Thursday, June 18, 2015

On Feminism (George Sand, Androgyny, Bisexuality, Etc.)

Dearest Readers,

I am in my office this morning, ostensibly working on my writing but more or less still reading The Benefactor and making sure all of the programs on my laptop are updated by the school, as it is technically their machine.  The quiet here is very nice today, and the weather is temperate--not too hot nor too cool, but just right.  I have the window open, the fan blowing, my shoes and socks off, and I am quite comfy.

This morning, I went to have my blood taken for my usual panel of tests before a doctor's visit.  I was talking with a phlebotomist whose family had been friends with the poet and memoirist Audre Lorde and who have found some serious misrepresentations of them and her in some of the recent work on her life.  I am wondering how one goes about interviewing and documenting these issues before those who know the truth about them are no longer alive.  Where can we publish those kind of very valuable remembrances?  What format do they take professionally for us?  The phlebotomist is willing to be interviewed and I would not mind at some point perhaps later in the summer conducting and writing this interview; I would have to brush up my reading of Lorde as I have not considered her works in a long while, although I have taught in the past in Introduction to Poetry and in my Women in Literature courses.

Currently, I am working my way through Sontag's The Benefactor as well as Elizabeth Berg's Dream Lover, which Angie gave me for my birthday, and which is based on the life of George Sand.  Sand is a fascinating and important writer, but, as with many writing and artistic women who lived extraordinary lives (such as Aphra Behn among others), the work they wrote and produced is itself overshadowed by the life. Sand had long relationships and perhaps affairs with many of the major male writers and artists of her day (e.g., Liszt, Chopin, Flaubert) and occasionally smoked a cigar and cross-dressed to travel as a man.  The couple of her novels that I have read have been thoroughly my kind of book, so she is someone I have wanted to read about and in more deeply.

Most often, however, where I come across Sand is when I teach Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote two amazing sonnets in admiration of Sand, and which offer two (separate) lines of fascinating and relevant feminist thought--one of the sonnets argues that Sand is more woman than any woman has ever been, and the other argues that Sand transcends gender categories all together.  These sonnets chart for my students and me two approaches to feminist thought:  One seeks to reconstruct masculine values by emphasizing those that are most deeply female.  I like this side of feminism best because of its potential to remake the world with those values-values of affect (empathy, an ethic of care, cooperation instead of competition, etc.), openness to change and the Other, and an ethics that responds deeply and empathically to contingency.

The other side of feminism (at least in those sonnets, and you can find this side most pronounced in the wonderful chapter 6 of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and some of the work of Carolyn Heilbrun) is an emphasis on moving beyond gender into a kind of androgynous space.  Androgyny has perchance received a bad rap, but it is not without its strong merits.  I think the Unisex movement of the sixties and seventies may have had something to do with this reputation, but that is only part of the larger picture.  Julia Kristeva in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt argues rather convincingly that androgyny's real problem is its evocation of a kind of asexuality; she suggests that bisexuality is a better and more productive model of a move beyond gender and gendered categories.  She may indeed be right.

Okay, so now it is back to The Benefactor, which also raises some of these issues as the major character is bisexual and rather open in discussing it.  Yet I am not sure of his motivations nor his self-concept here.  More about that later, I suppose.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

On Susan Sontag's The Benefactor

Dear Readers,

Here I sit, listening to the last couple of movements of Mozart's Symphony #35, the Haffner symphony, on a rainy day with the pounding of the jackhammer as construction workers spend their second day outside of my home.  I have been reading Susan Sontag's first novel, The Benefactor (published in 1963), and find it quite good, even though most critics and many of her friends thought it wasn't her best.  I am definitely more interested in her essays than her fiction, but this novel has captured my imagination because its main character, Hippolyte, is a disenchanted intellectual who has left the academic world in pursuit of something else which he cannot define.  (For those of you who know me, don't worry--I am not planning on leaving academics.).

The novel is told in flashback so far, working through that wonderful charting of memory that the best Modernist novels do so well.  It is written from the vantage of Hippolyte as a sixty-one-year old, looking back on his twenties and the choices he made then.  He is very much someone I find sympathetic.  Listen to how he explains his disenchantment with academics even though he is an intellectual and one who quests after knowledge: "Inspired [at university] by the project of becoming learned, I enrolled in the most varied courses of lectures.  But this very thirst for inquiry, that led to investigations which subsequently preoccupied me, did not find a proper satisfaction in the divisions and faculties of the university.  Do not misunderstand me, it was not that I objected to specialization...Neither did I object to pedantry.  What I objected to was that my professors raised problems only to solve them, and brought their lectures to a conclusion with maddening punctuality." I just love that description and find it fascinating that we have changed only somewhat in our ways of teaching since then, and perhaps not quite enough.  Further, I think this description is in part autobiographical and could be applied to Sontag, who herself left academics around this date having not finished her dissertation on Simone Weill, and living much of her time after leaving in Paris.  (If Hippolyte now moves to Paris or even Europe in his twenties, I will know even more certainly that he is based on her.)

One brief note here about the use of memory--I know that in this novel, Hippolyte is going to start blurring his real life and his dream life.  I love the interplay between memory, remembrance and the present, and how faulted memory can shape present life.  Sontag has a compelling vision of the memoryscape of her central character here, as she is very well-read in Freudianism and Surrealism.  This lack of playing with memory, remembrance, and its relationship with the present is the key reason I find Stephen King's Lisey's Story an important but ultimately unsatisfactory novel; memory in that novel is just too darn clear!

The book cover of The Benefactor lists as its models Kafka, and this influence is certainly apparent.  I also see a strong influence of Vladimir Nabokov, especially his later books like Look at the Harlequins! (one of my favorites), which may date after Sontag's early novel.  Where I am in the novel Hippolyte is becoming more and more obsessed with his own mind, and particularly his developing habit of vivid and rather verbal dreaming.  (Sontag will explore the dreamworld again quite strongly in her second novel Death Kit (1967), which is also more profoundly Surrealist and, at least to me, not as successful as The Benefactor appears to be).  Yes, as critics have noted, The Benefactor has all of the hallmarks of Surrealist fiction, but even more because of Sontag's essays and background, I think we can conclude that Freud in general and his Interpretation of Dreams in particular has a lot to do with the structure of this novel's explorations.  (Of course the influence of Freud on Surrealism and the impact of Surrealism on Freud is a long and interesting history that I know too little about at present to write with any precision.)  Thus I see the early '60s in Sontag's work--both essays and fiction--as a long, drawn-out conversation with her ex-husband Philip Rieff and his apologetic approach to Freud (more about that in my book on Sontag when it comes out!).

Good fiction has a way of drawing us in, often through empathy.  (This is one of the reasons why I find most postmodern fiction unsatisfactory, as I find nothing to hold on to in relation to the characters.  Please fault me here if you choose, but my model for the best novels ever written are still Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and George Eliot's Middlemarch.)  So far in my reading of The Benefactor, I would list it as one of Sontag's better novels, alongside The Volcano Lover.  I will let you know what I think as I continue reading this fascinating early text.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

On (Teaching) English Romanticism

Dear Readers,

I have been working on my ENG 419, British Romanticism, syllabus for fall, and enjoying immensely rethinking and focusing this course which I have taught previously.  My brief description that I give to the students on the syllabus reads as follows:  "The first generation of English Romantics was faced with the cataclysm of the French Revolution and its aftermath, which meant war for Great Britain and the threat of invasion.  Yet the Revolution represented at least in name some of the very values that the British held dear (i.e., liberty, equality, and brotherhood).  We will examine this semester the works of English Romantics who are considering in deep and analytical ways the impact of the Revolution and the emergence of ideas of individualism and nationhood in the 1790s into the early nineteenth century.  We will read those who saw the French Revolution as the end of civilized behavior and the death of chivalry (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France), those who saw it as an opportunity to transform society in remarkably liberal ways (Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice), those who used the period as a time for great and transformative making of art and literature (William Blake, Vala/The Four Zoas, The Book of Urizen, Milton, and Jerusalem), and those who used the ideas of the period to transform the domestic novel into something very different than what it had been (Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter and Eliza Fenwick, Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock)."

The work I have become most excited about in the list is Godwin's Enquiry.  According the back blurb, this work marks the beginning of "philosophical anarchism."  I am not sure I agree with this characterization of the Enquiry, unless the one ("philosophical anarchism") shades in its definition a bit into modern libertarianism. There is still way too much generosity and care for the other in Godwin to fit fully or comfortably into the libertarian camp, though; for the versions of at least American libertarianism I know tend to be very deeply individualistic and self-obsessed, not acknowledging nor caring that we are part of the same society and that as part of that society--that social contract, to use Rousseau's phrasing--we bear some responsibility one to another. Philosophical anarchism falls into some of the same traps but its utopian spirit, which tends not to be so narcissistic, is attractive though not practicable or implementable as I see it.  Godwin seems to me to be arguing for something that still shares the interconnectedness of what will become more fully the socialist impulse (after Marx) in England in the nineteenth century than perhaps either philosophical anarchism or libertarianism.

More significantly, at least for my reading of Godwin, is his notion of literature.  Godwin is not willing nor desirous of separating the various forms of texts--literary, historical, philosophical--into categories, but sees them all adhering to one another under the notion of literature and their using/employing the literary in their makeup.  He has a very high calling for the transformative impact of literature and the literary on culture and this is a vision of his that I deeply share as well. Perhaps this is why Godwin also was invested in what can only be labelled a kind of philosophical and, at least in the care of Caleb Williams, a proto-Marxist fiction, and later with children and the production and circulation of children's books.  It will be fascinating to see what the students this fall make of this impressive man, his political/philosophical treatise, and the historical context(s) from which it emerges.