Literary Characters Versus Real People

For years, my thesis adviser kept telling me, "Clarissa, these are not real people you are discussing. These are characters. You are not analyzing historical accounts or ideological manifestos but works of art." I had no idea what she was trying to tell me and kept getting annoyed.

And then I started reading criticism on female novel of development and realized that the following argument keeps being offered by the critics who write on the subject: "Novels reflect reality. The reality of women in the 19th century was that they were miserable, stunted, and oppressed. After the women's liberation movements achieved important successes in the 1970ies, women became liberated, happy and a lot less oppressed. Ergo, novels about women written in the 19th century will be populated by oppressed, miserable female characters who are incapable of developing. After the 1970ies, novels will show crowds of happy, fulfilled female protagonists." 

When you start reading actual female Bildungsromane, you discover that both novels and reality are a lot more complex than such facile definitions allow us to imagine. These works of fiction do not conform to the critical expectations in the least. Often, they present the exact opposite of what the above-mentioned argument leads us to expect.

This is probably the rule of literary criticism that it took me the longest to learn: characters are not real people.

Trials and Tribulations of Higher Education in Japan

This week, I spoke at an international conference on modern languages and literature. As usual, talks presented varied greatly in quality. Still, one of the presentations shocked me like no other by the extremely low level of scholarship that informed it. The academic who gave this talk was from Japan. I hate to say it, but her presentation was a jumbled mess. The quality of the talk was such that if it were given by one of my undergrads, it would have received a failing grade. The offending scholar made every basic mistake that beginners in literary criticism can make: she offered an exremely long and confusing retelling of a very famous novel (which most of the people present at this session have probably read more than once), she started many of her sentences with "What the author wanted to say here is. . .," she attempted to offer a shaky biographical analysis of the author's decision to write this novel.

To make things even worse, she kept insulting the listeners' intelligence with feeble efforts at explaining some pretty self-evident things. To give an example, we were regaled by the following explanation of what Protestantism is (remember that the conference was taking place in Chicago, so many of the academics present could be expected to have a fairly intimate knowledge of Protestantism): "Protestantism comes from the word 'protest.' It originated in the XVth. . . or I mean the XVIth century. It was when Martin Luther . . . do you know who Martin Luther was? . .  Well, he was a priest. . . or I mean he was this person who protested. . . I mean, he wanted to protest. . . and many people protested after that. . . so it's called Protestantism because it comes from the word 'protest'."

Before attending this talk, I had no knowledge of what was going on in the Japanese system of higher education. So I decided to find out. The first article on the subject that I encountered offered me a glimpse into the reasons behind the sorry state of Japanese scholarship:

Public spending on higher education in Japan has been the lowest among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member nations. In addition to this, the government has cut the state subsidies to national universities by 83 billion yen over the past six years under the structural reform policy, causing all the universities to face financial problems while attempting to carry on with existing academic programs.

But wait, there is more:

According to the World University Rankings 2010-2011, published by the Times Higher Education on Sept. 16, the number of Japanese universities ranking among the world's top 200 dwindled to five from 11 the previous year. . . The poor performance shown by Japanese universities is a clear indication of the dwindling standards of the nation's science and technology. A dramatic decline has been noted in recent years in the number of academic papers written by researchers at national universities and inter-university research institutes and printed in science journals. . . Japan also languishes near rock-bottom among the OECD nations with regard to allocations of public money for primary and secondary education calculated as a percentage of GDP. It would be difficult to find another industrialized nation as stingy as Japan in setting aside money for education.

On Tuesday, the American people have allowed the Republican party to take control of Congress. The Republicans have told us on numerous occasions that the only way to address the growing national debt is to introduce huge budget cuts. Since they are obviously not going to force any cuts on the Pentagon, it is self-evident that education will be the first to suffer. The results of such policies are easy to predict. All we have to do is look at Japan.

The New York Times Dispenses Advice to Scholars of Literature

Nothing is as annoying about the hateful New York Times as their constant attempts to earn their conservative credentials by ridiculing the long-haired, Derrida-reading elite hippie professors. This newspaper is especially virulent against the scholars of the Humanities, which is understandable since we are overwhelmingly progressive in our politics (as opposed, for example, to our colleagues in sciences, many of whom are, for some incomprehensible reason, very conservative and even vote Republican.) Recently, The NY Times joined the campaign to destroy the institution of tenure in this country. The Times can't fail to realize that the destruction of tenure will mean the end of any respectable system of higher education in the US. Of course, if that happens, this newspaper can expect a huge influx in subscribers, since the level of stupidity in this country will sky-rocket.

Today, The New York Times decided to attack the scholars of literature, ridiculing us and presenting us as complete losers who have no idea what we are doing. Some paid gun from the University of Chicago wrote a piece called "In Defense of Naive Reading" where he makes a series of completely disingenuous claims about the way literature is supposedly taught in universities. These completely spurious claims are enough to make the helicopter parents who read the paper flip out and go on a perennial "What is our children learning?" rant.

So here are some statements the author of the essay makes:

1. Too much theory is being taught in college literature courses. According to the author of this piece, we expose our students to the endless lithany of "psychoanalytic criticism, new or formal criticism, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, discourse analysis, reader response criticism or “reception aesthetics,” systems theory, hermeneutics, deconstruction, feminist criticism, cultural studies." Now, this is just a lie, pure and simple. There was an explosion of interest in literary theory that occurred in late 70ies and early 80ies. This all came to an end, though, over 20 years ago. After the huge progressive gains of the 70ies, American society shifted dramatically to the right. A strong push to turn away from theory originated in Ivy League universities in the mid-eighties. Today, this de-theorizing tendency has won a resounding victory. (If you want to argue with me about this statement, try mentioning the word "deconstruction", or even worse, "feminism" in a literature class at Yale. Then, we can continue this discussion. As somebody who has tried writing a doctoral dissertation that mentioned - just mentioned - reader response criticism and cultural studies at an Ivy League school and paid the price for trying to do it, I can tell you that the author of the NYTimes piece is either a complete dufus or a liar.)

For those who want an informed (and a beautifully written) account of this turn away from theory, I highly recommend After Theory by the amazing Terry Eagleton who, unlike the author of the NYTimes article, is a world-famous scholar of literature.

2. Professors of literature still haven't figured out how to evaluate their students' work. If that were true, as the author of this offensive article suggests, we should all be fired on the spot. Or at least have our tenure taken away because we obviously have no idea what we are doing. Of course, Robert Pippin has no idea what he is talking about. His claim that there is an "absence of any consensus" on "whether the student has done well or poorly" demonstrates a profound ignorance of our field of knowledge. Pippin could have talked to any of the excellent scholars of literature on his own campus, who would have enlightened him on our methods of evaluation students. A small hint: using the clumsy expression "the fact that" twice in such a short article and creating an argument based on false assertions would have earned him a grade of C- in any of my courses.

3. The last accusation that Mr. Pippin (I'm not trying to be offensive to the guy, that's his real name) wages against professors of literature is that we are on the verge of applying voodoo science in our classrooms: "One already sees the “application” of “results” from the neurosciences and evolutionary biology to questions about why characters in novels act as they do or what might be responsible for the moods characteristic of certain poets. People seem to be unusually interested in what area of the brain is active when Rilke is read to a subject." Why we should waste time on reading Mr. Pippin's delusional visions is left unexplained in the article. There is also no explanation for who these mysterious "people" he mentions are. Of course, they sound like complete quacks, and I wouldn't want them in my field of knowledge. The only problem is that they are a figment of Mr. Pippin's over-active imagination. Nothing like that is happening in the field of literary studies. For some reason, though, the author tries to make the impressionable readers of The Times believe that the field of literary criticism is filled with quacks who apply brain measurements to the work of Rilke.

Mr. Pippin ends his rambling and weird article with an attempt to provide a "good" analysis of a work of literature. What's truly funny, though, is that his reading is heavily indebted to psychoanalytic theory, which has been outdated for about 30 years. This reminds me of Moliere's immortal character, M. Jourdain, who had no idea he was speaking in prose. Mr. Pippin should realize that in his attempts to berate scholars of literature he looks just as ignorant and foolish as M. Jourdain.

Bakhtin as a Literary Critic: A Sad Joke of History

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Second Edition) just came out. It's a huge volume of 2,500 pages that offers selections from the writings of 150 major theorists of literature. Many changes have been made since the first edition, and for the most part, these changes are welcome. Sometimes, the editors go a little overboard in their wish to be less Eurocentric in their selection of important theorists, but overall, this is a useful volume. In an ideal world, graduate students in literature programs would get this book as a welcoming gift from their universities on their first day of grad school.

One thing that I always ask myself when I see such anthologies, though, is when will Mikhail Bakhtin stop being included in them as a legitimate literary critic. Bakhtin is a tragic and, in many ways, truly admirable scholar. He worked hard to preserve the possibility that people of the Soviet Union would have a chance to hear the names of Cervantes, Rabelais, and other major European writers. Bakhtin realized that the only way to save these authors from being blacklisted by the Soviet censors was by attaching some ridiculous pro-Soviet interpretation of their works. He managed to "prove" that these writers were proto-Communists of sorts, and as a result, we had a chance to read their works.

Bakhtin wrote at a time when there was hardly anything more dangerous in the Soviet Union than being a scholar in the Humanities. By origins, he belonged to the Russian nobility, and his father managed a bank before the revolution of 1917. During the years of Stalin's rule, Bakhtin was accused of participating in a clandestine movement of the Russian Orthodox Church. Anybody who has any familiarity with the history of Stalinism must realize that all these things mean that Bakhtin lived in a mortal fear for his life.

We can hardly blame a person for creating highly ideological works of criticism to save his life. This is obviously what Bakhtin did. So it seems like some kind of a nasty joke when people quote Bakhtin's theories as legitimate criticism. We will do a greater honor to this tragic figure by recognizing the degree of coercion to which he was subjected on a daily basis. Time has come to let Bakhtin rest in peace.

Terry Eagleton's On Evil: A Review, Part I

In his book On Evil, Terry Eagleton offers his readers an eminently readable treatise that combines literary criticism and philosophy in a way that does justice to his complex and charged subject. In my view, Eagleton does what every scholar of literature should attempt to do: make his analysis accessible to a wide reading audience without sacrificing the intellectual rigor of his work. As usual, the book is written beautifully, and Eagleton's sense of humor is highly enjoyable.

Eagleton begins On Evil by discussing how the concept of evil has been appropriated by a certain type of political discourse. The implication behind referring to terrorists as "evildoers" and their actions as "pure evil" is that if we accept that there is a rational  explanation for acts of terror, we somehow condone them. This, of course, is completely wrong:

Calling the action evil meant that it was beyond comprehension. Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable. . . if evil really is beyond explanation—if it is an unfathomable mystery—how can we even know enough about it to condemn evildoers? The word “evil” is generally a way of bringing arguments to an end, like a fist in the solar plexus. . . No Western politician today could afford to suggest in public that there are rational motivations behind the dreadful things that terrorists get up to. “Rational” might too easily be translated as “commendable.” Yet there is nothing irrational about robbing a bank, even if it is not generally considered to be commendable.

 The tendency to refer to terrorists as evil only serves the purpose of shutting down any kind of discussion of their actions. As a result, we are left with no understanding of what they do and what. Consequently, we cannot possibly hope to combat terror since we have precluded any opportunity to analyze terrorism in any meaningful way. There are other consequences, says Eagleton in his incomparably delectable writing style, to the constant references to evil that populate a certain kind of political discourse:

Once the middle classes get their hands on virtue, even vice begins to look appealing. Once the puritan propagandists and evangelical mill owners redefine virtue as thrift, prudence, chastity, abstinence, sobriety, meekness, frugality, obedience, and self-discipline, it is not hard to see why evil should begin to look like a sexier option.

Even though Eagleton ridicules the way certain politicians have appropriated the word "evil," he believes that evil actions and evil individuals do exist. In this, he disagrees not only with a certain brand of liberals but with many Marxists as well. (We have to remember that Eagleton himself is an unapologetic Marxist, which does not preclude him from pointing out the many subjects where he disagrees with his fellow Marxists):

For there are indeed evil acts and individuals, which is where the softhearted liberals and the tough-minded Marxists alike are mistaken. As far as the latter go, the American Marxist Fredric Jameson writes of “the archaic categories of good and evil.”1 One is forced to assume that Jameson is not of the view that the victory of socialism would be a good thing. The English Marxist Perry Anderson implies that terms like “good” and “evil” are relevant to individual conduct only—in which case it is hard to see why tackling famines, combating racism, or disarming nuclear missiles should be described as good. Marxists do not need to reject the notion of evil, as my own case would exemplify; but Jameson and some of his leftist colleagues do so partly because they tend to confuse the moral with the moralistic.

 I quote so much because it is impossible not to love Eagleton's way of expressing himself. As I said before, if I ever learn to write half as well as Eagleton does, I will die happy.

In Eagleton's view, the nature of evil is metaphysical, in the sense that it aims to destroy being as such, not just certain parts of it. It is the metaphysical nature of evil that Eagleton tries to analyze (and in my view, succeeds in doing so) in On Evil. The most intolerable thing for evil is that anything should exist. Its most important goal is the annihilation of being as such:

Evil would actually prefer that there was nothing at all, since it does not see the point of created things. It loathes them because, as Thomas Aquinas claims, being is itself a kind of good. The more richly abundant existence is, the more value there is in the world. . . Given the intolerable fact that things do exist, however, the best evil can do is try to annihilate them.

Eagleton comes up with the strongest and the most convincing explanation for the reasons that push people to engage in mass murder, genocide, extermination of others, etc.:

The kind of others who drive you to mass murder are usually those who for some reason or other have come to signify the terrible non-being at the core of oneself. It is this aching absence which you seek to stuff with fetishes, moral ideals, fantasies of purity, the manic will, the absolute state, the phallic figure of the Führer. In this, Nazism resembles some other brands of fundamentalism. The obscene enjoyment of annihilating the Other becomes the only way of convincing yourself that you still exist. The non-being at the core of one’s own identity is, among other things, a foretaste of death; and one way of fending off the terror of human mortality is to liquidate those who incarnate this trauma in their own person. In this way, you demonstrate that you have authority over the only antagonist—death—that cannot be vanquished even in principle. Power loathes weakness because it rubs its nose in its own secret frailty. 

In his  Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek says that the question we need to ask ourselves is not "Is there life after death?" What we should ask instead is, rather, "Is there life before death?" Eagleton echoes this statement in On Evil. He mentions "the worthless purity of those who have never lived", which can lead people to desire to bring destruction to those who have the capacity to enjoy the richness of human existence. It is among those who have never actually allowed themselves to live, to enjoy, to love life that evil has its perfect breeding ground. We can't but think of the glee with which the US Evangelicals indulge in their apocalyptic fantasies of world destruction. It is no wonder, then, that those very Evangelicals are so prone to wage wars on all and sundry.


[The second part of the review is here]

Hispanic Neo-Baroque

This post is inspired by the sessions on Hispanic Neo-Baroque I am participating in today.

Main principles:

• There is a common Neo-Baroque space (which is cultural, artistic, and ideological) shared by Spain and Latin America.
• It represents a peculiarly Hispanic approximation to modernity.
• It is an improvement on the Enlightened worldview since it manages to bring together the modern and the pre-modern, the mythic and the scientific, etc.
• Neo-Baroque inspires a culture of questioning and resisting neo-liberalism.
• It also poses a challenge to the English-speaking Protestant imperialist and hegemonic ideology of the US.
• The Baroque has been historically marginalized in its capacity of an Occidental discourse, so now it is capable of giving a voice to subaltern groups.

My critique:

• There is nothing more Baroque than neo-liberalism and nothing more neo-liberal than the Baroque.
• Instead of giving a voice to the marginalized groups, it makes the representation of these groups more palatable to the affluent consumer of the 1st world. Novels by Garcia Marquez, Almodovar's recent films, Brazilian City of God cutesify painful realities of the Hispanic world in order to make them less threatening to a US consumer. The inhabitants of the favelas, the horribly abused Latin American women, etc. are prettified and voraciously consumed by the jaded Western readers and viewers. I have yet to see ANY liberating potential in these cultural products. If anybody can provide me with examples of how this art and/or ideology can be liberating, I would be very grateful

Reasons for my critique:

• As I wrote before, I completely disagree with the male-chauvinistic belief in the failure of the Enlightened project. Offering any alternative to it, especially one as politically toothless as Neo-Baroque, bothers me.
• I specialize in Peninsular literature and I simply do not believe that today Neo-Baroque art is either prevalent or mainstream in Spain. There are some feeble attempts to work with the Neo-Baroque but they belong, for the most part, to those who want to transplant peculiarly US cultural phenomena into Spain (Rosa Montero's Temblor is one example.) By theorizing Hispanic Transatlantic Neo-Baroque we, in my view, theorize something that does not exist. And this is profoundly unscientific.
• In spite of the liberating agenda we might attempt to ascribe to the Neo-Baroque, the only kind of cultural products it has created so far are the products that mark an extreme degree of conformism. The Neo-Baroque art's greatest originality lies in how inventive and creative it is in coming up with more and more ways to conform to the system of world domination that has been and remains especially oppressive towards the Hispanic people.

Slavoj Žižek's Violence, Part I

Slavoj Žižek is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers. I cannot recommend his 2008 book Violence strongly enough. It's incredibly well written, so that any reasonably educated person can read it without struggling with arcane references and obscure terms. There is very little Lacan, whcih is great, because we have to admit that Lacan has been dead and buried in any possible sense of the word a long time ago. (For me, the first attribute of a chauvinist is a fascination with Lacan. Thankfully, Žižek seems to be getting over this sad limitation).

The approach Žižek takes to violence is nothing short of brilliant. Trying to analyze violence is always difficult, he argues, since our unavoidable emotional response to it does not allow for a detached rational analysis. This is why he proposes that we "cast ... sideways glances" at it, which will allow us to achieve a "dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of violence." This is exactly what Žižek proceeds to do in his book.

The kind of violence that interests Žižek the most is, of course, that which "pertains to language as such, to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning." With this statement, Žižek brings our attention back to the issues of ideology that for some time have been buried under the proclamations of a "post-ideological" era.

The Slovenian philosopher has no patience with liberal communists and their castrated self-congratulatory agenda: "The delicate liberal communist - frightened, caring, fighting violence - and the blind fundamentalist exploding in rage are two sides of the same coin," says Žižek. "We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every progressive struggle today." His critique of these people is strong, direct, and to the point. Žižek tells us that there is no difference whatsoever between the traditional left and the traditional right: "Both the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority and order and parochial patriotism, and the old left with its capitalized Struggle against Capitalism are today's true conservatives fighting their shadow-theatre struggles and out of touch with the new realities." Nobody could have this better. I have to say that I experienced almost physical pleasure when I read this.

Žižek 's book offers an incredibly profound understanding of the workings of ideology. Those who believe that the debates about ideology have no place in contemporary society should turn to the analysis presented in Violence. According to Žižek: "Verbal violence is not a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence. . . Reality in itself, in its stupid existence, is never intolerable: it is language, its symbolization, which makes it such." There couldn't possibly exist a stronger and more timely vindication of the activities of any philosopher, thinker, and literary critic. Bravo, Žižek!