhaps it is not the case, then, that Bukowski expressed himself purely in his writing.  And although it might be the case that writing is merely one compulsion among others for his protagonist, perhaps it was not so for Bukowski.  Perhaps Bukowski did not write in order to live but, rather, lived in order to write.  Perhaps he did not base his novels on his own life but, rather, modeled his life on the protagonists that he created.  If this is so, the writing of Bukowski would indeed constitute the work of literature in the strongest sense of the word–that is, what is “composed of letters.”  For Bukowski, perhaps life was not the foundation of literature.  Perhaps literature, rather, was the foundation of a shattered life.  Literature as compensation, as evidence of an insufficiency: “People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.”

Joseph Suglia

IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OLD, FEEL FREE TO CLICK BELOW TO READ MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION: