The expansion of multifarious rationalities in the political, economic and social spheres of 18th century Europe radically transformed the constitution of humanity in relation to the world, marking the novel discontinuity termed modernity. In discordant opposition, Romantic literature emerged to expose sites capable of destabilizing modern rationalities. An apotheosis of the German Sturm und Drang movement, Geothe’s 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther charts the peregrinations and perdition of the conflicted youth Werther. Traversing his subjective terrain and the German countryside in search of a space unfettered by modernity, Werther ascribes the villagers of Wahlheim as markers of all he lacks, utilizing them to anchor his bourgeois subject-position. Werther’s naïve egalitarianism masks his failure to acknowledge the other in her difference, silencing the subaltern and marking her for incorporation into the machinery of modernity.
Werther’s contempt for bourgeois society impels an assiduous identification with nature, evoking superfluous descriptions of immeasurable beauty. His enthrallment with the environs of Wahlheim is epitomized by the symbol of the garden: “The garden is simple, and as soon as one enters, one feels that it was planned not by a scientific gardener but a sensitive heart wishing to commune with itself alone” (Goethe 5). Werther believes his peregrinations through the German countryside draw him closer to the divine, in whose presence his creative faculty is elevated: “…could you only breathe upon paper all that lives so full and warm within you, so that it might become the mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God!” (Goethe 6). Werther perceives village folk to be in harmony with nature, in contrast to the calculated conventions of bourgeois society, and thus makes them the object of his representations.
Werther sketches the image of two village children, “without having added the slightest invention of my own,” because “Nature alone is illimitably rich, and Nature alone forms the great artist” (Goethe 14). When a young peasant shares the story of his love for a widowed woman, Werther is enrapt by the sincerity of his passion and considers seeing her firsthand, but concludes that “It is better that I see her through the eyes of her lover; she might not appear to my own eyes, in reality, as I now see her; and why should I destroy the lovely image I already possess?” (Goethe 20) Werther’s imaginary identification with the villagers inspires his paintings, poetry, and actions without reflection upon the violence intrinsic to his gaze. While Werther apprehends the residents of Wahlheim as a naturalized spectacle for his representations, the villagers’ attitudes towards him are structured by pathos of distance formed by rank and class distinctions. Werther depicts peasants as happy children in their propensity to live for the present, actualizing their will by spontaneous and raucous demands. When Werther recognizes the inequality enabling his lofty labor, his sentiments vacillate toward contempt for the divine faculty through which “we paint our prison walls with gaily colored figures and luminous prospects,” prompting him to recede into subjective interiority and subsume others through a nostalgic gaze (Goethe 12).
Werther’s visual consumption of girls fetching water is recoded by his perspective to substantiate patriarchal fantasies inspired by Homeric “cradlesongs”: “I see them, our forefathers, meet at the fountain and do their wooing, and feel how benevolent spirits hover around wells and springs” (Goethe 7). The fountain forms another central symbol in The Sorrows of Young Werther, indicating not simply an imaginary relation marked by resemblance and emulation, but an inimitable identification with the Other. After meeting Lotte Werther rejoices the divine verisimilitude of Wahlheim, irrupting in inordinate descriptions of natural beauty as he roams mountains and valleys; ultimately, however, he is unable to locate what he seeks:
"Oh, it is the same with the distance as with the future! A vast, twilit whole lies before our soul; our emotions lose themselves in it as do our eyes, and we long to surrender our entire being and let ourselves sink into one great well of blissful feeling. Alas, when we approach, when There has become Here, everything is as it was before, and we are left with our poverty, our narrowness, while our soul thirsts for comfort that slipped away." (Goethe 33)
Werther articulates a sense of spatial dislocation and temporal dialectic as he momentarily recognizes the disconnections between a gestalt of coherent singularity and his fragmented bodily experience. When he crosses this sublime threshold he is obligated to deplore the poverty of his language. His peregrinations have educed perdition.
However, he proffers an anxious effusion of nostalgia to mask his sense of lack: “So the most restless vagabond yearns in the end for his native land, and finds in his poor hut, in the arms of his wife, in the circle of his children, and in his labor to support them all, the happiness he searched the wide world for in vain” (Goethe 33). The impoverished vagrant haunts his speech, a symptom of Werther’s bourgeois subject-position, anchoring his sense of self through imitation of that which is absent and displaced. Werther revisits his desire for return to a point of origin, a sense of fullness that eludes him except in Homeric patriarchal fantasies, “which I can, thank God, weave without affectation into my own way of living” (Goethe 34). Werther fails to negotiate the creative potentialities of inimitable identification and returns to his construction of an idealized bower:
"How happy I am that my heart is open to the simple, innocent delight of the man who brings a head of cabbage to his table which he himself has grown, enjoying not only the cabbage but all the fine days, the lovely mornings when he planted it, the pleasant evenings when he watered it, so that, after having experienced pleasure in its growth he may, at the end, again enjoy in one single moment all that has gone before. " (Goethe 34)
The violence of Werther’s representations lies in egocentric identification with the peasants of Wahlheim while the ideological underpinnings of his gaze remain inconspicuously invisible. Citing egalitarianism in accordance with the Golden Rule, Werther abhors the material conditions that prevent him from freely interacting with who he pleases; yet his specifically bourgeois economy of desires is implicated in the structural violence producing an impoverished class of peasantry. Drawing his capital from others’ deprivation while refusing to acknowledge his privileged position, Werther’s hegemony is embodied by his self-representation as powerless, robbing the subjugated peasantry of even their language of protest.
The political implications of Werther’s naïve romanticism are illustrated through his damned love for Lotte. Despite his knowledge of her engagement to Albert, he convinces himself that she reciprocates his feelings. Finding her unobtainable, Werther’s descriptions of Nature’s immeasurable beauty give way to the sublime abyss of death:
"There is not one moment which does not consume you and yours, and not one moment when you yourself are not inevitably destructive; the most harmless walk costs the lives of thousands of poor, minute worms; one step of your foot annihilates the painstaking constructions of ants, and stamps a small world into its ignominious grave. Ha! It is not the notable catastrophes of the world, the floods that wash away our villages, the earthquakes that swallow up our town which move me; my heart is instead worn out by the consuming power latent in the whole of Nature which has formed nothing that will not destroy its neighbor and itself. So I stagger with anxiety, Heaven and Earth and their weaving powers around me! I see nothing but an eternally devouring and ruminating monster." (Goethe 66)
Werther decries the unforgiving world for its infinite violence, yet throughout the novel it is his monstrous ruminations that devour himself and the other. Werther’s ascetic self-denial, his consuming soul-searching, and self-representation through written discourse, constitute a subject rife with the traces and functions of power. Overcome with a sense of impotence in relation to the structural violence he unwillingly propagates, Werther desperately tries to assert his will upon the world. Yet his inability to understand the Other in her difference marks his inability to understand himself beyond the scope designed by discourse. The will turning against life, Werther instrumentalizes Lotte and calculates his doom by her hands.
Werther’s suicide affirms the inevitable assimilation and incorporation of romanticized spaces into the rationalizing processes of modernity. His failure to effectively undertake the Romantic project lies in egocentric identification with peasantry as a symptom and anchor of all that his bourgeois subjectivity lacks. His naïve desire to transcend modern social conventions denies the material privilege undergirding his perspective, and functions to rob the subaltern of her dissident language. While Werther is unable to endure the ineffable Real, his encounter with this sublime threshold exemplifies a radical alterity that continues to haunt the modern subject with the potential for destabilization, or the threat of destruction.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Saturday, March 29, 2008
ABC
"Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name; lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."
He is blinded by fluorescent lights reflecting off linoleum floors. A woman hands him a card lettered “C” and directs him towards neatly ordered rows of seats. Machinery circulates temperate air with the stinging whiff of rubbing alcohol, and a camera in the corner of the ceiling notes muted gesticulations. Sitting beside “D” he is relieved they arose before the sky shattered in brilliance, beating the throngs of twitching bodies that lined up behind them. Grasping a pencil tightly in his slippery hand, he surveys several check boxes and his eye rests on one that reads “SORES, ‘CUTS’ OR LESIONS.” He scrawls most of the answers but refuses to write his name.
A saccharine smile in a sea of curls calls “C” and he follows her towards a small room down the corridor. She adjusts her glasses and taps her cherry nails, examining the card. “I see you left your name and address blank. I want you to know our conversation will remain confidential. Can I ask you a couple of questions?” He nods. “What is your country of origin?”
“Bangladesh.” He stares at the punctuation of a black spot on his foot. When relatives from the old country visit, their suitcase bears mangos and chilies in syrup, olives pickled in spiced oil, and the stench of salted fish, which inevitably stains the saris and shawls tucked underneath. On the trip back their suitcase is packed with soaps, shampoos, moisturizers, and hair products to scour their muddied hides—a deodorant commercial: Charles Barkley in a pith helmet remarking, “Anything less would be uncivilized.”
“Have you ever shared needles, syringes, or works?”
“Needles?” He stares at his beauty spot. He has a nascent memory: a sickly tree offering chalky fruit that made his face squint. Once he looked up “guava” in an encyclopedia to discover that it originated in South America. Had a seed caught on the wings of a bird in migration?
“You came here with ‘D,’ right? This is good. We always suggest that partners come together.”
The walls of the room are covered with posters: “My boyfriend gave me HIV. I was only worried about getting pregnant”; “‘HIV is not just a white man’s disease”; “No glove, no love”; and copious reminders to know yourself. The counselor prostrates his right arm and ties the rubber tubes tightly. She coaxes him with reassuring pats from her plastic hands, and asks him to look at the white wall to his left. She locates the lifeline, punctures the skin, and liberates a bloom of blood.
His mind drifts along the alabaster edges of the wall. The scar on his left arm had healed nicely, a wound from the thorns of Acacia Cemetery. Acacia witnesses few visitors besides the chance anthropologist. He stole in through a chink in the rusted gate, stirring wreathes of milkweed and the furled slumber of cicadas. Tracing his fingers on coarse slabs of slate, he divines antique engravings. Sophie of old Ozone Park spent her days toiling in tin and copper. She proffered her dowry for a plot of broken beer bottles and vines. Calcified angels are all that remain. Yet old Sophie roams the freeways and stripmalls of Levittown, in the attic of a big box with cobwebs and stale cake. Her call to arms mediates a quiet violence upon her old haunts. He inherits this soil after the exodus to Long Island.
Blood circulates through tubes, collecting into a vial in the counselor’s hands, and “C” quickly turns away to stare at the white wall. There is an intersection in Ozone Park where a mosque of brick and wire stands mid-construction, the dome beginning to take shape. Its cement minarets stand across an iglesia adorned with the star of David. The street is called “Mizanor Rahman Way.” Years ago he had followed the development of Mizanor’s mythology. “Gang War Blamed in Brawl Slay.” A man was pummeled by an angry mob of 20 men with baseball bats, hockey sticks, and iron rods. “2 Confess in Killing Bangladeshi.” A 12 year old Bangladeshi rode over the foot of a Latino teenager with his bike. The teenager stole his bike and ran away. A crowd of Bangladeshis recovered the bike and started a brawl with the Latinos. “Bangladeshi Fatally Beaten in Mistaken Identity.” There was drinking due to the Dominican Day Parade, said the police. Rahman was on his way home from work. Mistaken as one of the men who retrieved the bike, he was clubbed to death with a wooden chair leg.
“United for Slain Victim.” The counterwoman from El Castillo de Jagua places dollar bills in a makeshift memorial on “Mizanor Rahman Way.” The money will be sent to his wife and child back home. Moonlighting as a busboy in a restaurant downtown, Rahman was a photojournalist who had come to New York to report on the 2000 presidential election. Three weeks before he was ready to go home, his clothes and books packed into a suitcase. Now his blood christens the soil of Ozone Park. When the counselor extracts the needle “C” imagines a shattered camera lens, mirrors and gears strewn on the ground like a gutted clock.
*
Light gleams through the window revealing a silken strand swaying in front of his eyes. Pursuing the thread to its zenith, Pradip studies the machinations of a solitary hunter. “The Roman emperor Domitian had a hobby of pinning down flies. He would needle the seams that prop its paper wings to better scrutinize its exquisite expiration.” Pradip examines the lineaments of his partner’s face, wondering what the worm imagines while arrested in chrysalis. “Want to hear a freaky story?” “No.”
“In Japan there’s a restaurant where the suits and ties take a break from their control tower to savor rustic eats. From outside the place looks typical, lukewarm décor like a bootleg Venice. You step through a wooden door, then a metal vault, and are conducted down spiral staircases to a dimly-lit basement with a scarlet carpet.”
“Cut to the chase.”
“Have you ever been to the Palm? It’s kind of twisted. Before they serve your lobster steaming red on a platter with drawn butter, they’ll show its clamped claws for your grinning approval. Here, they’ll fetch a plump sow for you to stuff, before it’s roasted whole with an apple in its maw.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pork your pig and eat it too.”
“That’s not kosher.”
“They also offer chickens, goats, even elephants.”
“That can’t be true.”
“The Japanese are crazy; the Atom bomb fucked ‘em up.” He scoffs. “Have you read about the German cannibal?”
“Jeez, Pradip, you’re like Columbus sometimes.”
“—My Montezuma in a wreath of coca leaves—” He kisses Jacob’s hand.
Jacob raises his chin from his chest to view a shrieking baby, taut red with pouting. The mother pauses from her rosary beads to direct the husband, firmly clasping a stone sphere between her fingers. The father breaks off corn bread to feed the raucous child, who ogles Jacob through a cotton cocoon. “You know who’s missing in your account, Pradip?”
“Who’s that?”
“La Malinche.”
“I’m not familiar.”
“And you call yourself a scholar. Look her up, you prick.”
Satiated, Pradip reclines in his plastic throne and views a litany of putrid images transmitted from a TV on the ceiling. “Burning blisters, bloody discharge, sores erupting—are they describing a fucking volcano? Yuck, Jacob, that one looks like a cauliflower!”
“I need some air.”
They exit the cramped room, descending a staircase of laconic steel. They sit outside on the steps of the edifice. Elm and oak trees stir in the gust releasing blonde leaves. Acorns plummet, roll, and rest on cemented earth, while a squirrel skitters forth to collect its booty. Women in ermine furs saunter past, weighed by their harvest of paper or plastic. “Your trucker hat’s quite hip, Jacob.”
“My ancestors were truckers. This is my grandpa’s cap.”
“I thought your ancestors were barbarians.”
“Bar-bar-bar-bar.”
Pradip chuckles. “You know, I tried to look up your hometown, Jacob. I couldn’t find it.”
“My dad called me a couple of days ago to say he sold our house in Ohio. A mess of stucco caked with soot, cold chimney, hardwood floors. When me and my brother played hide and seek we’d always get splinters. Out back we had a field of milkweed, where I’d sleep sometimes in the company of cicadas. Indian summers: the nymphs unearth from tree trunks to rest on feather-veined leaves. Fat with sap, they ditch their cramped skins for wings of parchment and leave their calcified selves clinging on bark.”
“Sounds bucolic.”
“The Ohio River Valley’s a trip, Pradip. We should bust out the raft sometime. We can see the world and you don’t need a passport. Cairo, Jerusalem, Rome—ancient towns strung across old River Jordan.”
Pradip ponders the fact. “Can you see stars in Ohio?”
“On breezy days maybe."
“Where’d your dad move?”
“Cincinnati. He gets angry when he hears telemarketers fake an American accent. But the old dog’s teeth are worn down.”
Pradip stares at a couple of pigeons scavenging a mound of muffin on the sidewalk. “I hear your tummy rumbling, Jacob.” Pradip approaches a glinting cart on the curb, and waves to a stocky fellow cloistered within. “Hola amigo. Como estas?” the figure exclaims with a wide grin. Pradip squints with a smile and a nod and offers a fistful of quarters. He procures a large cup of coffee and a chocolate chip muffin, breaking off pieces for Jacob.
“How’s the DUMBO general store?”
“Plumage plucked upon structures of styrofoam; astrakhan tufts of beaver sorry fleece; tanned-tinted cowbell boots; varnished snakeskin coiled to release: another glass behemoth along the waterfront.” Jacob sips coffee to moisten his lips.
“Did you have a busy shift yesterday?”
“Cappuccino, Moccaccino, I made foam and froth and frap all fucking day. I came home stinking of burnt sugar.”
“The smell of your sweat gets me hard.”
“They must be spiking those bottles of water, Pradip; the matrons of DUMBO are spawning broods. The women chat up a storm on their cells, while the maggots crawl over everything, poking their fingers in electric sockets."
“C’mon, you love kids, Jacob.”
"A bizarre fag couple comes in hauling a new-born like a Louis Vuiton bag. After mollycoddling for a minute, they hand her off to a Caribbean lady while they sit at the bar sucking on a bottle of wine. What a sterile creation, Pradip. The milk and honey’s nursed through a plastic nipple.” A burst of gale unfastens prickly thistles, tufts of cotton, and spherical seeds. An acorn plunges into their coffee cup. “I’d rather fling my shit on the wall.”
A flight of stairs leads to fluorescent lights and linoleum floors. They reclaim their seats among the furrowed bodies. The saccharine smile tiptoes with a folder clasped between her nails. She surveys the room and calls the letter “C.” Pradip kisses Jacob and walks down the corridor, the door shut behind him. Jacob stares at the blank TV screen on the ceiling as the tape rewinds.
In the stucco confines of their house in Ohio the television was ritually set to the image of a field circumscribed by chalk and seats. Timpani drums of brass band fanfare fueled the throbbing crowd as tiny figures inched back and forth on the green lawn. Or the padded coliseum of American Gladiators: bronzed figures swathed in red and blue lycra repelling an enemy incursion with foam shields and nerf balls. He and his brother would fashion walls and towers out of sofa pillows.
Over years of holidays and good report cards Jacob had acquired a sizable collection of action figures. He would subject the miniature men to rigorous physical examination: flexing their joints in awkward ways, gripping their hands round gunmetal aimed at invisible foes. And when no one was watching, he undressed the dolls to inspect their incomplete manufacture. One year Jacob’s family went to Florida for Christmas. The place felt alien; they never put their scarves and sweaters to use. The football game on TV was the sole continuity with their holiday ritual. When the Steelers scored their second touchdown, the phone rang with alarming urgency, the receiver handed to his mother. Her face grew grave with creases as she shrieked and wailed.
They returned abruptly to find the precarious structure caked with soot, wood panels splintered. The sofas were soaked with moldy moisture, water dripping carpet-puddles. His mother needled old articles—a disfigured Jesus black with carbon, the spine of a charred cookbook, a chiffon wedding dress scorched to embers. The neighbors reported a lightning bolt struck the second floor, starting a consuming blaze. Jacob ventured upstairs to his room and opened the door, smacked by the caustic stench of burnt plastic. He found a mosaic of red, blue, and black molded and melted where his chest of toys once stood.
The TV finishes rewinding the tape and begins to replay its fetid imagery. The door down the corridor opens, and Jacob sees Pradip solemnly walking with a letter in his hand. Pradip carefully produces a scrap of paper from the envelope and hands it to his lover. His name is inscribed in ink. “We keep trying to make babies, but they come out like shit,” he cries, breaking into laughter.
*
He is blinded by fluorescent lights reflecting off linoleum floors. A woman hands him a card lettered “C” and directs him towards neatly ordered rows of seats. Machinery circulates temperate air with the stinging whiff of rubbing alcohol, and a camera in the corner of the ceiling notes muted gesticulations. Sitting beside “D” he is relieved they arose before the sky shattered in brilliance, beating the throngs of twitching bodies that lined up behind them. Grasping a pencil tightly in his slippery hand, he surveys several check boxes and his eye rests on one that reads “SORES, ‘CUTS’ OR LESIONS.” He scrawls most of the answers but refuses to write his name.
A saccharine smile in a sea of curls calls “C” and he follows her towards a small room down the corridor. She adjusts her glasses and taps her cherry nails, examining the card. “I see you left your name and address blank. I want you to know our conversation will remain confidential. Can I ask you a couple of questions?” He nods. “What is your country of origin?”
“Bangladesh.” He stares at the punctuation of a black spot on his foot. When relatives from the old country visit, their suitcase bears mangos and chilies in syrup, olives pickled in spiced oil, and the stench of salted fish, which inevitably stains the saris and shawls tucked underneath. On the trip back their suitcase is packed with soaps, shampoos, moisturizers, and hair products to scour their muddied hides—a deodorant commercial: Charles Barkley in a pith helmet remarking, “Anything less would be uncivilized.”
“Have you ever shared needles, syringes, or works?”
“Needles?” He stares at his beauty spot. He has a nascent memory: a sickly tree offering chalky fruit that made his face squint. Once he looked up “guava” in an encyclopedia to discover that it originated in South America. Had a seed caught on the wings of a bird in migration?
“You came here with ‘D,’ right? This is good. We always suggest that partners come together.”
The walls of the room are covered with posters: “My boyfriend gave me HIV. I was only worried about getting pregnant”; “‘HIV is not just a white man’s disease”; “No glove, no love”; and copious reminders to know yourself. The counselor prostrates his right arm and ties the rubber tubes tightly. She coaxes him with reassuring pats from her plastic hands, and asks him to look at the white wall to his left. She locates the lifeline, punctures the skin, and liberates a bloom of blood.
His mind drifts along the alabaster edges of the wall. The scar on his left arm had healed nicely, a wound from the thorns of Acacia Cemetery. Acacia witnesses few visitors besides the chance anthropologist. He stole in through a chink in the rusted gate, stirring wreathes of milkweed and the furled slumber of cicadas. Tracing his fingers on coarse slabs of slate, he divines antique engravings. Sophie of old Ozone Park spent her days toiling in tin and copper. She proffered her dowry for a plot of broken beer bottles and vines. Calcified angels are all that remain. Yet old Sophie roams the freeways and stripmalls of Levittown, in the attic of a big box with cobwebs and stale cake. Her call to arms mediates a quiet violence upon her old haunts. He inherits this soil after the exodus to Long Island.
Blood circulates through tubes, collecting into a vial in the counselor’s hands, and “C” quickly turns away to stare at the white wall. There is an intersection in Ozone Park where a mosque of brick and wire stands mid-construction, the dome beginning to take shape. Its cement minarets stand across an iglesia adorned with the star of David. The street is called “Mizanor Rahman Way.” Years ago he had followed the development of Mizanor’s mythology. “Gang War Blamed in Brawl Slay.” A man was pummeled by an angry mob of 20 men with baseball bats, hockey sticks, and iron rods. “2 Confess in Killing Bangladeshi.” A 12 year old Bangladeshi rode over the foot of a Latino teenager with his bike. The teenager stole his bike and ran away. A crowd of Bangladeshis recovered the bike and started a brawl with the Latinos. “Bangladeshi Fatally Beaten in Mistaken Identity.” There was drinking due to the Dominican Day Parade, said the police. Rahman was on his way home from work. Mistaken as one of the men who retrieved the bike, he was clubbed to death with a wooden chair leg.
“United for Slain Victim.” The counterwoman from El Castillo de Jagua places dollar bills in a makeshift memorial on “Mizanor Rahman Way.” The money will be sent to his wife and child back home. Moonlighting as a busboy in a restaurant downtown, Rahman was a photojournalist who had come to New York to report on the 2000 presidential election. Three weeks before he was ready to go home, his clothes and books packed into a suitcase. Now his blood christens the soil of Ozone Park. When the counselor extracts the needle “C” imagines a shattered camera lens, mirrors and gears strewn on the ground like a gutted clock.
“Now it’s time to wait.”
*
Light gleams through the window revealing a silken strand swaying in front of his eyes. Pursuing the thread to its zenith, Pradip studies the machinations of a solitary hunter. “The Roman emperor Domitian had a hobby of pinning down flies. He would needle the seams that prop its paper wings to better scrutinize its exquisite expiration.” Pradip examines the lineaments of his partner’s face, wondering what the worm imagines while arrested in chrysalis. “Want to hear a freaky story?”
“In Japan there’s a restaurant where the suits and ties take a break from their control tower to savor rustic eats. From outside the place looks typical, lukewarm décor like a bootleg Venice. You step through a wooden door, then a metal vault, and are conducted down spiral staircases to a dimly-lit basement with a scarlet carpet.”
“Cut to the chase.”
“Have you ever been to the Palm? It’s kind of twisted. Before they serve your lobster steaming red on a platter with drawn butter, they’ll show its clamped claws for your grinning approval. Here, they’ll fetch a plump sow for you to stuff, before it’s roasted whole with an apple in its maw.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pork your pig and eat it too.”
“That’s not kosher.”
“They also offer chickens, goats, even elephants.”
“That can’t be true.”
“The Japanese are crazy; the Atom bomb fucked ‘em up.” He scoffs. “Have you read about the German cannibal?”
“Jeez, Pradip, you’re like Columbus sometimes.”
“—My Montezuma in a wreath of coca leaves—” He kisses Jacob’s hand.
Jacob raises his chin from his chest to view a shrieking baby, taut red with pouting. The mother pauses from her rosary beads to direct the husband, firmly clasping a stone sphere between her fingers. The father breaks off corn bread to feed the raucous child, who ogles Jacob through a cotton cocoon. “You know who’s missing in your account, Pradip?”
“Who’s that?”
“La Malinche.”
“I’m not familiar.”
“And you call yourself a scholar. Look her up, you prick.”
Satiated, Pradip reclines in his plastic throne and views a litany of putrid images transmitted from a TV on the ceiling. “Burning blisters, bloody discharge, sores erupting—are they describing a fucking volcano? Yuck, Jacob, that one looks like a cauliflower!”
“I need some air.”
*
They exit the cramped room, descending a staircase of laconic steel. They sit outside on the steps of the edifice. Elm and oak trees stir in the gust releasing blonde leaves. Acorns plummet, roll, and rest on cemented earth, while a squirrel skitters forth to collect its booty. Women in ermine furs saunter past, weighed by their harvest of paper or plastic. “Your trucker hat’s quite hip, Jacob.”
“My ancestors were truckers. This is my grandpa’s cap.”
“I thought your ancestors were barbarians.”
“Bar-bar-bar-bar.”
Pradip chuckles. “You know, I tried to look up your hometown, Jacob. I couldn’t find it.”
“My dad called me a couple of days ago to say he sold our house in Ohio. A mess of stucco caked with soot, cold chimney, hardwood floors. When me and my brother played hide and seek we’d always get splinters. Out back we had a field of milkweed, where I’d sleep sometimes in the company of cicadas. Indian summers: the nymphs unearth from tree trunks to rest on feather-veined leaves. Fat with sap, they ditch their cramped skins for wings of parchment and leave their calcified selves clinging on bark.”
“Sounds bucolic.”
“The Ohio River Valley’s a trip, Pradip. We should bust out the raft sometime. We can see the world and you don’t need a passport. Cairo, Jerusalem, Rome—ancient towns strung across old River Jordan.”
Pradip ponders the fact. “Can you see stars in Ohio?”
“On breezy days maybe."
“Where’d your dad move?”
“Cincinnati. He gets angry when he hears telemarketers fake an American accent. But the old dog’s teeth are worn down.”
Pradip stares at a couple of pigeons scavenging a mound of muffin on the sidewalk. “I hear your tummy rumbling, Jacob.” Pradip approaches a glinting cart on the curb, and waves to a stocky fellow cloistered within. “Hola amigo. Como estas?” the figure exclaims with a wide grin. Pradip squints with a smile and a nod and offers a fistful of quarters. He procures a large cup of coffee and a chocolate chip muffin, breaking off pieces for Jacob.
“How’s the DUMBO general store?”
“Plumage plucked upon structures of styrofoam; astrakhan tufts of beaver sorry fleece; tanned-tinted cowbell boots; varnished snakeskin coiled to release: another glass behemoth along the waterfront.” Jacob sips coffee to moisten his lips.
“Did you have a busy shift yesterday?”
“Cappuccino, Moccaccino, I made foam and froth and frap all fucking day. I came home stinking of burnt sugar.”
“The smell of your sweat gets me hard.”
“They must be spiking those bottles of water, Pradip; the matrons of DUMBO are spawning broods. The women chat up a storm on their cells, while the maggots crawl over everything, poking their fingers in electric sockets."
“C’mon, you love kids, Jacob.”
"A bizarre fag couple comes in hauling a new-born like a Louis Vuiton bag. After mollycoddling for a minute, they hand her off to a Caribbean lady while they sit at the bar sucking on a bottle of wine. What a sterile creation, Pradip. The milk and honey’s nursed through a plastic nipple.” A burst of gale unfastens prickly thistles, tufts of cotton, and spherical seeds. An acorn plunges into their coffee cup. “I’d rather fling my shit on the wall.”
*
A flight of stairs leads to fluorescent lights and linoleum floors. They reclaim their seats among the furrowed bodies. The saccharine smile tiptoes with a folder clasped between her nails. She surveys the room and calls the letter “C.” Pradip kisses Jacob and walks down the corridor, the door shut behind him. Jacob stares at the blank TV screen on the ceiling as the tape rewinds.
In the stucco confines of their house in Ohio the television was ritually set to the image of a field circumscribed by chalk and seats. Timpani drums of brass band fanfare fueled the throbbing crowd as tiny figures inched back and forth on the green lawn. Or the padded coliseum of American Gladiators: bronzed figures swathed in red and blue lycra repelling an enemy incursion with foam shields and nerf balls. He and his brother would fashion walls and towers out of sofa pillows.
Over years of holidays and good report cards Jacob had acquired a sizable collection of action figures. He would subject the miniature men to rigorous physical examination: flexing their joints in awkward ways, gripping their hands round gunmetal aimed at invisible foes. And when no one was watching, he undressed the dolls to inspect their incomplete manufacture. One year Jacob’s family went to Florida for Christmas. The place felt alien; they never put their scarves and sweaters to use. The football game on TV was the sole continuity with their holiday ritual. When the Steelers scored their second touchdown, the phone rang with alarming urgency, the receiver handed to his mother. Her face grew grave with creases as she shrieked and wailed.
They returned abruptly to find the precarious structure caked with soot, wood panels splintered. The sofas were soaked with moldy moisture, water dripping carpet-puddles. His mother needled old articles—a disfigured Jesus black with carbon, the spine of a charred cookbook, a chiffon wedding dress scorched to embers. The neighbors reported a lightning bolt struck the second floor, starting a consuming blaze. Jacob ventured upstairs to his room and opened the door, smacked by the caustic stench of burnt plastic. He found a mosaic of red, blue, and black molded and melted where his chest of toys once stood.
The TV finishes rewinding the tape and begins to replay its fetid imagery. The door down the corridor opens, and Jacob sees Pradip solemnly walking with a letter in his hand. Pradip carefully produces a scrap of paper from the envelope and hands it to his lover. His name is inscribed in ink. “We keep trying to make babies, but they come out like shit,” he cries, breaking into laughter.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Williamsburg Edge
My map begins mid-transit on the A train to Broadway Junction, where a pinstripe-suited figure carries a briefcase and a heavy leather-bound book, slowly ambling down the aisle. His exhortations are not the hellfire and brimstone of a Caribbean dialect, but the egalitarian accent of an American black man raised in Bed-Stuy. “Jesus loves you, he died for your sins!” Confessing his life story to the crowded train, we learned he had been a crack addict and a male prostitute, but was redeemed through the power of Christ.
Watching the figures on the L train, I contemplate the political economy of visibility. The body is a spectacle to flaunt a garish look, parry with a sneer, and compel the gaze of an other. The economy of postured images presented by young individuals on the L train fades when sonorous Mexican guitar players busk down the corridor of the subway car. Sitting next to me, a young man with a pad of paper and pencil clandestinely sketches an image of a woman sitting across from us.
On Broadway and South 6th there are many landmark buildings, such as the Peter Luger Steak House and the Williamsburg Art and Historical Society. One large edifice is an HSBC Williamsburg Savings Bank, which upon closer inspection has a sign stating it used to be a children’s social services agency. I haven’t researched the history of this site yet, but I would venture that the original function of the building harkens to a point in time discussed by Dowling, either the reform efforts of turn of the century bourgeoisie, or the mobilization and organization of immigrant groups. Now it’s the branch of an international banking institution: the privatization of public services and globalization of markets--another manifestation of neoliberalism. Around these buildings there are scattered sites of hipster consumption such as the retailer “Brooklyn Industries.”
Having explored South Williamsburg, I veered towards the river and started walking along the waterfront on Kent Avenue. Most of the buildings are either construction sites or municipal buildings owned by the Department of Environmental Protection. Further up are striking forms of hip: the laconic façade of the Domino Sugar Factory, organizations such as the Freestyle Arts Association or this enigmatic building “Duffs.” Intellectual labor reigns supreme, but historic spaces along the waterfront are conserved as repositories of nostalgia for sites of production. There are many new high-rise condos going up along the river. A couple in particular caught my eye. One prominent instance of hip is an apartment building adorned with a smokestack. Another building complex was titled “Williamsburg Edge.” Liminality and marginality are motifs that constitute and inform the hip desire for a space beyond the banality of middle class rationalism. Yet as the website advertises (http://www.williamsburgedge.com/) the amenities of this apartment complex centers around the privilege of seeing and consuming. The hipster embodies a gaze complicit with the machinery of his beloved’s displacement, attracting intensive capital investments from multinational corporations such as Hypo Real Estate, the company that funds “Williamsburg Edge” and other such luxury developments in global cities. The contemporary hipster is produced in conversation with transnational circuits of capital and labor, and an economy of desires that accompanies these relations of power.
Watching the figures on the L train, I contemplate the political economy of visibility. The body is a spectacle to flaunt a garish look, parry with a sneer, and compel the gaze of an other. The economy of postured images presented by young individuals on the L train fades when sonorous Mexican guitar players busk down the corridor of the subway car. Sitting next to me, a young man with a pad of paper and pencil clandestinely sketches an image of a woman sitting across from us.
Stepping out from the Bedford Avenue stop I see “Williamsburg Realty.” On the corner of the block, a sign says “Northside Shopping District,” indicating a committee of neighborhood businesses coordinating efforts to promote Williamsburg’s commerce. This is a familiar scene in gentrified neighborhoods dominated by consumption, such as places in NoHo/SoHo or parts of Midtown. I understand these organizations as a manifestation of neoliberalism in its privatization of public services; for example, many of these commercial organizations often employ the racialized poor, particularly ex-convicts, to provide the labor that makes these spaces palatable for the freedom to consume.
I decide to take a turn south. On South 1st Street is a real estate agency named “The Jacksonian”; the glass windows of the Jacksonian display various lofts for sale. The architecture is all glass framed by metal—the structural violence is transparent. Right next door is the Elliman Gallery which features an exhibit titled “Face Out” ( www.theportraitpainter.com/) about the Stolen Generation, mixed-race children of Australian Aboriginals who were forcibly extricated from their families by the government in attempts to acculturate proper citizen-subjects—an apt gallery for a space such as this.
Walking down Bedford, passing South 3rd, I see traces of immigrant populations scattered everywhere—numerous iglesias, restaurants with signs donning “comida crillos,” and the ever-present security camera surveying residents and passersby strolling down these lanes. It’s here that I see one clear indication of what we define as hip: a restaurant called “Simple Café,” it's storefront adorned with graffiti while its clientel seems predominately white. The Simple Cafe utilizes the structure of hip, employing the aesthetics of South Williamsburg to promote consumption. As I walk further along, close to the Williamsburg Bridge overpass on Broadway, the dominant commercial institutions are construction companies. The construction industry is profitting with development. Scanning the names of these companies elucidates that many of the entrepenuers are Italian Americans; the laborers also consist of working class whites, as well as Latinos and blacks. These businesses are similarly adorned with graffiti, many of which are marked by the artists’ tag and website; one construction supplier displayed an intricate graffiti piece and the address http://www.ymicrew.com/. I reflect on my own privilege as tourist and colonizer when I pull out my camera.
On Broadway and South 6th there are many landmark buildings, such as the Peter Luger Steak House and the Williamsburg Art and Historical Society. One large edifice is an HSBC Williamsburg Savings Bank, which upon closer inspection has a sign stating it used to be a children’s social services agency. I haven’t researched the history of this site yet, but I would venture that the original function of the building harkens to a point in time discussed by Dowling, either the reform efforts of turn of the century bourgeoisie, or the mobilization and organization of immigrant groups. Now it’s the branch of an international banking institution: the privatization of public services and globalization of markets--another manifestation of neoliberalism. Around these buildings there are scattered sites of hipster consumption such as the retailer “Brooklyn Industries.”
Walking down further to South 9th and Roebling, one gets a sense of the “old Williamsburg” (not to be nostalgic). Latino music is blasting around an area marked by housing projects, bodegas, places to wire money, and stores selling phone cards—a thoroughly immigrant population resides here. Walking further across Roebling one starts to see the synagogues and private schools of Hassidic Jews. The businesses here revolve around an economic relationship between Hassids and Latinos; for example, the supermarket arefrequented mostly by Jewish residents and also by Latinos, but the workers areall Latino. The relation is obviously asymmetrical, but there were no outright indications of discord.
Having explored South Williamsburg, I veered towards the river and started walking along the waterfront on Kent Avenue. Most of the buildings are either construction sites or municipal buildings owned by the Department of Environmental Protection. Further up are striking forms of hip: the laconic façade of the Domino Sugar Factory, organizations such as the Freestyle Arts Association or this enigmatic building “Duffs.” Intellectual labor reigns supreme, but historic spaces along the waterfront are conserved as repositories of nostalgia for sites of production. There are many new high-rise condos going up along the river. A couple in particular caught my eye. One prominent instance of hip is an apartment building adorned with a smokestack. Another building complex was titled “Williamsburg Edge.” Liminality and marginality are motifs that constitute and inform the hip desire for a space beyond the banality of middle class rationalism. Yet as the website advertises (http://www.williamsburgedge.com/) the amenities of this apartment complex centers around the privilege of seeing and consuming. The hipster embodies a gaze complicit with the machinery of his beloved’s displacement, attracting intensive capital investments from multinational corporations such as Hypo Real Estate, the company that funds “Williamsburg Edge” and other such luxury developments in global cities. The contemporary hipster is produced in conversation with transnational circuits of capital and labor, and an economy of desires that accompanies these relations of power.
One major site that currently looks dim but portends more neoliberal hipsterism is the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal Six, a former docking station when the waterfront was industrially active. This is where I would like to conduct further research, particularly regarding the entitites that are funding its reclamation and development, including The Trust for Public Land, the Rhodebeck Charitable Trust, JM Kaplan Fund, and Citistorage. Right across from this bare park is Neighbors Allied for Good Growth (http://www.nag-brooklyn.org/) a community organization that works with city officials and businesses to come to comprises regarding the forms of development engulfing Williamsburg. As I continue to further conduct my research, this will be an interesting resource.
After walking along the waterfront I ambled up to North Williamsburg/Greenpoint, passing by McCarren Park, once called “Needle Park,” and stopped by a strip of businesses on one block. I went into a café named Mamalu to grab a cup of coffee. Mamalu is what I would classify as a “baby colony,” sites I’ve seen before in neighborhoods like DUMBO, where upper-middle class mostly white women come together for frothy cappuccino, bringing their babies along. The store has every conceivable need for a child , from baby food, diapers, a changing table in the bathroom, to a space with toys for the toddlers to hang out—the entire store brought to my mind the image of a mechanized mammy. I bought a cup of coffee and dropped my change in the tip cup. Latina labor substantiates bourgeois middle class femininity. The other two stores were Grooming and Baths, for petcare, and Urban Rustic, an organic food store big on “green” discourses of environmentally sustainable development. These three stores reflect aspects of the three relations of communication elaborated by Todorov—inter-human communication, communication with nature, and communication with the divine—and the shifts in these semiotic systems produced through neoliberal capitalism.
As it begins to rain, I head back towards the subway, and one if my last views is of the Orthodox Transfiguration Cathedral.
After walking along the waterfront I ambled up to North Williamsburg/Greenpoint, passing by McCarren Park, once called “Needle Park,” and stopped by a strip of businesses on one block. I went into a café named Mamalu to grab a cup of coffee. Mamalu is what I would classify as a “baby colony,” sites I’ve seen before in neighborhoods like DUMBO, where upper-middle class mostly white women come together for frothy cappuccino, bringing their babies along. The store has every conceivable need for a child , from baby food, diapers, a changing table in the bathroom, to a space with toys for the toddlers to hang out—the entire store brought to my mind the image of a mechanized mammy. I bought a cup of coffee and dropped my change in the tip cup. Latina labor substantiates bourgeois middle class femininity. The other two stores were Grooming and Baths, for petcare, and Urban Rustic, an organic food store big on “green” discourses of environmentally sustainable development. These three stores reflect aspects of the three relations of communication elaborated by Todorov—inter-human communication, communication with nature, and communication with the divine—and the shifts in these semiotic systems produced through neoliberal capitalism.
As it begins to rain, I head back towards the subway, and one if my last views is of the Orthodox Transfiguration Cathedral.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Navigating the East Village
My first instinct upon beginning a personal map of the East Village was to draw on the cultural makeup of the neighborhood as well as my memory, being that I attended middle and high school right on what I now consider its northern end. The map I've posted here indicates what I feel are the general borders of the neighborhood (pink is the EV territory). Interestingly, this one is also the scheme used most often by Real Estate businessmen and the NYC Tourist industry. Despite the myth-making of the business world, these borders do hold up as far as my standards about cultural maps (insofar as borders realistically can). Walking one block beyond them in any direction reveals a clear distinction in culture and general atmosphere, brought on by big businesses on the west, residences to the north, and a relatively different population of residents and commuters to the south (and arguably elsewhere).
Of course, the confluence of the business vision of the neighborhood and the cultural one is not new. In fact, the modern existence of the East Village, and its very conception as an individual neighborhood is contingent on such a shared history. Before the 1950s, the area was considered part of the Lower East Side (Interestingly, many of my friends who live in it, particularly the non-white ones or whites who defined themselves by hip-hop, still call it that), and was populated mostly by poor immigrants and racial/ethnic minorities. The architecture was defined by tenements, and there were few businesses. The ones that did exist catered mostly to locals. In the 1950s, Allen Ginsberg moved there, and by the middle of the decade, the neighborhood had become home to various beatniks and self-described bohemian artists of several sorts. In the 1960s, hippies began moving in. By the late 1960s, the immigrant and minority population was no longer a visible majority. It was at this time that various Realtors began describing the neighborhood as "the East Village" to market it as the Greenwich Village, which had been hip in the 50s but had by then become mostly middle-class and decidedly uncool. Calling it the Village also erased its association with the immigrant ghettos. This helped bring more hip wannabes into the neighborhood, but also offended the traditional bohemian sensibility by destroying its obscurity). Many sites now considered landmarks, like the famous CBGB & OMFUG materialized soon after, making the bohemian conception of the space branch out and splinter into different varieties. Today, the neighborhood consists mainly of the relics of this bohemian past and its fetishized vision of the older space.
During my walk, there were several things that stuck out to me, and that made me question my own relationship to the neighborhood. The first thing I noticed was that all of the landmarks and sites which I initially categorized as the "old neighborhood" were actually only so old as to belong to the initial wave of bohemia. Indeed, perhaps the popular vision of the neighborhood had crept into my own. In order to rectify this, I began to envision the ideologies and dreams that had built my own conception of the place, and then to deconstruct them. I began to notice, much to my dismay, that I could not find any signs of the pre-bohemian community, except in the projects that existed on the extreme eastern side, where many Latinos still live, and in fetishized spaces.
There is McSorley's Old Ale House on East 7th Street, a place that has been operating since the 19th century. Back then, it actually was a gathering space for immigrants, many of them Irish. Now, it is being marketed as an "authentic" community space, and its connotations of working-class grit, along with Irish stereotypes, are being flaunted to no end. Of course, it has changed ownership since its earliest days, and in some sense it is being forced to do this to stay open; it is catering to rather than being evicted by the new waves of bohemia, and now, yuppies, that live there. Once inside, I saw a rather diverse group of people, mostly minding their own business. The interior remains mostly unchanged, to help maintain the preferred atmosphere. There are many people inside who would not look out of place in the stereotypical Williamsburg, but there are some who seem to be local, working class residents as well.
There is also the site of the former CBGB, survived only by its new apparel store since the original shut down in the October of 06 after it was seized by the Bowery Residents Committee in the name of starting a home for orphaned children. It may move to Las Vegas, though it has not done so yet. Now, though, plans have changed, and fashion designer John Varvatos plans to open a store at that address sometime very soon, promising to respect the legacy of the site, whatever that may entail. Still, the new CBGB store is something more corporate than before itself, selling all sorts of trinkets and apparel that depend on the old CBGB's image as a site for once avant-garde, underground punk music made by mostly-starving artists. Everything is priced rather high, but the most popular item remains the only apparel marketed by the original CBGB, the black tee shirt with the site's logo printed on it. Once again, nostalgia and fetishism reign.
More generally, St. Mark's Place is changing quickly. There are more Japanese-owned stores than ever before, and a large population of tourists, many of whom are Japanese themselves. Interestingly, the new stores don't seem to be drawing on any of the mythologies previously associated with the street. They do seem to draw local crowds interested in what they have to offer, and they are definitely connected to the influx of Japanese tourists. This is an example of a change that is seemingly unrelated to the past, but perhaps there is more here...
Thursday, February 28, 2008
The American Orient
While Kerouac’s text focuses on negotiation and legitimization of Beat cultural miscegenation, William S. Burroughs’s works seem more sensitive to the inescapable relations of power structuring human interaction. Burroughs’ “algebra of need” presents an apotheosis of Beat social critique, utilizing intimate knowledge of junk economics to articulate a vision of capitalism that binds humans to systems of supply and demand, devaluing and degrading the individual. He theorizes a systematic manufacture of dependence afflicting both consumer and perpetrator, whose own need for power and control is never satiated. As commodification dominates ever-expanding arenas of social life, superseding economics to encompass sexual and psychological mechanisms of biopower, these “viral” control systems are internalized to become self-replicating impulses regardless of agents’ intentions (Johnson 108-109). Burroughs emphasizes the self-destructive quality of capitalism, but throughout his works he offers few viable alternatives for an individual to dismantle this “algebra of need.” Burroughs’ experimentation with styles of cutup and fold-in suggests a linguistic antagonism to discourses of Modernity, but in the earlier stages of his writing career he relies on self-discovery through the anti-Modern.
Desire for escape undergirds Burroughs’ excursions into Mexico, South America, and North Africa during the end of the 1940’s, and the style and tenor of his narratives. Similar to Kerouac’s DuLouz Legend, Burroughs chronicles his personal experiences through his literary self-reflection Lee, introduced in his first publication Junky. Burroughs’ 1953 Queer presents Lee in a state no longer sutured by junk, embodying a fragmented subjectivity desperately in search of stabilization through intimate contact with racial Others. Recounting Lee’s quest for a lover in numerous avatars of American Indian boys and the figure of Allerton, Burroughs maps his subjective expedition using rhetorical devices known as “routines,” which enable him to traverse vast spaces and temporalities in what some scholars have interpreted as a “politics of establishing nonsystematic connections, an antisystem that would not be trapped in the rigid formations of the state, the unconscious, or language” (Vrbancic 313). However, Lee’s desires to procure the affections of Indian boys and possess Allerton through financial coercion reflect an inability to escape this “algebra of need.” Burroughs’ acute awareness of this relation precludes anti-hierarchical representations suggested by postmodern readings of Queer. While he seeks refuge in a psychic zone unbound by the space-time of Modernity, the presence of capitalist machinery in the landscape of Central and South America—and the “viral” mechanisms of control inextricably dwelling in his own subjectivity—integrally structure this cartography of an American Orient.
In the introduction to Queer Burroughs explains his expatriation from America as a move to avoid narcotics charges. He travels to Mexico, which he describes as “basically an Oriental culture”—an anarchic space “with the special chaos of a dream”—marked by corrupt officials, accessible heroin, senseless violence, and young men unabashedly holding hands in public (Burroughs VII). An inexpensive Mexican livelihood was covered by his monthly allowance of seventy-five dollars from the G.I. Bill, which also funded Burroughs’ courses in Mayan and Mexican archaeology at Mexico City College. Yet his scholarly aspirations seem to be secondary to a major focus of his representations:
Boys in from the country in spotless white linen and rope sandals, with faces of burnished copper and fierce innocent black eyes, like exotic animals, of a dazzling sexless beauty. Here is a boy with sharp features and black skin, smelling of vanilla, a gardenia behind his ear. (Burroughs X)
Burroughs’ consumption of this image subsequent to a dosage of junk renders him surmounted with sensations of sublimity and a wafting sweet perfume. He mobilizes signifiers of visual contrast to fetishize physical alterity and gaze these boys as striking features of a natural Mexican tableau. Throughout Lee’s quest, his subjective space is populated by carefree Indian boys embodying anti-Modern, but his corporeal relations involve economic exchanges triggering violent impulses to dominate racial Others.
Lee is not alone in his self-exile from restrictive American morality. The first half of the book is set around a handful of bars patronized by fellow expatriates, each forming distinct social worlds of its own space-time: the Chimu Bar frequented by gay Mexicans; the Green Lantern populated with effeminate gay men; Lola’s, a “waiting room” catering to G.I. students with “neither past nor future”; and the Ship Ahoy existing on “borrowed time,” where Lee spends many of his hours seeking communication and contact (Burroughs 18-20). Lee’s conversations with fellow queer expatriates illustrate a sentiment of marginality driving these men to seek sexual gratification in Mexico. Yet this desire is actualized through American capital and undergirded by a need to affirm masculinity through symbolic forms of violence.
The oil rig routine encapsulates the gendered penetration of capitalist machinery in Burroughs’ cartography of anti-Modern. He emphasizes the proximity of American agents in the exploitation of Mexico’s natural resources, describing attempts to drill an oil well in an area where “you could almost spit over into Tex-Mex where I got my hundred acre cotton farm” (Burroughs 29). Critiquing Modern means of representing and enumerating space, Lee describes an American oil man with “the calling” who buys leases from the land’s inhabitants, and enlists support from a bank president “accustomed to dealing in facts and figures,” for whom he “gets out his maps, a huge bundle of maps as big as carpets” (Burroughs 31). Lee mocks the utility of scientific discourse through a geologist “who talks some gibberish about faults and seepage and intrusions and shale and sand, and selects some place, more or less at random, to start drilling” (Burroughs 31). Burroughs clearly disparages the purported ability of maps to perfectly represent a territory, prompting postmodern scholars such as Mario Vrbancic to suggest that Burroughs’ cartography is delineated by nomadic thoughts forming “unregulated networks in which any element may be connected with any other; they have no privileged point of entry, no intrinsic hierarchy” (Vrbancic 325). However, Lee highlights the penetrative symbolism of oil drilling, describing the driller as an overtly masculine American who upon examining the prospective site says, “some holes got lubrication, and some is dry as a whore’s cunt on Sunday morning” (32). This survey of a gendered Mexican landscape penetrated by Americans satiating an “algebra of need” for oil parallels the material privilege enabling Lee’s quest for contact, and the discursive power reproducing these representations through Burrough’s gaze.
Against this juxtaposition of alienated queer expatriates and prepubescent Mexican sex workers Lee locates a lover in the “delicate and exotic and Oriental” Allerton (Burroughs 16). Failing to initially draw Allerton with maladroit indications of attraction, Lee resorts to sleeping with a young boy from the Chimu Bar. Lee tries to ascertain Allerton’s sexual interests by proxy, buying a lottery ticket from a Mexican boy and commenting “Come back in five years and make an easy ten pesos” to gauge Allerton’s reaction (Burroughs 39). Through routines Lee gains Allerton’s attention, while presenting the reader with complex semiotic networks structured by class, race, sexuality, and violence. Conversing with Allerton, Lee begins to recount an incident where a Jewish man was caught in the airport smuggling gold bullion into Cuba. This elicits an anecdote about a Jewish revolt under the Romans, when “she-Jews” performed “strip teases with Roman intestines” (Burroughs 51). Entrails trigger a description of Lee’s friend Reggie, who worked for the British Intelligence:
Lost his ass and ten feet of lower intestine in the service. Lived for years disguised as an Arab boy known only as ‘Number 69’ at headquarters. That was wishful thinking, though, because the Arabs are strictly one way. Well, a rare Oriental disease set in, and poor Reggie lost the bulk of his tripes. For God and country, what? (Burroughs 51)
Lee’s routine traverses vast spatial and temporal regions using metonymic links to draw a subjective cartography unbound by a fixed locality and sequential flow (Vrbancic 323). The threads connecting this routine communicate the complexity of sexual attraction to racial Others precisely because of a relationship of domination. Anti-Semitic descriptions of the gold smuggler connote racially-tinged contempt for the “algebra of need,” linking an expression of the terrifying power of sexuality embodied by she-Jews, to a final vignette of a British soldier gutted by war and reduced to an emasculated prostitute dominated by Arabian men. Lee foreshadows subsequent routines with this relatively tame example, and is able to pique Allerton’s interest through these performances.
While open to sexual experimentation, Allerton’s “curious detachment, the impersonal calm of an animal or child” evinces an asymmetry of emotional investment that dooms this relationship (Burroughs 44). Lee’s coercive attempts to retain Allerton’s presence exacerbate this fate, such as when he proposes to buy his camera from the pawn shop, establishing the precedent for a relationship bordering prostitution. Allerton is aware of the threat posed to his independence and temporarily dismisses Lee’s advances, rather cultivating a heterosexual identity by playing chess with a woman named Mary.
Lee’s interest in patterns of behavior prompts him to buy a book on chess, which “rules out the element of chance and approaches elimination of the unpredictable human factor” (Burroughs 63). A space cleaved by perpendicular lines into uniform squares of black and white binary oppositions, Burroughs’ chess board represents a constrictive blueprint for gender and sexuality that he can purportedly escape by “cruis[ing] into space, without the temporal encrustation of history, of temporal subjugation” (Vrbancic 314). Drawing near Allerton and Mary’s habitual game of chess, Lee’s routine submits the historical development of chess to a subjective causation reflective of his flippant defiance to Modernity, but tainted by Orientalist discourse. Attributing its origin to the Arabs (it actually originated in India) when chess was essentially a sitting content, Lee recounts its changes during the Baroque period when the “practice of harrying your opponent with some annoying mannerism came into general use” (Burroughs 65). Lee’s narrative humorously mirrors his own disruptive behavior, achieving the objective of perturbing Mary. Beyond the chess board’s suggestion of binary gender roles, the martial maneuvers of the game take on allegorical significance as he describes a 1917 chess match at Baghdad featuring Arab, German, and Italian chess masters. By this point Allerton and Mary have left, but Lee’s routine has established the semiotic groundwork to explore his hypocritical stance towards the objects of his need.
Burroughs’ Corn Hole Gus’s Used-Slave Lot routine starts with Lee’s decision to desert his position as aide-de-camp under command of the sexually exploitative General Von Klutch. His nightly experience of forced sodomy signifies a perverse physical and psychological domination that Lee is not willing to withstand, but more than willing to inflict on Others. Lee sets out on a caravan with his paramour Abdul until his partner contracts a debilitating disease, when Lee remorsefully has to abandon him since he “Lost his looks completely, you understand” (Burroughs 67). Alluding to the image-driven quality of consumer subjectivity produced by the “algebra of need,” Burroughs elaborates this conceit as Lee’s bartering with a Dutch merchant produces a defective slave boy:
the Lulu-Effendi was showing sings of wear even before I hit Timbuktu, and I decided to trade him in on a straight Bedouin model. The crossbreeds make a good appearance, but they don’t hold up. In Timbuktu I went to Corn Hole Gus’s Used-Slave Lot to see what he could do for me on a trade-in. (Burroughs 67)
Lee’s calculated treatment of slave boys expresses the human devaluation resulting from commodification of social life, in this case drawing a parallel to the automobile business. The “algebra of need” afflicts capitalist perpetrators with an obsessive obligation to politically and economically subjugate oil-bearing areas such as those mapped by Lee’s subjective, while manufacturing an intense desire in consumers to purchase a car, a critical indicator of American cultural capital. Gus tries to sell “Sahib Lee” “a one-hundred percent desert-bred Bedouin with a pedigree goes straight back to the Prophet,” but Lee’s acute awareness of Gus’s “Scotch-tape and household-cement reconditioned jobs” impels him to haggle with the salesman (Burroughs 68-9). Rhetorical exchanges of haggling highlight correlations between the economic value of the slave boy and indicators of quality such as youth, ethnicity, sexual experience, and physical endurance. Burroughs’ social critique of Modernity is unmercifully incisive and darkly humorous, but drawing on a corpus of representations popularized by Romantic literary icons such as Samuel Beckford and Lord Byron, he contributes discursive currency to wildly skewed visions of an Orient populated by diverse slave boys waiting for possession by alienated Western artists. Burroughs recognizes his complicity in the politico-economic subjugation of racial Others, but this does not undercut the discursive power of his gaze as he imposes semiotic structures of anti-Modern onto this Orient. In bondage to Lee’s subjectivity and quantifying systems of supply and demand bound for diminishing returns, these boys are degraded into faceless, voiceless subhuman figures.
After this subjective dreamscape, Lee contemplates how to compel Allerton’s companionship. Initially he considers purchasing a share in the Ship Ahoy where Allerton had compiled an exorbitant debt, but he scales down his scheme to a financial agreement in which Allerton will accompany Lee on a trip to South America free of charge, but is obligated to perform sexual favors twice a week. Lee’s plan is to locate Yage, a plant used by South American medicine men to induce telepathy, which Lee theorizes has been used by Mayan priests to institute forced labor for peasants, and is currently being tested by the Russian and American governments: “Automatic obedience, synthetic schizophrenia, mass-produced to order. That is the Russian dream, and America is not far behind. The bureaucrats of both countries want the same thing: Control. The superego, the controlling agency, gone cancerous and berserk” (Burroughs 91). The metaphor of Yage reflects Lee’s attempts to modify Allerton’s sexual behavior, but also principally functions as groundwork for Burroughs to further map his American Orient.
Allerton’s grudging acceptance of their financial contract renders him coldly detached in their sexual activities, prompting Lee to explore South American gay bars in search for a lover among Indian boys. Observing a group of boys who to put on a sexually explicit performance seemingly to intrigue or mock him, Lee is overcome with an aching desire for anti-Modern. Shifting from a corporeal to subjective plane, Lee imagines a deserted house stripped of its roof and overgrown with weeds and vines, where these boys affectionately please him without the compulsion of money. Burroughs articulates a vision of his ideal anti-Modern space-time “He lived on the river and ran things to please himself. He grew his own weed and poppies and cocaine, and he had a young native boy for an all-purpose servant. Boats were moored in the dirty river. Great masses of water hyacinth floated by” (Burroughs 97). Yet Lee’s fantasy collapses as his South American cartography is penetrated by the “algebra of need.” Lee observes Americans wearing luxurious suits talking about purchases of South American territory, and he jokingly engages in a prospective deal to start a head-shrinking factory. Approaching the end of his trip in Puyo, the jungles are silent because Indians have used money earned from the Shell Company to buy guns with which to expedite their hunting. He examines the “prefabricated bungalows of Shell Mara. The Shell Company had spent two years and twenty million dollars, found no oil and pulled out” (Burroughs 111). Alluding to the oil rig routine presented early in Queer Burroughs completes his cartography where he began, but with a sense of defeat because of his inability to find the anti-Modern anywhere other than his subjective plane.
The epilogue to Queer describes the hostile resistance faced by Lee in his attempts to photograph natives of Panama. He remarks, “There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit” (Burroughs 124). Burroughs possesses an acute awareness of the privilege he wields as the gazing artist, and the power inherent in his representations of anti-Modern. Kerouac and Burroughs consumed racial Others’ cultural products to stimulate an American renaissance and formulate social critiques enacted through anti-Modern discursive strategies. Yet with Modernity as the referent of all their discontents and dissent they fail to offer much resistance, but rather observe its hegemony further manifest itself. As their failures to find lasting intimate contact and communication with racial Others allegorize, their privileged social perspectives render them a dominating force that distorts their subjects by constructing an artificial aura of allure around suffering.
Works Cited
Burroughs, William S. Queer. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Johnston, Allan. “Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political Economies and Utopian Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation.” College Literature 32.2 (2005): 103-126.
Vrbancic, Mario. “Burroughs’s Phanatasmic Maps.” New Literary History. 36 (2005): 313-326.
"The Talking Class"
Efforts to understand the Other stimulate innovation and offer the beholder means for cultural critique. Yet inextricably located within a historical relationship of oppression, in complex ways the artist’s gaze unwittingly reproduces dominant discourses of alterity. In the American context, the literary movement known as the Beat generation epitomizes the contradictions of cultural miscegenation, particularly Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. This works centers on a quest of self discovery, presenting the negotiation of an American “Beat” identity that enables Kerouac to claim the cultural products of racial Others. While denuding the privilege enabling the Beats to undertake an American renaissance, and admirably interrogating the limitations of communication and representation, this text nonetheless exemplifies functions of power rooted within its rhetorical structure. Equipped with new idioms gained from racial Others, Kerouac’s spontaneous prose is employed to wage a discursive battle against Modernity. The anti-Modern semiotics structuring this text fails to accomplish the desired resistance, but rather by rendering Modernity the fulcrum around which all else revolves, the Beats incorporate racial Others into a doomed dialectic that ultimately affirms Modern hegemony.
Anti-Modern American subcultures such as the Beats were distinct responses to social reorganizations after World War II: shifts in capitalist modes of production towards consumerism, the consolidation of the military-industrial complex, and state propagation of Cold War anxiety. These structural changes catalyzed shifts from an ethos of frugal self-sufficiency to a notion that freedom and identity should be performed through modes of conspicuous consumption, reinforcing stringent notions of gender roles, and inculcating disinclination towards social critique (Johnson 105-106). Coupled with rising standards of living, the coercive homogenization of 1950’s America was rendered desirable by a sense of increased affluence for public. Political and economic trends of the 1950’s centralized American society according to a means-ends rationalism that prized enumerative objective efficiency over subjective desires, resulting in a commodification of social reality and the reduction of human beings to conduits for production and consumption (Johnson 106-107). Alienated individuals desiring escape from mechanisms of control perceived to be the excesses of Western rationalism, Kerouac gazes racial Others through a lens of romantic primitivism to construct alternative social spaces of anti-Modern.
Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Subterraneans juxtaposes the writer Leo Percepied’s encounters with a budding San Francisco underground community dubbed the subterraneans, against his short-lived, rapturous romance with Mardou, a subterranean woman of African American and Native American ethnicity. A self-proclaimed “bop writer,” Kerouac composes his narrative in conscious emulation of jazz, positioning him in historical relationship of cultural appropriation well charted by Amiri Baraka’s “Jazz and the White Critic.” Baraka interacted with the Beats in the racially diverse bohemia of 1950’s Greenwich Village, but became estranged by stark contrasts between artistic ideals and a social reality of slumming marked by white privilege. He describes the discursive power inherent in white critics’ attempts to deride, formalize, and institutionalize jazz against standards of Western musical forms. He also discusses white jazz musicians’ appropriation of this “secret” form: “The white musician’s commitment to jazz, the ultimate concern, proposed that the sub-cultural attitudes that produced the music as a profound expression of human feelings, could be learned and need not be passed on as a secret blood rite” (Baraka 13). Baraka’s perceptive commentary elucidates the motivation for Leo’s attraction to jazz and racial Others:
…up on the stand Bird Parker with solemn eyes who’d been busted fairly recently and had now returned to a kind of bop dead Frisco but had just discovered or been told about the Red Drum, the great new generation gang wailing and gathering there, so here he was on the stand, examining them with his eyes as he blew his now-settled-down-into-regulated-design ‘crazy’ notes… (Kerouac 13)
Suffering as a source of wisdom, inspiration, and exuberance is an innate condition of Parker’s saintly sacrifice. As a white writer whose dynamism has been asphyxiated by the artifice of Modern language, Kerouac believes he can revive his humanity by discarding unnecessary punctuation marks in favor of “the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)” (Kerouac, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose 484). Yet as Baraka asserts, this sentiment is tainted by “Nostalgia, lack of understanding or failure to see the validity of redefined emotional statements which reflect the changing psyche of the Negro in opposition to what the critic might think the Negro ought to feel” (Baraka 19). In this passage Leo’s egocentric perspective denies Parker any sense of agency or history. His existence is defined solely in relation to “the great new generation gang,” performing at the Red Drum to deliver subterraneans from Modernity through his soulful music. Leo’s attention to eye contact with Parker signifies an imagined personal connection between the two: “directly into my eye looking to search if really I was that great writer I thought myself to be” (Kerouac 13). As a fellow artist, Leo’s emotional investment in Parker as a symbol of the tormented outsider does not reflect Kerouac’s understanding of Others as much as his self-representation and the negotiation of his American and Beat identity.
Leo cannot incorporate himself smoothly within intellectual circles such as the subterranean collective, plagued by a sense of social dislocation stemming from his own ethnic background. Leo’s upbringing as a working-class French-Canadian immigrant structures his self-representation as an outsider, impelling his anxious defense of hetero-normative masculinity and fetishization of race:
…confession after confession, I am a Canuck, I could not speak English till I was 5 or 6, at 16 I spoke with a halting accent and was a big blue baby in school though varsity basket-ball later and if not for that no one would have noticed I could cope in any way with the world… (Kerouac 3)
Alterity is a crucial sentiment undergirding Kerouac’s “mythology of self” as chronicled in the Dulouz Legend, Kerouac’s canon of fictionalized autobiographies. Kerouac’s ancestral narrative consists of a union between European colonists and Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians of Canada, with a point of origin in his French ancestor Baron Alexandre Louis Lebreis de Kerouac, who was allotted land in Canada and married an Iroquois princess (Nicholls 526). Kerouac manages his alterity by constructing a mythology of origin that legitimizes his adoption of African American and Native American racial qualities. He attempts to reclaim this ancestral past through possessing an avatar of his female progenitor: Mardou.
Leo’s wild oscillation between affection and revulsion towards Mardou exemplify a gulf between Leo’s love of the individual and the symbol he has constructed her to represent. Listening to Mardou “formed just the background for thoughts about Negroes and Indians and America in general but with all the overtones of ‘new generation’ and other historical concerns in which she was now swirled just like all of us in the Wig and Europe Sadness of us all” (Kerouac 20). Leo’s representations of Mardou mobilize tropes of temporality symbolized by progenitors. Leo feels a personal affinity towards Mardou’s “Cherokee-halfbreed hobo father”, while she symbolizes the generative, maternal essence of racial Others. Kerouac’s fantasy of an intimate link to America through his ancestral Indian matriarch is found in the form of Mardou:
…in Mardou’s eyes now the eventual Kingdom of Inca Maya and vast Azteca shining of gold snake and temples as noble as greek, Egypt, the long sleek crack jaws and flattened noses of Mongolian geniuses creating arts in temple rooms and the leap of their jaws to speak, till the Cortez Spaniards, the Pizarro weary old-world sissified pantalooned Dutch bums came smashing canebrake in savannahs to find shining cities of Indian Eyes high, landscaped, boulevarded, ritualled, heralded, beflagged in that selfsame New World Sun the beating heart held up to it… (Kerouac 25)
This passage graphically illustrates Kerouac’s reliance on contemporary anthropological discourse. His emphasis of Mardou’s Mongoloid features alludes to theories of Native American migration over the Bering Strait circulating since the 1930s. Kerouac does not cite this knowledge for analytical clarity, but utilizes elements of romantic primitivism to formulate a problematic critique of Modernity. Countering the assumption of pre-Columbian barbarism, Leo venerates the artistry and architectural capabilities of the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs in lyrical flows unbound by arbitrary punctuation marks, comparing them to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (whose name he intentionally de-capitalizes). On the other hand, Leo’s descriptions of European colonists are marked by disruptive commas, and emasculating descriptors connoting disconnect from harmony with nature. Kerouac conflates cultures of vastly distinct temporal and geographic settings into an idealized motley mosaic; he refashions diverse historical trajectories into a uniform clash of civilizations between the organic vitality of racial Others and the penetrating sterility of Modernity.
Leo loves Mardou as an embodiment of indigenous American cultures, through possession of whom he may negotiate and legitimate his conflicted identity. Yet once Leo has obtained Mardou, his idealization of suffering triggers behaviors to distance himself and expedite heartbreak. He increasingly focuses on Mardou’s physical alterity—the visual contrast of cotton tufts in the kinks of her hair, or the “…stubble-like quality of the pubic, which was Negroid and therefore rougher…” (Kerouac 76). The second part of The Subterraneans centers on the contradictions inherent in Leo’s negotiation of identity:
Doubts, therefore, of, well, Mardou’s Negro…like it would preclude completely the possibility of living in the South, like in that Faulknerian pillar homestead in the Old Grandad moonlight I’d so long envisioned for myself…what would they say if my mansion lady wife was a black Cherokee, it would cut my life in half, and all such sundry awful American as if to say white ambition thoughts or white daydreams. (Kerouac 45)
Kerouac’s identity involves a careful negotiation between a central whiteness and a sense of marginality driving him to seek spiritual rehabilitation through the existential joy embodied by victimized racial Others. His aspiration of a “Faulknerian pillar homestead” is fraught with irony because it is an unobtainable ideal in light of his French-Canadian working-class background. This desire uncovers a facet of Kerouac’s social identity which, despite all his derision of Western over-civilization, still seeks acceptance and security from the normative ideals of whiteness. Leo may never obtain this fantasy, yet neither is he willing to seriously risk his allegiance to whiteness by wholeheartedly pursuing a relationship with Mardou.
As the novel proceeds to its preordained conclusion, Leo’s descriptions of Mardou begin to consistently exhibit a paranoid fear that she harbors malignant intent to physically or symbolically harm him: “…she was really a thief of some sort and therefore was out to steal my heart, my white man heart, a Negress sneaking in the world sneaking the holy white men for sacrificial rituals later when they’ll be roasted and roiled…” (Kerouac 49). The practices and qualities of racial Others’ that Leo had hitherto perceived as instances of organic vitality are now inverted to construct an image of a threateningly wanton Jezebel. In public Leo displaces his hostility onto Mexican and black prostitutes who solicit on the streets of San Francisco, claiming they are only out to exploit men by capitalizing on their desires—loosely veiled implications of Mardou’s supposed malevolence.
Leo starts to contemplate Mardou’s experience from outside his own narrow perspective only after alienating and negating her love. Mardou disconnects herself from Leo because she is no longer able to endure his tirades of symbolic violence. Encouraged by Leo to pursue a relationship with a subterranean paramour named Yuri, Mardou still cannot escape Leo’s predilection to objectify her into a symbol: “‘What are you talking about in there, bop? Don’t tell him [Yuri] anything about music.’—(Let him find out for himself! I say to myself pettishly)—I’m the bop writer!” (Kerouac 98). Ultimately it is abundantly clear that Kerouac’s possession of Mardou does not amount to a sincere emotional bond of love, as much as a trophy evincing the authenticity of his Beat identity. The resistance posed by his dissident rhetorical strategies is dubious, but the discursive power wielded by Kerouac’s position as a member of the “Talking Class” ensures the replication of the romanticized racism structuring his narrative.
Baraka, Amiri. “Jazz and the White Critic.” Black Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.
Kerouac, Jack. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Viking, 1992.
Kerouac, Jack. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove Press, 1981.
Nicholls, Brendon. “The Melting Pot that Boiled Over: Racial Fetishism and the Lingua Franca of Jack Kerouac’s Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies. 49.3 (2003): 525-549.
Anti-Modern American subcultures such as the Beats were distinct responses to social reorganizations after World War II: shifts in capitalist modes of production towards consumerism, the consolidation of the military-industrial complex, and state propagation of Cold War anxiety. These structural changes catalyzed shifts from an ethos of frugal self-sufficiency to a notion that freedom and identity should be performed through modes of conspicuous consumption, reinforcing stringent notions of gender roles, and inculcating disinclination towards social critique (Johnson 105-106). Coupled with rising standards of living, the coercive homogenization of 1950’s America was rendered desirable by a sense of increased affluence for public. Political and economic trends of the 1950’s centralized American society according to a means-ends rationalism that prized enumerative objective efficiency over subjective desires, resulting in a commodification of social reality and the reduction of human beings to conduits for production and consumption (Johnson 106-107). Alienated individuals desiring escape from mechanisms of control perceived to be the excesses of Western rationalism, Kerouac gazes racial Others through a lens of romantic primitivism to construct alternative social spaces of anti-Modern.
Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Subterraneans juxtaposes the writer Leo Percepied’s encounters with a budding San Francisco underground community dubbed the subterraneans, against his short-lived, rapturous romance with Mardou, a subterranean woman of African American and Native American ethnicity. A self-proclaimed “bop writer,” Kerouac composes his narrative in conscious emulation of jazz, positioning him in historical relationship of cultural appropriation well charted by Amiri Baraka’s “Jazz and the White Critic.” Baraka interacted with the Beats in the racially diverse bohemia of 1950’s Greenwich Village, but became estranged by stark contrasts between artistic ideals and a social reality of slumming marked by white privilege. He describes the discursive power inherent in white critics’ attempts to deride, formalize, and institutionalize jazz against standards of Western musical forms. He also discusses white jazz musicians’ appropriation of this “secret” form: “The white musician’s commitment to jazz, the ultimate concern, proposed that the sub-cultural attitudes that produced the music as a profound expression of human feelings, could be learned and need not be passed on as a secret blood rite” (Baraka 13). Baraka’s perceptive commentary elucidates the motivation for Leo’s attraction to jazz and racial Others:
…up on the stand Bird Parker with solemn eyes who’d been busted fairly recently and had now returned to a kind of bop dead Frisco but had just discovered or been told about the Red Drum, the great new generation gang wailing and gathering there, so here he was on the stand, examining them with his eyes as he blew his now-settled-down-into-regulated-design ‘crazy’ notes… (Kerouac 13)
Suffering as a source of wisdom, inspiration, and exuberance is an innate condition of Parker’s saintly sacrifice. As a white writer whose dynamism has been asphyxiated by the artifice of Modern language, Kerouac believes he can revive his humanity by discarding unnecessary punctuation marks in favor of “the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)” (Kerouac, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose 484). Yet as Baraka asserts, this sentiment is tainted by “Nostalgia, lack of understanding or failure to see the validity of redefined emotional statements which reflect the changing psyche of the Negro in opposition to what the critic might think the Negro ought to feel” (Baraka 19). In this passage Leo’s egocentric perspective denies Parker any sense of agency or history. His existence is defined solely in relation to “the great new generation gang,” performing at the Red Drum to deliver subterraneans from Modernity through his soulful music. Leo’s attention to eye contact with Parker signifies an imagined personal connection between the two: “directly into my eye looking to search if really I was that great writer I thought myself to be” (Kerouac 13). As a fellow artist, Leo’s emotional investment in Parker as a symbol of the tormented outsider does not reflect Kerouac’s understanding of Others as much as his self-representation and the negotiation of his American and Beat identity.
Leo cannot incorporate himself smoothly within intellectual circles such as the subterranean collective, plagued by a sense of social dislocation stemming from his own ethnic background. Leo’s upbringing as a working-class French-Canadian immigrant structures his self-representation as an outsider, impelling his anxious defense of hetero-normative masculinity and fetishization of race:
…confession after confession, I am a Canuck, I could not speak English till I was 5 or 6, at 16 I spoke with a halting accent and was a big blue baby in school though varsity basket-ball later and if not for that no one would have noticed I could cope in any way with the world… (Kerouac 3)
Alterity is a crucial sentiment undergirding Kerouac’s “mythology of self” as chronicled in the Dulouz Legend, Kerouac’s canon of fictionalized autobiographies. Kerouac’s ancestral narrative consists of a union between European colonists and Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians of Canada, with a point of origin in his French ancestor Baron Alexandre Louis Lebreis de Kerouac, who was allotted land in Canada and married an Iroquois princess (Nicholls 526). Kerouac manages his alterity by constructing a mythology of origin that legitimizes his adoption of African American and Native American racial qualities. He attempts to reclaim this ancestral past through possessing an avatar of his female progenitor: Mardou.
Leo’s wild oscillation between affection and revulsion towards Mardou exemplify a gulf between Leo’s love of the individual and the symbol he has constructed her to represent. Listening to Mardou “formed just the background for thoughts about Negroes and Indians and America in general but with all the overtones of ‘new generation’ and other historical concerns in which she was now swirled just like all of us in the Wig and Europe Sadness of us all” (Kerouac 20). Leo’s representations of Mardou mobilize tropes of temporality symbolized by progenitors. Leo feels a personal affinity towards Mardou’s “Cherokee-halfbreed hobo father”, while she symbolizes the generative, maternal essence of racial Others. Kerouac’s fantasy of an intimate link to America through his ancestral Indian matriarch is found in the form of Mardou:
…in Mardou’s eyes now the eventual Kingdom of Inca Maya and vast Azteca shining of gold snake and temples as noble as greek, Egypt, the long sleek crack jaws and flattened noses of Mongolian geniuses creating arts in temple rooms and the leap of their jaws to speak, till the Cortez Spaniards, the Pizarro weary old-world sissified pantalooned Dutch bums came smashing canebrake in savannahs to find shining cities of Indian Eyes high, landscaped, boulevarded, ritualled, heralded, beflagged in that selfsame New World Sun the beating heart held up to it… (Kerouac 25)
This passage graphically illustrates Kerouac’s reliance on contemporary anthropological discourse. His emphasis of Mardou’s Mongoloid features alludes to theories of Native American migration over the Bering Strait circulating since the 1930s. Kerouac does not cite this knowledge for analytical clarity, but utilizes elements of romantic primitivism to formulate a problematic critique of Modernity. Countering the assumption of pre-Columbian barbarism, Leo venerates the artistry and architectural capabilities of the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs in lyrical flows unbound by arbitrary punctuation marks, comparing them to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (whose name he intentionally de-capitalizes). On the other hand, Leo’s descriptions of European colonists are marked by disruptive commas, and emasculating descriptors connoting disconnect from harmony with nature. Kerouac conflates cultures of vastly distinct temporal and geographic settings into an idealized motley mosaic; he refashions diverse historical trajectories into a uniform clash of civilizations between the organic vitality of racial Others and the penetrating sterility of Modernity.
Leo loves Mardou as an embodiment of indigenous American cultures, through possession of whom he may negotiate and legitimate his conflicted identity. Yet once Leo has obtained Mardou, his idealization of suffering triggers behaviors to distance himself and expedite heartbreak. He increasingly focuses on Mardou’s physical alterity—the visual contrast of cotton tufts in the kinks of her hair, or the “…stubble-like quality of the pubic, which was Negroid and therefore rougher…” (Kerouac 76). The second part of The Subterraneans centers on the contradictions inherent in Leo’s negotiation of identity:
Doubts, therefore, of, well, Mardou’s Negro…like it would preclude completely the possibility of living in the South, like in that Faulknerian pillar homestead in the Old Grandad moonlight I’d so long envisioned for myself…what would they say if my mansion lady wife was a black Cherokee, it would cut my life in half, and all such sundry awful American as if to say white ambition thoughts or white daydreams. (Kerouac 45)
Kerouac’s identity involves a careful negotiation between a central whiteness and a sense of marginality driving him to seek spiritual rehabilitation through the existential joy embodied by victimized racial Others. His aspiration of a “Faulknerian pillar homestead” is fraught with irony because it is an unobtainable ideal in light of his French-Canadian working-class background. This desire uncovers a facet of Kerouac’s social identity which, despite all his derision of Western over-civilization, still seeks acceptance and security from the normative ideals of whiteness. Leo may never obtain this fantasy, yet neither is he willing to seriously risk his allegiance to whiteness by wholeheartedly pursuing a relationship with Mardou.
As the novel proceeds to its preordained conclusion, Leo’s descriptions of Mardou begin to consistently exhibit a paranoid fear that she harbors malignant intent to physically or symbolically harm him: “…she was really a thief of some sort and therefore was out to steal my heart, my white man heart, a Negress sneaking in the world sneaking the holy white men for sacrificial rituals later when they’ll be roasted and roiled…” (Kerouac 49). The practices and qualities of racial Others’ that Leo had hitherto perceived as instances of organic vitality are now inverted to construct an image of a threateningly wanton Jezebel. In public Leo displaces his hostility onto Mexican and black prostitutes who solicit on the streets of San Francisco, claiming they are only out to exploit men by capitalizing on their desires—loosely veiled implications of Mardou’s supposed malevolence.
Leo starts to contemplate Mardou’s experience from outside his own narrow perspective only after alienating and negating her love. Mardou disconnects herself from Leo because she is no longer able to endure his tirades of symbolic violence. Encouraged by Leo to pursue a relationship with a subterranean paramour named Yuri, Mardou still cannot escape Leo’s predilection to objectify her into a symbol: “‘What are you talking about in there, bop? Don’t tell him [Yuri] anything about music.’—(Let him find out for himself! I say to myself pettishly)—I’m the bop writer!” (Kerouac 98). Ultimately it is abundantly clear that Kerouac’s possession of Mardou does not amount to a sincere emotional bond of love, as much as a trophy evincing the authenticity of his Beat identity. The resistance posed by his dissident rhetorical strategies is dubious, but the discursive power wielded by Kerouac’s position as a member of the “Talking Class” ensures the replication of the romanticized racism structuring his narrative.
Works Cited
Baraka, Amiri. “Jazz and the White Critic.” Black Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.
Kerouac, Jack. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Viking, 1992.
Kerouac, Jack. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove Press, 1981.
Nicholls, Brendon. “The Melting Pot that Boiled Over: Racial Fetishism and the Lingua Franca of Jack Kerouac’s Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies. 49.3 (2003): 525-549.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Notes from Foucault's "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"
Some motifs we should consider as we move forward:
The origin (or myth thereof) vs. the Mask
F: "...there is 'something altogether different' behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemiel fashion from alien forms."
Teleological metahistory as presumed by Christianity (Eden, the garden) vs. a history dependent upon discontinuities, accidents, emergent and lost strands
F: "...to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations -- or conversely, the complete reversals -- the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents."
The mind vs. the body
F: "The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissaciated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration."
As genealogists of "hip," what tools shall we bring with us?
-- disclaiming the existence of a single, essential Origin
-- avoiding teleological explanations
-- accepting that reality is constructed
-- being meticulous as we track the different shifts and movements of "hip"
-- understanding our own role in writing history by being self-reflexive in our approach
-- emphasizing fragmentation, rupture, story instead of truth
Some possible directions:
-- interactive media
-- scrapbooking
-- a Benjaminian "arcades project"
The origin (or myth thereof) vs. the Mask
F: "...there is 'something altogether different' behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemiel fashion from alien forms."
Teleological metahistory as presumed by Christianity (Eden, the garden) vs. a history dependent upon discontinuities, accidents, emergent and lost strands
F: "...to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations -- or conversely, the complete reversals -- the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents."
The mind vs. the body
F: "The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissaciated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration."
As genealogists of "hip," what tools shall we bring with us?
-- disclaiming the existence of a single, essential Origin
-- avoiding teleological explanations
-- accepting that reality is constructed
-- being meticulous as we track the different shifts and movements of "hip"
-- understanding our own role in writing history by being self-reflexive in our approach
-- emphasizing fragmentation, rupture, story instead of truth
Some possible directions:
-- interactive media
-- scrapbooking
-- a Benjaminian "arcades project"
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