Toni Cade Bambara 1939-1995
African-American, Harlem-raised, engaged leftist, Bambara sets her stories in leftist organizing communities, the communities they support, or with people otherwise involved in left issues. She maintains strict focalization in her stories; that is, nothing enters narrative that does not corespond strictly with what the focal character might see, feel, think. The prose is active, rhythmic, impassioned, and strong throughout, although certain details of perspective seem lacking at times in the impressionistic flow.
From The Sea Birds Are Alive. NY: Random House, 1977
"The Organizer's Wife" is set in what appears to be rural black community, perhaps Southern, 20th Century. Bambara handles the dialect like Twain, with steady misspellings, rather than like Toni Morrison, with the dialect rendered clearly by syntax alone. The focalizer falls in love with a guy, but Revun Michaels' church sells the place out from under her. She beats him with a yardstick and kicks him in the head when he tries to get up. He's "small and balding" or the "short, fat, balding preacher" and appears unable to defend himself against the young woman, who is apparently rather large. The narrative makes out that the preacher's height and weight are linked somehow with craven hypocrisy and moral weakness. One feels the contempt often felt by people engaged in manual labor for those who make a living without lifting; it's unclear how much distance Bambara herself has from this opinion.
The woman sort of mysteriously begins holding an infant - she's gotten pregnant somewhere along the way - and her husband is apparently the organizer. Someone has probably bought out the church so that they can't organize and work with the community on it, and probably particularly so they can shut the school down. I was left feeling that more details about the preacher's position would help define the difference or correlation between the focal character's rage and her situation. an injustice, but one wonders the extent to which the focalizer's criticism of and violence against the preacher is justified. Does she assume that he could avoid the sale, and is this justified? One needs the details of the business transaction to decide. While these details are clearly no yardstick of justice, they would give us an idea what the preacher might or might not accomplish practically.
The difficulty seems to be that Bambara herself considers these things as morally or practically straightforward. Perhaps they are in some sense. Clearly, racist cops should be curbed. Clearly, a church that serves as the center for an entire community should not be sold out from under that community, however its continuance might be arranged. But even assuming Ultimate Justice for such assessments, left groups constantly fragment over ideological and practical differences over just how to repair such problems. Taken very broadly, such distinctions account for the entire spectrum of social opinion on these issues.
This seems to me just the weakness of ideological or politically involved literature in general. The difference with Bambara, really, is that she's so engaging and so loving with emotional detail that she manages to reduce the issue greatly. But she doesn't resolve it here.
"The Apprentice"
Narrator's with a friend, Naomi, who stops to interrupt a bust in which a cop's roughly frisking a black man; the cop stops and lets the man go, perhaps since he sees witnesses. Naomi seems pretty professional about it, insists on getting details of the man who's been pulled over, the cop and the badge and so forth.
Naomi's got some grey hair. She appears to be an organizer of some stripe.
They wind up at a church, talking with an older woman. An old man brags obtrusively. The story wanders. She's doing a character sketch of her energetic organizer buddy Naomi, that's all. In this we find the strength and weakness of Bambara's writing. She catches moments of consciousness authentically and intensely. But strangely, the episodes do not reveal their ideological inspiration as they might. That is, one empathizes with the narrator's clear feeling that Naomi is wise and courageous. We see in a general way that Naomi works against Injustice: the police treatment of the African-American driver smacks of racism and might have done so more clearly. Bambara's issue might have to do with the level of engagement, and she may be signalling readers that one who becomes engaged winds up doing so 24/7, simply out of the constant need.
All this is valuable, but one wants something more out of such a sharp observer. What is the political nature of Naomi's involvement? How does the psychological dynamic relate to the business of involvement? What internal conflicts does Naomi face?
This issue, of course, breaks down differently here than in "The Organizer's Wife," which seems more complete emotionally, but in which the exact nature of the sale of the church seems missing. Clearly the sale of the church constitutes a loss for the community andlated errand in the snow and cold, running through the ghetto with a bunch of kids.
"The Long Night" is a thrilling description of living through a police raid, worth reading just for the emotional roller coaster, but also nice to visualize life as a target of CIA involvement in Latin America or in the gunsights of COINTELPRO in the US. Little media attention has been given to back the realism of this kind of description, but this is just plain harrowing, very intense stuff, and feels totally authentic and particularly relevant in this day and age, given the demise of habeas corpus and our onetime 4'th and 6th Amendment protections.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman
In Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, the narrator relates a sequence of tales about his African-American servants in the South after the Civil War. The stories share a single dynamic: the African-Americans tell extraordinarily tall tales and insist on their veracity to such an extent that the narrator, out of indulgence for his wife, whom he presents as terribly indulgent to the African-Americans, must repeatedly change his behavior out of respect for their apparent superstitions.
As the tales continue, Chesnutt's point comes clear by stages. The ex-slaves have a different approach to truth and falsehood, at least when they have to deal with white people. They assume they following:
1) A African-American cannot tell a white anything and be believed.
2) A African-American cannot help a white person beyond following instructions without causing problems.
Therefore, the African-Americans make up stories to draw the whites in to behave as the African-Americans would wish. Most of these events involve garnering some small advantage for the African-American, his friends or family. But on some occasions it clearly involves quite a bit of work and imagination just to save white people from their own folly as well. This comes out most clearly in an involved plot involving prolonged insistance that a certain road is haunted, just to bring together two lovers who have been fighting.
For the Northern narrator, the entire manner of speech is at first unfamiliar; in fact, he never presents himself as mastering it. He patronizes the African-Americans obtusely and presents himself as over-generous in doing so. The plot undercuts his attitude quite clearly, presenting the African-Americans as wise beyond their education and position. However, the whole effect seems to imply that they're charmingly ignorant and folksy-charming in a very Aunt Jemima Stephen Fetchit kind of way.
As the tales continue, Chesnutt's point comes clear by stages. The ex-slaves have a different approach to truth and falsehood, at least when they have to deal with white people. They assume they following:
1) A African-American cannot tell a white anything and be believed.
2) A African-American cannot help a white person beyond following instructions without causing problems.
Therefore, the African-Americans make up stories to draw the whites in to behave as the African-Americans would wish. Most of these events involve garnering some small advantage for the African-American, his friends or family. But on some occasions it clearly involves quite a bit of work and imagination just to save white people from their own folly as well. This comes out most clearly in an involved plot involving prolonged insistance that a certain road is haunted, just to bring together two lovers who have been fighting.
For the Northern narrator, the entire manner of speech is at first unfamiliar; in fact, he never presents himself as mastering it. He patronizes the African-Americans obtusely and presents himself as over-generous in doing so. The plot undercuts his attitude quite clearly, presenting the African-Americans as wise beyond their education and position. However, the whole effect seems to imply that they're charmingly ignorant and folksy-charming in a very Aunt Jemima Stephen Fetchit kind of way.
Lydia Marie Child
Bio: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/lydia-maria-child-dlb/ 2/10/07.
Hobomok
I find Child interesting primarily through her political affiliations, which were abolitionist and feminist. She wrote effectively for her causes although her elequence did not always advance her literary career.
Hobomok is the name of a male Indian, but the novel has to do with the amours and marriagiability of a young lady in the early MA, 200-odd years prior to Child herself. The narrator is a young man, who arranges a frame story about how a friend of his has written a manuscript. The male friend's manuscript has a female focalizer, and this unmistakable female focus constitutes the rest of the novel.
The primary focalizer is female. The male characters seem uniformly wooden, dogmatic, and clueless, including those whom Child seems to consider appealing. The young women are adventurous, resourceful, though naive in ways that must have been charming. Their repeated anger seems more than merited by the foolish males, who drone on about church attitudes towards romance in the face of an apparently causeless looming war with some local Indian tribes, with no obvious reference to politics or economics, aspects of life with which Child herself must have understood but considered as outside the scope of interest.
Synopsis.
1. Mary Conant, resists her crusty father to love young Charles Brown, albeit chastely, per the customs.
2. Charles Brown has to leave, hopes to come back and marry her.
3. News arrives that Charley Brown has died.
4. When Mary's caring mother dies, Mary despairs.
5. Mary marries Hobomok because he's a nice guy who'll help her escape her father. Hobomok seems completely conscious of this circumstance, but marries her anyway.
6. Charles Brown turns out to have jumped ship and hung out in the colonies for several years; he returns to claim Mary as his bride, and asks poor Hobomok where to find her.
7. Hobomok leaves, abandoning his son because his wife loves Brown. Child carefully describes this event to exonerate Mary and Hobomok of the obvious criticisms, with little success.
8. Child asserts blandly that the son's well raised. It's unclear whether the "great tree" that Hobomok has produced is the child or the American nation built on his grave.
For Child this in part is a tale of the noble Indian -- without a twig of judgment. She patronizes, interrupts narrative to comment on the state of his judgment, make explanations and excuses for his lack of literacy and Christian education and so forth. To some extent she may be looking out of the eyes of focalizer Mary Conant, but such irony is weak and inconsistent at best. Given that she did make real sacrifices for minority causes, this is an interesting gauge of how far American society was from egalitarian ideals.
Hobomok
I find Child interesting primarily through her political affiliations, which were abolitionist and feminist. She wrote effectively for her causes although her elequence did not always advance her literary career.
Hobomok is the name of a male Indian, but the novel has to do with the amours and marriagiability of a young lady in the early MA, 200-odd years prior to Child herself. The narrator is a young man, who arranges a frame story about how a friend of his has written a manuscript. The male friend's manuscript has a female focalizer, and this unmistakable female focus constitutes the rest of the novel.
The primary focalizer is female. The male characters seem uniformly wooden, dogmatic, and clueless, including those whom Child seems to consider appealing. The young women are adventurous, resourceful, though naive in ways that must have been charming. Their repeated anger seems more than merited by the foolish males, who drone on about church attitudes towards romance in the face of an apparently causeless looming war with some local Indian tribes, with no obvious reference to politics or economics, aspects of life with which Child herself must have understood but considered as outside the scope of interest.
Synopsis.
1. Mary Conant, resists her crusty father to love young Charles Brown, albeit chastely, per the customs.
2. Charles Brown has to leave, hopes to come back and marry her.
3. News arrives that Charley Brown has died.
4. When Mary's caring mother dies, Mary despairs.
5. Mary marries Hobomok because he's a nice guy who'll help her escape her father. Hobomok seems completely conscious of this circumstance, but marries her anyway.
6. Charles Brown turns out to have jumped ship and hung out in the colonies for several years; he returns to claim Mary as his bride, and asks poor Hobomok where to find her.
7. Hobomok leaves, abandoning his son because his wife loves Brown. Child carefully describes this event to exonerate Mary and Hobomok of the obvious criticisms, with little success.
8. Child asserts blandly that the son's well raised. It's unclear whether the "great tree" that Hobomok has produced is the child or the American nation built on his grave.
For Child this in part is a tale of the noble Indian -- without a twig of judgment. She patronizes, interrupts narrative to comment on the state of his judgment, make explanations and excuses for his lack of literacy and Christian education and so forth. To some extent she may be looking out of the eyes of focalizer Mary Conant, but such irony is weak and inconsistent at best. Given that she did make real sacrifices for minority causes, this is an interesting gauge of how far American society was from egalitarian ideals.
Kate Chopin
Chopin apparently wrote on a lapboard between kids' interruptions. She claimed to be an intuitive artist not given to revision, which must have helped under the circumstances. She wrote lots quickly, partly with an aim to support herself, most likely.
The Awakening
Chopin wrote in somewhat the manner of french realists and naturalists like Zola, de Maupassant, Flaubert or Balzac. She caused some scandal by writing about adultery and infidelity without condemning them, but fell into relative obscurity, perhaps as report of such things became more commonplace. Interest in her work resumed as options of ignoring childrearing to pursue status and money became more acceptable, and as feminist critics looked for women's works ignored by male academics.
In The Awakening, Chopin sketches a woman's failed attempt at liberation. She leaves her husband and children with no introspection besides a couple abstract comments by Chopin's narrator, then drowns herself when she finds she cannot have her favorite of several suitors.
Along the way, Chopin sketches us some fairly rich surfaces of family life among in and around upperclass fin de siecle New Orleans. She draws male characters quickly but deftly. Mr. Pontellier is an unsympathetic cuckold though Edna doesn't actually cuckold him. He's more concerned with what he may consider propriety. He returns from gambling to inform his wife that their child Raoul, soundly sleeping, has consumption. Then he sits and smokes, pouting. Likewise, Robert and Viktor LeBrun appear as variant pretty young men, shy and bold respectively; Alcee appears as an attractive rake. We read nothing to suggest that her children are other than chirpy or bothered by their mother and father's inattention and their mother's eventual suicide.
Chopin's narrator obtrudes at various points to philosophize or moralize, probably in favor of some vision of liberation. Thus on 492-3 we find explanation of Edna Pontellier's immediate actions in her recognition of her "position in the universe," whatever that is. On 524, Edna has comments to make about identity. On 547 we are informed, quite explicitly, that a relative is not aware that he has coerced his wife to an early grave, although no supporting detail or further explanation appears.
Teaching
This text has been popular with undergraduates. It's brief and clear, as far as it goes. I'd prefer taking apart the formal problems of realism and naturalism with Flaubert, Zola, or Henry James, all formally more proficient works, apart from their maleness -- and it seems unfair to trouble James even with that. It does seem a fine basis for debate over relative gender roles. Unfortunately, I suspect it's becoming dated for many young women, some of whom find Ms. P's separation from her husband prosaically obvious and her troubles over it rather inexplicable.
I'd should think that something in a similar vein dealing with the circumstances of women raised in a post-1970's milieu would be most useful, but I can't say I know of a title.
"Desiree's Baby"
A short story, kind of fun, straight out of de Maupassant but set in the American South around N'awlins. A local haciendado falls in love with a pretty orphan and impulsively, apparently open-mindedly, marries her over his father's objections. She bears him a child, who becomes with time obviously African. He rejects his wife as black and sends her and the child away. As he burns her remaining effects, he also burns a letter from his own mother, who admits that she is black.
Sadly, Chopin does not describe precisely whether he has known this and is sending her away to protect himself, or whether he has not known and cannot face it, or even whether he finds out or whether someone else burns it.
Despite the improbable coincidences left as possible by this unclarity, it's a nice little twist-ending short that nicely shows up inconsistencies in racial and gender standards. I haven't used this in a class, but I should think it would be a popular piece.
"The Storm"
A storm throws two ex-fiances together for a couple of hours. Although they have each married other people, they have sex, certain that the woman's husband will not venture to travel with his child until the storm has passed.
The woman welcomes her family with no obvious discomfort. Chopin lets moral judgment remain conspicuous by its absence.
When I've used this in class, Chopin's amorality still provoked nifty quarrels.
Kate Chopin, nee Katherine O'Flaherty (1851-1904)
The Awakening
"Desiree's Baby"
"The Storm"
The Awakening
Chopin wrote in somewhat the manner of french realists and naturalists like Zola, de Maupassant, Flaubert or Balzac. She caused some scandal by writing about adultery and infidelity without condemning them, but fell into relative obscurity, perhaps as report of such things became more commonplace. Interest in her work resumed as options of ignoring childrearing to pursue status and money became more acceptable, and as feminist critics looked for women's works ignored by male academics.
In The Awakening, Chopin sketches a woman's failed attempt at liberation. She leaves her husband and children with no introspection besides a couple abstract comments by Chopin's narrator, then drowns herself when she finds she cannot have her favorite of several suitors.
Along the way, Chopin sketches us some fairly rich surfaces of family life among in and around upperclass fin de siecle New Orleans. She draws male characters quickly but deftly. Mr. Pontellier is an unsympathetic cuckold though Edna doesn't actually cuckold him. He's more concerned with what he may consider propriety. He returns from gambling to inform his wife that their child Raoul, soundly sleeping, has consumption. Then he sits and smokes, pouting. Likewise, Robert and Viktor LeBrun appear as variant pretty young men, shy and bold respectively; Alcee appears as an attractive rake. We read nothing to suggest that her children are other than chirpy or bothered by their mother and father's inattention and their mother's eventual suicide.
Chopin's narrator obtrudes at various points to philosophize or moralize, probably in favor of some vision of liberation. Thus on 492-3 we find explanation of Edna Pontellier's immediate actions in her recognition of her "position in the universe," whatever that is. On 524, Edna has comments to make about identity. On 547 we are informed, quite explicitly, that a relative is not aware that he has coerced his wife to an early grave, although no supporting detail or further explanation appears.
Teaching
This text has been popular with undergraduates. It's brief and clear, as far as it goes. I'd prefer taking apart the formal problems of realism and naturalism with Flaubert, Zola, or Henry James, all formally more proficient works, apart from their maleness -- and it seems unfair to trouble James even with that. It does seem a fine basis for debate over relative gender roles. Unfortunately, I suspect it's becoming dated for many young women, some of whom find Ms. P's separation from her husband prosaically obvious and her troubles over it rather inexplicable.
I'd should think that something in a similar vein dealing with the circumstances of women raised in a post-1970's milieu would be most useful, but I can't say I know of a title.
"Desiree's Baby"
A short story, kind of fun, straight out of de Maupassant but set in the American South around N'awlins. A local haciendado falls in love with a pretty orphan and impulsively, apparently open-mindedly, marries her over his father's objections. She bears him a child, who becomes with time obviously African. He rejects his wife as black and sends her and the child away. As he burns her remaining effects, he also burns a letter from his own mother, who admits that she is black.
Sadly, Chopin does not describe precisely whether he has known this and is sending her away to protect himself, or whether he has not known and cannot face it, or even whether he finds out or whether someone else burns it.
Despite the improbable coincidences left as possible by this unclarity, it's a nice little twist-ending short that nicely shows up inconsistencies in racial and gender standards. I haven't used this in a class, but I should think it would be a popular piece.
"The Storm"
A storm throws two ex-fiances together for a couple of hours. Although they have each married other people, they have sex, certain that the woman's husband will not venture to travel with his child until the storm has passed.
The woman welcomes her family with no obvious discomfort. Chopin lets moral judgment remain conspicuous by its absence.
When I've used this in class, Chopin's amorality still provoked nifty quarrels.
Kate Chopin, nee Katherine O'Flaherty (1851-1904)
The Awakening
"Desiree's Baby"
"The Storm"
Cathy Davidson
Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. Oxford: Oxford, 1986.
Davidson documents the rise of the novel in the US; its relation to women's writing and reading; and to some degree its relation to the history of publishing and distribution technology and economics. She's thorough and perceptive, and provides quite a useful background. The overall picture seems to be that of simultaneous and related rises in secular fiction, women's expression and reading, sequential reading, ease and speed of production and distribution.
I cherry-picked the following quotes from many I might have chosen:
On the beginnings of large-scale popularity for novels:
"Although Susanna Rowson's Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791) -- later known as Charlotte Temple -- had sold nearly forty thousand copies by the first decade of the nineteenth century, many of the copies were from pirated editions that brought no recompense to either the author or her American publisher. That publisher's first edition, it might also be noted, ran to only one thousand copies. One of the countries morst prosperous and sagacious early printers, Mathew Carey simply had no basis for predicting the popularity of Rowson's book. In fact, a first printing of a late eithteenth-century AMerican novel typically ran somewhere between three hundred and fifteen hundred copies, so Carey's edition of Charlotte was relatively large by the standards of the itme. In contrast, by 1825 a press run of ten thousand copies for an American novel was not unheard of ; by 1830 the paperback novels or 'story papers' that were distributed as newspapers through the U.S. postal system were retularly run in edition sof thirty thosuand copies" (17).
Davidson gives this account of how to get published in the 1800's:
"An author was required to contact a printer and contract with him (rarely, her) to have a new book brought before the American public. The a\uthor's offical recompense would be whatever the printer agreed to pay for the rights to an edition of a certain number. Often the actual recompense was whatever the printer was finally able or willing to pay. The printer's recompense would come from the sale of those same volumes, so the printing shopo that was also a publishing establishment was usually a bookstore, too. . . . Since publishers were often small local businesses in a large land with a sparse and scattered population, it was difficult to gain a large audience for most books." (18).
She notes also the publishers' and printers' problems.
"How could a publisher gauge the demand (or lack of one) for a specific title? Would a book (especially a novel) offend censorious critics? Would it be lively enough for an increasingly secularized public? Those decisions were all the more crucial in that for most printers there was little margin for error" (19).
"It should come as no surprise that most early printers, like most authors, brought forth only one American novel during the course of a whole career" (19).
This suggests, among other things, that a publisher or printer generally had to make money in some other way, and that the odds were that printing or publishing happened at a net loss or with too little remuneration to be with the labor involved. One might infer that this is a major reason that we find few early minority or underclass authors (white women, as usual, forming a subclass that tries these definitions).
English curriculae generally ignore the economic basis of production and distribution of literature itself, yet Davidson palpably shows distinct correlations between form and circumstance.
A description of Printing methods:
"The early publishers who decided to print a particular volume generally did so in a cottage-industry fashion. His shop might have one or two indentured apprentices, often as young as six or seven years of age. The apprentices took care of such unpleasant chores as 'treading out the pelts,' literally stomping on sheep pelts that had soaked for several days in the slop pail, a first step in making the ink balls necessary to ink the type. Apprentices and the printer's children would help with the cleaning, would sort type, and when strong enough would actually operate the heavy presses. The work was hard. Several eighteenth-century accounts describe the usual build and gait of one who had long served at the press -- an enormously develped right arm, a limp from having used the right foot on the 'step' in order to make the 'pull,' and sometimes even distended or permanently dislocated shoulders. The work was also general. To supplement the income from the press the printer's wife might run the town post office out of the print shop; often she sold books (imported or exchanged from different booksellers as well as thoseprinted in th shop) and other goods -- everything form household items and her own handicrafts o theater or lotter tickets, stateionery, pens, ink , and fancy imported products" (19-20).
My first publisher, William Van Doren, worked for a time in the 1980's by silkscreening a poster-style broadside he called The Wallpaper. He developed the unusual production method himself as a pre-digital way to support extensive experimentation with graphical presentation of text, and did some remarkable things with it. He personally described to me changes in his back and arms that came from the repetitive movements of silkscreening.
Transportation and shipping troubles:
"Joseph Dennie, in a letter to Royall Tyler regarding the Walpole, New Hampshire publication of Tyler's The Algerine Captive, aptly summarizes the too-common consequence of the combined problems of local printing and precarious distriubtjion: 'Your novel has been examined by the few and paproved. It is however extremely difficult fo r the Bostonians t supply themselves with abook that slumbers in a stall at Walpole, supposed, by the latest and most accurate advertisements, to be situated 400 miles north of their meridian.
"Four hundred miles was as formidable distance. To travel by stagecoach from Boston to Walpole might take two weeks or longer. Nor was it an inexpensive trip. In 1800, a stagecoachjourney could cost as much as $1 for ten miles" (21).
Relations with booksellers -
"The imprint on the title page of the first edition of Charles Brockdon Bron's Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800) indicates the sway in which one Philadelphia printer sought to carry his books to the larlger market: ' Printed and published by H. Maxwsell and sold by Messr's. T. TDobson, R. Campbell, H. and P. Rice.
"What effect did the improved transportation systems and the expanding publisher's networks have on the shape of American fiction? Obviously, that is a difficult question to answer. But it is worth noting that nearly all of America's novels published prior to 1820 were first published in the North. There were exceptions, such as George Fowler's A flight to the moon: or the Vision of Randalthus (1813) and John Neal's Keep Cool (1817) both published in Baltmore; . . . . but these volumes were all issued after 1809, with only marginal success, and none enjoyed a second edition. To put he matter in its most general terms, the new American novels tended to do best where they could best be distributed" (22-23).
If the sales item under discussion were gym socks, I doubt anyone would imagine that something so elemental as distribution were not involved in their dissemination.
On Copyright:
"Until the passage of federal copyright laws, there could be no real profession of authorship. Publishing, too, requried some protection. If a printer needed, say, to sell half fo a first edition of a novel simply to recoup his costs, he could not afford to have another printer, impressed by the novel's sales, come forward with a competing -- and perhaps cheaper -- edition. Such a pirated edition deprived both the author and the publisher of the profits they would otherwise have received."
One wonders how this relates to Net-era publication. It certainly has not applied in the straightforward manner described here to music sales. They bombed briefly in the mid-1980's, in response to cassettes, but picked up within a very short period of time, the pause being apparently an industry-wide panic of professionals rather than anything else. Moreover, while one may feel some empathy for authors and first publishers being robbed of their profits, a pirated edition was at least distributed, and perhaps distributed more than it might have been otherwise. So the relation to dissemination of literature in general might not be quite as described here.
Looking altogether at Chapter 2, one must note that
1. The economic difficulties of authorship and booksales prohibited reading and sales
2. The lending libraries were a great boon not only to reading and literacy but to publishing as well,
3. The physical object of the book was a great amount of its value and a great part of the trouble in its production.
4. The value difference between a particularly dense book like Paradise Lost and a new novel would have been immense, and a worthy consideration in terms of purchase. One can read Milton over and over without exhausting its ideas -- something that would be hard to say for Harriet Beecher Stowe. This may be a major factor in the shift from long poems to novels in general. Novels make more sense if one's going to read the work once, consider that one has put enough work into the thing, and set it aside.
5. Economies of scale impeded American publishing because English and european markets were larger, and booksellers could profit more by jobbing britlit than US lit. This would have made the results of any other economic and logistical difficulties more critical.
6. these substantial limits must remain in place to varying extents in third world countries and among minority communities.
Economics and Censorship
A quote for George Bush I, after his recent comments about blogs:
"I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing [in Virginia], and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!
William Berkeley, Gov.
Virginia 1619
Cited p 38
Fiction and Morality
"The opinion of the world in regard to works of fancy has of late years undergone a wonderful change. It is no longer considered an offense against either religion, morality, or prudence to peruse a book bearing the name of a novel. . . . To us it appears as if it were but yesterday, that the grave, the serious, the religious, and the prudent, considered novel reading as an employment utterly beneath th dignity of the human mind . . . . In those days, it was almost as disreputable to be detected reading anovel, as to be found betting at a cock-fight, or a gaming table. Those who had sons would have supposed them forever incapacitated for any useful pursuit in life, if they exhibited an inclination for novel reading; and those who had daughters who exhibited such an inclination, would have considred them as totally unfitted for ever becoming good wives or mothers." (James Mchanry, 1824, cited page 38).
Production and Reading Styles
"Rolf Engelsing, one of the important practictioners of histoire du livre, has argued persuasively that by the end of hte eighteenth century in Germany (and, by extension, throughout the Western world), reading was no longer largely limited to the Bible and other basic religious books for most people. Not only was the number of books increasing apace with the increasing number of readers but, in addition, more readers read more books in the course of a lifetime. Engselsing also argues that this change in quantity also effected a change in the quality and nature of reading. Instead of reading the book 'intensively' (reading the Bible over and over again), books were read 'extensively.' one book regularly replacing another, to result in a proto-mass consumption of print. Engelsing sees the novel as both a primary contributing factor to this change and its chief benefact or. Engelsing's insight is crucial. The whole mentality of reading was changing by the end of the eighteenth century, at least in America, and, clearly, the Bible and Psalter no longer occupied the singular place they once had in the life fo the community of of the individual leader. This is not to say that religion had lost its importance. Rather, other books rivaled the Bible for reading time in early America. Just as clearly, and increased demand for different kinds of books called the novel into being" (72).
I should point out that traditional plotted novels work far better for this kind of reading. One reads through For Whom the Bell Tolls one time in comfort, whereas earlier narrative forms, say Paradise Lost, suggest re-reading. Important exceptions exist, but they're treated different socially. For instance, how many readers of the Ulysses or Finnegans Wake read it straight through and do not discuss it, say in a class? The academic community provides something rather like the old priesthood for these works.
NOTE: On page 95, Davidson has a picture of the title page of The Power of Sympathy, given as the first American novel. It's interesting that the font is obviously old-fashioned in the variation of the typeface, which 20th Century and even late 19th Century readers would find distracting. This suggests that simplified, regular typefaces evolved in part with the need to streamline the reading process for sequential reads, as in novels.
NOTE: It's interesting that the early novels should focus on matters "of seduction," as Davidson describes extensively. This would seem to fit the sequential structure of novels on several counts. What this amounts to in a more contemporary description would be gender roles -- an aspect of human society in which one makes little headway without undersanding of global contexts. How people romance has to do with how they will raise children; how they raise children depends on how economy shapes their lives and how they were raised, and so forth.
And Reproductive Politics
"The high fertility rate of the postrevolutionary period is striking, but what is even more striking is the precipitous fall in the rate during the next century. The fertility rate dclined by 23 percent before 1850, by 50 percent before 1900. Since no new technologies for preventing births (such as the recent [Davidson writes in 1986] birth control pill) were developed during those years and since prophylactics were certainly known in late eighteenth-century American (and used widely in other countries, notably France), this striking decline in birthrate reveals a massive change in American social attitudes even within a generation or two" (117).
For a history of prophylactics, see Sex and Destiny, by Germaine Greer.
Probably true even though CD seems to discount the issues of distribution and marketing of the devices; distribution could only have been impeded by the the social disruption attendent on revolution, particularly given the unsympathetic nature of the Christian institutions that were often the first to re-establish order in outlying areas.
This doesn't mean there was no change in attitude, however; I just wonder in what ways attitude interplayed with distribution.
"Amorphous psychosociological shifts such as an emerging ideal of affectional marriage (rather than patriarchal authority and wifely subordination), a relaxing of parental control over one's offspring (especially in the matter of choosing marriage partners), an increased substitution of affection or authority in the dealings between parents and children, and a new emphasis on the mother's responsibility for imparting to her children both knowledge and principles of virtue have all been traced to the last part of the eighteenth century. All such changes, it has been further argued, became still more institutitonalilzed in the next century through industrialization and the increasing gender specialization within the family. With the father cast as the primary wage earner and more and more employed away from the home, the mother, even if she also worked for wages, was deemed responsibile for childrearing and household management" (125).
The note to this, .on page 293, continues, "The historiographty of changing family patterns is controversial and the picture tends to look different depending on what factors one includes. Class, regional, and racial factors all influence the interpretation in different ways. Degler, Kerber, and Norton, for example, all tend to see a changing family pattern with more options for women by the end of the eighteenth century, although Kerber, perhaps, views the situation less optimiistically than the other historians. Lawrence Stone has charted a change in family structure in England during the eighteenth-century, especially an increase in affectional marriages and affectional modes of child-rearing. See his The family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800. (NYC: Harper & Row, 1977). A similar pattern is described in the US by Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Polgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1982.) Daniel B. Smith, Inside the Great House: PLanter Family Life in EIghteenth-Century Chesapeake SOciety (Ithaca: Cornell, 1980); . . . . For a brief overview of the different arguments, see Thomas Pl Slaughter, "Family Politics in Revolutionary America, American Quarterly, 36 (Fall 1984), 598-606.
Davidson documents the rise of the novel in the US; its relation to women's writing and reading; and to some degree its relation to the history of publishing and distribution technology and economics. She's thorough and perceptive, and provides quite a useful background. The overall picture seems to be that of simultaneous and related rises in secular fiction, women's expression and reading, sequential reading, ease and speed of production and distribution.
I cherry-picked the following quotes from many I might have chosen:
On the beginnings of large-scale popularity for novels:
"Although Susanna Rowson's Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791) -- later known as Charlotte Temple -- had sold nearly forty thousand copies by the first decade of the nineteenth century, many of the copies were from pirated editions that brought no recompense to either the author or her American publisher. That publisher's first edition, it might also be noted, ran to only one thousand copies. One of the countries morst prosperous and sagacious early printers, Mathew Carey simply had no basis for predicting the popularity of Rowson's book. In fact, a first printing of a late eithteenth-century AMerican novel typically ran somewhere between three hundred and fifteen hundred copies, so Carey's edition of Charlotte was relatively large by the standards of the itme. In contrast, by 1825 a press run of ten thousand copies for an American novel was not unheard of ; by 1830 the paperback novels or 'story papers' that were distributed as newspapers through the U.S. postal system were retularly run in edition sof thirty thosuand copies" (17).
Davidson gives this account of how to get published in the 1800's:
"An author was required to contact a printer and contract with him (rarely, her) to have a new book brought before the American public. The a\uthor's offical recompense would be whatever the printer agreed to pay for the rights to an edition of a certain number. Often the actual recompense was whatever the printer was finally able or willing to pay. The printer's recompense would come from the sale of those same volumes, so the printing shopo that was also a publishing establishment was usually a bookstore, too. . . . Since publishers were often small local businesses in a large land with a sparse and scattered population, it was difficult to gain a large audience for most books." (18).
She notes also the publishers' and printers' problems.
"How could a publisher gauge the demand (or lack of one) for a specific title? Would a book (especially a novel) offend censorious critics? Would it be lively enough for an increasingly secularized public? Those decisions were all the more crucial in that for most printers there was little margin for error" (19).
"It should come as no surprise that most early printers, like most authors, brought forth only one American novel during the course of a whole career" (19).
This suggests, among other things, that a publisher or printer generally had to make money in some other way, and that the odds were that printing or publishing happened at a net loss or with too little remuneration to be with the labor involved. One might infer that this is a major reason that we find few early minority or underclass authors (white women, as usual, forming a subclass that tries these definitions).
English curriculae generally ignore the economic basis of production and distribution of literature itself, yet Davidson palpably shows distinct correlations between form and circumstance.
A description of Printing methods:
"The early publishers who decided to print a particular volume generally did so in a cottage-industry fashion. His shop might have one or two indentured apprentices, often as young as six or seven years of age. The apprentices took care of such unpleasant chores as 'treading out the pelts,' literally stomping on sheep pelts that had soaked for several days in the slop pail, a first step in making the ink balls necessary to ink the type. Apprentices and the printer's children would help with the cleaning, would sort type, and when strong enough would actually operate the heavy presses. The work was hard. Several eighteenth-century accounts describe the usual build and gait of one who had long served at the press -- an enormously develped right arm, a limp from having used the right foot on the 'step' in order to make the 'pull,' and sometimes even distended or permanently dislocated shoulders. The work was also general. To supplement the income from the press the printer's wife might run the town post office out of the print shop; often she sold books (imported or exchanged from different booksellers as well as thoseprinted in th shop) and other goods -- everything form household items and her own handicrafts o theater or lotter tickets, stateionery, pens, ink , and fancy imported products" (19-20).
My first publisher, William Van Doren, worked for a time in the 1980's by silkscreening a poster-style broadside he called The Wallpaper. He developed the unusual production method himself as a pre-digital way to support extensive experimentation with graphical presentation of text, and did some remarkable things with it. He personally described to me changes in his back and arms that came from the repetitive movements of silkscreening.
Transportation and shipping troubles:
"Joseph Dennie, in a letter to Royall Tyler regarding the Walpole, New Hampshire publication of Tyler's The Algerine Captive, aptly summarizes the too-common consequence of the combined problems of local printing and precarious distriubtjion: 'Your novel has been examined by the few and paproved. It is however extremely difficult fo r the Bostonians t supply themselves with abook that slumbers in a stall at Walpole, supposed, by the latest and most accurate advertisements, to be situated 400 miles north of their meridian.
"Four hundred miles was as formidable distance. To travel by stagecoach from Boston to Walpole might take two weeks or longer. Nor was it an inexpensive trip. In 1800, a stagecoachjourney could cost as much as $1 for ten miles" (21).
Relations with booksellers -
"The imprint on the title page of the first edition of Charles Brockdon Bron's Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800) indicates the sway in which one Philadelphia printer sought to carry his books to the larlger market: ' Printed and published by H. Maxwsell and sold by Messr's. T. TDobson, R. Campbell, H. and P. Rice.
"What effect did the improved transportation systems and the expanding publisher's networks have on the shape of American fiction? Obviously, that is a difficult question to answer. But it is worth noting that nearly all of America's novels published prior to 1820 were first published in the North. There were exceptions, such as George Fowler's A flight to the moon: or the Vision of Randalthus (1813) and John Neal's Keep Cool (1817) both published in Baltmore; . . . . but these volumes were all issued after 1809, with only marginal success, and none enjoyed a second edition. To put he matter in its most general terms, the new American novels tended to do best where they could best be distributed" (22-23).
If the sales item under discussion were gym socks, I doubt anyone would imagine that something so elemental as distribution were not involved in their dissemination.
On Copyright:
"Until the passage of federal copyright laws, there could be no real profession of authorship. Publishing, too, requried some protection. If a printer needed, say, to sell half fo a first edition of a novel simply to recoup his costs, he could not afford to have another printer, impressed by the novel's sales, come forward with a competing -- and perhaps cheaper -- edition. Such a pirated edition deprived both the author and the publisher of the profits they would otherwise have received."
One wonders how this relates to Net-era publication. It certainly has not applied in the straightforward manner described here to music sales. They bombed briefly in the mid-1980's, in response to cassettes, but picked up within a very short period of time, the pause being apparently an industry-wide panic of professionals rather than anything else. Moreover, while one may feel some empathy for authors and first publishers being robbed of their profits, a pirated edition was at least distributed, and perhaps distributed more than it might have been otherwise. So the relation to dissemination of literature in general might not be quite as described here.
Looking altogether at Chapter 2, one must note that
1. The economic difficulties of authorship and booksales prohibited reading and sales
2. The lending libraries were a great boon not only to reading and literacy but to publishing as well,
3. The physical object of the book was a great amount of its value and a great part of the trouble in its production.
4. The value difference between a particularly dense book like Paradise Lost and a new novel would have been immense, and a worthy consideration in terms of purchase. One can read Milton over and over without exhausting its ideas -- something that would be hard to say for Harriet Beecher Stowe. This may be a major factor in the shift from long poems to novels in general. Novels make more sense if one's going to read the work once, consider that one has put enough work into the thing, and set it aside.
5. Economies of scale impeded American publishing because English and european markets were larger, and booksellers could profit more by jobbing britlit than US lit. This would have made the results of any other economic and logistical difficulties more critical.
6. these substantial limits must remain in place to varying extents in third world countries and among minority communities.
Economics and Censorship
A quote for George Bush I, after his recent comments about blogs:
"I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing [in Virginia], and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!
William Berkeley, Gov.
Virginia 1619
Cited p 38
Fiction and Morality
"The opinion of the world in regard to works of fancy has of late years undergone a wonderful change. It is no longer considered an offense against either religion, morality, or prudence to peruse a book bearing the name of a novel. . . . To us it appears as if it were but yesterday, that the grave, the serious, the religious, and the prudent, considered novel reading as an employment utterly beneath th dignity of the human mind . . . . In those days, it was almost as disreputable to be detected reading anovel, as to be found betting at a cock-fight, or a gaming table. Those who had sons would have supposed them forever incapacitated for any useful pursuit in life, if they exhibited an inclination for novel reading; and those who had daughters who exhibited such an inclination, would have considred them as totally unfitted for ever becoming good wives or mothers." (James Mchanry, 1824, cited page 38).
Production and Reading Styles
"Rolf Engelsing, one of the important practictioners of histoire du livre, has argued persuasively that by the end of hte eighteenth century in Germany (and, by extension, throughout the Western world), reading was no longer largely limited to the Bible and other basic religious books for most people. Not only was the number of books increasing apace with the increasing number of readers but, in addition, more readers read more books in the course of a lifetime. Engselsing also argues that this change in quantity also effected a change in the quality and nature of reading. Instead of reading the book 'intensively' (reading the Bible over and over again), books were read 'extensively.' one book regularly replacing another, to result in a proto-mass consumption of print. Engelsing sees the novel as both a primary contributing factor to this change and its chief benefact or. Engelsing's insight is crucial. The whole mentality of reading was changing by the end of the eighteenth century, at least in America, and, clearly, the Bible and Psalter no longer occupied the singular place they once had in the life fo the community of of the individual leader. This is not to say that religion had lost its importance. Rather, other books rivaled the Bible for reading time in early America. Just as clearly, and increased demand for different kinds of books called the novel into being" (72).
I should point out that traditional plotted novels work far better for this kind of reading. One reads through For Whom the Bell Tolls one time in comfort, whereas earlier narrative forms, say Paradise Lost, suggest re-reading. Important exceptions exist, but they're treated different socially. For instance, how many readers of the Ulysses or Finnegans Wake read it straight through and do not discuss it, say in a class? The academic community provides something rather like the old priesthood for these works.
NOTE: On page 95, Davidson has a picture of the title page of The Power of Sympathy, given as the first American novel. It's interesting that the font is obviously old-fashioned in the variation of the typeface, which 20th Century and even late 19th Century readers would find distracting. This suggests that simplified, regular typefaces evolved in part with the need to streamline the reading process for sequential reads, as in novels.
NOTE: It's interesting that the early novels should focus on matters "of seduction," as Davidson describes extensively. This would seem to fit the sequential structure of novels on several counts. What this amounts to in a more contemporary description would be gender roles -- an aspect of human society in which one makes little headway without undersanding of global contexts. How people romance has to do with how they will raise children; how they raise children depends on how economy shapes their lives and how they were raised, and so forth.
And Reproductive Politics
"The high fertility rate of the postrevolutionary period is striking, but what is even more striking is the precipitous fall in the rate during the next century. The fertility rate dclined by 23 percent before 1850, by 50 percent before 1900. Since no new technologies for preventing births (such as the recent [Davidson writes in 1986] birth control pill) were developed during those years and since prophylactics were certainly known in late eighteenth-century American (and used widely in other countries, notably France), this striking decline in birthrate reveals a massive change in American social attitudes even within a generation or two" (117).
For a history of prophylactics, see Sex and Destiny, by Germaine Greer.
Probably true even though CD seems to discount the issues of distribution and marketing of the devices; distribution could only have been impeded by the the social disruption attendent on revolution, particularly given the unsympathetic nature of the Christian institutions that were often the first to re-establish order in outlying areas.
This doesn't mean there was no change in attitude, however; I just wonder in what ways attitude interplayed with distribution.
"Amorphous psychosociological shifts such as an emerging ideal of affectional marriage (rather than patriarchal authority and wifely subordination), a relaxing of parental control over one's offspring (especially in the matter of choosing marriage partners), an increased substitution of affection or authority in the dealings between parents and children, and a new emphasis on the mother's responsibility for imparting to her children both knowledge and principles of virtue have all been traced to the last part of the eighteenth century. All such changes, it has been further argued, became still more institutitonalilzed in the next century through industrialization and the increasing gender specialization within the family. With the father cast as the primary wage earner and more and more employed away from the home, the mother, even if she also worked for wages, was deemed responsibile for childrearing and household management" (125).
The note to this, .on page 293, continues, "The historiographty of changing family patterns is controversial and the picture tends to look different depending on what factors one includes. Class, regional, and racial factors all influence the interpretation in different ways. Degler, Kerber, and Norton, for example, all tend to see a changing family pattern with more options for women by the end of the eighteenth century, although Kerber, perhaps, views the situation less optimiistically than the other historians. Lawrence Stone has charted a change in family structure in England during the eighteenth-century, especially an increase in affectional marriages and affectional modes of child-rearing. See his The family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800. (NYC: Harper & Row, 1977). A similar pattern is described in the US by Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Polgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1982.) Daniel B. Smith, Inside the Great House: PLanter Family Life in EIghteenth-Century Chesapeake SOciety (Ithaca: Cornell, 1980); . . . . For a brief overview of the different arguments, see Thomas Pl Slaughter, "Family Politics in Revolutionary America, American Quarterly, 36 (Fall 1984), 598-606.
Twain
Were you to set up the reading list, which Twain would you choose? I suppose Huck Finn's de rigeur, given its place in the history of narrative voice, its social contexts, its history of being banned here and there. None of the other novels seem necessary in the same way, and I'd be tempted to go to short stories and essays.
In his forward to Pudd'nhead Wilson, he describes his creative process in a way that reminds me of Frank O'Hara's poem about his painter friend and the oranges, or Henry Miller's "The Angel is my Watermark;" that is, he describes a process in which the finished work springs dynamically from the author's experience of his materials, and the results little resemble the initial conception. This is a valuable statement in itself. Twain presented it as though it were a weakness of process, but in a way such that one expects that he knew full well it was not.
He had intended Wilson as a short story, and it's interesting to imagine how it must have expanded. The key theme, of course, is another of Twain's little identity reversals, launched once again to level another pretentious class division. It's not surprising that Twain should have originally conceived this piece as a short story. One can imagine the idea expressed -- and for a 21st century American, probably adequately expressed -- in a line or two. It's a snapshot, if a revealing one and relevant to its day; all the author had to do was set the snapshot up to show us what we were looking at.
But that setting-up took some work.
Wilson himself must have been necessary at first simply to provide some excuse for having fingerprinted a little African-American child in the antebellum South. The embellishments of his personality and the cartoon-hick dismissal of his education by the townsfolk set this up. Twain's gloriously expansive trial scene, with Wilson outdoing unborn generations of TV and movie barristers, was probably motivated by his own original audience's imperfect acceptance of fingerprinting as firm evidence.
Given both of these as necessary, the text had to have body. Narrative convention needed a concatenation of scenes establishing Roxy's maternity to set up the cruelty of her son's racially based dismissal of her. As is, son seems almost from the first unnecessarily and wantonly cruel in ways that don't get explained. I thought we'd get some insight into this when so-called Tom responded to his mother's revelation of his African ancestry with an "I know." I thought we'd get an examination of some phobia of discovery or some recognition of having been given away, and an obsessive cruelty derived from that. But no, so-called Tom's cussedness goes so unexplained that at time's one's tempted to take Roxy's crude "It's the n----- in you," for Twain's own explanation, far from Twain's expressed opinions as it is. The narrative is still being used to set up the single photo-perfect scene, and does not explore as far as it might.
Twain's good for plenty of fun along the way, of course, but set beside Huck Finn, for instance, Wilson suffers badly for scale. For all Twain's ear for dialect, the characters seem cut-out because they don't violate stereotype or category. Judge Driscoll remains the pompous ass he is at the start of the story, a man too stupid to realize when a child he's charged with is switched for another, then inane enough to fight a duel with a man he barely knows because he thinks the man has kicked said charge. One needn't imagine that Twain, of all people, would ascribe to such a man any sense. Not even Roxy or so-called Tom show much more nuance. No, Twain's got what he needs for his point without that. As he shows so-called Tom beside so-called Chambers, and the manners each have because of Roxy's social improvisations, one can easily conclude that all such class distinction constitutes usurpation -- the point of each and all of Twain's switched-identity novels: Wilson, Yankee, The Prince and the Pauper.
I wonder whether the sort of picaresque form of Huck Finn wasn't ideal for Twain on this basis. It seems the picture he must have had of Huck slowly enlightened by the nature of his partner must have bore more nuance and process from the beginning, since it requires in some form the passage of time and, since his observations and not his journey are the central focus, suggests Huck as the narrator -- really, with the return to picaresco, the innovation of this text. Then the phsysical resemblance of the Missiissippi itself to the plot -- Huck floats down river into the deep South a bit like Conrad's Marlow sails up the Congo -- lends both an episodicity and a sort of odd teleology to the text. One knows that as Huck wanders from home, Jim wanders towards a deeper and deeper culture of slavery. In all, the text makes happy use of the confluence of the Mississippi.
But I think in general Twain's strongest for the pithy comment, that his poetics leans towards rhetoric and polemic when he's not in a yarn, and that I'd like to make a good list of his essays and shorts, and largely teach from the highlights.
In his forward to Pudd'nhead Wilson, he describes his creative process in a way that reminds me of Frank O'Hara's poem about his painter friend and the oranges, or Henry Miller's "The Angel is my Watermark;" that is, he describes a process in which the finished work springs dynamically from the author's experience of his materials, and the results little resemble the initial conception. This is a valuable statement in itself. Twain presented it as though it were a weakness of process, but in a way such that one expects that he knew full well it was not.
He had intended Wilson as a short story, and it's interesting to imagine how it must have expanded. The key theme, of course, is another of Twain's little identity reversals, launched once again to level another pretentious class division. It's not surprising that Twain should have originally conceived this piece as a short story. One can imagine the idea expressed -- and for a 21st century American, probably adequately expressed -- in a line or two. It's a snapshot, if a revealing one and relevant to its day; all the author had to do was set the snapshot up to show us what we were looking at.
But that setting-up took some work.
Wilson himself must have been necessary at first simply to provide some excuse for having fingerprinted a little African-American child in the antebellum South. The embellishments of his personality and the cartoon-hick dismissal of his education by the townsfolk set this up. Twain's gloriously expansive trial scene, with Wilson outdoing unborn generations of TV and movie barristers, was probably motivated by his own original audience's imperfect acceptance of fingerprinting as firm evidence.
Given both of these as necessary, the text had to have body. Narrative convention needed a concatenation of scenes establishing Roxy's maternity to set up the cruelty of her son's racially based dismissal of her. As is, son seems almost from the first unnecessarily and wantonly cruel in ways that don't get explained. I thought we'd get some insight into this when so-called Tom responded to his mother's revelation of his African ancestry with an "I know." I thought we'd get an examination of some phobia of discovery or some recognition of having been given away, and an obsessive cruelty derived from that. But no, so-called Tom's cussedness goes so unexplained that at time's one's tempted to take Roxy's crude "It's the n----- in you," for Twain's own explanation, far from Twain's expressed opinions as it is. The narrative is still being used to set up the single photo-perfect scene, and does not explore as far as it might.
Twain's good for plenty of fun along the way, of course, but set beside Huck Finn, for instance, Wilson suffers badly for scale. For all Twain's ear for dialect, the characters seem cut-out because they don't violate stereotype or category. Judge Driscoll remains the pompous ass he is at the start of the story, a man too stupid to realize when a child he's charged with is switched for another, then inane enough to fight a duel with a man he barely knows because he thinks the man has kicked said charge. One needn't imagine that Twain, of all people, would ascribe to such a man any sense. Not even Roxy or so-called Tom show much more nuance. No, Twain's got what he needs for his point without that. As he shows so-called Tom beside so-called Chambers, and the manners each have because of Roxy's social improvisations, one can easily conclude that all such class distinction constitutes usurpation -- the point of each and all of Twain's switched-identity novels: Wilson, Yankee, The Prince and the Pauper.
I wonder whether the sort of picaresque form of Huck Finn wasn't ideal for Twain on this basis. It seems the picture he must have had of Huck slowly enlightened by the nature of his partner must have bore more nuance and process from the beginning, since it requires in some form the passage of time and, since his observations and not his journey are the central focus, suggests Huck as the narrator -- really, with the return to picaresco, the innovation of this text. Then the phsysical resemblance of the Missiissippi itself to the plot -- Huck floats down river into the deep South a bit like Conrad's Marlow sails up the Congo -- lends both an episodicity and a sort of odd teleology to the text. One knows that as Huck wanders from home, Jim wanders towards a deeper and deeper culture of slavery. In all, the text makes happy use of the confluence of the Mississippi.
But I think in general Twain's strongest for the pithy comment, that his poetics leans towards rhetoric and polemic when he's not in a yarn, and that I'd like to make a good list of his essays and shorts, and largely teach from the highlights.
Wordsworth
Wordsworth applies a philosophy bearing traces of Locke and Kant to the practical problems of poets, influencing the line that runs through Emerson, Whitman, and Williams through the Objectivists and Beats. He lays the principles out concisely in his Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads,
He sees his work as "fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation" (437 Adams). Or, again, ". . . all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (438). He sees poetry not as an attempt to "explain the ways of God to men," as per Milton, but a rendering of human emotional percept. Accordingly, he holds plain-ish language essential to this task: ". . . such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical langauge than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets" (438). This particularly reflects upon deliberately and falsely decorative language:
"The reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes, and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose" (439).
And, further, " --It is not . . . to be supposed that anyone who holds that sublime notion of poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon th sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavor to exite admiration of himslef by arts the necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of his subject" (443).
A key theme underlying these observations can be drawn from assumptions of commonality of perception articulated distinctly by Kant and Locke. Wordsworth's version, while less extensively articulated, reads with admirable clarity:
" . . . the poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are producedin him in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men" (443).
He extends this universality to an insistence that poetry should most properly be engaged in other disciplines:
"The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or the mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed . . . " (442). His appreciation of the basis for this observation is subtle, and deserves a longer passage:
"We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced aand carried on by subtle combination with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The man of science, the chemist and mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. . . . What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure" (442).
So here we have a central position not only for the poet in recognizing Truth, but even a central role for the emotions in recognizing even the most technical of information. Wordsworth refuses the distinctions -- including, I must add, since I have referred the reader to Kant -- at least some of the distinction between pleasure and beauty accorded by Kant.
Pretty radical for a guy out sniffing daffodils.
Page #'s are from Hazard Adams' anthology, Critical Theory Since Plato.
He sees his work as "fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation" (437 Adams). Or, again, ". . . all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (438). He sees poetry not as an attempt to "explain the ways of God to men," as per Milton, but a rendering of human emotional percept. Accordingly, he holds plain-ish language essential to this task: ". . . such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical langauge than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets" (438). This particularly reflects upon deliberately and falsely decorative language:
"The reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes, and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose" (439).
And, further, " --It is not . . . to be supposed that anyone who holds that sublime notion of poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon th sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavor to exite admiration of himslef by arts the necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of his subject" (443).
A key theme underlying these observations can be drawn from assumptions of commonality of perception articulated distinctly by Kant and Locke. Wordsworth's version, while less extensively articulated, reads with admirable clarity:
" . . . the poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are producedin him in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men" (443).
He extends this universality to an insistence that poetry should most properly be engaged in other disciplines:
"The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or the mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed . . . " (442). His appreciation of the basis for this observation is subtle, and deserves a longer passage:
"We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced aand carried on by subtle combination with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The man of science, the chemist and mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. . . . What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure" (442).
So here we have a central position not only for the poet in recognizing Truth, but even a central role for the emotions in recognizing even the most technical of information. Wordsworth refuses the distinctions -- including, I must add, since I have referred the reader to Kant -- at least some of the distinction between pleasure and beauty accorded by Kant.
Pretty radical for a guy out sniffing daffodils.
Page #'s are from Hazard Adams' anthology, Critical Theory Since Plato.
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