Memo about the success of summer research

Dr. Dowd,

I wish to thank you for your help with the UNCG Graduate School Summer Assistantship for 2011. Here follows a brief narrative of the progress toward the dissertation with which this assistantship has helped during the summer.

Research goal:

Nolan Belk argues that feminists, Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., and Ursula LeGuin among them, found SF conducive to challenging conventional frontiers of gender expectations in the 1970s and discusses how SF was used to challenge the boundaries of contemporary society and produce new ways of knowing the world for readers.

Quick summary of progress through summer 2011:

The research for the dissertation required trips to archives in California and Oregon which were supported in part by the summer assistantship. In addition to archival research, the trip to California also allowed for a challenging weekend of idea building and connecting with writing and research colleagues in the Las Angeles area. Although the trip to California and Oregon provided over a twelve-hundred documents, it also helped highlight information which was missing from the archives and provided contacts who can help fill the gaps. This missing information, combined with the archival research I have accomplished, will allow for new ways of looking at my dissertation topic. Some of these new ideas will be presented during a 50-minute presentation next week at the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, and further work will be presented at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference at Minnesota State University in October.

Calendar:

June 14-17: University of California at Riverside archives

The Eaton Science Fiction Collection at Riverside is the world’s premier collection of science fiction fanzines and research documents. The fanzine collections include near-complete runs of several zines from the 1970s which directly relate to my research into the collaborative nature of feminist science fiction. These zines show both the collaboration of the feminist writers as well as the antipathy the movement faced from within the larger communities of science fiction writers.

June 16: Las Angeles Science Fantasy Society library archives

LASFS is a fan-based science fiction club which dates from the 1930s. The library claims to be the largest privately-held library of science fiction and fantasy literature in the world. However, it was the personal connections I met which proved to be most valuable, including fifty-plus-year member Elayne Pelz who remembered the feel of the feminist movement in the fan community in the 1970s and who was able to put me in direct contact with archivists in British Columbia and New York.

June 17-20: Working collaborative visit with colleagues in California

As expected, a long and fruitful weekend of concentrated idea generation with research partner Ryan Nichols, research fellow at the University of Notre Dame and professor in the Department of Philosophy, California State University at Fullerton and with research-writing colleague Amy Coplan, Department of Philosophy, California State University at Fullerton.

June 21-24: University of Oregon archives

Oregon houses the literary archives of Joanna Russ, Sarah Miller Gearhart, and Ursula Le Guin (whose archives are still closed). I returned from Oregon with over a thousand pages of letters and other correspondence found in the Gearhart and Russ archives – and could have spent another two weeks there. The fruitful search yielded writings from not only these women but also from other subjects of my research including Samuel Delany, Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.), Suzy McKee Charnas, Le Guin, and others.

July: Identifying missing elements in the archival research and finding possible solutions.

An example of such discovery is the first feminist fanzine for science fiction, The Witch and the Chameleon. The fanzine is a primary source for research into how the feminist writers collaborated in thought and deed. However, only one issue of this fanzine was available in the Eaton Collection at Riverside. Through new connections at LASFS, I have been able to track down all the other issues except #1.

August 19: Presentation of research at Renovation, the 69^th World Science Fiction,

“Feminist Science Fiction and the Sociological Imagination”

October 14: Presentation of research at 8^th Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference, Minnesota State University at Mankato, “Collaborative Rhetorical Invention in Feminist Science Fiction”

SABBATH'S THEATER

“Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.” – first paragraph of Sabbath’s Theater

“And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” – last paragraph of Sabbath’s Theater

In his National Book Award winning novel Sabbath’s Theater Philip Roth gives us a character with very little in the way of redeeming qualities. Roth’s reader cares about Ozzie or Zuckerman or Portnoy without having to be convinced. Sabbath, not so much. When I first bought Sabbath’s Theater, a group of friends had decided that we needed to have a book club where we read awesome new books. All of us were aspiring professional writers, and three out of four of us now teach college-level English, so we were not going to be put off by difficult text or characters. But then the group chose Sabbath. They stopped reading after a hundred pages. I did, also, but only because of peer pressure. Because, to be honest, I absolutely LOVE this book.

The question is, why would I (and the National Book Award committee) love this book? It, like most of Roth’s work, is a character study. And the character is horrid. But the world he sees – Sabbath’s ability to SEE, and to show the reader – that’s amazing. From the center of the novel:

[Sabbath] seated himself heavily on his haunches, pale, perspiring, breathless, while on her own Drenka took over the quest [to achieve thirteen orgasms in a row]. This was like nothing he had ever seen before. He thought, It’s as though she is wrestling with Destiny, or God, or Death; it’s as though, if only she can break through to yet one more, nothing and no one will ever stop her again. She looked to be in some transitional state between woman and goddess – he had the queer feeling of watching someone leaving this world. She was about to ascend, to ascend and ascend, trembling eternally in the ultimate, delirious thrill, but instead something stopped her and a year later she died.

Why does one woman love you madly when she swallows it and another hate your guts if you suggest she even try?

Wow. The sheer emotional intensity and beauty of this vision of Drenka – of “woman” in this powerful moment when she is celebrating life to its fullest. Then the shock of Sabbath’s crudity immediately following it. You want to share Sabbath’s vision – you want in his head – you want to see Drenka’s ascension – but you want to be able to jump out before he drops the next foul bombshell. And you can’t. You have to read every single word in Sabbath’s head. If you don’t, you fear you might miss the best ones.

The first line of the novel is a great example of what Roth does with the character through the entire book: “Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.” Here Roth gives us a character who would use the word “foreswear” in an actual sentence. But then to follow it with “fucking”! The way this line unfolds in the mind is nothing short of brilliant. As a single line, the sentence works poetically, unfolding verbal connections which the reader could not see coming. Yet when it becomes a complete line, the reader knows something valuable about the character telling us the tale. Much like Humbert Humbert’s first few lines ending with “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” Sabbath’s line here shows the reader how his brain works.

It is telling that in a posting about a whole novel I would choose to focus on only a few lines. The density of the prose – the density of Sabbath’s thoughts – demands such close scrutiny. Zuckerman’s mind is growing, changing; it isn’t so full to bursting. And Portnoy is simply yelling at the top of his lungs – the thoughts are all verbalized for Portnoy, and therefore they take longer to express (as all our verbal thoughts take longer to “say” than the ones in our heads). Sabbath lives inside his own head. The rest of the world is his puppet show. I’m reminded of the line from the film Slingblade: “That Frank, he lives inside of his own heart. That's an awful big place to live in.” Sabbath’s head is a huge place to live, containing the entire universe of human sexuality.

About midway through the novel, Roth presents the reader with a puzzler – in a footnote he includes a transcript of a telephone conversation recorded and then broadcast to the world. Introducing the conversation, Roth says that numerous people would simply stop what they were doing and listen to this conversation for half an hour. And in placing it entire in the novel, Roth only uses half the page for the footnote – the top of the page is still the novel. This goes on for twenty pages. The reader checks out of the novel for twenty pages to read this footnote. And there is nothing in it that hasn’t been explained in the novel, except that the footnote is pure, unadulterated, sex. Porn. Flagrant Penthouse Letters kind of porn. There’s the beauty of Roth’s creation of Sabbath: What kind of person would record this exchange? What kind of person would say the things he says during the conversation? Obviously the perverted kind. This kind of character must be someone desperate to live – desperate to celebrate life through the perversion of his sexuality. But who wants to experience such a life secondhand? The other characters must be just like who? You? The reader? Can’t you just hear Sabbath laughing at you as you flip back twenty pages to find your place again?

After all, didn’t you stop to read all twenty pages of the pornographic exchange?

I know I did.

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA

“Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.” – Tennessee Williams

Like Gwendolyn Brooks’ Negro Hero, Tennessee Williams' characters must define their own morality. Living in existential loneliness, each of Williams’ characters craves the temporary connections which life sometimes gives. Tom in Menagerie and Blanche in Streetcar never manage to make meaningful connects. Brick and Big Daddy and then Maggie seem to manage such moments in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but it is Hannah from The Night of the Iguana who perhaps defines the moment best:

HANNAH: No, I’m not hopeless…. In fact, I’ve discovered something to believe in.

SHANNON: Something like… God?

HANNAH: No.

SHANNON: What?

HANNAH: Broken gates between people so they can reach each other, even if it’s just for one night only…. One night… communication between them on a verandah outside their… separate cubicles…. A little understanding exchanged between them, a wanting to help each other through nights like this.

In a play with perhaps less meat to it than the other three Williams’ plays I discuss, he here gives us a character quite as broken as any other, but a character who knows something about the need for human connection. And when there is no longer a god for characters to believe in, what else is left but some human connection?

In Iguana, the viewer is presented with a broken man of faith surrounded by women – some of whom wish him well; some of whom wish him ill. Shannon’s faith has been tested and then lost – that is, his faith in humanity has been lost. However, he’s still trying hard to connect human to human: “I’ve always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see!... and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never!” However, Shannon’s impassioned statement is made to a woman without such a heart – a woman who seeks his ruin.

Williams does this – has his characters explain themselves to others who cannot understand – precisely because such moments touch the audience so deeply. We know what it means to not be understood. And Williams knows that we know. Introducing the penguin edition of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays (which contains Iguana), Williams quotes an earlier statement of his regarding the connection between the playwright and the audience: “We come to each other, gradually, but with love…. With love and with honesty, the embrace is inevitable.” Williams believes in an intimate relationship between himself and his audience: “Their being strangers somehow makes them more familiar and more approachable, easier to talk to.” Clearly Williams sees his plays, his characters, as ways of crying out from his personal solitary cell to those other lonely prisoners in his audience trapped in their own cells for life.

With Shannon and Hannah and the rest of Iguana’s crowd, Williams gives his viewer several contradictory moral statements. And even a few amoral or perhaps nearly immoral ones. In the play there is no loving, caring god; there is no clear compass to salvation. Williams makes one moral path clear, however, and that is the statement of Hannah’s above: the only real thing to believe in is broken gates between people. The breaks are temporary – sometimes only for one night – but the connections are real. They are the modern substitution for a belief in some connection to a caring god in a world where such god is missing.

So, Menagerie and Streetcar present the loneliness of characters for whom the gates never seem to break – at least they don’t break for two characters at once like they do for Shannon and Hannah. Iguana gives a bit of hope for the love that can be found in such breaks, in the recognition of the humanity of another. But for me it is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that shows most powerfully how sublime is Williams personal lyricism as his characters cry out for honesty and love amidst a life of solitary confinement.

Missing few months

Sorry for the missing few months between May and September. I've been reading and reading and reading -- and I'm surrounded by books -- but I haven't been posting. I'm going to begin posting now and work diligently to get these posts up in the next few weeks. Doing the posting will help me remember the characters, plots, theories, and whatnot that make up the material I'll need when I sit for my exams.

Enjoy!

Brooks’ “Negro Hero”

“I loved. And a man will guard when he loves./ Their white gowned democracy was my fair lady./ With her knife lying cold, straight, in the softness of her sweet-flowing sleeve.”

Dorie Miller was a real war hero. Played by Cuba Gooding, Jr., he even makes an appearance as perhaps the best part of the terrible film Pearl Harbor. Undertrained and un-respected, Officer’s Cook Miller stood on the deck of a battleship and shot down a Japanese Zero during the attack on Pearl Harbor. After another three years of service as a cook, Miller died at sea. The Navy’s treatment of Miller was contentiously debated during the war. As a hero, he was sent on war bond tours, but when sent back to the front, it was as a cook rather than as a commissioned officer (like at least one similar white Pearl Harbor hero). Brooks poem “Negro Hero” assumes such knowledge. Or perhaps not. Maybe she really is writing about Jesus ;)

Brooks ends the later poem “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” with the line “The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.” And in “the white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men” from Gay Chaps at the Bar, Brooks recounts the ridiculousness of trying to separate the war-dead bodies by race before burial: “These Negroes looked like men.” “Negro Hero” predates these works, but the special question of identity faced by “Negroes” during World War II and afterwards is perhaps best examined in this homage to Dorie Miller wherein Brooks connects him with Christ.

Much like a woman or, more pointedly perhaps, a gay man, the hero of the poem must break military law in order to fight the enemy of Democracy. He is glad that he “gave glory,” otherwise he would have been crucified as a black man overstepping his boundaries. Now they praise him; “They are not concerned that it was hardly The Enemy my fight was against/ But them.” The hero is not fighting for the white men who judge his actions; instead, he’s fighting for democracy herself – and finding her knife in his back for his efforts. “Still – am I good enough to die for them, is my blood bright enough to be spilled,” was his question.

Brooks answer:

(In a southern city a white man said

Indeed I’d rather be dead;

Indeed, I’d rather be shot in the head

Or ridden to waste of the back of a flood

Than saved by the drop of a black man’s blood.)

For the hero here, “the important thing is, I help to save them, them and a part of their democracy.” But is that the important thing? Isn’t it, in fact, perhaps more important that his identity. Like the Navajo Code Talkers on Iwo Jima or the Pima Indian Ira Hayes who helped raise the flag there, Miller is considered both an enemy of the U. S. and a hero. Such a split identity is difficult to maintain. How can he fight for the very idea of democracy which he is denied. Like Christ, the hero Miller has to judge himself. He is the only one who can really determine if his sacrifice for democracy is worthy the cost. “And I am feeling well and settled in myself because I believe it was a good job.” Here the hero shows that only his personal judgment can matter in a world where no outside judgment makes moral sense. But the hero ends the poem still worried about the souls of those he saved: would they really prefer the preservation of their prejudiced hatred “To the continuation of their creed/ And their lives”?

What Brooks gives us with the hero is an example of a character who must define his own morality. Like Roth’s Ozzie, the hero is good. He asks the questions that make it clear he knows what “good” means. However, like Ozzie, he will be damned by those outside his experience. Such damning is similar to that of Blanche DuBois or Maggie the Cat in Williams’ plays. Not to bring Nietzsche in here, but these characters really do exist in narratives which go beyond any clear notions of good and evil. In such a world, only the individual can decide morality.

Gwendolyn Brooks’ “the mother”

The problem with trying to write about a book of poetry is the approach. Do you write about one poem? Five? Ten? The so-called themes of the entire life-long collection? I really have no idea, but I do know I can’t do justice to much more than a couple of poems at any one time, so here goes:

“Believe me, I loved you all./ Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I love, I love you/ All.”

The poems are Gwendolyn Brooks are disturbing – some are funny the way Dave Chappell is funny: you know that when you laugh you are really the butt of the joke. And some are bothersome because they challenge you to call your own moral assumptions into question. And some are irritating because you want to rail against the injustice of it all. And a few are almost too sad for words.

“the mother” is almost too sad for words. Here is a poem specifically questioning identity creation through roles. The mother is an archetypal figure who births and then cares for her young and by extension the rest of the world. Brooks’ narrator – being childless – is not this archetypal mother, though it is the role by which she judges herself. In the poem, the mother has aborted her children and is haunted by these abortions: “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.” These children haunt her because she never became that which the archetype (and the title) demands. How can she possibly be a mother when she chose to abort her children? But how can she not? “…how is the truth to be said?/ You were born, you had body, you died./ It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.”

These children missed life because the mother “stole” them: “Your stilted and lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths.” Her moral judgment is clear. She damns her decisions with her own guilt. But how can she be damned? She “was not deliberate”; she never intended pain. And it is only she who has pain. Finally, the reader cannot bear to judge her when he sees how harshly she judges herself, and the reader is very relieved to hear that even the mother has a defense against her own harsh judgment: she loved them all. And, ultimately, isn’t the love for her children the basic foundation of any mother?

Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews”

“A question shot through his brain. ‘Can this me me?’ For a thirteen-year-old who had just labeled his religious leader a bastard, twice, it was not an improper question. Louder and louder the question came to him – ‘Is it me? It is me?’… ‘Is it me? Is it me Me ME ME ME! It has to be me – but is it!’”

If you know anything at all about Philip Roth, you know that his stories are brilliant. Surely they are blasphemous, they undermine all the conventions of religious and conventional moralities, and they have lots of issues with semi-rebellious men, but WOW! Brilliant.

Before we get into Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer, I’m going to take a look at how his prose works in connection with the modern crisis of identity we’ve seen in Nabokov and Williams. Roth’s story “The Conversion of the Jews” is a good place to start because it specifically concerns itself with that moment when a boy becomes a man, refusing any longer to accept the limits placed on him by the adults who had previously controlled his life (but perhaps not yet realizing that he needs to beware of his own limits as well).

Sartre tell us that his “duty as an intellectual is to think, to think without restriction, even at the risk of blundering. I must set no limits within myself, and I must let no limits be set for me.” Ozzie is now learning that the limits set by others will be consistently wrong for him. He is a good boy, and the reader knows this because Ozzie asks good questions, and he seeks to learn. When the rabbi tries to get him to speed up his Hebrew reading, for instance, “Ozzie said he could read faster but that if he did he was sure not to understand what he was reading.” He asks, as a response to this rabbi, why he would ever seek to limit the power of God: “Why can’t He make anything He wants to make!”… “You don’t know! You don’t know anything about God!” In true existential fashion, Ozzie stands alone in his realization.

Here we see Sartre in Roth: the existential dilemma ending in the realization that “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on Earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this Earth.” I don’t connect the two thinkers lightly. I would not understand Roth as anything except a talented, foul-mouthed wit (as I would similarly not understand Salinger or Mamet) without seeing that Portnoy, Zuckerman, or Sabbath are always trying to reconcile their life experiences with the limits society has placed on and inside them. And it is only when these men become heroic deniers of such limits that they reach anything like their full potentials. However, Roth doesn’t give anyone characters to follow. We shouldn’t want to be Ozzie or Sabbath. Roth’s men are never going to be better than his readers. And there’s the key: Even the reader needs to look inside himself in order to find his personal aim.

What Ozzie discovers is that being good is only possible when one judges oneself as good. Here I’m reminded of the ending of Joyce’s “The Dead.” Gabriel is clearly a “good” husband, as society would judge such things, and Gabriel is very conscious of society’s judgment. But he realizes that he has failed in the role because he knew that he “had never felt that way about any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.” When Gabriel realizes his own shortcoming, he is saddened by it, but he has become himself in this moment BECAUSE he has become his own judge. In Ozzie Roth has created a character who looks outside himself for religious answers and realizes that such answers aren’t to be found outside. Then he finds the answer in the midst of a crisis of identity, and the answer was his all along. He exclaims, “Mamma, don’t you see – you shouldn’t hit me. He shouldn’t hit me. You shouldn’t hit me about God, Mamma. You should never hit anybody about God—…. Promise me, promise me you’ll never hit anybody about God.”

Of course, Roth’s readers know that as soon the rabbi or his mother (both of whom are physically abusive in the story) get their hands on Ozzie, he will be hit. But that violence doesn’t matter now. Or, better, it matters AFTER the story ends because the reader understands that Ozzie’s epiphany is his armor. Now at thirteen, Ozzie knows that he is alone in this world, and it is that fact of being alone which will empower him to be totally himself. This is Huckleberry Finn refusing to turn in Jim: “Alright, then, I’ll go to hell!” and it’s John Prentice dismissing his father: “Got take care of my mother. I’ve got a decision to make, and I’ve got to make it in a hurry.” And Roth ends with Ozzie coming down to be with the people again, but now “into the center of the yellow net that glowed in the evening’s edge like an overgrown halo.” He is saved by his own realization of being alone.