The Likeness of a Tailor’s Dummy: Bruno Schulz’s Recreation of the Human in Sklepy Cynamonowe

Are there ways in which we can look to literature to deepen our understanding of not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be a human in the physical world? The following post is a brief introduction to a paper I will be presenting at the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2012 Conference at Brown University on Bruno Schulz. As the conference’s theme is “Collapse/Catastrophe/Change” and my seminar is entitled “The Human as Catastrophic,” I am particularly interested in the ways in which alternative creation myths in Schulz’s stories function as blueprints, perhaps, to elucidate a different understanding of the human’s place in the world.

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This past year, in which I have been looking extensively at the work of Bruno Schulz, I have gradually discovered that the body of work committed to paper by this Polish-born author is a difficult—if not impossible—thing to describe. How can one say that these tales are fantastic without denying their poignancy, or admit their author’s modernist aesthetic without discounting his joyful spirit? In my many workings and re-workings of critical introductions on the topic, I have come to terms with the near-impossibility of a successful narrative rendering of Schulz’s Sklepy Cynamonowe; perhaps better suited to Schulz is a list of characters and plot elements, the big ones of which would include a father figure that comes to resemble the cockroaches he fears, apocalyptic comets, a Heresiarch’s inordinate fondness for mannequins, Pan as a man in a grubby jacket, and an abundance of malevolent women. But this, too, falls flat. For in Schulz’s work there is a usurpation of both the simplicity of such narratives and the focus of human mastery they imply. Rather, the fantastical masterwork of Sklepy Cynamonowe is rampant with what Jane Bennett so aptly calls “thing power.” The landscape of reality in Sklepy Cynamonowe is a veritable wonderland of hybrid relations and non-human actants: for every person Schulz describes, there is a nonperson who takes center stage elsewhere.

Schulz, who was born in the sleepy Eastern European town of Drohobycz in 1892, was in some fundamental way concerned with a project to re-create the world. Though this is in no small part a reflection of the geopolitical instability of his interwar Poland, Schulz’s philosophical leanings transcend the trappings such an overtly sociohistorical focus would imply. At the close of his 1936 essay “The Mythologizing of Reality,” Schulz considers the uncanny ability of words to rise above the corporeal world, to both render the inexplicable and transform living breath from stale air; he laments our careless discounting of myth in favor of more accurate “reality” and argues “the reverse would be more accurate: reality is but a shadow of the word.” For Schulz, the work of the author is not simply in creating tales that amuse or distract; rather, it is a noble and essential profession that sees its aim as both challenging the world and reinventing it.

As such, Schulz saw himself as a figure divorced of time and place, much to the chagrin of his more politically minded peers. In a series of open letters published in Studio no. 7 in 1936, writer Witold Gombrowicz accuses Schulz of ignoring the concerns and opinions of the common man and woman in favor of an elitist concern for ephemeral “truth”. As evidence, he cites a likely fictional encounter with a “certain doctor’s wife…met by accident on Line 18.” This proverbial stand-in for the masses discounts Schulz as “either a sick pervert or a poseur, but most probably a poseur”, to which Gombrowicz challenges Schulz to respond. And respond he does:

I know what you’re thinking, what a low opinion you hold of our life. And that pains me. You compare it with the life of the doctor’s wife, and that life seems real to you, more firmly rooted in the soil, whereas we, creating up in Cloud-cuckoo-land and devoted to some chimera under hundreds of atmospheric pressures of boredom, distill our products that are useful to almost no one.

In his description of what separates the proverbial “doctor’s wife from Wilcza Street” from artists such as himself and Gombrowicz, Schulz also utilizes the metaphor of scientific experimentation to assert “the avant-garde of biology is thought, experiment, creative discovery. We, in fact, are this belligerent biology, this conquering biology; we are the truly vital.” Contrary to Gombrowicz, who privileged ordinary women and chance encounters over the sublime, Schulz was very much concerned eternal truth, however elusive.

This brief digression into the realm of aesthetics is only to show that Schulz himself believed strongly in the story’s ability to reframe reality; rather than a reflection of the real, or mere communication of ideas, the word for Schulz was something very much alive and capable of invoking change. In this way, we can more clearly view Schulz through the lens of Bennett: in creating stories and making up tales, can we not also open the door to visions of “belligerent biology” rife with vital materialism and the agency of matter? Can Schulz’s aims of spiritual truth also be opened onto a more concrete, physical one?

Appropriately, such themes of creation and re-creation abound in Schulz’s work. In the story “Traktat o Manekinach”, the narrator’s eccentric father gives two heretical lectures on life and lifelessness; one is entitled “Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies, or The Second Book of Genesis” and the other “Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies: Conclusion.” On this “nameless Tuesday,” the narrator, along with a small crowd of female shopkeepers, listens, apprehensively:

“There is no dead matter,” he taught us, “lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life. The range of these forms is infinite and their shades and nuances limitless. The Demiurge was in possession of important and creative recipes. Thanks to them, he created a multiplicity of species which renew themselves by their own devices. No one knows whether these recipes will ever be reconstructed. But this is unnecessary, because even if the classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible for evermore, there still remain some illegal methods, an infinity of heretical and criminal methods.”

His father, the narrator tells us, “never tired of glorifying this extraordinary element—matter.” Had Schulz not explicitly deemed the father figure—also known as the Heresiarch—a “metaphysical conjurer,” the connotations are clear. The Heresiarch is a modern day alchemist, one who seeks to form an alternative creation myth in which the dross of the everyday is transformed into animate gold.  In this alternative creation story, humans relinquish their primacy over other forms of matter, each of which has a unique place in the cosmos. Echoing Jane Bennett’s discussion of “non-linear assemblages,” these “unknown forms of life” are as essential to nature as are the more familiar forms we are accustomed to. Such statements, I am inclined to believe, are nothing short of a revolutionary re-framing of the human’s place in the world.

Love and the Other: A Multiplicity of Mortals in Marie de France’s “Laüstic”

The following is a brief attempt at a reading of one Marie’s lesser-studied lais, “Laüstic.” This particular lai, when I read it for the first time a few months ago, struck me as an exceptionally deep meditation on love, empathy, and mortality. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante, editors of an exceptional translation of Marie’s lais, respectfully disagree. In their commentary of the lai, they describe the lovers as “like children” whose love has “little substance” and “no apparent reason for beginning or continuing.” Their feathered companion is treated no less gently and rendered a mere symbol of selfish love. Given the fact that Marie’s lais are littered with myriad adulterers, cheaters, and violent loves, one wonders what it is about the lovers of “Laüstic” that particularly irks Hanning and Ferrante. This lai, it seems to me, is at least worth a second look.

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In a 1986 interview for French radio, Jacques Derrida posited a reviewing of narcissism as not only a necessary condition of the human existence, but also a quality capable of ameliorating the uncomfortable divide between the singular subject and the other: “The relation to the other…must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible.” In other words, love is by definition an identification with both the external other and the other within—an exceedingly empathetic gesture that takes up one of Derrida’s central themes of the artificial binary systems. Perhaps this is why Derrida’s musings on the animal—or “l’animot”—are so central to his later work. By blurring the boundary between animal and human, one also necessarily brings into question the knowing subject and its enforced separation from the other—something very much at work in the act of love.

In Marie de France’s lai “Laüstic,” there seems to me to be a representation of this transference of empathy from the lovers to the animal other; despite the questionable morality of their union, both come—through love—to identify their spiritual pain with the nightingale’s physical pain. Though it would be tempting to equate the nightingale, as critics have repeatedly done, with a mere symbol for the lovers’ union, I believe a less anthropocentric reading is available to us. In line 63, Marie notes that “It is no wonder if he understands them [birds],/ he who has love to his desire.” The act of loving opens the knight—and, Marie implies, all who love—to a way of experiencing the world that is not only less human-centric in its privileging of vision as the center of knowledge, it also permits the identification with a previously othered being. Before learning to love, one could imagine that birds were simply birds to the knight—nothing but background noise and peripheral masses of flying feathers. After encountering the lady, however, their songs are heard anew with resonance and meaning. In short, the creatures are now endowed with not just natural reaction, but with what Derrida calls “response.”

Similarly, the singular nightingale that comes to a gruesome and violent end not only serves the function of standing in for the lady when her husband kills it, its dead body is lamented at least in part because it retains its self-hood as a nightingale: “The lady took the little body;/ she wept hard and cursed/ those who betrayed the nightingale.” One would be remiss to ignore the selfish reasons behind the lady’s despair, but it seems to me that there is something else at play here concurrently. The lady’s love for the knight and subsequent heartbreak allow her to identify with the nightingale’s betrayal as if it were her own—most obviously because it is. Moreover, Marie’s use of the phrase “little body” as well as her interjection that its murder was “too vicious an act” serve to underscore the sympathetic relationship between two suffering beings. The nightingale transcends the mere symbolic and becomes a small, fragile bird who was born, lived, suffered, and died.

In the dénouement, the nightingale achieves immortality, but to human ends. After serving as a sort of morbid, undead messenger, the nightingale is subject to the whims of the knight and confined to a bejeweled coffin to be “carried… with him always.” However, is it not possible that the slightest glimpse of heterogenic identification is still present? Though the dead bird lacks the agency of its human counterparts, it retains an intangible Derridian “trace” that resonates long after death. And through love, however selfish, the two adulterers achieve a narcissistic ability to see the self in the other. Is it feasible that the relationship between humans and birds in “Laüstic” calls into question what Derrida calls “the pure, indivisible concept” of the human animal as well as “the philosophical and theoretical right, to mark as opposite… the Animal?” If so, then perhaps we can begin to see an “irreplaceable living being” where once there was merely an empty gesture, a voice without a face, a mere symbol.

The Geography of Monsters: The Anglo-Saxon Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle

Is it possible that monsters are a constructed part of the geographical terrain of the human-lived world rather than those oddities seen as contrary to nature? The following post features the opening paragraphs of a paper investigating this question, one that I will present at the Medieval Association of the Pacific’s annual meeting March 30-31st in Santa Clara, CA. The topic has been approached before, often indirectly, but my hope is that in applying the theories of Yi-Fu Tuan, we might gain new understanding of the human geography of Anglo-Saxon England.

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Much has been written about the Beowulf manuscript and the monsters it contains, The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle not excluded from such a focus. Yet perhaps the idea of the monstrous in Anglo-Saxon England is as much a concern of place and space as it is one of mythology, theology or monstrosity for the sake of monstrosity. The Letter of Alexander’s textual landscape, for instance, read through Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinctions of place and space, serves to create zones of habitation within which humans, animals and monsters might challenge categorization for the reader as well as the contrived audience of this spurious letter. Defying their otherwise physical characterizations, those creatures that populate the places of the text are more often than not either human or animal, while the spaces in the text are, at times, occupied by monsters.

Having recently contemplated the medieval boundaries of the human while in seminar, I am reluctant to place the marvelous beings Alexander encounters into strict categories. It could even be argued that the Anglo-Saxons generally made less of a fuss over these labels than the present day readers of their texts. Yet there still seems something to be gained from contemplating these categories that are inherently value-laden. Observing these creatures as benchmarks of space and place, indeed, challenges the ways in which one might typically go about categorizing. For, the Letter of Alexander seems to contain monsters that maintain their humanity as well as both human and non-human animals who have become monstrous. Instead of viewing each marvel in a vacuum, as one might be inclined to do in the study of a single image in a bestiary, Alexander challenges its reader to first locate each of its creatures within the landscape of the text before jumping to any hasty conclusions.

If we are to enlist Tuan’s distinction that place offers “security and stability” from which one becomes “aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space,” we might begin to geographically locate Alexander’s catalogue of living beings within either place or space. For a medieval audience, what creature could offer more security and stability than a human being? Crafted in the image of God, the human offers security through community and stability in physical form, particularly when thinking of Isodore of Seville’s strict corporeal allowances for a human. On the other hand, free from the constraints of human society while living in the open, monsters pose a multi-faceted threat to humans, their bodies, beliefs and, ultimately, their places.

In fact, the very definition of monsters relies upon a strictly ordered nature. John Friedman’s lengthy study of the etymology of the English word monster, through the Latin monstra and the Greek teras, shows its earliest uses as displaying signs of contra naturam, a meaning that beginning with Isodore of Seville, “transfer[red] from individual monstrous births to the idea of monstrous races.” Asa Mittman, too, relies on the ordering of nature for his definition of monsters, stating, “Once proper people, plants, animals, divine and demonic beings have been accounted for, what remains are the oddities of creation, which I would describe as monsters.” To these valuable definitions of monsters, I would add what I feel is a necessary geographical component. Monsters, however contrary to nature in form, inhabit those undifferentiated spaces of the world in the history of their becoming a place.

Since at least the classical age, and likely long before, monsters have been thought to populate the edges of the earth. This belief seems as strong as ever in medieval England. Jeffrey Cohen, Friedman, Mittman and Andy Orchard have each explored medieval monsters at length, using extant art pieces, travel/encyclopedic literature, and, in Orchard’s case, a single manuscript, to support their findings. Additionally, James S. Romm and Mary Campbell both investigate the “edges of the earth,” monsters included. The cumulative work of these scholars on monsters suggests, as an underlying theme, the importance of human geography. Both monsters and places are not things one just stumbles upon––they are instead constructed through action, perhaps even relying on one another for their existence.

 

–Christopher L. Stockdale

ANNOUNCING O-Zone: A Journal of Object Oriented Studies

Figure 1. Margaret Inga Wiatrowski, Initiate the Collapse (2008)

by EILEEN JOY

I’m delighted to share with readers of Pictures. Places. Things. the launch of a new journal in object oriented studies, co-edited by myself and Levi Bryant (of Larval Subjects and the author of the first book published by Open Humanities Press, The Democracy of Objects) and featuring scholars such as Jane Bennett, Ian Bogost, Bill Brown, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Elizabeth Grosz, Katherine Hayles, Timothy Morton, Cary Wolfe, and others as advisory editors. O-Zone: A Journal of Object Oriented Studies is a peer-reviewed, open-access, and post-disciplinary journal devoted to object-oriented studies, both situated within and traversing the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the arts. The journal aims to cultivate current streams of thought already established within object-oriented studies, while also providing space for new pathways along which disparate voices and bodies of object-oriented knowledges might encounter, influence, perturb, and motivate one another.

Located within a post-Kantian philosophical outlook, where everything in the world, from the smallest quarks to lynxes to humans to wheat fields to machines and beyond exist on an equal ontological footing, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies invites new work that explores the weird realism, thingliness, and life-worlds of objects. Possible methodological approaches and critical modes might include: actor-networks, unit operations, alien phenomenology, agentic drift, onticology, guerrilla metaphysics, carnal phenomenology, ontography, agential realism, cosmopolitics, panpsychism, insect media, posthumanism, flat ontology, dark vitalism, prosthetics, territorial assemblage, vibrant materialism, dorsality, distributed intelligence, dark ecology, hyperobjects, realist magic, post-continuity, and other paradigms for object-oriented thought still coming into being and yet to be articulated.

The journal will appear annually and be available online, free of charge, and also in affordable print-on-demand and e-reader editions, published in partnership with punctum books. The description and call for submissions for our first issue, “Object/Ecology,” can be found HERE. We encourage submissions from all possible avenues: established scholars as well as graduate students and early career researchers, independent scholars, and artists. In order to follow all developments and future issues of the journal, you can keep track of us on Facebook or Twitter. Cheers!

Like A Dull Mirror or a Blind Man’s Dream: The Medieval Seer in Wolfram’s Parzival

One of my husband’s most requested critical thinking exercises among his teenage students are his famous “would-you-rathers.” In these exercises masquerading as games, students are asked to decide between two equally horrendous—or equally appealing—circumstances and must explain the reasoning behind their choice with sufficient evidence. Would you rather be God or God’s friend? Addicted to cigarettes or loneliness? Incredibly smart and incredibly ugly or incredibly dumb and incredibly pretty? What’s interesting about these explorations is what the answers reveal about the person who answers; in choosing a person is forced to align her or himself with a value system that buttresses their choice. Even more interesting, one can, from that, extrapolate a cultural value system in play that makes some choices inherently more popular than others. (Sadly, almost everyone under the age of twenty is pretty okay with being dumb and pretty.) I can still remember the tantalizing “would-you-rather” of my youth that came to me today while constructing the topic for this post: Would you rather be deaf or blind? I seem to recall that almost no one, myself included, ever picked blindness.

In no small way, I think that vision’s linguistic tie to knowledge and verbal experience is what makes it such a crucial sense. Although we may pinch ourselves to make sure we’re not dreaming, we don’t have to touch it to believe it or open our mouths to taste the truth. We elucidate truths, radiate confidence, shine a light on important concepts, illuminate ideas, and learn to see with clarity.  The way in which we speak of vision elucidates the ways in which we see it.

Wolfram Von Eisenbach’s brilliant German lyric Parzival, a thirteenth century re-telling of Chrétien de Troyes’ unfinished Grail romance, is a veritable wealth of visual metaphors. In the first chapter alone, I counted at least fifteen references to radiant looks, eyes telling hearts what to do, and beauty outshining all others. The opening sequence, in which Wolfram responds to his detractors, compares their “unripe wits” to “a dull mirror or a blind man’s dream.” Here, seeing is inextricably linked to a psychological clarity. A “seer” is not just someone born with the gift of sight, but a person able to accurately discern the wisdom of poetry. Throughout Wolfram’s work, beauty and radiance are associated with goodness and chivalric nobility. Night is a place of weariness, death, and sorrow, while when our hero wakes from nightmares, “indeed the sun was shining through the windows.” Perhaps, as has been suggested by other scholars, this connection reflects medieval art’s depiction of saintliness with bursts of light and halos, but I also think it elucidates the metaphor of vision as so central to Western epistemology.

Equally interesting is the text’s conflation of visions; in the description of Parzival’s birth, for example, a depiction of visible light is entangled with his mother’s psychological vision. In discovering a vision of “things unknown in her before,” she feels “as though a shooting-star swept her to the upper air where a host of fiery thunderbolts assailed her…and crackled with sparks.” These visions foretell the death of Parzival’s father and are consequently anguishing, but it is not the visions themselves that carry negative connotations, as evidenced by the reliance on luminescent imagery. The light of vision may bring with it presentiments of terror, but radiance itself is the realm of the divine.

Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought dedicates a scant few pages of his 600+ page masterpiece to medieval vision, but this account in no less instructive for its brevity. Many scholars, it seems, have viewed the medieval age as one in which a different structuring of the sensuous hierarchy was in place; hearing and touch, not sight, is said to have taken precedence. Citing studies by Lucien Febvre, Robert Mandrou, and others, Jay shows that often “there is an assumed contrast, sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes not, between medieval and modern visual cultures.” Though works such as Wolfram’s Parzival scream evidence to the contrary, unfair dichotomies of this type proliferate general thinking about pre-modern peoples; they, in common thought, are most certainly not us. And yet, the more I look to pre-modern texts, the more I see the us in them. It is, it seems to me, a fruitless endeavor to attempt to draw a definitive line separating the modern and pre-modern. Rather, a view of pre-modern work as art on its own terms would serve us better to elucidate the lessons such visions contain.

A Mis-placed Reading List: Florida, Appalachia and Medieval England

Winter break passed too quickly and the large stacks of books I had intended to read mostly remain unread. While traveling, however, I did manage to tear through dozens of magazines and several notable books (some of the first I’ve read entirely on my kindle).

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Citrus County by John Brandon (McSweeney’s: 2010, 224 pp.)

Brandon’s second novel, Citrus County couldn’t be set in any other location. His Citrus County is a place “fit only for ambush” in which there exist “no basements, no second stories.” It is a landscape “where nothing would roll away. Everything stayed right where it was and festered.” In this novel, place is paramount, yet unhinged. The school is no place of learning, the home is no nest of security, the swamp is not very scary and the underground bunker we want to avoid is somehow where we always knew we’d end up.  The interconnected lives of a disenchanted and homicidal high school geography teacher and two of his students, Shelby and Toby, display a level of placelessness that is surprising considering the vividness of the places they inhabit. Yet Brandon uses all of this to his advantage, willingly displacing the reader alongside his characters, a distance we are ultimately grateful he provides.

AWOL on the Appalachian Trail by David Miller (Mariner Books: 2011, 352 pp.)

Last year my father backpacked alone across the state of Missouri. The year before that he hiked the width of Illinois. I read Miller’s book on the Appalachian Trail, partly in support of Dad’s next venture: a 6 month trek of more than 2,000 miles, from Georgia to Maine. I chose Miller’s book for its journalistic style, rather than Bill Bryson’s perhaps more consciously literary account of hiking the AT: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering American on the Appalachian Trail. I wanted to know about hikers’ perceptions of the AT as a place. Is it possible that a trail of such length, crossing through hundreds of ecosystems, a wide variety of terrain and more than a dozen states, is something human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan might deem a “knowable place”? Miller’s account seems to suggest that it is. The hikers in AWOL on the Appalachian Trail follow a well-worn path marked by thousands of identical white flags, claim “trail names” and, sometimes, new identities along the way, and ultimately do obtain intimate knowledge of the place-ness of the AT. Miller’s book has left me anxiously awaiting my father’s own account of the same trek.

Maps and Monsters in Medieval England by Asa Mittman (Routledge: 2006, 292 pp.)

I recently returned to Asa Mittman‘s wonderful study of all things cartographical and monstrous…the one text from my reading wish list that I actually was able to read over break. Reading Maps and Monsters so recently after attending Asa’s lecture on monsters and monstrosity at Sonoma State University, allowed me to eerily hear his voice delivering his prose. Creepy but awesome. Asa’s study, at its best, places the monstrous along the edges of the world, oddly enough, the very same place Anglo-Saxons often mapped themselves. His work is more than influential to my own, particularly my upcoming study of the human places and monstrous spaces found within the Beowulf manuscript’s Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle. If you have interests that are medieval, monstrous, cartographical, geographical or spatial, then Asa’s monograph is a must.

Vision in Wonderland

In studying visual culture these last couple of years, I’ve become ever more aware of the myriad ways vision and the visual work as stand-ins for evidential knowledge in modern literature. And, like any true lover of knowledge, I get a happy tingly feeling when I’m able to combine two loves. Such was the feeling when I began to wonder, what about esoteric vision? I am currently reading Martin Jay’s seminal work on the history of French vision and thinking, yet again, about the intersection of various visions. What follows are some brief ruminations on vision and, well, vision, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

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In 1856, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—better known as children’s author Lewis Carroll—bought his first camera; that year, on the 8th of September, he took the first photograph of what was to be an extraordinary, plenteous body of photographic work. Ten years after taking up photography, during some of his most prolific photographic output, he wrote the quintessential Victorian fairy tale Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland followed by Through the Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There—hereafter referred to as Through the Looking-Glass—in 1871. Coupled with his unique views on scientific and psychic knowledge, Carroll’s work presents a cogent representation of Victorian visual imagination; the Alice books render an interesting, exemplary representation of visual culture in the late 19th century, both in terms of physiological sight and, just as important, yet consistently overlooked, a more intangible, marginally religious way of mystic “seeing.” This interdependence of disciplines speaks to an evolving way of looking at the universe, one in which previous epistemologies are revealed as not only inadequate and unsophisticated for the emerging Victorian mind, but also increasingly flawed.  Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass reflect a yearning for a system of knowing that would more adequately address a world poised on the brink of enormous and terrifying change.

 In the 19^th century milieu that Lewis Carroll inhabited, works by photographers such as Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge scientifically quantified movement through time and space; knowledge as intangible as how many legs a racehorse kept on the ground while running or the visual movement of microbial life could—and did—become known. Through photography, unseen chronologies were seen, the unknowable made knowable. As such, it is befitting that time is the first motif Alice encounters in both of the Wonderland books. In Alice ‘s Adventures in Wonderland, it is upon seeing a hurried white rabbit pull a watch out of his waistcoat pocket that Alice decides, “burning with curiosity” to leave the rational, ordered safety of the river bank. And so, following a creature that is, in turn, chasing time, Alice takes the first step on her journey down the rabbit hole.

Moreover, in Alice’s fall under ground, time is slowed to the point that she is not only able to notice the walls of cupboards and bookshelves, she is able to pick up a marmalade jar from one shelf, wonder what would happen were she to drop it, then decide to gently place it into a cupboard, all with relative ease. In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice notices time personified as a clock with the grinning face of an old man immediately after stepping through to the Looking Glass world. That the Wonderland clock “grins” rather than smiles at Alice is not to be overlooked; here, we see a hint of the distinctly Victorian tendency to view the passing of time as a lamentable, malefic condition of life. Seen as a movement closer to death and further from an idealized past, each passing moment serves to unremittingly—like a face grinning sinisterly from beneath a bell jar—remind humankind of what it has left behind, and how close her obliteration looms.

Coupled with scientific advancements in physics and evolutionary biology, photography provided the Victorians with new temporal methodologies; time, seemingly, could now be caught and subdued. And yet, as evidenced by the Alice books, it still remained as elusive as ever. As a metaphoric grappling with this desire, time, in Wonderland, both does and does not exist as such. While the white rabbit worries that the Duchess will be “savage” if kept waiting and constantly fears missed engagements, not too far away the members of a tea party lack the movement of time at all; for the Dormouse, Mad Hatter, and Mad Hare, the time is always six o’clock and thus, always tea time. According to the Hatter, it is after the Queen accuses the Hare of “murdering the time” during a concert that time appropriately comes to a halt, transforming time from intangible unit of measurement to corporeal body: “If you knew time as well as I do”, the Hatter chides Alice, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him“. Time shifts, is angered, and grows. Moreover, as both Alice books occur over the course of a brief lapse in Alice’s wakefulness, time is broadened to unfold a day’s worth of events over the course of a half hour nap.

For the inhabitants of Wonderland, time is alive, fluid, and knowable, yet contradictorily both stationary and unmetered. One would not have to look terribly far to discover that this is very much akin to the “time” represented in a photograph and that which has so troubled modern critics: while ostensibly capturing a single movement in time, the photograph also implies a past observed in the future; the viewer of a photograph connects not just with the image of a vanished moment but also with a Wonderland-like collapsing of time and events surrounding it.

Just as photography represented a shift in the Victorian mind’s view of identity, memory, and time, so too did emerging occult thought—a subjective, internalized form of knowing, as opposed to an external, organized knowledge—help shape the Victorians’ understanding of a world that was both in flux and increasingly unrecognizable. Like photography, the esoteric worldview that proliferated turn-of-the-century thought was at once a way to interpret the world and a way to challenge that subjective interpretation.

Despite the fact that mystical vision and nonsensical creatures dominate Wonderland, Alice repeatedly uses geography, mathematics, and her skills of recitation in an attempt to understand this world on above-ground terms; even while falling down an endless, supernatural rabbit hole, Alice attempts to pinpoint her whereabouts in relation to the center of the earth, wondering aloud, “…that would be four thousand miles down, I think… yes, that’s about the right distance—but then I wonder what Longitude or Latitude I’ve got to?” That distance is perhaps irrelevant in a world where endless tunnels are inexplicably lined with shelves of marmalade apparently does not occur to Alice. Similarly, when Alice finally acknowledges the strangeness of Wonderland, she wonders if she could have been “changed in the night” into another child she knows, and attempts to quell her identity crisis —which, as I have suggested above, underlies each of Alice’s dilemmas—by reciting multiplication tables, ultimately deciding, “the Multiplication-Table doesn’t signify: let’s try Geography.” When that fails, as does recitation, Alice cries herself a quite literal pool of tears. The problem is that nothing signifies; knowledge that Alice has been told to treasure so greatly is now of little use when knowledge is most needed.

Alice’s inability to use “above ground” logic and knowledge to solve her various Wonderland problems—as well as her inability to make sense of a new, unfamiliar identity—reflects the failure of 17^th and 18^th century worldviews to appropriately address the needs of the Victorian thinker. Concurrent revolutions in the way people saw the world—both literally and figuratively—led, in part, to the formation of the modernist artist. Indeed, as Wendy Steiner notes, Carroll’s use of “nonsense” is a direct parody of the inherent relationship between word and meaning and succeeds in subverting notions of a clear correlation between sign and referent—a theme that would become notably important to Carroll’s modernist successors, including Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Coupled with this skeptical language play, Carroll’s utilization of an atypical worldview in the Alice books—one in which the relationships between self, others, and the world are blurred—is an attempt to suggest alternative realities and modes of understanding for a culture poised on the brink of enormous, and frightening, change.

Our modern era has relegated the occult to the marginal and ludicrous new age and photographic sight—or memory—has become a trope; yet Alice’s discoveries of Wonderland vision are nonetheless as germane as ever. The relevance of Alice’s story lies in the fact that it repeats again and again: not only are we in the midst of a digital revolution sure to transform sight as much as the photographic image did, we are—somewhat less concretely—eternally waking up to find ourselves lost in the midst of strange and unfamiliar worlds where our surest logic does not hold. We are confronted with angry, heartless creatures and seemingly tyrannical power structures; forced into places we feel we do not belong and where no one wants us; told repeatedly our truths are wrong and that we’ve been foolish to believe them—the world shifts, and our vision with it. Alice’s persistent intellectual curiosity and willingness—however reluctant—to blur the boundaries of knowledge can be read as a blueprint for fathoming the unfathomable, which, especially in light of increased technologies, becomes a progressively more requisite challenge for modern humankind. As Alice finds, a blending of arts is in order, in which the sciences and humanities are in league, and which does not exclude spirit from the conversation. Otherwise, we risk losing our humanity—that most significant of identities—to the vast Looking-Glass unknown.

CFP: Urban Spaces in the Caribbean

This popped up on the ASLE listserv this morning. It is always nice to see such interdiscplinarity at environmentally-focused conferences and even nicer to see a focus on urban spaces, which are too often left out of environmental discourse. See below for more information.

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Panel Proposal: “Environmental Phenomena and the Urban Caribbean: The Social Impact of Development and Disaster”

ASA Annual Meeting / San Juan, Puerto Rico

November 15-18, 2012

 We are currently soliciting paper proposals and a chairperson for a panel tentatively titled “Environmental Phenomena and the Urban Caribbean: The Social Impact of Development and Disaster” for the 2012 ASA Annual Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico (Nov. 15-18). This panel seeks to examine the impact of environmental change—both “natural” and human-directed—on local and/or visitor populations in the urban Caribbean. How, for example, are Caribbean cities reconfiguring themselves to promote tourism, and what effects does this development have on urban ecology and/or environmental justice? What is the relationship between urban poverty and environmental disaster in the wake of increasingly frequent (and devastating) hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, landslides, and water contamination? How do histories of colonial development shape present configurations—or future imaginings—of urban space in this region? We encourage proposals from any discipline, including environmental studies, urban ecology, history, geology, sociology, urban planning, politics, cultural geography, literature, music, and art.

Paper proposals might focus on such topics as: natural phenomena and urban disaster; sustainable development and tourism; urban climate; urbanization and hydrology; environmental education; urban ecological parks; community-based environmental initiatives; literary/cultural/folkloric representations of urban development and/or disaster; historical patterns of colonial development and/or urban planning; race, nature, and the urban cityscape; urban pollution; politics and preservation; connections between urban and rural/plantation landscapes; gender and ecology; urban futures.

For paper proposals please send 1-page abstracts and a c.v. to bgleason@princeton.edu by Friday, January 13, 2012. Potential chairpersons please send c.v. only.

Without Any Shaping By A Human Hand: Vibrant Matter in The Book of John Mandeville

A brief inventory of the scope of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things is enough to make any skeptic of academia rife with bemused questions of rationale. Dead rats, creative worms, and the overlooked agency of Pop-tarts? What’s next, this skeptic might wonder, a political ecology of dryer lint and toenails? Despite my willingness to drink this particular brand of Kool-Aid, I’ll admit that Bennett does indeed make sweeping, bold claims, among them the concluding credo that “encounters with lively matter can chasten [our] fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests.” For Bennett, a belief in the vibrancy of matter is a political act and no mere intellectual exercise; its potential for application outside of disciplinary constraints—indeed, outside of the classroom or university altogether—abounds. What is missing from her brief study of “thing-power” is just this application, as she notes “that more needs to be said to specify the normative implications of a vital materialism in specific contexts.” Literature, it seems to me, is just one such context that deserves this unique type of study.

The Book of John Mandeville, a fantastical travel narrative written around 1350,  is full of vibrant matters and questions of agenic capacities. Interestingly enough, the thematic commonalities between The Book of John Mandeville and Bennett’s Vibrant Matter don’t end there. Like Vibrant Matter, The Book of John Mandeville, as Iain Macleod Higgins notes in his introduction, is at times boring, insightful, iconoclastic, and tedious. With its lack of plot, meandering narratives, and bouts of biblical cataloguing, it’s sure to disappoint the most sophisticated of casual readers. However, its lack of conventionality can be rewritten as a strength: Not only do its seemingly non-sequitorial episodes beg for critical attention, its patchwork-like qualities make the text itself an example of the type of nonlinear assemblage Bennett describes in her chapter on “Edible Matter.”

The true diamond that the Mandeville author describes as growing “without any shaping of a human hand” possesses a more life-like appearance than do traditional inanimate objects.  These “good diamonds… grow together male and female,” feed, and reproduce. A true diamond can also provide aid to its human counterparts, giving “to its bearer boldness and high spirits” as well as an immunity to “bad dreams and fantasies and [the] illusion of evil spirits.” However, it is important to note that the pure capacity of the diamonds in and of themselves is paramount to the Mandeville author. Not only does the author mention these properties first, he makes a point of stressing their independence from humankind. Giving the diamonds these properties of life opens the door to a different relationship to animate and inanimate, and the type of anthropomorphism that can, as Jane Bennett notes, “counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world.” Perhaps it is not only possible to view these diamonds as growing “without any shaping of a human hand” but also as beings with their own agendas, goals, and desires.

A similarly unique landscape flourishing without the intervention of humankind presents itself later in the text as the narrator discusses a dangerous sea in Prester John’s land. This sea comprised of “adamant stone” with the “property of drawing iron to it” expresses Jane Bennett’s notion of “matter as an active principle” and “not so brute after all.”  Moreover, this place wherein “the decay that was in the ships grows the great abundance of these shrubs and thorns and brambles and grass” represents the vital materialist belief in “one matter-energy” inhabiting human and nonhuman bodies alike. As if to spite their manmade existence, these ships return to their primordial matter and there erupt the strange fruit of decay.

As we are continually reminded by reading such pre-modern texts, the medieval treatment of the written word allows for much more variegation than our current concept of literature allows. This “active recombination” of words, ideas, fables, and genres that Higgins describes in his introduction to The Books of John Mandeville makes it an ideal source of vibrant matter in form as well as content. Perhaps alongside looking at the vibrant matter of “things” in this text, we can also see the text itself like a nonlinear assemblage wherein the impact of the various authors, influences, ideology, historical context, and whims of the parchment and quill “cannot be grasped at a glance.” It seems to me that there could be no “specific context” better suited to the study of matter and assemblage than this.

Containing Chaos: Patrice Nganang’s “Dog Days”

In an article published last summer in The Chronicle Review, Rob Nixon makes the case  for examining depictions of slow violence in literature of the global South. Defining slow violence as “neither spectacular nor instantaneous but instead incremental [violence], whose calamitous repercussions are postponed for years or decades or centuries,” Nixon argues for its “[particular pertinence] to the strategic challenge of environmental calamities.” Perhaps to discover intimations of slow violence, we should look to the environments created with these texts for signs of things gone awry––even those that, at times, might stand in place for the otherwise-silenced, subaltern voices.

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 “I take in the world from below,” claims the canine narrator, Mboudjak, in the early stages of Patrice Nganang’s novel, Dog Days (available in a wonderful translation by Amy Baram Reid, University of Virginia Press: 2006). And that is precisely the worldview the reader is allowed into, one that subverts the top-down politics of a Cameroon obsessing over the exploits of the tyrannical Biya. Mboudjak, as narrator, is a vital link in the ecology of the city streets to which he belongs and into which the reader becomes immersed. While narrating his geographic walking tour of Yaoundé, primarily within the neighborhood named “Madagascar,” Mboudjak traverses an urban landscape that could be read as a landscape of fear.

Human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, in his early work Landscapes of Fear, denotes such a terrain as one in which there “are the almost infinite manifestation of the forces for chaos, natural and human.” Mboudjak’s world, populated by mysterious spirits and reportedly (and sometimes truly) dangerous characters seems to easily lend itself to such a study. Yet might there be something more deeply grounded in the physical landscape of the Cameroonian streets that is equally capable of evoking fear?

As a self-proclaimed “object in the human universe,” Mboudjak is subject to the human-built constructions and constrictions of the neighborhood. Mboudjak relates of his master’s correction “if I stray from the path” and eventually gives up the freedom of his wanderings for the chains of civilization, sacrificing––in the process––the openness and freedom of space for the security found in the confines of a specific place. Should we read this decision as motivated by a desire for “freedom of the mind,” as Mboudjak claims, or rather, did the landscape produce a fear that could only be controlled by the ordering of the human world?

If the landscape is capable of producing fear, then perhaps there are also human-built structures in the neighborhood which are able to negate that fear. Tuan claims that “every human construction––whether mental or material––is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists to contain chaos.” Is it then, perhaps, that human constructions themselves might perpetuate cycles of fear and chaos? And if so, how does one tear down these structures, while seeming to dangle above the earth, like Mboudjak, from the end of a metal chain?