Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 1992"

Absence, Loss, and the Space of History in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract: \"~|G t was not a story t? pass on,\" Morrison writes in the final JL chapter of Beloved; she repeats, \"It was not a story to pass on. . . . This is not a story to pass on\" (336-38). The wrenching poignancy of the story that precedes the conclusion—condensed in the text's final word: \"Beloved\"—shows the tremendous importance of remembering in this story, as in other recent African-American fiction and criticism; the novel's endotsement of and almost hypnotic descent into oblivion in its final pages thus can hardly represent simple encapsulation of the novel's wisdom.1 In fact, the final chapter's insistent forgetting is deeply chilling. The almost lyrical, lilting quality of the language, with its repetition of terms like \"disremembered\" and \"unaccounted for\" creates a ghostly presence all its own. It is as if, in its vety denial of the \"breath\" and \"clamof\" of the now-to-be \"disremembered\" and \"unaccounted for\" ghost, the novel breathes its very own ghostly clamor (336-38). Is this or is this not, then, a stoty to pass on? And if it is, what and why and, in particular, how are we to remember the past? The way of remembering dramatized through the story is not the way of remembering that the text embodies. This difference between modes of histotical recollection is not unrelated to what is also a major issue in this text: how men and women produce not only the story of the past, but history itself.

Playing Caliban: Césaire's Tempest

Abstract: FTER the Amerindians (Carib, Arawak, Taino, and Siboney), .the original inhabitants of the Caribbean, were annihilated, and nothing remained but a blankness waiting to be filled by African slaves, a name would remain. The name alone would stand for all that had been destroyed: \"Cannibal\" uttered by those who \"civilized\" the land would live on to justify the extirpation of a race and the conquest of a world. Black slaves, their names forgotten, their pasts obliterated, were renamed in the New World. But no matter their new names, they would, when it served the settlers' purposes, embody the figure of the deformed and language-less savage. Caliban, now defined in most dictionaries as an anagram of Cannibal, or as something nasty, brutish, and short, specifically the \"grotesque and brutish slave in Shakespeare's Tempest\" (American Heritage), evokes images of the fierce Caribs of the West Indies. It was Shakespeare who first used the term for his \"lying slave\" who spoke the most beautiful language in the play, when Prospero wasn't around.

Laura Riding's Essentialism and the Absent Muse

Abstract: Poetry is not contemporary poetry. It is not philosophy. It is not even literature. As between literature and life, it is closer to life. But life invents time rather than poetry, a sanctimonious comment on itself, a ¦ selflessness. Poetry invents itself. It is nearly a repudiation of life, a selfness. Unless it is this, it is a comment on a comment, sterile scholasticism. \"Poetry and the Literary Universe,\" in Contemporaries and Snobs ( 14)

Uptown Folk: Blackness and Entertainment in Cabin in the Sky

Abstract: ETWEEN 1927 and 1954, the major Hollywood studios produced 1 only six feature films that took place in an all-black milieu: Hallelujah! (MGM, 1929), Hearts in Dixie (Fox, 1929), The Green Pastures (Warner Brothers, 1936), Cabin in the Sky (MGM, 1943), Stormy Weather (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1944), and Carmen Jones (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1954).1 The period in question was the heyday of classic cinema, bounded at one end by the introduction of sound and at the other by a shift toward a decentered, \"package unit\" mode of production;2 more importantly, 1954 was also the year when the Supreme Court ordered public schools desegregated, paving the way for a civil rights movement that would have a lasting effect on all the media. Until then, any studio film purporting to deal exclusively with black experience was truly exceptional and controversial. The six films just listed are therefore among the most unusual products ofAmerican show business. No proper history of the movies should ignore them, and they deserve far more critical analysis than they have received. ' Viewed from a late twentieth-century perspective, one of the most interesting of the \"all Negro\" productions was MGM's Cabin in the Sky, starring Ethel Waters, Eddie Anderson, Lena Home, and a host of well-known black performers. This film warrants special attention—not only because of its considerable entertainment value, but also because it appeared at a crucial juncture in the series, when African Americans were increasing their demands for better treatment from the movie

"Made in the Marquesas": Typee, Tattooing and Melville's Critique of the Literary Marketplace

Abstract: A few years since there was living on the island of Maui ... an old chief who, actuated by a morbid desire for notoriety, gave himself out among the foreign residents of the place as the living tomb of Captain Cook's big toe! — affirming, that at the cannibal entertainment which ensued after the lamented Briton's death, that particular portion of his body had fallen to his share. . . . The result was the making of his fortune; ever afterwards he was in the habit of giving very profitable audience to all curious travelers who were desirous of beholding the man who had eaten the great navigator's great toe. —Typee

The "Wholeness" of the Whale: Melville, Matthiessen, and the Semiotics of Critical Revisionism

Abstract: Last year we observed two important anniversaries in the history of American literature: 1991 marked both the centennial of Herman Melville's death and the semicentennial of the publication of F. O. Mathiessen's American Renaissance. In the half-century between those two occurrences, Melville went from being an obscure New York writer of sea stories to his current status as one of the dozen or so American authors who cannot be ignored. In many ways, the path of his posthumous career and his consequent centrality to American literary studies is even more fascinating than the ups and downs of his career while he was alive. In what follows, I would like to re-examine the admittedly familial story of Melville's critical rediscovery by exploring the significance of the \"Melville boom\" between the two world wars for the growth of American literary studies of the antebellum petiod. This exploration will be bracketed by a general discussion of the process of canon formation and the semiotics of critical rediscovery. Far from deploring the canonization of Melville as a \"classic American author,\" I will suggest that this development was a structural necessity and reflects a larger movement of critical historiography, an oscillation between similarity and difference that typically proceeds by acts of critical elevation such as the \"Melville boom\" of the early twentieth century and the \"Hurston boom\" of the late twentieth century.

Captive Utterance: Black Hawk and Indian Irony

Abstract: This is the text, Black Hawk: An Autobiography (1833), edited by Donald Jackson, an Illini Book from the University of Illinois Press, now entering the canon in American literature, coming in after The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Doughss (1845), taking its place in the category of representative nineteenth-century American autobiography. John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1932), once here, eloquent, beloved, is no longer canonical. Scholars (Robert Sayre, Sally McCluskey, Michael Castro, William Powers) have shown how significantly intrusive Neihardt was, writing the powerfully figurative beginning and ending of Black EWc Speaks. It is Neihardt, not Black Elk, who says at the splendidly Cooperian close of the text: \"you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead\" (BE 276). Black Hawk, it might be said, now speaks in the place where Black Elk spoke, delivers his captive utterance, his entrusted discourse, through a similarly suspect agency: an Anglo editor, John Barton Patterson; a mixed blood (French/Potawatomi) interpreter, Antoine LeClaire. Jackson's modern edition (1955) reissues Patterson's first edition with this important single change: Life of Ma-KaTai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk becomes Black Hawk, An Autobiography. How Black Hawk effectively speaks in Patterson's first edition, that text, title and all, against what Anglo-Indianist constraints, with what distinct Indian irony, to what end, this indeed is the issue. In his several readings of Black Hawk: An Autobiography, Arnold Krupat has pointed out Patterson's structuring and emplotment of Black

The Invisible City in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract: ion. The great power of Beloved lies in Morrison's delineation of the travails through which the slaves move toward filling that vessel

The Road Not Taken: From Edwards, Through Chauncy, to Emerson

Abstract: ITH disarming surrender, one key element of his rhetorical brilliance, Petry Miller admitted the apparent failure of pethaps his greatest essay, \"From Edwards to Emetson,\" when it was republished in 1956, sixteen yeats after its initial appearance: \"There can be no doubt that Jonathan Edwards would have abhorred from the bottom of his soul every proposition Ralph Waldo Emetson blandly put forth in the manifesto of 1836, Nature.\" In his headnote, Millet went on to claim the title \"essay\" fot his piece, \"in the otiginal sense of an endeavoi ot an exertion that does not quite teach its goal,\" and called fot othets to try to provide the \"volume of documentation\" that he had nevei been able to assemble, \"even though that shall prove my hunches wrong\" (Miller, Errand 184). Miller's humility is a good indication that he did not expect to be proven wrong, and that he realized his essay had proven to be one of the gteat acts of synthesis in Ametican literary history. Its success lay in Miller's ability to provide, by force of will and rhetoric, continuity between aspects of a culture which might better have been defined as antagonistic. Millet's ihetoiical humility aside, he was right in surmising that Edwatds would have \"laughed . . . ovet the discomfiture of the Unitarians upon discovering a heresy in their midst\" (Errand

Violence and the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England

Abstract: The new England puritans waged the Pequot War and King Philip's War, the central events of what Francis Jennings has aptly named the First and Second Puritan Conquests, primarily to acquire land in the Connecticut River valley. They did not always explicitly admit their self-interested motives, however. Instead, they developed an ideology that prescribed certain political and theological rationalizations for their conquests. In this essay, we analyze the Puritans' rhetoric of rationalization, focusing on the ideology represented by the figure of the \"body politic.\" By importing to the New World the figure of the polis as a single body engaged in a struggle for self-preservation, with the ruler (ultimately God) as its head, the Puritans came prepared to enact a violence of externalization. At crucial historical moments they employed material violence and representations of violence, both deriving from the ideology of the body politic, to construct and then suppress difference in the form of Indians, the other of the polis. This difference became the object of a state-produced and, as our analysis will stress, a state-producing narrative of violence manifested in the Pequot War and King Philip's War.1 During King Philip's War especially, the Puritans attempted to strengthen this state-producing narrative of violence through infusions of a theological narrative in which the process of individual sanctification was modeled as war. This merger of theological and political narratives, which provided stronger ideological justifications for the killing

New Historicism and Containment: Toward a Post-Cold War Cultural Theory

Abstract: s part of cold war cultural theory, New Historicism opposed .the idea of a subversive modernism with \"containment,\" reading literary works as suffused by power, controlled by mass culture, or subject to the state. This New Historical reaction against the notion of a subvetsive literary text was framed against textual approaches, but also against the claims of the \"liberal imagination,\" whose foremost exponent in America was Lionel Trilling. The return to history, like feminism, situated novels once again in excluded areas of history, and defined cultural criticism itself as subject to the control of social context. But the development ofAmerican criticism, as Frank Lentricchia noted in After the New Criticism, had already left to one side the Frankfurt School analysis of literature's domination by the marketplace, as well as its quest for a redemptive cultural critique (Lentricchia 12).1 New Historicism, however, carried Cold War limits into its evaluation of mass society. New Historical writing rethought the claimed freedom of the \"liberal imagination,\" considered the ideological uses of modernist \"subversion, \" and examined mass culture almost exclusively as a source of social control. This development from liberal cultural theory, and away from its socialist predecessors, took place in the political culture of McCarthyism, liberal pluralism, and the foreign policy doctrine of \"containment,\" formulated by George Kennan in 1947. 2 Such limited views of mass culture, as well as oppositional criticism, all emerged from this specific American situation, and their attitudes to-

Cavalier Ideology and History: The Significance of Quentin's Section in The Sound and the Fury

Abstract: IN CLASS AND CHARACTER JN FAULKNER' S SOUTH (1976), Myra Jehlen claimed that Faulkner drew \"characters whose inner lives are essentially linings for selves tailored to unalterable social patterns\" (i). As Andre Bleikasten has atgued (1983) and John T. Matthews has suggested (1989), this claim has had relatively little influence on the overall direction of Faulkner studies.1 Recognizing, along with Jehlen, that Faulkner is perhaps the only major American novelist virtually obsessed with histoty, I would like to reincarnate Jehlen's claim by arguing that even the character who has come to be figured by critics as Faulkner's most literary —Quentin Compson— can be seen as a distinctly historical one. Discussions of Quentin have vacillated between seeing him as representative of a decaying aristocratic tradition, a remnant of the Old South gone sour due to some biological or metaphysical taint, and seeing him as \"a more modern charactet trying to make moral sense out of the doom which has overtaken his family\" (Jehlen 41), a Hamletfigure trying to make sense out of a senseless world. In Figures ofDivision James Snead moves away from these types of analyses, connecting Quentin's plight to his social context by claiming that \"the terms of [Quentin's] identity are collapsing all around him\" (26). Pursuing the implications of Snead's comment, I want to argue that Quentin Comp-

William Faulkner and the American New Jerusalem

Abstract: EW views of America—its history, its culture, and especially its literature—are now emerging from a renewed inquiry into the methods, the moral purposes, and the historical consequences of Puritanism. In The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch reassesses the Puritan sermon or \"jeremiad,\" detecting there a rhetoric that endures well beyond the decline of the Puritan state and, indeed, well beyond the influence of puritanical morality. Sepatable from any specific moral value, the rhetoric of the jeremiad establishes a moral injunction to fulfill a social task: the Puritans were to fulfill the prophecy of an American Eden, a New Jerusalem to be created out of the wilderness of the New World. Thus the jeremiad offered the promise of the future as the guide and purpose of present actions and made the pursuit of a more perfect world a religious duty. Promising not only eternal salvation but also an earthly paradise, this rhetoric constitutes an especially powerful version of the Protestant ethic. It expresses an \"unshakable optimism\" whereby \"God's punishments were corrective not destructive\"; thus any disparity between the American Eden and the Ametican reality indicates not an impossible task but a lack of effort and commitment to duty and purpose (Bercovitch 7). In short, the American jeremiad \"inverts the doctrine of vengeance into the promise of ultimate success\

Undoing the Naturalistic Novel: Don DeLillo's Libra

Abstract: Literary naturalism was a naitative form whose theoretical foundation was grounded in classical science. Emile Zola, whom Chailes Walcutt has called the \"fountainhead\" of literary naturalism, was a disciple of the positivist Auguste Comte and argued in his essay \"The Experimental Novel\" that science would provide a \"solid ground\" upon which the novelist could \"lean fot support\" (52). Yet the science of the nineteenth century is not the science of the twentieth, and the conceptual paradigm of positivism—and classical, Newtonian science from which it sprang—has to a large extent been undernamed by the paradigms adumbiated by the new physics and systems theoty. In Libra, Don DeLiIIo exploits this paradigmatic shift and, in doing so, \"undoes\" the naturalistic novel. He tewoiks the natutalistic leitmotif of the self caught within a univetse of force, yet within a universe which is far different from that of Zola's naturalism. In fact, DeLillo's is a universe whose conception undetmines the basic tenets of classical science and, therefore, the theoretical foundation of the naturalistic novel. Newtonian science posited a mechanistic universe composed of discrete physical \"parts\" which functioned accoiding to certain set laws. Pre-eminent among these laws was that of linear causality: mattet moved in a one-way, linear chain of cause and effect. By isolating the parts in a process and studying the single effect of a single cause, a scientist, it was presumed, could unlock the secret of that piocess. Natural piocesses, in othei words, were ultimately knowable, and, since the univetse was considered the sum of its paits, so too was the univeise. These tenets of classical science all presupposed a tenet fundamental to

Frederick Douglass's Haven-Finding Art

Abstract: I walked for seven days before I found a place with a preacher's family. A nice place except they made me wear shoes. They sent me to school, though. A one-room place, where everybody sat. I was twelve, but since this was my first school I had to sit over there with the little bitty children. I didn't mind it too much; matter of fact, I liked a lot of it. I loved the geography part. Learning about that made me want to read. And the teacher was tickled at how much I liked geography. She let me have the book and I took it home with me to look at. But then the preacher started pattin on me. I was so dumb I didn't know enough to stop him. But his wife caught him at it, thumbin my breasts, and put me out. I took my geography book off with me. —Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Kaleidoscopic Visions: Images of the Self in The House of The Seven Gables

Abstract: In writing The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne chose to overlay his narrative with a lengthy and detailed description of the various spiritual, psychological, and even physical corruptions to which the Maule curse had rendered the Pyncheons liable. That choice allowed him to indulge his temperamental interest in the sources of sin, and to emphasize the ponderous weight and great complexity of the problem he was addressing, the power of Blackness. This gothic overlay of analysis is not, technically speaking, part of the plot; it does not advance the action. But it is presented in the form of a plot. Fitst and foremost, we encountet the problem of who, ot what, has enslaved the Pyncheons in what amounts to a murder mystety about the unaccountable death of seven generations of Pyncheon patriarchs. This \"false plot\" form serves two complementaty purposes: first, to suggest that something in the House needs to be inver

William Gass's The Tunnel: The Work in Progress as Post-Modern Genre

Abstract: If, as Lyotard suggests, prolepsis is the characteristic mode of modern metanarrative, then in the realm of fictional narrative the work-inprogress might be regarded as a paradigmatic literary genre of modernity, since the published portions of a work in progress always imply a metanarrative—that of the performance which has not yet taken place, the edifice which is still under construction. Yet it is Lyotard's well-known opinion that the postmodern is divided from the modern by its rejection of metanarratives, and its acceptance of a perspective restricted to the ongoing: after Auschwitz, he maintains, it is impossible to believe that the future holds our redemption (40). What makes a work-in-progress paradigmatically post-modern, then, is the disappearance of the \"Idea\" of the finished work as an effective or

Life in the Transitions: Emerson, William James, Wallace Stevens

Abstract: . . . often, indeed, it seems to he there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is \"of\" the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the past's continuation; it is \"of\" the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it.

Cooper's Monikins: Contracts, Construction, and Chaos

Abstract: In its own day, James Fenimore Cooper's The Monikins (1835) was roasted royally. \"In the politico-literary critical language of the [eighteen] 'thirties and 'forties, 'Monikins' was synonymous with dullness and perversity . . .\"; '\"the man who read The Monikins' became a designation foi a type of odd character\" (Dekker 151; Shulenberger 46-47). The Hudson Hawk or perhaps the Heaven's Gate of its time, The Monikins, with few exceptions, has remained a novel without readers. It has

Edna Under the Sun: Throwing Light on the Subject of The Awakening

Abstract: If traditional readings of Chopin's novel of awakening may be said to emanate from a single source, that point of departure — and the origin of so much critical light and heat generated by the text — might be located in what Wendy Martin has described as \"the primary concern of Chopin's fiction — the celebration of female sexuality, and the tension between erotic desire and the demands of marriage, the family, and a ttaditional society.\"1 From this shared starting point the everincreasing body of critical reflection on The Awakening has refracted along certain, quickly established lines: these find in Edna's ending either a transcendence that \"abandons . . . self . . . [in] a reaching out for, an attainment of, more self\"; or a movement towatd \"defeat and regression, rooted in a self-annihilating instinct [and] a romantic incapacity to accommodate ... to the limitations of reality\"; or again a gesture of such impenetrable ambiguity that in this, Chopin's \"most complex vision of an individual's search fot selfhood . . . the teadet has no sense of completion and no undeistanding of the meaning of Edna's total experience.\"2 Under these split-visions the novel itself becomes interestingly refractory, stubbornly unavailable to critical authority even as it lays itself bare (as Edna will by the end) to the peering critical function. Yet is the novel ultimately resistant to any definitive exposure of its meanings? In what light finally does Chopin ask us to see, or not see, het heroine?

The Fall Before the Fall: the Game of Identity, Language, and Voice in Melville's White-Jacket

Abstract: ???G am one with my skin," writes Charles Olson. Like that priest JL of corporeal truth, the body-builder, Olson strains towards making the exterior, signifying flesh submit to an interior "essence" which presses outward. Olson would make the word become flesh by making the flesh submit to and become word. While he claims a strong sense of self-identity, this sense of identity both announces a difference between interior and exterior, and asserts the insignificance of that difference. Only by assuming that this difference makes no difference can one then entertain the idea of identity, of being at one with one's skin. But what of this difference?