Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 1990"

History and the Invention of Innocence in A Lost Lady

Abstract: iven its subject matter of youthful love and adult treachery, Willa Cather's A Lost Lady may seem surprisingly dispassionate in tone. But as much of the novel's critical treatment reminds us, the absence of passion is often understood to indicate an exhausted yet clear-sighted understanding of things. In Morton D. Zabel's words, the novel reflects Cather's quiet mourning for America's noble pioneer past, her \"feeling that the inspiring landscape of the prairies, deserts, and mountains, no less than the gracious charms of colonial Virginia or old New York, had been obliterated by a vulgar and cheapening modernity\" (43).1 Most critics seem to share this assessment of America's decline from her grand past; they disagree with one another not over this version of history, but over the estimation of the novel's two main characters, Marian Forrester and Niel Herbert, the young man who admires, loves, and then repudiates Marian. The source of contention is the significance attributed to Marian's sexuality, manifested first in a fairly discreet infidelity to her husband and later, more problematically, in a less discreet affair and in overt expressions of dissatisfaction with her life in the prairie town of Sweet Water. Though some see Marian's sexual behavior as evidence of her failure to uphold her husband's ideals, her want of moral firmness, others argue with

Praetextus as Text: Editor-Critic Responses to Thoreau's Journal

Abstract: The essay that follows examines ideological and hermeneutical dimensions of bibliographical and critical attempts over the last century to represent Henry Thoreau's Journal, and concludes with a few reflections on the Princeton University Press project of producing a new edition of this Journal. A principal writing project of Thoreau's latet years, the Journal sounded his multifarious environment. Yet his journal entries are also a record of editing the text of his world under the influence of assumptions, values, and language linked to his histoty and culture, and his contesting of some of these influences does not remove them. Precisely the same can be said of each successive attempt to edit the Journal ot a portion of it, and of the present essay, which reflects on these previous attempts, on the aims and achievements of the most important of them, and on the recent appearance of the first substantial scholarship on the Joutnal (that ofWilliam Howatth and Sharon Cameron, both of whom used the resources of the Textual Centet of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau).' Inevitably, my own view of the Journal has taken shape in the presence of these influences. The preceding paragraph points to an underlying premise of this essay: that impermeable distinctions between textual editing, literary criticism, and literary theory are abstractions unsupported by scholarly practices. A century of various productions of a Thoreau Journal confirms that in this ongoing enterprise, at least, editorial work has not

Grammar and Etymology in Moby-Dick

Abstract: The words \"call me ishmael\" are not the fitst words of MobyDick. Before introducing his narrator and starting the nattative proper (a questionable category in this novel), Melville opens with the science of first words: \"Etymology.\" The novel begins with an outline of the history of the word \"whale,\" its derivation, definition, spelling, and, in the succeeding \"Extracts\" section, a chronicle of its usage from Genesis to Darwin, from the mythic to the mundane. Melville sets the term in the context of a dictionary entry, regarding the name fitst and foremost philologically, much as would the \"late consumptive ushet\" and the \"sub-sub-librarian\" whose portraits precede, respectively, the etymology of and allusions to the word \"whale.\" The latter chronology does not, Melville notes, propose to set forth a \"veritable gospel cetology,\" a series of authotitative statements intended to render the essential or symbolic nature of whales, but rather it offets an \"entertaining\" glimpse into \"what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan.\" That is, the list of quotations has less to do with the whale itself than with the way the whale has been variously and plurivocally represented. Similatly, the etymological citations confine themselves strictly to the term, not the

Knight's Gambit: Poe, Faulkner, and the Tradition of the Detective Story

Abstract: ����� Like the machine gun, the detective story is an American invention. We can assign its origin to a specific author and story. The author is Edgar Allan Poe, and the story the 184t tale "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The detective genre has, of course, enjoyed worldwide popularity since Poe's day, but perhaps because of its native roots it has always had a special place in American literature, in both popular and serious fiction. Needless to say, Faulkner is a major inheritor of Poe in this genre, and I would even go so far as to maintain that Absalom, Absalom!, with its two young narrators puzzling over the facts of a very old murder trying to understand the motive, represents in some sense the culmination of the gothic detective form. What I would like to discuss is Faulkner's relationship to the genre's origin (Poe's Dupin stories) in his own practice of detective fiction, that is to say, the way in which Faulkner interprets or inflects various conventions and images associated with the genre, devices that were for the most part invented by Poe. And I would like to center my discussion on Faulkner's 1949 collection Knight's Gambit. Let me begin with a fairly clear cut example of Faulkner's work in the genre, the story called "An Error in Chemistry," first published in Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine in G946 and awarded a second prize in the magazine's annual contest for the best stories to appear in its pages during the year. ' (The first prize that year, by the way, went to a writer named Manly Wade Wellman for a story with an American Indian

Self-reference, Self-revision, and Self-containment in Stevens' "Domination of Black"

Abstract: In the selection from the Adagia I have used as my epigraph, Stevens identifies the poem as a structure of containment, specifically, the enclosure of a comprehensible mental construct within a framework of language which exists in a problematic relation to the concept it encloses. The difficulty of specifying this relation is itself both conceptual and linguistic. Intuitively, it is hard to construe two things as mutually constitutive as words and ideas in a relation of subordination and containment. Grammatically, while the use of the subordinating colon and the hierarchizing "within" would seem to enforce a strict division between inside and out (granting the "poem of the idea" a privileged interiority), the use of the word "poem" to describe the logical interior of the structure, the non-semantic exterior, and the overall structure, unseats the stable relation of frame to content and of part to whole. Where telling differences should be marked and boundaries defined, we are offered an undifferentiated sameness. Despite the statement's strong assertion of hierarchy, this repetition enables reversal and transposition, so that the "poem of the word," the "poem of the idea," and "every poem" become interchangeable and inextricable. While presumably a definition and circumscription of the contents of

Poetics of Disclosure in Stevens' Late Poetry

Abstract: In American literature, the poetry ofWallace Stevens is perhaps that which most explicitly and repeatedly addresses the origin and function of poetic language. Many of Stevens' poems, especially his later ones, discuss and illustrate not only his own poetics but also its possible alternatives. In those discussions, they open a new perspective on poetry, which identifies the \"theory\" of poetry with the \"life\" of poetry.1 Such a fusion of theory and life characterizes in particular the poems that come after \"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,\" poems that reflect an increasing interest in the problem of Being. At the same time, these texts move beyond the apparent post-Romantic poetics of the earlier poems and indicate a place in language which resists incorporation into any traditional poetics ot explanation in familiar critical terms. I wish to focus here on the question of this non-spatial, linguistic place in the context of the whole of Stevens' work and the complex interrelation of its various poetics. Since this aspect of Stevens' poetic language, what we might call its \"poetics of disclosure,\" finds its exemplary expression in \"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,\" I will deal in detail with parts of this long \"manifesto,\" as well as with several poems written at about the same time. In order to bring this poetics into view, we must explore the ambiguity of disclosing, or in Stevens' own term, \"discovering,\" in his poetry. The difficulty involved in the disclosing function of language in Stevens' poetry comes from the fact that exploring the limits of the familiar interplay of the mind and the world, it suggests a poem beyond, \"a poem that never reaches words\" (CP 396). Stevens' poems often refer

Poe's Composition of Philosophy: Reading and Writing "The Raven"

Abstract: For most readers "The Philosophy of Composition" is less important as an account of how Poe actually wrote "The Raven" than as a statement of his general poetic theories. Kenneth Burke, for example, carefully distinguishes between Poe as the author of "The Raven" and Poe as critic of the poem, in order to argue that the essay represents a significant "guide for critics"—indeed, "the ideal form for an 'architectonic' critic to aim at."1 Although Burke does not go as far as Edward H. Davidson, who maintains that to appreciate the essay "one need not know the poem at all," like many other critics, he does separate the essay from the poem.2 Since few critics consider the essay in a context that includes "The Raven," the unfortunate result is that Poe's "Philosophy" is commonly disjoined from the "composition" that forms its pretext. In this essay I should like to rejoin Poe's philosophy and his composition by examining the intriguing relationship between the essay and the poem. As early as 1850 George Washington Peck suggested that in "The Philosophy of Composition" Poe "carried his analysis to such an absurd minuteness, that it is a little surprising that there should be any [one] verdant enough not to perceive that he was 'chaffing.'" Peck even compared the essay to Poe's "hatmless hoaxes," at the end of which the authot "cries 'sold!' in our faces."' Much like "The Purloined Letter," which Poe published just prior to "The Raven," and which has been exhaustively analyzed for its intticate doublings of texts and authors, I think "The Philosophy of Composition" can be regarded, although in a different sense than Daniel

The Innocent Imagination in John Hawkes' Whistlejacket and Virginie:Her Two Lives

Abstract: ccoRDiNG t? John hawkes, \"the poles of the authorial self, or . of the self that creates something out of nothing, are precisely these: cruelty, or ultimate power, and innocence.\"1 It is this combination of cruelty and innocence informing all of Hawkes' novels that constitutes their unremitting tension as self-indicting celebrations of the imagination. For Hawkes, the writing of fiction requires \"absolute detachment\" and the attempt \"to create a world, not represent it . . . the creation ought to be more significant than the representation.\"2 Such a statement seemingly privileges the authority of the writer and the autonomy of the work of art in contradistinction to more traditional mimesis. Hawkes' fiction is mimetic insofar as he wants \"to imitate the interior journey,\" which for him means finding \"all the fluid germinal, pestilential 'stuff of life itself as it exists in the unconscious. \"3 Applying Hawkes' aesthetic formulations to his work suggests that it is the bodying forth of inner reality that releases cruelty in his fictional worlds and that the language that creates this reality is innocent. Yet innocence so conceived remains abstract, if not obscure, and, indeed, Hawkes' many formulations of innocence within his corpus are themselves often elusive. I wish to analyze innocence as a thematic and textual concern in two of Hawkes' most recent novels in order to illuminate how Hawkes' championing of the artistic imagination does not rest in valorization, but rather works to examine the processes of art and the ends it serves.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Bomb: A Bibliography of Literature and the Arts

Abstract: For many years now our profession has largely ignored what surely should be one of the central concerns of our teaching and research: the threat of nuclear war. Even as the canon has recently opened up to incude important works once invisible or devalued because of their authors' gender, race or class, [it must be further enlarged] to confront nuclear texts: plays, poems, novels, and short stories, to be sure, but also a wide variety of 'non-literary' nuclear texts as well. Far more of us, in other words, must become nuclear critics. —Daniel Zins, \"Exploding the Canon\

Freud Reads Lesbians: The Male Homosexual Imperative

Abstract: OMEWHERE between desire and knowledge is the broad meta1 phorical locus of lesbian sexuality in Freud's work. This site, the scene of a mystery in the Dora case, is the illusive place where knowledge about sexuality and desire come togethet. Dora's attraction to Frau K. is exactly the knowledge Freud knows and misses because of his own counter-transferred desire.1 The coincidence of desire and knowledge around the elusive lesbian figure is an abundantly-described miseen-scène in feminist psychoanalytic criticism, but within the sapphic parameters of such alluring terms abides a more unwavering germ: under the guise of the evasive lesbian lies the intractable visage of male homosexuality. In his two main attempts to analyze lesbian patients, the Dora Case and \"Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,\" Freud rathet obsessively veets toward a male homosexual analysis.2 Though he delineates or enacts many of the configurations by which lesbian sexuality is represented and understood in contemporary western culture (as masculine, as immature), his elucidation of the ways we resolve the clash of paradigms—in the case of the lesbian, how we harmonize the tangled collision of gender and sexuality—reveals a consistent lesbian retirement in favot of a masculine model. Using Freud's work as an exemplary instance, I want to examine exactly how the lesbian figure both resists definition and tends to vanish as she is pulled between the comfortable \"normality\" of heterosexuality on the one hand and the ardent attraction of male homosexuality on the other. This same tension between enigmatic presence and inevitable fading continues in

The Embodiment of the Daughter's Secret in The Marble Faun

Abstract: s Hawthorne criticism attests, nothing incites discourse . like a secret. The pursuit of an unspeakable mystery at the heart of identity and of community—a mystery whose source lies in the difficulty of distinguishing sorrow or misfortune from moral failure—is central to much of Hawthorne's fiction. His work also illustrates a tendency within American Romanticism to call attention to how the body and representations of the human form, such as sculpture and portraiture, bear the signs of what cannot be directly spoken. The Scarlet Letter is perhaps the most striking dramatization of this tendency: Hester Prynne literally bears the mark of the unspeakable, of her never-named crime in the form of the letter ?\" which is in many ways the novel's central character.

Re-Poe Man A Problem of Pleasure

Abstract: The plots of poe's stories are too shallow to bury the bodies he needs to cover up. The bodies return, a tell-tale part always there to betray the alibis of his narrators. Roderick Usher's friend happily buries the blushing Madeline; Dupin's sidekick believes the police would really overlook the filthy letter; Legrand's friend in \"The GoldBug\" listens wide-eyed to a story of an ancient cryptographic note found fluttering on the beach. The narrators insist on their own reason and sanity, but they readily put common sense aside. Luckily, we are not such fools. We see the lapses, the riddles, and diddles, and we work at them until we find some way to cover over the limbs that still stick out—or we dig them up. We like our fictions to end with all accounts squared, in marriage or death, though Poe leans toward the latter. Many of his tales end in imminent death—or even in posthumous narration as in \"Ms. Found in a Bottle\" and The Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym—apparently demonstrating the claim made by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that all life tends toward a return to an earlier, inanimate state. Our lifelong struggles for knowledge, power, satisfaction, and certainty lead inevitably to the dust from which we arose. Or as John Irwin says of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, \"we see the quest for fixed certainty . . . for what it is—a death wish\" (235). But whether we see this quest as the meaning of a story, or the impossibility ofmeaning, there is some-

American Literature in American Literature

Abstract: Iontentious beginning, an agon of epigraphs: the fullness ' against the emptiness of our past. But this project of Duke Univetsity Press—reprinting samples of \"the best work being done by historians, critics, and bibliographers of American literature\"—sets up exactly that struggle. The series charts the last sixty years of the major journal American Literature and chooses its best essays on Emerson (and, in forthcoming volumes, on Melville, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Faulkner, The Frontiet Myth, and The Tfanscendentalists, among others). These anthologized selections are drawn from the archive of published editorial choices going back to 1929, choices which have always already illustrated (in the words of the \"Series Introduction\" shared by all volumes) \"the best work being done by historians, critics, and bibliographers of American literature during any given year\" (vii). This is an interesting doubling, in other words—historical criticism scanning its own history. The project is clearly an Emersonian one in which one age sounds another: the volumes echo a critical past which

War and Play: A Theory of the Vietnam Sports Novel

Abstract: ed from the non-utility of their activity—their labor is not a service and manufactures no product. See Richard Carlton, "Sport as Art—Some Reflections

The Equalizer and the Essentializers, or Man-Handling Feminism on the Academic Literary Left

Abstract: In this essay I intend to describe a characteristic turn in the recent history of literary criticism, but implicit in the argument is the connection between the semi-autonomous sphere of academic literary criticism and developments in a wider sphere, that of popular culture. Examples in that wider culture abound: One could refer, for instance, to a series of books and essays by Herb Goldberg, a popular psychologist in Los Angeles who writes about the need for men to receive equal attention to their emotional needs, the kind of attention that the women's movement has given to women and focused on women. According to Goldberg, \"on the deepest archetypal kvel the feminist movement is partially fuekd by an intuitive sensing of the decay and demise of the male\" (20).2 While this kind of male hysteria concerning feminism is hardly unique, what is truly alarming about it is the equation \"feminism = death of the male.\" Feminist women, in Goldberg's metaphor, are the intuitive scavengers of contemporary culture, with cormorant noses keenly poised for the day old road-kill of masculinity. This equation gives the embattled old boys fuel for their fires. And in television and movies this same point is allegorized over and over again. For instance, in the baseball movie Field of Dreams the

The Fate of Demonism in William Faulkner

Abstract: In Absalom, Absalom! the calculative and vindictive mentality which characterizes Sutpen in his devotion to a \"design\" constitutes the archetype of demonism definitive of the novel and the entire tradition of design in Faulkner's work. In a literal sense, Sutpen's \"design\" is simply his determination to transcend the meanness of his poor-white roots and to found a dynasty. Yet the meaning of his design far outweighs this simple story. The design is defined by the semantics, the rhetoric, of a historical tradition. This rhetoric weaves Sutpen's moral blindness, what he calls his \"innocence,\" and his will to transcend the animality of his brute existence into one coherent structure.1 Because the design originates in Sutpen's desire to \"vindicate the boy\" he was from brute existence it signifies the will to transcend animality (274): the design is the project by which Sutpen's descendants will be \"riven forever free from brutehood\" (261). Therefore the import of the design is not restricted to mere dynasty building, nor can Sutpen's fitst marriage satisfy the demands of the design. The fraction of black blood Sutpen's Haitian wife supposedly carries links her being to that of the slave, and the slave is the purest essence of that exploited animality Sutpen sees in his own sisters (235—36). In consequence, because the

Franklin's Purloined Letters

Abstract: Benjamin franklin's understanding of the discursive dimension of revolutionary action was formed, in part, by his experience in one of the most charged episodes of his political career, the affair of the so-called Hutchinson letters. What he discovered during this affair was that the political tie that subsisted between Great Britain and the colonies was a tie constructed of words. There was, in the eighteenth century, no other way for an imperial power to govern far-flung dominions except by the protracted and uncertain means of messages sent on ships across oceans. Such messages were long in transit, dangerously susceptible to diversion, and equally susceptible to misconstruction when they reached their destination. Such messages, for example instructions to royally-appointed governors, might miss their mark for various reasons: perhaps, for instance, the issues they addressed might be already irrelevant by the time the circuit of communications was completed. Despite such problems, however, there was no other route for power to take than that of language stretched over time and space. (Franklin's first encounter with the patronage politics of the Empire involved trouble with the transatlantic mail. William Keith, proprietary governor of Pennsylvania—who \"sometimes disregarded\" the \"Instructions\" sent him from the Proprietors in Great Britain, as Franklin later noted in his Autobiography [Writings 1345]—offered to sponsor him in setting up a printing shop in Philadelphia, by sending \"Letters ofCredit\

Uncovering Plots: Secret Agents in The Scarlet Letter

Abstract: i>i>r Il "* he custom house" must surely represent one of the most JL devious and circumabulatory prefaces ever written for a novel. Beyond the obvious function of presenting the scene of discovery of the letter which enables the plot, its purpose is far from immediately clear. What have stories of the narrator's own past or of his colleagues at the Custom House or of New England itself to do with the main body of the text to which they proffer an entree? Their formal connection even with the scene of discovery seems at best tangential, peripheral. As a consequence, commentators have latched on to the larger resonances of this central scene and to the theory of romance that it implies as at least partial justification for the rest of the introduction which, it is generally assumed, has lost much of its interest and relevance. Thus for Feidelson, the reading of the letter inaugurates a mode of symbolic perception that the text will later exploit: the characters attempt to interpret its meaning in the same manner as the narrator himself (66-67). Ziff in turn shows how the ethical dimensions of the theory of romance regulate the moral conclusions towards which the narrative orients the reader (123-25). For Dryden, the letter exemplifies the fact that all of Hawthorne's tales are "twice told": the act of creation involves "the weaving and reweaving of the texts of others" (133). More recently, Bell has noted that a kind of "duplicitous deception" marks both the behavior of the romancer and of Hester and Dimmesdale: both types are "artists, manipulating appearances" (46-47). '

The Book in the Travel: Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express

Abstract: hat is the status of the book in the travel book? Most writers of travel books, especially if they ttavel in order to write a book, take books with them. Reading provides pace, lends diversion, affords relaxation. Such reading, of course, must be perfectly occasional, incidental, and happenstance. Othetwise, there would be no point in going anywhere in the first place. Even if the purpose of the travel is to produce a book, the very project of ttaveling is unsettled if it gets submerged in reading. Ideally, in fact, it appears bettet for the traveler not to resort to books at all, and certainly not books about present destinations. Pico Iyer, in his recent collection ofAsian travels, Video Night in Kathmandu, is quite explicit about this: \"Entire books have been written on even the smallest of my themes, and if I had even tried to keep up with all the literature that comes out every week on China or the Philippines or Japan, I would never have found the time to write a patagraph myself\" (24). That is, he would have nevet had the time for the experience which has to be the basis for any paragraph he could write. Like any travel writer, Iyer emphasizes \"circumstance,\" \"serendipity,\" and \"caprice.\

From Jefferson to Thoreau: The Possibilities of Discourse

Abstract: The figures of jefferson and thoreau are not commonly juxtaposed beyond the occasional footnote pointing out that Thoreau's motto for \"Resistance to Civil Government\" does not appear as such in Jefferson's writing, although there have been passing attempts from Vernon Parrington on to fit Thoreau into a somewhat loosely defined tradition of \"Jeffersonian democracy.\"1 Bringing them together as explicitly as in the title of this essay presents several dangers, not least that of trivializing them in a catalog of factitious parallels. Both Jefferson and Thoreau became famous as architects of their own houses, for example; they shared large interests in natural history and the native Americans; each was fascinated with the prospect of walking or exploring westward; each distrusted the thrust of urban, capitalist culture, and so on. Pursuing such comparisons might be amusing, but in the face of their seemingly more important differences this kind of speculation merely risks its own powerlessness. Fortunately, there are larger possible rewards and greater dangers involved in such a juxtaposition. If literary criticism can control, select, and organize the production of discourse in order to avert its powers and dangers, criticism can also open the way for that discourse to extend our imaginative and moral comprehension of the world.2 Literary history always begins, at least in principle, with the selection of two writers or texts—we should note that the choice of either authorial subjects or objective texts as index projects different kinds of history—and the historian's discursive connection between these points extends an ordering line into the chaotic past. Thus, bringing