When I read Miller's review of A Mercy to my wife, we had a discussion that reminded me that Professor Morrison's Nobel acceptance speech contained this passage:
"The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek--it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language--all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.... There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness."
Well, now. Don't I feel guilty for all the mean things I said about her nice little novel! I, with my little bit of knowledge of history and style, was just trying "to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness." Caught in the act.
Or maybe she just thinks it's good to destroy language, and I don't.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
emerging literary genre: the unhistorical novel
For those of you who subscribe to Commentary, here is an excellent review by Cheryl Miller of a new novel that you really should read. (That is, you really should read the review, not necessarily the novel.)
For those of you who don't, here's a taste of what you're missing by not reading the review or the novel:
It's the 1680s, and there's an Anabaptist community (think Amish) in New York, Milton, where lives a freethinking Dutchman named Vaark. Being a freethinker among Anabaptists, he doesn't exactly fit in. So he and his wife live in isolation on their farm, along with a young Native American woman they've taken in, one Lina, whose family and tribe died of smallpox, an African woman named Sorrow who went crazy during her passage to America on a slave ship, an African-American girl, Florens, who was given to Mr. Vaark by her mother in payment of her master's debt, and two male homosexual farm hands. This group of outcasts live in a kind of Edenic harmony (is Milton anywhere near Woodstock?) until Mr. Vaark gets bitten by the greedy capitalist bug and destroys their idyllic existence. (Notice how deftly I managed to avoid giving away any plot spoilers.)
The novel, then, narrates an unremarkable series of events for late-17th-century America, involving a pretty average household of that day. What sets the book apart is the writing--or the style, for you literary types--and the character development and the richness of historical detail.
At one point, for example, Florens says, "I like talk. Lina talk, stone talk, ever Sorrow talk"--a lovely picture of semi-literate rusticity if ever there was one. At another point, she says, "I am moving north where the sapling bends into the earth with a sprout that points to the sky. Then west to you." The reader is obviously meant to realize a deep truth about Florens--that she has at some point taken a remedial grammar course followed by a creative writing seminar--though this is never mentioned explicitly.
Or consider Lina's grief at Mr. Vaark's cutting down fifty trees without having first "asked their permission." Or her diagnosis of what is destroying him and them--apart from the obvious problems that "he is a man" and "a Europe": "Cut loose from the earth’s soul they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples." (If that analysis rings a bell, it's because it's straight out of Marx's Paris Manuscripts of 1845--or any of countless neo-Marxian discussions of alienated labor. Oh, sorry. Marx must have fished the ideas out of the residue of Native American wisdom--something he did, perhaps, during his period as a correspondent for a New York newspaper.)
Or this gem of the writer's craft: "Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone’s guess." Ouch. A little dropoff in the level of formality there.
STOP! What is going on here? What feebly written, pathetic piece of trash is this? Why is Commentary running a review of some self-published bit of illiteracy that some poor deluded person who doesn't know any better has paid to have printed and listed on Amazon? Shouldn't we just pass over this kind of ephemera in silence, and spare the feelings of whatever wannabe author produced this junk?
Well, the novel in question is A Mercy, the latest creation of Toni Morrison--who, you may recall, won the Nobel Prize (for literature!) back in 1993, and is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus; Special Consultant to the Director of the Princeton Atelier; and Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts, all at Princeton University.
What we have here, in short, is an example of the historical, cultural, and literary illiteracy begotten upon higher academia by multiculturalism, relativism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, neo-Marxianism, Freudianism, oppression studies, and a host of other isms and attitudes that often get lumped together as postmodernism--a cloud of unknowing that has been called "diversitarianism."
What to call such a book? It isn't a historical novel, clearly. I thought of calling it an "anachronistic novel," but that lacks punch. Let's dub this sort of thing the "unhistorical novel." It comforts me to know that it isn't only evangelicals who write them.
For those of you who don't, here's a taste of what you're missing by not reading the review or the novel:
It's the 1680s, and there's an Anabaptist community (think Amish) in New York, Milton, where lives a freethinking Dutchman named Vaark. Being a freethinker among Anabaptists, he doesn't exactly fit in. So he and his wife live in isolation on their farm, along with a young Native American woman they've taken in, one Lina, whose family and tribe died of smallpox, an African woman named Sorrow who went crazy during her passage to America on a slave ship, an African-American girl, Florens, who was given to Mr. Vaark by her mother in payment of her master's debt, and two male homosexual farm hands. This group of outcasts live in a kind of Edenic harmony (is Milton anywhere near Woodstock?) until Mr. Vaark gets bitten by the greedy capitalist bug and destroys their idyllic existence. (Notice how deftly I managed to avoid giving away any plot spoilers.)
The novel, then, narrates an unremarkable series of events for late-17th-century America, involving a pretty average household of that day. What sets the book apart is the writing--or the style, for you literary types--and the character development and the richness of historical detail.
At one point, for example, Florens says, "I like talk. Lina talk, stone talk, ever Sorrow talk"--a lovely picture of semi-literate rusticity if ever there was one. At another point, she says, "I am moving north where the sapling bends into the earth with a sprout that points to the sky. Then west to you." The reader is obviously meant to realize a deep truth about Florens--that she has at some point taken a remedial grammar course followed by a creative writing seminar--though this is never mentioned explicitly.
Or consider Lina's grief at Mr. Vaark's cutting down fifty trees without having first "asked their permission." Or her diagnosis of what is destroying him and them--apart from the obvious problems that "he is a man" and "a Europe": "Cut loose from the earth’s soul they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples." (If that analysis rings a bell, it's because it's straight out of Marx's Paris Manuscripts of 1845--or any of countless neo-Marxian discussions of alienated labor. Oh, sorry. Marx must have fished the ideas out of the residue of Native American wisdom--something he did, perhaps, during his period as a correspondent for a New York newspaper.)
Or this gem of the writer's craft: "Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone’s guess." Ouch. A little dropoff in the level of formality there.
STOP! What is going on here? What feebly written, pathetic piece of trash is this? Why is Commentary running a review of some self-published bit of illiteracy that some poor deluded person who doesn't know any better has paid to have printed and listed on Amazon? Shouldn't we just pass over this kind of ephemera in silence, and spare the feelings of whatever wannabe author produced this junk?
Well, the novel in question is A Mercy, the latest creation of Toni Morrison--who, you may recall, won the Nobel Prize (for literature!) back in 1993, and is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus; Special Consultant to the Director of the Princeton Atelier; and Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts, all at Princeton University.
What we have here, in short, is an example of the historical, cultural, and literary illiteracy begotten upon higher academia by multiculturalism, relativism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, neo-Marxianism, Freudianism, oppression studies, and a host of other isms and attitudes that often get lumped together as postmodernism--a cloud of unknowing that has been called "diversitarianism."
What to call such a book? It isn't a historical novel, clearly. I thought of calling it an "anachronistic novel," but that lacks punch. Let's dub this sort of thing the "unhistorical novel." It comforts me to know that it isn't only evangelicals who write them.
Sowell food for thought
Thomas Sowell puts so many things so well (hey! look at that!) Today's column, Power Of Life And Death Is In Our Words, is a good example. Here are three quotations that I thought hit the bull's eye:
"Unfortunately, people on the make seem to have a keener appreciation of the power of words, as the magic road to other power, than do people defending values that seem to them too obvious to require words."
"Barack Obama is today's most prominent example of the power of words. Conversely, the understated patrician style of country-club Republicans is no small part of their many problems."
"Republicans have always had more people who would make good presidents than people who would make good presidential candidates. So long as we have a democracy, that distinction is crucial."
"Unfortunately, people on the make seem to have a keener appreciation of the power of words, as the magic road to other power, than do people defending values that seem to them too obvious to require words."
"Barack Obama is today's most prominent example of the power of words. Conversely, the understated patrician style of country-club Republicans is no small part of their many problems."
"Republicans have always had more people who would make good presidents than people who would make good presidential candidates. So long as we have a democracy, that distinction is crucial."
finally, a stimulus that might help us
Economic historians are now pretty sure that the New Deal didn't end the Depression. It just prolonged it and deepened it into the Great Depression. World War II seems to have done the trick, instead.
Thus I greeted this news from the current world frenzy of stimulation as holding out some prospect of helping us--finally: The German government is using some of its stimulus package to buy weapons and fighting vehicles for the army.
Thus I greeted this news from the current world frenzy of stimulation as holding out some prospect of helping us--finally: The German government is using some of its stimulus package to buy weapons and fighting vehicles for the army.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Which season do YOU forget?
I ask a small child, "Can you tell me all four seasons?"
"Winter, spring, summer", she says.
So I try again, "No, all FOUR seasons. You know your seasons, right?"
"Winter, spring, summer", she repeats.
Well I think she is a bright girl, so I try another tactic: "Ok, how about you tell me the four most important events in world history?"
"Sure--there was Creation, Jesus first coming to die for us, and Jesus coming again."
"Are you sure you didn't miss one?"
"Um ... yes, at least I think so."
This story sounds silly. And yet many Christians have a huge blind spot--a profound neglect of that fourth key event when shaping their worldview. Well, actually it was the second key event, but you get the point.
[to be continued]
"Winter, spring, summer", she says.
So I try again, "No, all FOUR seasons. You know your seasons, right?"
"Winter, spring, summer", she repeats.
Well I think she is a bright girl, so I try another tactic: "Ok, how about you tell me the four most important events in world history?"
"Sure--there was Creation, Jesus first coming to die for us, and Jesus coming again."
"Are you sure you didn't miss one?"
"Um ... yes, at least I think so."
This story sounds silly. And yet many Christians have a huge blind spot--a profound neglect of that fourth key event when shaping their worldview. Well, actually it was the second key event, but you get the point.
[to be continued]
a question for anyone who predicted the Crash of '08
I recently heard someone praising a financial guru for having predicted October's, indeed all of 2008's, stock market meltdown. It happens that I was on that particular guru's mailing list for several patches of the last twenty years (not by choice), and so I also know that he predicted the '87 Crash, as well as the '89 Crash, the '90 Crash, the '91 Crash, the '92 Crash, ..., the bursting of the dot-com bubble (nailed one!), the end of civilization as we know it because of the expected (by him) Y2K computer bug, and--well, you get the point. Something about stopped clocks.
So the next guy who comes along boasting of having called the '08 Crash, ask him for a complete list of the other crashes, financial meltdowns, and other disasters that he has predicted.
So the next guy who comes along boasting of having called the '08 Crash, ask him for a complete list of the other crashes, financial meltdowns, and other disasters that he has predicted.
reductio ad absurdum of open-mindedness
A former student who is teaching some high-school students how to write essays for standardized tests recently assigned them the question, "Should schools teach facts or open-mindedness?" The vast majority of them went for the second branch of this patently false dichotomy, but were unable to advance any arguments to support their thesis. She sensed that they all just knew that open-mindedness was the right answer, and duly fell in line.
What's wrong with this picture?
What's wrong with this picture?
what's in a misnomer?
John Podhoretz's editorial in the latest Commentary puts the problem with the Obama-Reid-Pelosi "stimulus" bill quite nicely: It's one thing to advance policies that you think will benefit the country. It's another to conceal those policies under the name of economic stimulus and to railroad the thing through Congress without meaningful debate or scrutiny. (By "scrutiny," I have in mind, for example, letting our elected representatives read the bill before they have to vote on it.) It almost seems that these people are afraid of disclosure and debate on their cherished policies.
And so they have put over one of the (in dollar terms) biggest lies in American political history: A "stimulus" bill that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office's economists estimate will slow the economy down. That's not a stimulus; that's a sedative. (In more ways than one.)
A ruse by any other name would seem as smelly.
And so they have put over one of the (in dollar terms) biggest lies in American political history: A "stimulus" bill that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office's economists estimate will slow the economy down. That's not a stimulus; that's a sedative. (In more ways than one.)
A ruse by any other name would seem as smelly.
another reason for DC non-statehood
There's a big advantage to having one statelet (or district) that is directly governed by Congress: It provides a kind of laboratory in which we can all see the effects of federal policies worked out, with no "blame the state government" or even "blame the President" excuse for Congress to hide behind.
No wonder Congress wants to push DC closer to statehood!
No wonder Congress wants to push DC closer to statehood!
why do we suddenly think DC needs congressional representation?
As I mentioned on Saturday, we are on the verge of atoning for another one of our many national sins, namely our failure to give congressional representation to the denizens of the capital district (known today as the District of Columbia, or more frequently as DC).
Which got me to thinking: How could the framers have been so blind on this point? They allowed Taxation Without Representation into the Constitution! A blatant contradiction of one of America's dearest values! Bad framers!!
Or maybe they had a different understanding from ours of the relationship between the states (or States, as they liked to call them) and the federal government. As a small minority of us knows, the Constitution established "checks and balances" between the three branches of the federal government. As an even smaller minority of us knows, it also set up checks and balances between the federal government and the states. It limited federal power by subordinating some of it to the power of the states. Which made it important that the seat of the federal government not be located within a state, for if it were so located, that state could interfere with the functioning of the federal government or could exercise undue influence over it. ("Put another $75 billion into the stimulus bill for Maryland's discretionary use and we'll turn the power back on.") And one of the chief ways the states exercised power and control over the federal government was through their Representatives and Senators. Therefore, DC wasn't a state and didn't have a congressional delegation.
Nowadays, because the powers ("rights") of the states have been largely eroded by the (federal) courts, we have mostly forgotten about federal-state checks and balances. The states seem to us more like mere territorial divisions of the federal system, responsible for supplying certain government services to their residents. (Note: "residents," not "citizens.") In other words--using New Jersey terminology--states are now to the federal government as counties are to state governments, or as municipalities are to county (and state) governments. In which case it is odd that there's this bit of territory in the US of A that isn't a state. That would be like Mercer County in New Jersey (which contains the state capital) not being a county, or like Morristown (the county seat of Morris County) not being a municipality.
But the analogy between DC and a county is a mistake. The reason Mercer County is a county is that the Constitution of New Jersey does not establish any checks and balances between the counties and the state. Counties are fully subordinate to the state. States were not supposed to be fully subordinate to the federal government, yet DC had to be in the interest of federal impartiality. Today, however, we think of states as being fully subordinated to the federal government, and so the analogy seems compelling to us.
If the states are in fact fully subordinate to the federal government--which is the only constitutional theory under which DC should be just like a state--then why not just retrocede DC back to Maryland, just as Alexandria (originally part of DC) was retroceded to Virginia in 1846? Then DC residents would vote and be represented as Marylanders, and since the federal government can order the states around freely, there would be no undue Maryland influence on the federal government--any more than there is undue influence on the Fed from New York, or on any other federal agency from the states where it has offices.
OR we could go back to the Constitution (which might require us to undo or to modify the 23rd Amendment), and let the residents of DC decide (individually) whether they want to move to a state in order to get to vote in federal elections.
My guess is that we'll deepen the current muddle by granting a congressman to DC, and then the courts will eventually decide that DC is really a state, and is entitled to two senators, and then we'll be arguing over whether DC is the kind of state that gets a star on the flag, since we won't want to have to redesign Old Glory yet again--anyway, 51 is such an ugly number--and of course there will be a move to rename DC to the State of Columbia, but that will botch up everyone's address form on his website since the postal abbreviation will have to change, and .............
I guess this is some of that change we could all believe in.
Which got me to thinking: How could the framers have been so blind on this point? They allowed Taxation Without Representation into the Constitution! A blatant contradiction of one of America's dearest values! Bad framers!!
Or maybe they had a different understanding from ours of the relationship between the states (or States, as they liked to call them) and the federal government. As a small minority of us knows, the Constitution established "checks and balances" between the three branches of the federal government. As an even smaller minority of us knows, it also set up checks and balances between the federal government and the states. It limited federal power by subordinating some of it to the power of the states. Which made it important that the seat of the federal government not be located within a state, for if it were so located, that state could interfere with the functioning of the federal government or could exercise undue influence over it. ("Put another $75 billion into the stimulus bill for Maryland's discretionary use and we'll turn the power back on.") And one of the chief ways the states exercised power and control over the federal government was through their Representatives and Senators. Therefore, DC wasn't a state and didn't have a congressional delegation.
Nowadays, because the powers ("rights") of the states have been largely eroded by the (federal) courts, we have mostly forgotten about federal-state checks and balances. The states seem to us more like mere territorial divisions of the federal system, responsible for supplying certain government services to their residents. (Note: "residents," not "citizens.") In other words--using New Jersey terminology--states are now to the federal government as counties are to state governments, or as municipalities are to county (and state) governments. In which case it is odd that there's this bit of territory in the US of A that isn't a state. That would be like Mercer County in New Jersey (which contains the state capital) not being a county, or like Morristown (the county seat of Morris County) not being a municipality.
But the analogy between DC and a county is a mistake. The reason Mercer County is a county is that the Constitution of New Jersey does not establish any checks and balances between the counties and the state. Counties are fully subordinate to the state. States were not supposed to be fully subordinate to the federal government, yet DC had to be in the interest of federal impartiality. Today, however, we think of states as being fully subordinated to the federal government, and so the analogy seems compelling to us.
If the states are in fact fully subordinate to the federal government--which is the only constitutional theory under which DC should be just like a state--then why not just retrocede DC back to Maryland, just as Alexandria (originally part of DC) was retroceded to Virginia in 1846? Then DC residents would vote and be represented as Marylanders, and since the federal government can order the states around freely, there would be no undue Maryland influence on the federal government--any more than there is undue influence on the Fed from New York, or on any other federal agency from the states where it has offices.
OR we could go back to the Constitution (which might require us to undo or to modify the 23rd Amendment), and let the residents of DC decide (individually) whether they want to move to a state in order to get to vote in federal elections.
My guess is that we'll deepen the current muddle by granting a congressman to DC, and then the courts will eventually decide that DC is really a state, and is entitled to two senators, and then we'll be arguing over whether DC is the kind of state that gets a star on the flag, since we won't want to have to redesign Old Glory yet again--anyway, 51 is such an ugly number--and of course there will be a move to rename DC to the State of Columbia, but that will botch up everyone's address form on his website since the postal abbreviation will have to change, and .............
I guess this is some of that change we could all believe in.
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