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An analysis of AS YOU LIKE IT (Shakespeare) by Dr. Joseph Suglia / Transgender Characters in Shakespeare / Gender and Shakespeare / Gender in Shakespeare / Shakespeare and Gender / Transgenderism in Shakespeare / Shakespeare Transgender / Transgender AS YOU LIKE IT / Shakespeare Transgender

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An analysis of AS YOU LIKE IT (Shakespeare) by Dr. Joseph Suglia

“Aimer grandement quelqu’un c’est le render inépuisable.”

—Paul Valéry, Cahiers (1944. Sans titre, XXVIII, 524)

In the wrestling match between Nature and Fortune, it is Fortune that chokeholds her opponent and flattens her on the mat.  “Nature” refers to the qualities with which one is born; “Fortune” signifies all that comes post-natal.  “Nature” is another word for “necessity”; Fortune is accident, preference, education, style.  In Elizabethan England: That which God makes is Nature; that which you like belongs to Fortune.  What you are born with is overthrown by what you like in Shakespeare’s most audience-accommodating comedy, As You Like It (circa 1599).

We see the clash between Nature and Fortune in the very first scene, one in which Orlando grieves that he, a natural gentleman, is reduced by Fortune to the status of a stalled ox.  This, the work of his brother Oliver, who mars what God made.  Orlando moans: “My father charged you [Oliver] in his will to give me good education.  You have trained me like a peasant, obscuring and hiding from me all gentleman-like qualities” [I:i].  Fortune will ever have her revenge.

Orlando is pursued by his fratricide-minded brother and banished by the skinless Duke Frederick.  After the first act, we are no longer in the duchy of Frederick, with the exception of the space-flash of Act Three: Scene One.  We are fleeting time with the exiled Duke Ferdinand and his fellows in the Forest of Arden.

The Forest of Arden is described as a “desert,” as a deserted, unpopulated place.  The Duke Senior calls the forest “this desert city” [II:i].  Rosalind calls the forest “this desert place” [II:iv].  Orlando says to Adam: “[T]hou shalt not die for lack of a dinner, if there live anything in this desert” [II:vi].  Later, Orlando: “this desert inaccessible” [II:vii].

Here we discover the first of the many paradoxes that will come to meet us in the Forest of Arden.  How could the forest be a “desert” if it is populated by more people than there were in the duchy of Frederick?

Disguise abounds in the Forest of Arden, as well.  Duke Ferdinand expresses the desire to hunt “venison” [II:i].  Who hunts venison?  Instead of using the words “deer flesh,” which would be Anglo-Saxon German, the Duke uses the French-Latin term (“venison”).  Nothing is more common than the use of linguistic camouflage to disguise the reality of the animals that we ingurgitate.  Instead of saying, “swine-flesh” (Anglo-Saxon German), we say, “pork” (French Latin).  Instead of saying, “cow-flesh” (Anglo-Saxon German), we say “beef” (French Latin).  And yet people seem to have no problem saying that they want to eat chicken, doubtless because they can imagine, without disgust, swallowing our squawking and bawking relatives.  Chickens (and fish) are seen as being remoter from human beings than deer, pigs, and cows.  Many would be afraid of nominating a Pulled Pork Sandwich a “Pulled Swine-Flesh Sandwich” for the visceral reason that pigs are perceived as being genetically close to human beings (which they certainly are).  Food-applied French Latin is the articulation of anthrophagophobia, which is a word that I have invented that means “the fear of cannibalism.”

Another paradox emerges when Duke Ferdinand praises the forest as a place where everyone is oneself.  Extolling the virtues of sylvatic life (as opposed to courtly life), Duke Ferdinand claims that the feeling of seasonal difference feelingly persuades him of what he is:

“The seasons’ difference—as the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, / Which even when it bites and blows upon my body / Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say: ‘This is no flattery. These are counsellors / That feelingly persuade me what I am’” [II:i].

Far from being unlike “the envious court” [Ibid.], the Forest of Arden is the Forest of Envy.  How can everyone be himself or herself in the Forest of Envy?  Rosalind is herself AND himself.  She envies, and identifies with, the male figure of Ganymede.  The Forest of Envy is a forest in which Jacques the Melancholy envies Touchstone the clown: “O that I were a fool. / I am ambitious for a motley coat” [II:vii].  It is a forest in which one is one-who-is-other-than-what-one-is.  Oliver transforms into a New Self.  Celia alienates herself from herself when she becomes Aliena; she is other-than-what-she-appears-to-be (“Aliena” means “stranger”).  Everyone is a stranger to oneself in the Forest of Envy.

Much like the internet, the Forest of Arden is a transformative, metamorphic space in which anyone can become anything that one wishes to become.  It is an indifferent space that comes before masculinity and femininity.  It is an indifferent space that comes before gender.  In the forest, men behave in the way that women are expected to behave and women behave in the way that men are expected to behave.  Jacques the Melancholy weeps when he considers a fallen deer–surely, this is an instance of a man acting in a way that would be considered feminine.  When the lioness tore flesh away from his body, Oliver reports to Rosalind-as-Ganymede and Celia-as-Aliena, Orlando fainted: “The lioness had torn some flesh away, / Which all this while had bled; and now he fainted / And cried, in fainting, upon Rosalind” [III:iv].  Surely, fainting is generally, and falsely, regarded as a symptom of female psychology.  And yet in the very same scene, exactly fifteen lines later, Oliver taxes Rosalind-as-Ganymede for swooning: “Be of good cheer, youth; you a man! you lack a man’s heart.”

At another moment, Rosalind does indeed act in the way that a man is expected to act.  The unwept tears of Rosalind tell us everything that we need to know about Rosalind’s “performance” as a man.  It is a performance that ceases to be a performance, that erases itself as a performance, and becomes the reality of what is being performed.  Rosalind:

“I could find in my heart to disgrace any man’s apparel and to cry like a woman, but I must comfort the weaker vessel, as doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat.  Therefore courage, good Aliena” [II:iv].

Let us remember that these words are spoken to an audience that is conscious of the comedic irony that is being enacted: Touchstone, Celia, and everyone in the Globe Theatre.  We are not unaware of Rosalind’s biological sex.

Other Shakespearean comedies contain female characters who dress as men (cf. The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merchant of Venice, the latter which contains no fewer than two female characters who dissimulate themselves as men).  Not to psychologize matters, this transformation of women into men almost certainly says something about Shakespeare’s paraphilia.

Note the attraction that Orlando has for Rosalind-as-Ganymede.  It might not be invidious to suggest that Orlando finds Rosalind more attractive as Ganymede than he finds Rosalind attractive as Rosalind.  David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly (1993), anyone?  If I am incorrect about this (and I am not), why would Orlando agree to court Ganymede in his hovel?  And why would he agree to marry Ganymede—even if we allow that the marriage is presented as fictitious?  Shakespearean comedy is conjugal propaganda, which means, as I have written elsewhere, that all of the principals marry in the fifth act, whether they want to or not.  A comedy in the Shakespearean sense is one that ends in forced marriage, forced dancing, and forced mirth-making.  Jacques the Melancholy is among the few who escape the coerced marriage, the coerced dancing, and the coerced merriment: “I am for other than for dancing measures” [V:iv], he wisely intones as he wisely steals from the stage.

The resonances produced by the name “Ganymede” would not have escaped Shakespeare’s audience.  “Ganymede” connoted homoeroticism in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, as Ganymede, famously, is the young boy who was given a first-class flight to the Olympian Lounge, where he worked part-time as a bartender to the gods and where he was romanced by Jove.  It is probable that the attraction that Orlando has for Ganymede is not homoerotic in the usual sense, but an instance of andromimetophilia.  The late Dr. John Money and Dr. Malgorzata Lamacz coined the term “andromimetophilia” to denote the sexual attraction to women who dress as men.

Each line in Shakespeare has become a cliché, which means, as Harold Bloom suggests, that everyone has read Shakespeare even without having read Shakespeare.  Who has not heard the verbal fossil that crawls from the downturned mouth of Jacques the Melancholy?: “All the world’s a stage.”  And yet most people stop quoting there.  The soliloquy continues: “And all the men and women merely players. / They have their exits and their entrances” [II:vii].  If nothing else, these lines mean that life is itself performance, that the dramatizations of Fortune supersede the nature of Nature.  This is surely why Shakespeare reminds his spectatorship that the play that he is writing is nothing more than a play, both in the Epilogue in which Rosalind expresses the desire to kiss every man in the audience, and in the words of Jacques the Melancholy, who calls attention to text’s shift from lyricism to blank verse: “Nay, then, God be wi’ you, an you talk in blank verse” [IV:i].  The reference to blank verse reminds us that the play that we are reading / watching is nothing more than a play in the literal sense.  Life is a play in the metaphorical sense.

All of the players in the Globe Theatre were male, which means the following: On the stage, there is a man (the male actor) who dramatizes a woman (Rosalind) who dramatizes a man (Ganymede) who dramatizes a woman (Rosalind again, the Second Rosalind).  The gender metamorphoses in Shakespearean comedy suggest that gender is not a natural category.  Calling it a “choice” might imply that gender is a matter of free will, for Shakespeare, and this concept is something that might be disputed.  Nonetheless, if you follow the metaphors of the play, the theorems are implied: If you decide to become more feminine, you will become more feminine.  If you decide to become more masculine, you will become more masculine.  But this has absolutely nothing to do with maleness or femaleness.  Gender does not exist below or beyond the expressions of gender.  Sex is Nature.  Gender is Fortune.  “Sex” signifies the secondary physiological characteristics with which one is born.  Gender is as you like it.

Joseph Suglia

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David Foster Wallace Is a Bad Writer: Part Four: CONSIDER THE LOBSTER / David Foster Wallace Was a Bad Writer / A Critique of David Foster Wallace: Part Four: Consider the Lobster / CONSIDER THE LOBSTER by David Foster Wallace / Is David Foster Wallace Overrated? / David Foster Wallace Is Overrated / CONSIDER THE LOBSTER IS Overrated / David Foster Wallace Controversy / David Foster Wallace Overrated

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David Foster Wallace Is a Bad Writer: Part Four: CONSIDER THE LOBSTER

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

It is said often of David Foster Wallace (or “DFW,” as his ovine fanboys have christened him, as if he were a shoe store or an airport) that he was a genius.  Would it be curmudgeonly of me to ask, “What kind of a genius was he?”?  He certainly was not a literary genius.  I would be willing to allow that he was, perhaps, a mathematical genius.  But a literary genius?  No, absolutely not.

Anyone who reads D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace will recognize that Wallace was a likable, sincere, soft-spoken person who had interludes of mean-spiritedness, and his death is an absolute loss.  At some stage, however, one must put one’s sentimentality aside and examine, coldly and soberly, the assertion that his writing is great literature.

* * * * *

Consider the Lobster is an agglutination of athetic “essays.”  (Athetic = “lacking a thesis.”)  The collection itself lacks a driving thesis, a sense of cohesion, a thread that would bind all of the pieces together.  Not a single one of the “essays”—such as they are—contains an argument, sustained or otherwise.

Because the book itself is disjointed, it might be useful to pause over each individual text.

“Big Red Son”: An appraisal of the pornography industry from which we learn that this industry is “vulgar” [7] (shocking!) and that Las Vegas is “the least pretentious city in America” [4].  It is disheartening when someone who seemed to care so much about English usage abuses the word “pretentious.”  “Pretentious” means “making the claim to be something that one is not.”  It does not mean “upscale,” “upmarket,” or “snooty.”  If we keep the proper meaning of “pretentious” in mind, it could just as easily be said that Las Vegas is the most pretentious city in America.

“Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”: Not so much a negative review of Updike’s Toward the End of Time as a negative review of John Updike the Human Being as he appears to Wallace.  From reading the first five paragraphs, one would sort of have to think that Wallace would eventually make a general statement about phallocratic American writers such as Updike, Mailer, Roth or American virility or fading masculinity, etc., but, no, the review has no implications beyond itself.

“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed”: At the beginning of this astounding lecture, Wallace makes the disarming comment that he is “direly underqualified” [60] to speak on the subject of humor in Kafka.  This assertion is correct.  Wallace knows nothing about Kafka or his work.  If you are not qualified to speak on a subject, then why speak on it at all?

“Authority and American Usage”: An “essay” on the conflict between prescriptivism and descriptivism, ruined by ingratiatory implorations (“DO YOU LIKE ME?”; “PLEASE LIKE ME!”).  I found the piece to be smarmy and bizarrely cloying, and the racist nonsense about African-Americans made me flinch.

“The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”: The most inappropriate response to the September 11, 2001 attacks ever written, with the exception of “Chuck” Palahniuk’s “The View from Smalltown, USA.”  Palahniuk’s response, incidentally, is a plagiarism of Wallace’s.

“How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”: A very strange review of the tennis star’s autobiography Beyond Center Court: My Story.  Wallace seems puzzled that Tracy Austin is a skillful tennis player AND a bad writer.  I am puzzled by his puzzlement.

“Up, Simba”: Painful-to-read meanders through John McCain’s doomed campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination.  Completely irrelevant since McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.  Incidentally, did you know that Palahniuk considers “meander” to be a “gay” word?

“Consider the Lobster”: From which you will learn, among other things, that the lobster and the cockroach (for instance) are cousins.  I thought that everyone already knew that.  The “essay” is nothing more than a catalogue of facts and is devoid of anything like an organizing thought.  Unless “lobsters exist” is an organizing thought.  As Hegel reminds us in the preface to Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, factual knowledge is not genuine knowledge at all.  It is possible to memorize facts Jeopardy-style without ever understanding anything.

“Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky”: Wallace did not have a background in classical or modern literature.  He read the postmodernists, and that was the extent of his knowledge of the literary arts.  His solipsism is painfully evident in the Dostoevsky essay.  He doesn’t even seem very interested in Dostoevsky’s work, except to the degree that it affects American readers and writers: “The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we—here, today—cannot or do not permit ourselves” [271].  A Russian writer is significant only insofar as he has an impact on an American writer or reader, then.  Is America the epicenter of the universe?  Of the multiverse?  Wallace’s solipsism reminds me of the obituaries of J.G. Ballard.  I paraphrase: “Ballard’s short story ‘The Sound-Sweep’ inspired the Buggles’ song ‘Video Killed the Radio Star,’ which became the first music video ever to be broadcast on MTV.”

“Host”: The editorial, annotative remarks will seem original to anyone who has not read Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.

Consider the Lobster is superficial, not radical.  I intend “radical” in its strict etymological sense of the word: “to the root.”  Wallace never even attempts to get at the root, the radix, the core, the heart of the subjects that he pretends to analyze.

But who cares?  No one cares about logic these days.  No one cares about language these days.  No one cares about logos these days.  No one cares about writing these days.

The blind, slavish, uncritical worship of David Foster Wallace represents one of the dangers of ad-hominem “thinking.”  An ad-hominem attack attacks the musician instead of the music, the philosopher instead of the philosophy, the artist instead of the art, the sociologist instead of the sociology.  But the reverse is also the case: Ad-hominem praise praises the musician at the expense of the music, the philosopher at the expense of the philosophy, the artist at the expense of the art, the sociologist at the expense of the sociology, the writer at the expense of the writing.

David Foster Wallace’s fanboys worship the ghost of the bandana-wearing writer, not the writing that he generated.

A DFW follower once explained his worship of the Dear Leader in these terms: “He is a genius, but he says, ‘like’ and ‘whatever.’”  He was a down-to-Earth genius, then.  An interactive genius.  A nice genius.  A friendly genius.  If the Friendly Genius attends your wedding, your son’s Bar Mitzvah, your son’s confirmation, etc., well, then, he is a good writer.  If he brings a casserole, then he is an especially good writer.  The Friendly Genius smiles at you.  The Friendly Genius smiles at you because he likes you.  If the Friendly Genius likes you, then maybe YOU are a genius, too!  Fanboys like writers who are nice and friendly and hip.  Accommodating and accessible.

[For a nice discussion of the competitiveness behind DFW’s ‘niceness,’ see Rivka Galchen’s review of the Wallace biography.]

The Cult of Genius has no interest in the letter.  The Cult of Genius is not interested in writing at all.  The Cult of Genius is obsessed with the appearance and personality of the author, not the extent to which he or she knows how to write.  Fanboys are preoccupied with Writers, not with Writing.  And they want to become Writers themselves, without bothering very much about Writing.  They don’t want their unwritten books to be published and read; THEY want to be published.

A genuine author, however, loves writing for the sake of writing.  This is one the things that Nietzsche might have intended when he wrote, in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister: Der beste Autor wird der sein, welcher sich schämt, Schriftsteller zu werden: “The best author will be the one who is ashamed of becoming a writer.”

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 on 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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