The Ambiguity of Fantasy: A Cultural Reading of P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins by Mark Young

December 1, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Professor of Renaissance literature and preeminent literary critic Stephen Greenblatt sees works of art, such as literature, as “fields of force, places of dissension and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of orthodox and subversive impulses.”[1]  His technique, popularly known as New Historicism, strives to recreate the socio-historical realities of a time period in order to better understand the “circulating social energies” of a time—the ways a text both draws influence from and impacts its cultural milieu.[2]   Greenblatt believes that texts, as cultural artifacts, allow keen-eyed researchers a window into a time and place, full of all its contending values, contradictory desires and cacophonous voices.

 

In his anthologized essay, “Culture,” Greenblatt suggests that texts embody the contradictory cultural mechanisms of constraint and mobility—representing, respectively, the boundaries of social behavior within a culture and the attempts to batter against those limits.[3]  Greenblatt’s cultural method of inquiry, furthermore, appears particularly germane to P.L. Travers’ well-known children’s fantasy novel, Mary Poppins (1934).  Within Travers’ text there appears a wealth of components reflective of and reinforcing the lived cultural realities of Britain in the 1930s; however, the surreal flights of fantasy within the novel appear to flee this quotidian set of values and communicate a more subversive message.  In this essay, I’ll magnify these textual ambiguities and, with the microscope of Greenblatt’s “Culture,” examine the ways in which Mary Poppins both reinforces and pushes against the values of its era.

In “Culture,” Greenblatt argues that works of literature embody a type of “constraint” within a culture that helps define and reinforce for its audience the rules of the status quo.[4]  He defines constraint as “the ensemble of beliefs and practices that form a given culture [and] function as a pervasive technology of control, a set of limits within which social behavior must be contained, a repertoire of models to which individuals must conform.[5]  Greenblatt adds that these constraints are enforced rarely through the extreme methods of imprisonment or execution because “seemingly innocuous responses” like “a condescending smile, laughter poised between the genial and the sarcastic, a small dose of indulgent pity laced with contempt, [or] cool silence” provide effective means of enforcing the societal norms.[6]

This “seemingly innocuous” technology of control can be seen at work within Travers’ Mary Poppins, especially in Mary’s exchanges with the Banks children, Jane and Michael.  Mary, for example, shoots a “terrible glance” at Michael in order to keep him from speaking until spoken to.[7]  She frowns in disapproval when Jane and Michael participate in Uncle Albert’s anti-gravity hijinks.[8]  She “sniffs her usual sniff of displeasure” when Michael asks questions about Uncle Albert and once again when both children question her about fairyland.[9]  She also resorts to “an offended silence” when the children question her about her magical abilities.[10]  And when Michael misbehaves, she tames him with a forceful “Humph!”[11]

Mary, however, is seldom so subtle in her enforcement of the rules.  When the hour grows late, she snaps at the children, “spit-spot into bed.”[12]  If they talk after dark, she threatens to “call the police” on them.[13]  On the way around town, Mary threatens to “go back home” if they ask too many questions.[14]  Indeed, she constantly controls the boundaries of each outing by announcing “it’s time to go home!” whenever the children become too involved or curious.[15]  Even when the children are immersed in the most enjoyable fantasy adventures, Mary reminds the children not to forget their coats, gloves, or hats and to mind their appearances.[16]

At positively every turn, and in every imaginable situation, Mary upholds the status quo by reinforcing the middle class values of proper etiquette, presentability, and obedience.[17]  Indeed, the children learn “that it [is] better not to argue with Mary Poppins” and, presumably, the social norms she reinforces.[18]

Another way Mary Poppins reflects and reinforces social norms can be seen in Mary’s intense class-consciousness.  Historian René Cutforth characterizes Britain in the 1930s as a decade in which “the universal game [within social spheres] was class assessment and judgment” where people “presented [their] ‘all present and correct’ act for inspection, and duly inspected the inspector” for laxities in appearance that could mark them as resting on an inferior rung of the social ladder.[19]  He adds that for many millions in Britain during the 1930s “to score well at this game was the chief reason for existence.”[20]

The neurotic self-consciousness described by Cutforth perfectly pertains to the character of Mary Poppins.  On her day off, for example, she “stop[s] beside an empty motor-car in order to put her hat straight with the help of a windscreen.”[21]  While having tea with Bert, her beau, she takes “a little mirror out of her bag and look[s] at herself in it.”[22]  While at her Uncle Albert’s apartment, she gazes into the tripartite window and “sigh[s] with pleasure. . .[as] she [sees] three of herself, each wearing a blue coat with silver buttons to match.”[23]  While out Christmas shopping, she gives “a quick glance into the window beside her” to find “herself shining back at her, very smart, very interesting [with] her hat on straight.”[24]  And in an earlier bout of window-mirror narcissism, Mary, quite pleased with her reflection, exclaims to herself “‘Just look at you!’”[25]  Obviously, Mary Poppins needs to continually assure herself that she is nothing short of “all present and correct.”

Mary’s penchant for new clothing may also reflect the class concerns of Britain in the 1930s.  According to historian T.H. Pear, the period in Britain after the 1920s marked a change in material production, which allowed “women of all classes. . .to resemble each other,” a peculiarity of fashion that had “never been known before.”[26]  Coupling Pear’s assessment of the availability of inexpensive and fashionable clothing with Cutforth’s concept of class prudery, it seems clear that new clothing helped distinguish those of a higher class from those of a lower.  And thus, when Mary Poppins feels “distinguished” in her “new hat,”[27] or when she delights in how “her new shoes [look] reflected in” a window,[28] or even how “nice her new gloves with the fur tops [look],”[29] she further participates in (and believes she is scoring in) the game of class assessment so characteristic of the decade.

The most convincing proof that Mary displays a heightened class-consciousness, however, appears in her treatment of those she regards as inferior.  She “nod[s] haughtily to the policeman” patrolling the Banks’ neighborhood.[30]  She intimidates the butcher with a “haughty sniff” and makes an “awful” grimace when he compliments her appearance.[31]  She belittles the bad taste of the department store’s Santa Claus impersonator.[32]  And she condescends to the fishmonger.[33] In light of Cutforth’s remark that “small-minded snobbery” accompanied Britain’s peculiar competitions of class in the 1930s, Mary once again emerges as a character immersed in and reflecting the class realities of her time period.[34]  In Greenblatt’s terms, then, Mary Poppins retransmits to readers a cultural “constraint” by reinforcing middle-class notions of obedience, vanity, and class-consciousness.

But if the more realistic elements of Mary Poppins seem to reinforce the 1930s British status quo, what of the fantasy elements with the story?  One way to see them is as another reflection of the times.  Cutforth, for example, describes the 1930s as a “long, uncaring flight from reality” after the societal shell-shock of WWI.[35]  This evaluation echoes fantasy critic Colin Manlove’s estimation of British children’s fantasy during the period.  He characterizes the 1930s as “the long idyll,” in which fantasy became “less a place for learning or growing than sort of a prolonged secondary world where the imagination [could] feel at home.”[36]

In many ways, Manlove’s argument finds an illustration within Travers’ Mary Poppins.  A quick recap of the novel’s plot will help make this abundantly clear:  Mary arrives at the Banks’ by flying with her parrot-tipped umbrella;[37] she and Bert jump into a sidewalk-chalk drawing and have tea;[38] she chaperones the Banks children to Uncle Albert’s, where a fit of laughing magically elevates them off the ground;[39] she speaks with a puppy to solve a dispute with its owner;[40] she uses a special compass to quickly take the children around the world;[41] she helps a relative glue gingerbread stars into the night sky;[42] she chats with the Banks’ infant twins;[43] she shows the children the zoo at night, where the roles of the animals and humans are reversed;[44] and she talks with Maia, one of the Pleiades, during a shopping trip before flying away again by parrot-umbrella propulsion.[45]

For a public recovering from the horrors of the Great War, shackled with the irons of fiscal uncertainty, and anxious about the threat of fascism (which was then escalating the possibility of another world war),[46] Mary Poppins might have provided a light and carefree escape from its everyday anxieties.  And, to use one of Greenblatt’s examples as an analogy, “an audience watching a play. . .would not be hatching a rebellion.”[47]  A public reading a fantasy book would then be less inclined to question (let alone batter) the boundaries of its society, especially if that fantasy book compiles and retransmits the values of that society back to each reader.  Thus, once again, in the realms of social conformity, class consciousness and escapism, Mary Poppins can be seen as a social document both reflecting and reinforcing the cultural work of Greenblatt’s social “restraint.”

On the other hand, Travers’ fantasy elements contain more complex elements that cannot be so easily attributed to mere escapism. Greenblatt’s idea of cultural “mobility” here becomes a useful lens through which we can view Mary Poppins.  He defines mobility as the “regulator and guarantor of movement” within a culture.[48]  In the most interesting cases, he adds, a text’s mobility propels it “to the very edges of what can be said at a particular place and time,” where it “batter[s] against the boundaries of [its] own culture.[49]

Evidence of such battering against social boundaries can be found within Travers’ “Laughing Gas” chapter, wherein a curious kind of subversiveness is implied by Mary Poppins’ actions.  Although Mary continually reproaches the fantastic, gravity-defying tea party held by Uncle Albert, she eventually participates in the festivities, exclaiming “its all very silly and undignified, but, since you’re all up there and don’t seem able to get down, I suppose I’d better come up, too.”[50]  This capitulation to the surreal hijinks marks Mary’s temporary surrender of her role as moral vanguard, which Travers has previously established (and yet continues to develop throughout the novel).  But, even more significantly, as Mary Poppins momentarily surrenders her authority, a new herald of the status quo emerges into the scene—Uncle Albert’s servant, Miss Persimmon.  She ambles in, initially quite unaware of the bizarre mid-air tea time, but her surprise upon discovering the skylarking recalls the very language Mary Poppins used in her earlier attempt to censure it:[51]

“Well, I never! I simply never!” she said, as she caught sight of them all seated on the air round the table.  “Such goings on I never did see.  In all my born days I never saw such.  I’m sure, Mr. Wigg, I always knew you were a bit odd.  But I’ve closed my eyes to it—being as how you paid your rent regular.  But such behaviour as this—having tea in the air with your guests—Mr. Wigg, sir, I’m astonished at you!  It’s that undignified, and for a gentleman of your age—I never did— —” [52]

Having thus transferred the role of apoplectic conformist to Miss Persimmon, Travers’ raises the stakes, as Mary subtly uses her magic to send Miss Persimmon “off the ground…stumbling through the air, rolling from side to side like a very thin barrel,” a spectacle that has the children “clutching their sides and gasping with laughter at the thought of how funny Miss Persimmon had looked.”[53]  Here, Travers undoubtedly invites readers to laugh, as Michael and Jane do, at the suddenly discombobulated voice of Edwardian conformity.  But what is perhaps most interesting is that Mary Poppins—the novel’s chief inculcator of obedience—here subtly encourages disobedience by helping to mock Miss Persimmon, Mary Poppins’ momentary proxy.  Travers’ “Laughing Gas” fantasy thus illustrates Greenblatt’s concept of “mobility” by battering, with laughter, against the mores of obedience and conformity otherwise established throughout the text.[54]

In the “Full Moon” chapter, Travers continues to suggest potentially subversive values with her fantasy.  Although the chapter may seem on the surface to demonstrate a merely amusing role-reversal of humans and animals, Travers infuses the scene with a more complex message resembling class equality.  Toward the end of the midnight zoo-romp, for instance, Michael and Jane witness a spectacle even more curious than the sight of animals feeding caged humans:

they saw leopards and lions, beavers, camels, bears, cranes, antelopes and many others all forming themselves into a ring round Mary Poppins.  Then the animals began to move, wildly crying their Jungle songs, prancing in and out of the ring, and exchanging hand and wing as they went….[55]

When Michael questions the Hamadryad about the meaning of this “Grand Chain,” the creature replies that “we are all made of the same stuff” and that “we are all one, all moving toward the same end.”[56]  Cosmic overtones aside, this scene can be viewed as a subversive antithesis to the games of class stratification so characteristic of the 1930s in Britain.  The Hamadryad’s refrain of “we are all one” mocks the class-based inferiorities Mary Poppins strives to impose on others in her fastidious grooming and material pride.  Thus, Travers’ “Full Moon” fantasy displays another site of “mobility,” colliding head-on with the values of class posturing otherwise permeating Mary Poppins.

The “Full Moon” Chapter can also be seen as a subversive endorsement of the mystic religion, Theosophy.[57]  The tenets of this religion call for a “universal brotherhood” in which “all human beings” and all “beings both high and low and intermediate” are inseparably “linked together, not merely by the bonds of emotional thought or feeling, but by the very fabric of the universe itself.”[58]  We can recall that the Hamadryad suggests to Michael that during the zoo celebration “Bird and beast and stone and star…are all one.”[59]  I would like to suggest that the animals’ “Grand Chain” within the “Full Moon” chapter represents an illustration of the Theosophic belief in a “Universal Brotherhood.”

With this in mind, Mary Poppins’ Christmas shopping contact with Maia takes on an entirely different, and potentially subversive, meaning.  In Theosophical parlance, Māyā names the “fabrication by man’s mind of ideas [which] derives from interior and exterior impressions” contributing to the “illusory aspect of man’s thoughts.”[60] The veil of Māyā, then, represents all of the human misconceptions preventing the realization of the cosmic unity proposed by Theosophy.  Therefore, in the “Christmas Shopping” chapter, as Maia descends from her place among the Pleiades, Travers alludes to the fabled Theosophic “falling of the veil” which would accomplish in the realm of humans the “Universal Brotherhood” achieved by the zoo animals in the “Full Moon” chapter.[61]

Travers, however, stops short of bringing a Theosophic version of Eden into her text.  Instead, she opts to have Mary—like in the “Laughing Gas” chapter—subtly endorse a subversive value.  As Maia returns to the stars, Jane and Michael detect “in Mary Poppins’s eyes something that, if she were anybody else but Mary Poppins, might have been described as tears.”[62]  Mary’s misty-eyed farewell to Maia is wholly significant, considering Greenblatt’s notion that cultural boundaries can be supported through an “apparently modest” act of positive reinforcement, such as “a gaze of admiration, a respectful nod, [or] a few words of gratitude.”[63]  At no other point in the novel does the otherwise haughty, imperious, and emotionally distant Mary Poppins visibly express any positive feeling for any person or activity.  Thus, her gesture of endorsement for the value system of Theosophy—a belief that would have been seen as heretical to Travers’ largely Christian British readership—further displays the concept of cultural “mobility,” with the previously established value system running into what Travers’ suggests within her fantasy.

One final way in which Mary Poppins exhibits Greenblatt’s “mobility” emerges from Travers’ layered and symbolically complex “Full Moon” chapter.  More specifically, the zoo-reversal seems to embody a subversive meditation on animal rights.  Travers, for example, places humans within the zoo cages, with sundry animal keepers to look after them and torment them.[64]  She describes the caged humans as “imprisoned,” with animal guards “laugh[ing] loudly” at them.[65]  Jane and Michael also see Admiral Boom, their next door neighbor, “prodded. . .with a stick” which “made [him] swear dreadfully.”[66]  The scene greatly disturbs both children, and they are moved to pity over what they perceive as cruel treatment.  Michael wants “to ask [the imprisoned humans] if they’d ever get out,” and he later exclaims “The poor humans!”[67]  Using the children’s reaction to the reversal, Travers moves her audience to view the caging of animals as comparable with the caging of humans—with both practices marked by mockery and cruelty.

Moreover, the placement of the human caging within the same time frame as the animals’ “Universal Brotherhood” ceremony also heightens the injustice of the imprisonment of any living creature.  Furthermore, according to animal rights chronicler Mark Gold, “the concept of rights for animals [within Britain] more or less disappeared from public debate for sixty years” after the first world war.[68]  This means that Travers evoked animal rights values within Mary Poppins thirty years before the first major animal rights publication hit the underground in 1975.[69]  Mary Poppins, then, shows itself as a cultural document displaying the most intense form of Greenblatt’s “mobility,” with the most apparent messages of the fantasy sections battering against the more quotidian values and “constraint” established elsewhere throughout the text.

What, then, are we to make of the ambiguities within Travers’ text? What cultural work would the seemingly subversive fantasy elements within Mary Poppins have achieved in the 1930s? Children’s literature critic Catherine Elick contends that the fantasy elements within Mary Poppins, especially the zoo reversal in the “Full Moon” chapter, can be better seen through the lens of cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque.”[70]  The fantastic role-reversal, Elick suggests, allows readers a kind of release valve. Their bottled-up emotions and repressed desires, accreting with the daily restrictions of societal norms, could be liberated through a temporary wish fulfillment.  In this case, Travers’ fantasy would allow readers to momentarily unfasten their psychic constraints inside the safe and socially acceptable arena of the imagination, only to later return to reality having productively slaked their unconscious yearnings.

Elick’s analysis echoes psychoanalytic critic Bruno Bettelheim’s idea that fairy tales provide readers, especially young children, with a way to manage the complex inner pressures through a process of textual “externalization.”[71]  Fairy tales, he argues, “show the child how he can embody his destructive wishes in one figure, gain desired satisfactions from another, identify with a third, have ideal attachments with a fourth, and so on, as his needs of the moment require.”[72]  This means that readers productively balance (and mitigate) contending emotions and desires when they project them onto characters or situations within a story.

More importantly, Bettelheim adds that “having taken the child on a trip into a wondrous world, at its end the tale returns the child to reality, in a most reassuring manner.”[73]  Here, the literary device of fantasy allows an escape into a world of possibilities and release, the nature of which—like dreams—can not be permanent. Bettelheim suggests, rather, that fantasy helps readers more clearly internalize and manage the boundaries of reality.  With this in mind, Mary Poppins’ continual denials of her fantastic adventures become more comprehensible; with each denial she more clearly draws the boundaries for her young charges—and for all readers—between what behavior is suitable only in the realm of fantasy and what behavior is tolerable in reality.[74]

Both Elick’s and Bettelheim’s analyses fall in line with my previous characterization of 1930s-era Britain, a time and place for intellectual escapism in the face of the rapidly encroaching threat of a second world war.  Mary Poppins both flows from and reinforces these “circulating social energies.”  Travers enchants her readers with a quick spell of wish fulfillment, allowing them, once the escape is finished, to remain noncommittal to the ambiguously couched values of disobedience, class equality, Theosophy and animal rights.  By virtue of their fantastic nature, the potentially incendiary scenes would have been easily dismissed by readers of the age as mere nonsense (or missed by readers too young to decode their complexities).  Is this what Travers intended? Perhaps, although I feel hesitant even tentatively to classify Mary Poppins as a merely escapist narrative, given its complex layers and diverse messages.

Whether or not Travers deliberately tattooed Mary Poppins with subversive values and then concealed them within the innocuous garb of children’s fantasy is another matter.  What remains certain is that Mary Poppins emerges under the microscope of New Historicism as a complex cultural document reflecting, to use Greenblatt’s words, a “dynamic interweaving of multiple strands from a culture that is itself an unstable field of contending forces.”[75]

 

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Trans. Hélèn Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Cunningham, Valentine. “Neutral?: 1930s Writers and Taking Sides.” Class Culture and Social Change. Ed. Frank Gloversmith. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980. 45-69.

Cutforth, René. Later Than We Thought: A Portrait of the Thirties. Oxford: Alden, 1976.

Demers, Patricia. P.L. Travers. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

Elick, Catherine L. “Animal Carnivals: A Bakhtinian Reading of C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew and P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins.” Style  35 (2001): 454-71.

Flanagan, Caitlin. “Becoming Mary Poppins: Life and Letters.” The New Yorker 19 Dec. 2005: 40-46.

Fussell, Paul. “An Anatomy of the Classes.” Everyday Theory: A Contemporary Reader. Eds. Becky McLaughlin and Bob Coleman. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2005. 187-201.

Gold, Mark. Animal Century: A Celebration of Changing Attitudes to Animals.

Charlesbury: Jon Carpenter Publishing, 1998.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Culture.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 225-232.

—. “Introduction to The Power of Forms.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and

            Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. London: Norton, 2001. 2250-

2254.

—. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance

            England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Manlove, Colin. From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England.

Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2003.

Pear, T.H. English Social Differences. London: Allen and Unwin, 1955.

Purucker, G. de. Occult Glossary: A Compendium of Oriental and Theosophical Terms. Pasadena: Theosophical UP, 1933.

Summerfield, Henry. That Myriad-Minded Man: A Biography of George William Russell “AE”. Gerard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1975.

Travers, P.L. Mary Poppins. New York: Harcourt, 1981.

ENDNOTES


[1] Stephen Greenblatt, “Introduction to The Power of Forms.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (London: Norton, 2001), 2254.

[2] Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 19.

[3] Stephen Greenblatt, “Culture.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 225.

[4] Greenblatt, “Culture,” 225.

[5] Ibid., 225.

[6] Ibid., 226.

[7] P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 31.

[8] Ibid., 36.

[9] Ibid., 30, 28.

[10] Ibid., 47.

[11] Ibid., 100.

[12] Ibid., 12.

[13] Ibid., 13.

[14] Ibid., 30.

[15] Ibid., 44, 177.

[16] Ibid., 37, 162.

[17] See Paul Fussell, “An Anatomy of the Classes.” Everyday Theory: A Contemporary Reader. Eds. Becky McLaughlin and Bob Coleman (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2005), 187-201. Fussell further taxonomizes the class systems apparent within the United States and Britain, and, according to his model, the Banks family embodies many of the core values of the self-conscious middle class. See, for example, 193-197.

[18] Travers, Mary Poppins, 45.

[19] René Cutforth, Later Than We Thought: A Portrait of the Thirties (Oxford: Alden, 1976), 34.

[20] Ibid., 34.

[21] Travers, Mary Poppins, 17.

[22] Ibid., 22.

[23] Ibid., 30.

[24] Ibid., 185.

[25] Ibid., 175.

[26] T.H. Pear,  English Social Differences (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955), 171.

[27] Travers, Mary Poppins, 102.

[28] Ibid., 111.

[29] Ibid., 175.

[30] Ibid., 17.

[31] Ibid., 111, 110.

[32] Ibid., 177.

[33] Ibid., 112.

[34] Cutforth, Later Than We Thought, 34.

[35] Ibid., 8. For more about the prevailing views of the period, including the loss of faith in royals, government, and spiritual ideals, and the economic future, Cutforth offers an excellent primer.

[36] Colin Manlove,  From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England (Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2003), 40.

[37] Travers, Mary Poppins, 6.

[38] Ibid., 24.

[39] Ibid., 36.

[40] Ibid., 57.

[41] Ibid., 88

[42] Ibid., 128.

[43] Ibid., 143.

[44] Ibid., 155.

[45] Ibid., 187, 196.

[46] See Valentine Cunningham, “Neutral?: 1930s Writers and Taking Sides.” Class Culture and Social Change. Ed. Frank Gloversmith (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980), 45-69. According to Cunningham, Nazism, the Franco revolution in Spain, and the pressures of conformity to one party identity or the other plagued the intellectual life of citizens in the 1930s.

[47] Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 18.

[48] Greenblatt, “Culture,” 228.

[49] Ibid., 231.

[50] Travers, Mary Poppins, 37.

[51] Ibid., 34.  Before joining in the zero-gravity teatime, Mary censures Uncle Albert with “Oh, Uncle Albert—not again?” (32). She also condemns the children’s involvement, exclaiming “Really! Really, such behavior!”

[52] Ibid., 41.

[53] Ibid., 42, 43.

[54] Ibid., 100.  In Travers’ “Bad Tuesday” chapter, Michael also embarks upon a non-fantastical protest against all rules, musing at the end of the day that he has “been so naughty, and [yet he] feel[s] so very good.”

[55] Ibid., 167.

[56] Ibid., 170.

[57] For more about Travers’ exposure to and practice of Theosophy, see Caitlin Flanagan, “Becoming Mary Poppins: Life and Letters.” The New Yorker 19 Dec. 2005: 40-46;

Also, for George William Russell’s role in Travers’ interest in the philosophy, consult Henry Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man: A Biography of George William Russell

“AE” (Gerard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1975), 41.

[58] G. de Purucker, Occult Glossary: A Compendium of Oriental and Theosophical Terms (Pasadena: Theosophical UP, 1933), 176.

[59] Travers, Mary Poppins, 170.

[60] Purucker, Occult Glossary, 100.

[61] Ibid., 100.

[62] Travers, Mary Poppins, 189.

[63] Greenblatt, “Culture,” 226.

[64] Travers, Mary Poppins, 156.

[65] Ibid., 156.

[66] Ibid., 157.

[67] Ibid., 159.

[68] Mark Gold, Animal Century: A Celebration of Changing Attitudes to Animals (Charlesbury: Jon Carpenter Publishing, 1998), 161.

[69] Ibid., 131.

[70] Catherine L. Elick, “Animal Carnivals: A Bakhtinian Reading of C.S. Lewis’s The

Magician’s Nephew and P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins.” Style 35 (2001): 455; for more about all things carnivalesque, see Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and his World. Trans. Hélèn Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984).

[71] Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy

Tales (New York: Vintage, 1977), 65.

[72] Ibid., 66.

[73] Ibid., 63.

[74] One of the peculiarities of Mary Poppins’ character resides in her stubborn insistence that nothing fantastic ever occurs throughout the course of the novel; these denials both confuse and astonish the Banks children, forcing them to question their own perceptions and/or memories of each surreal event.  See, for example, 45, 55, 172, 189.

[75] Greenblatt, “Introduction to The Power of Forms,” 2250.

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All Our Relations: The Border, a Material Site of Pure War by Emily Hicks, San Diego State University

October 12, 2009 by Leave a Comment

I. The Border:  A Material Site of Pure War

I am a pacifist and the daughter of a minister.  I am an ex-activist currently living in the U.S.-Mexico border, who is attempting to gain a deeper understanding of the border, my own theoretical model of the border, the border machine, the Deleuzo-Guattarian war machine, the Virilian concept of pure war and resistance, specifically resistance in border regions.[i]  In the following discussion of the militarized city, human-landscape interactions in border regions, the role of the state, and agency, I will refer to marxism, anarchism, and New Labour in the UK.  Over a decade ago, in 1996, Benjamin Bratton, who now teaches at UC San Diego and SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, posted the following online about my work:  “In her work, the border becomes a material site of pure war, wherein the technological production of boundaries and the dromological politics of the seen and the not seen are synthesized as a local theatre of violence” (Dromo:  Virilio and Borders/Time).  I read this, envying Bratton’s lucidity about my work, a lucidity that has surpassed my own.

 

Frankly, I am still trying to figure out precisely how the border becomes a material site of pure war and how this may be related to Deleuzo-Guattarian categories, border consciousness, the border subject, the cyborg and the post-human. Technology, according to Virilio, can both destroy and enhance the body.  My attempt to use holography as a way to understand border perception may overlap to some degree with Virilio’s interest in the gestalt.  In one case, there is a concern with multiple perspectives;  in the other, it is understood that different viewers interpret and make sense of patterns in individual ways.  In Spinoza’s terms, we do not all perceive the object in the same way.  I put forward a two part model of the border in my book Border Writing, published in 1991 but begun in the mid-1980s, that consisted of, first, a Deleuzo-Guattarian inspired border machine, and second, a border holographic model.  I am currently testing these models using techniques of computer simulation research, specifically, agent-based modelling.

The technological production of boundaries and the dromological politics of the seen and the unseen are, I agree, synthesized as a local theatre of violence in the U.S.-Mexico border, and, I would now add, the urban, autonomous zones in which The Black Panther Party organized prostitutes, drug addicts, the homeless and what Marxists might call the lumpenproletariat.  Anarchists have taken a more positive view of this group than have Marxists.[ii] Other local theatres of violence can be found in areas with multi-ethnic populations in the UK.  In San Diego, some inner city churches, such as those in City Heights, are related to these zones.  The Black Panther Party Breakfast Program was born in an Episcopal church.  The current state of the drug war brings a sense of urgency to this discussion, as does discussion within the media and in the international community, of Mexico as a “failed state,” spoken in the same breath with Pakistan.  To declare that Mexico is a failed state is a rhetorical strategy that can lead to a justification for further militarization of the border.

I.2 

In this paper, I will delineate, in an assemblage-like method, my autobiographical relationship with anarchist theory within the context of a discussion of the state, resistance and complexity science.[iii]  I am inspired by the work of the organization Anarchist People of Color and of ex-Black Panther Party member Ashanti Alston.[iv]  I wish to bring together a response to Bratton’s comments with a recent book chapter that I have written on the “nanny state” and The Black Panther Party.  This analysis of the use of space by The Black Panther Party in political organizing in Oakland, California, is being published in an article entitled “The Moral Bases of the Black Panther Party’s Breakfast Program, Johnson’s Head Start and Blair’s Sure Start:  A Critical Comparison,” a collection of essays with a preface by Anthony Giddens, entitled Remoralizing Britain? Political, Ethical and Theological Perspectives on New Labour.  The book, published by Continuum Press in the UK, was released on March 31 of this year.  Bratton, usefully for my purposes here, referred to Anthony Giddens in his 1996 comments about my work. Bratton continues:

There are, I believe, tremendous similarities between Virilio’s construction of space/time and Foucault’s, and some major, if not irreconcilable, differences.  Both are concerned with the technological construction of space/time as a basic problem from which all other issues flow.  For Foucault, however, language is the irreducible first technology, while for Virilio it is militarized space: the city (Dromo).

In my analysis of the autonomous zones in which the Black Panther Party organized in the 1960s in Oakland, both Virilio’s and Foucault’s construction of space/time are useful.  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, in some parts of Oakland, roles were reversed.  Members of The Black Panther Party perceived themselves, the police and the community differently:  they monitored the police.  In addition, I refer in my anthologized article on The Black Panther Party’s Breakfast Program to Bergson.

I.3

I will oversimplify and appropriate Bratton’s view here by referring to Foucault’s position as one in which there is attention to space/time and discourse while in Virilio’s construction, the city is a militarized space.  In Virilio’s view of history, the fortified city has been replaced by constantly shifting fortifications and weaponry. 

In the U.S.-Mexico border region, the militarized space can be modelled, using an extension of Deleuze’s work as read by Manuel De Landa.  That is, the Deleuzian concepts being applied in the field of geography by Mark Bonta and John Protevi, such as smooth and striated space, can inform modelling and complexity research.  Virilio’s negative views of technology can be tempered with some Chicana-inflected Donna Haraway and her cyborg manifesto, some Chela Sandoval without her facile dismissal of Deleuze.  Virilio perhaps is best served up with a nice bed of N. Katherine Hayles. An example of how Virilio’s work can be viewed in relation to Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts can be seen in the smooth/striated opposition.  If striated space is equated with the fortified city and smooth space  with the pre or non-fortified city, we can view San Diego and Tijuana in the following way.  San Diego is a naval base, and is striated, while Tijuana, while not a naval base, is involved in a drug war, and is also striated.  We can use different time scales, ranging from years to centuries, view the processes of stratification. The militarization of the border, with its shift from concern with documentation, then security, and now drugs, has resulted in a process of stratification on both sides of the border.  Anarchist no-border camps, using technology, create smooth, or temporarily smooth, spaces.  The most recent no-border camp in the U.S.-Mexico border was disrupted by police violence.

I am currently engaged in a project, with geomorphologist B.T. Werner, at The Complexity Lab at IGGP, Scripps Institute of Oceanography. I direct the Border Institute for Advanced Studies in Nonlinear Events and Structures, which is also a research entity that studies complexity.  We are using Octave, an open source alternative to MatLAB, to develop an agent-based model of the U.S.-Mexico border. We are considering how crossers with and without documentation make decisions about crossing the border both at recognized border crossings and in the desert to the east of San Ysidro. The larger context for our work is the study of resistance in human-landscape coupling and attention to indigenous knowledge.  We hope to share computer-based modelling using open source with those who are interested both inside an std outside of academic communities.  At this early stage, we are simply looking at  predictions about wait time and the decisions about crossing in relation to Brian Arthur’s El Farol Bar research.[v]  Arthur studied the comfort level of patrons of a bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  It was agreed upon by patrons that sixty minutes was the ideal number.  In our project, we are looking at the various ways that border dwellers make decisions, including heuristics (“I only cross during weekdays”) and projections based on publicized wait times (reported by the government and on the radio and television).

We are also studying aversion to wait time in relation to social class.  A maid may have to wait longer than she would like no matter how long the line is, while a tourist can choose when to cross.  The El Farol Bar problem is being studied by many researchers, along with The Minority Game and The Prisoner’s Dilemma, within multiple contexts, including game theory.  We are developing our research within the context of poststructuralist, postmodernist and anarchist thought, along with debates about political organizing, and we hope to publish our findings in a cultural studies journal, such as  the on line journal in the UK, Turbulence.  A conference associated with the journal was held in March of 2009 and included an impressive line-up of speakers:  Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Gianni Vattimo and Slavoj Žižek.  We will also publish our findings in a scientific journal.

I.4

I will now return to the theorist and design strategist Bratton.  I should have mentioned earlier that he works at CalIT2.  CalIT2 brings together artists, designers, nanotechnologists, scientists and others at UCSD and UC Irvine. Another CalIT2 researcher, hactivist Ricardo Dominguez, has collaborated with local anarchists.  In fact, he and I participated in a performance event at a no border camp.  The transgender artist Micha Cardenas, whose Second Life-based work on gender transformation in “Becoming Dragon” is influenced by Deleuzo-guattarian concepts, also works with local anarchists and at CalIT2.  Bratton sees Giddens’ work as a bridge between Foucault’s and Virilio’s perspectives on space/time, and I agree, although as he explains below, Giddens himself does not agree with this use of  his work. Bratton writes, and we must remember that this was in 1996, before Giddens became a baron and before he was Blair’s advisor.  Bratton writes:

Though when I mentioned this to him he was not at all in agreement, Anthony Giddens’ work on globalization and space/time production (and how that is structurally linked to everyday life) is a bridge between Foucault’s and Virilio’s emphasis, and provides for a more conventional understanding of the role of ‘action’ in the scenario (Dromo).

Giddens went on to develop the “third way,” in relation to the British Labour Party, New Labour, and to provide intellectual respect for the project of globalization. He did note that not all countries benefitted equally.  However, one suspects that he was not present at the January 18, 1999 Carnival Against Capitalism in London or the protests against the WTO in Seattle in the same year. He had already published Beyond Right and Left in 1994 and he would publish The Third Way in 1998.  By 1999, he was writing about how globalization was “shaping” our lives; he did not share a rejection of globalization with activists throughout the world. So what could Bratton have found in his work that could be of value for those who are able to see the underbelly of globalization?  For example, some of us can see its negative effects in the gestalt image, however we create it internally, in the over four hundred deaths of women in Juarez.

It is the role of “action” that intrigued Bratton.  In his earlier work, Giddens had discussed “the patterning of social relations across space-time.”  This role is linked to the problem of agency.  For Giddens, we are neither wholly determined nor fully free in our actions.

In 1986, I crossed the U.S.-Mexico border wearing a wrestling mask, followed by Berta Jottar, who was carrying a hidden video camera.[vi]  When I was asked to remove my mask, I explained that I was on my way to Los Angeles to see the G.L.O.W., the gorgeous ladies of wrestling, and that I could not reveal my identity. I was carrying a portable altar, a sunglasses case filled with magical powders from a botanica in Tijuana, Botanica Ochun, coins, a plastic baby and other items.  The gestalt that was created by the juxtaposition of these items, for one of the customs or immigration officers, was that I was a witch.  He began shouting that I was a “bruja,” and he and the other officer, somewhat confused, let me pass. In the mid-1980s, artists were able to engage in performances that brought the rights of immigrants to world attention. Today, tactics such as the one I have just described would not be possible.  I am grateful to the collective in Paris that will be showing the video at the Pompidou in the summer of 2010.

I.5

I will now introduce some of Virilio’s concepts that are especially useful for looking at the security/immigration/drug war nexus that characterizes the ever-transforming physical boundaries of the 2,000 miles of the US.-Mexico border.  Armitage, a commentator on Virilio, has written that in the late 1950s, Virilio began a “phenomenological inquiry into military space and the organization of territory” in his study of the ‘Atlantic Wall,” 15,000 Nazi bunkers that had been built during World War II along the coastline of France.  He and an architect designed a “bunker church.”  Armitage writes:

Later, Virilio broadened his theoretical sweep, arguing in the 1970s, for example, that the relentless militarization of the contemporary cityscape was prompting what Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 453) call the ‘deterritorialization’ of capitalist urban space and what Virilio terms the arrival of speed or chronopolitics. Reviewing the frightening dromological fall-out from the communications technology revolution in information transmission, Virilio investigated the prospects for ‘revolutionary resistance’ to ‘pure power’ and began probing the connections between military technologies and the organization of cultural space.  Consequently, during the 1980s, Virilio cultivated the next significant phase of his theoretical work through aesthetically derived notions of ‘disappearance’, the ‘fractalization’ of physical space, war, cinema, logistics, and perception (Beyond Postmodernism?).

Virilio argues that justice cannot be fractalized.  Marxist critic Douglas Kellner calls Virilio a religious humanist (Virilio, War and Technology).

II. An Analysis of Three Programs

I will now offer an analysis of three programs, the Black Panther Party Breakfast Program, the US program Head Start and the UK program Sure Start in order to develop and clarify an argument concerning social justice.  In “The Moral Bases,” I argue that the operations of the “nanny state” when founded upon “moralism” do little to advance the cause of social justice.  These three social programs encompass over four decades of transformations within the welfare state and immigration law.

In “The Moral Bases,” I explain the way in which The Black Party, unlike Johnson and Blair, were able to discern Third World zones within in the borders of the United States:

These three programs emerged from very different views of colonialism, the nation-state, critiques of the metropolis, attitudes towards assimilation and positions on the political compass.  Head Start and the breakfast program of the Black Panther Party began in the 1970s.  Blair’s Sure Start program was begun over three decades later in 1999.  While Blair put too much emphasis on the responsibilities of the socially excluded, Johnson placed the blame for the plight of African Americans on the dysfunctionality of the black family.  It was the Black Panther Party that saw capitalism in a global context as the center of the problem of the exclusion of African Americans from mainstream American life.  Paying attention first, to the postnational critique of the state implicit within the Black Panther Party’s commitment to the inhabitants of colonized zones within U.S. cities, and second, to their anti-colonial stance and support for Third World oppressed populations, they provide progressives with the opportunity to re-frame nanny state debates, whose terms have been set by conservatives.  (Hicks, The Moral Bases, 156).

In the US, the role of the state is being debated within the context of stimulus packages, and concerns with the nanny state have given way, for many, to concern with economic survival (Hicks, The Moral Bases, 156).

III. A Brief Discussion of Bergson and Grosz

In my book Border Writing, I privilege to some degree  the inhabitants in border regions, and those who negotiate cultural boundaries, border subjects (Hicks, 1991).  Nevertheless, I agree with Avtar Brah (Brah, 1996, p. 204) that “diasporic or border positionality does not in itself assure a vantage point of privileged insight” (Brah, 1996, p. 204).   Mignolo puts forward his view on decolonization in a manifesto (Mignolo, 2007).  I refer to his manifesto in the book I am completing on Magna Carta.  I put forward the model of the border machine, based on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, Hicks, 1991, xxxi-xxiv).  This machine included la migra (the immigration officer), los pollos (border crossers), helicopters (surveillance) and those who assist los pollos in crossing the border (los polleros) (Hicks, 1991).  I also discussed el cholo as being bicultural, that is having cultural knowledge of both sides of the border (Hicks, 1991).  In the U.S.-Mexico border region, cholo culture is associated with gang culture or the culture of the lumpen proletariat.

In “The Moral Bases,” I write that I wish to expand the model of the border machine, in which state actors and border crossers were presented as a machine that produced border crossings.  The figure is that of the monitor.  The monitor reverses the gaze; rather than being under surveillance by the state, the monitor observes the state.  The monitor may emerge within autonomous zones that are created in the interstices of institutional purview.  An example could be a teacher in the prisons.  The teacher is subjected, to some degree, to abuse from the same carceral institution that controls the life of the prisoner.  The relationship of the teacher in the prisons to educational institutions is somewhat marginal.  All of this creates uncertainty.  New forms of subjectivity may occur in the the interaction between teacher and student in the relatively autonomous zone of teacher-student interaction during class time.[vii]  The monitor can be any non-state actor who monitors human rights abuses against border crossers.  Examples of this role are Roberto Martinez and Victor Clark-Alfaro.  Some anarchists who are attempting to bring environmentalists together with immigrant rights activists may also function as monitors.  Some of these monitors comment on media coverage of border issues.

This activity may be distinguished from direct action.  Non-state actors have an important role to play within debates about immigration and the welfare state in both the US and the UK.  The boundary of the color line is crossed on a daily basis by some but not others.  The Black Panther Party fought state actors, the police, with guns and law books; its members monitored the behavior of the police.  Today, inhabitants of the US and the UK who live within the Third World zones of these countries are well-situated to act as monitors of rights abuses and to continue one part of the legacy left to the world community by the Black Panther Party.  These zones can be seen in Bergsonian terms as “zones of indetermination,” zones discussed by Elizabeth Grosz (Grosz, 2004, p.  169). Only art can reach those in these zones, according to Deleuze in What is Philosophy?

Jenny Edbauer, in her article discusses “zones of indetermination,” referring to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, in relation to affect and music.  She writes:

Here we might recall the experience of listening to music or seeing art that thrives in harmony or dissonance. During the event of hearing a song that jives with your body, you enter into a zone of permeability with other elements that are ‘properly’ outside your own sense.  Concerts illustrate this zone of indetermination to an even greater extent. Musicians often describe ‘feeding’ on a crowd’s energy and vice-versa. Commonly perceived delimitations–proper borders of identity and substance–break down in these instances, disclosing the affective sensation of peripheral relations at work. This is not to say that the sensual experience of affect marks a return to a primal scene of origination. As Deleuze and Guattari write, it is a question only of ourselves, here and now; but what is animal, vegetable, mineral, or human in us is now indistinct’ (What 174).

We already exist in zones of indetermination; particular events emphasize the sensual reality of such indiscernibility (Executive Overspill).

The decision of The Black Panther Party to organize in the poorest neighborhoods in Oakland, and specifically, the activity of feeding breakfast to poor, inner city children, resulted in a cultural and political entrance into the creation of new rituals, namely the feeding of children within the formation of communities.  The activity was born in a church; rather than communion taking place inside of the church, in the meals provided by The Black Panther Breakfast Program, the breaking of bread and fruit juice took place in the community outside of the church.

In “The Moral Bases,” I discuss Blairism and Sure Start, Johnson and Head Start and The Black Panther Party’s Breakfast Program in relation to nine zones of indetermination:  1) social class, ethnicity and inequality;  2) civil rights and immigration;  3) performativity and the role of the state;  4) social cohesion, exclusion and social/cultural capital;  5) work and employment (affective labor);  6) family and community and 7) the chola/o, 8) the monitor (el monitor) and 9) the border machine.

I note that The Black Panther Party located inequality not in the dysfunctionality of the black family of the culture of poverty, but rather in the deep structural contradictions of urgent capitalism and its color-class-caste system,’ which would later be called “the black economy” (Self, 2006, p.  4). The Black Panther Party emerged from what Self has called the “long” Civil Rights era (Self, 2006).  While immigration was not a focus of The Black Panther Party, there were ties between the group and various Latina/o groups including the United Farmworkers and The Brown Berets.  I explain that the postnational theory of the state suggested by the Black Panther Party is linked to monitoring state actors, the police, armed with law books, and to solidarity with the Third World.  Robert O. Self writes writes:

Unlike most black intellectuals in the 1930s, both radical and liberal, who saw the nation-state as the horizon of class struggle, the Panthers inherited the legacy of those black radical internationalists who, in the 1940s and 1950s, began to see beyond the limits of the nation-state to the capitalist foundations of a global color line. (Self, 2006, pl 37)

The ability to see beyond the limits of the nation-state was shared by most black intellectuals and Johnson (Self, 2006, p.  37).  The Black Panther Party Breakfast Program was started in 1969 at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, and like Head Start, it functioned within a cultural capital framework.  The cultural capital that accrued within Johnson’s Great Society and related post-Great Society programs led to the creation of countless projects often forgotten in attacks on the program.  Major alternative cultural centers in the United States, including the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego, began with the support of a port-Great Society Program, CETA (Comprehensive Employment and training Act).  The eradication of poverty was not the work of families in the analysis of the Black Panther Party.  More than supply-side actions were thought to be required.  In the current economic crisis, many churches are involved in food programs.  Can intellectuals of color, anarchists and others with shared concerns see beyond the limits of the nation-state, specifically in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border?  Can liberals go beyond condemning those who take up weapons, and attempt to understand why some make the predictions they do about their futures (based in some cases on the colonial past endured by their ancestors) and make the decisions they do?   Can people of faith do the same?

III.2 

In conclusion, I want to return to the topics with which I began, the border, the border machine, the war machine and resistance.  The history of The Black Panther Party,  the work of Bergson and the theoretical model of the border machine can help us to better understand one of Blair’s program’s, Sure Start, and can inform our analysis of Obama’s response to the economic crisis in the US in the future.  The emphasis on social cohesion and inclusion in scholarship on Blair should not obscure Bergsonian “zones of indetermination” within the contemporary cultural landscape of the contemporary, multicultural UK.  These multicultural “zones of indetermination” can be studied in relation to border zones and to anarchist theory.  Further research on how predictions about the future are made by various actors in border regions and how these predictions lead to decision-making that occur may help us to better understand resistance.

Moreover, the Black Panther Party’s attention to and perception while functioning within inner city zones can be viewed in relation to Bergsonian “zones of indetermination.”  By focussing on the lumpenproletariat, defined as including the unemployed, the Black Panther Party moved leftist political discourse away from an emphasis on the proletariat and towards the poorest urban neighborhoods and inhabitants of the margins.  This shift can be understood in relation to both anarchism and marxism.  I am not alone in my view that some of The Black Panther Party’s legacy can be built upon by anarchists.  Two examples of related perspectives can be found in the views of Ashanti Alston and organization The Anarchist People of Color.  The accomplishments of The Black Panther Party, including The Black Panther Party Breakfast Program, and the Party’s focus on inner city neighborhoods, could not be more relevant to the challenges currently faced by the underemployed and the unemployed, those in homes fearing foreclosure and those who are homeless, those sleeping in tents and without tents in tent cities, the homeless with and without children, and those sleeping or unable to sleep, in doorways and under bridges, in parks and in canyons, under the stars, but often, with diminishing hope.

REFERENCES

Alston, Ashanti and Chuck Morse. “Black Anarchism.” Anarchist Panther. Accessed 12 May 2009 <http://www.anarchistpanther.net/node/17>.

Armitage,  John.  “Beyond Postmodernism?  Paul Virilio’s Hypermodern Cultural Theory.”  Ctheory. Ctheory.net 15 November 2000.  15 May 2009 <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=133>.

Arthur, Brian. “Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality,”American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings), 84,406–411, 1994.

Bergson, Henri.  Matter and Memory.  Brooklyn:  Zone, 1990.

Bonta, Mike and John Protevi,  Deleuze and Geophilosophy, A Guide and Glossary.  Edinburgh:  Edinburgh UP, 2004.

Brah, Avtar.  Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities.  Gender, Racism, Ethnicity Series.London:  Routledge, 1996.

Bratton, Benjamin. “Dromo:  Virilio and Borders/Time.” 7 November 1996. Accessed 15 May 2009. File spoon archives/dromology.archive/dromology_1996/96-11-26.055, message 132

Cometbus, Aaron.  The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah. Self-published ‘zine/graphic novel.      Berkeley, 2008.

Deleuze.  What Is Philosophy?  New York:  Columbia, 1996.

Deleuze and Guattari.  A Thousand Plateaus.  Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota, 1988.

Edbauer, Jenny.  “Executive Overspill: Affective Bodies, Intensity, and Bush-in-Relation.” Postmodern Culture.  15 May 2008 <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.904/15.1edbauer.txt>.

Giddens, Anthony.  The Third Way and Its Critics. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.

Giddens, Anthony.  Beyond Right and Left.  Palo Alto:  Stanford, 1994.

Grosz, Elizabeth.  The Nick of Time, Politics, Evolution and the Untimely.  Chapel Hill:  Duke UP,             2004.

Hayles, N. Katharine.  How We  Became Posthuman, Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and           Informatics.  Chicago:  University of Chicago, 1999.

Hicks, D. Emily.  “The Moral Bases of The Black Panther Party’s Breakfast Program, Johnson’s Head      Start and Blair’s Sure Start:  A Critical Comparison.” Remoralizing Britain? Political, Ethical and Theological Perspectives on New Labour. Ed. by Peter Manley Scott, Christopher R. Baker and Elaine L. Graham. Continuum Resources in Religion and Political Culture series. London: Continuum, 2009. 

Hicks, D. Emily.  Border Writing, the Multidimensional Text.  History and Theory of Criticism series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991.

Hicks, D. Emily.  “I Couldn’t Reveal My Identity.” Videotape.  Color.  7 mins.  1986.

Kellner, Douglas.  “Virilio, War, and Technology: Some Critical Reflections.”  Illuminations.  15 May 2009 <http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell29.htm>.

Mignolo, Walter.  “Epistemic Disobedience and the De-colonial Option:  A Manifesto.”  Rev.  3 Mar.  2007.  15 June 2009 <http://74.125.95.132/searchq=cache:L4TWeRItwEIJ:waltermignolo.com/txt/ Epistemic_Disobedience_and_the_Decolonial_Option_a_Manifesto.doc+Guha%2BMignolo%2B2007&c>.

Sandoval, Chela.  The Methodology of the Oppressed.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000.

Self, Robert O.  “the Black Panther Party and the Long Civil Rights Era.”  In Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, ed.  In Search of the Black Panther Party.  Durham:  Duke, 2006.

Turbulence, Ideas for Movement.  15 May 2009 <http://turbulence.org.uk/>.

Virilio, Paul.  Speed and Politics.  2nd ed.  New York:  Semiotext(e), 2007.


NOTES

[i] Part of the title of this essay, “all our relations,” was inspired by a conversation about indigenous knowledge and complexity science with Linda Holler on 13 May 2009 in San Diego.  Some parts of this essay appeared, in a slightly altered form, in “The Moral Bases of the Black Panther Party’s Breakfast Program, Johnson’s Head Start and Blair’s Sure Start:  A Critical Comparison,” published in Remoralizing Britain.

[ii] See Introduction to Anarchism

[iii] My exposure to anarchist debates began in childhood.  My aunt and uncle, Barbara Ann Hicks and Moe Moskowitz, co-founded Walden School in Berkeley with several other anarchist families.  Other co-founders included Audrey Goodfriend and David Koven.  Goodfriend and Koven came to the Bay Area from New York.  Along with David Wieck and Diva, Goodfriend and Koven had worked on the anarchist journal Why?  My aunt and uncle co-founders of Moe’s Books in Berkeley, were pacifist anarchists and during WWII;  my mother and father were pacifists.  The story of Moe’s Books is told in Aaron Cometbus’s graphic novel The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah.  Through my mother’s side of the family, I am Melungeon.  My great-grandfather was an atheist and a socialist; he attended Truth Seeker meetings.  My great-great grandfather was a healer who worked with white and Indian (including Cherokee) communities and a friend of Quanah Parker’s.

[iv] I had the opportunity to meet Alston at a no border camp at the Sherman Heights Community Center in San Diego, California.

[v] See Brian Arthur’s famous article “Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality.”

[vi] See “I Couldn’t Reveal My Identity.”  Dir.  D. Emily Hicks.  Videotape.  Color.  9 mins.  1986. The videographer was Berta Jottar.

[vii] I am currently writing an article with Jerry Flores, a graduate student completing his MA at San Diego State University and entering a Ph.D. Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on this topic.  Flores’s MA thesis is on teaching in the prisons.

NOTES

[1] Part of the title of this essay, “all our relations,” was inspired by a conversation about indigenous knowledge and complexity science with Linda Holler on 13 May 2009 in San Diego.  Some parts of this essay appeared, in a slightly altered form, in “The Moral Bases of the Black Panther Party’s Breakfast Program, Johnson’s Head Start and Blair’s Sure Start:  A Critical Comparison,” published in Remoralizing Britain.

[1] See Introduction to Anarchism

[1] My exposure to anarchist debates began in childhood.  My aunt and uncle, Barbara Ann Hicks and Moe Moskowitz, co-founded Walden School in Berkeley with several other anarchist families.  Other co-founders included Audrey Goodfriend and David Koven.  Goodfriend and Koven came to the Bay Area from New York.  Along with David Wieck and Diva, Goodfriend and Koven had worked on the anarchist journal Why?  My aunt and uncle co-founders of Moe’s Books in Berkeley, were pacifist anarchists and during WWII;  my mother and father were pacifists.  The story of Moe’s Books is told in Aaron Cometbus’s graphic novel The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah.  Through my mother’s side of the family, I am Melungeon.  My great-grandfather was an atheist and a socialist; he attended Truth Seeker meetings.  My great-great grandfather was a healer who worked with white and Indian (including Cherokee) communities and a friend of Quanah Parker’s.

[1] I had the opportunity to meet Alston at a no border camp at the Sherman Heights Community Center in San Diego, California.

[1] See Brian Arthur’s famous article “Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality.”

[1] See “I Couldn’t Reveal My Identity.”  Dir.  D. Emily Hicks.  Videotape.  Color.  9 mins.  1986. The videographer was Berta Jottar.

[1] I am currently writing an article with Jerry Flores, a graduate student completing his MA at San Diego State University and entering a Ph.D. Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on this topic.  Flores’s MA thesis is on teaching in the prisons.

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Death by Ethanol: Confessions of a Sugar Addict by Pam Fox Kuhlken, Ph.D.

September 22, 2009 by Leave a Comment

I thought of presenting a hardcore research paper about food politics and the insidious conspiracy by the Corn Refiner’s Association of America (in collaboration with the FDA) to usher in a brave new world riding on amber waves of grain: a nutritious, affordable sweetener for all, High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) lining the food aisles of Walmart.[1]

I would begin with research like the bohemian classic “that exploded the sugar myth and inspired a health revolution,” Sugar Blues (1986) by William Dufty, an exposé on the dangers of sugar which reveals how this commonly ingested ingredient in countless foods is highly addictive and causes a host of medical problems from depression to coronary thrombosis.

Or my personal favorite that “calls a spade a spade,” The Sugar Addict’s Total Recovery Program (2002), by Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D., the first person to receive a doctorate in addictive nutrition, and who is best-known for her breakout book, Potatoes Not Prozac.  DesMaisons says that sugar addiction should be treated as seriously as heroin or alcohol dependency because it’s responsible for “mood swings, depression, fatigue, fuzzy thinking, PMS, impulsivity … [and] unpredictable temper.”[2]  In fact, in 2008, researchers at Princeton’s School of Psychology found that whether because of genetics or because of over-stimulation, sugar addicts, like drug addicts, have fewer dopamine receptors in the brain. Sugar causes neurochemical changes in the brain that also occur with addictive drugs—releasing opioids and dopamine and thus having addictive potential. The Princeton study found that sugar threw off dopamine-acetylcholine balance and resulted in aggression, anxiety, and depression.

Or I could take a political angle laced with emotional appeals and refer to Greg Critsler’s Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (2003), whereas, actually, we’re second only to South Sea Islanders.  Like Jenette Marshall’s Fat Nation (2004), Critsler’s Fat Land convincingly explains that 60% of Americans are overweight (and 20% are obese) because of a fast-food marketing strategy that prizes sales—via supersized “value” meals—over quality or conscience, and it’s the poor who suffer the most from ignorance and desperation.[3]  Coincidentally, as three researchers found in the 2004 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the rise in obesity over the past 30 years could be linked to the rise in consumption of HFCS, which began in 1970 because it was much cheaper than cane or beet sugar, and is now the sweetener used in 50% of products in the U.S., but only 10% worldwide.

Alternately, a psychedelic angle would draw on a 2008 study from the University of Bordeaux, France, published in Scientific American Mind that showed that rats given a choice between highly sweetened water and intravenous cocaine overwhelmingly favored the tasty beverage.  And we’re talking experienced cocaine-using rats who could self-administer the drug intraveneously—yet chose a virgin strawberry daiquiri instead.  (Perhaps MFA candidates will conduct an experiment to see whether their peers would prefer a Big Gulp or a joint?) Sugar, then, can be as pleasurable and addictive as habit-forming drugs.  Evolutionary theorists postulate that our hypersensitivity to sweet taste evolved when sugar was scarce and indicated a high-energy meal.[4]

But frankly, the resulting paper is neither research, nor a “Moloch, Moloch, Moloch” rant modeled on Ginsberg’s “Howl”—“Moloch” the tofu of poetry which I would modify, “Sucrose! Sucrose! Sucrose!”  No, this is a modest personal essay. I’ll leave the hardcore presentations to Larry McCaffery and Bill Nericcio, my colleagues on this “All-Star Faculty Panel.”

Today’s paper: “Death by Ethanol: Confessions of a Sugar Addict.”  You were expecting something about biofuel made from corn?  Please note that everything I’ll present today is essentially made of corn—the cow, a salad, biofuel, us, you, and even the Cracker Jacks I’ll distribute are corn syrup-coated popped corn eaten by humans who just ate corn for lunch and before that for breakfast, so your cannibalistic tissue and organs comprised of corn will perpetually digest corn.

In lieu of an actual PowerPoint, I will rely on your ability to conjure images.  The first to keep in mind is a diagram of a cow with its four stomachs.

Now imagine chewing each bite of a salad a recommended 25-50 times (depending on your saliva production and mastication ability) until it’s as thoroughly pulverized as cud after being digested in the first two of four stomachs before its regurgitation and ultimate digestion in the last two of four stomachs.  Six hours a day masticating, digesting, regurgitating.  Instead, you buy Tums or Beano because you have one stomach.

An enzyme in the stomach of cows converts plant fibers, called cellulose, into energy, separating pairs of sugar molecules (disaccarides) into simple sugars (monosaccharides). Simple sugars in turn can be fermented to make ethanol.  In April 2008, researchers at Michigan State University’s Consortium for Plant Biotechnology Research took the enzyme from the cow’s stomach and injected it into the leaves and stalks of the corn plant which transformed the whole plant into monosaccharides, a step away from ethanol.  So the corn plant—and, I will argue, our bodies—are ethanol.  Like dinosaurs rotting into oil—the corpse becomes fuel…the fuel is the corpse.

Your second PowerPoint image to conjure: a skull and crossbones on an ear of corn.

While the quirky vilification of HFCS by the filmmakers of King Corn is tempting, we’re the real culprits.  Whoever buys candy or soda or fast food today.  We are the market.  We, the corn, the people.

For those of you who ate at McDonald’s, your meal was conceived in an Iowa cornfield (devised at its global headquarters located on 88 acres—half still native woodlands—in Oak Brook, Illinois, by CEOs and scientists conferencing in a building just awarded the U.S. Green Building Council’s Platinum certification on Earth Day 2009).  Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients in the Chicken McNuggets.

If you were at Ralph’s or Vons instead, of over 45,000 items available, you had a 25% chance of picking up an item containing corn.  The food industry was quick to exploit the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant.

Remember the PowerPoint image of the skull and crossbones on an ear of corn.  Now superimpose your face in place of the skull and crossbones.

I love a scapegoat as much as the next guy—but life is multi-faceted and doesn’t occur in a vacuum. The Hebrew concept “satan” means accuser, anything that challenges us, and we could substitute corn or HFCS as easily as caffeine, nicotine, heroin… speed, money, sex, fame.  “Mammon” is the tofu of all evil, offering material trappings not of the spirit.  One might even substitute “fruit.”  Want proof?  A New York Times article (February 2009) cites research by professors at the Univ. of Iowa in Ames and at the Univ. of Australia that despite all the fuss about HFCS, when it comes to calories and weight gain, it makes no difference if the sweetener was derived from corn, sugar cane, beets, or fruit juice concentrate.

Is there a conspiracy between US consumption of added sugars and farm policy affecting sweeteners?  No, the link is tenuous, according to a 2006 study by Brendstrup, Paarsch, and Solow in the International Journal of Industrial Organization.  The researchers concluded that increased consumption of sweetened foods and beverages is a global phenomenon, which isn’t directly attributed to U.S. farm policy.  So with no government conspiracy, we’re looking at a market driven by capitalist sugar siphons—both producers and consumers.

In Christina Rossetti’s poem, The Goblin Market (1862), goblin merchant men conspire at the local farmer’s market in the glen to seduce girls into getting drunk on their intoxicating fruit.  The “satans” chant: “Come buy our orchard fruits, / Come buy, come buy” (3-4).

“Look at our apples,

russet and dun,

Bob at our cherries,

Bite at our peaches,

Citrons and dates,

Grapes for the asking,

Pears red with basking

Out in the sun,

Plums on their twigs;

Pluck them and suck them,

Pomegranates, figs” (357-67)

— (That’s Rossetti.)

 

Look at our glucose, sucrose, and starch

Mono-, di-, polysaccharides ripe for the asking,

Maple sugar, sap, sorghum

Sugarcane and beet

(Saccharum officinarum

and Beta vulgaris)

Dextrose of grapes or corn,

Lactose of milk

Fructose and maltose

Pluck them and suck them

Ingest th-OSE, not figs.

(That’s mine)

It may sound banal to be a gratefully-recovered sugar addict, but Rossetti understood that having sucrose in the veins was wormwood and felt like a gang rape, violent assault, or demonic possession.

Next PowerPoint image: goblin men with a golden platter of your favorite food-like products.

Two sisters heard the goblin cry.  One of them, Laura, “clipped a precious golden lock” (Goblin Market l. 126) of hair and “dropped a tear more rare than pearl, / Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red: / Sweeter than honey from the rock, / Stronger than man-rejoicing wine, / Clearer than water flowed that juice; / She never tasted such before / […] She sucked and sucked and sucked the more / Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; / She sucked until her lips were sore; / Then flung the emptied rinds away / But gathered up one kernel-stone, / And knew not was it night or day / As she turned home alone” (127-32, 134-40).

The two sisters in Rossetti’s poem remembered Jeanie, who should have been a bride, but fell sick and died in her prime because she succumbed to the call of goblin men.  And then, having sucked and sucked and sucked the more, Laura was pining away after the ephemeral food orgy.

The messianic sister was Lizzie who retrieved the remedy of pulpy fruit on (but not inside) her body.  Lizzie stood “like a royal virgin town” (423) beleagured by a fleet, yet “Would not open lip from lip / Lest they should cram a mouthful in: / But laughed in heart to feel the drip / Of juice that syruped all her face, / And lodged in dimples of her chin” (436-40).

Lizzie gave Laura the antidote on her lips, “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you, / Goblin pulp and goblin dew. / Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me; / For your sake I have braved the glen / And had to do with goblin merchant men” (473-79). (You may choose to see me as a Messianic figure, bringing you Cracker Jack.)

Visualize four Iowa farm girls in a convertible heading to California—all of their valuables are packed for the permanent move.

A week after her high school graduation, my mom (declining the bribe of a new Arabian pony for staying on the family farm) and the other three girlfriends you just conjured jumped in a convertible and left a 500-acre farm in Iowa for California.  I was born in Hollywood in the Summer of Love 1969.  My name, “Pamela,” in fact, means “sweet as honey,” from Greek παν (pan) “all” and μελι (meli) “honey.”  “Pamela” was invented in the late 16th century by the poet Sir Philip Sidney for use in his poem, “Arcadia,” given to a character who exudes “all sweetness.”  So I was set up to be a HFCS junkie from the womb.

My essay today is fueled by Iowa cornfields and Hollywood cinema, actually an Iowa film, King Corn: You Are What You Eat, a 2007 film by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, undergraduate roommates at Yale who discovered their families were both from the same small farming town in Iowa.  So, with their Ivy League degrees, they move to Iowa and rent a field to plant one acre of corn.  They play baseball while they watch the corn grow, using the government prescribed genetically-modified seeds.  The result, they discover, is inedible.  The product is only good for animal food and for refining as corn syrup—the cheap, feel-good carbohydrate fueling America, “ethanol in our blood,” which in excess leads to addiction, diabetes, obesity, mental illness, death.[5]

Back to our virtual PowerPoint, listen to the trailer in a man’s booming voice: “two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation.”

I never roomed with Ian or Curt, but I will save you from the 2-hour film by screening their ten-minute Special Feature, “The Lost Basement Lectures”—a spoof documenting the twin inventions of agriculture and “civilization.” The six lectures offer an exposé of the FDA’s conspiracy to keep civilized Americans fat and happy on 99 cent ersatz food laced with sometimes 3-4 non-nutritious corn sweeteners (HFCS) from genetically-modified seeds yielding over 85 varieties of enhanced sweetness with diminished fiber and nutritional value.[6]

The problem is that the mainstay of the American diet is an enhanced sweetener with diminished fiber and nutritional value. In other words, wormwood in our veins: “I ate and ate and ate my fill, / Yet my mouth waters still. / Tomorrow night I will buy more” (Goblin Market ll. 165-68).

Imagine “The Lost Basement Lectures” (forthcoming on YouTube).

Ten minutes later….

The confession continues.  I convinced myself to stop eating red meat in high school, and 20 years later after grad school, marriage, having a baby—despite biking and doing yoga—I was anemic, low in blood with just enough oxygen wafting to my brain to convince me that I had Alzheimer’s.

So I looked to the best American technology as fuel.  Since 1970, especially in the last 20 years, added sweeteners have increased dramatically in the US, mainly because of the HFCS in beverages like soda, “juice,” and energy drinks.[7]  Thankfully, I avoided caffeine-laced sugary energy drinks allowing one to travel at the metabolic speed of sugar: Rockstar (the energy king that “simply gets us”), Monster (with its legendary advertising campaign, unique taste, and impressive energy), Rip-It (exceptional variety, but you “feel nothing”), Sobe No Fear (14 flavors but only moderate energy), Amp (five flavors, moderate impact)…or Butterfinger Buzz (a caffeinated candy bar).  I might have tried them all but No Fear Sobe alone made my heart beat like a hummingbird’s.

Then I found my panacea: sugar.  Namely, frozen yogurts by day and a PowerBar by night.  Goblin pulp and goblin dew called to me from the glen where I could legally plug into the ethanol fuel pump of leaded corn syrup for a decade.

Lest you mock this diatribe as hardly hardcore, doctors said I had one of the worst cases of candida (systemic yeast) they had ever seen and I lost mental clarity and became the Lizard Queen crossing the threshold of doors of perception laced with sucrose.  While I was actually underweight because of my compulsive exercise, I was ingesting more than the 30 teaspoons of sugar the average American consumes a day (100 pounds annually, which is twice the USRDA), albeit in frozen rather than in solid or liquid form.

There’s your thought again: sugar addicts are such lightweights. Maybe you’ve experimented with real speed?  In this case, I would cite more research about sugar’s similar effect to drugs and alcohol, leading to neurological changes in: dopamine and opioid receptor binding; dopamine and acetylcholine release in the nucleus accumbens; enkephalin mRNA expression. It’s true. Just ask Nicole Avena, Pedro Rada, and Bartley Hoebel, three researchers whose study, “Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Intermittent, Excessive Sugar Intake,” appeared in the 2008 issue of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

Back to PowerPoint. Please visualize a Yin Yang.

Arguably anything in excess throws us out of balance (the Eastern model of the Yin Yang reminds us of symmetry), but sugar has become an abused drug of choice (20-32 tsp./day).  More than 100 pounds of processed sugar in more than 85 different forms is consumed annually by each American, including me, until my conversion.

This talk today is made possible by my acupuncturist and the wisdom of Chinese medicine getting to the root of my problem in 2005, balancing my yin and yang and getting me to meditate, eat with the seasons, take herbs, and finally, after 23 years as a flexitarian, to eat red meat (for four months now) to build my blood.  Now I have Chi.  I no longer rely on one of corn’s 85 varieties of sweeteners, each with a similar metabolic rate and a predictable result: 24/7 speed. I’m no longer on the bandwagon of low-quality nutrients and excess energy intake.

Having oxygen in my brain has been a novel experience, enabling me to live list- and Alzheimer’s-free once again.  The pace is steady, constant, not frenetic—more like fiber (which has a slower metabolic rate than sugar).  Beans, vegetables like corn and peas and anything green, fruit like apples and figs, whole grain bread, nuts.

After reading this paper, my husband told me the thing that keeps me from being a world-changing, mind-blowing reformer is that I’m not on caffeine. “Or sugar,” I added. “Sugar’s not good for you,” he said, “caffeine is.”

Picture the Slow Food Movement’s logo: an orange, smiling snail.

Consider, “Good, Clean and Fair: the Manifesto of Quality According to Slow Food,” written in 2006 by members of the Slow Food Movement, an organization founded in Italy in 1989.  Recently, chef Alice Waters, founder of the famed restaurant, Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA, and author of numerous cookbooks since the 1980s including the most recent, “The Art of Simple Food” (2007), appeared on 60 Minutes on March 15, 2009 as a spokesperson of the Slow Food Movement.  Waters launched the national “Slow Food Movement” in the U.S., urging people to enjoy good, clean, fair food: food that tastes good, is environmentally clean, and economically fair to the growers. In essence, she advised the nation to eat organic food that is locally and sustainably grown, according to the seasons, and sold at farmers markets.[8]

I leave you with wisdom from Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2007) among many bestsellers on food politics, including In Defense of Food (2008). Pollan simply recommends: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” adding, “There is incontrovertible but boring evidence that eating your fruits and vegetables is probably the best thing you can do for preventing cancer, for weight control, for diabetes, for all the different Western diseases that now afflict us.”[9]

But can you follow Pollan’s advice and avoid processed foods without spending a ton of time and money?

Of course not. The point is to change how you spend your time and money. It’s a question of priorities in a society that has devalued food to “99-cent-drive-through-custom-made-to-order-we-didn’t-start-your-meal-without-you-have-it-your-way” burgers.

From here, you can pick up additional exposes like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, the 2005 incisive history of the development of American fast food ascending from postwar Southern California, especially in the 1970s.

Fast Food Nation is an important muckraking jeremiad published a century after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), a graphic exposé of the meat packing industry that documents the unsanitary process by which animals become meat products (although Sinclair commented, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its stomach” because his original intention was to expose the immigrant workers’ horrifying work conditions). In the spirit of Sinclair, Schlosser looks at the handful of enormous factories run by monopolistic corporate executives that make our food with chemicals and feces. [10]

You could join the Long Now Foundation to promote “slower and better” thinking as counterpoint to today’s “faster and cheaper” mindset. As part of the movement, the founder, computer scientist, Danny Hillis, conceived of a 10,000-year clock: “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.  I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.”[11]  Discussions around long term thinking are far more focused, and lend themselves to good storytelling and myth-making—two key requirements of anything lasting a long time.  The Long Now Foundation is a model of hope for the future, encouraging us to plant acorns, knowing we may not live to see the oaks.[12]

So you’re at the fork in the road.  Will you pick up if the bite isn’t fairly traded, in season, organic, and locally produced?  Will the cornfield’s “offers […] charm us, / Their evil gifts […] harm us” (65-6) as in Goblin Market?  Or will we “thrust a dimpled finger / In each ear, shut eyes, and [run]” (67-8)?

For your final PowerPoint image, please visualize your future and the orange, smiling snail we left behind several frames back, still in the same place.

 

REFERENCES

Avena, Nicole, Pedro Rada, and Bartley Hoebel. “Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Intermittent, Excessive Sugar Intake.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 32.1 (Feb. 2008): 20-39.

Beghin, John and Helen Jensen. “Farm Policies and Added Sugars in US Diets.” Food Policy 33.6 (Dec. 2008): 480-88.

Brendstrup, Bjarne, Harry J. Paarsch, and John L. Solow. “Estimating Market Power in the Presence of Capacity Constraints: An Application to High-fructose Corn Sweetener.” International Journal of Industrial Organization 24.2 (2006): 251-67.

Brody, Jane. “America’s Diet: Too Sweet by the Spoonful.” New York Times (2.10.09): 7.

Corn Refiner’s Association. Washington, D.C. <http://www.corn.org/>.

Critsler, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

DesMaisons, Kathleen. The Sugar Addict’s Total Recovery Program. New York: Ballantine, 2002.

Dufty, William. Sugar Blues. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1986.

Dvoskin, Rachel. “Sweeter Than Cocaine.” Scientific American Mind 19.2 (2008).

Fisher, Daniel. “Food on the Brain.” Forbes 175.1 (1.10.05).

Go Further. Dir. Ron Mann. Star. Woody Harrelson. Boneyard Entertainment, 2003.

Heron, Katrina and Alice Waters. Slow Food Nation’s Come to the Table: The Slow Food Way of Living. Modern Times, 2008.

Johnson, Brian. “Taking Bites Out of the Fast Food Nation.” Maclean’s 117.19 (5.10.2004): 46.

Johnson, Richard and Timothy Gower. The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat and Sick. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2008.

King Corn: You Are What You Eat. Dir. Aaron Wolf. Star. Ian Cheney, Curt Ellis. Mosaic Films, 2007.

Long Now Foundation. Founder Danny Hillis. <http://www.longnow.org/>.

“The Manifesto of Quality According to Slow Food.” 2006 Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre expositions.
< http://www.slowfoodla.com/archives/000723.html>.

McNamee, Thomas. Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. New York: Penguin, 2001.

—-. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin Classics, 2008.

—-. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007.

Rossetti, Christina. The Goblin Market and Other Poems (1865). Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2009.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.

 

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle (1905). Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Slow Food International. Founded 1989, Italy. <http://www.slowfood.com/>.

Super Size Me. Dir. Morgan Spurlock. Kathbur Pictures, 2004.

Waters, Alice. The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2007.

Watson, James and Melissa Caldwell. The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2005.

Weise, Elizabeth. “New Data Not So Sour on Corn Syrup: High-Fructose Corn Sweetener Found No Worse Than Sugar.” USA Today (3.1.08). 7D.

West, Jackson. “Alice Waters’ ‘Slow Food’ Pitch Goes National.” NBC Bay Area (3.18.09). <http://www.nbcbayarea.com/>.

 

ENDNOTES

 

[1] Listen to a sleazy public service announcement from the PR rep at the Corn Refiner’s Association: “Mention corn syrups and consumers think of the sweetness and energy they offer—outstanding characteristics—but their value as food ingredients also flows from their adaptability to many circumstances and their other, less-known, advantages. Corn syrups can depress freezing to prevent crystal formation in ice cream and other frozen desserts. Salad dressings and condiments pour at manageable rates because of corn syrups’ effect on viscosity. In lunch meats and hot dogs, corn syrups provide the suspension to keep other ingredients evenly mixed, and, like other corn products, the basic syrups can improve textures and enhance colors without masking natural flavors, as in canned fruits and vegetables. Refiners produce a variety of basic syrups to meet these needs, provide energy, and offer the right sweetness—enough but not too much—in thousands of foods Americans rely on, from beverages and bakery, to cereal and packaged snacks.”

[2] DesMaisons’ plan for national detox includes protein and whole grains with every meal, a potato every night (sending tryptophan to enter the bloodstream and increasing serotonin in the brain which boosts optimism, creativity, and concentration, and reduces cravings); and a lifestyle that balances work, exercise, and sleep in order to allow biochemistry to alter mood swings and cure sugar cravings.

[3] Lower-income families have higher rates of obesity regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender, which Critsler attributes to lack of information about diet and exercise and the wide diversity of cultural beliefs about weight, body size, and self-esteem. Critsler blames the epidemic of obesity on parents’ reluctance to monitor their children’s eating habits; the marketing tactics of fast-food companies that encourage overeating; the ubiquity of fad diets; the phasing out of physical education programs in schools; and the sale of fast food at schools to save money on dining facilities.

[4] In evolutionary terms, the human brain has a multitude of ways to stimulate appetite and only a few way to turn it off. Humanity existed in a state of constant food scarcity until the industrial revolution. In his Forbes article, “Food on the Brain,” Daniel Fisher interviews Mark Gold, distinguished professor of neuroscience at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida who says: “Think about it: Your brain is walking through these megastores and saying, ‘Aren’t I a great hunter? I can catch king salmon or Kobe beef without any chance of being attacked by a sabre-toothed tiger.’”  Since we have a minimum of sweet receptors in the brain, today, when the average American ingests 20-32 teaspoons of sugar a day, the brain is overstimulated. Users experience a loss of self-control along with cravings and withdrawals associated with addiction.

[5] Peter Havel, an endocrinologist at the University of California, Davis, confirms: “At high levels of consumption, fructose, whether from high-fructose corn syrup or from table sugar (sucrose), increases triglycerides (fat) in the bloodstream, which could be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (“New Data,” USA Today).

[6] Michael Pollan comments in The Botany of Desire (2001): “Today’s fundamental agricultural issue has become how to deal sensibly with overproduction. The result of this surfeit of grain is behemoth corn processors, who have commoditized the Aztecs’ sacred grain and developed ways to separate corn into products wholly removed from its original kernels. This excess food and Americans’ wealth and rapid-paced lifestyles now yield supersized portions of less-than-nutritious eatables.”

[7] In 2003, the Journal of the American Dietetic Association touted HFCS as one of the most revolutionary in food science since 1990, but warned people that when calories are consumed in liquid form, they will be hungrier and may compensate at subsequent meals…in the fat, fast food nation.

[8] For a more prescriptive regimen, in The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat and Sick (2008), Richard Johnson, M.D., and Timothy Gower suggest how to cut back on HFCS in everything from candy and frozen food to soups and peanut butter by making substitutions and following a daily meal plan consisting of 50% carbs, 25% fat, and 25% protein.

[9] Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food (2008) recommends: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Eat food? The implication of Pollan’s advice is that what we’re eating now isn’t food. “Very often, it isn’t. We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods.” Pollan acknowledges that distinguishing between food and “food products” takes work. His tip: “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Take, for example, the portable tubes of yogurt known as Go-Gurt. “Yogurt is a very simple food. It’s milk inoculated with a bacterial culture. But Go-Gurt has dozens of ingredients.” Not too much? A large part of the conversation about food—like debating low-fat and low-carb diets—serves as a way of avoiding the idea that maybe we’re just eating too much, Pollan says. He says his advice about how to limit consumption is based less on science, which he says “has failed us when it comes to food, by and large,” and more on culture. “Cultures have various devices to help people moderate their appetite,” he says. “Once upon a time, there was scarcity. We don’t have that anymore; we have abundance. But if you go around the world, you find very interesting tricks and devices.” One is small portion sizes, Pollan says. “The French manage to eat extravagantly rich food, but they don’t get fat, and the reason is that they eat it on small plates, they don’t have seconds, they don’t snack.”  In Okinawa, Japan, a cultural principle called “Hara Hachi Bu” instructs people to eat until they are just 80% full, Pollan says: “You do know when you are full, and the idea of stopping eating before you reach that moment … if you do that, you will actually reduce your caloric intake quite a bit.” Mostly plants? Fruits and vegetables.

[10] In “Taking Bites Out of the Fast Food Nation” (Maclean’s, 2004), Brian Johnson reviews two comic documentaries that question fast-food culture while asking: if you are what you eat, would you turn into somebody else if you ate something completely different?  Super Size Me is the first feature film by 33-year old, Morgan Spurlock, a healthy young man with a vegan chef girlfriend who drives his body into the ground by ingesting nothing but McDonald’s for a month: three meals a day, accepting super-sized portions if offered. He gains 25 pounds, loses his sex drive and becomes depressed. After three weeks, doctors inform him that he’s at risk of losing his liver and his life. In Go Further (dir. Ron Mann, Canadian, 2003), a junk-food addict boards a hemp-fuelled bus with a contemporary band of merry pranksters, including actor-activist Woody Harrelson, and tries to survive on a purely vegan diet without dying of boredom with hobbies like cycling, environmentalism, and yoga. The feel-good road trip down California’s Pacific Coast Highway shows a panorama of environmental rape and rapture, and takes musical pit stops with Natalie Merchant and the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir.

[11] The 10,000-year clock would be constructed on a mountain in eastern Nevada, on a grand and equally obscure scale because Hillis believes the only way to survive is by being large and worthless (like the pyramids or Stonehenge) or being lost (Dead Sea Scrolls). While the project has no completion date, Hillis admits that the real danger is people losing interest in the 10,000 year clock: “The important thing is to make a very convincing documentary about building the clock and hiding it. Don’t actually build one. That would spoil the myth if it was ever found.”

[12] On this theme, enjoy an excerpt from Nazim Hikmet’s poem, “On Living”: “I mean, you must take living so seriously / that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees— / and not for your children, either, / but because although you fear death you don’t believe it, / because living, I mean weighs heavier […]”  <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-living/>.

[1] Listen to a sleazy public service announcement from the PR rep at the Corn Refiner’s Association: “Mention corn syrups and consumers think of the sweetness and energy they offer—outstanding characteristics—but their value as food ingredients also flows from their adaptability to many circumstances and their other, less-known, advantages. Corn syrups can depress freezing to prevent crystal formation in ice cream and other frozen desserts. Salad dressings and condiments pour at manageable rates because of corn syrups’ effect on viscosity. In lunch meats and hot dogs, corn syrups provide the suspension to keep other ingredients evenly mixed, and, like other corn products, the basic syrups can improve textures and enhance colors without masking natural flavors, as in canned fruits and vegetables. Refiners produce a variety of basic syrups to meet these needs, provide energy, and offer the right sweetness—enough but not too much—in thousands of foods Americans rely on, from beverages and bakery, to cereal and packaged snacks.”

[1] DesMaisons’ plan for national detox includes protein and whole grains with every meal, a potato every night (sending tryptophan to enter the bloodstream and increasing serotonin in the brain which boosts optimism, creativity, and concentration, and reduces cravings); and a lifestyle that balances work, exercise, and sleep in order to allow biochemistry to alter mood swings and cure sugar cravings.

[1] Lower-income families have higher rates of obesity regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender, which Critsler attributes to lack of information about diet and exercise and the wide diversity of cultural beliefs about weight, body size, and self-esteem. Critsler blames the epidemic of obesity on parents’ reluctance to monitor their children’s eating habits; the marketing tactics of fast-food companies that encourage overeating; the ubiquity of fad diets; the phasing out of physical education programs in schools; and the sale of fast food at schools to save money on dining facilities.

[1] In evolutionary terms, the human brain has a multitude of ways to stimulate appetite and only a few way to turn it off. Humanity existed in a state of constant food scarcity until the industrial revolution. In his Forbes article, “Food on the Brain,” Daniel Fisher interviews Mark Gold, distinguished professor of neuroscience at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida who says: “Think about it: Your brain is walking through these megastores and saying, ‘Aren’t I a great hunter? I can catch king salmon or Kobe beef without any chance of being attacked by a sabre-toothed tiger.’”  Since we have a minimum of sweet receptors in the brain, today, when the average American ingests 20-32 teaspoons of sugar a day, the brain is overstimulated. Users experience a loss of self-control along with cravings and withdrawals associated with addiction.

[1] Peter Havel, an endocrinologist at the University of California, Davis, confirms: “At high levels of consumption, fructose, whether from high-fructose corn syrup or from table sugar (sucrose), increases triglycerides (fat) in the bloodstream, which could be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (“New Data,” USA Today).

[1] Michael Pollan comments in The Botany of Desire (2001): “Today’s fundamental agricultural issue has become how to deal sensibly with overproduction. The result of this surfeit of grain is behemoth corn processors, who have commoditized the Aztecs’ sacred grain and developed ways to separate corn into products wholly removed from its original kernels. This excess food and Americans’ wealth and rapid-paced lifestyles now yield supersized portions of less-than-nutritious eatables.”

[1] In 2003, the Journal of the American Dietetic Association touted HFCS as one of the most revolutionary in food science since 1990, but warned people that when calories are consumed in liquid form, they will be hungrier and may compensate at subsequent meals…in the fat, fast food nation.

[1] For a more prescriptive regimen, in The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat and Sick (2008), Richard Johnson, M.D., and Timothy Gower suggest how to cut back on HFCS in everything from candy and frozen food to soups and peanut butter by making substitutions and following a daily meal plan consisting of 50% carbs, 25% fat, and 25% protein.

[1] Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food (2008) recommends: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Eat food? The implication of Pollan’s advice is that what we’re eating now isn’t food. “Very often, it isn’t. We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods.” Pollan acknowledges that distinguishing between food and “food products” takes work. His tip: “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Take, for example, the portable tubes of yogurt known as Go-Gurt. “Yogurt is a very simple food. It’s milk inoculated with a bacterial culture. But Go-Gurt has dozens of ingredients.” Not too much? A large part of the conversation about food—like debating low-fat and low-carb diets—serves as a way of avoiding the idea that maybe we’re just eating too much, Pollan says. He says his advice about how to limit consumption is based less on science, which he says “has failed us when it comes to food, by and large,” and more on culture. “Cultures have various devices to help people moderate their appetite,” he says. “Once upon a time, there was scarcity. We don’t have that anymore; we have abundance. But if you go around the world, you find very interesting tricks and devices.” One is small portion sizes, Pollan says. “The French manage to eat extravagantly rich food, but they don’t get fat, and the reason is that they eat it on small plates, they don’t have seconds, they don’t snack.”  In Okinawa, Japan, a cultural principle called “Hara Hachi Bu” instructs people to eat until they are just 80% full, Pollan says: “You do know when you are full, and the idea of stopping eating before you reach that moment … if you do that, you will actually reduce your caloric intake quite a bit.” Mostly plants? Fruits and vegetables.

[1] In “Taking Bites Out of the Fast Food Nation” (Maclean’s, 2004), Brian Johnson reviews two comic documentaries that question fast-food culture while asking: if you are what you eat, would you turn into somebody else if you ate something completely different?  Super Size Me is the first feature film by 33-year old, Morgan Spurlock, a healthy young man with a vegan chef girlfriend who drives his body into the ground by ingesting nothing but McDonald’s for a month: three meals a day, accepting super-sized portions if offered. He gains 25 pounds, loses his sex drive and becomes depressed. After three weeks, doctors inform him that he’s at risk of losing his liver and his life. In Go Further (dir. Ron Mann, Canadian, 2003), a junk-food addict boards a hemp-fuelled bus with a contemporary band of merry pranksters, including actor-activist Woody Harrelson, and tries to survive on a purely vegan diet without dying of boredom with hobbies like cycling, environmentalism, and yoga. The feel-good road trip down California’s Pacific Coast Highway shows a panorama of environmental rape and rapture, and takes musical pit stops with Natalie Merchant and the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir.

[1] The 10,000-year clock would be constructed on a mountain in eastern Nevada, on a grand and equally obscure scale because Hillis believes the only way to survive is by being large and worthless (like the pyramids or Stonehenge) or being lost (Dead Sea Scrolls). While the project has no completion date, Hillis admits that the real danger is people losing interest in the 10,000 year clock: “The important thing is to make a very convincing documentary about building the clock and hiding it. Don’t actually build one. That would spoil the myth if it was ever found.”

[1] On this theme, enjoy an excerpt from Nazim Hikmet’s poem, “On Living”: “I mean, you must take living so seriously / that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees— / and not for your children, either, / but because although you fear death you don’t believe it, / because living, I mean weighs heavier […]”  <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-living/>.

Filed under 2009 Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Coming Clean: A Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory by Kimball Taylor, San Diego State University

September 12, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Thirty-seven-year-old big-wave champion Darryl “Flea” Virostko and I stood on a cliff above the grey North Pacific. The wind howled. The surf spot we’d come to check folded in upon itself far below us. Flea unburied his golf bag from the bed of his battered Toyota Tundra. Just couple of years old, it belched white smoke from the exhaust pipe, bled steering fluid, and ran unevenly on seven of its eight cylinders. The right-hand door and mirror were mangled from a night a few months past when Flea was driving wasted and hit a tree. A number of nights unfolded like this, Flea admitted, that when driving debilitated, hazards jumped out at him. The words “Tow Fag” had been etched in acid on the windshield by Morro Bay locals (unaware they slandered the current poster boy for the Eddie, the world’s most prestigious paddle-in contest).

The truck’s interior brimmed with remnants of his former three-bedroom house. No longer able to make mortgage payments on the place just a few blocks from Steamer Lane, Flea was forced to sell. Fortunately, he’d often doubled his mortgage payments when the money was good, and even though he’d lost most of the home’s value by selling during a recession and paying delinquent taxes, he’d still pocket a fraction of his principal. Waiting on that check to arrive, however, was tough. Flea, his girlfriend, and their two dogs had spent some time living out of the truck. They’d recently found a cabin in the hills above Santa Cruz. Still, they might be hiking in and out of there. Letters tossed on the floorboard of the Tundra threatened repossession.

We traded driving balls into the wind, attempting to discern the white of the balls from the white caps on the sea. Obviously, he’d known that the surf would be crap, yet activities were the order of the day—hiking in the woods, building a dam in a creek bed, gathering rocks and shells from the beach—anything to keep the mind occupied. There was surfing, too, but these days it lasted such a short span, when his former pursuit could stretch through the night and day.

Importantly, however, this was a mission: Flea wanted to get it out, all of it. Rambling up-coast from Santa Cruz, we worked through the bending winter greenery in an effort to assemble his story. He’d been high for the last big chunk of it, so precise chronology became fuzzy. The obvious events were hard to look at, but unavoidable. “My contracts were up. The recession hit. And I was, basically…a drug addict,” Flea said.

Three-time consecutive winner of the Mavericks big-wave event, Flea was leaning toward the four-month sobriety mark via a 12-step program. And he was coming clean in dramatic fashion. Hovering somewhere between steps No. 4 (“a searching and fearless moral inventory”) and  No. 5 (admitting “the exact nature of our wrongs”) Flea possessed strength enough to bounce between pre-occupations with a reclaimed buoyancy. But there were the darker moments, and the just plain, being-Flea moments—like rolling down the windows to sound “Eastside fags” and getting in the face of a Steamer Lane surfer who’d been dropped-in on by a buddy and assumed to be raising arms in protest. Despite the public postures that still clung to him, the candor with which he now framed his life was courageous to the point of endearing.

For the past year he’d been drinking a half-gallon of vodka a day. The first thing he’d do in the morning, if he’d slept at all, was grab a Gatorade, pour half of it out, and top it off with vodka. He called this his “little sipper,” and it accompanied his surf checks. This massive consumption was made possible by the “sparks”: smoking crystal methamphetamine, maybe four or five times a day, maybe more. By dawn on the morning of the ’07-’08 Mavericks event, Flea hadn’t slept a wink, was wide awake in fact, but made sure to pick up a coffee to blend in with his health-conscious competitors. Paddling out high was not new, nor did it boost his game. He fell out in the first round.

Today, under the influence of coming clean, Flea finds it easier to say that he was a simple alcoholic, than to admit the rest. During the paddle-out for this year’s Mavericks opening ceremony, when asked to say something in celebration of the event by Jeff Clark, Flea said, “My name is Flea, and I’m an alcoholic.” The battle with methamphetamine that he and an entire group of Santa Cruz surfers have fought most often comes out in hushed tones. It’s been the gorilla in the room for most of the past decade.

“It got dark up here. Dark, dark, dark . . . It got grim,” said former WCT competitor Adam Replogle, “The partying started in high school and continued on, until that substance hit.”

That January afternoon, Flea and I had been to another white rock cliff just down the coast. Its nickname is “90 Degrees” because the track descending to a scenic beach is sheer for more than 100 vertical feet. At the bottom of the goat trail is a mangle of steel left from a pier that serviced the nearby cement factory. The pier is only pilings in the ocean now. Last year, Flea had been partying on the beach with other friends who orbited within methamphetamine’s gravity. The small alcove lies far enough from Santa Cruz, and obscure enough in geography, to prevent casual police intervention; it remained a kind of haven for partiers and addicts. In the early evening, Flea began to ascend the cliff trail with his dog. Two-thirds of the way up, a friend on top yelled down at him to fetch something or other. As Flea’s gaze rose upward, he became dizzy, and he blacked out. Witnesses say that his body completed a full back flip before striking dirt and stone. He eventually woke up to find himself on the metal leftover from the pier—60 feet below. Flea’s arm was badly broken and his face cut up, blood ran in dark ribbons. Once he came to, he wanted to scale the cliff again. Luckily, friends stopped him and called for a helicopter MedEvac. Flea recuperated in a nearby hospital for four days. “I was dead…I mean, I should have been,” he said.

When Flea and I visited the spot on our up-coast tour, he pointed down at the ledge he remembered standing on. I descended, expecting him to follow in the wake of the narrative. Instead he remained on top.

“So you’re not coming down?” I asked.

“No way, I haven’t been down since.”

The cliff is impressively steep. It’s difficult to imagine that a human being survived a fall from the place Flea indicated to the gathering of steel at its base. I tried to think of the fall in terms of Mavericks at its biggest. If he hadn’t bailed from paddle-in surfing from similarly high ledges, certainly he’d bailed from even bigger tow-ins. I remembered something sobering he’d said about his Mavericks career: “I know that every time I paddle out at Mavs, I’m going to get worked bad at least once. It’s just part of the program. There are guys who won’t face that fact, but they’re fooling themselves.”

Now recovered from his own addiction, Peter Mel recalled that when he was high on meth and surfing Mavericks, he could take two-wave hold-downs and pop up without bothering to think through the death dance he’d just endured. Sober, he said, those hold-downs “sit with you, they haunt you.”

I looked up to Flea’s head peaking over the cliff’s crown and hollered the obvious, “Have you ever fallen from a wave at this height?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve probably bailed from that far at least.”

The thing is, Flea’s cliff-bail was not his “rock bottom” moment. After the hospital stay he spent a couple of weeks semi-sober, “only drinking.” Then he was back on the “program.” It’s a word that could mean a serious athletic regimen, or a seriously drugged out regimen. In the cases of some of the world’s most elite big-wave surfers from the area, the term meant both.

Despite the consequences of surfing massive waves and abusing drugs on an equally large scale, the idea of “rock bottom” remains a fleeting one. To contrast it, I’d asked Flea about another passing moment: his glory years. Santa Cruz surfers are often late bloomers in the cash game. At 20, after a disenchanting attempt to relocate to the North Shore, Flea secured his first paying endorsement deal as an aerial phenom. This was the early ’90s, and the agreement paid $200 a month. He supplemented the pay with work as an apprentice plumber. That same year, Vince Collier, a local charger who’d made inroads into professional surfing, began introducing young Santa Cruz rippers to the scene 58 miles north at Mavericks. Flea’s level of performance surfing then merged with a rare lack of fear for the bigger realm, the optimum combination. “He wasn’t afraid,” said Hawaiian big-wave vet Brock Little, “And he was super talented.”

Collier can only be praised for introducing the best young surfers from Santa Cruz to the next big deal in surfing. Yet, Collier partied as hard as he surfed, and that kind of partying came as another kind of introduction for the area’s youth. Replogle explained, “There was two polar influences growing up in Santa Cruz: Richard Schmidt, clean and sober . . . and then there was Vince Collier.” Flea famously tells the story of his first go out at Mavs as a 20-year-old, and the half tab of acid that he’d dropped an hour before. As the acid kicked in, Collier drove him up to Mavericks and ushered him into the lineup. In the early days, that story only magnified Flea’s reputation as a badass.

Peter Mel, who rose alongside Flea in the most important generation of big-wave stars since Pat Curren and Greg Noll, pointed to Flea’s paddling ability as a prime factor leading to his success. Whatever the combination—fearlessness, high-performance acumen, or paddling skill—Flea harnessed it to dominate in a lineup of committed surfers pushing the boundaries of big-wave paddle surfing. He won the inaugural Mavericks event in 1999 (earning 98 of 100 points on a single ride), backed it up with another victory in 2000, and when the contest failed to run a few years due to small surf, Flea returned in ’04 to beat Kelly Slater in the final for a third consecutive win. By comparison, no surfer has won the Eddie even twice. Financially and emotionally, Flea considered this the height of his career. Until late last year, it buoyed his market value, and he dragged down 10 to 12 grand per month in endorsement pay.

Eighteen years and a harrowing hellman career beyond his first session at Mavericks, much of that success seemed to have vanished through a glass pipe. After his hospital stay and return to drugs, Flea’s broken arm failed to heal and the arm went gimpy—a debilitating injury for a surfer known for his paddling prowess. By fall of ’08, friends and family assembled for a surprise intervention. It wasn’t the first one, but it stuck. “What was Flea’s bottom moment?” asked Mel. “Walking into a room and seeing all of those faces, that’s what it was. Everyone’s bottom occurs when you realize you’re not just killing yourself, that you’re affecting the people who love you—because the people who love you are the last ones to leave.”

The night before committing to rehab, Flea smoked speed and drank through the wee hours. He emptied the tobacco from a pack of cigarettes, combined it with weed and repacked the cigarettes to smuggle in. On arrival, he blew a .28 on the Breathalyzer, a sometimes-fatal blood alcohol count. Even though his girlfriend accompanied him, inside the facility Flea announced his presence with, “Where are all the bitches? I thought there was supposed to be chicks in rehab.” The staff pounced, quickly discovering the weed cigarettes. And because of his state, they pushed a little red detox pill on him, chemically landing the high-flyer to the ground.

By January, more than 100 days sober, filling out physically and surfing again, Flea appeared to be growing younger. He busied himself rebuilding a life, a big part of which was work on an ambitious new plan that just might set things right.

Still, he said, “I wish I would have felt like this 10 years ago, I think there would have been a lot more success than there was.”

The meth epidemic gained a hold on Santa Cruz county around 2002, and by 2005 more than half of the local Sheriffs’ arrests were meth-related.[1] A 2007 Santa Cruz Sentinel piece estimated that the epidemic still hadn’t peaked. Housewives, people with day jobs, and teenagers were caught up in it.[2] Although members of Santa Cruz’s big-wave community fit a Sheriff’s study of dominant users (male, Caucasian, over 25), as professional athletes at least midway through their careers (supported by contracts largely dependent on their public images), the decision to begin using ‘meth’ made no sense.

“Bottom line, doing drugs was just fun and acceptable among my friends,” Flea said.

“You add what we were doing [surfing big waves] on top of that, and we were high—lit up like marlins on a double shot,” said Mel, two years sober at the start of the year.

Flea and Mel had shared nearly everything—from solitary go-outs at Mavs in which each of them traded bombs, spun under lips, pushed the sport further in singular rides, to chasing the raucous surf party into addiction. More than once they would end up surfing giant waves while high. “Fuckin’ crazy,” Mel admitted, his face in his hands.

“We were a peer group. We all pushed each other in whatever we did,” he said, “We spent a lot of time together, surfed every session together, called each other every morning. Who got the best barrel? Did the biggest air? Who’s partying the hardest? We were pushing each other, but we weren’t helping each other. We partied and it seemed innocent at the time. But it got out-of-hand, and then some drugs came out that took a hold of us. The drugs that brought me to my knees are the same drugs that brought Flea to his knees. It just took him a little longer to figure it out.”

The addiction, in fact, would end up fracturing the peer group. While still using, Mel said that he began to hear voices. He became paranoid. He thought his home was under surveillance—that “they” were listening to him. Mel eventually acted on his psychosis by cutting the cable lines to his house, which, in his mind, sealed the listeners out. “It [meth] basically made me crazy. I was crazy—losing it,” he said. This was a low moment, but not the bottom. Mel last used with Flea. He remembered staying up tossing around the idea that he would actually move in with Flea and that they would come clean together. In hindsight, it was just another attempt at hatching a plan to keep using. “I knew in my heart that that wasn’t going to work.”

Mel finally realized that his immediate family was “not going to take any more of it.” He came out to his extended family, and thereby began a path toward recovery. “My love for my family is what turned me around and brought me back. That, and the 12-step program.” Yet there were a lot of costs. “The drug doesn’t leave you, you have to keep working on it. I had to disconnect myself from all the things that led me down that road. I had to stop seeing my other family [his close friends]. When I first started getting clean, that was the hardest thing I had to do.” Other than supporting Flea at a recent meeting, in fact, Mel hadn’t really communicated with him in two years.

One of the things that allowed them to keep using, Mel believed, is that drug use is not talked about in the surf world—and this unwillingness to address the issue eventually hurts the grommets. “The kids know. Nat Young and those kids know. Maybe the parents don’t, but the kids are talking. But, no one [in the media] wants to touch it.” Flea’s sponsorship pretty much dried up early last year, so he hasn’t much to lose there. Quiksilver continued to sponsor Mel. Socially and financially, it was not an easy decision to talk. And yet, a major part of the 12 steps is providing service to the community, helping those who need it, and offering the experience only recovered addicts can. That, and a very tough form of honesty.

Mel admitted, “I’m embarrassed by the things I did. I’m so embarrassed I don’t even want to talk about it. There’s a quote. But what’s the cure? To communicate about it. And that’s what Flea is doing.”

Without forewarning, Flea drove me to another spot on our coastal tour. Wedged into a wooded canyon that lead to a private beach and the same towering white cliffs, there lay a ranch owned by family friends. Flea’s esteem for the place was obvious. He knew where to find a fossilized tree buried in a creek, a kind of stone comprised of oil that would actually burn, an abandoned tree house nearly invisible from the ranch. There was a good break on the south end of the beach. On the north end he pointed to ancient shells gathered in bands of the cliff face. Flea didn’t mention that the ranch was for sale, nor the grander possibilities he saw in it as he detailed its qualities. I wouldn’t learn until later, instead of a more rational rebound into the paid ranks of surfing, Flea’s ambition was a pie-in-the-sky idea he saw himself developing here.

The entire impetus for coming clean—and for this article, in fact—was a plan for community service Flea had been in the midst of creating with wetsuit manufacturer Jack O’Neill and Santa Cruz big-wave pioneer Richard Schmidt. The working title was “Flea-hab.” It proposed to serve surfers and athletically minded addicts through a 12-step program while healing the body and connecting with nature—“Using the ocean as a healer,” as Schmidt put it. This idea contrasted sharply with Flea’s experience of rehab, which lacked physical activity. Further though, Flea envisioned a special program capable of connecting with the ethos of “Surf City.”

The three would-be founders met early this year at O’Neill’s home overlooking Pleasure Point. At 86 years old, O’Neill’s awareness of drug culture and its aftermath is long and personal. He’d experienced the ’60s counterculture through his children, as well as many of the surfers he met since opening his shop in 1959. “The surfers, especially in the beginning, were always adventurous guys—and they tried everything, too. Some of them got stuck, you wouldn’t see them anymore,” O’Neill said, later adding, “It’s extremely disturbing when your kids get involved.”

As well as a longer view of history, O’Neill offered his financial power and business acumen to the planned rehab. Schmidt offered his organizational expertise in running camps, as well as his more recent experience with interventions. Flea offered life’s experience, counseling, and name. “There’s a big, big need for this,” O’Neill said, “And I think Flea can really do something. You’ve got to have been there in order to impress these guys and gain a following.”

Mel, however, openly worried that Flea was taking a lot on his shoulders for someone just a few months sober. “I’m two years sober,” Mel said, “And I struggle every day. Sometimes it’s more than enough work trying to save yourself.” He did add, however, that accountability, responsibility to others, and service to the community might just be the thing to serve in Flea’s own recovery.

After our tour of the coast, life grew a bit tougher for Flea. He learned that back taxes on his house would nearly clean him out. And a hoped-for sponsorship deal failed to materialize. Still, sponsorship or not, Flea was invited to the Mavericks event and the Eddie, and he knew he would be present and clearheaded when they ran. His dream of creating a rehab moved slowly, but the ranch was still a possibility. He said recent hardships wouldn’t drive him to use again, but that, “It’s hard to suck up sometimes. Getting clean and all that shit is good, but it gets harder as I go…There’s wreckage.”

And yet, Flea has taken hold-downs before, sucked it up, and paddled back out.

REFERENCES

Mel, Peter. Personal Interview. 6 Jan 2009

Squires, Jennifer. “Meth study: Drug use rampant, devastating to Santa Cruz County.” Santa Cruz Sentinel 21 Sept. 2007.

“The Meth Epidemic.” Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office. 20 Jan. 2009 <http://www.scsheriff.com/MethArticle.htm>

Virostko, Darryl. Personal Interview. 4 Jan. 2009

ENDNOTES

[1] “The Meth Epidemic.” Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office. 20 Jan. 2009

<http://www.scsheriff.com/MethArticle.htm>

[2] Squires, Jennifer. “Meth study: Drug use rampant, devastating to Santa Cruz County Meth study: Drug use rampant, devastating to Santa Cruz County.” Santa Cruz Sentinel 21 Sept. 2007.

 

Filed under 2009 Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Jesuit and the Alien Brothel; Or, The Poetics of Problematic Historiographies in Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow by Kenneth Miyazaki, San Diego State University

July 30, 2009 by Leave a Comment

The provocative novel, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, begins in the year 2060, 40 years after humans first discovered hauntingly beautiful music being broadcasted from the Alpha Centauri system.  The world voyeuristically awaits any snippets of news about Father Emilio Sandoz, a priest and the only surviving member of an exploratory mission commissioned by the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, to seek out the origin of these strange broadcasts.  The novel then makes an abrupt and dizzying jump 40 years back in time to 2020 and relates the fateful events that led Jimmy Quinn, an astronomer and friend of Father Sandoz, to extract the strange alien hymn from a sequence of radio waves.  Russell creates her own idiosyncratic but elegant progression as her narrative alternates between the exuberance of first contact in 2020 and the physically and emotionally broken Father Sandoz returning to earth in 2060.

Within months of the revelation of sentient life in the Alpha Centauri system, the Jesuits quietly financed a mission to explore the alien civilization, directed by their credo, ad majorem Dei gloriam: for the greater glory of God.  When word of the mission goes public, the United Nations then sends another mission to retrieve them.  When the rescue mission arrives on the alien planet, Rakhat, three years after the Jesuit mission made first contact, they discover that the sole survivor of the party is Father Sandoz.  He is then recovered by the U.N. mission and sent back to Earth in a ship set to autopilot.  Preceding him are lurid reports broadcast by the U.N. crew that he had killed the child who led the U.N. crew to him and had become a prostitute in an alien brothel while stranded on Rakhat.  Because of the physics of going at near light speed, the rest of the world has aged forty years while Father Sandoz has barely aged six when he finally returns to Earth more dead than alive.  Among his many infirmities, the aliens of the planet Rakhat surgically removed the muscles from his palms before grafting them onto his fingers, grotesquely elongating them.

As Father Sandoz recovers under the care of his superior, the Father General of the Society of Jesus, he must decide whether he will explain himself to the Father General or remain silent.  By finally deciding to justify himself by participating in a tribunal convened by the Father General, Father Sandoz not only defends himself, but the act of telling his own story allows him to reconnect with the traditional sources of his identity, such as his place within the Jesuit hierarchy, and also suture his own fragmented self.  Furthermore, his testimony not only restores mental and communal integrity, but also it provides the occasion that allows the voices of his dead friends and crewmates to be rescued from silence and oblivion: they live again in the dialogic space that Father Sandoz opens up.  Father Sandoz’s act of recounting the tragedy on Rakhat not only allows Father Sandoz to lay the ghosts of his friends to rest, but also Father Sandoz’s willingness to testify in the tribunal is the event that symbolically permits the events on Rakhat to be revealed both within the novel and at the metatexual level.  The finally, Father Sandoz’s testimonial performs one more function: it disrupts the seemingly insuperable forces that dominate both the novel and the real world of the reader, namely the governing discourse of transnational capitalism.

The novel’s plot has two narrative strains that switch back and forth with each other as the novel progresses.  The first strain begins in 2060 with Father Sandoz returning from the Alpha Centauri planet of Rakhat.  It covers his convalescence, his decision to participate in an inquiry into the expedition and his subsequent testimony before the Father General, Vincenzo Giuliani.  The second strain is positioned 40 years earlier in 2020.  It begins with the first discovery of the Rakhati broadcast, the events of the expeditionary mission on Rakhat and the mysterious disaster that leaves everyone but Father Sandoz dead.

While this narrative split is at first disorienting, its broken and fractured structure is meant to mirror the recently returned Father Sandoz’s precarious mental state.  Discussing two authors, Bao Ninh and Erich Maria Remarque, who were both combat veterans before becoming authors, Jane Robinett writes that, “the recursive, splintered, tangled cadence of psychological trauma” can “[provide] the essential framework” for the shape of a narrative.[1]  She goes on to write, “If Remarque and Bao Ninh are to successfully re/present the experience of war and of the combat soldier in texts that bind narrative and experience into a homologous relationship capable of reconstructing and recuperating the traumatic experiences they have survived, they must find appropriate structures to embody these disruptions.”[2]

Even though Russell, as the author, is the creator and mediator of Father Sandoz’s experiences, she nevertheless remains sensitive to how Father Sandoz’s trauma shapes and warps the novel’s narrative landscape.  Rather than Russell using a straightforward linear narrative that begins in 2020 and ends in 2060, she instead makes the death of the expeditionary mission, Father Sandoz’s internment in the alien brothel, and the death of the Rakhati child the center toward which both narrative strains move.  It is as though these traumas act as a black hole with Father Sandoz’s psyche unable to escape their gravity.  The trauma must be obsessively revisited, even if it is never to be truly transcended.

With each recursive reevaluation, the significance and meaning of the trauma changes as the victim attempts to transform the trauma from an incongruous and anomalous event to one that can be integrated into the victim’s traditional “belief systems on which [she builds], and with which [she defends], [her] individual and collective [identity].”[3]  The narrative is structured such that the traumatic events on Rakhat become the telos of both narrative strains: the second narrative strain, which begins in 2020, ends with the U.N.’s rescue of Father Sandoz from the alien brothel, and it seamlessly dissolves into the 2060 narrative strain at the point of Father Sandoz’s climactic avowal of innocence before the Father General at the novel’s conclusion.

When Father Sandoz testifies before the Father General, his testimonial is both a public act of defense before his superior and a very private meditation on the nature of God’s engagement with Creation.  What makes Father Sandoz’s reflections on what led to the disaster on Rakhat so painful is not just the trauma of the events themselves, but also the ironic juxtaposition of the broken down Father Sandoz of 2060 against the Father Sandoz of 2020 who naively believes that God is calling him to the Alpha Centauri system.  When Jimmy Quinn, the astronomer who first uncovers the radio broadcast from Rakhat, shares his discovery with his close friends, among them Father Sandoz, Sandoz is immediately convinced that it is more than a coincident that they are together to hear the alien music.  For Father Sandoz, it is a sign from God that they are all meant to travel to the origin of the broadcast as a group.  For Father Sandoz, atheism or agnosticism had never been a possibility, but until then he had only felt God’s presence obliquely through his work with the poor, the oppressed and war refugees.  When he hears the broadcast from Rakhat, for the first time in his life Father Sandoz believes that God is directly communicating with him.

But the reader is already aware of the dramatic irony embedded in Father Sandoz’s initial exuberance and knows how his mission to Rakhat will end.  Furthermore, the Father Sandoz of 2060 is also keenly aware of this irony.  It is as though by allowing her readers to share the same perspective as Father Sandoz, Russell forces both to puzzle over the questions together.  The novel dramatizes ancient but enduring questions of people trying to identify God’s presence in the world: do our experiences point to a God actively and intimately involved in the temporal world, or do they instead give evidence of a silent and distant God?  If they point to a God who personally intervenes in the world, how does one act in accordance with His will?  When Father Sandoz returns from Rakhat, there is one more question that he is desperate to answer: do his traumatic experiences stand as evidence of God’s mysterious and inscrutable ways, or do they instead demonstrate His intentional malevolence?  Thus questions that begin as a search for God’s immanence in the world end as questions of theodicy.

Russell works to make these questions relevant and relatable to a contemporary audience.  One way she accomplishes this is by using technology to dramatize much older orders of religious experience.  For instance, first contact with the inhabitants of Rakhat is analogized to the dynamics of divine call and response.  The astronomer and computer programmer Jimmy Quinn discovers the alien music by running a collection of radio waves through an audio synthesizing program.  Quinn says that most astronomers who had been searching for extraterrestrial life had expected first contact to come in the form of binary codes, not music.  Quinn’s decision to run the radio waves through an audio synthesizing program to yield music was pure intuition.  The analogy to divine call and response is unmistakable: only through intuition can one properly interpret the “broadcasts” of God in the midst of the seemingly random events of one’s life.

According to the dynamics of call and response, God calls each person to participate in His divine plan.  Each person’s ability to recognize and respond to this calling is an act of grace, but it is also voluntary: one is free to either accept or decline the divine call.  If one does accept, one enters into a covenant with God.  This covenant is never permanent, irrevocable or definitive; rather, its continuance is based on the human party’s willing performance of God’s will.  Furthermore, the human party’s participation in the covenant is always based upon its consent and it is always free to opt out of the covenant.[4]  For the Father Sandoz of 2020, the call from God seems unmistakable, and he willingly and freely responds to it.  Even after the mission to Rakhat is overtaken by tragedy, Father Sandoz testifies that he never sold his body, an act that would violate his vow of celibacy.  It is as though even if Father Sandoz feels himself to be in a covenant with a malevolent God, he is still unwilling to repudiate his covenant with God, as though to spite Him.  Remaining faithful to his vows seems more significant to Father Sandoz himself as a sign of his dignity and personal integrity than his fidelity to God.

The subjective nature of divine call and response betrays its disquieting indeterminacy.  Though God’s will in the world will theoretically further our progress toward the “one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves,”[5] in practice knowing exactly what God is calling each of us to do is a much more dicey proposition.  If God is indeed broadcasting messages to all of us here on Earth, what exactly is He asking us to do?  What are the terms of the covenant?  Is there even a covenant?  This is to say, is God even calling us, or rather is what one believes to be a divine call simply one projecting one’s own ego into the world and mistaking its echo for the voice of God?  For Father Sandoz there is no doubt: because each member of his circle of friends has a specialty that would be indispensable for a mission to the Alpha Centauri system, he believes that God is obviously calling them all to the stars.  Quoting Mother Theresa, Father Sandoz says to his friend and subsequent crewmate Dr. Anne Edwards: “‘“God does not require us to succeed.  He only requires us to try,’”[6] which is to say, God requires us to respond to His call.

Another factor that Father Sandoz interprets as signaling that he is meant to travel into space is that by 2020, interstellar space travel is technologically possible, if untried.  The Alpha Centauri system is the closest solar system to our own.  According to Jimmy Quinn’s calculations, the system itself is four light years away, but for a ship to accelerate to near light speed and then decelerate at the proper rate, the travel time would be 17 years for people living on Earth relative to an interlude of seven months for the people on board the ship.[7] If divine call and response masquerade as radio broadcasts, radio telescopes and audio synthesizing programs, then traveling at light speed also assumes a religious significance.  Speaking to Father Sandoz about the quirks of traveling near the speed of light, his friend and subsequent crewmate George Edwards says, “‘Nobody understands this the first time they hear about it […] And most people who think about it at all just accept that the math works out this way.  But let’s say you go to Alpha Centauri and come straight back.  When you get home, the people you left would be thirty-four years older but you’d only have aged about a year, because time slows down when you’re near light speed.’”[8]

The first part of George’s statement, “Nobody understands this the first time they hear about it . . . And most people who think about it at all just accept that the math works out this way,” is a declaration of faith in an abstract system that could be Einsteinian physics just as well as religion.  The second part of his statement is less reassuring: traveling at the speed of light will radically disrupt one’s communal ties, a traditional foundation of identity.  At this point, Russell performs a cunning sleight of hand that transforms a cultural anxiety about speed into something that has a distinctly religious resonance.  The disruptive effects of traveling at the speed of light address the anxieties of speed: the discourses that speed privileges emphasize “production, consumption, acceleration, modification, termination, recuperation” as “the definitive measure of […] value,”[9] discourses that are inherently dehumanizing and alienating.  But what could become a heavy-handed critique of our culture’s obsession with speed is transformed into something else.  Not speed, but responding to the divine call profoundly breaks the expeditionary crew’s communal ties.  This is because one “will stand out as anomalous, impossible to integrate, ‘other’”[10] if one obeys the prerogatives of a divine call above the priorities of the community.  This elegant symbolism follows a pattern Russell uses consistently throughout the novel of imbuing technology with religious significance.

Speed has other disruptive effects that the novel suggests can be salutary and potentially liberating.  Russell does highlight some particularly disruptive effects of time travel.  For instance, Father General Vincenzo Giuliani entered the Formation for Priesthood three years after Father Sandoz, but while Giuliani is in his late seventies in 2060, Sandoz is in his mid 40s.  But for a novel that is set in the near future and that makes such rapid chronological leaps, what is perhaps even more surprising is just how predictable and recognizable are Russell’s 2020 and 2060.

Though this at first seems counterintuitive, if the reader notes the lines of continuity from the real world to the fictional world of The Sparrow, Russell’s 2020 and 2060 do not only seem plausible but downright inevitable.  Among political, economic, technological and social changes, Puerto Rico has become the 51st state, the United States has lost its superpower status after being outfoxed by Japan in a trade war, Poland has become a volatile but rapidly emerging economic power akin to the real world India or China, and the field of Artificial Intelligence has advanced to the point that not even scientists and linguists are above being replaced by computer programs.

In the fictional 2020, war and poverty are so endemic that private individuals and companies are allowed to sweep the war zones and overcrowded orphanages and “adopt” children who show promise.  The children are then educated, and in return they are indentured for as much as 25 years to their patrons, a system likened to intellectual prostitution.  Sophia Mendez, one of the crewmembers of the Rakhati mission, was one of these indentured servants after being culled from an Istanbul devastated during the Turkish Civil War.  It is no mistake that before Sophia sold herself intellectually to her patron, Jean-Claude Jaubert, she survived by selling her body after both of her parents were killed.

By Sandoz’s return in 2060, these centrifugal forces have taken their logical course: among other developments, the United States is no longer a single nation and the Society of Jesus has seceded from the Catholic Church over the issue of birth control and the fallout from the Society’s unsanctioned mission to Rakhat.  In our post-national, post-industrial and increasingly privatized world, Russell’s postulations do not seem all that far-fetched.  Indeed, just as Father Sandoz is never portrayed as astonished by these developments, the reader too accepts these as well within the range of possibility.  In the near future of Russell’s The Sparrow, wealthy private citizens and powerful corporations (like the Society of Jesus) seem unbound by the laws of traditional nation-states.  For instance, the alacrity and vigor of the Jesuits in organizing the expeditionary mission to Rakhat is contrasted against the United Nations, which is impeded by years of bureaucracy and squabbling before they reach a consensus.  Russell constructs a near future that is neither apocalyptic nor utopian; rather, her near future is one that conforms to her reader’s reasonable expectations concerning the rise of corporate power.  In essence, she plays out the deterministic forces that are transforming her reader’s own world in less spectacular, but in no less radical ways.

The complexity of Russell’s novel is built on an intricate and dazzling interplay between contemporary real world trends, their persistence into the landscape of her novel, and the shared circumstances of both her reader and her characters as they are both forced to adapt to and negotiate within systems that work to silence them or rob them of agency.  In other words, Russell recognizes real world dynamics, that of the emergent domination of corporations and transnational capitalism at the expense of traditional nation-states, and then she project them into her fictional world. By confirming the ascendancy of corporations in her fictional world, it seems as though Russell imbricates both her readers and her characters in the same ineluctable totality. Contemporary readers who have been laid off of from their jobs or have had their homes foreclosed during the recent economic crisis immediately empathize with the plight of Sophia Mendez, all victims of forces beyond their control.  And the reader is taken aback when Russell discusses Father Sandoz’s humanitarian work in, of all places, Sudan.

When the expeditionary crew travels to Rakhat, the act of traveling at the speed of light is used to symbolically reach escape velocity from these politically and economically deterministic forces.  If these overweening forces dictate the arc of the linear timeline of 2020-2060, then the act of traveling at light speed is what grants the explorers the ability to defy and transcend them and write their own unique, if tragic, narrative.  It introduces a different type of temporal consciousness, a religious consciousness that privileges repositories of memory and sites of experience.  Charles Taylor distinguishes between different registers of time in his book, A Secular Age.  He contrasts linear, “temporal” and “secular” time against an order of time that is pegged to some eternal order, such as Platonic Forms or Christian eschatology.  This register of time is what Taylor calls “higher times”:

“Secular” time is what to us is ordinary time, indeed, to us it’s just time, period.  One thing happens after another, and when something is past, it’s past.  Time placings are consistently transitive.  If A is before B and B before C, then A is before C.  The same goes if we quantify these relationships: if A is long before B, and B long before C, then A is very long before C.[11]

Applying this simple, linear schema to The Sparrow, it is as though the reader is living in A, and the novel depicts the events of the near future in B and C.  Even though B and C may exist in a fictional world, the genealogy that Russell constructs is so insidious and seemingly inescapable because it is anchored in real world dynamics.  Seemingly self-evident and inviolable divisions between the real world and Russell’s fictional world become fluid, and both seem to occupy the same unsettlingly liminal space.
Taylor then goes on to describe what constitutes “higher times:”

Now higher times gather and re-order secular time.  They introduce “warps” and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering.  Events which were far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely linked.  Benedict Anderson in a penetrating discussion of the some of the same issues I am trying to describe here, quotes Auerbach on the relation prefiguring-fulfilling in which events of the old Testament were held to stand to those in the New, for instance the sacrifice of Isaac and the Crucifixion of Christ.  These two events were linked through their immediate contiguous places in the divine plan.  They are drawn close to identity in eternity, even though they are centuries (that is, “aeons” or “saecula”) apart.  In God’s time there is a sort of simultaneity of sacrifice and Crucifixion.

Similarly, Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997.  Once events are situated in relation to more than one kind of time, the issue of time-placing becomes quite transformed.

Why are higher times higher?  The answer is easy for the eternity which Europe inherits from Plato and Greek philosophy.  The really real, full being is outside of time, unchanging.  Time is a moving image of eternity.  It is imperfect, or tends to imperfection.[12]

Taylor provides a theoretical framework through which the novel’s two structures of time can be compared. Secular time corresponds to the linear timeline of 2020-2060.  Of course, the narrative structure of the novel does not follow a strict linear path.  This essay has already argued that the novel’s narrative structure is warped in order to reflect Father Sandoz’s trauma.  Another factor shaping the unique narrative structure is the distinctive qualities of “higher times,” where time is organized around events that resonate from and point towards an eternal order.

Another parallel that trauma and higher times both share is their recursive natures.  Colin Burrow, discussing the “temporal uncertainty” of John Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity writes, “the events of the Christian ritual year have the unique quality of being at once single historical actions (Christ was born on one day) and repeated ritual events (Christ is born on every day on which Christmas is celebrated.)”[13] These events that are ritualistically commemorated are similar in nature to Father Sandoz’s trauma: they are both anomalous, but ultimately they must be integrated into the flow of history in order to be of communal significance. Father Sandoz’s experiences, especially his trauma, take on the characteristics of an organizing locus of “higher times.”  He is at once a freak, anomalous, “other,” marked by his mysterious surgery and an object of curiosity for the voyeuristic public, but he must also ritualistically reenact and re/present his trauma before the Father General if he is to transform his experience into something beyond the bitterness trauma.

At the climax of his testimony, Father Sandoz finally begins to reveal what led to the catastrophe on Rakhat.  When the expeditionary crew reaches Rakhat, they meet two sentient species, the Runa and the Jana’ata.  The Runa is the prey species and their movements and reproductive rights are controlled by the Jana’ata.  When the expeditionary crew teaches the Runa how to cultivate gardens, the excess calories in their diets trigger their reproductive cycles, causing them to breed without Jana’ata consent.  When the Jana’ata retaliate against this breach of protocol, the expeditionary crew is slaughtered along with the offending Runa and Father Sandoz is taken captive.

Eventually, Father Sandoz is put into the custody of a Jana’ata merchant whom he had befriended, but when it seems that Father Sandoz is safe, the hand mutilating surgery is performed on him without the significance of the procedure ever revealed.  Symbolically, it represents the cost of transcending the flow and flux of secular time, of daring, first, to enter “higher times,” and then introducing it as a disruptive force within the diachronic, linear flow of the narrative.  Father Sandoz’s testimony is such a defiant challenge to the seemingly inescapable logic of the dominant discourse because it seemingly does the impossible: it provides alternatives.

The introduction of an alternative way of valuing and accounting for human experience reveals the possibility of evading and subverting the dominant discourse. Indeed, this dominant discourse’s tacit representation of itself shadows the more visible but tentative self-representation of Father Sandoz, silently fashioning the myth of its omniscience and omnipotence.  This myth always threatens to co-opt the narrative structure or efface the personal stories of the characters.  This is most evident in the case of Sophia Mendez, who literally becomes a commodity and a token of commercial exchange within this system. The excursion to Rakhat, far from posing a danger to Father Sandoz’s life, becomes the “proof” of his existence and enables him to become the symbolic and literal incarnation of “higher times.”

Eventually, Sandoz is exchanged one more time and put into the brothel of Hlavin Kitheri, an aesthete and member of the Jana’ata royalty.  Sandoz’s encounter with Hlavin is saturated with ironies.  For instance, he learns that the songs that first brought him to Rakhat were composed by Hlavin.  The subject of these songs, so beautiful that most people on Earth believed them to be liturgical music, were at best ephemera and at worst pronographic.  In fact, Hlavin even composed songs extemporaneously and broadcast them as he was raping Father Sandoz.  Thus if the temporal call to Rakhat (i.e. the radio broadcast) originated from a truly despicable source, Father Sandoz is tortured by the possibility that the divine call to Rakhat comes from an equally malevolent source (i.e. God).  There is one other crucial tie between Hlavin and God: Sandoz identifies both of them as his rapist.  To the Father General, he says, “‘Can you guess what I thought just before I was used the first time?’ he asked them as he began to pace.  ‘This is rich.  This is very funny!  You see, I was scarred but I didn’t understand what was going on.  I never imagined—who could have imagined such a thing?  I am in God’s hands, I thought.  I love God and I trust in His love.  Amusing, isn’t it?  I laid down all my defenses.  I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God.  And I was raped.  I was naked before God and I was raped.’”[14]

Father Sandoz’s testimony of his rape is itself a kind of performance, a ritualistic identification with and reenactment of his own passion: it is at once his justification that he had remained faithful to his holy orders (i.e. he was raped and did not sell his body) and his means of healing his own sense of personal violation and his loss of faith in a benevolent God.  His reenactment in and inward interpretation of his own existential drama supplants his earlier performative response to God’s call. Perhaps most significantly, it is not portrayed as his definitive reconciliation with or renunciation of God.  Rather than creating a resolution, his testimony makes possible the discursive space necessary to give expression to the hostile, ambiguous and unstable feelings of betrayal which coexist with his lingering faith in an inscrutable God.

Finally, Father Sandoz’s testimonial introduces “higher times” into the narrative. “Higher Times” explode the hermetically sealed and hermetically sealing poitical and economic forces that dominate Father Sandoz’s world as well as our own.  Father Sandoz is a character of possibilities: the possibility of writing our own stories despite the deterministic forces that would write them for us, and the possibility of enduring long enough to rediscover ourselves despite the enthropy and inertia of an exhausted world.

REFERENCES

Castle, Gregory. The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell  Publishing, 2007.

Burrow, Colin. “Poems 1645: the future poet.” The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Ed. Dennis Danielson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 54-69.

Ecstasy of speed: SDSU crisis carnival 2009. (2009). Retrieved May 13, 2009, from http://crisiscarnival.sdsu.edu/

Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. By Michel Foucault. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ed. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. 139-164.

Khan, Victoria. “The metaphorical contract in Milton’s Tenure of King’s and Magistrates.” Milton and Republicanism. Ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 82-105.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. By Virginia Woolf et al. Ed. Francine Prose. London: Harcourt Inc., 2003. 119-135.

Robinett, Jane. “The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience.” Literature and Medicine. 26.2 (Fall 2007): 290-311.

Russell, Mary Doria. The Sparrow. New York: Ballantine Books-Random House, 2008.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. London: Belknap-Harvard, 2007

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. In Memoriam. 2nd ed. Ed. Erik Gray. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

 

ENDNOTES

 

[1] Robinet, “Traumatic Experience,” 296.

[2] Ibid., 297.

[3] Ibid., 293.

[4] Khan, “metaphorical contract,” 86-87.

[5] Tennyson, In Memoriam, 101.

[6] Russell, The Sparrow, 97.

[7] Ibid., 96.

[8] Ibid., 97.

[9] Ecstasy of Speed, accessed May 13, 2009.

[10] Mendelsohn, 126.

[11] Taylor, 55.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Burrow, “the future poet,” 59.

[14] Russell, The Sparrow, 349.

 

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A Redemptive Economy: Corpus Christi Pageant Cycles as Liturgical Relativization of Secular Time by Gaelan Gilbert, San Diego State University

July 29, 2009 by Leave a Comment

1. Modern Secular Time

Charles Taylor has recently argued that in modern societies “we tend to see our lives exclusively within the horizontal flow of secular time,”[1] to the point that time “has become a container, indifferent to what fills it.”[2] What Taylor means by “secular time” pertains to both contemporary American and European culture and, as globalization continues, other parts of the world, as will be explained below, as well as the culture of the late-medieval period in Europe. Taylor extends his observation by saying, the disciplines of our modern, civilized order have led us to measure and organize time as never before in human history. Time has become a precious resource, not to be ‘wasted.’ […] We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done.[3]

One contemporary way of controlling time is through speed, since speed is often conceived as a way of ‘beating the clock’ so as to not ‘waste’ the precious resource of time. There is thus a ‘need for speed.’ And if speed is merely an increased rate of movement over a given area of space in a specific segment of time (think of MPH, RPM, etc.), then – as the effects of globalization indicate – speed necessarily treats the unique particularities of places – such as buildings or forests – as ultimately eliminable obstructions to the accelerating progress of goods and capital. In other words, a need for speed “displaces” places, flattening and reducing them to the mathematical concept of space, which remains indifferent to its contents. In this sense, space, like secular time, also becomes a homogenous container. Both are problematic inasmuch as they occlude and neglect temporal and local differences, thus emptying times and places of gathered and complex significance.[4]

Such is symptomatic of what William Cavanaugh has called the “global monoculture” of the market. In order to slake the market’s ‘need for speed,’ temporal and local dedifferentiation erodes local communities and their trans-local traditions, while responsibility is shirked, on all levels. As John Wright acutely observes, “[w]e’ve learned that we have to detach our lives from any particular place so that we might be accessible to a global market, career advancement, with no lasting moral ties to anyone. The market place is universal, abstract, not local and particular. By denying the particularity of place, all might supposedly belong, be absorbed into the producer-consumer cycle that continuously repeats, going no where.”[5]

Another negative aspect of this ever-accelerating production-consumption cycle is disembodiment.[6] For example, today the global market proffers not a local marketplace (like the piazza of a medieval Italian city) but an electronically generated cyberspace whereby (and “in” which) disembodied individuals instantaneously “connect,” often to purchasable commodities, in only a “virtual” present. And all the while the homogenous tick-tock of technologically regulated clocks reminds us that time is running out.

Granted, there are benefits to the speed at which information, via the internet and other electronic technologies, is afforded to those who can afford them, so to speak. But these advantages in no way outweigh the negative effects of homogenous time and space characteristic of this, “a secular age,” especially considering the damage already and continually done to local communities by the pretensions and consequent expansion of the market, which itself relies on the internet for its extreme instantaneity and global scope. To reiterate, in the context of such expansion, overlapping places and complex remembered times are subjected and dissolved within the meta-physic of a uniform spatial grid (res extensa) and the accompanying univocal ‘secular’ time of which Taylor speaks. According to the (Cartesian) logic behind such a grid, every place can be mapped, plotted and even leveled for military or capitalist purposes, while time, as beating to only a single measure, can be regulated with mechanical, and now even digital precision.

In light of this state of affairs, we are led to ask: what sort of community could both differentiate and thus resist, by a means other than acceleration this harmful homogenization, while maintaining individual differences? What embodied practices could serve as the means to ‘thicken’ and ‘punctuate’ temporality, and allow the particularity of places to persist peacefully? And what sort of economic ‘production-consumption’ cycle would such a community enact as a way of relativizing the secular order?

In order to better reply to these queries, we shall first investigate the early emergence of profit-driven, mechanically implemented ‘secular time’ in late medieval Europe. Based on this brief investigation, we shall describe the dichotomy which Taylor employs, that between secular and what he calls “higher” time(s). We shall then move on to a particular example of a community of the late medieval period which was faced with the emergent technological homogenization of time, and explore how its doxological and economic practices reoriented the emergent possibility of a purely secular temporality by relativizing it in light of the sacred.

2. Medieval Secular Time

Jacques le Goff, in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, notes that “[i]n 1355, the royal governor of Artois authorized the people of Aire-sur-la-Lys to build a belfry whose bells would chime the hours of commercial transactions and the working hours of textile workers.”[7] Like merchants today, so were medieval merchants empowered by the mechanical standardization of time, since “the exact measurement of time”[8] was “a prime opportunity for profit.”[9] The Artois governor’s authorization for what le Goff deems the “rationalization of time was [also] responsible for [time’s] secularization,”[10] for “merchants and artisans began replacing Church time with a more accurately measured time useful for profane and secular tasks, clock time.”[11] For the purposes of this paper, we shall accept le Goff’s representation of the introduction of the clock-tower as a culturally “discontinuous” event.[12]

Thus, instead of an “imprecise and variable” ecclesially-based temporality in Aire, secular “labor time” was technologically granted autonomy; rather than the monastically rung bells, it functionally presided with mechanical precision over the economic and bodily practices of that community. We are perhaps reminded of Taylor’s description of “an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done,” especially when we acknowledge that one of the effects of the clock-tower, as the harbinger of mechanically regulated time, was the extension of working hours into the night, which had hitherto remained a time of rest and charitable fellowship with kin.[13]

We should now clarify more specifically the meaning of “secular,” a term we have been using much. In the late medieval period, the Latin term saeculum denoted a century, or an age, of the temporal world. It is this sense of ‘secular’ which Charles Taylor employed above. Thus ‘secular time’ connoted “ordinary as against higher time.”[14] This distinction between ordinary and higher temporalities is important. In ordinary, secular time, “one thing happens to another, and when something is past, it’s past.”[15] This is a rectilinear, non-recursive model of time, like Deleuze’s Aionic time which, in his own words, is a “pure empty form of time, which has […] unwound its own circle, stretching itself out in a straight line.”[16]

In regard to the late medieval period, after the implementation of the clock-tower, the “labor time” of which le Goff speaks was basically aligned with secular time. In our own day and age, as Taylor contends, secular time is equivalent to the “‘homogenous, empty time’ which [Walter] Benjamin makes central to modernity.”[17] They are ultimately the same in a key philosophical aspect, namely their acknowledgement of only the reality of the ontologically immanent, which is to say the refusal of the valid existence of that which transcends or exceeds their chronometric scope.[18]

On the other hand, what Taylor calls ‘higher times’ refer human existence to that which exceeds and thus differentiates time. As he shows, in the late medieval period it was the ontologically transcendent eternity of God which exceeded temporal being and thus imbued it with deeper meaning. But in what way? For Taylor, ‘higher times’ “gathered, assembled, reordered, [and] punctuated profane, ordinary time” [as] “kairotic knots.”[19] ‘Higher times’ even “introduce ‘warps’ and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering [so that] Events which [are] far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely linked.”[20]

Circa 1400, such “knots” and “warps” primarily included feasts, fasts and holy-days from the Church’s liturgical calendar. As Taylor argues, “the Church, in its liturgical year, remembers and re-enacts what happened in illo tempore when Christ was on earth. Which is why this year’s Good Friday can be closer to the Crucifixion than last year’s mid-summer day. And the Crucifixion itself, since Christ’s action/passion here participates in God’s eternity, is closer to all times than they in secular terms are to each other.”[21]

In this sense, eternity and time are not opposed, but temporal being participates in eternity even as the eternal – liturgically acknowledged as it is in the celebratory events of ‘higher times’ – breaks into, gathers and differentiates secular time. Taylor thematizes this multi-layered account: “as well as the ‘horizontal’ dimension of merely secular time, there is a ‘vertical’ dimension, which can allow for the ‘warps’ […] so that everything relates to more than one kind of time.”[22] As the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur contends, “it [is] necessary to confess [eternity as] what is other than time in order to be in a position to give full justice to human temporality and to propose not to abolish it but to probe deeper into it, to hierarchize it, and to unfold it following levels of temporalization.”[23]

It was precisely this hierarchically differentiated temporality that in the 14th century was arguably first threatened by the technology of the clock tower, which – for economic purposes – threatened to reduce this “multiplex time” to a univocal secular time. As le Goff says, “[t]ime was no longer associated with cataclysms or festivals but rather with daily life, a sort of chronological net in which urban life was caught.”[24] This ‘labor’ time and the ‘higher times’ of the Church’s liturgical year thus met in opposition. In some cases, a deterritorialization of bodily praxis bore witness to this. For example, le Goff notes how the concept of a schedule, a method which quickly became crucial for the hourly ordering of daily servile labor, was appropriated from the initial “monastic manner of regulating the use of time,” namely the schedule of hours for prayer.[25]

In light of such an opposition between temporalities, then, in what embodied way did particular communities, by reference to ‘higher times,’ effectively gather and reorder a ‘labor’ time with mechanically supported pretensions of autonomy?

3. Corpus Christi Pageant Cycles as Liturgical Punctuation and Reorientation of Secular Time

While le Goff concludes with resignation, saying, “[h]enceforth, the clock was to be the measure of all things,”[26] I want to focus on a particular late medieval urban community’s dramatic practices of festivity as a mode of liturgical action which in some degree served to resist the emergence of a secular temporality. That community is the city of York, circa 1380. In this case, the reason for its festivity was the feast of Corpus Christi, first introduced by Pope Urban IV in 1264 to honor the sacramental body of Christ, the Eucharist.

The feast was first introduced in England in 1318 and was “seized on by the authorities as an occasion for the promotion of both charity and Christian catechesis [and] rapidly won popular allegiance.”[27] Yet the practice upon which I want to focus, namely Corpus Christi pageant cycles, first occurred later and thus much nearer in time to the technological institution of ‘labor time,’ beginning as they did in the late 14th century. In fact, the earliest record of their production places their emergence within twenty years of the technological implementation of ‘labor time’ at Aire.[28]

The Liturgical Nature of Corpus Christi Pageant Cycles

Corpus Christi pageant cycles, in Sarah Beckwith’s words, “are best understood as a form of liturgy.”[29] Speaking of the cycles, Beckwith elaborates: “[t]hrough the resources of theater, ritual and liturgy, they narrate the Christian myth, and in this most fundamental of senses, they remember the life of Christ and the eucharistic imperative the invitation celebrated in the Feast of Corpus Christi: ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’”[30] The cycles exemplify “the tendency in late medieval England to elaborate and make more explicit the representational and dramatic dimension of the liturgy.”[31] Rather than detailing the structural parallels between the cycles and such high-medieval doxological innovations as the Easter trope, Quem quaeritis?, which increasingly formed a part of special holy-week Masses, it suffices for our current purposes to briefly explicate the term ‘liturgy’ here, despite its marginalization from many modern academic forums due to its ritualistic – and thus supposedly hegemonic – connotations.

Catherine Pickstock destabilizes such connotations: “[t]o say that human life has a fundamentally […] liturgical character is […] a way of indicating that the most realistic actions with a pragmatic and functional character nonetheless also exceed themselves by indicating the […] transcendent, which is the horizon in which they operate.”[32] Liturgy is a doxological practice which, because of its intricate and necessary bodily involvement, fundamentally stands firm against any gradual cultural proclivity for “‘excarnation’, [considered as] a transfer out of embodied, ‘enfleshed’ forms of religious life, to those which are more ‘in the head.’”[33] As Pickstock writes elsewhere,

the liturgy of the Middle Ages was embedded in a culture which was ritual in character. This was a time when the Offertory gifts were not disconnected from the produce of everyday life; indeed, the category itself of ‘everyday life’ was perforce a thoroughly liturgical category. For the community was not something which existed prior to, or in separation from, the Eucharist as a given which simply met at regular intervals to receive the Sacrament. Rather, the community as such was seen as flowing from eternity through the sacraments.[34]

Here we see Pickstock’s emphasis on the participation of temporality in eternity via liturgy. Indeed, liturgy both relativizes time in light of the eternal and keeps faith grounded in the physically, which is to say visibly contingent reality of embodied human existence; in being a performance which ‘re-members’ the body of Christ, it allows for the non-identically repeated practices so vital for a proper maintenance of individual difference in community through time.[35]

In the Greek, leitourgia etymologically means a ‘work’ of the ‘people,’ an ergon of the laos. The significance of this becomes clear when we recall, with le Goff, that it was precisely an economic, and even ergonomic, shift which resulted from the late-medieval technological standardization of ‘labor time.’ In relation to a contrast between temporalities, then, we have a parallel contrast between two conceptions of work, which is to say, two economies. One is profit driven, and constitutes the practical structure of a form of proto-capitalist social organization reliant on precision and uniformity, while the other pertains no less to work and life, but does so in a way that does not neglect to acknowledge the dependence of the world upon the goodness of the eternal God, which is to say the status of all that temporally is (even monetary profit) as gift.

Context and Performance

Corpus Christi pageant cycles were performed only during the feast of Corpus Christi, which occurred once a year, ten days after Pentecost. The pageants themselves dramatically narrated anywhere from fifteen to forty of the more significant events in salvation history, such as the Creation and Fall (of Lucifer and humanity), the Flood, a diverse scattering of other core Old Testament events, the Nativity, sometimes various events from Christ’s life, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension and the Last Judgment. The pageants were staged at varying times on mobile wagons positioned in multiple locations throughout the streets of York, often according to the interlinking of several routes along which groups of people could serially ambulate.

These locations at which people congregated both figuratively and topologically instantiated distinct episodes in the narrative of salvation history, so that a unique meshing of time and space was effected. In this way, not only was an entire portion of the year reordered by a festive cycle of “higher times,” and thus suspended from ‘labor time,’ but the entire particular urban place of York was transformed into a network of dramatic performances, a veritable urbs signorum. As if on a pilgrimage which nonetheless remained within the city walls, people walked from one stage to the next, reliving as a social body the narrative of the eternal God’s creation and redemption of the temporal world.

This practice of staging active representations of the biblical narrative operated along the ‘vertical’ dimension of which Taylor speaks, and thereby constitute precisely one of those “kairotic knots” of ‘higher times’ which thicken and reorient secular time.[36] Moreover, by theatrically signifying the core events of the Christian narrative (particularly the “historical” corpus Christi itself as the body of an actor), the York cycle of pageants comprised an interactive arena in which every citizen could conceive and (in the sense of Ricoeur’s “forward-directed reference”) consequently proceed to enact the stories of their own lives within the determinative yet ‘open’ context of that larger narrative.[37]

Indeed, besides signifying God’s body on stage, the pageant cycles, by involving the participation of the entire socio-ecclesial body, also made present the corpus Christi off stage, as the gathered local community. Corpus Christi theatre, as Eamon Duffy notes, “encourag[es] an ever deeper or immediate sense of imaginative participation in the biblical event[s]by gild members than that offered by the prescribed liturgy.”[38] It is in this sense that some scholars have called the pageant cycles a sacrament of theatre, as something more than mere spectacle. Sarah Beckwith convincingly contends that “these plays actualize the body of Christ.”[39] Duffy, too, goes on to describe the feast of Corpus Christi as “conceived and presented in late medieval communities as a celebration of the corporate life of the body social, created and ordered by the presence of the Body of Christ among them.”[40] We would do well to remember here, however, that the presence of Christ’s corpus is always already manifold and complex, with historical, sacramental, ecclesial dimensions. During the feast of Corpus Christi, a uniquely theatrical dimension was added, and the concomitant affectivity altered the dynamic of the other three, as I argue below.

Reconciliatory Affectivity

It was a unique admixture of relation between the latter three of these dimensions – sacramental, ecclesial and theatrical – that actively encouraged a common move toward penance in the form of embodied reconciliation between persons. As a total, open-ended series of affective events, “Corpus Christi theatre explores […] the embodiment of forgiveness.”[41] As the initiative for the feast, the sacramental corpus Christi held a position of prominence. Indeed, as Beckwith articulates, the underlying impetus for social reconciliation was the consumption of the Eucharist: “preparation of the soul and reconciliation […] entailed not merely self-examination but actually restoring damaged bonds of love between people.”[42] Here we can recall Pickstock’s earlier point regarding the community as being given through the sacraments. But with the pageant cycles, the theatrical supplements this: “[Corpus Christi theatre] animates the intersubjective dimensions of theater to show that the presence of Christ and his absence are utterly bound up with our presence to each other in bonds of charity.”[43] This, in turn, leads to an emphasis on the socio-ecclesial aspect, so that “confession and penance are acts that concern the community as a whole.”[44]

Yet we must interject here with the qualification that in the late medieval period, even while (as Duffy indicates) “the Host […] was the source of human community,”[45] the doctrinal emphasis of the Mass had shifted, from a participatory and mysterious event to a more causal mediation of grace received visually.[46] This is what makes the pageant cycles so interesting, with their parallel aspects of communal participation and theatrical spectacle. The tensions here between participation and causality mirror those in the very late medieval Mass itself; after all, and as we mentioned above, the cycles themselves grew out of the liturgical tropes during the Mass.

I thus propose that the pageant cycles represent a lay desire for a participatory eucharistic schema whose recognition of the re-membering and congregating of the ecclesial corpus Christi each week was somehow absent from the structure of the Mass itself, having been “displaced” by a terminological inclination toward the causal power of Sacrament as the “enchanted” object. The form of participation which the cycles foregrounded was primarily economic.[47]

An Alternate Production-Consumption Cycle

In other words, the bonds of charity Beckwith mentions were fundamentally economic bonds, involving merchants and artisans who joined together in producing these plays. To begin with, as a feast, on Corpus Christi “total or partial abstention from servile work was required and the laity were expected to observe the Sunday pattern of attendance at matins, Mass, and evensong, fasting on the preceding eve.”[48] In this sense, “labor time” and its “servile work” are utterly suspended and relativized by the feast, as an instance of ‘higher times.’ Moreover, each pageant was funded by York’s artisan gilds, so that the pageant cycle unified the local economy with a common practice to which each gild uniquely contributed. For instance, the shipwrights’ guild was in charge of the ‘Building of Noah’s Ark’ pageant, the Baker’s guild of the Last Supper pageant, etc.[49] Funding was also donated from annually accumulated earnings and so was returned to the entire community.

Granted, “[c]raft gilds and urban corporations saw in the ritual order of the great [Corpus Christi] processions associated with the feast an opportunity for civic and social iconography, the display of piety an opportunity for the display of the worship and the social clout of those involved.” Yet it is in materially engaging both the work and time of the citizens of York that Corpus Christi pageant cycles proffer a radical critique of the regulation of time for the sake of monetary profit, particularly in light of the late-medieval possibility of an emergent autonomous secular temporality.

We can describe the content of this critique in noting how, by means of their complex and pervasive dramaturgical series of “kairotic” performances, Corpus Christi cycles relativized the “everyday” (i.e. secular time) in light of the eternal God. This liturgical relativization relied upon the freely offered resources stemming from a vital economic base, and constituted a reemphasis on the participatory nature of the eucharistic corpus Christi as a socio-ecclesial event.

Therefore, in contrast to the capitalist production-consumption cycle operative in the context of modern secular time, which was first emerging in the late-medieval period by way of technological advancement, late-medieval Corpus Christi pageant cycles embody an alternative production-consumption cycle: the production of dramatic performances which, in encouraging the move to penance and communal reconciliation, restored the bonds of charity necessary for the proper consumption of the Eucharist. And this cycle fits within the divine economy of redemption whose very narrative the plays perform. It is in this way, then, that Corpus Christi pageant cycles truly are a ‘work of the people,’ a liturgy, to the point that they pervade, relativize and thereby reorient the temporal economy of York, reconciling people in ways which balance communal corporeality and appearance with differential variety in celebration and individual penitential piety.[50] We can accordingly describe the cycles as imperfect embodiments of a redemptive economy.

Conclusion: A Redemptive Economy

Like the Sacrament they celebrate, Corpus Christi theatre, in William Cavanaugh’s words, “performs a narrative of cosmic proportions, from the death and resurrection of Christ, to the new covenant formed in his blood, to the future destiny of all creation.”[51] And, to indicate their relevance for modern temporality, with the reorientation of secular time that Corpus Christi theatre affects, “[t]he consumer of the Eucharist is [thus] no longer the schizophrenic subject of global capitalism, awash in a sea of unrelated present [moments], but walks in a story with a past, present, and future.”[52]

By enacting the pageant cycles – without any ‘need for speed’ or ‘excarnation’ – the community of York was “[p]articipating now in a new, dynamic economy […namely] the relations that constitute the body of Christ.”[53]As an alternate, yet no less ‘economic’ production-consumption cycle which freed time from the clock-tower, Corpus Christi theatre differentiated time in relation to the eternal and reoriented human existence within the narrative context of God’s incarnate entrance into and redemption of temporal being.[54] This narrative is contrasted to the exploitive trajectories of early capitalist organizations of labor. The festive performance of the pageant cycles thus reestablished the community of York[55] as first and foremost a pilgrim people of God, travelling principally through time in productive cycles of penitence and reconciliation, rather than standardizing temporality for profit.

In closing, we can hope that a contemporary recognition of the reductive nature of strictly secular “labor time,” and a resultant desire for temporality’s differentiation will animate the production of equally creative models of social praxis such as Corpus Christi theatre embodied in late medieval York.[56]

 

 


REFERENCES

 

Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York

Corpus Christi Plays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

 

Berry, Wendell. “An Entrance to the Woods.” The Art of the Personal Essay.

New York: Anchor Books, 1997.

 

— Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings. Lon

-don: Routledge, 1993.

 

Cavanaugh, William T. Theopolitical Imagination. London: T&T Clark, 2005.

 

De Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centu

ries. Vol. 1. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1992.

 

—, The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1984.

 

De Lubac, Henri. Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. Trans.

by Lancelot C. Sheppard and Sister Elizabeth Englund. San Fran

cisco: Ignatius Press, 1988.

 

Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Trans. by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale.

Ed. by Constantin V. Boundas. New York : Columbia University

Press, 1990. p. 165

 

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England

1400-1580. 2nd Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

 

Kinghorn, A. M. Medieval Drama. London: Evans Brothers, Ltd., 1968.
Leff, Gordon. The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook: An Essay on the Intellec

tual and Spiritual Change in the Fourteenth Century. New York: Harper

& Row, Publishers, 1976.

 

Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Chicago: Uni

versity of Chicago Press, 1980.

 

Pickstock, Catherine. “Liturgy, Art and Politics.” Modern Theology 16.2

(2000): 159-180.

 

— After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

 

— “Liturgy and Language: The Sacred Polis.” Liturgy in Dialogue. Ed. Paul

Bradshaw & Bryan Spinks. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press,

1994. pp. 117-138

 

Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and

David Pellauer. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

 

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Har

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Ward, Graham. Christ and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

ENDNOTES

[1] Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. p. 59

[1] Ibid. p. 58

[1] Ibid. p. 59

[1] From this stem negative psycho-somatic effects. As Wendell Berry notes, “we seem to grant to our high-speed roads and our airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported […] the faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over – and the longer it takes to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything” (Berry 672).

[1] Wright, John. “The Mission of the Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City, Sermon #3.” October 22, 2007. http://www.pastorjohnwright.org/archives/2007/10/the_mission_of.html#more

[1] In regard to Christian religious praxis, Charles Taylor has coined the term “excarnation” (Taylor 554); this term will be advantageous for us below.

[1]Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. p. 35

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid. p. 30

[1] Ibid. p. 36

[1] Ibid. Le Goff argues that “once commercial networks were organized […] time became an object of measurement” (35). We see similarities here with Taylor’s argument concerning the secular time of today.

[1] I am implying Gordon Leff’s usage of ‘discontinuous’ here, as opposed to ‘continuous’. See Leff, Gordon, The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook : An Essay on Intellectual and Spiritual Change in the Fourteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1976.

[1] This encroachment on the nocturnal has of course exponentially increased today, so that now 24-hour stores are common, and the city, as they say, never sleeps. Such represents a distortion of even a purely mundane time, that is, a time based only upon the movements and rhythms of the seasons and processes of the world. With this in mind, the secular time of the clock-tower is doubly problematic, for it threatens to usurp and displace both the liturgical temporality of the ecclesial calendar, as well as the ‘natural’ oscillations of cosmic temporality.

[1] Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. p. 55

[1] Ibid.

[1] Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Trans. by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. by Constantin V. Boundas. New York : Columbia University Press, 1990. p. 165

[1] Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. p. 54

[1] Within the medieval period, the mutual indifference of secular time, regardless of what happens ‘within’ it, arguably proffers a parody of the Augustinian-Boethian doctrine of God’s immutable “present,” which “contains” all times; secular time does so by constituting a rival schema that, like a Scotist univocal ontology, posits itself as a “container,” albeit a totalizing one.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid. p. 55

[1] Ibid. p. 58 My italics.

[1]  Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. p. 57

[1]  Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984. p. 30

[1]  Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. p. 48

[1] Ibid. p. 51

[1] Ibid. p. 52

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. 2nd Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. pp. 43-4

[1] I am aware at the ‘leap’ I am making by linking such geographical distances without further research; I hope to extend my study – which is at this point preliminary – in the future in order to build upon these potential lacunae. To continue, the clock-tower began in 1355 and the York cycles were first performed circa 1375. But we must underline that the reasons for the institution of the Corpus Christi feast itself are complex, and involve a shift in understanding regarding the Eucharist itself, which – considered as the true body of Christ – was the celebrated object of this week long feast. Henri de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum traces the high-medieval doctrinal shifts that led to this consideration. In brief, for approximately a thousand years, the body of Christ was considered in three ways, which were nonetheless unified. First, there was the historical body, which was Jesus Christ, God the Son incarnated as a particular Jew in first century Palestine and raised from the dead. The second corpus Christi was that of the Church which after Christ’s ascension, was considered as the real, or true body, the corpus verum. The third corpus Christi was the sacrament of the Eucharist, which was considered the corpus mysticum, or the mystical body.  William of St. Thierry puts it this way:

Whenever the intelligent reader finds in a book anything about the flesh or body of the divine Jesus, he may apply this threefold definition of his flesh or body […] For he must think in one way of that flesh or body which hung on the Cross and is sacrificed on the altar, in another way of his flesh or body which is abiding life to the person who received it in Communion, and in yet another way of that flesh or body which is the Church…Not that we would depict Christ as having three bodies, like Geryon in the fable, since the Apostle testifies that the body of Christ is one. But the mind or heart makes the distinction with a certain relation to faith, though the reality maintains the undefiled truth in its simplicity. (On the Sacrament of the Altar, c. 12 {PL 180, 361-2}; quoted from Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. p. 388)

During the first millennium or so of the Christian tradition, the constitution of the latter two bodies (ecclesial and sacramental) occurred as a reciprocal event, as both a physical assemblage in a single geographic location and a consecrated liturgical transformation which, in their shared relation to the risen historical body of Christ (‘which hung on the Cross’), were kept in a tension that defied conceptualization, and thus avoided a binary opposition in which one was privileged over the other.

However, as Michel de Certeau notes, “after the twelfth century, the expression [corpus mysticum] no longer designated the Eucharist, as it had previously, but the Church. Conversely, ‘corpus verum’ no longer designated the Church but the Eucharist. The adjectives ‘mysticus’ (hidden) and ‘verus’ (truthful, real and knowable as such) were reversed […] the change was in the form of a chiasmus between the signifier and the signified” (de Certeau Mystic Fable 82). Accordingly, instead of the visible body of the church and the invisible sacramental body, after this reversal “the Church, the social ‘body’ of Christ, is henceforth the (hidden) signified of a sacramental ‘body’ held to be a visible signifier, because it is the showing of a presence beneath the ‘species’ (or appearances) of the consecrated bread and wine” (82).

No longer were Church and the Sacrament held in a fruitful tension as ontologically equidistant from the historical ‘body’ of the risen Christ. Rather, the sacrament, as the third ‘body,’ came to be more closely associated with the historical ‘body,’ to the exclusion of the social, ecclesial ‘body.’ It was this emphasis on the Eucharist as the ‘true’ body that led to the institution of the Corpus Christi feast, which honors the object of the Sacrament with a revered status it traditionally did not possess. But there were other, politically significant repercussions, not the least of which was a move from a doctrine which was grounded in salvation as participation, or incorporation, whereby those socially gathered were considered the visibly ‘real’ ecclesial corpus Christi, to one reliant upon efficient causality, whereby emphasis was placed on the priest, who was seemingly endowed with a power to ‘make’ the ‘real’ sacramental corpus Christi, and which itself, in turn, was held to have transmitted the force of grace to the sacrament’s consumer.

When abused, this shift transformed the laity, during the mass, into a mere audience who waited expectantly for the ringing of the bell (during the epiclesis) and the elevation of the host as the spectacle of spectacles. In this sense, the term ‘liturgy,’ which in Greek etymologically denotes a ‘work’ of the ‘people’, (an ergon of the laos) arguably no longer applied accurately to the Mass. An unnecessary opposition was thereby established between the ecclesial ‘body,’ and the clerics, who were associated with the Eucharist. It was this seeming opposition against which Wyclif reacted, but it concerned an issue which would have been nonexistent in an earlier period.

See also John Milbank, “The Last of the Last: Theology in the Church.” Conflicting Allegiances: The Church-Based University in a Liberal-Democratic University. Ed. Michael L. Budde & John W. Wright. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004.

[1] Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. p. 100

[1] Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays. p. 3

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. p. 20

[1] Pickstock, Catherine. “Liturgy, Art and Politics.” Modern Theology 16.2 (2000): 159-180. p. 160 This distinction between the ontologically transcendent and immanent parallels the eternal/temporal relation. Another way of saying this is that “the liturgical relativises the everyday without denying its value” (161).

[1] Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. p. 554.

[1] Pickstock, Catherine. After Writing. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. pp. 170-1

[1] In regard to the positive nature of liturgical repetition, Pickstock’s words are worth including here: “It is a quotidian error to suppose that repetition requires identity between things […] Positive repetition, then, emerges from difference, and it constitutes development; each new assertion of an element, over and against the disparate world, has absolute significance in relation to what has gone before […] Commemorative repetition cannot be dissociated from the event to which it refers. There was repetition in the original event of the Last Supper, not simply in the parallelism of Jesus’ words, but also in his repetitive call to repeat and remember. Without that provision for repetition, the event itself would be incomplete. […] While in the quotidian aren paratactic repetition signals a decline in meaning, proliferation forming a broad-scale grammaticalization, sacral repetition produces an intensification of meaning, a perpetual lexical reassertion, the cumulative effect of which is the suspension of mundane time. Events are transposed from linear time into a perspective of eternity” (“Liturgy and Language: The Sacred Polis.” Liturgy in Dialogue. Ed. Paul Bradshaw & Bryan Spinks. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1994. pp. 136-7). In the same article, Pickstock extends the significance of non-identical repetition in relation to mundane, or secular, time: “The Eucharistic present does not persistently enter the repeated interstices of our diurnal order to reside passively in them, but rather to transpose the horizontal into the vertical, the quantitative into the qualitative, chromos into kairos. […] Repetition in the sacred polis seeks to harness the present not by annihilating the past, but rather by vivifying it, and by setting the present in the context of eternity. The cumulative effect of such recursive present moments is to suspend the ravages of mundane time and to establish a vertical plane where each event points simultaneously behind and in front of itself, filling each moment of history with meaning and purpose” (137). In regard to this, we can recall Taylor’s similar mention of the twin axes of horizontal (ontologically immanent/secular/finite) and vertical (ontologically transcendent/sacred/eternal) times, the latter imbuing the former with ‘meaning’, and thus disallowing nihilism.

[1] And this in part by materially involving the formation of ‘kairotic knots’ or locative clusters of ‘pilgrims’ at multiple urban positions. In Michel de Certeau’s words, a ‘kairotic knot’ “mediates spatial transformations. In the mode of the ‘right point in time’ (kairos), it produces a founding rupture or break. […and] modifies the local order. The goal of the series is thus an operation that transforms the visible organization. But this change requires the invisible resources of a time which obeys other laws (The Practice of Everday Life 85). For the ‘series’ of Corpus Christi pageants, such an ‘other’ time is the eternal which, in de Certeau’s words, ‘produces a founding rupture or break.’ And the resultant transformation of visible organization which Certeau considers essential to the enactment of narration occurs in the production and reception of the pageants themselves, as I shall argue below.

[1] What Paul Ricoeur notes in regard to the narrative of Augustine’s Confessions applies here: “the attraction of the eternity of the [divine] Word felt by temporal experience is not such as to plunge the narration, which is still temporal, into a contemplation free from the constraints of time” (Ricoeur 29). Moreover, the residual nihilism which accompanies an over-emphasis on the capacity for independent self-determination (arguably the myth of modernity), as opposed to dependence on others and God, is avoided (a emphasis which we see emerge, for example, with Chaucer’s ‘self-narrating’ pilgrims, also in the late 14th century).

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. p. 21 I should note here that Duffy is specifically referring to Candlemas celebrations, but says in the succeeding paragraph that “it is the liturgical celebration which shaped and defined such gild observances, and the same centrality of pattern of the liturgy is evident in a number of the surviving Corpus Christi plays of the Purification” (Duffy 21).

[1]  Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays. p. 116

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. p. 26

[1] Sarah Beckwith Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings. London: Routledge, 1993. p. 91

[1] Ibid. p. 92

[1] Ibid. p. 101

[1] Ibid.

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. p. 92

[1] The history of this doctrinal emphasis is traced briefly above. See note 25

[1] This was in part due to the terminological shifts which both de Lubac traces in Corpus Mysticum and de Certeau retraces in The Mystic Fable regarding the threefold body of Christ. See note 26 above. Whether there exist substantial links between the univocity of secular time and the “loss” of participation remains to be explored. If said temporal univocity stems from Scotus’s univocal ontology (which disallowed metaphysical participation), then this exploration would certainly bear fruit.

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. p. 42

[1] Duffy notes that “the gilds, not the clerks, took over the management of the processions.” Ibid. p. 44.

[1] They also provide an opportunity for the lively education of the mostly illiterate, yet increasingly literate, late medieval laity. As Duffy observes, “[w]hatever their precise content, these plays clearly involved massive corporate effort by the laity of York to foster knowledge of the elements of the faith” (Ibid. p. 67).

[1] Cavanaugh, William T. Theopolitical Imagination. London: T&T Clark, 2005. p. 118

[1] Ibid. Moreover, during the ‘higher time’ of the Corpus Christi feast, the future of all persons itself is made visible in the final pageant, the Last Judgment, as the gathering of all peoples and time itself into eternity at the eschaton, which, as Beckwith notes, is the “crucial horizon in these plays”: “[a]s an eschatological feast, the future breaks into the present […] it has happened already and is yet to come” (Beckwith 113).

[1]  Ward, Graham. Christ and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. p. 84

[1] In this vein, Corpus Christi theatre arguably functions as a quasi-liminal result of the dialectical relation between medieval academic doctrine, occupying the Bakhtinian authoritative primary genre of the treatise or summa (always composed in Latin), and vernacular, ‘literary’ texts, themselves occupying various secondary genres. Indeed, liturgy is arguably the a priori conflation of these two, as a communally enacted praxis of doctrinal poesis. But, while Corpus Christi plays stem from liturgy, they come more and more to respond to the doctrinal and ecclesial shifts first occurring in the late medieval period (regarding the Eucharist and the overall increase in clericalization).

Thus, by commenting on the consequences of certain doctrinal shifts – that is, the transference of the phrase ‘corpus verum’ from the ecclesial body to the sacramental body – Corpus Christi theatre constitutes a founding moment in the historical and cultural dialectic between texts of hierarchically differentiated genres, on the (Bakhtinian) primary and secondary levels. And such interaction in this case precisely exposes on the level of culture the displaced role of liturgy as a mode by which immanent ‘everday’ life is relativized and made meaningful in reference to the transcendent. The very production of Corpus Christi cycles, then, when considered as culturally enacted yet ecclesially sanctioned, summons a community – in this case York – to hearken back to the previous balance between the threefold body of Christ, which is to say back to a time when the social Corpus Christi received equivalent emphasis with the sacramental Corpus Christi, bears witness to the threat of a loss of a liturgical way of life. The trajectory of this loss, in all its manifold aspects, and this hearkening back functions as a principal motivator of the transition from the late medieval to the early modern periods, respectively.

[1] Which was more definitively determined by the fact that the minster of York, like the respective cathedrals of all medieval towns, was presided over by a single bishop.

[1] Interestingly, such has arguably occurred; the York Corpus Christi pageant cycles have, since the mid-twentieth century (although more so in the last two decades), once again become an aspect of cultural life in York, however contrived. Do they serve the same function? Of course not. A valid inquisition, then, would concern the worth of the performance of these pageants if, for example, they do not function simultaneously both as a genuine celebratory expression of an ecclesial feast and as an artistic medium for the encouragement of penance and communal reconciliation. Must they inevitably be construed as a nostalgic form of entertainment which ambivalently pays homage to a ‘lost past’? How lost, in fact, is this past? Or, rather, could the initial function(s) of Corpus Christi theatre be legitimately reinstated, so that their performance occurred within a cultural context which itself gave primacy to the ecclesial and doctrinal ties? Would such a move require the fundamentally private, and thus supposedly ‘sectarian’, nature of these performances, or not? Such investigations regarding the modern resuscitation of the pageant cycles should be undertaken, insofar as suggested conclusions may indicate the contemporary significance of these cycles, and thus assist in determining the nature of their alteration and outlining their current function in more detail.

In fact, Sarah Beckwith has outlined in detail the various complications and ambiguities surrounding the 20th century stagings of the ‘mystery plays’ in York, particularly during the 1951 Festival of Britain which, as Beckwith quotes one author as having argued, was to be both a post-war cultural exhibition and “a concerted attempt to construct a ‘new secular mythology’ through which to constitute a future” (Beckwith Signifying God 5). Beckwith further contends that these post-WWII stagings were intended, via the “revisiting [of Britain’s] own ancientness” (180), to contribute a positive ethos within “the twin contexts of populism and nationalism and state subsidy in England after 1945” (180-1). Surely this is a far cry from the cycles’ original, late-medieval functions. 

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Diversions and Deceit: Eliot, Nabokov, and the Art of Misdirection in a Speed-Reading Society by Rose Burt, San Diego State University

July 18, 2009 by Leave a Comment

In the preface to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the character Charles Kinbote urges the reader to refer to his annotations to a poem and to “study the poem with their help, rereading them of course.”[1]  Critics who followed this advice soon published labyrinthine notes with annotations of the annotations of the poem, “Pale Fire.”[2]  In his review of such criticism, Charles Ross writes of academics: “We are a busy people.  Not many can wile away the hours in graduate school trying to construct a grammar of Zemblan.  Give the public the solution it wants; then let us reread…a great short essay might have been a better choice than a spiraling critical study.”[3]  While at first Ross’s statement seems merely like the late-night grumblings of an overloaded student, in a society increasingly concerned with industrial efficiency and measuring success in terms of output (as the pressures of promotion on the tenure-track would suggest), Ross’s outlook on the ideal forms of reading and criticism echoes the sentiments of many academics.  Ross’s comment is indicative of two prevalent attitudes of academic scholars that have prevailed even into this century: first, the desire for linear arguments and graspable solutions, and second, the preference for packaged critical inquiry with portable, concrete analyses.  When we read a poem or novel, we often want to end our first reading with a sense of satisfaction and comprehension.  When we read criticism, we seek clear, structured, theory-based studies that give us answers to questions of relevance and literary significance.  At the very least, thinking about “re-reading” and “spiraling critical study” strikes us with some trepidation.

In this sense, we are not so far off from the speed-readers we criticize outside of academia.  When faced with challenging texts, the first inclination for many is to turn to other sources to do the deciphering on our behalf, and to spend our time in traditional forms of criticism aimed to identify cohesive taxonomies and formulaic approaches to the keys of a text.  Although we often wax poetic to our friends, colleagues and students on the virtues of close reading, library research and reading in isolation, many of us are not beyond using sources that will do the work of summarizing the text on our behalf.  We explain to ourselves (and sometimes, to others) that we are merely trying to understand the discourse that has already been written on the text so that we can add something fresh rather than re-iterating previous arguments or following a cold trail.  However, we might as well just use Ross’s excuse: “We are a busy people.”  We, too, calculate the line of best fit that will help us reach our “solution” as quickly as possible.

The task of writing to keep a reader’s interest and to challenge methods of reading is not a new one, and many entertainers and artists alike have undertaken diverse strategies to pull the reader back into the text.  So, too, might we identify a variety of writers like Spenser, Pope, Byron, and Beckett who annotated their own texts in order to comment on forms of literary criticism.[4]  Few texts, however, have managed to actively engage the reader and parody inconsequential criticism to the extent that T.S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov have.  Both Eliot and Nabokov take on the task of devising new methods of interacting with the reader to supplant the speed-reading process and to re-engage the reader in the joys of textual manipulation.  To do so, Eliot and Nabokov integrate their own summaries, endnotes, and annotations that reiterate the theme or refer the reader back to the text at hand. Famously, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Nabokov’s Pale Fire extend their arguments through the inclusion of diversions, extended annotations, and mock authorial explanations in published endnotes accompanying poems of the same name. In effect, these diversions misdirect the reader into trusting sources which complicate and extend the arguments presented.

Eliot’s inclusion of the endnotes in the second publication of The Waste Land has long been a matter of controversy, if not reproach.  Eliot himself has fueled the fire by intimating that the notes were composed along with the poem and embellished later, and included in the new edition both to “ward off possible accusations of plagiarism”[5] and to produce the material needed for the poem to meet the 32-page length printing requirement to be sold as a book.  As Eliot remarks, the notes “‘became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day…I regret having sent so many inquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail.’”[6]  Eliot’s metacommentary serves to confirm the use of endnotes as a significant source of misdirection in the text. The Waste Land, when it was published as a poem without the notes, was noted as an “‘ample test of the reader’s ability and maturity in the skills of reading poems.’”[7] To call the reading a test is an understatement, as Eliot’s network of complex allusions and fragments is meant to instill in the reader some sense of dislocation and insecurity.

The Waste Land is characterized by a mixture of memory of things past and present desires for unity, related in “a heap of broken images.”[8]  The use of multiple languages, narrators, and fragments serves to engage the reader in an attempt to find unity in a world that has been shattered.  Eliot writes, “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,”[9] futilely attempting to put back together the pieces.  The poem is accompanied by Eliot’s somewhat candid endnotes which often seem to explain the origins of an allusion but divert the reader from ascertaining the connection.  In his note on “The Fire Sermon,” Eliot writes, “The complete text of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon…will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series).  Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident.”[10]  Other notes refer the reader to passages of “anthropological interest,”[11] admirations of the interior of a church,[12] to conversations in Australia,[13] and, most notably, to passages of texts in foreign languages without translations.[14]

The deceitful lack of clarity present in the endnotes has been documented by many other authors (most notably, in Kaiser’s “Disciplining The Waste Land”), so I won’t dwell on it here.  Most importantly, although the endnotes seem inconsequential, they replicate the effect of the poem itself in diverting the reader from finding a satisfying, coherent truth.  If another editor had added endnotes, it is almost certain that we would have had English translations of all verses of the poem.  Critics and publishers are noted for their meticulous desire to make texts accessible and easy-to-read, feeding the closet inclinations of scholars who would much prefer to have all the notes in one edition.  However, if such endnotes had been provided, it would have required less participation on the part of the reader and would have undermined the poem’s representation of the impossibility of collecting fragments into a unified whole.  To re-engage the reader into the task and to reinforce his message, Eliot provided his own notes on the text, which tempted the reader into new forms of critical inquiry and imposed a critical lens for which to view the text.

Like those following The Waste Land, the annotations in Pale Fire also serve to divert the reader into new methods of reading and to mock traditional forms of critical approaches to a text, though they do so in even more pronounced ways.  Unlike The Waste Land, where the endnotes provide referential information to support the poem, for Pale Fire “the commentary is the novel,” as Nabokov wrote in a 1961 letter.[15]  In the prologue to the novel, we understand that it is the voice of Kinbote who will narrate the poem and the reflections for us, and that it will be “the commentator who has the last word.”[16]  Whether the reader decides to read the novel from beginning to end or to follow the narrator’s directions for jumping from annotation to annotation, it is revealed fairly quickly that Charles Kinbote is not who he initially made himself out to be, and that the notes have very little to do with the realistic life or intentions of a Mr. John Shade, if such a character exists.

More often than not, the choice of anecdotes to go along with the lines of verse seems purely coincidental.  For example, when the poem reads “I never bounced a ball or swung a bat” (line 130), the narrator’s explanation reads: “Frankly I too never excelled in soccer and cricket,”[17] and continues to detail the accomplishments and proclivities of the narrator, rather than focus on a close reading of the poem.  Even in glossing the annotations we get a sense that reality and fiction are blurred.  In the notes on line 149, the narrator mentions “illusion,” “ripple-warped reflection,” “doubleganger,” “deceived,” and “counterfeit” within five sentences.[18]  Other diversions include the narrator’s occasional misdirection, as when the reader is referred to a “nice response to line 312,”[19] when no notes were included for that line.  The structure of the annotations force the reader to choose what information to deem as relevant, and the undertones of deceit cause the reader to reassess both the content of the poem and the annotations.

In addition to subverting the reader’s intentions of quickly finishing the novel with a solid understanding of its message, the annotations to Pale Fire frequently mimic, comment on, and exaggerate traditions of literary criticism so as to parody the ridiculousness of analyses that make themselves out to be wholly comprehensive or capable of understanding the author’s full intentions.  The usurping of traditional standards of criticism takes a number of forms in the text, but most often includes either direct disapproval or exaggerated representation.  As an example of the former, John Shade is related as saying, “‘when I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool.’”[20]  This directly contradicts Kinbote’s preface to the poem, where he asserts the seriousness of the poem as he believes it was intended to be written.

Other examples of satirical mimicry of literary critics abound in the text.  The structure of the novel itself, with over two hundred pages of commentary for a one thousand line poem – “smothering the poem with its notes”[21] – is an absurd relation of how critics can dig for clarifications and connections that far exceed the intention of the author.  To this extent, some of Kinbote’s methods of explaining Shade’s supposed intentions also amplify some of the less reasonable approaches of critics to a text.  Kinbote relates that the name “Vanessa” (line 270) must be “an allusion to Vanhomrigh, Esther!”[22]  At times, Kinbote relies on many pages of analysis to annotate a single word from the poem.  Nabokov uses the annotations to suggest that a more appropriate critical analysis of Pale Fire would be one that leaves off trying to distinguish reality from illusion, using theoretical terms from foreign languages, and trying to figure out the “sincerity” of the novel, and instead to acknowledge that a single text may have many layers and narratives that intermingle. As Véra Nabokov wrote in a letter to friends just after Pale Fire was published, the novel “is indeed a very funny book, and only a few reviewers realized what it was really about.”[23]

In The Death of Literature, Alvin Kernan describes Pale Fire as a novel “grappling with a growing narcissism and solipsism in modern life that are making any kind of communication, including the privileged literary kind between authors and readers, increasingly difficult, perhaps ultimately impossible.”[24]  Nabokov often represents his narrator as speaking directly to the reader, with comments like “I trust the reader has enjoyed this note,”[25] and “I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.”[26]  In other words, the narrator is afraid that he will lose connection with the reader, with the understanding that if the reader is unable to accept the same emotional responses and judgments as the storyteller, all reading and writing become irrelevant.  Even more significantly, the novel comments on the beauty of a text’s ability to affect our reactions – a sentiment that we are beginning to lose.  When the narrator describes the moment where he will read the finished version of the poem, he writes: “We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing…I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.”[27]  This is what fiction provides us with, and what we are in danger of losing by getting swept up into the world of seeking concrete solutions and efficient ways of analyzing a text rather than interacting with it.  Eliot and Nabokov urge us to acknowledge that we will never simply grasp a fragmented or multi-layered reality.  Rather, they encourage us to re-immerse ourselves in the text and to revel in the truths it can show us.

REFERENCES

“At The End of the Book.”  Editorial.  New York Times 7 Dec 2006 late ed.

(East Coast): A38.

Eliot, T.S.  “The Waste Land.”  The Oxford Book of American Poetry.  Eds.

David Lehman and John Brehm.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.  351-365.

Golding, Alan.  From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry.  Madi

son, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Grabes, H.  “The Combination of Autobiographies as ‘correlated pattern in

the game’: Pale Fire.”  In  Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov’s Eng

lish Novels.  The Hague: Mouton & Co. B.V., Publishers, 1977.  54-69.

Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green.  “Disciplining The Waste Land, or How to Lead Crit

ics into Temptation.”  Twentieth Century Literature, 44 (Spring 1998):

82-99.

Kernan, Alvin.  The Death of Literature.  New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 1990.

Nabokov, Vladimir.  Pale Fire.  New York: Vintage International, 1989.

—.  Selected Letters (1940-1977).  Eds.  Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J.

Bruccoli.  San Diego: Harcourt Publishing, 1989.

Ross, Charles.  Rev. of Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery,

by Brian Boyd.  Modern Fiction Studies 49.2 (2003): 374-375.

Woodward, Daniel H.  “Notes on the Publishing History and Text of The

Waste Land.”  The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 58.3 (July-Sept 1964): 252-265.

ENDNOTES

[1] Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage International, 1989): 28.

[2] One of the more famous works documenting such criticism is Brian Boyd’s Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (Princeton University Press, 1999).

[3] Ross, Charles, Rev. of Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, by Brian Boyd.  Modern Fiction Studies 49.2 (2003): 374.

[4] Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green, “Disciplining The Waste Land, or How to Lead Critics into Temptation.”  Twentieth Century Literature, 44 (Spring 1998): 86.

[5] “At The End of the Book.”  Editorial.  New York Times 7 Dec 2006 late ed. (East Coast): A38.

[6] Woodward, Daniel H., “Notes on the Publishing History and Text of The Waste Land.”  The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 58.3 (July-Sept 1964): 260.

[7] Golding, Alan, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995): 108.

[8] Eliot, T.S., “The Waste Land.”  The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Eds. David Lehman and John Brehm.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.  351-365): line 22.

[9] Ibid, line 431.

[10] Ibid, endnote on line 308.

[11] Ibid, endnote on line 218.

[12] Ibid, endnote on line 264.

[13] Ibid, endnote on line 199.

[14] Ibid, endnotes on lines 60, 63, 64, 92, 218, 293, 367-77, 412, and 428.

[15] Nabokov, Vladimir, Selected Letters (1940-1977) (Eds.  Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli. San Diego: Harcourt Publishing, 1989): 332.

[16] Nabokov, Pale Fire 29.

[17] Ibid, 117.

[18] Ibid, 143.

[19] Ibid, 218.

[20] Ibid, 156.

[21] Grabes, H., “The Combination of Autobiographies as ‘correlated pattern in the game’: Pale Fire,”  In Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov’s English Novels (The Hague: Mouton & Co. B.V., Publishers, 1977): 65.

[22] Nabokov, Pale Fire 172.

[23] Nabokov, Selected Letters 339.

[24] Kernan, Alvin, The Death of Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 199): 206.

[25] Nabokov, Pale Fire 147.

[26] Ibid, 207.

[27] Ibid, 289.

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