Midnight Snack!

Over the past week I've been developing a recipe for easy trashy burritos that blow taco bell and such out of the water, and I think I've finally got it down to where I want it. I can't keep this to myself, so here you go.

Trashy burritos:
1 tbsp favorite neutral oil
16-20 oz ground beef (ideally 15% fat but as desired)
1 medium onion minced
2 jalapeno chiles seeded, de-ribbed, and minced
2 roma tomatoes cored, seeded, and minced
3 large cloves of garlic minced
1/4 cup fresh cilantro finely chopped
1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
3/4 tsp cayenne pepper or to taste
Salt to taste
16 oz can refried beans
6 8-inch flour tortillas
Spicy nacho cheese dip

1. Heat oil in 12-inch skillet or sautee pan over medium heat then add ground beef. Break beef apart and brown for about a minute or until fat begins to render.

2. Add onions and peppers and continue cooking until onions begin to become translucent.

3. Add tomatoes and garlic and continue cooking for two minutes until garlic begins to soften, then add half the cilantro and all the cumin, cayenne, and salt. Cook for 30 seconds.

4. Add refried beans and let beans heat and loosen then mix together beans and meat.

5. Meanwhile, prepare tortillas by placing one tortilla on each plate and spread a thin layer of spicy nacho cheese over the tortilla leaving an inch of uncheesed tortilla around the edge. Microwave each tortilla for twenty seconds.

6. Turn off heat to stove and as each tortilla comes out of the microwave, spoon 1/6 of filling into the center of tortilla, add a little fresh cilantro, roll into burrito, and enjoy.

Makes 6 burritos and feeds 2-3 people.

If you want to class them up a little, perhaps try guacamole instead of nacho cheese and halve the refried beans in favor of another tomato and a tbsp or two tomato paste, but I devised this recipe to be a tastier, homemade alternative to fast food burritos while retaining that trashy, guilty edge and have not tested this healthier alternative.

"Camp as Paradigm": Bio-Politics and State Racism in Foucault and Agamben

In Michael Walzer’s 1982 essay, “The Politics of Michel Foucault,” he ends his critique of Foucauldian politics by saying that the “catastrophic weakness of his political theory” is that he neither “…inhabits some social setting and adopts, however tentatively and critically, its codes and categories…or…constructs a new setting and proposes new codes and categories” (Walzer 1986, 67). It bothers Walzer that Foucault doesn’t supplement his (admittedly convincing) genealogies of contemporary power relations with a program for altering these power relationships to the benefit of society. He acknowledges the Foucauldian emphasis on local resistance, but dismisses it saying, “Despite [Foucault’s] emphasis on local struggles, he is largely uninterested in local victories” (Walzer 1986, 59). Although this statement (along with many of Walzer’s arguments) is easy to refute, he does bring up a point that even Foucault would not deny: it is difficult to take Foucault’s work as it is and find a bright outlook for the world he describes. Foucault himself wasn’t shy about this lack either. While he does expand on his personal ideas of political praxis in some of his interviews, he says little in his formal work other than to hope for one day a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” (Foucault 1978, 159) in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, which even a Foucauldian admirer like Giorgio Agamben finds to be a little too fanciful (Agamben 1998, 187).

Perhaps the one failure of Foucault’s that, unresolved, rings as most ominous is his failure to further examine the problem of bio-political state racism that he first raises in his lecture series, Society Must Be Defended. At the end of the last lecture, Foucault suggests that bio-power is here to stay as a fixture of modernity. He doesn’t even go so far as to suggest that bio-power itself is something that even needs be done away with, perhaps given its focus on the preservation of the population of the nation it which it is practiced. Yet his analysis of bio-politics and bio-power leads inevitably to state-sanctioned racism, be the government democratic, socialist, or fascist. As a result, he ends the lecture series with the question, “How can one both make a bio-power function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the function of death, without becoming racist? That was the problem, and that, I think, is still the problem.” It was a problem to which he never returned. However, in the space opened by Foucault’s failure to solve the problem of state racism and to “elaborate a unitary theory of power” (Agamben 1998, 5) steps Agamben in an attempt to complete an analysis of Foucauldian bio-politics and to, while not solve the problem of state racism, at least give direction for further inquiry and hope of a politics that escapes the problem of this racism.

Foucault’s Rise of Bio-Politics and State Racism
According to Foucault, the foundation of contemporary bio-politics arose during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (Foucault 1978, 136) as had been the prior paradigm of sovereignty. Where the old paradigm of the sovereign gave the king “the right to take life or let live,” the new bio-political paradigm is one where sovereignty “…is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (Foucault 2003, 241). By this shift, Foucault means to highlight the fact that the exercise of power is no longer to lead subjects via a threat of death in order to maintain sovereignty, but rather to take hold of life for a different reason: “…to administer, optimize, and multiply [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (Foucault 1978, 137). Instead of one ruler or body constituting sovereignty via a power to kill, “It is in order to live that [jurists] constitute a sovereign” (Foucault 2003, 241).

The necessity of this change from the old model of sovereignty to modern bio-politics lies in the changing conditions of the modern world, particularly, the newfound need for an increasing, healthy, productive population. Whereas the goal of the “anatamo-politics” of the disciplinary power mechanism Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish focuses on conditioning individuals into disciplined workers, bio-power creates and sustains that workforce, a “…global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on.” It constitutes its subjects through “a set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of the population, and so on” (ibid., 242-43). It achieves these ends through state-sponsored welfare programs, the contemporary emphasis on charitable organizations, and through the control through creations of disciplinary discourses on a wide variety of subjects, such as sexuality (Foucault’s best-developed example) among others.

Through the disciplining of sexuality in the anatamo-political sense of disciplining individuals toward specific views of sexuality and sexual expression, sexuality can be codified, controlled and normalized, as Foucault details in The History of Sexuality: Volume I. However, the purpose of this disciplinarization is not just for the sake of normalization of a population for its own sake, but rather so that the population can in its own turn be regulated. By disciplining people as to notions of proper sexual practices, birth control, child sexuality, hygiene, etc.—as understood by academic disciplinary study—combined with “forecasts, statistics, and overall measures” (ibid., 246), bio-politics was able to create a population of the size and type it needed for the proper “insertion of bodies into the machinery of production” in such a way that it “ensured the maintenance of production relations” that rising capitalism needed to function (Foucault 1978, 41). The problem that leads from this need to protect life is the consequences Foucault sees in any society where bio-politics is the driving force behind sovereignty, and that is the inevitable inclusion of state racism.

This state racism was not an original feature that was present in the founding of bio-politics and bio-power, but it does develop from it. Rather, Foucault traces the origins of bio-politics and bio-power from the less insidious and longer-standing discourse of race struggle or “race war.” As Foucault defines the difference, “Racist discourse [contemporary racism] was really no more than an episode, a phase, the reversal, or at least the reworking, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the discourse of race war.” The discourse of “race war” is thus not racism as we know it, but a “counterhistory” of one race in regards to that of another (Foucault 2003, 66). In this sense of counterhistory,

‘[R]ace’ itself is not pinned to a stable biological meaning…two races exist whenever one writes the history of two groups which do not, at least to begin with, have the same language or, in many cases, the same religion…The only link between them is the link established by the violence of war…[T]wo races exist when there are two groups which, although they coexist, have not become mixed because of the differences, dissymmetries, and barriers created by privileges, customs and rights, the distribution of wealth, or the way power is exercised (ibid., 77).

So the concept of “race” that Foucault is working with both in terms of racial struggle and contemporary racism is not originally solely biological, but also cultural and political. It is the constitutive conflict of whenever someone “writes a history of two groups,” as he says. What this type of history is, and what it is used for is not the mythico-philosophical history that Foucault characterizes as the history of the “right of sovereignty,” but rather a historico-political history that came into its own in sixteenth and seventeenth century England and France as a way for disenfranchised groups of society to assert their own rights, often against the state’s sovereign. It is in this sense that different groups within society would wage an internal war against other groups, and historico-political discourses were their weapons in a nonphysical struggle that, given the definitions above, constituted a race war or race struggle.

According to Foucault, the emergence of historico-political discourse was a major turning point in the political landscape of Western Europe. The mythico-political history that preceded it was primarily concerned with proving that “…the greatness of the events or men of the past could guarantee the value of the present…each of [the sovereign’s] decisions is inscribed in a sort of law for his subjects and an obligation for his successors…it makes it possible to judge the present, and make it submit to a stronger law” (ibid., 67). The historico-political discourse emerged as a form of history built upon the “decentered position” of the historian who tells a history that “…is interested in the totality only to the extent that it can see in one-sided terms” and is considered a truth in the sense that the truth “is essentially part of a relationship of force, of dissymmetry, decentering, combat, and war.” As for the historian, he is “inevitably on one side of the other…and is working toward a particular victory” (ibid., 52-53). Thus, historico-political discourse is a discourse that takes as its “truth” the truth that is in the best interest of his “race” or group’s rights that the historian can justify historically. The paradigmatic example of Foucault’s historico-political discourse is Henri de Boulainvilliers re-working of the history of the Gauls’ invasion and conquest over the Franks to show how the King of France’s use of history of as a justification for his rule was a misinterpretation of that historical event. Boulainvilliers, on the side of France’s disenfranchised nobles, re-interprets the invasion in such a way as to show how the King, a non-absolutist title in the barbarian aristocracy in Frankish society, is in fact a usurper and a crook who has robbed the aristocracy with whom he was only supposed to be a first among equals. Boulainvilliers’ purpose in this re-working is, for Foucault, was an act of social warfare where the nobles are asserting their right to equality in wealth and privelege with the King. They used historico-political discourse as their weapon.

That these nobles referred to themselves as a “nation” hearkens back to an original definition of “nation” that is divorced from the state. Rather, as Foucault puts it, “According to this [broad] definition, the nobility was a nation, and the bourgeoisie was also a nation…a nation that does not stop at the frontiers but which, on the contrary, is a sort of mass of individuals who move from one frontier to another, through States, beneath States, and at an infra-state level” (ibid., 142). These nations are the groups of people who attempt to use this new historico-political discourse as a weapon to assert their rights against other nations or targets in such a way as to be looked at as race or class struggles (or wars) within a society, instead of as only outside struggles such as physical wars and conflicts with other countries or as justifications for colonialism. Thus, a discourse of racial war was brought inside of a society through the concept of differing “nations” or social “races” and their oppositions in historico-political discourse.

As a response to these historico-political attacks by Boulainvilliers and others throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the French monarchy, Louis XVI and his administration realized they needed to “so to speak, recolonize that knowledge” (ibid., 137) for the use of the state, to reconfirm the legitimacy of the state. “[The ministry’s] purpose was to code this discourse on history once and for all, and in such a way that it could be integrated into the practice of the State” (ibid., 178) as part of a larger project to “ensure that knowledge was centralized” (ibid., 181) in all the emerging disciplines. In this process, there was also an alteration of the meaning of “nation” to the more common “Statist” definition that stated: “[F]irst, it must be a great multitude of men; second, it must be a great multitude of men inhabiting a defined country; third, this defined country must be circumscribed by frontiers; fourth, the multitude of men who have settled inside those frontiers must obey the same laws and the same government” (ibid., 142). Further, “The nation does not constitute a body. The nation in its entirety resides in the person of the king” (ibid., 218). Again, this universalizing definition is an attempt to define the intra-state, inter-“nation” (in the original sense of the word), or racial struggles of the state as more rebellious than a legitimate historically-supported struggle over rights. Foucault argues this shift of the definition of “nation” gives rise to the idea of “class” as a replacement. Unfortunately for the French monarchy, this new use of “nation” did become the dominant definition until after the French Revolution, and further, “disciplinarization did not defuse the confrontation [between ‘nations’]…but actually made it stronger thanks to a whole set of struggles, confiscations, and mutual challenges” (ibid., 186).

The monarchical state had run out of time. After the French Revolution, with the founding of the Third Estate, there was a debate over which part of society, which “class,” best represented the new French nation (in the new, statist sense). Foucault cites Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’ pamphlet on the Third Estate as a key answer to this debate. As Foucault paraphrases, “And yet there is ‘a’ nation in France…who have the potential capacity to ensure the substantive and historical existence of the nation. These people supply the historical conditions of existence [the necessary ‘functions’ and ‘apparatuses’ of a nation Sieyes outlines] of both a nation and thea nation” that would become “the nation” was the class of the bourgeoisie. Yet the antihistoricist bourgeoisie, without a historico-political interpretation with which to assert their rights as the nobles and the monarchy did, instead adopted a different historico-political strategy: a historico-political interpretation of Roman history as a liberal republic, as opposed to the conservative absolutist state the monarchy interpreted Rome as. That is, a state made up of primarily private citizens from whom state sovereignty springs. As Foucault speaks for them, “‘We are no more than one nation among other individuals. But the nation that we constitute is the only one that can effectively constitute a nation. Perhaps we are not, in ourselves the totality of the social body, but we are capable of guaranteeing the totalizing function of the State.’” This historico-political discourse entailed a universalizing of rights and laws by including citizens of the state into the nation as well through a “…self-dialecticalization of historical discourse...” that characterizes the present as “…the moment when the universal speaks its truth” (ibid., 236). Another effect of this transfer of power and perspective to a class with no historical grounding was an inversion of historico-political discourse in the hands of the now-dominant bourgeoisie. Instead of historico-political discourse as a weapon against other nations within the state, the bourgeoisie positioned it as “…a history that is polarized toward the present and toward the State, a history that culminates in the imminence of the State, of the total, complete, and full figure of the State in the present. And this will also make it possible…to write a history in which the relations of force that are in play are not of a warlike nature, but completely civilian, so to speak” (ibid., 224-225).

The new focus not on the past and legitimizing sovereignty but instead on the health of the state in the present ensuring universal rights and laws for those within its nation is what marked the shift from the old model of sovereignty to the new paradigm of bio-power. However, with the new Statist definition of “nation,” the nations of the old definition, which waged racial war and racial struggle, were recoceptualized as the classes within a nation or state that we know today. However, by taking the notion of classes and thus class struggle (which becomes the primary site of continuing historico-political, counterhistorical discourses thereafter) out of Foucault’s original definition of “race,” the sole remainder is biological race, the basis of contemporary racism. This new form of racism divorced from old notions of racial struggle, Foucault says, “takes over and reconverts the form and function of the discourse on race struggle, but it distorts them, and it will be characterized by the fact that the theme of historical war—with its battles, its invasions, its looting, its victories, and its defeats—will be replaced by the postevolutionist theme of the struggle for existence” (ibid., 80). In other words, instead of “nations” struggling for rights, we are left with biological races vying for racial superiority. When combined with the new bio-political perspective that emerges in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—as illustrated by Foucault in the rise of the Third Estate, where the purpose of the state is to universalize the rights of its citizens and “make” them live in the ways described at the beginning of this section—contemporary biological racism, Foucault argues, inevitably is adopted by the state.

Foucault opens the final lecture of Society Must Be Defended by stating that though the theme of a war between races “was eventually eliminated from historical analysis by the principle of national universality…the theme of race does not disappear, it does become part of something very different, namely state racism” (ibid., 239). From this one can see the problem that is present when a bio- and anatamo-political society, which sees as its goals regularization and normalization respectively, is faced with external threats and internal differences it is unable to assimilate. In both cases, a society that is based on the protection of the lives of its subjects must resort to racism. As Foucault says, racism is a way “to subdivide the species [the bio-political state] controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races.” Further,

…[R]acism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: ‘The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I—as species rather than individual—can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate’ (ibid., 255).

Thus, the bio- and anatamo-political state, on behalf of members of its nation, is able to authorize bloodshed not only against other nations, but against its own people in the name of racial purification. As Foucault says, this purification process has no limit. The Nazi regime, as the ultimate example of a perfectly bio- and anatamo-political state—and thus “an absolutely racist state, and absolutely murderous state, and an absolutely suicidal state”—not only eliminated perceived biological threats to the German bloodline, but was also so absolutely intolerant to internal difference that, at the end, “Hitler gave the order to destroy the German people’s own living conditions” (ibid., 260) as a method of further purifying a losing Germany of its weak peoples that led to such a defeat. Unfortunately, for Foucault, every modern bio-political state inevitably heads in this direction, and as Walzer criticizes him for, Foucault has no answers on how to escape the problems he has unearthed.

Agamben’s Bio-Politics and Racism of Sovereignty
Another critique Michael Walzer has for Foucault in his essay on Foucauldian politics is on Foucault’s disowning of those followers of his who claim a close kinship between the carceral and the gulag. The passage in question is in an interview entitled “Powers and Strategies” where Foucault dismisses the similarities between the gulag and the carceral by mocking those who stay, “Look how skillful we are at evading the problem of the Soviet Gulag by dissolving it in the troubled waters of political imprisonment in general.” He continues, “The Gulag question, on the other hand, involves a political choice” and he encourages others to pursue a separate genealogical investigation of the Gulag (Foucault 1980, 134-137). Yet that is not good enough for Walzer, who states, “…[F]oucault provides no principled distinction, so far as I can see, between the Gulag and the carceral archipelagos…Nor does he provide a genealogy of the Gulag and…his account…contains no hint of how or why our own society stops short of the Gulag” (Walzer 1986, 62). The mistake Walzer is making and the reason he fails to see the difference is that he assumes the Gulag to be an anatamo-political institution like the carceral. Rather, when Giorgio Agamben does take up Foucault’s suggestion of studying the Gulags and the concentration camps of the twentieth centuries, he shows that unlike the carceral, these institutions are not anatamo-political normalizing institutions, but rather bio-political institutions that are “the exemplary places of modern biopolitics” (Agamben 1998, 4). Agamben also points out that, in fact, our society has not stopped short at all as Walzer thought.

There are a few major questions raised by Foucault’s genealogy of bio-politics that Agamben helps to clear up: We know it is the bourgeoisie that initially presided over the rise of bio-power in France, but Foucault also states that socialist and fascist states are just as prone to bio-politics and state racism, if not more so; so what is common factor leads all three governments in that direction? What role does the sovereign body that presides over bio-political states play if bio-power is diffused into the capillaries of the state? Finally, if bio-power is so diffused, how does state racism get a foothold in such a state, when that would mean the moral and political cooperation of vast numbers of people? For Agamben, the answers to these questions begin with a disagreement with Foucault: While Foucault sees the genesis of bio-power as a relatively recent movement, Agamben rather argues, “…the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (ibid., 6).

Though likely Agamben would agree with Foucault’s genealogy of the rise of bio-politics to a social paradigm from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Agamben sees the genesis of bio-power and bio-politics as coinciding with sovereignty itself. For Agamben, sovereignty is grounded in the state of exception. That is, the power of the sovereign is that “…of proclaiming a state of exception and, therefore, of suspending the order’s own validity.” Either the sovereign suspends the order’s validity in order to create or change law, or he does nothing, allowing the norm of law to stand. Thus, “the sovereign…legally places himself outside the law”; however, what the sovereign says when he is outside the law then becomes the law. In that sense, the sovereign always both acts outside the law, but by the fact that this is the mechanism of law-making, is still always within the law, being the source of law (ibid., 16). In this way, the logical mechanism by which the sovereign exercises power over bodies is the same mechanism: by excluding them from the norm of law. Agamben calls this mechanism the “relation of exception…the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion” (ibid., 18). This is the case in any situation where sovereign power is exercised simply by the fact that every case is an example, and “[t]he example is thus excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it but, on the contrary, because it exhibits its own belonging to it. The example is truly a paradigm in the etymological sense: it is what is ‘shown beside,’ and a class can contain everything but its own paradigm” (ibid., 22). Hence, if the domain of bio-politics is “situated at the point at which the individual as a simple living body become[s] what is at stake in a society’s political strategies” (ibid., 2) and the power of the sovereign over individuals is in excepting them from the juridical order (thus stripping them of the political existence granted by this order), what is left is the sovereign bringing back into society (through the relation of exception) only the bare life of the individual thus constituting a bio-political relationship between the two at the individual level.

Agamben’s paradigm for this relationship is Roman legal figure of homo sacer, or “sacred man.” In Agamben’s genealogy, the term “sacred” is meant in the original Roman sense of one who is “…simply set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law”—one who is excepted from human law, but not consecrated to the Gods. Thus, the homo sacer, being outside of both human and divine law is “[l]ife that can be sacrificed and yet may be killed.” This term referred to the original form of Roman capital punishment where the homo sacer is stripped of all political relationships and could be killed by anyone without punishment. In a social order where any scripted killing was a sacrifice, the only way to enforce capital punishment, and thus exercise the sovereign power over the body of the individual was to except that person from the norms of the law in order for the norm prescripted by the law to be able to be carried out. Thus, with political existence stripped from homo sacer, all that remained was the bare life of the individual reinscribed within the community “in the form of his being able to be killed” and given to God “in the form of unsacrificeability” (ibid., 82). As shown above, the sovereign relationship with any object of its power is the same as with homo sacer in that the relationship between sovereign and the individual always involves the reinscription of the bare life of the subject back into society. The implications of this, Agamben goes on to explain, is that:

[H]omo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted…The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life…is the life that has been captured in this sphere…and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty…The sovereign is the one with whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns (ibid., 83–84).

Not only is the relationship of the sovereign exception the essential mechanism of sovereign power over life, but it is also the method for politicizing bare life as the essential object of sovereign power. Further, it is important to note that once an individual has been designated homo sacer, “all men act as sovereigns” insofar as each has the same bio-political prerogative as that which belongs to the sovereign, to make live or let die, which becomes vitally important when, as Foucault describes, bio-power becomes a paradigm of modern power.

As Foucault tells us, one of the first tasks of the bourgeoisie after the French revolution was the universalization of rights and laws, the guarantee of by the new sovereign bodies of the West that they would take care of their citizens equally. Both Foucault, as we have seen, and Agamben agree that this is a vital event in the rise of bio-politics during this period. Agamben relates these universal rights to bio-politics initially through their paradigmatic example, the writ of habeus corpus, a legal procedure “…originally intended to assure the presence of the accused at the trial and, therefore, to keep the accused from avoiding judgment” which has another, hidden face as “…grounds for the sheriff to detain an dexhibit the body of the accused.” Thus, “Corpus is a two-faced being, the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and of individual liberties” (ibid.,125). This turns out to be the case, in Agamben’s analysis, with all declarations of rights. Rights attach themselves directly to the body, or bare life, of the subjects in that the rights to citizens is guaranteed by birth in a nation-state. It is the emergence of a subject as bare life at birth that is granted rights, as bare life is the only relationship the sovereign can have with the subject. As such, “Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state” (ibid., 127). As such, when universal rights are declared, every subject is now in a bio-political relationship with the sovereign body, where the source of rights only comes when one’s bare life is excepted from the juridio-political order at birth only to be reinscribed as a citizen, a member of a nation-state who is guaranteed rights only insofar as they are located at the site of the citizen’s bare life. Thus, every citizen is related to the nation-state only through the relation of exception, the same mechanism through which the Romans designated homines sacri.

Such a new system of this is unequivocably bio-political. In applying the relation of exception to all members of a nation-state, the reality within that nation-state is that, as Walter Benjamin put it, “the ‘state of emergency’ [or state of exception] in which we live is not the exception, but the rule” (Benjamin 1968, 257). We can see this in the linking of “life and politics—originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man’s-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life—begin to beome one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception” (Agamben 1998, 148). The juridical order only has power over life by excepting it and reinscribing it back into the juridical order in the form of bare life, and in the bio-political state, bare life is the subject and foundation of politics. In this sense, law and life become indistinguishable. This state of exception as rule is the ideal environment for bio-politics to flourish, as it is only in this way that the nation-state can achieve full political sovereignty of the bare life of the citizens that constitute it and thus ensure its ability to carry out its program of the management of bodies.

In the new “nation-state” that both Foucault and Agamben have described as a state of universalized rights and laws, there is no singular sovereign king, but rather a sovereign nation, where the nation is made up of its citizens. In this sense, “bare life…now fully enters into the structure of the state and even becomes the earthly foundation of the state’s legitimacy and sovereignty…Declarations of rights must therefore be viewed as the place in which the passage from divinely authorized royal sovereignty to national sovereignty is accomplished…birth [thus bare life]…here for the first time becomes…the immediate bearer of sovereignty.” In other words, sovereignty resides in every citizen, and every citizen is part of the “members of the sovereign” (ibid., 127–129). People are simply divided into those who exercise the “passive rights” of the general population or the “active rights” of those who govern on behalf of the nation. In this sense, the individual power to govern does indeed come from the people, though only few exercise the “active rights” of a governing figure. These are the common factors all bio-political governments have in common.

The problem is, since bio-politics functions in a state of exception, where the norm of law is always in suspension “…in order to make [the norm’s] application possible,” the sovereign power that regularizes bodies is not in fact the force of law, but rather a “force of law without law” (Agamben 2005, 38–39), the only way to exercise one’s rights is within the exception where those rights can only be enforced through a force that is not the law. What this means, according to Agamben, is that “…the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state” (Agamben 1998, 126). What he means by this, is that, in regard to a post-World War I Europe, many countries found their borders filling with refugees who, as not having been born there, did not have citizenship, yet should still be considered a “man of rights.” Yet their existence calls into question the idea of birth and nationality as necessarily connected notions and {put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis” (ibid., 131) This fracture opened the doors for “juridical measures allowing for the mass denaturalization and denationalization of large portions of [countries’] own populations…citizenship was something of which one had to prove oneself worthy and which could therefore always be called into question” (ibid., 132). And if the political subject in the bio-political society is nothing but a bare life invested with certain rights, rights which could be taken away at any time through a loss of citizenship, all that would be left is bare life—homo sacer. In that way, any citizen is already homo sacer to the extent that the rights that citizen has are far from guaranteed within the state of exception. Also consider the emerging topic of euthanasia as a discussion about “life unworthy of being lived” that should perhaps be decided upon by “a state committee composed of a doctor, a psychiatrist, and a jurist” (ibid., 139) and a blurring of the definition of death to the point that “…partisans of brain death and modern biopolitics propose that the state should decide on the moment of death” (ibid., 165) as second and third ways of marking cases of those who are homo sacer—who may be killed without being sacrificed.

It is no surprise that in a state where all these practices are realized as functions of sovereignty—denaturalization, decision on life worth living, and definition what is considered dead—that such a state has reached the peak of bio-politics and state racism has reached a point of primacy in the employment of bio-power. In a state where everyone is sovereign and at the same time everyone is potentially homo sacer, the bio-political process or regularization takes as its mechanism of regularization a selection process by identifying and purifying of society those who are dead and who have lives not worth living—this tends to start at the level of the biological racism that is left over from the adoption of the “nation” by the state in Foucault’s analysis above. Though in a bio-political state, bio-power is diffused throughout the social body in what Agamben calls, in State of Exception “potestas,” those who are given the role of governance through “active rights,” and thus are the ones who hold the decision over the exception, are invested with “auctoritas” or the authority to “…assert itself only in the validation or suspension of potestas” (Agamben 2005, 86). The problem is, when a bio-political state becomes totalitarian—as in Stalinist Russia, Fascist Italy, or Nazi Germany—the people are still sovereign and have potestas, it is just that the now the leader, in this example Hitler, “His power [his auctoritas] is, rather, all the more unlimited insofar as he is identified with the very biological life of the German people.” The spheres of potestas and auctoritas, the two constitutive aspects of Agamben’s bio-power are now combined in his one person in which life and law are coexistent as well. “…[H]is existence has an immediately political character…the Fuhrer is no longer an office in the sense of traditional public law, but rather somethinga that springs forth without mediation from his person insofar as it conicindes with the life of the German people” (Agamben 1998, 184). The sovereign power constituted by the German nation is thus at once still theirs and given to Hitler to use, his word now having the power of not only authorization, but of fact in that what he says is carried out through the potestas of the people by the very fact that he says it. As Agamben says, “…when [auctoritas and potestas tend to coinside in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine” (Abamben 2005, 86).

It is thus no surprise that Hitler was able to order the denaturalization and denationalization of the Jews and send them to concentration camps just as it is no surprise that Stalin did the same with political dangers in sending them to the Gulags. The concentration camp and the Gulag are thus the sites of pure exception and symbols of state racism in their purest form, where every citizen, in this case the guards, had the right of sovereignty over the bare life that was left to the homo sacer that were there interred. However, Agamben is careful to point out that such extreme racism and tactics are not limited to Totalitarian States, those are just the places of their maximum exposure. Agamben warns us, “the camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet…today’s democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces with in itself the people that is excluded [and thus racially targeted as future homo sacer] but also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life” (Agamben 1998, 176–180). Thus, as every citizen is sovereign and potential homo sacer in a bio-political society, every citizen is involved in the creation and continuation of state racism, and every citizen can be a target, depending on who is currently being excluded.

Local Resistance and Divine Violence
In the light of Agamben’s help in augmenting Foucault’s theories of bio-power and state racism, I’d like to briefly return to the critique Michael Walzer made of Foucault’s politics when he said, “Despite [Foucault’s] emphasis on local struggles, he is largely uninterested in local victories.” The local victories Walzer listed that he felt Foucault was not duly impressed by were “new laws about consent, confidentiality, access to records; juridical interventions in the administration of prisons and schools” (Walzer 1986, 59). As Foucault points out in his interview “Intellectuals and Power,” in these cases, what we are looking at are not local “victories” at all, but rather “a new disposition of the same power with, at best, a change of masters” (Foucault 1996, 81) and that is hardly revolutionary.

Rather, what Foucault means by local resistance is that the only way of accomplishing this regional, local, and non-totalizing undermining of power, as Deleuze puts it but Foucault agrees, is that “only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf” (ibid., 76). As Foucault goes on to elaborate, this means that there are a multitude of different forms of power and they are exercised in countless different situations on specific people. But one cannot effectively injure an entire power hierarchy alone. Nor can one ever be effectively “represented” by others. The only truly political act that can have any revolutionary potential, is to speak about the injustices of one’s own particular situation in the most specific and local manner. “It is because to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalized networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power…[to] confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on prison conditions” (ibid., 79). Thus, according to Foucault, it is only when criticism of the system is specific, not general, and multiaccented by those with direct experince, not representative, that the cracks in the facades of power can be clearly pointed out.

But what, ultimately, will these local resistances lead up to? What is their end point? According to Benjamin, “…it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency” (Benjamin 1968, 257) as opposed to the current state of emergency that is the rule which is characterized by the blurring of the limits between life and law and between violence and law. According to Agamben, this true state of exception is one where “bare life must itself…be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoē” (Agamben 1998, 188). The exception in this case of a true state of exception thus appears to be a sovereign relationship with bare life that is a means with no ends, but rather a form of or result from Benjamin’s pure (or divine or revolutionary) violence, which “is that which does not stand in a relation of means toward an end, but holds itself in relation to its own mediality…so pure violence is attested to only as the exposure and deposition of the relation between violence and law” (Agamben 2005, 62). Divine violence can shatter the link between not only violence and law, but also life and law that were joined through the “fiction of their articulation,” but which divine violence hopes to separate. The goal of this separation, for Agamben, would be, “To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law [as a] means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of ‘politics’” (ibid., 88).

This space for human action, I believe, is where Foucault’s local, political acts take place as localized acts of divine violence not with an eye on altering the power structure, thus leaving at best “a change of masters,” but with an eye toward a true revolutionary violence if these local resistances were to be coordinated on a large enough scale. As Foucault has been criticized, he does not have a particular end in mind behind these resistances, but that is by Benjamin’s definition, requisite for the violence to be pure or divine instead of constitutive, which would just reinscribe the violence back into the juridical order via the power/resistance dynamic. Agamben, however, does see a world beyond divine violence that he borrows from Kafka and Benjamin when he says, “One day, humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good…a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical” (ibid., 64).

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

———. State of Exception, trans. Kevil Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

———. Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz and trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1978.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, Inc., 1978.

———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, et al. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

———. Foucault Live: Collected Inverview, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996.

———. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.

Walzer, Michael. “The Politics of Michel Foucault.” In Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy, 51-68. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986.

Cat's Cradle and the History of the Apocalypse

Before August 6, 1945, fewer than thirty novels had ever been written "...which specifically depict nuclear war and its aftermath" (Brians, 101). In the ten years that followed, over two hundred novels were written on the subject. In the ten years after that, over three hundred more were written (Brians, 351–358). Most of these novels were science fiction, including Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. In fact, science fiction became the genre of choice for writers looking to work out their fears and anxieties about the very real threat of the apocalypse that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. For the first time, humanity possessed a power with which it could easily wipe itself out. But why did the task of dealing with and predicting the effects of nuclear war fall mainly into the laps of a genre that generally was not thought of as particularly literary? In Containment Culture, Alan Nadel argues in part that the science fiction boom is the result of a failure on the part of scientists to give a coherent and reliable account of either the form nuclear war may take or the ultimate consequences of such a war. As a result, the responsibility of dealing with such a vast task fell into the domains of science fiction writers like Vonnegut to go where science could not by illuminating the failures of science to construct a coherent emerging cultural narrative of nuclear warfare.

In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut's characters illuminate a general regard toward the chronicling of the history of nuclear war as a pointless endeavor. For instance, the novel opens with the narrator, Jonah, collecting material for his book about "...what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan" (Vonnegut, 11). Jonah intended to call the book The Day the World Ended. However, Jonah's project does not get off the ground and the book he originally intended is never written. If the title of Jonah's book is taken literally, then perhaps Nadel can help to illuminate exactly why Jonah found the "factual" book impossible to finish.

In Containment Culture, Nadel describes science as a sort of history that is written before it happens. History, he argues, is a reporting of the "facts" of events that happened in the past. Science, on the other hand, is the reporting of the "facts" of events that should happen given a hypothesis and a set of natural laws as parameters. He quotes Michael de Certeau in describing the difference between modern science and history as "...the rift between a subject that is supposedly literate [history], and an object that is supposedly written in an unknown language [science]. The latter always remains to be decoded" (de Certeau, Writing, 3). In other words, science is like history in that it is a narrative that has already been written, even though the results of the experiment have yet to be experienced. The difference is that we can read a history readily while with science, "written in an unknown language," we have yet to understand all its secrets and narratives, though they were already written when time began. In order to "decode" the language of science, scientists must perform experiments. In this context, a new scientific hypothesis is much like a work of science fiction in that it is a previously unknown result of the creativity of a human mind and, as of yet, has as much basis in fact as a work of fiction until experience proves otherwise. As de Certeau puts it, "In order to come into being, science must resign itself to a loss of both totality and reality" (de Certeau, Heterologies, 214). Until proven, a scientific theory is a sort of fiction. Nadel clarifies by stating, "If science did no more than describe what had happened, it would be called history" (Nadel 43).

Of course, there is such a field of study as the History of Science that chronicles the attempts of scientists to prove their hypotheses and thereby turn an educated guess into a known fact of knowledge and science into history. This supposes that the ultimate goal of science is to predict the future and write the "History of the Future" (Nadel, 40) before it is history in truth. Rather, Nadel describes science as the modern equivalent of prophecy or fate ("a sense of unalterable history" [Nadel, 47]) that has yet to be made manifest. In essence, what Vonnegut is doing by having Jonah attempt to write a book about "the day the world ended," as an event that has yet to literally come to pass, is to write a history of the future. The book Jonah wanted to write is, ultimately, the book he has written—a book about the end of the world. The reason he was able to finish it at the end of the novel, not at the opening of the book, is that he was attempting to write an account of an event that has not happened in a "factual," or scientific, way. As we will see, this is not possible with the subject matter he has chosen. Instead, he is only able to finish his "history" after the world has ended in fact—a time when his history no longer has any meaning; there is no one to read it.

That the end result differs from his intention, in that his original title is written as hyperbole while the resulting book is "factual," isn't relevant. His original conception is to write "The Day the World Ended" as a book about the atom bomb—a topic that he and others of the era saw as "a fearsome destroyer and apocalyptic omen" (Boyer, 25). Though the atom bomb did not result in nuclear winter in Cat's Cradle, a post-apocalyptic winter is exactly what Vonnegut gives us in the end regardless. It is simply caused by "ice-nine" instead of atomic warfare. As in science, the hypothesis of Jonah (and the world at large of the time) is but an educated guess. Often, the result of a scientific enquiry does not fit the hypothesis as expected, though the question upon which the scientist hypothesizes remains the same. Simply, Vonnegut suggests that "history" about any apocalyptic scenario is no better than the vaguest scientific hypothesis until it is history in fact.

With the nature of science and its "...unavoidable connection [with] fiction" (Nadel, 41) laid out, one can begin to understand the explosion in the genre of science fiction after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This understanding is best illuminated by examining the ways science deals with the shadow of possible atomic warfare that continues to loom over the world, even decades after the last use of atomic weaponry. If it is the duty of science to utilize natural laws and combine them with hypotheses to write a history of the future, then how does one write a future of a nuclear Armageddon? If the goal of successful science is to ultimately become historical, then how can a nuclear apocalypse fall under the umbrella of science? As Nadel notes, "The ascent to nuclear power thus empowers an absurd discourse...for it necessitates the understanding of an event that cannot exist retrospectively" (Nadel, 46). The effects hypothesized by science of a nuclear apocalypse cannot be verified by experience because there would be no one left to do the verifying. Since a nuclear apocalypse of this nature can never be written as a history, it falls outside the domain of science to predict, as is reflected in the failure of the "scientists' movement" that Boyer relates (Boyer, 47–106). The furor surrounded scientists' ultimately inaccurate "prescient" proclamations of "one world or none" for only a few years. The public can only take being exposed to doom-and-gloom predictions for so long before their narrow repetition of ideas and the resultant popular fear was "overwhelmed by larger forces...manipulated by other people pursuing other goals" (Boyer, 106). However, the history of the nuclear apocalypse does not fall outside the domain of science fiction, the type of science no one expects to be proven true or false.

Thus, when Jonah confronts Bokonon at the end of the novel, Bokonon tells him, "If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow." After all, such a history would be good for little else. It would certainly be a cold, hard form of comfort to know that there was a "history of human stupidity," something people could use to learn from the mistakes of humanity, but that there is no longer anyone alive to read and benefit from it. It is only useful as a pillow for a dead man "...thumbing [his] nose at You Know Who" (Vonnegut, 191). This failure of history and science in such a case is why the responsibility for the exploration of the form and effects of such an apocalypse falls to the realm of fiction.

Indeed, if one purpose of history is to learn from the mistakes of the past, then the purpose of Vonnegut/Jonah writing a novel about The Day the World Ended, ultimately titled Cat's Cradle, is to produce a mock history. The title "Cat's Cradle" itself suggests this when, like the useless quality of a fake history such as Vonnegut's, Newt aptly signifies that the game "Cat's Cradle" as entertaining but insubstantial ("No damn cat, and no damn cradle" [Vonnegut, 114]). Like many other writers of science fiction, Vonnegut intends Cat's Cradle to be a learning experience—a history of the end of the world that the public still can read. Nadel describes the purpose of literary postmodern science fiction as "...generic mutations, hybrids, deformations become interesting not because they represent a falling away and/or progress toward some essential ideal of representation/expression, but rather because they help identify the cultural narratives that permit the appearance of generic stability" (Nadel, 52). In other words, science fiction as a literary genre is not meant to be escapist ("falling away") or prescriptive ("progress toward some essential ideal"), but rather they attempt to strip away the false facades of "generic stability." Science fiction attempts to critique, or at the very least lay bare, the "cultural narratives" that allow such facades to go unquestioned. In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut questions a variety of such cultural narratives, but none more so than exposing facades constructed around the popular perception of science and scientists.

The most obvious targets of Vonnegut's ire are the very people whose position he is usurping: the scientists who created the atomic bomb, aka "ice-nine." Like the atomic bomb, there is an inherent "dual nature" to ice-nine. Nadel describes the dual nature of the atomic bomb as "...totalizing and minuscule, secreted and omnipresent, capable of binding or of rendering asunder" (Nadel, 14). Atomic power is the power of life in the universe, "binding" all bodies together, yet at the same time it is the one and only power that is capable of the complete "rendering asunder" of life as well. Similarly, ice-nine is but crystals of water, the most essential nutrient to life on earth, and it is also the one thing that can render all other water on earth undrinkable. However, one point Vonnegut makes with his substitution of ice-nine for atomic weaponry is to point out that such an essential nutrient as water (thus atomic energy) only came by its destructive nature at the hands of irresponsible scientists. Nadel agrees with Vonnegut saying, "for the energy in the atom to become fuel, 'unnatural' acts must be performed; nature must be violated...the duality comes not from the fuel, but from those who tap and spend its energies" (Nadel, 23). Thus, ice-nine is a way for Vonnegut to show that scientists did not stumble onto a hidden use of water, they perverted its nature beyond recognition.

As for the scientists themselves, Vonnegut gives us Dr. Asa Breed and Dr. Felix Hoenikker to highlight the self-delusion under which he sees them as operating. Scientists too recognize a dual nature to the invention of atomic weaponry, but scientists see the problem as necessary: "the processes for the production of atomic weapons and for development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes are, through most of their courses, identical and inseparable" (U.S.Dept. of State, v). In other words, the existence of the most destructive weapons on the planet is an unfortunate side effect of the use of nuclear power as a source of energy. Thus, the negative aspects of atomic dual nature are simply problems we have to live with in order to use its advantages. Vonnegut hints that such a justification of atomic power is no excuse for science to deny responsibility for the totality of its creations. Case in point, Hoenikker's justification for the invention of the ice-nine that destroyed the world was that "...one of the aspects of progress should be that marines no longer had to fight in mud" (Vonnegut, 37). So, Hoenikker invented ice-nine to rid the world of mud. By giving such a trivial genesis to ice-nine, any justification there can be for a power that might destroy the world is inherently foolish. Simply because there is a dual nature doesn't make the exploitation of the negative aspect a great idea. Regardless, Asa Breed and Angela Conners see this noble purpose as reason enough to insist that "[i]f you ever do do the book, you better make Father a saint, because that is what he was" (Vonnegut, 81). Never mind "Father" ends up being responsible for the most dangerous substance the earth has ever known. When Jonah attempts to suggest such might be the case to Dr. Breed, Breed responds with anger and the end of the interview (Vonnegut, 41).

Scientists such as Breed and Hoenikker make the error of assuming that the advance of knowledge is an unqualifiedly good thing. Miss Faust describes Dr. Hoenikker by simply saying, "...the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth" after pointing out that "intimate things, family things, love things...weren't the main things with him" (Vonnegut, 43). The portrait Vonnegut paints here of the Doctor is one where morality does not enter into the thought process. Things that ought to be paramount in his life from a moral standpoint took a back seat. Dr. Breed seems to agree that "[n]ew knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become" (Vonnegut, 36). Again, Vonnegut hints that science and scientists are detached from the values that dominate the lives of the average person. To these scientists, truth and knowledge are more important than the well-being or safety of the general population. Micheal de Certeau supports this view of scientists by arguing that "[e]thical tasks are replaced by what is supposed to be an expression of reality [within] the scientific establishment" (de Certeau, Writing, 200). In other words, scientists see the most important goals in life as the increase of knowledge, or the discovery of the "reality" that was written at the beginning of time but only now becoming legible. In this light, science is not an "ethical task," but is rather replacing ethical tasks in a way that does not leave room for both ethics and scientific knowledge to coexist.

Vonnegut implies that scientists such as Hoenikker are pardoned from not noticing the dual nature of their inventions because their childlike nature shields them from the realities of the real-world uses of their toys. This may not necessarily be true. Hoenikker does label his ice-nine as "Danger!" and advises others to "keep away from moisture," and as a substance which "he had no doubt meant to melt up" (Vonnegut 165–166), but that didn't stop Hoenikker from creating ice-nine to begin with. The fact that he knew the danger shows him as even more irresponsibly childish. As such, Vonnegut also portrays Hoenikker and those like him as not as innocent as they wish they were and are thus accountable for the uses to which their inventions are put. George Kennan once described atomic scientists as "[p]olitically...as innocent as six-year-old maidens" (Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950, 301), and the picture Vonnegut paints on the surface seems to echo that sentiment. Hoenikker is portrayed as a man who once apparently sincerely asked, "What is sin?" (Vonnegut, 21) and performed "...some of his most famous experiments...with equipment that cost less than a dollar," which turns out to be "...cheap, gay toys" (Vonnegut, 45). How can one hold a man like that accountable when he doesn't hold himself accountable for the things he creates? While Hoenikker may be a metaphorical father of the bomb, Vonnegut's answer is to this question is to look to Felix's real children.

Vonnegut portrays the Hoenikker children as key figures in the struggles between the United States and the USSR in regards to which super power is to occupy the superior position in their power struggle through superior proliferation and control of ice-nine. Nadel characterizes this struggle in its real-world atomic aspect as a sort of courtship/seduction game being played between the two nations. Commenting on Kennan's theories of containing the spread of Soviet thought into free nations, Nadel states, "Kennan thus outlines a scenario wherein the United States seduces the Soviet Union through a slow process of courtship that situates the United States in the superior role..." (Nadel, 31). Of course, this theory does not take in to account that the Soviet Union will also be attempting to occupy that same superior role. Vonnegut does not buy in to the rhetoric that one or the other nation must necessarily be submissive. Once each nation learns of the existence and the significance of ice-nine, the race to possess this new ultimate weapon is on. In order to obtain this ice-nine, both nations employ the exact same tactic: the seduction of Hoenikker children. The U.S. seduces Angela and the U.S.S.R. seduces Newt. In this way, Vonnegut plays no nationalist favorites, equating the two countries in tactics and intent. Rather, he makes the dynamic interesting where the children themselves are concerned.

If the Hoenikker children represent the legacy of Dr. Hoenikker the scientist, then perhaps Dr. Hoenikker's legacy is not as pure as Angela and Dr. Breed think it is. They think of Hoenniker's legacy as that of his bomb child. But Vonnegut takes a more direct and literal approach of parentage and legacy by focusing on Hoenikker's biological children. Vonnegut uses the Hoenikker children to suggest that maybe the two super powers are not the seducers they see themselves as being. Rather than taking advantage of innocent children, Frank Hoenikker lets slip that "I bought myself a job, just the way you (Angela) bought yourself a husband, just the way Newt bought himself a week on Cape Cod with a Russian midget" (Vonnegut, 163). This leads to the possibility that the legacy of Dr. Hoenikker through is various "children" is far from being pure and rather one of prostitution. Each Hoenikker offers his or her goods in order to gain a desire. He or she then denies any role by trying to displace the responsibility for his or her action on others—the nations of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. For example, Frank dumps all the responsibility of his decision and its consequences onto Jonah and takes a trip "...down a spiritual obliette" (151). This shows that the legacy of science is really not the innocent child it appears to be. Science and thus scientists aren't purely innocent simply because of their morally ambiguous neutrality, instead purely focusing on the desire to knowledge. Rather, this dangerous, atomic science is portrayed as a Lolita-type character who is a willing partner in illicit activities for which the seductive partner (government) is forced to accept the blame while the legacy in question hides behind a façade of innocence. After all, scientists only "handed the bomb over to the generals" (Boyer, 95), they did not use them, but that doesn't change the fact that, to a large extent, the offspring of the scientist, Hoenikker's legacies, are to blame for the end of the world in more ways than one.

Though Boyer does go into some detail about the "scientist's movement" of the mid- to late-1940's, his narration too seems to support the notion of moral ambiguity on the part of scientists. Despite all the rhetoric of "one world or none" of the scientist's movement, Boyer points out much of the criticism surrounding "...the atomic scientists' motives and their moral right to offer themselves as political guides...A reflective silence, Niebuhr implied, might be a more appropriate stance for the makers of the bomb than eager volubility" (Boyer, 95). Further, Boyer gives us an example of Edward Teller, who,

...when the UNAEC negotiations collapsed, Teller lost all further interest in political efforts to control atomic weapons. The one great moment had passed; further effort was pointless...Succumbing increasingly to an all-encompassing suspicion of the Soviet Union, Teller championed development of the hydrogen bomb, challenged nearly all arms-control efforts as naïve and dangerous, and advocated a nuclear arms build-up almost without control or limit (Boyer, 101).

In other words, as the moral rhetoric behind the scientists' movement gave way, Teller and many scientists like him simply switched positions and went back to work making more, bigger, better bombs. After all, that is what, as nuclear scientists, they do while justifying it to themselves as an intellectual exercise—manipulating primarily what is, Nadel reminds us, the negative half of the atom's dual nature.

At the very least, Cat's Cradle can be read as an indictment of the irresponsibility of science and the façade of innocence that covers scientists in general. But more than that, we can also see in Jonah's two books, one failure and one success, that perhaps the true fault of science in the era of containment is their lack of foresight which caused them to overstep their own rational boundaries. Without due consideration of the consequences, scientists—looking for the next boundary to cross, the next frontier to explore—created, in their search for truth and knowledge, a legacy that escaped their control. And, being scientists, they were unable to write the cultural narrative for how the "history of the future" would play out in regards to atomic weaponry, as science does not provide a means with which to test a hypothesis about "the day the world ended." Such a history can only be written through experience, as Jonah finds, and the only experience can be through fiction. Ultimately, unable to write their own legacy of the bomb—which, as the scientists' movement would have had it, was that of world government—their creativity exhausted, these scientists mainly went back to that which they knew best, making bombs. Much like Dr. Hoenikker and his legacies, both weapon and human, the government is what seizes control of the atomic legacy for its own ends. Perhaps, what Vonnegut suggests is that next time, science should leave the contemplation of the apocalyptically horrible in the hands of science fiction and leave the real world out of it.

Bibliography
Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture
     at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Brians, Paul. Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895–1984.
     Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987.

de Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans.
     Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

de Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New
     York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Kennan, George. Memoirs 1925–1950. New York: Pantheon, 1967.

Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives,
     Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham, NC: Duke University
     Press, 1995.

United States Dept. of State. The International Control of Atomic
     Energy: Growth of a Policy. Washington: Government Printing
     Office, 1946.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt. Cat's Cradle. New York: Dell Publishing Co. Inc.,
     1963.

A Short Summary of Panoptic Surveillance in Foucault

Heh, here's a brief exegisical summary I wrote for a class a while back. I found it while sorting through some of my old papers, and I thought it was a nice condensation and explanation of Foucault's key concepts in Discipline and Punish. It isn't an essay per se, but It seems worth posting all the same.

As Foucault lays it out, in the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries, much of the western world saw a sudden shift in the strategies on punishment. The system before this shift Foucault refers to as the "society of spectacle"; afterwards, "disciplinary society." Each system was a strategy of the hegemony of the time to exercise power and control over the lower classes, but they each used entirely different strategies and techniques.

Under the regime of spectacle, Foucault uses the example of the execution of "Damiens the regicide" in 1757. This gruesome public execution showed in the most explicit way the strategy of a "society of spectacle" in exercising power of the bodies of its subjects. In this manner, the regime in charge made it known to its subjects what crime was and what the consequences of crime would be. Damiens showed, in the most literal sense, what it was to attack the "The King's Body," (or its double in the "crown"/state). It was the hope that this punishment onto the body of the individual for everyone to see would serve to repress criminal tendencies in other individuals in the population. However, what it also did is set up the criminal as "the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king," who represents "the 'lack of power' with which those subjected to punishment are marked." Thus, the criminal is often the more sympathetic figure, especially when it is the case that "the punishment was thought to equal, if not to exceed, in savagery the crime itself." When this occurs, it has the ability "to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers." Thus, a new mode of punishment was needed—one where the perception of the infliction of punishment was not on the body, but on the soul.

This new mode of punishment is best informed by and illustrated for Foucault by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. The Panopticon is a building designed for complete, constant, anonymous surveillance of its subjects. Under this surveillance, never knowing if or by whom one is being watched, the subject is trained to resist any impulse of misbehavior or "abnormality" for fear of being caught, never knowing if such a display is safe or not. In this way, the enforcement of rules is shifted from the spectacle of the power of violence enacted upon the body to the power of discipline essentially coded into the "soul" of the subject under the gaze of the Panopticon. Thus, the body of the subject is made into an "object of knowledge" that can be studied, catalogued, and completely individualized in every way available to the human sciences. As Foucault puts it, the body is turned into a site of "political technology" that, as it is further studied, increases the knowledge base of the human sciences and thus allowing the dominant hegemony ability to exercise greater power through better individualization and surveillance in an ever-increasing cycle of "power-knowledge." Foucault explains then how the idea of the Panopticon can infiltrate the rest of society through these methods, ultimately creating a state where people police themselves unconsciously.

All this ties, for Foucault, most strongly into the idea of the penal system. This is where those who are not adequately "normalized" through these discourses end up. The judge no longer is a punisher, but one who decides, with the help of specialists of the human sciences, how to understand and cure (or "normalize") the criminal in question. Thus, punishment of the body and sympathy for punishment that arose in the "society of spectacle" in response to this punishment is short-circuited by the "humane" system and its stated goal of "rehabilitation." Punishment is no longer on the body of the punished, but on his soul through endless surveillance and individualization in the social Panopticon.

A brief sketch of Delillo's representation of TV in Mao II

One of the more personally striking scenes in Mao II is the passage when Karen watches a TV report of the infamous soccer (football) riot in the UK. Karen notes that "on any given day it was mainly the film footage that she wanted to see and she didn't mind watching it without sound." She then proceeds to experience the clip of violence not as a horrible event of violence and death, but as a work of art; as she puts it, "it is like a religious painting, the scene could be a fresco in a tourist church...". But Delillo isn't trying to say that Karen is wrong, desensitized, or even fooled by taking the visual images in without the context of sound. Instead, he seems to be pointing out that, like the mass of bodies in the riotous crowd, mass media is an environment where individuality (whether the boy in the white cap or the singular meaning attempting to be conveyed through the report) is lost in the onslaught of the surroundings.

Delillo is pretty clear in pointing out that the overt message or meaning of the newscast is irrelevant. It is only the medium of the representation that matters. In Karen's words, "you could make up the news as you went along by sticking to the pictures only." Karen doesn't see anything wrong with this idea of ignoring the message in favor of the medium, and Delillo doesn't give us any hint that we ought to correct her, either. Instead, Delillo's description of the riot, while seemingly bruital, is really clinical and strictly descriptive, not laying any negative judgments on the barbarity of the scene. He accomplishes this description through a sort of detached prose where Karen even stops to search for the appropriate word to use ("writhing"), supposing a sort of clinical interest in the correct way to categorize rather than a visceral label. Further, Delillo plunges into his litany of violent imagery ("terrible slow straining and heaving," "two men crawling on heads and shoulders," "pressed together and terribly twisted," "suffering faces"), only to cease the litany mid-description to point out "men calmly watching...in shorts and jerseys...standing in the grass" (as well as the seemingly irrelevant observation "soccer is called football abroad") before delving directly back into the violent images. Not only does this interrupt the flow of meaning (paradoxically by seamlessly being integrated into the narrative), as if this image were on par with the violent ones immediately surrounding it on both sides. But, in wondering why Karen and these soccer players seem calm and desensitized, one can look at the strong artistic parallel presented in the passage.

Such scenes have become much like the religious works of art that Karen compares it to. Unlike art, television (and particularly the news) is supposed to represent a form of reality. Yet art is something that, while it may be horrible in the sense of being "filled with people suffering," it isn't something that is supposed to be taken as a direct representation of reality as it television. However, Delillo here suggests that television (and perhaps mob behavior/violence in general extrapolating to the soccer players themselves) actually has become no more than an aesthetic, soundless form of art. People tune in to television to see these types of things, and the television stations oblige by giving their viewers what they want. The actual reality behind the event becomes of second importance if of importance at all. Television (and spectacles in general, perhaps), are no longer any more meaningful than the relationship between viewer and viewed.

Brief Thoughts on "A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid

I think I found a favorite passage. This description of Kincaid's is one of the most succinct, effective descriptions of colonialism I have read:

In a small place, people cultivate small events. The small event is isolated, blown up, turned over and over, and then absorbed into the everyday, so that at any moment it can and will roll off the inhabitants of the small place's tongues...The people in a small place then experience the event as if it were sitting on top of their heads, their shoulders, and it weighs them down, this enormous burden that is the event, so that they cannot breathe properly and...eventually they absorb the event and it becomes a part of them, a part of who and what they really are...(52–53)

Though not specifically stated as such, Kincaid makes it clear that, in the case of this book, that event is Antigua's colonization by the British, but also colonization in general of any form.

When I read her repetition of "a small place" over and over in this passage and on the two pages that follow, I don't read that such a place is necessarily small, and it isn't really even a place at all. Rather, Kincaid is describing the process through which a larger, more technologically advanced culture can, when it sets its mind on colonization, completely obliterate any culture that stands in its way. Such was the case in Antigua. The British, with their overwhelming force both militarily and culturally settled itself "...sitting on top of [the Antiguans'] heads, their shoulders..." and projected their own values onto them. Kincaid then spends most of the essay discussing the political and cultural corruption that permeates through Antigua. She notes in particular the politicians' desires for wealth over the good of the people and that hotel training is more highly looked upon than formal education (i.e. the library). However, Kincaid is also careful to say that it wasn't the intention of the British to change their culture to such a singularly capital-driven, top-heavy society that is so full of corruption. To the British, they were bringing "enlightenment" to an unenlightened society. Rather, the culture that arose after the end of British control is simply the outcome of this heavy burned of colonialism on such "a small place."

Kincaid's primary argument against colonialism seems to be its destruction of a culture's natural development. She points out that Antigua never had an industrial revolution or an "Age of Enlightenment." They never had to go though the painful process of finding themselves as their own culture and society within the larger framework of the modern world. Instead, they were given a shortcut through which they missed out on the important lessons that give a society the ability to find its own equilibrium. After all, how could they expect to be faced with the weight of hundreds of years of British tradition, culture, and power without becoming infatuated and subverted by the advantages of wealth and middle-class promises that a seemingly successful capitalist state like Britain hints can be theirs? And, as Kincaid points out, the British weren't moral role models on the same scale as they were cultural. After all, it's hard to see those who are running your country as having anything but "bad manners." So, those in positions of power in Antigua go where the money is, take advantage of whomever they can, and think they are capitalists for doing so.

But the fact is, this situation of unnatural, broken development isn't only a formula imposed on those countries that are currently, or recently have been, directly occupied. Kincaid also shows how colonialism, both in Antigua and throughout the rest of the world, is alive and well today. But these days, it isn't the same old physical occupation it used to be. Instead, it is culture and capital that are doing the colonizing.

In the first chapter of A Small Place, Kincaid asks us to imagine ourselves as tourists in Antigua and guides us through what seems like a typical first tourist experience in Antigua (though pointing out questions that we, as tourists, may not ask ourselves). But she quickly turns the tables on the reader, no longer inviting us to explore Antigua, but telling us that "a tourist is an ugly person"—not the person, necessarily, but the tourist in the person. While a tourist is not an invader who colonizes with guns blazing, the tourist does expect to be treated with a certain level of deference. This expectation does not necessarily spring from the explicit belief of personal, innate superiority, but rather from the point of view that the tourist is the one with disposable capital that the host wants. As in the case with Antigua, tourism and a booming tourist industry is not necessarily what the people of Antigua want, but because of their lack of natural development of other capitalist industries, in a sense, it is what they get regardless. It is an industry where they can make money to feed their need (British-originated) for further capital that (again due to lack of natural learning&$41; is not put into building the infrastructure of Antigua as a whole, but rather it is put back into the tourism industry to build more capital without the thought or experience that expansion is possible. Because of this vicious cycle, each tourist that visits Antigua is contributing to the stagnation of an Antiguan culture which cannot grow outside of a one-dimensional economy on its own. Tourists are the new colonists, imposing what they want and their ethnocentric demands on this country which, as Kincaid says, becomes a weight which in turn "eventually...becomes a part of them, a part of who and what they really are."

"The plastic substance, imposed by tradition"

I'm currently working on finishing up Henry James' Wings of the Dove, and I came across this passage that, quite frankly, I find highly interesting in the way it precursors a good bit of post-structuralist literary theory by a solid fifty-plus years. I can just smell Foucault in the background, and I can't help but think this is the ideal kind of thing to save in case I ever need a good example for a paper on these themes, which I suspect I will at some point.

That was the story—that she was always, for her beneficient dragon under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to the 'value' Mrs Lowdner had attached to her. High and fixed, this estimate ruled, on each occasion, at Lancaster Gate, the social scene; so that our young man now recognized in it something like the artistic idea, the plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such a person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way to express, the part, so all this was what Kate was to do for the character she had undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. it was made up, the character, of definite elements and touches—things all perfectly ponderable to criticism; and the way for her to meet criticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up was exact and that she looked at least no worse than usual. Aunt Maud's appreciation of that tonight was indeed managerial, and Kate's own contribution fairly that of the faultless soldier on parade. Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall at the play; the watchful manager was in the depts of a box and the poor actress in the glare of the footlights. But she passed, the poor actress—he could see how she always passed; her wig, her taint, her jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance accordingly greeted witht he proper round of applause. Such impressions as we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very much less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make the point that there was, still further, time among them for him to feel almost too scared to take part in the ovation. He truck himself as having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind—so that, at any rate, he only stared in silence at the older woman's technical challenge and at the younger one's disciplined face. It was as if the drama—it thus came to him, for the fact of a drama there was no blinking—was between them, them quite preponderantly; with Merton Densher relegated to mere spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the most expensive. This was why his appreciation had turned for the instant of fear—had just turned, as we have said, to sickness; and in spite of the fact that the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights, as he believed, the small gleam, fine, faint, but exquisite, of a special intelligence. So might a practised performer, even when raked by double-barreled glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey a sign to the person in the house she loved best.

Holy crap. You get all that? It's impressive how James positions Kate's character in her social context purely in relation to having to live under the constant gaze of her Aunt as the "theatre manager." James credits Kate in that she "passed," but I'm not sure that's entirely a complement. It's made quite clear that she lives her life not only in the "'value' that Mrs Lowdner had attached to her," but now she is also under the gaze and scrutiny of Densher, for whom she must play a separate role (that of lover) at the same time. Kate's challenge is to merge both roles into one performance, and the fact that she is so highly successful at it is one of the primary points that shows that, while James may predict postmodernist theory in this passage, he is—at heart—a true modernist. If this were a postmodern novel, she would fracture in the attempt to contain dual roles simultaneously—hey, it drives Holden Caulfield into an asylum—to two different observers at the same time. For the modernist James, however, to do so is possible. She's just that extraordinary. The theatre aspect serves to further reinforce the notion that Kate can only play the role society has established for her and that she cannot deviate—due to constant surveillance—lest she lose everything she is working for. Yet, she does get to be offstage at times (such as when she's out with Densher without her Aunt's knowledge), but she must constantly fear discovery (i.e., Milly in the art gallery), as Foucault explains is the method of control outside of survellance in his coneptual "Carcerial" in society in general. This fear of discovery keeps her behavior and interaction with Densher within at the very least allowable, though not ideal, bounds.

There, that should be enough to remind me why I am intrigued in that passage. There is certainly much more to dig out, and there are counter-arguments to be made, but this will serve as a start. Thank you for bearing with me.

Some Random Book Meme

Hardback or Paperback?
Depends on how much I'd have to pay for it. Hardback is always preferable, but I'd rather pay half as much for a trade paperback.

Highlight or Underline?
In a course pack, highlight. In books I own, neither; why would I want to fuck 'em up? I'll use sticky notes in books.

Lewis or Tolkien?
Tolkien, mainly by the fact that I haven't read any Lewis (though I suspect I'd like Tolkien more anyways).

E.B. White or A.A. Milne?
E.B. White by a long ways. As far as children's books go, I could go either way. But White's career as an essayist and critic blows Milne out of the water.

T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings?
I very much like them both, but I am more interested in the themes Eliot takes on.

Stephen King or Dean Koontz?
Stephen King. Stephen King. Stephen King. Koontz is just an inferior stylist, his stories are much less complex, and I can't imagine that he has the self-awareness or ability to write a book on writing that could even come close to being as informative and insightful as King's.

Barnes & Noble or Borders?
Barnes & Noble has a larger selection, but Borders tends to carry some non-mainstream books that I'd have to order at Barnes & Noble...so Borders by a hair.

Waldenbooks or B. Dalton?
B. Dalton. Better selection, better prices.

Fantasy or Science Fiction?
I read a ton of fantasy in Jr. High and High School, but since then I don't think I've read more than three or four fantasy books (over almost six years), and I haven't ready any in the last two years at least. Sci-Fi, on the other hand, has figured prominently into my literary studies (i.e. Vonnegut, Dick, Delaney, Shute, etc.), so I'd have to answer that now I prefer SF.

Horror or Suspense?
Horror. I have never read a suspense genre novel that I have particularly enjoyed.

Bookmark or Dogear?
Due to my abhorrence of ruining perfectly good books, I am very much a bookmark man.

Hemingway or Faulkner?
While I enjoy and respect Hemingway's work, Faulkner interests me much, much more.

Fitzgerald or Steinbeck?
While Steinbeck might have written much more than Fitzgerald (due to Fitzgerald's young death), Fitzgerald can claim one thing Steinbeck can't: He never wrote one book that wasn't great. For that, F. Scott is the man.

John Irving or John Updike?
I haven't read enough of either to give a definitive answer, but right now it's Updike and I doubt that'll change.

Homer or Plato?
While I like my philosophy, I'm a literature man at heart, and in Literature, Homer reigns supreme.

Geoffrey Chaucer or Edmund Spenser?
I've read a ton of Chaucer and only a little Spenser (and none of The Fairy Queen), so right now I'm going to have to stick with Chaucer.

Pen or Pencil?
I use pen now (required at work and all), but deep down I prefer a pencil.

Looseleaf or Notebook?
Notebook. If you give me loose papers, they'll be scattered across any given space within moments.

Alphabetize: By Author or By Title?
Arranged by subject (i.e., Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Mythology, etc.) then alphabetized by author.

Novella or Epic
It doesn't matter. I'm just interested in how good it is.

Fiction or Non-fiction?
Fiction is my primary focus, but I love to read in a wide range of academic non-fiction disciplines from Philosophy to Mythology to Literary Theory and Criticism to Politicas Theory to History to Biography and beyond.

Historical Biography or Historical Romance?
Give me a good literary Biography any day. I can't imagine I would enjoy a Historical Romance.

A Few Pages per Sitting or Finish at Least a Chapter?
At least a chapter. I hate stopping in the middle of a chapter. I ususally then feel the need to re-read the chapter to make sure I'm not forgetting anything.

Short Story or Creative Non-fiction Essay?
Either one is great, but again, I'm a sucker for good literary fiction, short stories included.

Buy or borrow?
Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy. Over 1,200 books owned and climbing.

Book Reviews or Word of Mouth?
Word of mouth from someone whose taste I trust. I'm only really interested in a book review if it is by a reviewer with a more literary slant. In other words, no newspaper reviews (not evey the NY Times) or Web site reviews. I'll take reviews in literary journals first, and high standard magazines such as the New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly second.

The Onset of ADD

I have never in my life had such a difficult time finishing books as I am having right now. It's disgusting. My attention span is almost nonexistent. Seriously, here's how many books I'm reading on my own (non-school) right now:

• The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
• In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories by William H. Gass
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare by Henry Greenblatt
• The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
• Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age by Alan Nadel
• The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things by Barry Glassner

And I'm probably forgetting something. These aren't even the books that I've just read a page of, either. I've read at least a quarter of all of them. I honestly don't think I've ever exceeded two or three books at once before. And this isn't even counting my ever ongoing quest to finish the Bible and The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Eck. I think this weekend I just need to knock off at least one if not two of the ones that are closest to finished and continue to work through them in like manner over the next few weeks.

When the Blind Lead the Blind: Rhetoric in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

The fifth chapter of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man finds the Narrator sitting in chapel utterly entranced by the words of Reverend Homer A. Barbee, who entrances the audience by beautifully eulogizing the life and death of the school's beloved founder many years before. After hearing the moving speech, the Narrator notes, "For a few minutes old Barbee had made me see the vision and now I knew that leaving the campus would be like parting of the flesh" (120). Barbee made the Narrator want to be a part of this vision more than anything, and the Narrator knows this desire is ultimately to be denied. Yet, moments later, the Narrator "...hurried past the disapproving eyes of teachers and matrons, out into the night" (121). This seems to contradict his desire to be a part of the vision, his leaving of the place where the vision is being forged and reinforced. Instead, he finds himself feeling "resentment" toward Barbee's address. One part of this reaction is certainly his not wanting to leave, but knowing he will be forced out. Yet, on another, as of yet undefined level the Narrator is for the first time reacting against the novel's recurring theme of rhetoric as a manipulative device of power and control.

On the surface, Barbee's speech does little more than give a moving eulogy about the Founder and praise Dr. Bledsoe's accomplishments in having "...kept his promise a thousandfold" (119). Barbee begins by relating to the days before the Founder as "...this barren land after Emancipation...this land of darkness and sorrow..." (107). He then speaks of the Founder's birth, escape, education, and accomplishments, referring to the Founder as "the great sun" (114) and similar illuminative imagery throughout. The Founder is clearly the one to change "...this land of darkness and sorrow..." into something brighter. Barbee speaks of the Founder's death followed by Dr. Bledsoe's charge and successful fulfillment of the Founder's deathbed wish that Bledsoe "...take on the burden. Lead them the rest of the way" (116). Then Barbee relates how Bledsoe has become the great figure who vastly increased the size of the university and even conducted the President himself around campus (119).

All in all, Barbee's speech strikes the reader at first as nothing more than a simple, if inspiring and flowery, narration of fact. But it has, in fact, done much more than that. As has already been pointed out, the Narrator has already been made to "see the vision" and in doing so become reconnected to it. No doubt the same effect has taken place on the other students in attendance. It inspires confidence and admiration for the administration in place to do what is right and best for the black people. Yet, in order to accomplish this end, this seemingly harmless speech has become a form of power, control, and manipulation. It starts by nearly deifying, or at least mythologizing, the founder through its lauding of virtue and celestial comparison upon him (making a reverend the perfect messenger). Then, at the end, we see what is probably the true purpose of the Reverend's speech: The reinforcement of Bledsoe as the new leader, and one who is as great, if not greater, than the Founder, through such direct comparison as even claiming, "For has not your present leader become [the Founder's] living agent?" (119). Barbee is implicating that the Founder and Bledsoe are at least equals, before going on in the very next paragraph to explain how Bledsoe has surpassed the accomplishments of the Founder in the ways listed above.

The purpose of this manipulation is to re-establish Bledsoe's authority in the eyes of those who may doubt him. This speech is only minimally meant to influence the trustees. Bledsoe has other, more effective ways to manipulate them. Rather, it is to improve his image and re-emphasize the necessity of fidelity with the students and teachers of the university. To be frank, up to this speech, Bledsoe is not portrayed as the equal of the founder. He fawns over the trustees (Norton being a prime example [94–95]) in a way that, unlike the vision Barbee gives us of the Founder, does not inspire respect so much as comfort on the trustees' parts. The students refer to him as "Old Bucket-head" (92), certainly a less respectful appellation than the universally revered "Founder." Disregarding what we learn in chapters following the scene in the church, there is ample evidence to suspect this influencing of opinion may be the true purpose of the Reverend's speech.

At this point, it would certainly be reasonable to assume that I am perhaps reading too deeply into this by implying the purpose of the speech was more devious than it superficially appears, but there is a key hint for both the Narrator and for the reader that such an interpretation may very well be valid. As the Narrator puts it, "Homer A. Barbee was blind" (120). The use of the full name after so many references to the Reverend as just "Barbee," combined with the simplicity of the declarative, seems to imply some shock, almost of incomprehension, on the part of the Narrator. In other words, this physical deformity seems to have quite an effect on the Narrator. Superficially, the physical aspect of this blindness calls into question the veracity of Barbee's tale about the founder. For instance, what should the Narrator (or the reader for that matter) make of Barbee's story of the dying star:

"For against that great—wide—sweep of sable there came the burst of a single jewel-like star, and I saw it shimmer, and break, and streak down the cheek of that coal-black sky like a reluctant and solitary tear..." (115)

Certainly it is possible Barbee lost his sight after that, but there is nothing in the text to suggest this is the case. If this incident is perhaps made up, what else might be?

However, more important than Barbee's physical blindness is what it suggests about his inner blindness. As pointed out above, Barbee does not seem to be talking about the same Dr. Bledsoe that everyone else knows. He may really believe everything he says about Dr. Bledsoe. On the other hand, we also find out soon after that Bledsoe is willing to "...have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am" (128). With this in mind, it isn't a far-fetched idea that an interpretation of Barbee's speech as I outlined above is easily justified, and that Barbee is little more than Bledsoe's tool to manipulate the student body, and Barbee is the blind man who cannot see to what end his power is being used. He seems to truly care about the Founder and what the Founder stood for. He sees himself as serving those ends in allowing his gift to be used to reinvigorate the student population. As a reverend, he doesn't see that he's really helping a corrupt man who has betrayed the ideals of the Founder. Although the Narrator does not realize any of this at the time of Barbee's speech, this revelation of blindness and manipulation is the tipping point that turns the Narrator from seeing "the vision" to resisting it and feeling "resentful." Barbee is merely the first example of a theme that runs throughout the novel: Those with the command of rhetoric as being blind to its true use as employed by those with power.

Whether the speaker is Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer or the Narrator himself, those who posses the power of persuasion are never able to make their gift work the way they intend. As the Narrator points out about Ras to his followers, "...but [the Brotherhood] counted on this man [Ras], too. They needed this destroyer to do their work...They want you guilty of your own murder, your own sacrifice!" In other words, the Brotherhood has been manipulating events and counting on Ras to stir up bad feeling into a race riot, which is exactly what Ras is doing. Knowing how Ras operates, the brotherhood was able to manipulate a situation where they knew Ras would "...come uptown with guns and rifles" because the Brotherhood understands what Ras is about politically. They know that he will use his influence to create a situation where the Brotherhood can "...turn your death and sorrow and defeat into propaganda...'Use a nigger to catch a nigger.' Well, they used me to catch you and now they're using Ras to do away with me and to prepare your sacrifice" (482–483). Ras' command over people's hearts through his own peculiar, earnest rhetoric is being used against him and the Harlem community by the Brotherhood because, like Barbee, Ras is too blind by his own sense of righteousness and self-importance to believe that he could be used by his enemies.

Even more than Ras, the Narrator himself is the primary example of manipulation in the novel. Though he senses something wrong with Barbee's speech, he does not make the connection between rhetoric and manipulation until the end of the novel. The Brotherhood first found interest in the Narrator as he used reverse psychology to stop an eviction. As Jack says, "With a few words you had them involved in action!" (251). Jack sees the manipulative power and wants to hire the Narrator as a tool. He works well for the Brotherhood. He is the one who generates interest in "No more dispossessing of the dispossessed" (295) in that initial speech as well as at his first rally. The Brotherhood uses him first to drive up membership, a seemingly noble task at the time. Yet it isn't until later that we discover that the Narrator's charisma is a double-edged sword for the people of Harlem. The Brotherhood reassigns him on a plot ultimately revealed as engineered by Jack ("That he, or anyone at that late date could have named me and set me running with one and the same stroke of the pen was too much" [491]) that turns the sentiments of Harlem from one of hope with their new leader to one of abandonment. Amazingly, the Narrator is amazed to find upon his return, those who once he considered "Brothers" are now set against him ("I wouldn't be his kin even if I was..." [366]). He remains blind. The Narrator thinks it was simple mismanagement on behalf of the Brotherhood, but they really used the Narrator's rhetorical skill to drum up false hope in order to plant the seeds of the race riot and provoke Ras into action in the passage quoted above.

While obviously the Narrator is aware he is being used for a purpose (what else is employment?), he remains blind until far too late to do anything to prevent the riots that are starting at the time of his epiphany. He begins to understand after Clifton's funeral that he is a pawn, and he decides to play the part of good pawn, thinking that he is harming the brotherhood. Yet still he is blind. Through it all, he thinks that the Brotherhood ultimately wouldn't do anything that would directly harm the people of Harlem. In the interview with Jack after the Narrator's speech at Clifton's funeral, Jack's response to the Narrator's assertion that the people of Harlem believe that the Brotherhood has betrayed them is to say, "That's an indefensible lie...We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them" (408)! After the interview, the Narrator is convinced it is the Brotherhood that is blind (410), yet he is to discover that he was wrong; it was him all the time. The Brotherhood really did know what Jack claimed was a lie about the sentiments of Harlem. But that was part of the plan to which the Narrator was still blind.

The last, most important question that remains is to explore why Ellison seems to see the use of rhetoric as so inherently deceitful and manipulative. As explored above, every overt use of it in the novel turns out to be sinister when it is meant to be well-meaning because of the blindness of those who possess it. It is evident why those in power wish to use those who posses the skill. It is a powerful form of manipulation. Ellison notes in the prologue how people perceive the world around them: "A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality" (7). In other words, people live in their own reality to the extent their experience is filtered through "inner eyes" that only see the world in the way they expect to experience it; people can create their own experience of reality. In essence, people can create themselves through the narratives their "inner eyes" tell them. Using this notion of the "inner eyes" as a framing device, mastery of rhetoric is possibly the most powerful form of manipulation there is. A powerful speaker has the power to change how the "inner eyes" of others experience reality through powerful techniques of persuasion. A master speaker can make people literally see the world—reality&mash;in the way that the speaker wants them to see it. Barbee can change the reality of Dr. Bledsoe as "Old Bucket-head" to the reality of Dr. Bledsoe as one of the greatest black leaders. Dr. Bledsoe didn't have to change, only the perceptions of those in the audience. The same goes for the power of Ras and the Narrator to turn normally "law-abiding" (239) people into an angry mob bent on riot.

While this ability to alter a person's perception of the world is certainly a powerful tool, perhaps the reason Ellison is afraid of its power can be found in the Narrator's self-identification as a "thinker tinker" (11). As Dr. Malcolm Griffin points out, the Narrator comes to believe his responsibility is only to define himself through his expression. Yet the purpose of rhetoric is to change the way others define themselves. This inevitably leads to a mob mentality in the novel, whether a chapel full of like-minded students or a rioting mob, that kills of individuality and self-expression. The speaker who uses rhetoric is taking the responsibility for self-definition away from those whose duty to themselves should be to be able to express their own thoughts, which is often hard when the mob mentality is firmly entrenched. For example, in the Narrator's second-to-last confrontation with Ras, the Narrator has supporters among Ras' followers who ask to "Give the brother a chance to answer!" (415) and ultimately Ras' followers remember the good the Narrator has done for the community. By the final confrontation, Ras has wiped out the memories of the Narrator's good deeds from the mind of his followers. He has no more supporters.

Given this view of rhetoric by Ellison, it is no wonder that all the rhetorically accomplished speakers in Invisible Man are blind to being used. To speak rhetorically is to speak artificially. It is used to express not the speaker's voice, but to express the voice that the crowd will best react to and the agenda of those in power. Barbee, Ras, and the Narrator are all puppets of other people, either Bledsoe or the Brotherhood, and they say what their manipulator wants them to say and what the audience will best respond to. As a result, instead of self-defining themselves as unique individuals, they are defining themselves as only a part of the mass crowd they are set to manipulate, and as a result, they cannot help but believe their own rhetoric after a while. All three of Invisible Man's narrators succumb to this. Thus, they lack the ability to create a self-definition in the way the Narrator as "thinker-tinker" ultimately understands how to do, and if they can't define themselves as individuals, how can they possibly separate themselves from the homogenous crowd who only see what they are told to see. And as a crowd will follow the speaker, so will the rhetorician follow the ideas he is fed. He best expresses them, how can he not believe them?

Virginia Woolf Essay—Mrs. Dalloway

When Virginia Woolf said we should "not take it for granted that life exists more fully in that which is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small," the words that stand out for me are "commonly thought." It isn't that these things really are small or unimportant, only that their importance is not obvious—it does not smack you in the face—yet it is safe to say that life is mostly made up of events without a great inherent significance—whether brushing your teeth or getting up for work in the morning. However, there is a significance to that which is small, and one of the primary goals of stream-of-consciousness writers such as Woolf is to bring the importance of seemingly small thoughts, actions, and events to light. Their primary mode of conveying this notion is by showing how such small things are a point of access to something much grander and more significant—it is small thoughts and actions that connect and give context to the big thoughts and actions. As a result, an accomplished stream-of-consciousness writer such as Woolf only exposes a seemingly insignificant thought or action from even a minor character in the service of an important end.

In Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, one such seemingly small event occurs when Clarissa’s daughter, Elizabeth, boards an omnibus after having lunch with her tutor, Miss Kilman:

Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded the omnibus, in front of everybody. She took a seat on top. The impetuous creature—a pirate—started forward, sprang away; she had to hold on the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall. And did Elizabeth give one thought to poor Miss Kilman who loved her without jealously, to whom she had been a fawn in the open, a moon in a glade? She was delighted to be free. The fresh air was so delicious. It had been so stuffy in the Army and Navy Stores. And now it was like riding, to be rushing up Whitehall; and to each movement of the omnibus the beautiful body in the fawn-coloured coat responded freely like a rider, like the figure-head of a ship, for the breeze slightly disarrayed her; the heat gave her cheeks the pallor of white painted wood; and her fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead, blank, bright, with the staring incredible innocence of sculpture (Woolf 205–206).

By no means does Elizabeth get much direct attention in the novel. On the contrary, she gets only these few pages as access to her consciousness, and the characters will occasionally refer to her throughout. Yet this apparently insignificant event of boarding a bus and riding up to the Strand, narrated through the consciousness of a relatively minor character, actually contributes in a big way to what Woolf has to say about the changing nature of England in the early 1920's.

In the passage quoted above, Woolf sets Elizabeth up as both a reflection and a product of the shift in power, class, and customs taking place in English society. Like many other British modernist novelists of the time, E.M. Forester being a great example, Woolf takes a strong interest in the shift from an imperialist culture, with the gentry as the dominant class, of the 19^th Century to an industrial culture, with a more dominant capitalist class. The passage above is notable for portraying Elizabeth as everything a young woman, and a member of a rich, politically powerful family, should not be.

First, one must remember that in 19^th Century Britain, young women like Elizabeth should not even be traversing a city like London unescorted with the British notion that a gentile woman like her is not equipped to be responsible for herself—that is a father/brother/beau's job. However, here we find Elizabeth as she "...competently boarded the omnibus, in front of everybody. She took a seat on top." So not only do we find she is competent, but neither is she shy of asserting herself in public or claiming a prominent seat. While this could be attributed to her position as a member of the gentry, the reader is led to understand that this is not normal behavior for someone in her position as she is an "...impetuous creature—a pirate…reckless, unscrupulous...arrogant...insolent...disarrayed..." and a host of other adjectives contributing to a picture of Elizabeth not acting as a gentle-woman ought to act.

Yet we already know Elizabeth does not play the part of a young Lady. Earlier in the novel, Clarissa worries, "...how [Elizabeth] dressed, how she treated people who came to lunch she did not care a bit..." (Woolf 16), though Richard thinks it is "...only a phase...such as all girls go through" (Woolf 15). But on the bus, Woolf lets us know that it is not a phase. Elizabeth does not want the part of Clarissa who, though it galls her when Peter points it out to her, is one of the wives who throw parties to help advance her husband's career, or Lady Bruton who, though she wields the power of the gentry in influence, she is not competent enough in practical matters to write her own letter. Instead, Elizabeth fancies herself on the bus as a "...figure-head of a ship, for the breeze slightly disarrayed her; the heat gave her cheeks the pallor of white painted wood; and her fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead, blank, bright, with the staring incredible innocence of sculpture." Elizabeth sees herself as putting herself in the forefront (like a figure-head) and staring out in to uncharted territory ("having no eyes to meet") instead of following the proscribed path of marriage and family that her mother followed. As her mother notices, "[t]hat she did not care more about it [courtship]—for instance her clothes—sometimes worried Clarissa" (Woolf 205). Instead, we find Elizabeth as a blank slate (her "incredible innocence") whose course has not been decided. She has resisted the influence of her mother and her social position, and she has resisted the attempted domination and subversion of Miss Kilman, as is pointed out when she fails to "...give one thought to Miss Kilman...she was delighted to be free."

Elizabeth's newly realized independence and freedom she experiences in this seemingly insignificant event—seemingly abstract chain of thought—is what later leads to her ability to make a monumental decision in her life. It is later during the bus ride that Elizabeth recalls what Miss Kilman also said to her, "...every profession is open to a woman of your generation" (Woolf 206) and instead of stopping where she should, Elizabeth decides to continue up to the Strand, London's central business district. Once there, Elizabeth is inspired and decides, "In short, she would like to have a profession" (Woolf 207).

Elizabeth's bus ride and ultimate realization she wants to give up her current class and way of life for a new one is Woolf's tool for showing the reader one example of how England in the 1920's is changing. Lady Bruton's class is the one fading. Woolf implies that Butron's family (which is used as a symbol for her class) is being relegated to the past. Richard wants to write a history of her family, feeling that such a people should be remembered (Woolf 167). In other words, Woolf is implying Bruton's type, the gentry and imperialists, are fading into history—or at least their power and influence is. Lady Bruton's primary concern is Britain's fading imperial influence ("but what a tragedy—the state of India!" [Woolf 274]). Elizabeth, on the other hand, does not care at all for this. She desires to become a professional and join the rising ruling class of Britain, the ones she so admires on the Strand. But without the realizations, freedoms, and connections she experienced on the omnibus, would she have been prepared to make such a monumental choice? Probably not—at least, not right then. The seemingly insignificant event of a bus ride turns out to supply the background and abstract connections—in the form of fleeting thoughts and associations—that allow Elizabeth to make the decision she does, and Woolf to help us to understand through Elizabeth the changing social climate of England at the time. In other words, especially in a stream-of-consciousness style, there is no such thing as an insignificant thought.

D.H. Lawrence/Kate Chopin Essay (Part 2)

Recently, I completed yet another essay for my Modern Novel class. The books under discussion for the most recent essay were D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Both novels were revolutionary in the ways they depicted the effects of various social dynamics on the lives of their characters. Sons and Lovers focuses primarily on the dynamics within the Morel family and how that influences the characters in the relationships they pursue and the people who they become. The Awakening focuses on the dynamics of gender relations in a similar manner. The essay I had to write had to address three questions in three different sections. I will post the sections as I get to each of them. To read the first, click here. Here is the second:

The essay that follows responds to the topic of analyzing Sons and Lovers using the framework of gender dynamics that is used throughout The Awakening. Go for brevity over detail with the objective being to merely show competence in using the model of one novel to extract meaning from another.

In The Awakening, Edna sought a way to free herself from her role as mother and wife for which she had been groomed since young. She grew up going through all the phases she was supposed to go through as a woman: her first crush with the cavalry officer, her first love with the tragedian, courtship, marriage to Mr. Pontillier, and birth to her two children. It was upon completing this cycle that she began to understand that she did not want to be one of "...the women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels" (Chopin 16). Ultimately, she is able to escape back into independence only through her own death. However, in Sons and Lovers, the first chapter, "The Early Married Life of the Morels," Gertrude Morel also leaving the role of "mother-woman," but Gertrude finds her path to contentment in her gender role arguably even more impossible than Edna does.

Like Enda, Gertrude presumably passes through all the same phases. While we aren’t necessarily introduced to her first crush, in the first chapter we do learn of her first love, John Field, as well as her courtship and marriage to Walter Morel and the birth of her first two children. Also like Edna, she does not share all the typical interests someone of her gender traditionally shares, though she and Edna don't necessarily share the same interests. Lawrence describes Getrude as "...lov[ing] ideas, and was considered very intellectual. What she liked most of all was an argument on religion or philosophy or politics with some educated man" (Lawrence 9). In other words, she has many of the interests that are normally ascribed to men of the time. In fact, she is strong willed and, as is pointed out, between her and her husband, when it comes down to force of will, she is the stronger, and while Walter is physically stronger, he "...was afraid of her" (Lawrence 23). She has the strength and fire and he is the one who was "sensuous." It is as if Lawrence is swapping traditional gender characteristics between the husband and wife, yet the gender roles must stay the same.

Over the course of the first chapter Walter descends from the good husband, recently married, and trying to make a good impression, before the charade is up when Gertrude discovers the truth about her new house and its furnishings. Once the truth is uncovered, however,

...her manner had changed towards him. Something in her proud, honourable soul had crystallized out hard as rock...This thing was gall and bitterness to Mrs. Morel, and she had a fair share of it...He began to be rather late coming home (Lawrence 13).

At this point, Walter gives up trying to fulfill his full role as male of the household and Gertrude is forced to assume almost all the responsibilities of his traditional gender role except his work at the mine. While, unlike Edna, she is no longer confined to her own role, she doesn't really want to be anything other than the wife of Walter who was "perfectly happy" (Lawrence 11) at the start of her marriage. Instead, she has a role and responsibility she does not want forced upon her with no reduction of her own role as a woman and wife. By the time Gertrude understands what is happening, she is in the same position as Edna finds herself in at the end of The Awakening: "This Christmas she would bear [Walter] a child" (Lawrence 13). She is trapped by her maternal tendencies into this horrible situation of no longer having the option or the ability to be her own person without giving up her children: "Ah, wouldn't I, wouldn't I have gone long ago but for those children," she says during a fight with Walter. "Do you think it's for you I stop—do you think I'd stop one minute for you?" (Lawrence 22-23). Unlike Edna, Gertrude would never go so far as to say, "She would never sacrifice herself for her children" (Chopin 79).

As a result of this unwanted role and responsibility as male of the household in addition to her duties as mother and wife, it is no wonder Gertrude is so ready for first William and then (especially) Paul to take over the role of "man of the house" (Lawrence 88) as Paul proclaims himself while Walter is in the hospital. Gertrude neither asked for nor wanted to be more than a wife or mother, and she is more than willing to pass up responsibility for the household when the chance is there. This is evident by her bitterness when William disappoints her expectations of fully stripping Walter of his role as provider after William leaves for London: "That William promised me, when he went to London, as he'd give me a pound a month. He has given me ten shillings—twice; and now I know he hasn't a farthing if I asked him" (Lawrence 99). It is no wonder that, after losing not only William's attention as "man of the house" that she would cling even more tightly to Paul in that role and impede Miriam to have full access to him as Gyp had with William.

Ultimately, Gertrude never is able to escape from the weakness of her husband. She is perpetually forced into a dual role that does not suit her. While she may not resent that role as Edna resents her own role in The Awakening, Gertrude's battle to maintain her free choice is every bit as impossible as a result of her husband's weakness. While she and Edna may not choose the same ideal, they both simply want the ability to make that choice. Unfortunately for Gertrude, part of her choice of being wife and mother—to whomever she can get to assume the role—not only takes away the option of death that Edna eventually chooses, but necessarily assumes her at least superficial subordination. Hence, she keeps little of the traditional male authority over the family and their workings. She cannot force Paul to assume the role of "man of the house," she can only do so by using Paul's love of her as a source of manipulation to keep him as her de facto male partner—a role Paul struggles against—again taking her out of the ideal maternal role as Chopin's concept of the "ministering angel." In other words, even wanting what she is supposed by society to want, Gertrude, as much as Edna, finds her gender role ultimately outside of her power to determine.

D.H. Lawrence/Kate Chopin Essay (Part 1)

Recently, I completed yet another essay for my Modern Novel class. The books under discussion for the most recent essay were D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Both novels were revolutionary in the ways they depicted the effects of various social dynamics on the lives of their characters. Sons and Lovers focuses primarily on the dynamics within the Morel family and how that influences the characters in the relationships they pursue and the people who they become. The Awakening focuses on the dynamics of gender relations in a similar manner. The essay I had to write had to address three questions in three different sections. I will post the sections as I get to each of them. Here is the first:

The essay that follows responds to the topic of analyzing The Awakening using the framework of family dynamics that is used throughout Sons and Lovers. Go for brevity over detail with the objective being to merely show competence in using the model of one novel to extract meaning from another.

One of the most prevalent intra-family dynamics in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is the seemingly innate trait of many of Lawrence's characters to resist one or both parents on an existential level. Lawrence's characters try their best to distance themselves from the unpleasant aspects of their parents by seeking out opposite qualities in their other relationships. Paul seeks out Clara because, unlike Miriam, Clara does not demand the same spiritual ownership of Paul that Paul's mother exerts. Miriam, on the other hand, seeks out Paul in part because he has a spiritual, artistic side Miriam sees as lacking in her own father, who "...did not carry any mystical ideals cherished in his heart..." (Lawrence 142). Moreover, all the Morel children, with the later exception of Paul, grow up with an aversion to alcohol as a reaction to their hatred of their alcoholic father. Yet this dynamic is not solely seen in Lawrence’s novel. Each of these examples from Sons and Lovers is a sort of a rebellion—a yearning to be free from the influence of the parent through an outward channel. Hence, it is no surprise that Kate Chopin also uses the dynamic of family—and of Edna's relationship with her father in particular—in The Awakening to help explain the derivation of Edna's desire to be her own person that she is ultimately willing to sacrifice her life to feel free.

One of the earliest pictures we have of Edna's childhood occurs as Edna is looking out over the sea and recalls "...a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out at the water" (Chopin 29-30). Considering that Edna strongly identifies the sea as a place for "...the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation" (Chopin 25), there is a strong hint that Edna considers that scene to be the only one presented in the novel from her childhood where she is outside of the influences of her male relations and able to be in a place of complete "solitude" and "inward contemplation." Standing alone as that memory does in its relationship to the freedom of the sea, it may have been the last time Edna had that sense of feeling of being able "...to control the working of her body and her soul" (Chopin 47) as she later identifies swimming in the ocean (which Chopin parallels in the meadow memory) to be. After this point, Edna's life fell into the predetermined female pattern of crushes, courtship, marriage, and childbearing. Yet when she does begin to attempt to cast off her predetermined role and become her own person, it can be read as Edna trying to free herself from her father's influence in the same manner detailed above as in Lawrence's novel.

The most telling hint that this may be the relationship that Edna most strongly resists is actually revealed in the thought of her husband, Léonce, who realizes, "The Colonel was perhaps unaware that he had coerced his own wife into the grave" (Chopin 119) when the subject of Léonce's leniency toward his wife comes up. However, that leniency on the part of Léonce is perhaps exactly the reason Kate is with her husband; he will not coerce her. Instead, he evinces "uniform devotion" (Chopin 14). In fact, the one time he tries to coerce her, she easily rebuffs him without any further argument on his part (Chopin 53). She will not let Léonce treat her as her mother was treated. In this way, Edna tries to rebel and escape her father and the fate of her mother, like many of Lawrence's characters try to escape their parents' fates.

By the time Edna's father visits, Edna is attempting to convince herself that neither he nor anyone else will coerce her "into the grave" as the Colonel did to his wife. Edna goes about this by "...serving him and ministering to his wants" not because she has to, but because "[i]t amused her to do so" (Chopin 115). Similarly, throughout the visit, Edna finds herself for the first time able to enjoy her father's company because she now sees herself as choosing to spend time with him and to take his side in an argument with her husband on the subject of horse-racing, in which Léonce once again proves himself the opposite of the reckless gambler the Colonel is implied to be:

Mr. Pontellier himself had no particular leaning toward horse racing, and was even rather inclined to discourage it as a pastime, especially when he considered the fate of that bluegrass farm in Kentucky (Chopin 116).

Again, the scene shows Edna's attraction to her husband as perhaps being the opposite of her father.

Ultimately, Edna convinces herself of her autonomy and free will by telling herself that this is what she is choosing to do, but fails to realize that she is still in the position of doing exactly what her father wishes her to do within her role as a female and as a daughter. She may not be as free as she thinks, but it does not dawn on her until much later, when she realizes the trap her biology has laid for her. As pointed out by Adéle Ratignolle, Edna must always "[t]hink of the children...[r]emember them" (Chopin 182). Beginning with the influence of her father, Edna had been removed from that moment in the meadow of individuality and solitude and shoehorned into the role first of daughter, and later of a wife. While she may have at first believed that by escaping her father she could escape her role, she ultimately realizes that, because of the trap her body has laid, she can never escape the role of mother; she can never be fully free. Thus, it is no surprise when Edna ultimately chooses to attempt to return to that last independent moment in her memory by going to the one place she associates with it, the sea. Also, because her desire to escape her father and thus the fate of her own mother as one of being dominated and "coerced...into the grave," it is no wonder she chooses to take the one, final course of action that guarantees such will not be the case: she drowns herself.

To read the second essay, click here.

GRE Update

Holy crap! I finally got my official GRE scores back with the official percentile rankings that will go out to grad schools. Not only does the new score report give me the Analytical Writing scores I didn't get immediately after the test, but there are other differences as well. Allow me to elaborate:

Verbal—640 out of 800 and the 90^th percentile
This is the same score, but apparently the real percentile is a one percent drop from the original estimate. In hindsight, I probably could have scored a bit higher if I had studied word lists and such that are published instead of figuring I was good enough at vocabulary and confining my study strictly to practice tests.

Quantitative—730 out of 800 and the 75^th percentile
This score is actually a ten point increase from the score that was reported to me upon test completion. I won't complain about that. However, even with the ten point raise in score, my percentile ranking dropped three percent from the original estimate. Well fooey on them. It would have been nice to hit the 80^th percentile, but I'll live. Yet I can't help but wish I had taken the GRE immediately after graduating. I probably would have done about the same on the Verbal and Analytical Writing sections, but had I remembered all my calculus and had been as proficient at math as I was as a sophomore, I'll bet I could have hit 800 (perfect score) on this section. Considering how much I felt like "I used to know how to do this in calculus and now I don't have enough time/recollection to do it otherwise, I'll just take an educated guess," and I still got 730, 800 isn't really much of a stretch.

Analytical Writing—6.0 out of 6.0 and 96^th percentile
Woo! Can't get any better than a perfect score. I'm surprised. I was expecting more in the area of 5.0 or 5.5 on the section. I knew I did well, but I didn't know I did that well. I guess the 96^th percentile means that about 4 percent of testees get perfect scores, which seems a little high, but oh well.

Overall, I did well enough that I sincerely doubt I'll be taking the GRE again unless I find some reason to suspect that my Verbal score is too low, though it should be adequate, I think.

Depressing Music! Woo!

I got this from Joel, who got it from someone else, and so on.

10 albums randomly selected from my collection:

Green Day—Insomnia
When I think of Green Day, I'm amazed that for such a prolific and ludicrously successful band, they are given short shrift for their immense influence on the music world. With the help of Offspring, they basically resurrected punk music. Some days I curse them for inspiring such trash as Blink 182 or MXPX, but I wouldn't give up any of their first three CDs. Everything since then has been solid, but without Dookie and Insomnia, rock music would not be what it is today.

Distrubed—Believe
Admittedly, I bought Disturbed's first album, The Sickness because I enjoyed the raw anger and emotion of their singles. Upon purchase, it turns out that there is little depth beyond the four singles on that album. However, their second alubum is, in my opinion, a defining rock album. It is everything one likes about Distrubed from the first album, but under control and much, much more consistent. This is one of only six or seven albums where I truly enjoy every song from front to back. It isn't as top-loaded with radio songs as the first album, but it's better music.

Ugly Kid Jo—America's Most Wanted
Heh, this is the second CD I ever owned as a kid behind Will Smith's Code Red (terrible). It is freaking hilarious to this very day. I can't even say how many times I've listened to "Everything about You," but that's classic. I also like his cover of "Cat's Cradle" for what it's worth.

Rob Zombie—Hellbilly Deluxe
Pfft. The best metal album of the last ten years in my opinion. There is not one single song on this album I don't enjoy rocking out to. Zombie is not only a master at catchy hooks, but he knows how to kick a listener's endorphins into overdrive. I can't think of a single hard rock album as consistent from front to back.

Dave Matthews—Live at Luther College
I very much enjoyed this when I first bought it in high school. In fact, I think that this two-disk acoustic album is much better than Dave's regular stuff. However, my musical tastes have changed and I don't listen to it much anymore&mash;though I do still listen and enjoy from time to time on a purely nostalgac level.

Nirvana—In Utero
There isn't much I can say about Nirvana. This is more experimental and a little harder to appreciate than Nevermind from a pure enjoyment perspective, but I'm convinced it is every bit as brilliant in its own way. Listen to the entire album straight through with an ear for themes to get what I'm saying.

Collective Soul—Collective Soul
This was my favorite band for a couple years. They are damn close to christian rock given their spiritual roots, though the songs have nothing directly to do with Christianity. I enjoyed them for their thoughtful lyrics and heavy edge. I don't listen to this CD anymore, but I still regard it as one of the 6–7 CDs that is listenable from front to back.

Pink Floyd—The Wall
Whoa. Talk about coherency and story front to back, I can probably write essays on this album if I were to try. Though it is far from my favorite album to listen to, it may be the greatest rock album ever in my book from a combination of lyric, musical, and overall effect perspectives. Seriously. Listen to it as a whole and then disagree.

Godsmack—Faceless
Of Godsmack's three albums, this is the least enjoyable, though I still find it well-worth the purchase with four or five solid singles. They are still my favorite rock band to put in when I'm having a shitty day and I want to break shit.

Tool—Anemia
If you at all like metal, hard rock, or deep lyrics, just go buy this album. Seriously, there isn't a single metal band that is more musically talented than Tool. There just isn't. Don't argue.

What is the total amount of music files on your computer?

1,311 songs.

The last CD you bought is:

Chevelle—Wonder What's Next

What is the song you last listened to before this message?

Incubus—"Pardon Me"

Five songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:

Nine Inch Nails—"Into the Void"
Jimmy Eat World—"The Middle"
Tool—"Anemia"
Buck Cherry—"For the Movies"
Garbage—"Only Happy When It Rains"

Who are you gonna pass this stick to?

Whatever sad SOB actually reads this blog, I guess.

Eerie, isn't it?

next to of course god by ee cummings

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

*          *          *

Although I can't find when this specific poem first appeared, given the fact that ee cummings died in 1962, I find it amusing that this poem is so appropriate today. Whether it was written before or after 1984, I think reading into the relationship between the two works is a very constructive exercize. I'd recommend it. As the poem stands by itself, I find it most instructive as relates to its focus on rhetoric. I have quite a bit to say about this poem, but I would rather recommend you read it two or three times for yourself and get a real grip on what's going on. No need for my judgement to cloud over yours.

Many Voices

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

I admit, when I first read The Sun Also Rises for a class on Mondern Literature, I was not enamored. It struck me as overly minimalistic and angst-ridden.

Now that I'm taking another Modern Literature class, four years later, I actually found I enjoyed Hemingway this time around. I read In Our Time through twice before writing an essay on it and found I had a much better grip on it for the redundant reading. Some of the fifteen stories in particular are more striking than others (I personally was drawn to "The Three Day Blow," "Soldier's Home," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "Mr. and Mrs. Eliott," and "Big Two-Hearted River"), but really it takes the collection taken as a whole to achieve its full effect.

Really, each story is made up of two parts: there's the main story, then there is a 40-200 word italicized section at the beginning of each story. The two sections are in no way related to each other plotwise, but they seem to very subtly comment, inform, and enhance each one another.

Hemingway comes at the reader with a plethora of voices, rhythms, and issues that, while they are not always related to one another (though about half the stories employ the same character, Nick Adams), are necessary to be taken as a whole to get the entire experience of what he's trying to say. His favorite themes seem to be war, violence (not necessarily always the war kind), loss (in many, many forms), the healing power of nature, and the right way to live. Each story generally has a little bit to inform the reader about each, and then the last story, "Big Two-Hearted River," picks up and completes all these threads. Especially the second time through, this culmination was quite an experience.

Overall, In Our Time is a very quick and painless read, but rewards deeper contemplation. If the themes I listed above are of interest, then I recommend. If contemplative, minimalist writing is favored, then I recommend. If you're looking for excitement or an obvious message, then I don't recommend. It's as simple and complex as that.

My Most Enjoyable Authors

Inspired by Joel's lists of what he's read, watched, or listened to lately, here are my ten most enjoyable authors—prose only. I'm not saying these are my ten greatest writers, but the ten (in order) whom I savor and enjoy to endless and perhaps even obsessive amounts.

1. Kurt Vonnegut


2. David Mitchell


3. Don Delillo


4. Jeanette Winterson


5. Haruki Murakami


6. Jose Saramago


7. E.M. Forester


8. William Faulkner


9. Michel Foucault


10. James Joyce

You might be thinking, "Gee, Modernism and especially Postmodernism are his favorite periods." You would be damn right. The only author on this list that is far, far underrepresented is David Michell. The man has been a Booker Prize finalist for two of his first three novels and he is not yet 35 people! If you enjoy any of the other PoMo authors on this list, you absolutely must pick up one of his three award-winning novels: Ghostwritten, number9dream, or Cloud Atlas. To do otherwise would be a crime against all that is good and right in this world.

Read if You Dare...

Well, I said I'd post my first essay for my "Modern Novel" class, and here I go.

First, the assignment (paraphrased):

1. In the first part, take one of the chapters of In Our Time and write a short essay about how the two parts in it connect.


2. In the second part, write about "Big Two-Hearted River" in relation to the chapter you have studied.

Analysis of "The Three Day Blow"

One striking difference between "Chapter IV" of Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time and many of the previous chapters is that in both the opening, italicized section and the story, "The Three Day Blow," begin with their characters being in a surprisingly good mood. The soldiers in the opening section seem quite pleased with themselves, describing the barrier they have erected with adjectives such as "perfect," "priceless," and "topping." In fact, they were "frightfully put out" when they had to retreat (43). In a similar way, Nick is in a good mood—and why not? He's relaxing by the fire with a friend, he'll be going hunting the next day, and he is having a good conversation with Bill about things he enjoys "on a high plane (54)." However, these upbeat attitudes shared by the two sections of the story are far from what they appear. They are instead subordinated to and merely another form of the more dominant theme that emerges through comparison of the two sections: screens of an intangible, transparent, and devious nature.

The primary screen, that one which is most obvious, is the "...big old wrought-iron grating from the front of a house" that the soldiers use to barricade the bridge. We are led to understand that what is so useful about this screen is that it is "[t]oo heavy to lift and you could shoot through it... (43)." In other words, it has been turned into an effective way to kill enemy soldiers. Yet it is even more useful applied to "The Three Day Blow" as the primary key for unlocking the more complex screens that Nick has employed.

At first glance, there does not seem to be any screens in or around Nick's section of the chapter. The only one ever named is the screen near the fireplace which Bill warns Nick not to "dent the screen," which Nick is careful to avoid doing (47). Yet even such a minor screen has an importance in the context of the story as it unfolds. What will happen when screens are dented, broken, or rendered ineffective? In each case to follow, there will be consequences if such a breaking of the screen were to take place. Had the soldiers' screen broken, it would probably have meant their deaths. But although the soldiers' screen does not break, it is rendered ineffective through a different means, and they are forced to retreat. In this context, the near denting of a seemingly insignificant screen takes on a greater meaning. But although no other screens are evident in Nick's story, they are there.

First, consider the purpose of alcohol in the story. Like the Soldiers' screen, it is insubstantial, but effective. Obviously, it isn't something that can be seen or felt, but it is a sort of screen for emotions and thoughts one would rather keep out. For instance, twice in the story, alcohol seems to be Nick's reaction to feeling alone. When Nick initially wishes for the presence of the authors Chersterson and Walpole, perhaps knowing the impossibility of achieving this desire, his first response is to agree with Bill's suggestion, "Let’s get drunk (51)." Later, when he considers "[h]e might never se [Marjorie] again," his first response is, "Let's have another drink" as a way to block the welling of unpleasant emotion. Yet even as the alcohol is proving as an invisible screen behind which he can hide, it is also a screen from which, like the soldiers, he and Bill can still "shoot through it" by criticizing authors like Walpole and Chesterson ("I guess [Chesterson's] a better guy...[b]ut Walpole's a better writer (51)") and by pointing out how fishing is "...better than baseball (55)."

Again like the soldiers, Nick is quite pleased with the barricade he has chosen to use, but neither proves as infallible as either Nick or the soldiers had hoped. Certainly the soldiers are happy with their barrier, the adjectives quoted above attest to how pleased they are. So too pleased is Nick. He points out about his father, "He claims he's never taken a drink...He's missed a lot, (52)" inferring that alcohol is a terrible thing to have missed. Nick is as proud of his barrier as the soldiers are of theirs. Even drunk, Nick feels "...quite proud of himself...thoroughly practical (53)" even after knocking over a pan of food. Yet, again, the alcohol shields him from any such negative emotions as guilt or blame which would likely attack him if he were to knock over the same pan sober.

But fallibility of their barriers turns out to be the problem both for the soldiers and for Nick: something will somehow get through. For the soldiers, "...the flank had gone, and we had to fall back." Not surprisingly they were "frightfully put out (43)" by this occurrence. Nick loses his screen in the same way. Nick did not expect to be exposed to a threat over which he had no control; in this case, it was Marjorie that flanked him. Nick, like the soldiers, could have held out indefinitely on his own, but in both cases, their peers, whether other soldiers or Bill, rendered the screens useless. All of a sudden, Nick's barrier was gone: "The liquor had all died out of him and left him alone...He wasn't drunk. It was all gone (57)." All of a sudden, upon losing their screens, both Nick and the soldiers were no longer in the good moods they were in as the story began. But what was it, specifically, that causes both the soldiers and Nick to be so attached to their barriers in the first place?

Another hint at this answer is found in a third screen found in "The Three Day Blow" in the form of a mirror. The mirror mimics the soldiers' screen in a different manner than does the alcohol, and in this case it is seen in reverse, from Nick's story to the Soldiers'. The way in which the mirror can be interpreted as a screen for Nick is that when he looks into it he does not see a reflection. Instead, "He smiled at the face in the mirror and it grinned back at him. He winked at it and went on. It was not his face but it didn't make any difference (54)." In other words, Nick is seeing something else through the mirror that is not he, though he cannot touch or personally interact with that image, as though they were separated by an invisible, yet solid barrier. It even seems like a jolly, likeable image in the way "...it grinned back at him." In the same way, the soldiers see the enemy officers in their uniform, definitely an "other" as seen through their screen which serves much the same function in keeping the officers and soldiers out of contact. Again, the soldiers seem to feel quite cordial to the officers, remarking how "very fine (43)" they are.

One way to interpret this analogy is to assert that of course the image Nick sees through the mirror is his own, even if he doesn't seem to think so. He simply does not associate himself with that image. Under this interpretation, Hemingway is implying that the enemies the solders are firing at are, too, in some way the soldiers themselves. It is not that two enemies in war are so different (they are all people, just on different sides of a national boundary); it is just that each side refuses to associate itself with the enemy. This is what makes war possible.

When considered together, these screens begin to illuminate that there is one screen both the soldiers and Nick are using from whence all the screens noted above are derived. The biggest screen of all is the good mood and upbeat attitudes that dominate much of the story. It is a screen between Nick and the solders and their true feelings. Nick's happiness, whether artificially created through alcohol or because he feels like "[t]here was not anything that was irrevocable (59)" is his tool to delude himself into belittling the cares and mistakes of his past by putting such them into a context where they don't hurt. For the soldiers, their barrier on the bridge is a thing to feel happy about that will take their cares off the fact that they are in fact killing people who are likely remarkably similar to themselves. It is only when this ultimate screen is dented—through the denting of those less important ones as Nick is careful not to do at the fireplace—that reality and the unhappiness that Nick and the soldiers truly feel sets in.

*               *               *

As noted in the previous section, one characteristic of "The Three Day Blow" in Hemingway's In Our Time that stands out among the stories that immediately surround it is the upbeat attitude that Nick displays for much of the story. This is also a trait present, and most evident, in "Big Two-Hearted River." However, the difference in the quality of the happiness of the two stories is what is most noticeable. As established above, the quality of Nick's happiness in "The Three Day Blow" is artificially created at times through alcohol and at times through self-delusion, thinking that "[t]here was not anything that was irrevocable (59)." Meanwhile, "Big Two-Hearted River" is remarkable for the authenticity of Nick's happiness. The difference is not most noticeable in the way he lives or what he does; it is in the way his actions reflect a healthier relationship with time—past, present, and future.

In the first paragraph of "The Three Day Blow," we are introduced to Nick walking through a bare orchard where "[t]he fruit had been picked...Nick stopped and picked up a Wagner apple from beside the road, shiny in the brown grass from the rain (45)." This image leaves us with the impression of an apple that is as out of place as it can be: fruit where all the fruit is gone and bright and standing out in front of a dull, drab background. It's as if by the act of picking up the apple, Nick is admitting to an attraction for something out of place—as if he himself feels as out of place and is resisting being where he is, as is this solitary apple in a fall storm. As the story rolls on, we again and again find Nick escaping from the immediacy of life. He uses the screens of alcohol, delusion, and therefore the happiness described above as ways to keep his cares at bay. He speaks of baseball and authors and alcohol ("'[the whiskey's] got a swell smoky taste,' Nick said, and looked at the fire... (46).")

What Nick doesn't talk about until Bill brings it up is what is truly consuming him, "All he knew was that he once had Marjorie and that he had lost her...That was all that mattered (57)." Suddenly, Nick's former happiness is entirely erased. Before Nick admits this, there is no suggestion whatsoever of Marjorie or that this is the one topic that is "all that mattered" to him. We discover here how consumed Nick has become with the past, his mistakes, and how he cannot let them go peacefully. The only way Nick is able to repress the past again is to delude himself into thinking he can go back, that "...he could always go into town on Saturday night (61)," and he technically could. But from both the previous story, "The End of Something" and, as he says, "I couldn't help it...All of a sudden everything was over...It was my fault (58)," it truly is over. He just doesn't know how to admit it.

"Big Two-Hearted River" finds Nick at a much later and greatly altered point in his life. Instead of trying to search for something else—something different or out of place—we find Nick very much at peace with himself and his present. Instead of remarking on an apple, Hemingway goes out of his way to give at least six instances of Nick remarking the "...sweet fern, growing ankle high..." that covers the non-scorched land through which Nick travels. He even picks some so "...he smelled it as he walked (182)," displaying a oneness with his physical surroundings that he lacked before. Also, rather than being struck by the apple that sticks out in the previous story, Nick is now struck by how the grasshoppers blend in. "...He realized that they had all turned black from living in the burned-over land." They had adapted to the "burned-over land" as a way to better survive by blending into their environment. Nick realizes the value of this, and questions "...how long they would stay that way (181)." In other words, when the land heals they'll be at a disadvantage until they change back to brown—but eventually adapt back they would. These two examples of Nick reconciling with nature suggest a parallel with his own inner healing from "The Three Day Blow" fascination with being almost against nature as the apple of the first story suggests. Nick is finally content to be where he is.

A powerful clue to this newfound contentment is the style Hemingway uses in "Big Two-Hearted River." Instead of Nick focusing on baseball or books or booze as in the previous story, he is mostly occupied with his immediate present. He focuses on what is present and what Nick is doing. The style of writing is, for long stretches, descriptive and reportorial:

Nick ate a big flapjack and a smaller one, covered with apple butter. He put apple butter in the third cake, folded it over twice, wrapped it in oiled paper and put it in his shirt pocket. He put the apple butter jar back in the pack and cut bread for two sandwiches (197-198).

It isn't that, as in many other stories, Hemingway is shying away from emotion for fear of dark thoughts and feelings such as the Marjorie memories that attack Nick on "The Three Day Blow." Instead, Hemingway makes the point that the past is no longer a source of pain for Nick. He is able to be present without fear now with those things that concern him in the present. To further this point, Hemingway makes sure we know that Nick hasn't forgotten his past; he is simply now at peace with it.

Nick's peace with his past is clear from the moment he is off the train in "Big Two-Hearted River." In "The Three Day Blow," Nick comforts himself knowing he can go back to town. Now, in "Big Two-Hearted River," he actually does try to go back to town only to find it is not there. Instead of the town, he finds scorched countryside and foundations where the town used to be. But Hemingway gives the impression that the town is not what concerns Nick. Instead, Nick acts very much unconcerned that the town is not there. He simply continues on his journey, not giving the town another thought. His first stop is the bridge to watch the trout struggle upstream where "Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling (178)." While this seems similar to his reaction to Bill talking about Marjorie in the previous story, we are corrected two paragraphs later when we are told, "He was happy (179)." Hemingway gives us a reason for this happiness: "He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him." In other words, Nick has finally mastered the fears, needs, and desires which had, in the previous story, mastered him.

On the occasion that Nick is affected by the past, he shows his ability to master it and keep it in the past where it belongs. Upon recollecting the last time he ever saw his friend, Hopkins, the story ends, "Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story (191)." He handles the loss of a friend by expressing the sentiment the story leaves him with ("The coffee was bitter"), but able to laugh at the joke, put it into the context of an ending, and move on. This contrasts sharply with his hopeful self-deceit he goes through with Marjorie. In the latter case, he is only able to go on by denying there is an end. On the occasion that Nick does let the moment overwhelm him, after hooking the large trout, he is able to re-presence himself by allowing time to slow back down and stretch out:

He sat on the logs, smoking, drying in the sun, the sun warm on his back, the river shallow ahead entering the woods, curving into the woods, shallows, light glittering, big water-smooth rocks, cedars along the bank and white birches, the logs warm in the sun, smooth to sit on, without bark, gray to the tough; slowly the feeling of disappointment left him (205).

Nick is able to re-establish himself into the present and let the past and his disappointment slip away. Next time he loses a trout his reaction is, "He reeled in and holding his hook in his hand, walked down the stream (208)." Not only has he put the event immediately in the past, but the difference in the two reactions to losing trout show off his ability to adapt—much like the grasshoppers.

Evidently, Nick has learned a great deal and made large strides in the intervening time between the two stories about how to live in the present and how to deal with the past. From Nick's varied experiences, Hemingway seems to suggest that the best way to live in the present is to actually allow oneself to be surrounded by it; not to resist it and to adapt when necessary. Certainly, it probably took the grasshoppers time to adapt to the scorched land, and it will take them yet more time to re-adapt, during which time they'll be exceptionally good prey for birds and such, when the land heals. However, as Hemingway was quite probably aware, and he shows Nick to be aware, is that it takes time, pain, and often loss to adapt—much like the soldier of "Soldeir's Home." The only fear is when one is so far out of one's natural element that adaptation is not possible. The grasshopper who jumps from the jar, only to drown in the river, oblivious to what jumping really means. But once the adaptation has taken place, and Nick is able to live out of the past, which allows him to enjoy and control his present. This seems to be what Hemingway wants to say about the right way to live with one's past and present.

And the right way to live with the future? Hemingway seems to say that with control of the present comes an ability to influence the future, so don't rush it. Nick can fish where he wants. In "The Three Day Blow," the story ends with Nick and Bill rushing to join Bill's father shooting in the swamp. But by the end of "Big Two-Hearted River," Nick realizes that "In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it." Instead, he knows that if it is necessary for his survival, "[t]here will be plenty of days coming when he could fish in the swamp (212)."

Hemingway, Ernest: In Our Time. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons: ????. (Year not listed. The Scribner Library is the series.)

A Friend's Experience of Stephen King

"reading his books gives me blue balls of the brain
hehehehe
wow this is really good woo i cant wiat until
WHAT?!
THATS ALL I GET?
GODFUCKING DAMNIT"

I can't say I agree, but that first analogy is golden.

*Snicker*

"...[director] Boll remains mainstream cinema's most awesomely incompetent living filmmaker."—Slant Magazine

Just In Case You're Curious...

I mentioned before that I was going to take the GRE last weekend; well, here are my scores:

640 out of 800 Verbal—91^st percentile
720 out of 800 Quantitative—78^th percentile

I have to wait for two weeks to find out my Analytical Writing score, but I get the feeling I'll score 5-5.5 out of 6 on it—though I couldn't say what percentile that would put me in.

Anyways, I'm happy with the score. It should make up for my lazy 3.5 GPA in college.

Now I just have to worry about my English Subject test in the fall and my writing sample this summer. Yaay!

The Grammatical Fiction

You often hear of Communism that the ideals are great, it is only the execution that leaves much to be desired. It is the people who corrupt the system that are the flaw. However, in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler makes the point that it is a fundamental flaw in the logic and philosophy of Communism that leads to its fall. In the novel, Rubashov plays the part of Trotsky (though not perfectly) and Number One can only be Stalin.

Rubashov is the idealist on whose back and through whose blood Communism is able to succeed. He believes in its ultimate good so wholeheartedly, that he believes the end justifies the mean. Here is where there is a problem. Rubashov is arrested. He is the last of the "old guard" still alive. Number One has had the rest killed. Sure, Number One is the dictator who is consolidating power and eliminating potential rivals. Yet Koestler shows that it isn't even Number One's greed for power that is the true downfall of Communism. It is that any logic with the notion that the means justifies the end will ultimately fail.

Rubashov is captured. "The Grammatical Fiction" of "I," that of rights and fair treatment, begins to speak to him that maybe the means do not always justify the ends. Has he known it all along? Was he really the idealist he made himself out to be? Ultimately, he is unable to break from his old habits and he gives in willingly to serve the state that he still believes in, regarless of the fact that it is killing him needlessly and he knows it. The forces he has helped to set in motion are too strong and he's too old to change his ways.

I'm inclined to say this is a better, deeper, and more intuitive indictment of communism than one will find in any other fiction of the era, especially the highly biased Animal Farm. Koestler was a long-time communist before finally realizing its flaws. It is truly a great book, though definately not for the mainstream.

Getting Lazier as I Get Busier

...If that makes sense, at least. As I take on more in life, this blog get neglected—not that I was a posting nazi before or anything, but I came to the site just in time to see a tumbleweed blowing through.

Seriously, I'm fucking swamped right now. I'm working on my copyediting certification through the University of Washington, taking a literature course on the Modern Novel, still working full-time as an editor at Raising More Money, and, to top it all off, I've been using all my spare time the last couple weeks studying for my GRE General Test, which is tomorrow, Jan. 22. God damn. That's all I can say.

I must say I'm actually pretty confident as far as the GRE goes, though. My pretests were hitting about 90th percentile in Verbal, 90th percentile in analytical writing and 80th percentile in math. If I can keep up those numbers tomorrow, that should make up for my GPA deficiencies (3.5) when applying to grad schools.

However, I have been reading, so I need to write a few book thoughts for those that I've finished (I'm halfway through four books right now...ick).

I'll also be posting the essays I write for my Modern Novel class. By next weekend I will have up a lengthy essay on Hemingway's In Our Time. Tomorrow night, after my test, I'll post a couple of book blurbs.

Although I don't think anyone reads this, if someone does, keep checking, if only weekly! I'll be better.

Not as Democratic as You Thought

A People's History of the United States
This was easily the most interesting history I've ever read. Why? Imagine reading a history where 90% of the US historical figures you've ever been taught to admire and revere in high school history turned out to be a bunch of filthy bastards. That's what you get from this book. Well, they may not be that bad, but Zin focuses more on how figures such as Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Columbus, Andrew Jackson, etc. helped to repress, or just exterminate, minorities and the lower classes so that the upper classes could thrive. That's really what this book is about: oppression of "inferior" classes in the United States throughout the country's history.

Zin certainly has his own viewpoint and has chosen what he's going to focus on. He does not deny that these leaders have done good things as well, but he rightly points out that a history that covers everything would be pretty much impossible. Hence, he chooses to focus on the downtrodden and the way US history has treated them. One does not so much doubt his facts or statistics either. His assertions are well-supported by numerous writings of both famous and more anonymous figures who were actually there and in the trenches as well as by facts and statistics from various government agency archives. Again, the only thing to keep in mind is that he uses these statistics to his own advantage. Like any other historian, Zin's point of view is not the objective "truth." No one can supply that.

The only real criticism that I have about the book is best exemplified by the chapter "The Upcoming Revolt of the Guards" where Zin lays out his theory for the only way to truly change the Capitalist system to a more people-friendly system. While I have no objection to the overtly socialist ideals he sets forth, I am critical of his argument (or lack thereof really). Instead of providing us with justification and reasoning as to why this is the course of action we ought to take, he instead engages in the same shallow rhetoric for that brief chapter that makes The Communist Manifesto a less-than-convincing document. Besides, while I make no claim that history should not be argumentative or prescriptive (it always has been and always will be), I don't like it to be so blatant about it.

All in all, Zin's A People's History is a great and illuminating look at the repressed side of American history that everyone should be aware of, whether they agree with Zin's point of view or not.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Though this may be a romance, it isn't one in the Nora Roberts sense of the word (thankfully). Rather, it is a romance in the Shakespearian sense that it is neither comedy nor tragedy, and it does have romantic aspects sprinkled throughout. However, it is a dark, brooding novel that focuses far more on loss, revenge, and the deterioration of the human soul than it does on love or anything else the average person might conceive of as "romantic."

In many ways, it parallels Milton's Paradise Lost, if in a metaphorical sense. We have Heathcliff as the devil (as he is often referred to throughout) and his fall from grace. We have both Catherines as Eve-type characters in slightly different ways, and as I explain below, it is their choices (often under the infernal influence of Heathcliff) that determine the future of the narrative, much as Eve's choice determines the future of humanity. We even have the loss of paradise toward the end, but with the hope of eventual salvation and a return thereto (i.e., as Paradise Regained is suggested in the last book of Milton's epic).

The characters of Wuthering Heights are a generally unlikable bunch of flawed human beings provoking and being provoked by each other. Strikingly realistic for a "romantic" novel. It is the strong, independent women of the novel who are the foundational characters around which the book revolves. They are the focus of attention, and it is only through them that the male characters are able to accomplish whatever ends they set out to accomplish. In fact, one of the main struggles of the book can be seen as the attempts of the women to remain independent of the male characters' repeated attempts at subjugation and control. Interestingly, it is always the women who end up with the choice as to result will prevail in each battle of this war.

In this sense, Wuthering Heights can be seen as a feminist novel, but not as a preaching one. Rather, Bronte seems to strive for the reader to understand the strength and resiliency of her women through their subtle control of the narrative and their resistence to the constant pressure that the male characters exert from attempting to take that power away. One final example of this is through the framing of the narrative itself. Though superficially told by Mr. Lockwood, he is initially relating Ellen Dean's story verbatim through the first half of the book. However, halfway through, he discards Ellen and "summarizes" the story she told him off-screen. In other words, he attempts to dominate the telling of the narrative as Heathcliff, Edgar, Hareton, and Hindley attempt to dominate the women of the novel at various points. Yet, like all the other dominations throughout the novel, this narrative domination fails as well. Ultimately, Ellen is able to reassert herself as the official storyteller over the last few chapters, but what was the effect of losing her immediate voice for the intermediate period, I'll leave up to you to interpret. I'm still working it out myself.

Enjoyable? That's beside the Point

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
This novel is the winner of this year's Booker Prize over a book I loved and ardently supported, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Did it deserve to beat out Mitchell's opus? Arguably, yes. Where Mitchell's magnificent novel is raw, vibrant, explosive, exciting, poetic, and prophetic, The Line of Beauty is refined, subtle, understated, touching, eloquent, and reflective. How is that for two opposites? Hollinghurst excels in creating a prose where everything is vividly rendered from mood, to tone, to atmosphere, to pacing, to setting, to plot, all with an economy of words. That is, though the book is so perfectly realized, it still retains the quality of perfectly translucent prose. The reader is not distracted from the story by Hollinghurst showing off his literary virtuoso like Mitchell sometimes can be accused of doing. Rather, this book is a perfectly crafted work of determined, fully realized art. Hollinghurst runs a massive gamut of themes from art and beauty, to obession and love, to wealth and morality, to sex and power, and beyond. This is a deadly serious and utterly adept creative work that is here to inspire and mature the reader—never to entertain. It is not always fun to read like Mitchell, but it sure as hell earns every ounce of praise it receives.

Damn Me for a Lazy Bastid!

I've been spacing on this whole blog updating thingie...I promise myself to do better...starting with getting back into some heavy reading. I've been too lax about that lately.

Hi ho!

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
Like most of Vonngut's work, Slapstick is a critical look at American values and culture. It's told as a memior from the point of view of the last President of the United States before the fall from a technological height and back toward barbarism...which just might be better after all. While not pinnacle Vonnegut on the level of Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, or Slaughterhouse-5, it is better than what 99% of what is out there. Highly recommended.

All This for a Twig

The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer
The premise of this book is really simple: Why did the custom exist of the Priest of the Sacred Grove at Nemi having to be slain by his successor, who first had to pluck the fabled Golden Bough? From this premise, Frazer sets off on a course through anthropology and mythology to trace the course of human thought that ultimately culminated in this seemingly unspectacular, if barbarous, custom. While the book is long and often tedious, it is also often fascinating and always fabulously rewarding for those interested in mythology, anthropology, or literature.

Not as Smutty as I Expected

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
The man is an absolute master at relationships. I have not read any other writer that has his patience and skill at building complex, realistic relationships through the accumulation of minute detail. While the characters and plot are only adequate, the relationships between the characters, and the poetic prose, drove the novel and managed to keep me engaged the whole way through. I was surprised that this novel, at least, showed no indication of the smuttiness of which Lawrence has often been accused. Overall, a good introduction to a literary author who will get another look later.

Another Round Down, One to Go

Just in case any of you might have forgotten to check, the Booker Prize Shortlist was announced on Tuesday. As you can see, Cloud Atlas, my hopeful champion from before the longlist was even announced, made the cut and is still the runaway favorite to win. However, I do want to read Mitchell's closest competitor, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. It sounds like a fascinating and well-written novel. I can only count the days 'till the winner is announced on October 19. In other words, I gotta get reading. I suggest you all do the same. :-D

What a Great Pomo Novel

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
In number9dream, David Mitchell as much as admits that Norwegian Wood was the inspiration for his novel. I can see why. This is probably the most powerful and elegantly told novel of its kind short of The Catcher in the Rye. Major themes include death, isolation, and absence, but also devotion and love. It may be "just a love story" as some complain, but it is the most interesting and fascinating love story and postmodern coming of age tale I have ever read. I love this book.

Simply Complex?

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
This is a truly great novel. It's well-written, engrossing, poignant, and takes on a lot of the big issues. The difference is, it is comparatively up front about its issues, something many authors cannot do without keeping the story intact. It is at once complex yet simple to understand. I can see why it ranks so highly on the Radcliffe Top 100 Novels list. At the same time, I can also see why it doesn't even appear on the Modern Library's Top 100 Novels list. It doesn't have that sense of deep untertone and vast implications one often associates with great literature. So where do I stand on it? I respect Harper Lee's achievement in writing a true and important classic. At the same time, I often find myself more drawn to more challenging works. I'm glad I read it—I liked it—but it didn't give me that feeling of a mental workout that I enjoy.

Better Than I Expected

Shopgirl by Steve Martin
This book surprised me a little. It was actually probably a little more enjoyable for me than the better-regarded The Feast of Love (see below). Martin's writing is a sort of large vocabulary minimalism. It's underwritten if anything—a pleasant contrast to Baxter's overwriting. And, while it may not be nearly as polished as Baxter's book, it is far more earnest. You can tell Martin isn't trying to impress anyone; he's just writing. That carries weight with me. That said, I probably won't pick up another book of his on my own, I may try him again if something is strongly recommended.

"The Bittersweet Lies of Bokonon"

Frankly, I find it hard to believe in much. However, it's also interesting that there isn't much that I am unwilling to believe in. Rather, I prefer to hold no opinion in pretty much whatever matters in which it is more or less simple to get away with such sophistry.

Take, for instance, relious belief: I have none. However, I don't rule out anyone's beliefs. I mean, if pressed, all I would say about God and the universe is that, if there is a God, I honestly doubt anyone on earth is correct in their conception or worship of Him/Her/It. Considering the difference of opinion, it's almost inconceiveable that anyone has it exactly right. I figure that if I'm ever meant to know the truth, I will when I die or when God comes down to me in all His/Her/Its glory and personally explains&mash;even then, I may pass it off as my own insanity—that's always a possiblity. However, regarless, I don't really care what the truth is.

Hence, with the exception of day-to-day matters of life where an opinion is warranted, I have few firm beliefs. Instead, I find myself fascinated with learning as many points of view and schools of thought on each subject as possible. However, not every area of interest receives an equal amount of interest. In order I would rank my interests as follows:

1. Literature and Classics


2. Literary Criticism and Theory


3. Mythology


4. Philosophy


5. History


6. Anthropology


7. Religious Studies


8. Psychology


9. Sociology


10. Mathematics


11. Political Science


12. Physical Sciences

As you can see, I'm a true whore for the humanities. I feel like the humanities are more interested in expanding the mind to all various points of view while the physical sciences are focused on narrowing all possible points of view into one "truth." How logical does that really seem? No, seriously. If you don't see what I mean, I recommend The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.

It is rare when I actually have an opinion on a current event that is strong enough to impell me to action. The only thing I can currently think of as such an action item is the presidential race. I will vote for Kerry, because he is not Bush, who I think of as a moral and intellectual wasteland of a human being—a perception with which Kerry does not leave me.

However, I know that my opinions and beliefs are exactly what they are: not the truth. I sincerely doubt anyone knows the whole truth on any subject. In fact, the biggest complement I think I have ever received I received this past weekend; my best friend—oddly enough a devout, uber Mormon—told me he thinks my system of neutral belief is what he considers possibly the human ideal, and that he highly respects me for being able to stick to it, though he can't. What more can a person ask than that his diametric opposite praise him for that which he opposes?

Well, really, I can't say that I oppose other beliefs. Rather, I am more than happy to see anyone practice whatever system of beliefs they feel morally bound to. I may not believe what they do, but since there is little in which I believe, I would be grossly out of line to throw out the beliefs of anyone else. That would be hypocracy at its very highest level for me. I can't recall who said it first, but there is no saying I can say I adhere to more than, "to each his own." To an extent you can call that my belief...or nonbelief if you prefer. It's all the same to me.

"No Damn Cat, No Damn Cradle"

"I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or what was going to be.

"And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, 'I'm sorry, but I never could read one of those things.'

"'Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God,' I said, 'and, when God finds a minute, I'm sure he'll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand.'

"She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.

"She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing, [writes Bokonon]."

Another One Down

Blindness by Jose Saramago

Wow. I'd been hearing a lot about Saramago in the last few years, and I can't say I'm disappointed. This is an amazing novel about blindness on all levels. It is a brilliant allegory about fear, selfishness, and redemption. I can't think of a novel I've read lately that is more intellectually rewarding. However, if you don't much care for heavy intellectual effort in reading, take a pass. Otherwise, Blindness gets my highest recommendation.

Booker Prize Validation

Well everyone, it is once again time to get revved up for one of my very favorite events of the year...that's right, it's Booker Prize time!

That's right, the Booker's Longlist has been released. For those of you not in the know, the Booker Prize is the better version of the Pulizer Prize for Fiction or the National Book Award. The difference is that, while the two latter are U.S. only, the Booker is basically the entire English-speaking world except the United States. Moreover, it's picked solely on literary merit.

This year the Longlist is 22 novels. One of those novels happens to be the best novel I have read that has been published in the last five years, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Not only is it nominated, but the oddsmakers (yes, you have to love any country where betting on who will win a literary award is a big deal) have put Cloud Atlas as the biggest favorite to win ever as of the publication on the Longlist. Needless to say, I feel validated. My pick for the "next big author" over three years ago looks like it's going to pay off.

Anyways, they'll be announcing the Shortlist (final six) on Sept. 21. So, if you're a.) a book whore, or b.) a David Michell fanatic (as I am both), then mark that date on your calendar. I know I will.

This list will be simple enough; I am going to list each book I read since sometime in mid-June (which happens to be about as far back as I can remember with certainty). I'll write a short bit about each book.

The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer

In Progress

Blindness by Jose Saramago

In Progress

The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter

Meh. I'd say this is the most mediocre book I have read in a long time. It was strongly recommended to me by a friend and, since it was a finalist for the National Book Award a few years ago, I thought it might be worth reading. Now I remember why I respect the Booker Prize so much more than the National Book Award. The novel was fine—I'm not sorry I read it—but it is really not much more than a good story without a lot of substance behind it. I prefer novels that are more likely to make me ponder. The one literary element that really had potential, the book's namesake painting, was woefully underused as nothing more than an explanatory device. Probably not an author I'll try again.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

This proved to be much more fascinating than I'd feared. It's also been a sharply controversial book that has become known as one of the most influential books of all time regardless. Nominally, it is a theory on how scientific revolutions come to pass: the events that trigger them, the forms they take, and the path to their general acceptance. If you've ever heard of a scientific paradigm, this is where the notion comes from. This work, especially its notion of multiple perceptions of the same world, has also been applied to other disciplines outside of science. Highly recommended.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

A thoroughly refreshing African American novel. It is a story that touches less on racism (though it is there as an important subtext) and more on the lives and loves of the characters who are trapped within their own culture. However, Nattie and those around her do get out of the white culture for awhile, only to find that the basic human condition is unchanged no matter where one happens to be. Regardless, the book does wonders with unique, inspiring characters who grow and change over the course of the story and ultimately are able to locate themselves within the context of their surroundings. A book that definately gives a large nod to the works of Zora Neale Hurston.

White Noise by Don Delillo

No one is tapped into the dark underside of contemporary American culture like Don Delillo is. In White Noise, Delillo explores death and humanity's fear of death in an insightful and uniquely contemporary way. This may sound boring, but Delillo is an absolutely hilarious and fascinating writer. His philosophical dialog, while utterly unrealistic, is entertaining and astonishing in its complexity of ideas and connections. It is pure pleasure to read what his characters have to say about culture and all that it implies, especially in Delillo's conception of the new forms of dying unique to our time.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

This is the latest book by my favorite contemporary author. Like Ghostwritten and number9dream, this is written in Mitchell's near-trademarked transparent writing style. As a result of style and attention to detail, his chracters are well-realized and either highly likable or despicable as the situation calls for. For me, the best part is the usually deft manner in which he is able to employ his themes and literary pyrotechnics without sacrificing the enjoyability of the story. If you're interested in the nature of reality, destiny v. agency, post-colonialism, and human nature (among other themes), this is one highly enjoyable novel.

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

*Yaaaawn* I decided to read this book because it is the foundational text of the psychoanalytic school of literary criticism. T.S. Eliot, among others, lists it as an inspiration. Since lit crit is my bag, I thought I might as well read it. Yes, it is an important book about the reason why we dream and the processes that take place. It's ideas of displacement, condensation, wish-fulfillment, etc. are all important to literature, but this is the driest book I've ever read. Despite the clear, easy writing, it was a very difficult book to get through.

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels

This short and extremely influential document is the ideology that the USSR and communist China founded their governments upon. It is indeed incentiary writing about how the "history of civilization is the history of class struggle" and as capitalism continues to exploit the workers (the proletairat) and thereby widening the social gap between them and the upper-middle class (the burgiose), a revolution was inevitable. He proceeds to outline what this is going to look like and what the results will be. Unfortunately, he frequently indulges in questionable logic, incorrect assumptions and worst, an assuption that once the proletariat is in control, they'll want to give up their power eventually. Hah!

Brave New World: Revisited by Aldous Huxley

I read this directly after finishing Brave New World. This is Huxley's big, long essay where he essentially says: "see how fucking right I was?" His thesis is that the society he envisioned in Brave New World was coming to pass far more quickly than he imagined. He then goes on to detial the steps that are inexorably leading to our descent into totalitarianism. At the end, he suggests systems of eduction that he sees as the only way to prevent this almost certain and horrible future.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

This novel centers around outsiders: sane men in insane societies where art, beauty, and all the profound things in life are replaced with the sensual pleasures. Huxley envisioned this as the ultimate totalitarian state: one where everyone is happy and content with their stations in life, but no one is as free as they think. People are born into the system, live their lives in it, and die in it without ever realizing it exists.

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

I think I originally read this in 6^th or 7^th grade. I remember thinking it was okay, but not as good as White Fang. Well, it's a lot better than I remember. Aside of it's being about a dog, it's also about spirit, survival, will, and the primitive forces in anyone. It's a quick and easy read that I would recommend to anyone.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

I first read this as a sophomore in high school and remembered little-to-noen of it. On rereading it, I must say it was more enjoyable than I remembered. It is far from a "great work" in a literary sense, but it is a thorough, scathing, yet truly fair and honest satire about why communism can never work: humans (er, I mean pigs) do not have the necessary moral character to deny the corrupting influences of great power.

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

This novel truly surprised me. I had never heard of it before reading this list, and probably never would have pick it up either. Historical fiction has never siezed my interest. However, this is a fascinating book that is beautifully written and packs some very subtle satire and characters worth rooting for.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Wow. I did not particularly enjoy this book. Some parts are fascinating, but his experiment in natural living and in a more honest human economy just does not ring true to me. I can accept pieces of his arguments as useful, but on the whole, I'm far from a disciple. His indictment of society aside, I just don't find his alternative views as an improvement.

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault

Once again, Foucault is showing us that everything we know is wrong by tracing the history and evolution of discipline and punishment from the stocks and public executions of the 18th Century to the modern penitentiary system. He argues that despite the good intentions of the modern penal system, it has failed in its noble aims. What's more, on some level, society knows it has failed, but keeps it around anyway because it serves as a method of control which we cannot give up.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

This was my first Woolf novel. While it wasn't as difficult to read as I had been led to believe, it was difficult to gain an understanding of. That said, I found it a rewarding novel with some provocative existential and pyschological insights.

Howard's End by E.M. Forester

A surprisingly excellent book. It is simply and elegantly written, and easy to understand and appreciate. There are also more issues than I can begin to discuss simmering beneath the surface. However, one way to read it is a chronicle of the changing culture of England in the early 20th century. It's much more interesting than you heard.