“…nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself”: Technogenesis and Ghost in the Shell (1995)

(Note: this is a fairly comprehensively edited and expanded version of a paper I wrote in grad school. I’ve decided to more-or-less retain the MLA flair.)

A wee bit more complex than a “shell.”

But first, a number (from a later addition to the franchise; I’m mostly talking the 1995 film here).

            When considering the range of available interpretations of our cultural moment and the role played by digital technology, a certain degree of unsureness seems inevitable.  Contemporary anxieties about how technology is molding our subjectivity are often reflected in cultural products like novels and films.  The theme of the evolution of consciousness has been central to many creative works, and the embodied phenomenon of technogenesis has sparked an especially fruitful run of stories in the science fiction genre.  The 1995 animated Japanese film Ghost in the Shell directed by Mamoru Oshii interrogates the role digital technology plays in modern life and the possible directions it may take into the future.  The plot involves the merging of a sentient computer program with a human whose body had previously been modified with cybernetic implants.  As a creative vision, it is imbued with ambivalence.  The social order it depicts is dreary and dystopian, with human affairs ironically perverted by the very technology that was designed to enable better communication and human interconnectedness; this could be taken as a sly critique of capitalist society, of course, as most of the technology developed under such socioeconomic conditions is meant to facilitate transactive relationships rather than deeply communal ones.  The pervasive alienation experienced by the characters in this near-future makes the promise of transcendence, or at the least meaningful and productive change, a particularly attractive proposition, and the imperatives of a starkly physicalist world all but guarantee that that proposition is encountered in the intimate space of the human body itself.  Hence, we have the cyborg.  The figure of the cyborg, the merging of human flesh with machine components, is central to the film’s plot and themes, and suggests the ways and means information technology may be embodied.  The critic Carl Silvio understood the ambivalence governing the mood of Ghost in the Shell– “Though the cyborg… may represent the final imposition of information technology as a means of social control, it may also be potentially recoded and appropriated… as a means of dismantling the binarisms and categorical ways of thinking that have characterized the history of Western culture” (54).  Silvio’s project is explicitly political, and oriented towards disrupting the dynamics of dominance and oppression, which makes it a more fundamentally instrumental critique than the work of Hayles and other digital humanists who- while not ideologically neutral- are more interested in tracking the development of our cultural-technological moment than challenging its real or imagined shortcomings.  For such DH scholars, the form, function, and technical constitution of the new digital subject (to coin a term) is of greater interest than the ideological content that new subject may have. Ghost in the Shell certainly has a narrative with a political valence, but itembraces an ambiguity- one closely tied to its depictions of troubled subjectivities in transitive flux- that resists an overly polemical reading. 

            Taking this into account, the subject of my present inquiry with regard to Ghost in the Shell will be the ambiguous nature of the process of technogenesis and the “new” human subject it generates.  I will argue, contra Silvio, that breaking down (or seeming to break down) dominant power structures is not the primary narrative function of the cyborg protagonist’s character arc, and that its re-conceptualization of digitized consciousness is principally formal, not ideological; this means a plurality of subjectivities can be generated from it, and not necessarily just ones reflecting the imperatives of a contingent and instrumental political purpose.  This is not to suggest, of course, that ideology is absent or irrelevant.  Ultimately, Mamoru Oshii’s film isolates the nature of contemporary, information technology-induced technogenesis in the process of remediation, in which the latest metaphor for the human mind is the rapidly changing forms of new media.  The speed, pace, and nature of this transformative information landscape does indeed dispel the possibility of glib epistemic binaries (Western or otherwise), but also prevents the narrative from serving the purpose of mere polemical repudiation; its ideological subversions are too pluralistic in their implications for that.  

            Ghost in the Shell fits comfortably within the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk, a literary as well as cinematic set of story conventions that combine counter-cultural or ‘punk’ attitudes with interest in the prominent social and psychological influence of information technology.  The story concerns a young Japanese woman named Major Motoko Kusanagi, who works for a specialized branch of the Tokyo police department concerned with cyber terrorism and espionage called Section Nine.  The year is 2029, and Tokyo has degenerated into a bleak post-industrial landscape where cabals of corrupt government officials run the show and technology has literally re-configured the human body to the point where cybernetic implants are the norm.  The most troubling aspect of this near-future world is the ubiquitous practice of implanting computer chips into the human brain as a means of accessing the ‘data net,’ a system of computer networks roughly analogous to the modern-day internet.  The key difference between the present and future network is the future’s lack of a mediating computer interface.  In 2029, users tap their conscious thoughts to directly access and retrieve information on the net, a practice which becomes dangerous when skilled hackers learn how to electronically enter and alter the computer components installed in human brains to erase memories and implant false ones.  This grim practice summons many of the anxieties surrounding the externalizing properties of communication technologies.  Advanced computer networks enable the widespread dissemination of information, but the accuracy of information and how it may influence users remains uncertain, and data placed on the internet remains notoriously vulnerable to erasure, alteration, and manipulation, and inserting these features of contemporary information technology directly into the human brain offers a vision of the consciousness-shaping effect of pliable information brought to a dystopian extreme.  The mind is now a database, with data sets that can be manipulated to a strictly functional end.  Here technology erases subjectivity and agency, reducing human subjects to mere puppets. 

            The ersatz nature of memory in this future world corresponds agreeably to the artificial features introduced to the human body.  Major Kusanagi herself is almost entirely a machine, having traded in the majority of her organic components for a robotic body years prior to the beginning of the narrative.  Near the start of the film, this too is represented as something that inhibits human agency and well-being, and so Silvio must be given his due. He writes, “Kusanagi undergoes a profound humanist crisis concerning her cybernetic construction and what it suggests about her identity… Major is acutely aware that her entire sense of self and consciousness are inseparable from the organization to which she belongs” (59).  Section Nine reserves the right to take back all the cybernetic implants it installs into its operatives in the event they should choose to quit, an act that itself would be self-negating as it would involve the erasure of their memories; the technology is designed to permanently bind its human hosts to the service of national institutions.  Here again technology inhibits and imprisons, and constricts the range of human potential.  However, this condition is fraught with contradiction and prompts a serious question: Why would anyone willingly surrender their sovereignty in such an intimate, embodied fashion?  There is no evidence that the Major or any of her co-operatives have been coerced by Section Nine to do what they do.  This would seem to suggest that change, especially embodied change, is something the Major, and possibly the other similarly enhanced characters, deliberately seek out, whatever the cost.  This approach to physical and psychological change is accomplished through technology, and mirrors the logic of technological progress as described by the Major in an early scene: “If a technological feat is possible, man will do it. Almost as if it’s wired into the core of our being.”  Technology is here conceptualized as a reflection and externalization of human extinct, with no free will attached.  Technological change proceeds with the seemingly inevitable logic of a natural phenomenon, so humans change along with it because they must.  They could just as easily resist eating and reproducing.  The implications for this are startling- the transhistorical instincts of human beings are potentially more powerful than the historically contingent imperatives of human political systems.  Inasmuch as technology is an extension of the human, the efforts of institutions to circumscribe its use may very well be doomed.       

            The nature of the changes undergone by the characters of Ghost in the Shell is complex and multifaceted, but best understood in light of the data network they all have access to through their cybernetic brain implants.  The change they experience in their new technocratic environment is essentially relational.  As Silvio remarks, “The world has… become coded; its elements are defined, not by an inner/outer dichotomy, but by their relational positions within larger systems of information… Kusanagi’s sense of self thus does not derive from a supposedly interior source… but rather from her relation to the organization to which she belongs” (59).  Technology is understood to operate on the principal of social functionality, and it takes this command to the level of the most intimately experienced subjectivity. By definition, technology is the application of scientific knowledge to perform functions.  Information technology, and communication technology generally, operates by extending the contents of the human mind outward into a larger network, which may have a structure and influence inimical to the humanist self.  The anxiety is that human subjectivity may very well be reduced to mere functionality in service of an inhuman, bureaucratic network.  In Ghost in the Shell, this subjectivity-diminishing project begins with the physical body and extends inward and outward from there.  In the case of its cyborg protagonist, the Major, this process is acutely felt and understood- “Because Section Nine actually owns the material underpinnings of her subjectivity, her sense of personhood cannot be thought of apart from its bureaucratic organizational structure… In short, the body… behaves much like a signifier within a postmodern information system, its meaning determined… by its position in the overall pattern” (Silvio 59-60).  Despite the intrinsically anxious nature of this dynamic, the Major remains remarkably cool, collected, and lucid about her condition throughout the film.  She is possessed of a self-awareness and an understanding of her state that prevents her from succumbing to total dehumanization. 

            So far it may seem that the vision of Ghost in the Shell is decidedly pessimistic about the relationship between human beings and information technology.  One might even say it is technophobic.  It is important to note, however, that no matter how grimly functional human affairs seem to be in this future world there is always a hopeful thread that manifests itself in the form of faith in constructive change.  The biomechanical alterations underwent by the citizens of future Tokyo grant them superhuman physical and cognitive powers that come at the price of greater interdependence in a criminally antihuman, technocratic social order.  This hyper-modern social order treats humans in strictly instrumental terms, even though the ultimate “purpose” of modernity has long since been obscured.  The digital future is plagued by a paradoxical condition of increased interconnectedness growing alongside an increased alienation from self and (legible, autonomous) other.  Only the capacity to renegotiate the social order can grant the characters hope, and this capacity hinges on a mastery of pattern-recognition that may enable the rediscovery of an adaptable but coherent self. Interestingly, this pattern-recognition seems to lead inexorably to the very human capacity towards story-telling, a form that is a marked contrast to the massive, fluid dynamics of the data network.

The main thrust of the story of Ghost in the Shell is Section Nine’s pursuit of a mysterious super-hacker known as the Puppet Master, a computer genius responsible for many acts of cybercrime and cyber-terrorism.  Near the opening of the film, the Puppet Master ‘ghost hacks’ (the term for illegally accessing someone’s brain through the installed computer implants) a hapless garbage man and a petty thief and manipulates their actions to serve his ends by implanting false memories.  Major Kusanagi and her partners Batou and Togusa manage to apprehend them both and interrogate them at police headquarters.  Togusa’s interrogation of the garbage man, whose false memories included a wife and daughter he never had in reality, is one of the most harrowing moments in the story.  Slowly and painfully, the garbage man is forced to understand that the subjective experience of his life is false.  He is not a married man with a daughter, but a poor, friendless bachelor.  The Puppet Master, by hacking his brain, had crafted a social network for him that was not authentically human, but an illusion designed to serve a practical end.  The rise of digital media has made information itself a commodity, with its truth value or human interest of secondary concern to its monetary potential.  When this principal is brought to bear on the information-processing properties of the human mind itself, the result is the obliteration of human subjectivity and human agency.  The manner in which Togusa manages to convince the garbage man to recognize the reality of his situation is especially interesting.  He forces him to try to reconstruct the circumstances under which he met his wife and eventually started his family.  When the garbage man is unable to build a linear narrative of his family’s past, just an inchoate amalgamation of imprecise recollections, he comes to realize that his memories are false.  The key to this recognition is the failure of narrative.  N. Katherine Hayles, referencing the work of Lev Manovich, has described the cultural forms of database and narrative.  Manovich understood these two information-oriented forms as ‘natural enemies,’ and the critic Ed Folsom enthusiastically agreed with him in his essay “Database as Genre” (175).  “The attack of database on narrative… threatens to displace narrative, to infect and deconstruct narrative endlessly, to make it retreat behind the database or dissolve back into it” (qtd. in Hayles 175).  The key to understanding the difference between narrative and database and their reputed antagonism is to understand the way each organizes information for human subjects.  The database is usually relational, and oriented towards the large-scale collection of data and its categorization.  They are almost always self-contained and deal in information that is ‘closed,’ or precisely quantified and delineated.  Narratives, on the other hand, are never self-describing (A basic account [summary] of the information provided by a narrative generally doesn’t do justice to the experience of the story itself) and deal in indeterminacy (Hayles 176-179).  Though databases can be useful for narratives, the differences create tensions- “Whereas database allows large amounts of information to be sorted, catalogued, and queried, narrative models how minds think and how the world works, projects in which temporality and inference play rich and complex roles” (Hayles 179).  In short, the narrative is the “natural” human brain, and the database is the computer.  It stands to reason that the integration of human and computer components would have the potential to produce a human being that thought more like a database, or a computer that thought more like a story-telling human being.  That is the anxiety reflected in the scene in Ghost in the Shell involving the interrogation of the garbage man.  When the Puppet Master hacked his brain he corrupted his narrative-oriented thought patterns, dumping context-free information into his mind like one would a database so that the garbage man could perform a function like a good little machine.  When Togusa reveals to the man that his memories of his wife and child do not fit into any narrative structure or have the externalizing properties of narrative, the garbage man recognizes them as false.  He is in the unnerving position of being more database than story, more machine than man, at least on the level of conscious perception. 

Another remarkable scene in Ghost in the Shell that reflects many contemporary anxieties (and perhaps some hopes) surrounding the cognitive and social effects of information technology occurs around the midpoint, some time after the scene with the garbage man.  A humanoid robot designed to look like a beautiful young woman is hacked by the Puppet Master and controlled remotely so that it breaks out of the factory where it was stored and wanders onto a nearby road and is hit by a truck.  The damaged machine is brought to Section Nine headquarters where scans reveal that a ‘ghost’ (a consciousness-trace usually left by a human brain) is present despite the absence of any organic materials in the unit.  The Major, ever curious, wishes to interface with the robot in order to ascertain the nature of the consciousness within it, but before this can happen, the machine speaks and announces itself as the Puppet Master- “I am not AI. My codename is project two-five-zero-one. I am a living, thinking entity that was created in the sea of information.”  As it turns out, the Puppet Master is not human but rather a computer program that was created by corrupt officials from Section Six (Foreign Affairs) to conduct espionage missions.  It managed to achieve sentience and now wishes to be recognized as a living being with rights.  Upon revealing his true nature, the Puppet Master gets into a fierce debate on the nature of living organisms with a Section Six official:

It can also be argued that DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life has become more complex in the overwhelming sea of information. And life, when organized into species, relies upon genes to be its memory system. So, man is an individual only because of his intangible memory... and memory cannot be defined, but it defines mankind. The advent of computers, and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data has given rise to a new system of memory and thought parallel to your own. Humanity has underestimated the consequences of computerization. (Ghost in the Shell)

This utterance, more than any other line in the film, best elucidates the story’s central themes.  To shed light on its significance, the work of Wendy Chu is useful.  The Puppet Master’s words utilize computers and related technologies as a metaphor for life, and positions memory as central to understanding both life and human thought.  He also orients his conceptions toward the future when he articulates a plan to merge his consciousness with Major Kusanagi’s.  Chu described new media and information technology’s future-oriented nature as follows- “New media empowers individuals by informing them of the future… This future- as something that can be bought and sold- is linked intimately to the past… Computers as future depend on computers as memory machines… This future depends on programmable visions that extrapolate the future… based on the past” (8-9). By linking the ‘past’ biological functions of organisms with the ‘new’ electronic processes of computers the Puppet Master stakes a claim to the sense of temporality associated with narrative-making machines, or the thought processes of human beings.  He argues that it is memory that makes humanity what it is.  It would seem that the computer, as a memory tool, has come the closest of any technology to developing the cognitive attributes of the human, but the structure of the database had heretofore limited its ability to develop along the lines of narrative-determined humans, despite in many ways being an extension of them.  The facility to sense an unfolding in time and an orientation toward the future would be a significant game-changer for the machine. 

If we understand technology in the McLuhanite sense (that it is essentially a prosthesis that extends or enhances some human capacity) than information technology extends, enhances and empowers human thought.  Does it have the capacity to become human thought?  Just as the scene with the garbage man revealed anxieties about humans becoming too much like machines, the scene where the Puppet Master first speaks reveals fears about machines becoming too much like humans.  Intriguingly, the articulation of this fear includes much speculation about the nature of human thought, and by extension, human nature.  The basic mood still remains dystopian and pessimistic however, and it is only with the film’s climax that a hopeful reconciliation between the competing paradigms of man and machine cognition takes place.

            The climax of Ghost in the Shell involves a confrontation between the criminal operatives of Section Six and Major Kusanagi and Batou.  Section Six has kidnapped the damaged robot shell that contains the ‘ghost’ of the Puppet Master, and the Major makes every effort to retrieve it so that she can interface with the new organism ‘bred in the sea of information.’  The effort is predictably violent and hinges on the spectacle of shoot-outs and explosions, but the Major and Batou ultimately prevail.  After acquiring the Puppet Master, the Major interfaces with him.  This prompts the following exchange between the two:

• Puppet Master: We have been subordinate to our limitations until now. The time has come to cast aside these bonds and to elevate our consciousness to a higher plane. It is time to become a part of all things.
• Major Motoko Kusanagi: You talk about redefining my identity. I want a guarantee that I can still be myself.
• Puppet Master: There isn’t one. Why would you wish to? All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you. (Ghost in the Shell)

It is tempting to understand the Major’s reticence as a desire to preserve her sense of self in the context of an environment that constantly seeks to appropriate it for instrumental ends.  Her ongoing, subtle resistance to such efforts ironically creates the conditions by which she can assuredly relinquish her sense of an autonomous (some might say humanist) self for something potentially greater. The Puppet Master wishes to merge his consciousness with the Major’s in order to achieve a new state of being which, he feels, will enable him to at last become a ‘complete’ organism, one that has effectively reproduced (as opposed to merely copied) itself and one that will eventually die.  This merging provides the one optimistic note in the film’s overall bleak portrayal of digital technogenesis.  While combining the consciousness of the Puppet Master and the Major does not offer any guarantee of achieving a transcendent state, it stands as a confident feat of epigenetic evolution; that is, an example of a change in the organism that does not involve a change of DNA.  The new being that emerges at the end of Ghost in the Shell can engage with his/her environment with confidence, knowing the useful attributes of both man and machine are at his/her disposal.  This manifestation of the new in many respects fulfills the promise of remediation as described by Bolter and Grusin.  Remediation is the incorporation of the forms and functions of older media into newer media, with the purpose of “multiplying media and erasing all traces of mediation” (Bolter and Grusin 5).  To understand this process is to appreciate first and foremost that media mediates the experience of representations.  The trajectory of media development is to eliminate the awareness of the mediating device(s) so that the experience of consuming media feels immediate.  Considering how technology can function as a potent metaphor for human concepts and faculties, the process of remediation can serve nicely as a representation of technogenesis, the co-evolution of the human and the technical to the end of an unmediated engagement with the environment.  In Ghost in the Shell, the ‘old media’ is the human mind itself, metaphorized as a form of media since the new information technology it has created is its prosthesis and (incomplete) mirror.  The ‘new media’ is the emerging intelligence of advanced computer programs and networks, and the remediation is the incorporation of biological functions and narrative cognition (human qualities) into the new media form.  This vision is teleological to a point, but ambiguous since more future obviously lies beyond its effectuation.  At the film’s end, Major Kusanagi/The Puppet Master is empowered with greater knowledge- an unmediated (or at any rate, less mediated) experience of the world- but the moral significance of this state or the logical course of action it should prompt remains uncertain.  However, the Major’s fate should still be regarded with optimism for the simple reason that it staves off the chief anxiety that characterized the earlier events in the story- the loss of a coherent subjectivity in service to the old database-driven requirements of the machine.  Evans and Rees remarked that “digital technology… may be challenging even further a fundamental acceptance of the boundaries of physical human identity” (22).  The strength of Ghost in the Shell is that it interrogates the fears that inevitably accompany such changes but offers constructive and creative pathways through them.  

Works Cited

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin.  Remediation: Understanding New Media.  Cambridge,

            MA: The MIT Press, 1999.  Print.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong.  Programmed Visions: Software and Memory.  Cambridge, MA:

            The MIT Press, 2011.  Print.

Evans, Leighton, and Sian Rees.  “An Interpretation of Digital Humanities.”  Understanding

            Digital Humanities.  Ed. David M. Berry.  London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.  Print. 

Ghost in the Shell.  Dir. Mamoru Oshii.  Perf. Atsuko Tanaka, Akio Ôtsuka, Kôichi Yamadera,

            Bandai Visual Company, 1995.  DVD. 

Hayles, N. Katherine.  How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis.

            Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.  Print.

Silvio, Carl.  “Refiguring the Radical Cyborg in Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell.”  Science

            Fiction Studies. 26.1 (1999): 54-72.  Print. 

A Cliché Revisited: An Original Poem

There is a love that functions 

There is a love that blinds 

There is a love that suctions 

There is a stab sublime 

There is a love for freedom 

There is a love kept free

There is a love that roams enslaved

Like froth upon the sea 

There is a love now fading 

There is a love like wine

There is a love obeying 

There is a fear divine 

There is a love like Shelley’s!

There is a love like Blake’s.

There is a love like Swinburne’s…

A sop to sate the fakes.

Of all these loves that chatter 

Of all these hungers lent 

The one that stakes the matter 

Is the one that curls unspent. 

“…in the silences between words, the tissues speak.”: An Analysis of the Film Galaxy of Terror

(This is an edited and expanded version of a paper I wrote some years ago while in grad school, hence the fealty to MLA citation conventions.)

The aesthetic of the cult film is easy to identify but difficult to define, as is often the case with modes of expression that are at once prevalent and diverse.  Salient characteristics include dubious artistic intent with correspondingly dubious artistic merits, an appeal to prurient or base interests in the viewer, minimal budgets and flimsy production values, as well as exotic, bizarre, or unconventional themes and storylines.  Critics who argue for the validity of the cult aesthetic in film tend to make much of the latter qualities.  Certainly, few would argue against the proposal that the primary appeal of the cult film is its implicitly oppositional, if not counter-cultural, stance in relation to what may be called “mainstream” and “elite” values of beauty, aesthetics, and formal verisimilitude.  The grotesque features of cult cinema are seldom a consequence of mere failure on the part of the filmmakers.  It is doubtful that anyone would propose that an inept but mainstream Hollywood blockbuster like Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever counts as a cult film as that term is usually understood, since the proper cult film is what is generally produced, consumed, interpreted, and embraced on the cultural periphery, and makes little effort to appeal to mainstream standards of classical cinematic aesthetics despite a frequent tendency to ape the more superficial qualities of mainstream movie successes.  Beginning with this understanding, the plethora of cinematic oddities directed or produced by Roger Corman would seem to have a legitimate claim to being the foremost canon of representative cult cinema.  The Corman oeuvre is a quintessential body of films that are amenable to a kind of token-to-type analysis owing to recognizable recurring formal attributes, and close critical examination is an efficient means to get a conceptual handle on the idea of the “cult film,” even though Corman’s work hardly exhausts the idea of the cult film as a cultural phenomenon.

The critic’s understanding of the cult film becomes somewhat troubled when s/he attempts to pursue an assessment of a work that goes beyond its implicitly- sometimes explicitly- oppositional stance.  As the critic Greg Taylor maintains, “In truth, cultism was never equipped to handle the complexities of aesthetic analysis, because it originally pitched itself as an alternative to this very sort of traditional discernment” (261).  The contrarian nature of the cult aesthetic and its accompanying enthusiast sub-culture inevitably produced a set of critical standards that privileged a personal, often nostalgic, and certainly idiosyncratic set of affective relations between the viewer/consumer/fan and certain cult works.  The more “institutionalized” standards of criticism often used for the assessment of mainstream or elite works of art were contrary to what the cult film stood for.  As a consequence, “standards tend… to remain vague, obscured behind the oppositional gesture itself…  Thus, attempts to delineate the strengths of cult objects in detail have been so rare simply because they are difficult to sustain given the sparseness… of the underlying criteria” (Taylor 262).  This brings critical judgments directly into the realm of the highly subjective, a result that should probably be unsurprising since the sensibility embraced by the cult aficionado is supposed to be limited to the auspices of a, well, “cult.”  “Cultism is so inextricably bound up with issues of self-definition as to make the critique of any particular cultist gesture tantamount to personal attack” (Taylor 262).

I feel, however, that it is worth the effort to develop a mode of criticism that can in some sense accommodate the cult aesthetic, for both the reason that cult films have intrinsic artistic merits that should be explored, but also because they reveal certain strange and idiosyncratic qualities of the cultures that produce them.  The cult aesthetic is worth understanding because the tensions and contradictions in the culture at large are worth understanding.  A mode of criticism and a set of critical standards that can be helpfully employed to make cult films speak their peculiar truths and place them in a larger context or body of work (even a “canon” if we are feeling generous) is both attainable and desirable, and can probably be best achieved by engaging with critical models that are pre-occupied with cultural problems not traditionally associated with aesthetics, such as narrative (not necessarily ‘literary’) and medical studies.  The critical engagement with the cult film should honor its oppositional stance first.  Because cult cinema frequently deals with the extremes of human behavior, and individual films are often saturated with lurid sex and gory violence, and generally embrace a giddily outrageous mode of representation that fetishizes depictions of human suffering (this is especially conspicuous in the horror genre), I feel critical studies of trauma, injury and/or illness should be brought to bear on considerations of specific cult films.  Illness narratives, with their emphasis on physical suffering and bodily dissolution and the resources human beings call upon to cope with them, can be seen to be ubiquitous in cult films, provided receptive audiences are willing to adjust their stock perceptions on those matters.  This may not be immediately obvious due to the eccentric nature of the artistic sensibility, where the vulnerability of the human body is not honored in such a way that does justice to the tragedy of the human condition or the human desire for a transcendence of limitations, but where the human body is often subjected to wildly bizarre and exotic modes of transformation and trauma.  My task here will be to demonstrate that the illness narrative is operating, albeit on an often near-subliminal level, in many cult films.  The critical text I will be utilizing will be Arthur Frank’s landmark study The Wounded Storyteller, a work that analyzes how the sick and wounded make sense of their condition through the act of storytelling, and how the construction of a narrative of and through the compromised body enables the process of healing.  The insight I find most useful for my purposes relates to the centrality of the body in constructing the formal qualities of narratives of illness.  Frank’s project is unabashedly moral, as he believes listening to stories of illness helps develop the capacity for empathy and thus broadens the moral strength of the community.  The film I will be assessing is the 1981 Roger Corman-produced science fiction/horror outing Galaxy of Terror (directed by Bruce D. Clark and co-written by Clark and Marc Siegler).  It is a clear homage to the Ridley Scott film Alien, and the basic premise involves an interstellar civilization of the far-future where the crew of a spaceship is sent to a distant and mysterious planet called Morganthus to rescue another ship that crash-landed there.  Upon arrival, they become stranded themselves due to an unseen force that compromises their ship’s instruments, and they find the crew of the ship that preceded them all brutally killed.   A mysterious alien structure nearby may hold the key to understanding how and why it happened, and as the characters investigate, they are killed off one-by-one by grotesque monsters that are all physical manifestations of their worst and deepest fears.  Each death functions as a mini-narrative of bodily corruption and dissolution, wherein the attacking monster serves as a metaphor for the character’s fear, and each character’s fear is in turn related back to their understanding of their body and its vulnerabilities.  The narrative type developed and proffered by Frank that most closely resembles this trajectory is the Chaos Narrative, and I will endeavor to show how it and related ideas are operating in Galaxy of Terror.  I will then explain how the medium of cinema is uniquely equipped to handle this type of storytelling, and then I will relate these ideas back to the problem of the critical assessment of the cult aesthetic. 

Arthur Frank’s baseline understanding of the illness narrative (from which he constructs his larger theoretical-analytical schema) is fairly intuitive.  “The mystery of illness stories is their expression of the body: in the silences between words, the tissues speak” (Preface).  To understand illness narratives, one needs to accept the centrality of the body and the imprecision of language to articulate its needs.  This is one area where the medium of cinema is uniquely equipped to tell such stories; although language is (usually) utilized as a formal element in the form of dialogue, and although there is a “film grammar” that some critics have argued is roughly analogous to conventional grammar, the visual nature of the film medium enables viewers to appreciate the “silences” of which Frank speaks in the form of images.  Galaxy of Terror does not specifically depict people suffering from illness, but rather it shows scenarios in which bodily fears[i] run amok and destroy the people possessed by them.  The trajectory of bodily trauma that characterizes the deaths scenes in Galaxy bears a strong relation to the illness narrative because it shares in its recognition of the body’s mutability, vulnerability, and ephemerality.  At the very beginning of The Wounded Storyteller, Frank describes and quotes a woman suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome: “she ‘needed… to think differently and construct new perceptions of my relationship to the world.’  Serious illness is a loss of the ‘destination and map’ that had previously guided the ill person’s life: ill people have to learn ‘to think differently’” (1).  The basic structure of an illness narrative involves a person falling ill and coming to recognize a need to fundamentally re-structure his/her subjectivity, a nebulous entity that bears a much stronger and disturbingly dependent relation to the physical body than previously thought.  This adjustment is achieved, or not achieved, through the aegis of narrative, or story-telling.  The self is closely bound to the concept of narrative, and learning new patterns of thought is inextricably entwined with telling new stories.  The characters in Galaxy of Terror essentially face the same dilemma whenever they are confronted by one of their own, personal Monsters from the Id: they need to learn to think differently, or perish in body and mind.  Much like the person suffering from a severe or terminal illness, their subjectivity is closely bound to the body and their sense of its strengths and weaknesses, and when the mysterious alien force on Morganthus triggers their fears of physical vulnerability, very strange and very brutal body-narratives play out, but not in the medium of words.  Instead, these stories play out in the potently excessive cinematic manner of embodied metaphors, an approach that adds a sense of immediacy to a storytelling mode that often struggles when confined to words.  “The ill body is certainly not mute- it speaks eloquently in pains and symptoms- but it is inarticulate.  We must speak for the body, and such speech is quickly frustrated: speech presents itself as being about the body rather than of it” (Frank 2).  The visual immediacy of the monstrous, embodied metaphors present in Galaxy of Terror changes the nature of the “speaking.”  The stories they relate are grasped emotionally and lack clarity or conventional linear development.  But stories they are.  A noticeable difference between the illness narrative described by Frank and the events of Corman’s film is the position of the onset of “illness” on the timeline of a specific character arc.  In Galaxy of Terror, psychological anxieties become bodily traumas, a reversal of the standard illness narrative where a bodily trauma or change instigates psychological anxiety which is then engaged and hopefully alleviated by the act of storytelling.  This is because the fear of trauma, illness, and the loss of bodily integrity is always present in the film, and indeed, this fear is always present, though not necessarily consciously, in human beings everywhere at all times.  The fear that applies to all the characters of the film is the dread that they would be unable to manage bodily disruptions.  Their wounds lead them inexorably into chaos, where the very possibility of a corrective narrative- that is, a coherent sense of self- is permanently frustrated.  For the crew of the Morganthus, the psychological is closely bound to the physical body.  “The mind does not rest above the body but is diffused throughout it” (Frank 2). 

The dynamic of every death scene in Galaxy of Terror is the word being made flesh, or ideas being joined to objects and emerging as embodied metaphors.  “The speech that the body begets always imposes itself upon the body” (Frank 28).  Why do certain bodies beget certain kinds of speech, and produce different metaphors?  Frank answers this question by proposing four different body types, which are basically different methods of dealing with perennial bodily problems.  They include the disciplined body, the mirroring body, the dominating body, and the communicative body.  I believe that all four approaches to dealing with body problems- which are primarily understood by Frank to be problems of action (29) – beget different kinds of anxieties, and are represented by the characters in Galaxy of Terror to various degrees.  Frank is careful to point out: “Ideal types are puppets: theoretical constructions designed to describe some empirical tendency” (29).  As an action-oriented science fiction B-movie, Galaxy of Terror does not have much room for complex characterization, and the characters on display can be easily reduced to a set of tendencies, bodily and otherwise.  “People define themselves in terms of their body’s varying capacity for control” (29).  Each character in the film attempts to assert bodily control in a different way that I will insist roughly corresponds to the body types outlined by Frank, and this generates different sets of body-related fears that in turn beget different monstrous metaphors that then proceed to assault and maim.  By now, some examples should be in order.

The Mirroring Body is most conspicuous in the character of Ranger (played by Robert Englund), whose hallucination involves being attacked by a malevolent doppelganger of himself.  In addition to the obvious “mirroring” taking place in this confrontation, there are many features of the Mirroring Body narrative present in Ranger’s characterization.  Frank defines the mirroring body in terms of consumption, “attempts to recreate the body in the images of other bodies: more stylish and healthier bodies.  The primary sense is visual: the body sees an image, idealizes it, and seeks to become the image of that image” (43).  The device employed by the plot of Galaxy of Terror to make the hallucinations of the characters seem relevant is to reveal a character’s fear through dialogue before isolating them in some corner of the alien game cube and subjecting them to their grisly fate.  Before Ranger experiences his hallucination, he has a confrontation with Cabren (the level-headed space veteran and protagonist) which reveals his naked envy of everything Cabren is capable of that he is not.  His idealization of Cabren’s abilities is part and parcel of his central fear as a mirroring body- the fear of disfigurement, understood broadly as the sudden inability to effectively perform as an ideal image (Frank 44).  The evil doppelganger he confronts is his morally disfigured self, an entity he is capable of defeating when he finds out that it doesn’t bleed when he cuts it.  Lacking bodily vulnerabilities, the monster suddenly ceases to be credible as a bodily fear, and Ranger is capable of banishing it from his mind. The doppelganger’s lack of bodily vulnerabilities also reveals the essential nature of the manifested fear it represents; it is all image with no tangible substance to sustain it, and Ranger’s attempts to confront it (and on some level “consume” it) only serve to harm Ranger. It is the recognition of the doppelganger’s ersatz corporeality that allows Ranger to reconfigure the logic of The Mirroring Body metanarrative that haunts him and defeat his monster- a literal mirror image of himself.      

Less fortunate is Dameia (played by Taaffe O’Connell), the ship’s technical officer and character I would argue is representative of the Communicative Body.  Frank positions the Communicative Body as being accepting of contingency and wholly associated with itself as a complete body-self unit (48).  This produces a sense of other-relatedness, or a dyadic approach to other bodies.  “The communicative body realizes the ethical ideal of existing for the other…  Communication is less a matter of content than of alignment: when bodies sense themselves in alignment with others, words make sense in the context of that alignment” (Frank 49).  Dameia is easily the most empathetic crewmember, and she extends comfort and sympathy to numerous other characters throughout the film.  When she is first introduced, she assists Ranger in securing a safe position on the ship during the reckless take-off procedure initiated by the unhinged captain.  It can be argued that the communicative body is in opposition to the Dominating Body (to be described next) in that it privileges communication over force.  Its principle fear, then, is contact without alignment, or having to experience the violent imposition of another body.  Before Dameia has her monstrous encounter, she gets into a confrontation with the belligerent team leader Baelon, and Baelon insults her with a well-placed bit of slut-shaming that reveals that Dameia has a reputation for an ambivalent and confused attitude toward sexuality.  It is revealed a little later that she is also significantly frightened of worms, non-human creatures the culture at large regards with disgust and ambivalence, and which are invariably coded as distant from the human. Dameia’s fatal vision consists of the film’s most memorably grotesque and disturbing sequence; a giant maggot attacks Dameia and rapes her to death, an encounter with a dominating body that comes wrapped in the image of a confirmed phobia.  The alien otherness of this attacking body speaks to the abject terror of non-alignment which sustains the communicative body.

As mentioned previously, the Dominating Body is represented by the character Baelon, the bellicose Rescue Team Leader who is always over-eager to indulge his temper and detects threats in every corner of the ship and insults in every gesture from his crewmates.  Dominating bodies define themselves in force and refuse to accept contingency of any kind.  It is also troublingly dyadic, responding to its dread of contingency by attempting to assert control over other bodies.  “When the body is dissociated from itself but linked with others, the body’s will turns against the other rather than toward itself” (Frank 47).  This makes the nature of its fear fairly easy to deduce: it dreads, much like the communicative body, a body that can and will effectively dominate it, but unlike the communicative body that dreads an exchange without alignment (rape instead of intimacy) the dominating body simply fears losing a fight with another dominating body.  This is precisely what happens to Baelon, who envisions an immense, reptilian monster which charges him and which he cannot fight off no matter how much firepower he hurls at it.  Eventually, the monster overwhelms and disembowels him. 

The body type that is ultimately lionized and made heroic in Galaxy of Terror is the Disciplined Body, represented by the protagonist Cabren who survives the film to the end to confront the person secretly responsible for stranding the crew on Morganthus (Ranger, the mirroring body, also survives but sustains an injury that prevents him from being an effective final combatant; he remains at a distance from the climactic battle.).  At the beginning of the film, it is shown that the character organizing the rescue mission to Morganthus is the head of the intergalactic empire in which all of the characters live, a mysterious figure called the Master whose features are obscured by a glowing red haze that surrounds his head.  Near the climax of the film, it is revealed that the ship’s cook Kore is in fact the Master in disguise and that he steered both the previous crashed ship and the current one onto Morganthus in order to test the mettle of the crew and select a successor.  It turns out that the mysterious alien structure in which most of the action takes place was constructed by a long-extinct race in order to train its young to manage fear.  In humans, it has the capacity to confer great power on anybody who “wins” the game and makes it into the central chamber (In a case of murky plotting, the exact nature of this “power” is never described in any detail, but it apparently enables the Master to govern a vast intergalactic empire.).  The Disciplined Body is ideally suited to survive such a game, as it is self-defined in actions of self-regimentation.  “Its most important action problems are those of control… to reassert predictability through therapeutic regimens… to compensate for contingencies it cannot accept” (Frank 41).  The methods it employs are strictly monadic, that is, solitary and orientated toward self-support and self-discipline.  Cabren is the very model of the disciplined body, as he is the only character who retains a cool head throughout the proceedings, trying to temper conflicts and retain control as crisis after crisis occurs and the dead bodies keep piling up.  Significantly, he is the only character who does not experience a fear-themed hallucination of any kind until he angrily confronts Kore near the film’s end, and then Kore needs to communicate the visions directly instead of allowing them to be largely self-induced as with the other characters.  Crucially, in this climactic confrontation, Cabren combats the embodied fears of all his murdered crewmates, gaining an understanding of their body-based anxieties in the process.  It is strongly implied, however, that this does nothing for Cabren’s feeling of empathy, as he needs to remain emotionally aloof in order to effectively “conquer” his own fear and the embodied fears of the others.  Cabren pursues a disciplined regimen of body-control, making him a ritualist ideally suited to perform the ceremonial transfer of power from an old Master to a new one.  He emerges victorious over Kore and becomes the Master himself.  This course of development is radically different from the ideal of the Wounded Storyteller propounded by Frank.  Frank’s project encourages the sharing of illness narratives to promote a feeling of empathy.  In Galaxy of Terror Cabren’s apprehension of the illness narratives of the other crewmembers does not enable empathy, but emotional discipline, a necessary pre-requisite for the political authority that he is entrusted with at the film’s end.  The sharing of stories enables the conquest of other bodies, an outcome not anticipated in any of Frank’s writings but explored, albeit in a crude, cult-ish manner, in an obscure Roger Corman Science Fiction B-picture. 

As I already discussed, each grisly death in Galaxy of Terror is a mini-illness narrative, and with the exception of the cases of the story’s two survivors, each mini-illness narrative bears a striking resemblance to the theory of the Chaos Narrative, one of three types of illness narrative developed by Frank.  Its features and characteristics are myriad and complex, but the aspect that should be considered central is well-summarized as follows- “Chaos is the opposite of restitution: its plot imagines life never getting better.  Stories are chaotic in their absence of narrative order.  Events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence or discernible causality” (97).  Each and every kill scene in Galaxy of Terror follows this hopeless and non-linear trajectory to some extent.  Monsters appear and disappear seemingly at random, violence occurs in total isolation when characters are completely separated from their fellows (the alien force governing the planet has the seemingly supernatural ability to separate the characters at will), and matter is destroyed and re-constituted and then destroyed again without any regard for the laws of causality or logic.  Crucially, these visions largely play out without words (The only sounds are the grotesque groans, growls, and slurps of the monsters and the victims’ screaming.).  “Words suggest [the wound’s] rawness, but that wound is so much of the body, its insults, agonies, and losses, that words necessarily fail” (Frank 98).  This allows for the image to take over.  I’ve already discussed how the monsters in Corman’s film are essentially embodied metaphors, and therefore can be understood as visualized representations of a linguistic concept.  The monsters cannot be “told” by the sufferer, only experienced with a frightening immediacy.  The reflection and sense of linear temporality necessary for storytelling is absent, and the abstractions often present in stories are instead viscerally lived in the moment.  The absence of a capacity to reflect is crucial: “For a person to gain such a reflective grasp of her own life, distance is a prerequisite.  In telling the events of one’s life, events are mediated by the telling.  But in the lived chaos there is no mediation, only immediacy.  The body is imprisoned in the frustrated needs of the moment” (Frank 98).  It is impossible to really convey the chaos narrative through the medium of the written word, but the immediacy of the moving image, especially the metaphorical moving image, may be able to give a viewer an impression of lived chaos.  The solitary, gruesome deaths the characters of Galaxy of Terror experience are all about being imprisoned in the solitary, frustrated needs of the body for an indiscernible amount of time that can only terminate in death, and the dissolution of narrative and its accompanying sense of a coherent self.  There is an anti-narrative quality to all of the deaths in the film.  Causality is suspended but narrative conventions are still present in a distorted form, most saliently the staples of conflict and metaphor, both tied to the needs of the vulnerable body. 

In order to effectively conquer a chaos narrative, one must reconstruct it, and to reconstruct it, one must have the privilege of distance, psychological if not literal.  This is the imperative of every character in Galaxy of Terror, and what it really means when the Master says they must “learn to control their fears.”  They need to cultivate psychological distance by re-conceptualizing their bodies’ needs.  Only two characters manage to do this by the film’s end, and they achieve it through embracing the standards of the disciplined body.  This is significantly different from Frank’s understanding of the effective ways to banish chaos, which place a stronger emphasis on embracing the standards of the communicative body (104).

I hope that I have by now demonstrated that many of Arthur Frank’s insights are easily applicable to the storytelling conventions present in the film Galaxy of Terror.  I will now add to my earlier speculations on why the medium of film is uniquely well-suited to deal with some of these issues related to ill and suffering bodies and the many ways they tell stories about themselves and other bodies, as well as tease out some of the broader philosophical and cultural implications of the cinematic approach to these matters.  The philosopher Noel Carroll located one of the most powerful aspects of cinema in the affective power of the moving image- “…certain motion pictures can… afford us self-knowledge, by awakening feelings in us we never knew we had and enabling us to examine them… the link between the moving image and our affective life is one of its major draws” (148).  Since Frank is concerned with the welfare of the moral community and feels that the sharing of stories of illness is conducive to its development, any medium that has the power to activate the affective life should be regarded as useful to that purpose.  The feature unique to cinema is the moving image, a tool that has both the narrative draw of the written or spoken story and the sensual immediacy of the visual.  Cinema allows us to visualize the ill or suffering body and how it dwells in real time better than any other medium one can imagine.  Indeed, it is the capacity to imagine that makes storytelling so useful to the development of moral sense.  “…our capacity to respond to fictions emotionally is rooted in the capacity… of the emotion system to be aroused not only by that which we believe, but also by that which we imagine.  Motion pictures are sense—bearing vehicles that mandate viewers to imagine the states of affairs and events that they depict audiovisually” (Carroll 154).  This is closely tied with Arthur Frank’s idealized vision of the wounded storyteller and what s/he can do for the imagination of the whole human community- “The community [can] elaborate [the wounded storyteller’s] story, both within itself and beyond.  In this elaboration, the community recognizes what it has in common, and it grows.  Witness, here as elsewhere, grows…” (Frank 184). 

A film like Galaxy of Terror demonstrates the functionality of the ideas of thinkers like Frank and Carroll without any of the idealizations or optimism.  The mechanism of the human and bodily behaviors described by Frank is depicted but not in a manner that allows for much empathy or dignity.  The cult aesthetic allows the viewer the pleasure of recognition, but its total eschewal of sentimentality and tragedy inhibits a humanistic understanding of the truths portrayed in the film.  For some, this may be the cult aesthetic’s biggest failing.  I suggest that it is its most unique quality and major strength.  It is folly to idealize the human subject for the very simple reason that s/he is a body and immune to such transcendent representations.  As the critic Jeffrey Sconce remarked in his discussion of sleaze in the cinema, “Often, sleaziness implies a circuit of inappropriate exchange involving suspect authorial intentions and/or displaced perversities in the audience” (4).  Galaxy of Terror, a film that features a scene where a woman is raped by a giant maggot in graphic detail, is clearly sleazy.  The strength and possibly problematic quality of such works is that they allow viewers to view the insights of people like Frank independent of their ethical concerns.  The cult aesthetic is essentially amoral, and draws attention to the disturbing fact that the human is not only a body, but an animal. 

Works Cited

Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures.  Malden, MA: Blackwell

            Publishing, 2008.  Print.

Frank, Arthur.  The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics.  Chicago:

            University of Chicago Press, 1995.  Kindle.

Sconce, Jeffrey ed. Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and

            Politics.  Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.  Print.

Sconce, Jeffrey.  “Introduction.”  Sconce 1-15.

Taylor, Greg.  “Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic?  Cultism as Discernment.”  Sconce

            259-272.   

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[i] which at least in the universe of the film seem to be the only fears that people can have, although a specific fear’s relation to “the body” may not be immediately obvious

“…the world overlays and varnishes us…”: A Reading of Herman Melville’s Pierre

(This is an edited and slightly expanded version of a paper I wrote in grad school some years ago; again, the explanation for the tiresome MLA flourishes.)

Herman Melville’s seventh novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities can be said to be a work with more defenders than admirers, and therefor a work that attracts modes of criticism that emphasize justification instead of explanation; that is to say, the business of shedding some hermeneutical light is intimately bound up with the task of explaining (wishing) that the light will catch something worth seeing.  The reader of such criticism is assumed a skeptic.  Indeed, Pierre has generally only been judged worthy as a kind of post-Moby-Dick hangover (a metaphor for Melville’s psychological disturbances, which we hope weren’t overly determined by alcohol), or as a parody of contemporaneous novelistic modes, or as a precursor to broadly ‘modernist’ literary techniques, or simply the predecessor to Melville’s strong short fiction and poetry.  Very few have taken the book to be of value in itself, and matters are not helped by Pierre’s lurid subject matter (The plot briefly summarized: A young man breaks it off with his fiancé so he can marry his sister.) or its oblique approach to its thematic concerns.  Oftentimes, the emotions and subjects Melville evokes seem to exist at a right angle to the events of the story, especially the transparently autobiographical later chapters of the book in which the titular hero embarks on a doomed writing career.  Pierre, whatever its eccentricities as a story or as a work of art, is too rich and profound in many of its sections to be dismissed outright, but a significant challenge to any critic, still having to play the role of a defender, is to elucidate on the ‘ambiguities’ alluded to in the title.  The most effective way to do this is to consider, at least in part, the circumstances under which it was written and the motivations Melville had in writing it in the first place.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that Melville’s writing was every bit as exploratory as it was declarative; its sermonic tendencies may have obscured this point for some readers.  Putative statement need not be lacking in a capacity for ambiguity.  Melville wrote to work through his moral, aesthetic, spiritual, and psychological obsessions, and occasionally, over the course of a single work, his thematic and philosophical subjects would alter significantly, shooting off on discursive courses over which the author felt he may not have had full control.  Of the most importance, Melville would leave the shifts in theme apparent to his readers, as they were easily trackable through the alternating generic modalities of his style; the attentive reader could trace Melville’s thought process, or at least a literary proxy of it, over the events of a story.   Moby-Dick is the paradigmatic example of this tendency.  The critic Andrew Delbanco put it quite well: 

“He [Melville] was the first to understand that if a literary work is to register the improvisational nature of experience, it must be as spontaneous and self-surprising as the human mind itself.  …by concealing the existence of earlier versions of his work, he ran the risk of falsifying himself.  In this sense, Moby-Dick was like an active archeological site in which the layers of its own history are left deliberately exposed.  (146)

I will argue that while foregrounding the writing process is useful for understanding many of Melville’s works, it is absolutely essential for understanding Pierre.  Pierre is the novel where the act of composition is considered in a direct, literal fashion, and the value of writing is confronted and interrogated at length.  The mental process revealed over the course of the plot is one of disillusionment, but that assessment in itself is incomplete.  There are in fact multiple types of disillusionment on display, running from loss in faith in the security of the family unit, the viability of Christian morals, the achievability of an ideal artistic expression, the ability to communicate anything of oneself to others, and even the possibility of knowledge.  In writing Pierre, Melville displayed a forfeiture of faith in writing itself, or in the creative act which had sustained him for many years.  Considering his productivity after the publication of Pierre, it is safe to say that Melville recovered from this disenchantment to some degree, but his seventh novel represents what is probably his biggest crisis in faith; namely, his faith in his artistic mission. My task will be tracking the psychological and emotional trajectory of this crisis as presented in Pierre.

            The origins of Melville’s ‘Kraken’ book lay in his frustrations concerning readers’ expectations.  Pigeonholed as a relatively frivolous travel writer and “resident authority on things nautical and places exotic” (Higgins and Parker 5) Melville was keen to make the best use of his newly-discovered literary talents.  The genesis of his first post-Moby-Dick outing was part of his expanding effort to attain artistic and intellectual autonomy and uniqueness: “…in mid-November 1851… Melville was ripe for an attempt at a new, non-nautical genre through which he might make a bid for a high, less specialized literary reputation and through which he might satisfy his internal needs to surpass his previous literary achievements” (Higgins and Parker 5-6). Inevitably, such ambition is accompanied by anxiety, and Melville was (oddly?) predisposed to exacerbate it by modeling the dysfunctional dynamic of the Glendinning family, the focus of his novel’s incestuous drama, after his own family’s internal scandals.  Specifically, there is some reason to believe that Melville’s father, Allan Melville, had fathered an illegitimate daughter.  In addition, he had died in a state of delirium not dissimilar to that of Pierre Glendinning’s father (Higgins and Parker 6).  These disparate anxieties would coalesce to generate the story of Pierre.  The symbolic capacities of the subjects already existed in incipient form, as observed by Higgins and Parker:

In Pierre, the plot involving the sudden appearance of an unknown young woman, supposedly half-sister of the hero, had the great advantage of being easily allegorized within Melville’s psychological preoccupations: in the “boundless expansion” of Pierre’s life and mind Isabel would represent the invading unconscious.  (6)

This “invading unconscious” would prompt an internal unfolding that would disrupt every vestige of security the character of Pierre possessed.  Once Pierre comes to recognize the needs of his inner life, he becomes inescapably dissatisfied with his hollow existence at his estate, Saddle Meadows.  The story’s tragic dénouement is the revelation that Pierre is incapable of satisfying his social and psychological needs due to both his circumstances and personal flaws. 

            The parodic tendencies of Pierre are most conspicuous in the early parts of the book, where the pastoral quaintness of Pierre’s home at Saddle Meadows is too overtly saccharine to be taken seriously.  As one critic described it, “…we can suspect that nature has been too thoroughly domesticated…  This place is too soft a pastoral… its very lushness a symptom of unresolved and unrecognized problems” (Brodhead 226).  The picturesque environment is meant to symbolize the infantile falsity of Pierre’s youthful mindset at the start of the story.  Pierre’s troubles are clearly not meant to be contingent or avoidable, but a permanent feature of his condition that, in his ignorance and youth, he is initially unable to recognize.  Saddle Meadows is only edenic in appearance because Pierre has yet to acquire necessary knowledge, and this knowledge significantly prompts an inward-directed psychological investigation that comes to generate very external social consequences.

            As the great, exploratory symbol of Moby-Dick is the whale, the image that centers and structures the symbolic order of Pierre is the human face.  This implies many things, including a thematic concern for communication (Human expressions are ‘read,’ after all.) and human subjectivity (Human expressions reveal inner emotional truths, after all.).  It is a human face that initially disrupts Pierre’s harmonious existence.  Attending a social gathering with his mother, Pierre observes a young woman whom the reader later learns is Pierre’s half-sister Isabel.  Observing Isabel’s melancholy features exerts a profound influence on Pierre that proves life-altering: “…my creed of this world leads me to believe in visible, beautiful flesh… but now! – And again he [Pierre] would lose himself in the most surprising… ponderings, which baffled all the introspective cunning of his mind.  Himself was too much for himself” [Italics mine] (Melville 49).  Furthermore, Isabel’s face is said to “mystically appeal to his own private and individual affections… challenging him in his deepest moral being…”  (Melville 49). It is important to bear in mind that all of these ponderings occur well before Pierre has any way of knowing who Isabel is or her relation to him and his father.  Yet all of Pierre’s future anxieties are already present in incipient form, implying either an origin from within or a kind of mystical sympathy between the characters.  The challenge of Isabel’s countenance is that of an authentic image- perhaps kindred to a Platonic form, or deeper truth- that disrupts the superficial (some might say degraded to artificiality) appearances of Pierre’s immediate environment.  This initial shock prompts further, eventually self-destructive, reflections and discoveries.

            Upon learning of Isabel and her illegitimate origins, Pierre relocates the portrait of his father, whom he had previously venerated, and pauses a while to observe his features as the painting mediates them; this is the novel’s second considered ‘reading’ of a human face.  It prompts the first lesson of Pierre’s development, and that is the essential artifice and hypocrisy of the adult world and social environment he is about to enter as a young man coming of age.  Imagining the portrait speaking to him, Pierre hears: “I [the image in the painting] am thy father as he [Pierre’s actual father] more truly was.  In mature life, the world overlays and varnishes us… we, as it were, abdicate ourselves, and take unto us another self… in youth we are, Pierre, but in age we seem” (Italics Melville’s) (Melville 83).  The painting of his father reinforced Pierre’s heroic conception of the Glendinning family dynamic, and the recognition of the hollowness and inauthentic nature of its idealized portrayal signifies a simultaneous loss of faith in the possible accuracy of artistic expression.  In this section, Pierre learns that his social existence is false and that the lie is reinforced with the misleading idealizations of art. 

            The possible meanings of this revelation and their implications are temporarily deferred and the subsequent courses Pierre’s psychological development takes are significantly different.  They primarily concern a repudiation of contingency, or the efforts of Pierre to locate an eternal, transcendent principle in his inner self that owes nothing to the circumstances of his lived, social reality or the material world.  Pierre even asks himself, “How shall I steal yet further into Pierre, and show how this heavenly fire was helped to be contained in him, by mere contingent things… but I shall follow the endless, winding way… careless whither I be led, reckless where I land” (Melville 107).  Pierre makes this declaration with the intention of acting on the dictums issued from within his soul, to forsake mere propriety for eternal Truth.  The actions Pierre ends up taking are done with the purpose of creating a ‘pure’ social order in line with the eternal truths of God.  The impossibility of achieving such an order is supposed to be the crux of the story’s tragedy, but the resemblance of Pierre’s mission to Melville’s own literary endeavor is unmistakable.  Not content with his privileged but limited lot, he seeks alternatives courageously but recklessly, valuing the journey perhaps due to an intuitive understanding that the destination does not exist.

            The manner by which Pierre seeks his alternative social and moral being was and remains the most controversial aspect of his story.  He dissolves his relationship with the respectable young woman Lucy Tartan and arranges a false ‘marriage’ with his newly-discovered half-sister Isabel and then flees to a nameless city to pursue a career as a writer.  The incestuous subtext is immediately apparent, and the fact that Pierre seeks to justify his actions with broadly moral rhetoric makes the arrangement that much more grotesque and bizarre.  Amy Puett Putters put it quite well: “The work evolved… into a scathing portrayal of a young man consciously bent on doing right- honoring an obligation to support a girl he believes to be his late father’s illegitimate daughter- but unconsciously driven by incestuous love for this same girl” (239).  It is important to understand, however, that Pierre’s ethical concerns are not mere sublimation of sexual desire.  Rather, the two feelings coexist and amplify one another.  Richard Brodhead aptly described the tendency as a “holy feeling” that increases with its combination with a sexual desire and the suppression of the awareness of that desire (235). The result is an often confusing but fascinating yearning that is both authentically holy and genuinely profane.  Such a yearning is rearticulated in the later section in the form of Pierre’s attempt at beginning a career as a writer, a move that excites his inner desire for truth-telling but which he undertakes at least in part for vulgar (or at least practical), material reasons.  He needs to earn money for his new family.  However authentic each half of his desire may be on its own, practical demands work so that they cancel each other out, and Pierre is forced to lie to himself and others in order to pursue his ‘Truth.’  “The necessary deception,” observed the critic Lawrance Thompson, “to the effect that Isabel and Pierre are married, is but the first of innumerable subterfuges and lies which Pierre is forced to make… as he tries to imitate God…” (280).  The result is that both Pierre’s publishers and the relatives of his surrogate family correctly brand him a liar, and Pierre’s final self-recognition is the novel’s tragic ending.

            The fact that Pierre receives two nasty letters near the story’s end accusing him of being a liar and a fraud is significant.  They repudiate not so much Pierre’s moral mission as his inability (or possible unconscious unwillingness) to properly communicate its importance and legitimacy to anyone else.  The letter from Stanly and Frederic attacks Pierre’s pursuit of an alternative family and corresponding social structure, and the letter from the publisher attacks his artistic integrity, on moral grounds (Melville 356-357).  Neither set of accusations reflects the true motivations of Pierre, but rather the social compromises he had to make to pursue those motivations, and our protagonist is left with the reputation of possessing those familiar faults- that is, essentially fraudulent modes of expression- that he had previously ascribed to the social milieu he has come to reject and that were interrogated at length vis-à-vis the painting of Pierre’s father.  The most intriguing thing about Pierre is the manner in which Melville expands and alters the trajectory of its tragedy.  The surface plot involves a young man learning the impossibility of leading a holy and truthful life in line with God’s eternal laws because the material and contingent social concerns of the world make such a life impossible.  In pursuing this line of thought, Melville seemed to recognize a parallel with the creative desire, and the inherent uncertainty about whether art could codify and make coherent many of life’s mysteries.  He also came to recognize art’s capacity to be frivolous or fraudulent, and this led to at least a temporary state of disillusionment with his creative capacity.  The worst possible thing that could happen to an artist in Melville’s position is to be accused of inauthenticity, and this is exactly what happens to Pierre.  The split nature of the book’s tragedy is somewhat confused, but undeniably rich and possibly the single most revealing and autobiographical sequence in all of Melville’s works.  The depiction of the anxiety of the religious mission is partially abandoned for the portrait of the artist as young martyr.    

Works Cited

Delbanco, Andrew.  Melville: His World and Work.  New York: Random House, Inc.

• Print.

Melville, Herman.  Pierre, or the Ambiguities.  New York: Penguin.  1996.  Print.

Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds.  Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Pierre,

            Or the Ambiguities.  Boston: G.K. Hall & Co.  1983.  Print.     

Brodhead, Richard.  “Conscious Idealizings and Unconscious Sexuality.”  Higgins and

            Parker 226-236.

Emmers, Amy Puett.  “New Crosslights on the Illegitimate Daughter in Pierre.” Higgins

            and Parker 237-240.

Higgins, Brian and Hershel Parker.  “Introduction.” Higgins and Parker 1-27

Thompson, Lawrance.  Melville’s Quarrel with God.  Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton

            University Press.  1952.  Print. 

“…then we give God the glory for it…”: Snake-handling and Pentecostalism

(Note: I’m not sure when I will be able to follow up on my first essay about Michelle Remembers, so no more prophecies concerning when that will be posted. Suffice to say, I am working on it. In the meantime, enjoy this old piece I originally wrote for an American Studies class back in the day.)

R.G. Robins’s Pentecostalism in America (2010)and Ralph W. Hood and W. Paul Williamson’s Them That Believe (2008)are two fairly recent books that offer complementary but non-identical approaches to understanding Pentecostalism in the United States.  Robins is a historian, and endeavors to write a broad history of the movement in a chronological fashion and addresses the central doctrinal features of Pentecostalism as well as its distinctive practices.  He ably contextualizes Pentecostalism and illustrates its adaptability and role in modern U.S. culture.  Ralph W. Hood and W. Paul Williamson are psychologists who take a more interdisciplinary approach and focus exclusively on one aspect of the movement- serpent-handling.  Serpent-handling has not been a feature of any mainstream Pentecostal church since the early 1920s, though support for the practice appeared in Pentecostal periodicals through the 1940s.  It is today a practice associated exclusively with renegade sects throughout the Appalachian region of the U.S., and stands in marked contrast with the mainstream and global respectability attained by dominant Pentecostal denominations.  With its central ritual involving the handling of dangerous, venomous reptiles, serpent-handling sects are positioned as being in opposition to the dominant culture, depending on the family unit (kin-group formations, if one prefers) for its relative durability and longevity.  Hood and Williamson attempt to understand the appeal and function of this ritual from every perspective, and draw upon a range of disciplines within the social sciences and humanities in order to illuminate it from multiple conceptual angles.  The first portion of their book describes the history of Pentecostalism, and in many respects reads like an abridged version of Robins’ effort, and then moves on to a history of serpent-handling sects in Appalachia, pointing out the parallels with long-standing folk traditions.  From there, the authors describe the practice of snake-handling itself, and its meaning as a ritual.  Drawing on a psychoanalytic and evolutionary framework to explain the allure of the serpent as both sign and symbol, Hood and Williamson proffer an intriguing take on the practice which places the emphasis squarely on lived experience; William James is alluded to more than once. 

The value, I feel, of considering these two texts together has already been hinted.  Robins basically offers a ‘macro’ view of Pentecostalism, investigating the movement as a social and historical phenomenon with populist roots that eventually became institutionalized.  The role of institutionalization is of crucial concern when considering his history next to Hood and Williamson’s study.  According to Hood and Williamson, Pentecostalism’s arrival in the mainstream was the main driving force in the arrival of serpent-handling-as-sect.  Serpent-handling, in addition to providing a glimpse of a more ‘micro’ understanding of a religious movement and sensibility through the practice of rituals amongst small groups of people, serves as the oppositional shadow of the larger movement, a schismatic sect that brings to light the social, philosophical, and theological divisions within a religious movement.  The essence of the division is Biblical textual authority and the role it plays in understanding Pentecostalism’s most salient characteristic and ritual centerpiece- the Sign.  The reason the Division exists at all is social and political.  Biblical literalism makes intense demands on religious followers that are at odds with mainstream American culture and the general ebb and flow of modernity.  As a practice that can maim and kill, snake-handling will always, in all probability, be marginal both within the context of Pentecostalism and the cultural life of the United States, but as Hood and Williamson observe, prevalence is not the only standard that can be used to assess a religious ritual’s vitality; longevity is also important, and by that standard snake-handling has more than kept pace with mainstream Pentecostalism.  Considering the mainstream and marginal in Pentecostalism, as well as the larger social reality in relation to private belief and the often contentious relationship between social and religious values (something often overlooked in more secular-minded considerations of religion) will together be the principle focus of my analysis of Pentecostalism in America and Them That Believe.

                Pentecostalism in America, as already indicated, is a general history of the Pentecostal movement in the United States, a succinct but thorough overview of its historical and cultural roots, its development throughout the twentieth century, a discussion of its key foundational figures, and a speculation of its current import and possible future.  The trajectory of Pentecostalism has been an assured but by no means inevitable sprint to the mainstream, a religious sensibility that emerged as a reaction against the disorienting rootlessness inflicted by modernity.  As indicated by the name (The Pentecost refers to the moment when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles), Pentecostalism drew from the teachings and experiences of the early church and was (and is) deeply concerned with the primeval origins of Christianity.  It is of a set of faith traditions that seek to purify and improve present conditions through a thorough apprehension of the primitive origins of faith.  Pentecostalism placed a strong emphasis on sanctification and the occurrence it sought for most vigorously was baptism- or possession- of believers by the Holy Spirit.  The manifestation of the Holy Spirit was invariably thought to be accompanied by a visual sign, and indeed, the Sign, properly understood, would come to dominate most features of Pentecostal worship.  Although there was much early uncertainty about what constituted a proper sign, it was ultimately- and intuitively- the Bible that would provide guidance to the faithful.  Early founders of the Pentecostal movement, such as Charles Parham, would come to favor glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, as the most conspicuous and persuasive indicator of possession by the Holy Spirit.  The popular stereotype of the ecstatic Pentecostal follower gibbering in a strange language has its origins in Parham’s insistence of glossolalia as the most important sign with scriptural support.  Specifically, Mark 16:17-18 names five signs that the resurrected Christ said would identify believers; speaking in tongues was just one of these.  The centrality of glossolalia is understandable considering that the remaining four signs are either extremely dangerous (taking up serpents, drinking poison) or are difficult to demonstrate in a social setting (healing the sick, casting out devils).  The perceived incompleteness of what would become mainstream Pentecostalism’s approach to the signs would set the stage for the schismatic biblical literalism of the snake-handling tradition.

Robins is forthright in his approach to history, indicating his possible bias from the introduction of his book by quoting the old aphorism that all history is autobiography.  Being raised in the Pentecostal tradition, he brings an insider’s perspective on the practices of the various churches, and places a strong emphasis on the diversity and adaptability of Pentecostal institutions.  In fact, according to Robins, it is the fundamental disunity of the movement that poses the biggest challenge to understanding it, and it is only by uncovering “an organic relation to a common past” (Robins 1) that Pentecostalism, as such, clicks into focus.  The origins lie in the Holiness movement of the late 19^th century, which was principally a Methodist school keen on reviving a Wesleyan understanding of sanctification.  With the benefit of hindsight, the holiness movement’s religious methods and rituals can be seen as being of greater significance than its theology.  The chief organizational practice was the camp meeting, a passionate and fraternal setting that both linked the faithful to a less divided and chaotic past and fostered fellow-feeling that was badly sought after in post-bellum America.  The sensibility was very much in reaction to the modern world, characterized by ethnic tension, urban rootlessness, and industrial-capitalist exploitation.  Compounding the sense of alienation was the often break-neck pace of social and technological change.  Renewal movements generally offered solace through a return to origins, with the early, 1^st century church serving as the exemplar and ideal.  Pentecostalism promised a return to the early church days of miracles.  This vision, it would seem to me, offers a very particular understanding of religious community, both in terms of organizational code and practical function.  Holiness gave people a sense of unity through a certain conception of the past that could be manifested, courtesy of the Holy Spirit, in the present, with the organizing metaphor of purity imputed to the Christian faith’s historical origins; Pentecostalism offered a means of confronting the problems of the day, ordered along the premise that modern life was tainted by myriad moral impurities.  The egalitarian approach and emphasis on spiritual autonomy ultimately doomed the Holiness movement to an early incoherence, but its energy would last into the early twentieth century when a number of preachers and theologians imbued the tendency present in the camp meetings with an appropriately symbolic significance, and empowered Pentecostalism with its own terminology.  Specifically, Charles Parham placed a new-found theological emphasis on glossolalia, which granted Pentecostalism a strong evangelical tool (Speaking in a different language without instruction was supposed to facilitate evangelicalism and thus herald Christ’s return.), a persuasive indicator of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and “the seal of the Bride of Christ” (Robins 23), or the marker of the true church.  Parham’s influence granted Pentecostalism a pronounced eschatological tendency, which was hardly alien to Evangelicalism, then or now.  Pentecostalism, perhaps more than any other faith, understood the evangelizing power of the Sign; it is what would bring unbelievers to God.  Speaking in tongues would not achieve widespread recognition until William Seymour, Parham’s African-American protégé, established a Mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles.  From there, both Pentecostalism and its litany of signs would expand, eventually reaching every corner of the country (and beyond) and encompassing all five of the signs indicated in Mark 16:17-18. 

    Robins mentions the practice of snake-handling only three times in his history.  He is surprisingly non-judgmental, but predictably confers on it marginal status.  Clearly, the ritual cannot be ignored because of its notoriety, but sensible people can continue to doubt its overall importance to the Pentecostal movement.  Robins, like most scholars, locates the arrival of snake-handling as a religious ritual (as opposed to a folk tradition or one-off manifestation of religious enthusiasm) with the arrival of Pentecostalism in the American South.  He offers a persuasive but incomplete explanation for snake-handling’s Southern roots- “Southern Pentecostalism stood out from its regional peers for its emphasis on sanctification, its ethical rigorism (sic), and its strict church discipline.  In addition, the Pentecostal tendencies toward literalism and emotional intensity received their fullest expression here…  the region gave birth to the phenomenon of serpent handling, a Pentecostal subculture that… has etched one of the movement’s most enduring popular images” (44-45). Robins would seem to link the peculiarities of Sothern Pentecostalism to the peculiarities of the Southern character, and neglects the specifics of what Southern culture may have brought to Pentecostalism.  Hood and Williamson draw attention to the possible significance of folk traditions and previous isolated incidents of snake-handling at revivalist meetings across the South.  Robins correctly emphasizes how Southern conservatism magnified the already literalist tendencies of Pentecostalism; if all five of the signs described in Mark 16 were to be put into practice as a religious and ethical mandate anywhere, it would probably be in Appalachia.  What is even more remarkable is the degree of tolerance with which the practice was met by establishment Pentecostals of the time.  Robins writes, “Leaders… were slow to condemn the practice because of its textual basis and its apparent validation of their claim that all of the apostolic signs and wonders had been restored among them.  Condemnation would eventually come, but only after serpent handling had gone unchecked for several years” (45).  This would seem to indicate a tension within the early Pentecostal movement between religious fidelity and social utility.  It is a problem faced by many, if not most, religious movements; the conflict between concerning oneself with business beyond the physical, material world and maintaining an organization that is adaptable to the unavoidable demands of said world.  Snake-handling illustrates that the manifestation of this conflict occurs along (communal) ritual lines.  Ritual serves as the point where a religion’s metaphysics and spiritual orientation can be made manifest to any and all observers; it is the public face of a religion’s spirituality.  Pentecostalism, right from its inception, had pronounced fundamentalist tendencies, and the textual authority of the Bible was- and for the most part still is- regarded as absolute.  Since all of Pentecostalism’s religious signs (the foundation of Pentecostal ritual) have textual origins, this makes any “selective” take on scripture extraordinarily difficult.  However, to gain mainstream respectability in a modern American (later global) context, selective understandings of scripture became necessary.  In this respect, snake-handling sects can be regarded as the religious purity that mainstream Pentecostalism has chosen to reject, although Hood and Williamson make it clear in their study that any generalization about snake-handling in relation to mainstream Pentecostalism should be made with caution.

Them That Believe, in contrast to Robins’s work, is not strictly a history, but an interdisciplinary analysis that draws on historical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, and neurophysiological approaches to studying a specific religious ritual in its appropriate context.  Hood and Williamson announce at the outset that they are sympathetic to snake-handling sects, but do not practice the faith itself or share in its religious convictions.  This again provides a contrast to Robins, who brought an insider’s perspective to his study of Pentecostalism.  Them That Believe positions itself as an understanding outsider’s take on religious praxis.  The methodology employed by Williamson and Hood  is multi-faceted, as befits a resolutely interdisciplinary work, but the most important empirical evidence brought forth by their study was culled from several years’ worth of travel around the Appalachian region, visiting snake-handling churches as ‘participant observers’ and conducting extensive interviews with practitioners.  For this reason, it may be most useful to regard Hood and Williamson’s book as a work of anthropology, and the structure and on-the-ground functionality of the snake-handling ritual is given primary focus.  The early chapters of Them That Believe, however, are historical overviews, considering the history of Pentecostalism generally, the practice of snake-handling specifically, and the initial acceptance and eventual rejection of snake-handling by major Pentecostal churches.  There is some overlap between the material covered by Robins and Williamson and Hood, but for fairly intuitive reasons, Hood and Williamson give more attention to theology and ritual, though they share Robins’ understanding of the importance of region in accounting for Pentecostalism’s diversity and adaptability. 

The third and fourth chapters of Them That Believe contain the material of the greatest historical interest, not only in the context of Hood and Williamson’s study, but of the snake-handling tradition generally.  Snake-handling cannot be traced to any one figure in particular, but the man most commonly given credit for popularizing snake-handling and decisively establishing it as a religious tradition is George Went Hensley.  In yet another ironic historical turn, the most profoundly anti-modern incarnation of a profoundly anti-modern religious movement gained its early notoriety through the decidedly modern phenomenon of media sensationalism.  Hensley, a minister ordained at a prominent Pentecostal church called the Church of God, came to be troubled by the Church of God’s selective reading of Mark 16:17-18, which, as indicated previously, stipulated five signs that would signify true belief in Christ.  Although the specifics are uncertain owing to a dearth of textual evidence, it is commonly held that Hensley, while ministering at Owl Hollow in rural Tennessee, retired to the peak of a nearby mountain and came upon a rattlesnake, which he then took up without harm to himself.  Between 1910 and 1914, Hensley developed a reputation as an intensely charismatic preacher who regularly handled dangerous, venomous snakes, and he received a great deal of attention from local and national newspapers and magazines.  Hensley was by no means the first snake-handler; it is probable that, as a youth, he witnessed a young woman named Nancy Kleinieck handle serpents at a coal camp revival.  The handling of snakes as a sign of devotion was not without precedent in Appalachia, but it is generally agreed that Hensley’s charismatic religious work, backed by the perceived theological authority of emerging Pentecostalism, effectively paved the way for serpent handling as a viable religious tradition.  The history provided by Hood and Williamson is instructive for a number of reasons.  It demonstrates the process by which a religious practice becomes a tradition or ritual.  Historical authority (in this case textually mediated) articulated by a prominent figure of the faith joins with the right social milieu to create the impression of a divine manifestation, or something like a sacrament.  Evangelicalism provides a narrative foundation which makes the practice of the ritual seem coherent and desirable. 

Inevitably, the intrinsic danger of handling venomous reptiles brought this newly arrived ritual into conflict with the wider culture.  In 1936, a young man named Alfred Weaver attempted to handle a rattlesnake at one of Hensley’s sermons, and received multiple bites that would prove fatal.  This event is commonly thought to mark the beginning of Hensley and the tradition’s troubled legal status; as the twentieth century went on, more laws were passed forbidding snake-handling.  Presently, every Southern state with the exception of West Virginia has laws restricting the practice of handling dangerous snakes.  Hensley himself would later leave the Church of God to found his own church, the Church of God with Signs Following, and eventually die from a snakebite. 

What is remarkable is that the mainstream Church of God and its sister church, the Church of God of Prophecy, actively endorsed snake-handling for a time, citing its textual justification.  Official condemnation from the Church of God would occur in the 1920s, but as late as 1943 prominent Pentecostal leaders defended the practice.  M.A. Tomlinson, the son of Church of God of Prophecy founder A.J. Tomlinson, wrote in an editorial for a Pentecostal periodical, “We do not make a show of taking up serpents, but if they are brought to us and God’s power is present to manifest this sign that follows believers, then we give god the glory for it” (qtd. in Hood and Williamson 54).  Although the process was uneven, mainstream Pentecostalism would eventually abandon snake-handling entirely; indeed, many Pentecostal churches condemned it from the beginning.  Hood and Williamson argue that a useful model for understanding the schism between mainstream Pentecostalism and snake-handling sects is church-sect theory.  Church-sect theory, though imperfect, helps explain a counterintuitive fact; that the most conservative, high-demand churches are the ones that frequently possess the most longevity and vitality.  One would think intense religious requirements, whether social, personal, or conceptual, and their attendant stressors would run the risk of alienating church members over time, but this is not the case at all.  The members of sects, in contrast to churches, are almost exclusively voluntary in their association (one can be merely born into a church) and experience a great deal of tension with the dominant culture; inasmuch as this tension is distinctive, sects have a means of preserving themselves and their traditions, as the like-mindedness of the sect members in conjunction with their estrangement from a disapproving mainstream culture reinforces the centrality of the sect as the basis for social identity and a sense of belonging.  Importantly, Hood and Williamson observe, “…it… is important to recognize that as some sects grow by abandoning high-cost behaviors, a residual group that maintains these behaviors survives- although it may be seen as less successful when emphasis is on growth rather than survival…” (58) The high-cost behavior associated with snake-handling is one of the aspects of the faith that encourages its preservation.  Legal prohibitions add to the cost of snake-handling, ironically reinforcing the dynamic that ensures the longevity of controversial schismatic sects.  When viewed in the light of the history of Pentecostalism, this pattern reveals a compelling truth about Pentecostalism and perhaps religious movements generally.  It would seem that the features of a faith that enable its growth are not necessarily the same features that guarantee its preservation.  Pentecostalism got its start and early rapid growth by being relatively egalitarian, flexible, and adaptable, but some of the longest-lasting and most iconic traditions within the faith are the least flexible or amenable to alteration or compromise.

No consideration of snake-handling would be complete without an analysis of the practice of handling snakes itself.  Hood and Williamson helpfully devote a chapter to a more worldly consideration of the serpent as both sign and symbol (The distinction between the two concepts and how they interact through the ritual is crucial.) across cultures.  The snake is commonly associated with death and the phallus, although many traditions, such as Romanticism, have associated it with knowledge, the marginal, or the transgressive.  The fear of snakes would seem to be a human universal, probably with evolutionary origins.  The symbolic value of the snake takes on a special power when it is also manifested as a sign in the context of the snake-handling tradition.  The experience of handling the snake itself as part of a religious service is preceded, in the words of the believers themselves, as an acutely felt desire; as a ‘wanting to do.’  This in turn is replaced by fear and anticipation as the reptile is approached, and a sense of elation and victory when it is taken up without bodily harm.  It is important to understand that snake-handlers regard their practice as an imperative, or as something they must do.  They do not consider it as proof of faith and they do not expect to necessarily come away from the act unscathed.  The signs are followed because they are divine orders, what marks ‘them that believe.’  The appeal of the practice to believers is a direct connection with God.  In every instance, it is God, and not the believer, that manifests the sign.

Hood and Williamson conclude their study with an evaluation of the current state of snake-handling churches.  Because of the legal prohibitions on the practice in most states, many snake-handlers are reluctant to openly identify themselves.  As a consequence, the exact number of adherents to snake-handling is difficult to ascertain.  The typical church has very low membership, usually about 10-20 people.  A larger one may have up to 100 participants.  The most compelling point made in this final section of the book concerns the role of the family in maintaining the practice of snake-handling.  Because no mainstream institution supports the practice anymore, snake-handlers are dependent on the smaller but nonetheless powerful foundational unit of the family to practice and preserve their faith.  It is the practice, backed by familial support and granted narrative coherence thanks to both scripture and evangelical teaching, that preserves snake-handling as a faith tradition.  When attempting to understand snake-handling in relation to Pentecostalism generally, a number of challenges present themselves, but I feel this quote concerning the crisis of Pentecostalism on the eve of the First World War may capture something of the essence: “Pentecostalism was a bumptious, contrarian movement with sectarian instincts.  Pride, purity, and proof-texts dictated ‘separation from the world.’  But an extroverted, missionary-minded movement like Pentecostalism could never truly separate from the world it defined itself over against yet lived within and sought to save” (Robins 49-50).  In short, I feel it may be helpful to understand snake-handling as the embodiment of all of Pentecostalism’s most ‘separatist’ tendencies, the seeking of religious purity among a select few, even to the point of death, in relative seclusion.  The regional and theological coloring this separatist movement has taken on can give some indication about the character of the religious movement generally beyond its perceived, dominant socio-political aspects.  Purity would seem to be stronger at the margins of a faith, and in the case of Pentecostalism, faith is the conquest of death through signs and symbols.             

Works Cited

Hood, Ralph W. and W. Paul Williamson. Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian
Serpent-Handling Tradition. Berkeley: University of California, 2008. Print.
Robins, R.G. Pentecostalism in America. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2010. Print.

“… the universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its head…”: Melville’s Mardi and Neoplatonism.

(Note: I have fallen behind on my promised follow-up to my post on Michelle Remembers, so here is a little something to tide over all zero of my regular readers. It is a slightly edited version of a paper I wrote for an independent study back in grad school, so of course MLA formatting is present in all of its glory. I had previously posted on Herman Melville and his third novel, Mardi, here and here. Enjoy! I hope to have the MR post up sometime in October.)

Herman Melville’s literary ambitions underwent a significant change in character between his second and third novels, shifting away from the genre of fictionalized (though how fictionalized is still debated) travelogue to the romantic, philosophical, and more self-consciously ‘literary.’  The change is announced from the author’s note that precedes the title page of Melville’s third production, Mardi (1849):

“Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my experience.  This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi.” (xvii)

Though the broad and expansive genre of the nautical adventure ostensibly remained the baseline for this literary project (Melville even promises to focus his attention on Polynesia, the setting of his first two works, Typee and Omoo.), Melville clearly intended for there to be dramatic formal, stylistic, and thematic alterations to the nature of his writing.  In that respect, Mardi does not disappoint.  Though Melville advertised an intention to compose a ‘romance,’ not necessarily in the Hawthornian sense of that word, there really is no pinning down the generic orientation of Melville’s third novel.  The author’s note foregrounds, right from the outset, an interest in the relationship between truth and fiction, a topic which inevitably summons the larger subject of epistemology.  Melville was notably frustrated by critics who took his Typee and Omoo as fabrications when he intended them to be reflections of his actual lived thoughts and experiences.  The fact that a literary mediation cast doubt on what Melville understood to be the truth would be the first ‘germ’ in the cultivation of a radically new way he had about how he understood and ‘thought with’ literature. This was no doubt helped along significantly by the immense volume of new books he was reading in the months leading up to and during the composition of Mardi.  Melville, being an expansive if occasionally confused thinker, must have noticed immediately that the problem of genre is at the heart of the question concerning the relationship of fiction and truth.  The formal conventions of genre and the specific, often constraining storytelling elements that go along with it, impose a degree of artifice on the vagaries, disunities, and contradictions that mark human thought.  Human thought may not necessarily be ‘the truth’ of the universe (in fact, it quite probably is not) but it is quite obviously the only material human beings have to work with for comprehending themselves and their environment, or whatever other phenomena they may care to ponder.  While composing Mardi, Melville discovered with an intense zeal his capacity for intellectual, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic exploration, and this led inexorably to a frustration with genre, more specifically his chosen genre of the seafaring romance.  The consequence of this struggle is a book that is of multiple genres, and which possesses little formal unity.  The critic Merrell R. Davis isolated no fewer than three distinct books within Melville’s ostensibly single volume: “The Narrative Beginning,” “The Romantic Interlude,” and “The Travelogue-Satire.”  It may be possible to isolate further books still.  Overall, Mardi gives the reader a vivid sense of the circumstances of its writing; when Melville seemingly exhausted the epistemological potential of one genre, he would move on to another, leaving the attentive critic with the over-arching impression of a meditation whose structural integrity hinges on the ongoing act of literary composition.    

            For these reasons, what ‘standard’ formal coherence exists in Mardi is, I would argue, a product of Melville‘s engagement with his major theme: knowledge.  Mardi can be taken as an intelligible record of an artist’s intellectual growth, but not as a fully-realized aesthetic achievement.  Melville’s favored rhetorical devices for the exploration of the range and limits of the human mind, especially in the later sections of the book, were the allegory and the philosophical dialogue.  The shifts in genre that occur throughout the novel, for the most part, can be tracked through the alteration of these rhetorical devices and related stylistic shifts; it is a compositional approach that has the effect of altering the ‘reality’ (that is, the superficially realistic qualities of the story and how they relate to the putative reality of the reader) of the narrative.  If one were to merely consider the events of the narrative, then Mardi would seem to be a more easily classifiable text.  As the scholar Chris Sten noted, Mardi can be understood as an “imaginary voyage,” or “one of the principal forms of the novel before the twentieth century.  The precursor of the modern genre of science fiction, which proposes to describe life in a distant time, the imaginary voyage pretended to describe life in a distant place…” (64)  This narrative form proved to be sufficiently expansive to accommodate the full range of Melville’s developing obsessions, leaving room for philosophical speculations, mythopoeic questing, rugged nautical adventure, pointed political satire, and much else besides.  The imaginary voyage would seem to have allowed Melville the opportunity to think about the world through a representation of the world (arguably the business of all literature) in the fluid and multifaceted way he desired.

            As I have indicated, the chief theme of Mardi is knowledge, and the cumulative effect of the narrative is that of a journey inward, into the life of the mind.  The story’s essentially tragic orientation is recognition of the frustrating insecurity that comes from an awareness of the limitations and frequent unreliability of human thought and perception.  The basic plot, or the bulk of it anyway, consists of the narrator Taji’s efforts to recover the maiden Yillah (a symbolic personification of a utopian or spiritual ideal) within the mythical South Seas archipelago of Mardi.  Assisting him is an entourage from the island kingdom of Odo whose members are each representations of certain human intellectual and creative faculties.  As Merrell Davis observed, “The voyage through Mardi is both a quest and a sight-seeing expedition, at once a grand tour of the innumerable islands of a mythical archipelago and a quest to recover a phantom… the voyage affords an opportunity for presenting… satirical characterizations which are directed toward the exposure of the follies and vices of man and the institutions which man has created” (142).  Mardi is a world in itself, an arena to be explored or mapped out.  Yillah can be taken as an ideal clarifying principle, or a vision of utopia.  Her perpetual elusiveness illustrates both the limitations of human knowledge, and the un-achievability of a utopian social order.  The relationship between the world and the means of representing the world, and by extension understanding the world, has central importance in Mardi.  The proliferation of diverse social orders and personalities in conjunction with a proliferation in symbolic representation is, I will argue, the principal reason behind its stylistic changes; as the world changes (that is to say, as we perceive more and more of the world’s varied constituent parts), so must the mode of representation, and any shift in representation in turn informs how the world comes to be understood, and how new information about it is processed.  The practical effect of this unfolding in the context of Melville’s novel is a drift away from representing reality into representing representation, or the patterns of human thought itself.  The ‘voyage thither’ of the subtitle could just as easily be ‘a voyage inward.’

            As I have established, Mardi is conspicuously lacking in a formal structure from a strictly ‘literary’ point of view, but some unity becomes legible if one thinks of it as less a novel and more a creative representation of an intellectual development.  In some respects, Mardi is a bildungsroman (or a confessional) masquerading as a romantic quest.  One critic who has gone further than most in tracking the elusive formal unity of Mardi is Bruce L. Grenberg, who reasonably observed, “Surely it is foolish to think that the shift from adventure-narrative to allegorical quest slipped into Mardi undetected by Melville… it seems manifest that Melville saw a unity in the book that has eluded most readers, a unity that comprises more than a simple consistence of narrative point of view” (27).  The narrator of the story, who will eventually adopt the moniker Taji, begins his tale as a bored and listless crewmember on a whaling ship becalmed at sea.  His dissatisfaction stems not just from mere boredom, but a more deeply felt spiritual malaise.  His vision of the universe is monistic, and perhaps panentheistic: “Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin… the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all brothers in essence…  All things form but one whole; the universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its head” (Melville 12).  The narrow and circumscribed world of the whale ship Arcturion is hardly a fitting place to become better acquainted with the expansive divinity of the wider world.  This line also marks the first unambiguous evocation of a Neoplatonic conception of the world, a view that Melville granted a number of his narrators, most notably Ishmael from Moby-Dick.  In the Neoplatonic scheme, the Great Chain of Being, the most perfect being sits atop a metaphysical hierarchy and governs the apparent plurality of all things, including the principles of change and evolution.  The unity of the plurality can be understood in terms of the most perfect being on top- God.  “[F]or certainly in this conception of the universe, angels and earthlings… and human ‘nations and families’ can indeed be ‘brothers in essence… for all these creatures have in common their spiritual selves (their essences) and all emanate from the Supreme Being” (Zimmerman 39).  This understanding of ultimate truth deeply informs Taji’s quest and helps explain the seemingly endless proliferation of island nations explored in the later chapters of Mardi; from the Neoplatonic standpoint, one arrives at ultimate truth through an engagement with the diversity of forms- and concludes that they are ultimately One. 

            Even in the early, realistic chapters of Melville’s novel, Taji’s quest has a clear intellectual component, and the reader receives some subtle hints of the future dissolution of the recognizable ‘real’ world and the entrance into the fanciful world of the mythical archipelago.  Taji’s motivation for abandoning the Arcturion with his simpleton companion Jarl sets up the eventual generic shift: “We are asked to join a narrator who… flees a known and secure reality in search of self, tries simultaneously to penetrate and transcend the facts of the world in an effort to grasp the comprehensive meaning of those facts.  We are asked to enter the world of the mind” (Grenberg 28).  However, such an abdication of security, both physical and social (Jarl aside), cannot have immediate rewards.  Abandoning one’s ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is not a soft measure, and the most immediate effect is not one of transcendent experience but an encounter with the raw, brutal reality of the natural order.  Here the reader gets their first epistemic model- Empiricism.  More precisely, an empiricist approach to the natural world is joined with a Transcendentalist sensibility in Taji’s character.  “With the security of social order and custom behind him, the narrator finds himself frighteningly close to the dense reality he would transcend…  Melville is asking us to join his narrator in exploring the world as it truly is, not as it seems to be through habit and common perception” (Grenberg 28).  This intimate encounter with reality is perfectly matched with a relatively realistic (but typically rhapsodic and allusive) narrative style in the early chapters, and Taji’s method of epistemic mastery is careful observation and classification.  This is on display in chapter 13, where Taji describes the various species of shark observed from his and Jarl’s boat.  This task has a peculiar sense of urgency: “Ever present to us, was the apprehension of some sudden disaster from the extraordinary zoological specimens we almost hourly passed” (Melville 40).  The use of the term “zoological specimens,” as well as the explicit reference to the great German naturalists Muller and Henle, implies a solid grounding in the empirical or natural sciences.  Taji is classifying to conquer, to gain a knowledgeable basis for making his way in an apparently hostile and volatile environment.  Taxonomy is just the first of a plethora of knowledge-organizing models to come in Melville’s narrative.  It proves inadequate in itself as a means for truly achieving transcendent knowledge.  As Grenberg observed, “The mind can work upon, but not control, the reality that exerts itself suddenly and without warning…  it is this quality of nature’s unpredictability, with its implicit unconcern for human concerns, that most thwarts the narrator’s efforts to control his existence” (29). 

            It is tempting to mark the Aleema sequence of the novel as the first major generic transition Melville imposes.  It is the point where Taji confronts and kills the priest Aleema who is about to sacrifice the fair maiden Yillah as part of a religious ceremony.  This seems to be the moment where the far-fetched, but nonetheless reality-bound sailor’s yarns of the early chapter give away to the mythopoeic constructs of the romantic quest.  However, Chapter 38 (“The Sea on Fire”) may be a more appropriate marking point since it features a major epistemic shift for the narrator-protagonist.  After the events on the Parki, Taji, Jarl, and new companion Samoa come upon a phosphorescent patch of sea late at night.  It has a strange, otherworldly, ethereal majesty that prompts much speculation: “Now, sailors love marvels, and love to repeat them.  And from many an old shipmate I have heard various sage opinings…” (Melville 123)  Taji then proceeds to list the possible explanations for the sea’s luminescence, which include Jarl’s formulation that it is the consequence of “commotion among the mermaids,” Faraday’s theory that an electrical phenomenon in the atmosphere is responsible, and the theory that it is the product of dead matter in the sea itself.  “But these are only surmises; likely, but uncertain.  After science comes sentiment…” (Melville 123)  When it comes to assigning significance or meaning to an observed phenomenon, mere description or classification will not do.  Sentiment, or the peculiar, emotionally-charged vagaries of the human heart, seeks to inflict its own logic.  “The narrator’s gloss upon the fiery sea has multiplicity as its most salient feature… As logical explanation, scientific or otherwise, the narrator’s argument and conclusion are muddle-headed.  As poetic statements of Melville’s larger purposes, however, they are pure revelation” (Grenberg 31-32). The poetic principle here is of a strongly Romantic character: the imaginative engagement with nature.  Such a program introduces an additional lair of multiplicity through the introduction of ambiguity. The poetic principle lends itself to a peculiar personifying power when applied to the natural world, and in a manner that prefigures the far more violent quest of Captain Ahab, Taji is imbued with the desire to find the ultimate secret at the heart of nature.  “Yillah is nature’s prized secret, which the narrator is determined to possess at whatever risk or cost” (Grenberg 32-33).  Many a reader may find the introduction of such a romantic, mythopoeic entity like Yillah into a narrative that heretofore had been more-or-less realistic somewhat jarring, but her arrival could be said to have been subtly foreshadowed by the phosphorescent sea, since that is a point where the recognition of the desirability, if not necessity, of a new form of knowledge occurs. 

            The arrival of Yillah and Aleema on the scene prompts an action from Taji that parallels his abandonment of the Arcturion at the beginning of the novel.  Taji confronts and kills Aleema and “rescues” Yillah.  There follows a stretch of ten chapters where Yillah and Taji are together.  It is important to give this portion of the novel some attention, since it in large part defines the scope of Taji’s quest for Yillah following her disappearance.  The significance of the young lovers’ interactions corresponds to an ideal or idealized state, when nature is fully apprehended and in perfect harmony with the engaged imagination.  This engagement is dialectical, and in Melville’s story occurs in the arena of social interaction.  The foundational unit of this perfect state is two people- Taji and Yillah.  Yillah can take on a social existence- that is, she can come to symbolize an ideal of social organization- in the later travelogue-satire sections of Mardi in part because of the dialectical quality of her introduction and early development. 

            The murder of Aleema is not the only sin Taji commits when it comes to Yillah.  He also fabricates a story that brings Yillah’s mythical identity in line with his own.  Upon their first meeting, Yillah tells a story about how she is a native of Oroolia, “the island of delights,” and how in youth she was ensnared by a sentient vine and transformed into a blossom, which in time rebirthed her and cast her ashore on the island of Amma, the home of the priest Aleema.  She indicates that she has no actual memory of these events, but that they were revealed to Aleema in a dream.  Taji is skeptical of the literal veracity of this story, and believes, not unreasonably, that Aleema has deceived Yillah as part of the sacrificial rites: “For ulterior purposes connected with their sacerdotal supremacy, the priests of these climes oftentimes secret mere infants in their temples; and jealously secluding them from all intercourse with the world, craftily delude them, as they grow up, into the wildest conceits” (Melville 139). Taji, with his Neoplatonic orientation and its demands for a plurality of experience as the chief means of acquiring authoritative knowledge, strangely has no compunctions about indulging Yillah’s fantasies for personal gain; whatever his interest in Yillah, he does not have any immediate inclination to lift her veil of delusions.  “To possess her finally, the narrator does not discredit her dream world; he enters it by claiming for himself a divine origin in Oroolia and a dream past in which he was her lover” (Grenberg 33). This induces a state of “Romantic ecstasy,” or of seeming intimacy with Nature’s divine secret, the ultimate aesthetic goal of the Romantic imagination.  What this might suggest is an end to all strivings, if not for the complicating factor of time.  Romantic ecstasy is always fleeting, but leaves its mark to the effect of a restless epistemology.  “In conception, and perhaps in aspiration, Melville was… akin to Emerson and Thoreau; if these elevated moments were to be accepted as anything more than hallucination or willing self-deception, they had to be integral to one’s persistent experience of the world” (Grenberg 34).  Significantly, Taji and company make landfall on the island kingdom of Odo not long after acquiring Yillah.  The domain of the sea, unencumbered by the social conventions represented by the whale ship Arcturion, could be a credible arena for the development of dreams, or the imaginative faculties.  Sure enough, Taji manages to achieve an ideal in the form of Yillah, but such an ideal needs to be tested against the persistent, lived experience of the world in order to be authoritative and truly transcendent.  In a turn of events at once predictable and indicative of yet another epistemic shift, Yillah vanishes not long after the group arrives in Odo.  This sets the stage for the final section of the novel, the travelogue-satire with conspicuous shades of allegorical significance. 

            The sequence of events from Aleema’s murder at the hands of Taji to the disappearance of Yillah at Odo bears the character of an Edenic fall from grace, most conspicuously in the psychological effect it has on Taji.  He ponders to himself and to the wider heavens, “To you, ye stars, man owes his subtlest raptures, thoughts unspeakable, yet full of faith.  But how your mild effulgence stings the boding heart.  Am I a murderer, stars?”  (Melville 179)  Taji now has the stain of an original sin, and he now must dwell in a world which constantly reminds him of his fallen state.  His soliloquy to the stars reflects an awareness of, and a certain faith in, a heavenly, transcendent sphere, but at this point in his story the loss of Yillah has effectively cut him off from it.  Here there is an epistemic shift towards the moral, and the moral compass Taji adopts is of a special significance itself:  “Melville’s Mardian world and Taji’s ensuing search for Yillah throughout that world are irredeemably humanistic, and the ensuing search for Yillah… the attempt to realize humanity’s highest dreams, takes place in a context almost totally devoid of religious and transcendental implications…” (Grenberg 35)  It is no longer the transcendent but the social that is held up for scrutiny by Melville, and appropriately enough, the generic orientation of the text transforms from romantic adventure yarn to travelogue-satire.  Though there is a shift to the social, the world Melville depicts does not get any more noticeably earth-bound; this is the section of the narrative where Taji acquires his name and takes on the role of a Polynesian Demigod from the sun.  This role involves Taji taking on yet another fictional backstory which he cannot substantiate or expound upon at any length, and one that, oddly enough, strengthens his new-found social role within the kingdom of Odo.  While interacting with King Media (a self-styled Demigod himself) Taji remarks, “As for anything foreign in my aspect, and my ignorance of Mardian customs: – all this, instead of begetting a doubt unfavorable to my pretensions, but strengthened the conviction of them as verities” (Melville 174).  The transcendent realm may be remote from social existence, especially in terms of knowledge, but it still exerts an authoritative influence.  Furthermore, the social is no less mythological in potential.  When Taji becomes a demigod, he assumes a cultural significance to the Mardians, and soon his desires and aspirations, his grand Yillah-oriented narrative, assumes a social significance which prompts action and questing among other parties.  As H. Bruce Franklin observed, “This penultimate abdication [Taji leaving the ocean and arriving in Mardi] is his [Taji’s] penultimate allegorical death…  From this point on, ironically and appropriately the Mardians become far more important than the narrator.  ‘Taji’ as a Mardian conception becomes more significant than the player of Taji.  The three mythologists and their king make Taji’s quest their own” (44).  When personal transcendent knowledge assumes a social significance, it becomes myth, and myth prompts knowledge-seeking of a related, and perhaps cyclical, character.  Taji’s quest for Yillah becomes a kind of epistemological compass by which the Mardian explorers navigate their archipelago, and a frame of reference which helps, at least in part, to contextualize the information they acquire on their journey.  The journey has social significance not just because it is different and often conflicting social orders that are held up for scrutiny over the course of the travelogue-satire, but because the questers who adopt Taji’s obsessions are ideals and constituent parts of a civilized social order.  Grenberg is again quite helpful: “Taji and his companions in the quest, Media, Yoomy, Babbalanja, and Mohi, constitute not only the multifaceted individual personality… but also the multifaceted structure of civilized society… it is natural to stress the characters’ identities as functions of the mind… but it is also noteworthy that Melville draws an analogy between the individual and his society” (35).  Roughly, the questing characters can be taken as representations of mental faculties: Media is volition, Mohi is memory, Yoomy is creativity or imagination, and Babbalanja is reason and, occasionally, mystic perception.  The social analogues of these mental functions are the philosopher (Babbalanja), the historian (Mohi), the poet or artist (Yoomy), and the politician (Media).  Additionally, it is quite tempting to conceptualize these characters as the disparate parts of Melville’s artistic sensibilities, which he needed to synthesize in the space of the text in order to carry off a truly great feat of the literary imagination.  Taji fades into the background in order to give these new arrivals center stage, and this robs the quest for the missing Yillah of a great deal of dramatic urgency, but it can be argued that Taji does not fade from the narrative so much as he is fragmented into this new set of personalities which dramatize the conflicted and multifaceted nature of his epistemological quest.  Furthermore, Taji’s psychological and spiritual division can be understood as the inevitably and dramatically appropriate response to his fallen state and the loss of his Yillah: “[The] elastic relationship among the questers- threatening to break altogether periodically throughout the quest- reveals the disintegration of Taji’s personality in a world without Yillah” (Grenberg 36). By this point in the novel, Taji’s orientation toward knowledge has changed significantly.  In the beginning, his endeavors were marked by a general sense of intellectual restlessness and social isolation.  The latter quality in part informs Taji’s sense of independence, which aids his abilities as an inquirer, and his receptivity to the outside world.  A broad sense of curiosity and a desire to absorb information marks the early stage on Taji’s intellectual journey.  The encounter and communion with Yillah and her subsequent disappearance radically alter the manner in which Taji seeks understanding.  “Before he first discovers Yillah, his wanderings have no definite object.  After he loses her, he no longer drifts; he then searches specifically if futilely.  In Mardi, therefore, the hero’s life is presented in two stages: he is a wanderer, and then a searcher” (Dillingham 105).  A search implies an object or goal.  It is essentially a teleological project, and the structure of Melville’s allegory makes it clear that his protagonist eventually develops a strong desire to believe that human striving for knowledge and understanding would eventually yield fruits.  The epistemological goal, here represented by Yillah, serves an interpretive function in this quest; it is the standard by which new information is measured and contextualized. 

            Dysfunction of some sort marks every social order encountered by the questers in the kingdom of Mardi.  For Grenberg, there is a recurring pattern to the seemingly diverse range of social problems Melville presents through his Mardian kingdoms- the inability of their rulers and citizens to properly integrate knowledge and experience into a coherent sense of self, a necessary prerequisite for a stable social identity. “The disintegrated world of Juam, Willamilla, Ohonoo, and Vivenza is presented as a product of the disintegrated personalities of its rulers.  Thus, the quest for Yillah is both internal and external, the search for unity by the unintegrated self in a disintegrated world” (36).  Isolation combined with stasis creates the inadequacies present in the island kingdoms.  For Melville, relativism of a sort colors his assessments of different sociocultural landscapes, not because he felt there were no standards for judgment (Yillah’s presence would determine a utopian order) but because he felt that only comparisons among different social possibilities could yield sufficient information about the range of human possibility, understanding, and capacity to live and work in cohesive groups.  This understanding may very well be a reflection of Melville’s conception of perfect knowledge, the ability to integrate and properly contextualize and comprehend the essence of the full range of baffling and frightening information the external world hurls at human subjects. “The individual islands clearly signify the isolated and fragmented nature of individuals and states who through ignorance, weakness, stubbornness, or pride have cut themselves off from the world… the beliefs and behavior of all those they meet are presented as direct products of the ways they look at their world” (Grenberg 36-37).  The lack of utopia in Mardi is reflective of a lack of unity to human experience and perception, and thus signifies the impossibility of grasping any kind of ultimate knowledge.  This has profound implications for the eventual emotional effect of Melville’s novel.  Taji’s seeking after knowledge leads him to a greater incoherence, which strikes at the very unity of his sense of self; and yet he presses on.  “Taji simply refuses to accept the implications of his own experience.  His dream of attaining oneness with the universe is so intense that it blinds him to the facts of the world’s recalcitrance.  Melville wants us to see these dreams as both irresistible and impossible… Taji’s quest is as hopeless as it is necessary to his self-definition.” (Grenberg 47)  It is well worth mentioning that Taji’s transition from wanderer to quester inevitably entails a more active and opinionated engagement with the world.  In short, the more he learns, the more he is prompted to act towards a focused end.  The result of this development is a gradual articulation of the theme of the relationship between knowledge and action.  How does what we know (or think we know) encourage us to act, or not act?  For Melville, Mardi served as a sort of dry run for this theme, which would receive its greatest treatment in Moby-Dick, but the question has tragic implications in the context of Mardi as it is. 

            No consideration of Mardi would be complete without some attention paid toward Hautia, the mysterious and sensuous queen of Flozella.  Her heralds pursue Taji and his companions all over Mardi, attempting to entice him to Hautia’s lair.  Additionally, a trio of Aleema’s former associates pursues the band in an effort to kill Taji in retaliation for the murder of the priest.  Respectively, these different pursuers represent forces that would halt meaningful intellectual exploration; Hautia is the realm of comfortable illusion, while the vengeful companions of Aleema are potent reminders of the fallen state that inevitably tortures and limits the experiences of human beings.  Hautia is of slightly greater interest for the simple reason that she serves as a double for Yillah, or antithesis to Yillah’s thesis.  If Yillah is a poetic ideal, then Hautia is the folly of poetic illusions, or the superficially beguiling sights and sensations that distract people from the pursuit of real truth; artifice as opposed to art.  In her own way, Hautia represents the hazards of investing oneself too much in a beautiful illusion, much like Madame Bovary or Dorian Gray, and in that respect is the exact opposite of Yillah, who offered a ‘genuine’ vision of truth and beauty.  “As the symbol of fathomless creative power, she serves as both inspiration and nemesis to Taji and… to Melville, for as creative imagination she on the one hand offers the possibility of all things, while on the other hand she denies to all things any status other than that of possibility” (Grenberg 55).  This problem goes right to the heart of Melville’s project, which is fiction.  Fiction, when in thrall of Yillah, is in harmony with the governing principles of nature.  When it takes its cue from Hautia, fiction consists of nothing more than the meretricious beauties of mere fantasy and wish-fulfillment, superficially attractive, but lacking the permanent, self-sustaining value of truth. 

            Taji’s quest to recover Yillah, and achieve what he most desired from intellectual exploration- the perception of, and communion with, the ultimate truth or governing principle of the universe, is a failure.  His consolation is to continue in his pursuit beyond the realm of both quotidian reality, social responsibility, and the circumscribed nature of human thought itself.  His final defiant declaration as he leaves the Mardian archipelago pursued by Aleema’s former companions is quite telling- “Now, I am my own soul’s emperor; and my first act is abdication!  Hail!  Realm of shades!” (Melville 654)  This intensely Miltonic line, which recalls Satan’s outburst upon his banishment in Paradise Lost, can be understood as a kind of spiritual and intellectual suicide.  As Yillah cannot be found in Mardi, ultimate truth cannot be comprehended by ordinary human thought processes and habits.  Surrendering to the wide unknown strangely enough does not end Taji’s forward momentum; he has reached the limitations of earthly knowledge and then sets out for parts unknown.  It is quite tempting to consider this in light of Melville’s growth as a writer.  As the critic Harold Beaver remarked, “Fiction was the one centre where all divergencies might converge and where all inconsistencies must necessarily consist.  That was to become Melville’s task: not to resolve the dichotomies of love and hate, male and female, fact and fiction; but to calibrate their mutual tension” (39).  In the end, such a project could be emotionally powerful, intellectually edifying, and aesthetically pleasing, but never attuned to any revelatory promise.  For Melville, that was the tragedy of thought but the triumph of his fictional art.      

                   

Works Cited

Beaver, Harold.  “Mardi: A Sum of Inconsistencies.”  Herman Melville: Reassessments.  Ed.  A.

            Robert Lee.  London: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1984.  28-40. Print.

Davis, Merrell R.  Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage.  New Haven: Yale University Press,

            1952.  Print.

Dillingham, William B.  An Artist in the Rigging: The Early Work of Herman Melville.

            Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972.  Print.

Franklin, Bruce H.  The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology.  Stanford: Stanford University

            Press, 1963.  Print.

Grenberg, Bruce L.  Some Other World to Find: Quest and Negation in the Works of Herman

            Melville.  Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.  Print.

Melville, Herman.  Mardi, and A Voyage Thither: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition. 

            Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library,

            1970.  Print.

Sten, Christopher.  The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel. 

            Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1996.  Print.

Zimmerman, Brett.  Herman Melville: Stargazer.  Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s

            University Press, 1998.  Print.   

“…the rules of blood would not permit…”: Insu Heinz Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother

(Note: I am a little delayed on the completion of the follow-up post for my reading of Michelle Remembers, so here’s something to tide you over that was originally set to be published next week. I’m gunning for some point during the first half of next week for the second part of my Michelle Remembers analysis.)

(Another Note: I originally wrote this piece while in grad school, hence the fidelity to MLA style and citations.  At the time I wrote it, my political orientation was a bit more ‘incipiently radical’ than it is today, so I am not sure I would stand by every assertion made here now.  For example, today I don’t think I’d characterize the relationship between [South] Korea and the USA as ‘exploitative and neo-colonial,’ though it is still undoubtedly unequal.  I nonetheless prefer to keep this paper more-or-less in its original state for coherence purposes, so I present it here with only minor edits.)

Insu Heinz Fenkl’s novel Memories of My Ghost Brother is one of those helpful texts that announces its thematic intentions from the title page; it is indeed a story about memory, with a special emphasis placed on memory’s relation to the family dynamic.  Specifically, the narrative of Memories concerns a young boy, presumably drawn heavily from the author’s own experiences and subjectivity, named Insu Fenkl who lives in a Korean ‘camptown,’ a community in Korea situated near a U.S. military base during the 1960s and 70s.  Insu is the son of a Korean woman with a possible- if not probable- history of prostitution and a German-American army sergeant.  Although the generic conventions of Insu’s story strongly suggest the memoir (and indeed, Memories functions quite well within the parameters of the memoir form), there are numerous digressions which possess an emotional or generic character not typical of that literary mode.  The most conspicuous of these digressions are the numerous quasi-moralistic folk tales told throughout the novel, coupled with dreams and fantasies similarly evocative of the fantastic and supernatural.  For Fenkl, the act of remembering (The desire to remember no doubt led to his selection of the memoir as his ‘base’ genre.) is intrinsically creative, but also imbued with a sense of personal and familial responsibility.  He articulates this literary approach near the conclusion of his novel: “I went trying to name the dead to give them peace… and if I could not name them with a word, I could name them with their stories” (269).  Over the span of his narrative, Fenkl recounts the deaths of a number of friends and family members who had a significant influence over the course of his childhood.  It is well worth noting that all of Insu’s dead friends and relatives are treated to creative re-imaginings of their lives and struggles, or are otherwise associated with creative narrative styles.  The young baby and maid who fall down a well are envisioned by Insu as lonely, frightened ghosts.  His friend James is thought to have been deliberately drowned by his mother (This theory is never verified, but it fits Insu’s emerging conception of the social dynamics of his community.) and his uncle, and later his father, are fond of retelling Korean and Vietnamese folk tales as a means of inculcating moral values and the capacity for inventive expression.  Fenkl’s articulation of the various personalities he encounters through stories amounts to a means of him negotiating a necessarily conflicted identity.  As a mixed-race child growing up in Korea near a U.S. military base, Insu is in a liminal state marked by the legacy of war, racism, imperialism, and much else besides.  He must endeavor to situate himself socially and historically to banish the acute sense of isolation that comes when one does not comfortably or obviously fit into any one particular culture or society. 

For this inquiry, I will explore how stories, dreams, and fantasies function within Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother.  I argue that, although Insu is chiefly concerned with untangling his conflicted subjectivity, his imaginings and the stories he encounters offer intriguing ways of understanding and describing the Korean American, Amerasian, and mixed-race experiences, as well as how such experiences and troubled identities enable original approaches to literary expression. Novel approaches to the literary in turn can aid in conferring a sense of cohesion to a complex, multifaceted, and divided sense of self.

            As indicated previously, the chief purpose of Insu’s narrative is to negotiate his conflicted identity and social position, and his principle method is creative remembering, or memorializing key personalities through stories.  In order to fully understand the nature of Insu’s troubled state, it would be helpful to say something about the specific social and historical circumstances in which he found himself throughout his childhood.  Insu spent his childhood years in a Korean camptown during the late 1960’s with the politics of the Vietnam War looming in the background.  Camptowns constituted socially controversial zones that were characterized by prostitution, black marketeering, crime, and a legacy of displacement.  In Ji-Yeon Yuh’s account of Korean war brides and ‘western princesses,’ the historical context of the camptown is ably described- “Because U.S. bases were one of the few steady sources of income in the poverty-stricken years of the 1940’s through 1970’s, the camptowns attracted not only poor women, including war widows, and orphans seeking to make a living, but also entrepreneurs and criminals” (241).  This created an illicit atmosphere that was often dangerous to those who had to live and work in one of these zones.  Fenkl describes the experiences of his literary alter-ego as very often being precarious, and he becomes involved with everything from petty theft to black marketeering, and he has some memorably confused and anxious encounters with some prostitutes.  His family was certainly not spared from the dysfunction.  Insu’s mother, aunt, and cousins all need to do what they need to survive, including working the black market and possibly the meat market.  Insu and his family exist in an insular, Korean-speaking enclave with many other families with mixed-race children, with duty keeping Insu’s father away most of the time.  They are, to varying degrees, estranged from both the culture of the United States and the culture of Korea.  It is quite possible that Insu’s mother’s position as a camptown woman (Though not necessarily a prostitute, her association with the camptown and her having a white husband and mixed-race child would be enough to cause people to perceive her as a camptown woman.) has defined the family’s estranged state.  As Yuh has stated, “Their connection to the envied and admired America, however, does not save camptown women and military brides from contempt and ostracism” (244). The reason for this contempt?  Yuh posits that the camptown dynamic served- and continues to serve- as a constant reminder of the essentially exploitative, unequal, and neo-colonial relationship between South Korea and the United States.  By denying the Korean military bride and holding the western princess in contempt, South Koreans can effectively maintain (seemingly) self-sustaining national identities that are autonomous and conform to conventional patriarchal conceptions of the state.  Fenkl’s inside narrative does much to dismantle such a tenuous perspective.  In a particularly vivid account of his experience inside and around the base, Insu notes, “I had walked down alleys where girls not much older than me would suck a GI’s penis for a few dollars, where boys my age would let a man fuck them and then pretend to be their family friend.  I had seen a man stabbed in the gut with a sharpened afro pick, had my shoulder slashed by a fast straight razor, smashed a thief’s head with a brick” (249).  Preceding this description is a disquieting anecdote about a young Korean boy from the area who finds a piece of unexploded ordinance on an American firing range and blows himself up.  Insu, utilizing his standard imaginative method, imagines the obliterated child as a ghost, unconscious of its own post-death state and pleading to the living for attention.  Tellingly, the standard living Korean’s reaction to the ghost’s presence in Insu’s account is in keeping with Yuh’s interpretation- they ignore him and try to banish him from memory. 

SOUTH KOREA. 1961. Tae Song Dong. Women entertaining GIs.

            Insu’s ghosts are never just metaphors for memory but narrative schemes in themselves.  The conception Insu has of storytelling seemingly emerges from three distinct sources- folklore, literature, and dreams.  These three brands of evocation determine how ghosts and the memories they come to represent are depicted in Memories of My Ghost Brother.  This in turn allows Insu to re-imagine his conflicted Amerasian identity apart from the exploitation and alienation which dominates most of his lived, conscious experiences.  The ghost which comes to have the final word on this point is the ghost of the title, one whose ghostly qualities may very well completely reside in Insu’s imagination.  Kuristo, or Christopher, is envisioned at first in a dream as a protecting or liberating force.  Insu suspects this specter may possess a flesh and blood analogue, and questions his older cousin, Haesuni, on the topic.  It turns out Insu’s mother had a previous mixed-race baby named Kuristo of unknown paternity (more evidence of prostitution) whom she was forced to give up upon marrying Insu’s father.  Kuristo was adopted and sent to America, and his ultimate fate remains unknown to the family.  In the form of a ghostly vision, he comes to symbolize Insu and his mother’s fantasy of America.  Insu remains ambivalent about his American half and the United States generally throughout the novel, and for the most part asserts a Korean identity.  This is probably best exhibited by a moment when Insu compares the Christian faith to which his father attempts to convert him to his native Buddhism, “…the American religion I could not understand…  I believed in ghosts and ancestors and portentous dreams of serpents and dragons because those were the things I could touch in my world” (Fenkl 241). This makes explicit that Insu’s approach to storytelling and his understanding of reality and experience is closely tied to an Eastern, Korean identity.  Kuristo is the intrusive American side of his identity, the part forcibly and unwilling exiled to the West, and one which had to be disavowed in order for him to live and think as he does. When Insu departs for America at his story’s conclusion, the connection between Kuristo and the unrealized, largely inscrutable American half of Insu’s sense of self is suggested: “And in the end, just before the departure… I would look back to see Kuristo waving a sad-eyed goodbye.  He is walking away from me into that next world… I am too terrified to run forward and look at his face because I know it will look too much like my own…  Kuristo, my ghost brother, gone already into the Westward Land” (Fenkl 270).  Using the metaphor of a ghost passing its way into the afterlife, Insu imagines his brother transitioning into the ambivalent, still-imagined (though not idealized) sphere of an American identity.  Kuristo’s exit marks the departure of a certain imaginary America, and to follow is the lived reality.  Naturally, this process is accompanied by a great deal of ambivalence, with the promise that Korea will still be central to Insu’s identity: “…I had wondered about America… [but] I knew… that I would long to return to the place of my birth and the language of my mother” (Fenkl 269).

            Insu did not arrive at his conception of ghosts by accident.  Numerous people and forces pass on instructive stories, often of a supernatural character, to him over the course of the narrative.  The most memorably grotesque of these tales comes from Insu’s uncle, Hyongbu, who delights in retelling old Korean folk tales as a means of instruction.  He tells Insu three such tales at different points in the novel, one involving a man who marries a woman who, unbeknownst to him, is a blood-sucking fox demon who makes short work of his family, friends, and neighbors and who transforms into a mosquito after the man successfully burns her alive, another about a tiger who rescues a virtuous man from imminent disaster, and another about a woman who undergoes hideous trials, including being raped by several goblins, in order to cure her sick husband and ensure his future success as a great ginseng hunter.  Hyongbu clearly wishes for these stories to be instructive, and importantly insists on an ancestral connection between the stories’ characters and his and Insu’s family.  For example, the story about the great ginseng hunter is supposedly about Hyongbu’s great uncle.  This approach would seem to suggest that Insu’s uncle needs to recalibrate cultural memory along folkloric and supernatural lines in a manner quite similar to Insu himself; creative re-imaginings of the past inform the coherence of their understanding of Korean identity. And despite the didactic aspects of the ginseng hunter story, Hyongbu becomes strangely recalcitrant when Insu presses him to explain the significance of it and the other stories he tells.  After imparting the tale of the ginseng hunter, Insu’s uncle tells him, “You always asks me what it means… and I always try to explain to you that the meaning of the story is in the story.  If I could tell you what it meant, I’d just tell you the meaning and throw the story away” (Fenkl 228).  Insu then alludes to Aesop’s Fables, a volume which is very explicit about the moral intentions of folk tales and myths.  Here we see two strands of Insu’s creative development, or the cultivation of memory- the traditional, oral folktale and printed literature; we won’t be distracted by the irony that Aesop’s stories originated in an oral tradition and that most of their written versions seek to mimic that tradition.  Insu’s uncle supplies some advice on how to best appreciate the significance of stories, clearly favoring the oral mode: “Well, professor Aesop can eat my shit.  And you can wipe my ass with the pages of your book.  We tell stories because they’re meant to be told.  Just remember the story, and you can worry about the meaning later, understand?” (Fenkl 228) In other words, storytelling is the means by which memory is preserved, while the meaning or significance assigned to it is deferred, and can only be recovered through an act of remembering that the story itself makes possible.  While it is quite debatable that this principle applies to the grotesque folk tales told by Hyongbu- they impart fairly unambiguous messages about the value of patriarchal control over women, the notable exception being the parable of the heroic tiger- Insu nonetheless comes to apply this lesson to his recollection of the living people he has encountered or imagined, especially the ones who are dead by the end of the novel.  An especially powerful example comes about concerning the fate of his play-friend James and a decision made by Changmi’s mother.  James, who was the son of a black GI and a Korean prostitute, mysteriously drowns in a shallow creek, and not long afterward, his mother marries a white GI and moves to the U.S.  It is speculated, though not confirmed, that James’s mother murdered her son in order to free herself and relocate.  Changmi’s mother, on the other hand, expresses the desire to give her probably infertile black GI husband a child by sleeping with another black GI.  The reader never learns if she goes through with this plan, but Insu supplies a narrative and an interpretation for both women that ties right back into the racist and neo-colonialist arrangement that colors all aspects of life in the camptowns.  He reflects, “The irony and the symmetry of what [James’s] mother and Changmi’s mother had done never struck me until twenty years later.  How pragmatic was that balancing act James’ mother destroying her half-Black son to find a white husband, Changmi’s mother plotting to bear a half-black son to keep her new black husband” (Fenkl 232).  Not content to merely draw an association between the two, Insu crafts an instructive lesson from the (possible) events that brings his observations into the realm of elegy.  “It was unfortunate that the rules of blood would not permit one mother to hand her son to the other, to keep the balance sheet in the world of the living and not in the sad realms of ghosts and memory.  I would learn that women… will traffic in children for the mythic promise of America.  And they would look back in regret from the shores of the Westward Land” (Fenkl 232).  Obviously, this passage would be echoed at the novel’s conclusion, and evokes a tragic melancholy about the degree of Korean-ness that must be sacrificed in pursuit of a possibly illusory American-ness.  The sacrifice, if not coerced, is certainly made under strain and in the context of an unequal power relationship.  Most striking is that it goes right to the heart of the family unit; the nation state has its claim over familial bonds and their dissolution or formation.  The rule of “blood,” as Fenkl indicates, is what makes the nation’s claim tragic. 

            Young Insu’s capacity for interpretation and reimagining causes him to outpace the rather simplistic ideological tendencies of his uncle’s stories.  As already indicated, the purpose of Hyongbu’s stories, despite his claims to the contrary, are within the realm of the traditional understanding of the folk tale.  It has been observed that “’…profound messages’ are usually embedded in folklores, and a close examination of such tales leads to a revelation of ‘a people’s moral principles’” (Propp qtd. in Park). The most basic value conveyed by Hyongbu’s two longest stories is a validation of the patriarchal family unit, and as Joohyun Park observes, these have a larger significance to the social order: 

[T]he folk tales play an important role in Memories in that through the tales, the readers are introduced to the common sentiment toward the ‘fox girls’ i.e. ‘Western Princesses…’  Hyongbu, resembles men in the post war Korean society who were unwilling to admit that the women’s ‘fall’ derives not from their individual morality, but from the very situation in which Koreans had to live under the influence of the American army residing in Korea. (127)

Hyongbu does not seem to have much love for the Americans, at various times referring to them as ‘Yankee bastards’ and similar epithets, but can still find fault with the women in his life and the decisions they make.  The simple reason for this is probably the fact that Hyongbu’s traditional masculine role has been much diminished due to his failing health and present circumstances.  However, whatever the bigotry and grotesqueries of his tales, Hyongbu’s fables are notable for their conspicuous Korean-ness, drawing on characters and archetypes that are either from or have special resonance within Korean culture (the fox demon, Buddha).  Also, by insisting on a connection between the characters in the folk tales and his own family, Hyongbu establishes a degree of continuity with this imagined Korean past and his present moment, insisting on the continued vitality of traditional Korean values despite the American neo-colonial presence.  The transference of such values from Hyongbu to Insu cannot be uncomplicated though because of the inevitable modern and American influences Insu is routinely exposed to.  His father, a well-read man with a love for literature, exposes him to Western texts like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and films like Night of the Living Dead play routinely at ASCOM.  Such Western influences are reflected not only in allusions to certain texts, but in the structure of Fenkl’s novel itself.  As the critic Kun Jong Lee observed, “In Memories of My Ghost Brother, Fenkl twists key episodes and political contexts of [Rudyard Kipling’s] Kim to emphasize the continuity of the Great Game in Asia…  At the same time, he resurrects the native voice silenced by colonial discourse…” (320) The oral tradition of the East is imbedded into the literary tradition of the West and colored by the lived experiences of the author.  This kind of genre experimentation constitutes the creative act of remembering that I have been attempting to elucidate throughout this paper.  It is a project that is both personal and political, and involves re-orienting problematic Western and Eastern narrative modes in relation to real world events and human subjectivities.  It is worth noting that when Insu’s father gives him a copy of Kim, Insu does not immediately read it, and so does not understand the numerous references that his father makes to it over the years.  It is only after Insu reads the novel in young adulthood that he comes to understand its relevance to his father.  By incorporating the then-unread Kim into the structure of his novel which recounts events from a deeply personal perspective- events that could not have had any relation to Kim at the time they transpired- Fenkl develops one of his key themes; namely, that memory determines the emotional significance of events, and that the act of remembering is an intrinsically creative, narrative-oriented endeavor that prevents the lived experiences from ever being recovered in their purity.  This lack of purity need not be deplored, however, as the inventive dimension of remembering is what lends human beings the possibility of forging coherent identities.  Just the same, it is important to recall that the process is also politically charged, and forged in zones of struggle and conflict; Kim is emphatically not a politically neutral text.  By using it in conjunction with his Uncle’s folk tales and his own dream visions, Fenkl successfully critiques a certain Western literary brand of memory while simultaneously making it more pluralistic.  Kun Jung Lee provides a perfect example by comparing two aspects of Kim and Memories pertaining to colonial rule of subject populations.  She observes that the major characters of Kim are all members of groups subjugated by the British Empire, but the circumstances of their story eventually make them happy and content with British rule- the ultimate colonialist fantasy.  In Memories, Insu’s father recounts his experience training the Montagnards, the people of the central highlands of Vietnam, in the war effort against the Viet Cong.  Significantly, he uses a Montagnard folk tale to describe their displeasure with the Americans and several other groups that have persecuted them over the years; it is a story about how monkeys became alienated from humans (previously treasured and equal companions) through repeated human betrayal.  Not only does this convey displeasure with colonial rule, a noticeable reversal from the Kipling novel, but it does so in the voice of the colonized, placed in the mouth of the colonizer in an ironic reversal of Kipling’s happy ventriloquism (327).  Here we see again how Fenkl utilizes Eastern oral traditions to both subvert and expand Western literary forms to a political purpose. 

            The political component of Fenkl’s novel goes to the very core of the narrative voice, which is deeply introspective, thoughtfully attempting to piece together the fragmented structure of memory.  Fenkl’s political concerns are actually personified by Insu, the character who, as the critic Hyungji Park has noted, “physically embodies the liminality and hybridity of the base camp communities” (308).  The reason the Korean half of this hybrid position seems to win out in the end again can be understood through the presentation of the Eastern and Western styles of narrative.  The presence of the West as purely “text” is not just a literary trick on Fenkl’s part but a feature of his actual relationships.  The narrative of the East is conveyed orally, through one on one communication with a family member.  The narrative of the West is communicated textually, largely through novels, films, and stilted letters from an absent father.  “’Daeri [Insu’s father] stands in Insu’s life and in this narrative as the representative of the West, particularly as mediated through ‘text…’  Texts… stand in for any real father-son relationship, and only reiterate the inadequacy of the relationship.”  The inadequacy of the relationship goes hand-in-hand with the inadequacy of the Western literary project in relation to colonialism.  It is inadequate to the task of memory and does not do justice to the ghosts.  Fenkl chooses to address this problem not by overturning the Western model, which would scarcely be possible considering his mixed heritage, but addressing the nature of memory itself and how it exists as a means of producing awareness within literary texts.  In other words, it “does not posit naïve or wholesale retrieval as the desired or even possible corrective to historical and narrative erasure, but rather attends to the… complex problem of knowledge production” (Kim 281-282).  The sort of real-world, non-aesthetic knowledge that Fenkl seems to want to produce through his literary, aesthetically realized project is the memorialization of key personalities in his life, properly given their history and context.           

    

Works Cited

Fenkl, Heinz Insu.  Memories of My Ghost Brother.  New York: Dutton, 1996.  Print.      

Kim, Jodi.  “’I’m Not Here, If This Doesn’t Happen’:  The Korean War and Cold War

            Epistemologies in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s

            Memories of My Ghost Brother.”  Journal of Asian American Studies.  11.3 (2008):

            279-302. Web.  12 November 2013.

Lee, Kun Jong.  “Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother: An Amerasian

            Rewriting of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.”  Journal of American Studies.  42.2 (2008):

            317-340. Web.  12 November 2013. 

Park, Hyungji.  “Western Princesses in the Great Game: US Military Prostitution in Memories

            Of My Ghost Brother.”  n.t.  14.3 (2007): 305-331.  Web.  12 November 2013.

Park, Joohyun.  “How Folk Tales Function in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost

            Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl.”  Journal of American Studies.  43.1 (2011):

            115-142. Web.  12 November 2013. 

Yuh, Ji-Yeon.  “Out of the Shadows: Camptown Women, Military Brides, and Korean

            (American) Communities.  Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader. Eds.

            Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University

            Press, 2010.  239-255. Print.  

“…where the little girl was a prisoner.”: A Peircean Semiotic Reading of Michelle Remembers (Part I)

(Note: I originally wrote the bulk of this piece in 2019. It was both fairly long and incomplete, so I will be presenting it here in modified, expanded, and edited form, and in two parts. The following is Part I. For those who need a primer on Peircean semiotic and how it might relate to the analysis of works of creative expression, I recommend these two overviews from Signo-Semio. I have also written on Peirce and literature here. I will link each source that I use the first time I use it as I don’t feel like writing a proper Works Cited, my superficial loyalty to MLA notwithstanding. Part II will probably be posted sometime next week.)

In the foreword of Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith’s lurid 1980 pseudo-exposé Michelle Remembers, Pazder, a Canadian psychiatrist, positions himself as a witness.  “It was my privilege to witness as she [Smith] risked the abyss, venturing far beyond her normal memory pool, her imaginings, fantasies, and dreams, to somewhere at the very core of her being…  Perhaps it was what Jungians call the ‘base of the psyche,’ the meeting ground of our ancestral past and our present, the source of myth and symbol, the junction of mind and body, heart and soul” (Pazder xii). Michelle Smith has the honor of being the explorer, the party who has “grappled with the polarities of life and death, love and hate, light and dark, good and evil” (Pazder xii).  Pazder then goes on to lay out some basic facts of the narrative the reader is about to imbibe- that it covers a series of therapy sessions that lasted 14 months, that these sessions addressed a frightening period in Michelle’s life, and that this period occurred around her fifth year; these memories were previously “buried” but then uncovered in the therapeutic context with a “purity that is a phenomenon in itself…”; the significance of this phenomenon is that it “provides an understanding of how a child survives,” an “achievement” that “will confront and inform many generations”  (Pazder xii). This foreword is quite helpful in that it illuminates the moral, aesthetic, and thematic intentions of the text clearly and unambiguously.  In fact, abolishing a measure of ambiguity that inflects both the scenario it describes and related cultural and psychological phenomena would seem to be its principle mission.  Michelle Remembers is a tale of recovering a horrific moral clarity from a bubbling cauldron of uncertainty.  This achievement of moral clarity has the unmistakable contours of a type trauma narrative, one which emphasizes the piercingly literal character of the (eventually) recalled, precipitating traumatic event, and one which centers a confrontation with the agent of the traumatic event.  It is a narrative type infinitely amenable to a semiotic reading, as symptomology- semiotic as John Locke understood it- features prominently in its development.  The Pazder half of this testimony, for all its proclamations of a non-intrusive ‘witness’ position in the affair, is perpetually observing Smith for marks of the Devil, reading the signs to craft a master sign of its own.  We may give this master sign the name of ‘trauma narrative,’ and it must be understood that this is a story embedded in a rich and multifaceted gothic tradition, with a submerged (some might say chthonian) character which suits its antagonist- Satan.

Michelle Remembers is a book permanently linked in the popular imagination with the satanic ritual abuse (SRA) moral panic that occurred in North America during the 1980s and 90s.  It is, in fact, seen by many scholars as a text which codified the narrative beats of a typical SRA testimony, and enabled the dissemination of SRA tropes through myriad communication and media networks which helped propagate the moral panic far and wide.  The text itself has all the features of a macabre gothic melodrama, including some rather quaint moralistic flourishes which are apparently meant to add an obscuring fig leaf to its essentially exploitative character.  In his foreword, quoted above, Pazder alluded to a metaphysics of inwardness that can be very easily associated with traditional Christian conceptions of ‘the soul,’ though he almost obligatorily dresses it up in a fashionable secular-scientific guise (Jung specifically is invoked for the purpose, a dated choice even in 1980).  This inwardness is a storytelling conceit, of course.  Gothic narratives traffic in the obscure, the buried, the submerged, and the hidden, and these qualities are just as likely to manifest in the genre’s characters’ individual psychologies as they are in narrative events.  Michelle’s putative deep-diving into her psyche to recover her traumatic experiences pure and whole must have the character of a steady, inward gaze in order to be persuasive on the narrative’s own terms, but there is more than enough evidence that the tale was crafted in a more dialectical fashion, with Pazder taking the more active role in developing its satanic character.  

The sociologist Mary de Young articulated the importance of Pazder and Smith’s potboiler- “The long-repressed memories of the pseudonymous Michelle were published in 1980… a best-seller that not only discursively links the master symbols of the decade- vulnerable children, the menacing devil and the psychological trauma model- but does so in an archetypal moral drama that so deeply resonated with cultural fears and anxieties that it incited the day care ritual abuse moral panic” (21).  The archetypal quality of the moral drama is what is key.  The plot, putatively true, involves a 27-year-old woman named Michelle (a pseudonym, as mentioned) who suffers from peculiar emotional disturbances relating to a recent miscarriage and a hodge-podge of unresolved family and relationship problems.  She seeks the services of a British Columbia-based therapist named Lawrence Pazder; significantly, both he and Smith come from staunch Roman Catholic backgrounds.  Smith had sought Pazder’s aid years prior as a university student.  In the early phase of her therapy, Michelle experiences some relief and comfort for her present condition but cannot banish the feeling that a body of repressed experience is at the core of her unhappiness and needs to be unearthed.  Pazder, in his capacity as a Virgil-esque guide to the dark corners of the psyche, soothingly eases Michelle into this difficult task.  Soon enough (from the reader’s perspective anyway), Pazder obtains a dark revelation.  After releasing a wall-piercing shriek, Michelle stammers:

It’s Malachi.  What’s happening to me?  I don’t know if it makes any sense… Oh! God, I hurt… I’m hurting… He’s hurting me all over, and something’s really scaring me.  His eyes are scaring me.  I can’t stand them.  They look crazy.  No!  Take them away.  He’s hurting my arms.  Ow.  Ow.  He’s throwing me upside down fast.  It’s hurting my arms.  I want to run away… He’s grabbing me tight… I can’t get away.  No! I can’t breathe… [coughing, gasping] He’s got me by the throat with one hand… Help!  Somebody’s got to help me… He’s pointing at me… He says he’s pointing me… He says, ‘North… west…’ and he points me real hard.  He turns me over and grabs my neck and points me.  I don’t want to be all pointy.  It hurts.  Why is he hurting me?  

…

No! No! No! Help! Mommy! Mommy!

Where’s my mommy?  Why isn’t she here?

…

            It was black and I could see my teddy bear… I loved the bear so much I wanted to become the bear… I wanted to crawl inside with him and be safe… I feel numb… there was nothing left of me just my head… no body… All that was left of my insides was a tiny warm spot… That’s all I was! (Italics and ellipses in original) (Pazder and Smith 15-17)

This outburst is one of the many blocks of text strewn about the pages of Michelle Remembers that are allegedly culled from tape recordings of the actual sessions Pazder conducted with Michelle Smith.  This particular outpouring of confused horror appears in chapter two, and in chapter three it is molded into a more legible form by Pazder which, not accidentally, transforms the inchoate wail of distress into a concrete, and some might say confront-able, manifestation of evil.  This semiotic process produces something akin to a literary symbol, or in Peircean terms, a rhematic symbolic legisign (the critic John Sheriff called it a class-8 sign for simplicity’s sake).  “The representamen [sign-vehicle] of a class-8 sign is represented by its interpretant as a sign of possible objects in their character merely- hence as a sign of the feeling, the quality of immediate consciousness, of what is in the mind in the present instant” (Sheriff 78). The symbolic quality of this sign class inevitably makes it subject to convention, and therefore the mediating powers of history and culture, but the sign as it is experienced has a forceful immediacy and impressionistic quality in consciousness, akin to Firstness.  Switching away from Michelle’s disorganized first-person accounts in chapter three, Pazder gives the reader a picture of satanic evil that comes to ground his narrative’s titillating aesthetic milieu, as well as its moral pretenses, rendered in a more superficially dispassionate third-person voice.  We now can better envision poor Michelle’s grotesque tortures: 

Some women had entered the darkened space, where the little girl was a prisoner.  They walked in a single file, oblivious to the child’s presence.  Clad in an oversized shirt, she watched, in fear and awe, as they went about their bizarre tasks- methodical, coldly efficient… some of them went about tacking up large black sheets on all four walls.  Then the women began to set up candles… Someone draped the bureau with a round black cloth embroidered in an intricate white design.  On top of the cloth were placed two silver goblets and a knife.  And more candles… 

One of the women approached Michelle and picked her up.  The little girl’s apprehension faded- she could not help but smile.  The woman was extraordinarily beautiful, with shining dark hair.  Unlike the others, who wore simple black dresses, this woman wore a black cape with a hood.  It set her apart.  Michelle thought: Ah! A princess!  (Pazder and Smith 21-22)

Such helpful tableaus and descriptions appear between Michelle’s first-person outbursts.  Both of the aforequoted passages present the reader with a treasure trove of signs for perusal and interpretations; they all function symbolically when considered in their literary context, but for the figures in the narrative- and by extension the reader- the indexical qualities of Malachi’s pointing hand and the ceremonial objects furnished by the female adherents to the cult can hardly be missed.  Indexical signs “direct the attention to their objects by blind compulsion… anything which focuses the attention is an index.  Anything which startles us is an index…. A fragment torn away from the object” (Peirce qtd. in Chandler 51). The semiotician Daniel Chandler succinctly summarized the matter: “Indexical relations offer the most direct connection with a referent, in strongest contrast to symbolic relations”  (Chandler 51).  Pazder is constantly reading symbols in Michelle’s stories and in Michelle herself, but the narrative routinely inscribes indexical significance to these symbols so that they ‘point to’ a metaphysical instantiation of evil, at first manifested in the underground cult of which Michelle was a victim, and later, climactically, by the devil himself.  The figures of the black-clad devil-worshiping women were in fact foreshadowed earlier in the novel when Pazder receives Michelle into one of their preliminary sessions.  He betrays an urge to read her semiotically in a rather Lockean mode (perhaps this is understandable, as Pazder is a physician), taking both her demeanor and choice of attire as indexically signifying something more than Michelle’s personal distress: “When she arrived, he received still another surprise: she was wearing black, all black- black blouse and black pants… it seemed an unmistakable sign to him that something was up.  So did her demeanor.  She was somber… She was like a high diver standing at the edge of the board on tiptoes… the equipoise before a swift, sure motion…” (Pazder and Smith 10)  The previously timorous Michelle seems to have acquired a measure of confidence, one that mimics the mannered precision of the Satanist women the reader will encounter in later chapters, and the black clothing speaks for itself.  Aside from invoking the pop-psychological trope of a victim of abuse coming to identify with her abusers, Michelle’s unconscious invocation of the female Satanists constitutes an indexical gesture to an imagined social reality- the satanic cult conspiracy.  Of course, this ‘reality’ is a fabrication, one constructed in collaboration with the therapist, but it is significant that the constructed symbol of social evil, mistaken for a material reality, is predicated on a perceived indexical relationship between the behavioral and physical features of a patient and a wider social context.  Considered in a more literary sense, Michelle’s presentation functions metonymically with the satanic cult conspiracy.  The dimestore poetry of the metaphor Pazder chooses to close his description of the eager-to-confess Michelle speaks its own truth.  Michelle’s confident manner is in service to the brute forces of gravity, and she is about to take a plunge into the abyss.  Her descent into the blackened regions of her repression is undertaken as if it were of her own volition, yet the fall is inevitable and all but requires a measure of passivity.  This general vision of Michele comes to serve as Pazder’s ‘ruling metaphor’ for Michelle, and so transforms her into the narrative’s symbol of innocence and strength.  An observation by Chandler is apropos: “Ruling metaphors reorganize experience.  They foreground ways of thinking that are consistent with them and background alternatives…” (155)  With such a vision of feminine poise, clearly in distress and subject to forces almost gravitational in their power, one needs to construct a particularly dastardly antagonist, a complementary metaphor to serve as the vision’s shadow.  As the satanic panic (considered as a sociological phenomenon) makes clear, such a process of construction has real consequences, as it makes reality for subjects. “Changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we see the world and act upon those perceptions” (Lakoff and Johnson qtd. in Chandler 155).  

Pazder cut his teeth studying tropical medicine and spent a period of time in West Africa, where he allegedly encountered a range of local black magic practices that did not neatly dovetail with a staunch Catholic sensibility.  This was apparently a lens by which he viewed and interpreted much of Michele’s testimony.  “Michelle remembered being hung upside-down as a child and twirled in dizzying circles by a black-robed man named Malachi, and having colored sticks dipped in liquid from a silver goblet inserted in every orifice of her body while beautiful black-robed women chanted and danced around her” (de Young 22). The narrative only gets more grisly and sensational from there.  The reader comes to understand that Michelle’s mother is a member of a clandestine satanic cult, and Malachi is an apparent senior member.  The abuse Michelle comes to suffer at the hands of this cult escalates over the course of the narrative until it obtains an almost pornographic intensity, though its penchant for discursively combining certain master cultural symbols as a means of explaining ambiguous experience in late modernity remains consistent throughout.  Michele is placed in a car with the body of a dead woman by Malachi and her mother.  Malachi then pushes the car into a ravine, causing a massive explosion which necessitates Michele clawing her way out through the wreckage.  Her subsequent stay in a hospital is cut short when the nurse, also a member of the cult, spirits her off to an isolated Victorian mansion where she is imprisoned in a basement.  The Nurse becomes something of a central antagonist, nearly eclipsing Malachi in the pageant of Michele’s tortures. “It was the nurse who brought her to a cemetery and forced her to stand in an empty grave, tricked her into defecating on a crucifix and bible, injected her with stupefying drugs, made her consume the flesh of a dead person, and brought a statue of the devil alive by daubing it with blood from an amputated finger” (de Young 22).  Satan makes an early appearance as an effigy in chapter thirteen.  A white statue of Lucifer features prominently in the cult’s graveyard rituals.  On one occasion, when the nurse is absent, Michele crawls inside the statue, an experience “which frighten[s] her because she [feels] she [is] in the devil” (Pazder and Smith 99). This proves to be but a prelude to one of the most grotesque incidents in the novel.  During a ceremony, a ‘possessed’ woman dances above and around Michele’s reclined body while the encircling cultists chant a satanic mass.  “As she danced, the chanting grew louder and louder, and she danced faster and faster until the air began to grate… and the possessed woman stood over Michele, her legs straddling the child’s petrified body.  The woman’s face came closer… and her snakelike tongue worked its way into the small girl’s mouth”  (Pazder and Smith 126-127). The snake imagery in this passage proves to be prophetic.  Another first-person interjection from Michele (again, presumably culled from the tape recordings of the sessions) elaborates on the experience: “It was like a snake was in my mouth.  And the next thing I know, I feel all funny down below… It was a snake!  It was a real snake, and it seemed like it was crawling out of me… I thought it was inside and it crawled out… I think she’s put a snake all the way through me” (Pazder and Smith 127). The transmogrification of this grotesque act of child sexual abuse into a fantastical, almost baroquely surreal supernatural event is in keeping with the novel’s semiotic process.  The raw material of traumatic experience, putatively unmediated and ‘literal’ as Cathy Caruth might have it (201), is here transformed into a potent, biblical symbol of wounded innocence.  In the context of the narrative, the snake has an indexical relationship with the woman’s tongue, in that it is effected through her abusive act.  It only gets worse from there.  Malachi slices a dead baby in half and smears Michele’s stomach with blood.  He then does the same to the white statue of the Devil and seals the young Michele within it.  “The only way I can see out is through those eyes… they pushed all the snakes in through the eyes, so they’re all at the bottom, and they put the rest of the dead baby in there and told me that’s what I got to eat” (Pazder and Smith 129). The serpent imagery proliferates, and the symbol of wounded innocence is granted a ghastly literality in the form of both the abused child and mutilated infant.  The tendency of Michele Remembers is to repeatedly compound its symbols, but simultaneously insist on their literality in the context of the traumatic experience.  The dead infants and kittens, the writhing snakes and hideous acts of sexual abuse and cannibalism, always need to multiply and proliferate across the narrative space.  It can be considered a resolution to an aporetic quality of the text- most of the imagined atrocities proffered by Michele have a conspicuous symbolic character that anyone in a post-Freud culture would recognize, but the traumatic narrative type embraced by the authors insists on a literality to the experience that prompts symbolic qualities to be disavowed.  The solution is to ascribe the significance of the symbolism to the activities of the imagined cultists and to escalate the extremity of their actions, so that the reader may not notice the psychoanalytic clichés behind the piles of baby entrails.  In an effort to transcend the symbolic, or to present their conceptions as something ‘more than’ symbolic, the authors pile up a thick layer of materiality over the symbolic surface of the text; this may make the symbol more ‘real’ and less overtly archetypal, but it paradoxically strengthens its ability to function as a symbol by making it that much more seemingly immediate (or indexical) to the unfolding psychologies of the characters.  The gruesome events and revelatory images function as literary symbols that acquire meaning in the context of a narrative that unspools temporally, developing the figures in the story as characters even while the authors insist on the literal nature of the things and events described through the pulpish use of violent extremity.  This tension within the text proves unresolvable, and the authors’ solution, as we shall see, is to attempt to produce an indexical gesture beyond the text itself by identifying evidence of satanic conspiracy in the ‘real world.’   

The ceremony continues: “The black-robed figures formed two circles, and each circle moved in the opposite direction from the other.  Suddenly, and in unison, all the celebrants swept their cloaks back and revealed what was beneath: children.  A child clung to each celebrant’s leg…” (Pazder and Smith 131) Realizing that nothing good could come of this scenario, Michelle attempts to help by first making a series of guttural animal noises that at first seem to imbue the satanic effigy with life.  “[T]hey thought it was the effigy come to life.  They still didn’t understand that it was a person inside.  Michelle wanted to burst out so badly… but it was no use; the more noise she made, the more real the effigy seemed”  (Pazder and Smith 131).  This is the point where the reader begins to acquire a precise idea as to what the final form of the Satan of the narrative will be, but in the moment its overt artificiality in the face of a credulous audience serves well as an accidental metaphor for Pazder and Smith’s entire project.  “In her frenzy, she grabbed what was at hand- the snakes… she gathered them up in handfuls and pushed them through the effigy’s eyes” (Pazder and Smith 132). The dismembered baby parts soon follow.  Strangely enough, this only seems to excite the celebrants and children as they proceed to dance ‘faster and faster.’  Michelle then spontaneously materializes outside the effigy and cuts a frantic and crazed figure.  It is the feral face of wounded, abused innocence which startles the followers of the Dark One.  “[T]he other children shrank from the sight of her… Everyone was standing still, shocked… They all seemed scared” (Pazder and Smith 132). The possessed woman who had previously menaced Michelle is the only one to approach her without fear.  She violently throws the girl on a bed and proceeds to vomit all over her, a move which mirrors the previous scene of the effigy vomiting forth serpents and decaying human parts.  Michelle then bolts, retrieving a snake from the floor and gripping it between her teeth.  Her wild, frantic flailing and snarling keeps the celebrants at bay.  Mary de Young reads this scene in a heroic light, as Michelle’s actions seem to scare the other children into fleeing (23).  The nightmare is not over for Michelle herself, however.  She notices a woman dressed in white whom she mistakes for her mother and approaches her for comfort.  The result is despairing: “’No! Michelle shrieked.  ‘It’s not my mom.  It’s that lady!’  Michelle was utterly crushed.  Slowly she turned to the effigy.  She knew there was only one place she belonged- inside the white thing.  She crawled back inside.  There was no escape” (Pazder and Smith 133). The fact that the false mother and the false Satan share the quality of vivid whiteness is almost certainly significant.  The crux of the ceremonies is the violation of purity and innocence, and the purity signified by whiteness proves to be a deception in the world of the cultists, and using it for the hue of their satanic idol a deliberate mockery.  Furthermore, the womb-like embrace of the satanic effigy seems to serve as a symbolic mirror to Michelle’s embrace of the false mother.  

The collaborative testimony of Pazder and Smith is obviously of a character that invites skepticism.  Apparently in unspoken recognition of this fact, the novel offers a manifestation of the hidden domain of the Satanists in the world outside the psychiatrist’s office, a scene which, not coincidentally, affirms the narrative’s moral sense and provides the blueprint for the defeat of the perceived subterranean evil lying in wait in the heart of modern industrial society.  It also enables a superficially plausible resolution to the tensions within the symbolic structure of the text.  Unsurprisingly, a grotesque pastiche of a traditional Christian conception of evil meets its adversary in a mawkish pastiche of conventional Catholic piety.  Mary de Young summarized the moment thus: “To bolster her spiritual defenses during the harrowing months of memory recovery, he brought her to be baptized by a local priest.  In the corner of the church, Michelle noticed a wooden bench incised with what appeared to be satanic symbols” (23).  More precisely, they are the same intricate symbols recalled by Michelle worn by the cultists.  The priest is baffled and outraged as to how the bench appeared in the church, and the resolution to everyone’s anxiety over this apparent ocular evidence of satanic machinations is to douse it with holy water and set it ablaze on a bonfire.  The unexamined conceit would seem to be comparable to the assumed indexical relationship between the signs of satanic activity and their hidden world.  Just as the Satanists somehow manifested their presence in the form of Michelle’s black clothing near the beginning of the narrative, so our heroic figures feel they can indexically strike against Satan’s underground by destroying their heretical graffiti.  There is at least some perceived evidence of success: “The photographs Pazder took of the burning seemed to the three of them to show a glowing spectral presence at the edge of the fire, a presence they took to be that of the Virgin Mary and her child, Jesus” (de Young 23). These photos serve to foreshadow the novel’s climactic confrontation between good and evil, and they possess a suggestive power that was probably lost on the authors: “The pictures were put away.  It was too much to think about.  They went back to their work, remembering.  But the photographs were on their minds… A month later, on a visit home, Dr. Pazder showed the photos to his father, asking him if there was any way to explain these anomalies.  His father said no, no way at all” (Pazder and Smith 151).  The critical reader may be tempted to infer that these photos, aside from almost certainly being a case of pareidolia, will have a contaminating effect on Pazder’s remaining sessions with Michelle.  In the literary sense, this anticipation of contamination serves as surprisingly effective foreshadowing.  

Though there are no shortage of fantastic details in Michelle Remembers that should arouse incredulity, the fact that a literal, personal Satan makes an appearance stands out as the clincher.  Of course, the novelistic character of Pazder and Smith’s enterprise scarcely makes the occurrence of the supernatural surprising. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how this gothic tale could conclude in any other way, since its pious pretenses make an Anne Radcliffe-esque return to material normality all but impossible.  The Devil needs to appear to satisfy the story’s elemental, Manichean moral sense.  

The appearance of the real devil is preceded by the destruction of the false one.  The white effigy, after a particularly gory round of child sacrifices, is cast into the flames of a bonfire (of course, this is the shadow of the real-world ceremony conducted earlier by Pazder, Smith, and the priest).  “On top of the bulging cloth was set the child’s head.  Nearby stood the effigy, once white but now completely reddened with blood; it had been placed at the center of a red circle that had been painted on the floor.  Michelle was taken and put in the circle too…  Michelle saw the figures closing their circle upon the effigy… In a double rank they bore it toward the fire and… heaved the grotesque red image into the flames” (Pazder and Smith 171). The dismembered child’s body is tossed on the fire as well.  This sacrifice of a facsimile of Satan is the necessary precondition for a more literal manifestation of Satan.  The effigy, in conjunction with the satanic celebrants, served to mediate Satan’s presence on earth.  With its ritualized destruction, the cult can experience a more primeval, unmediated manifestation of Satan.  When Satan makes his appearance, he is maddeningly indistinct and not immediately amenable to easy representation: “In one session Michelle drew pictures for Dr. Pazder as she emerged from the depths of memory.  She tried to show him some of the forms Satan was taking.  But she found her drawings too definite and distinct; Satan was vaporous and constantly changing” (Pazder and Smith, unpaginated pictorial insert). In Peircean terms, the effigy was Thirdness, and Satan himself Firstness. Thirdness should be understood as mediation, or that which brings a First and Second into relation.  “Now Thirdness is nothing but the character of an object which embodies Betweenness or Mediation in its simplest and most rudimentary form; and I use it as the name of that element of the phenomenon which is predominant wherever Mediation is predominant, and which reaches its fullness in Representation” (Peirce qtd. in Kalaga 49). Representation robs evil of a measure of its immediate power, which is to say it makes a conception of metaphysical evil seem somewhat less plausible.  The destruction of the effigy enables the devil to switch between the modalities of ontological Thirdness and Firstness; we shall not be distracted by the irony that this process is instantiated in the form of a literary symbol.  “Firstness refers to the mode of mere being without reference to anything else. Examples are unreflected feeling, a mere sensation of color and form; possibility or quality” (Aghaei 25). Presenting evil in this sense grants it a primeval and constitutive power that only a similarly positioned principle of ontological goodness could hope to defeat.  If this Manichean sensibility did not in itself seem the substance of a certain brand of ‘closed’ literary text, then the popular drama of ratiocination that forms the bulk of the narrative- here transpiring largely on the psychiatrist’s couch instead of within the more familiar detective-fronted criminal investigation- should further give the reader the distinct sensation of pulp-horror. Even the moral and religious pretenses dovetail neatly with then-recent popular cinematic offerings like Carrie (1976) and The Exorcist (1973).  Furthermore, it should not be surprising that the aforementioned Peircean modalities of firstness, secondness, and thirdness possess an explanatory power for the psychological significance ascribed to events and are transferable to a literary medium.  “In consciousness, feelings are Firstness; reaction-sensations or disturbances of feelings are Secondness; and general conceptions are Thirdness…” (Sherriff 66)  Michele’s character arc can, in many respects, be read as a psychological manifestation of the processual movement from Firstness to Thirdness; vague feelings of unease become physical disturbances that are then organized by an explanatory narrative.  There is significance in the fact that a sort of regression between the third and first modalities occurs in relation to the figure of Satan when he transforms from symbolic, inert (and iconic) idol to his ‘true’ form.  This shift betrays the essentially literary character of Michele Remembers.  “Without denying that we cannot escape from language, from Thirdness, Peirce shows us that Thirdness (linguistic, symbolic signs) can symbolically represent Firstness… literary art is language (Rhematic symbol) used to show, picture, symbolize the quality of immediate consciousness that can never be immediate to consciousness” (Sherrif 89).  Pazder and Smith are under the impression that they can say something about the Satan they hold with potent immediacy in consciousness, in Firstness, couched as he is in their conception of traumatic experience, but the story they end up telling places the Evil One perpetually in Thirdness.  The reader will not miss that Satan is a symbol, no matter what, and no account of an idol becoming ‘real’ is likely to change that.             

The Devil appears as a voice in the therapist’s office before he makes his pseudophysical entrance in Michelle’s recovered memory.  It intrudes upon Michelle’s typically childlike aspect, and soon enough the reader is treated to a duel between Michelle’s past child self and the possessive power of Lucifer.  It is clearly a depiction of something that resembles Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), which in turn can be thought of as a secular-scientific update of the concept of possession, phenomena that can be subsumed into the broader category of trance.  “Until the emergence of the alternate consciousness paradigm [MPD] the only category to express the inner experience of an alien consciousness was that of possession, intrusion from the outside” (Crabtree qtd. in Hacking 149). MPD would later be superseded by the category of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) among mental health professionals, but MPD is more relevant for a discussion of the condition depicted in Michelle Remembers. Ian Hacking is helpful for establishing the relevance of the condition for Michelle’s case: “The most distinctive symptoms become fully evident only in the course of treatment.  Hence the published descriptions of multiples best fit patients in therapy” (21-22). This provides a hint as to the dialogical quality of the specific manifestations of symptoms present in accounts of MPD and cases of recovered memory. The therapeutic context, setting aside the matter of whether or not it creates the symptoms in question, certainly molds perceptions of their emergence and constituent features.  The dynamic between therapist and patient eventually takes on the form of an investigation not at all removed in spirit from a detective story or supernatural thriller.  Pazder operates in the capacity of the lead detective while Smith serves as both his capable assistant and site of the crime, and by extension the principle body of evidence.  Abductive reasoning, of a sort, proves crucial to this unfolding semiotic process.  It functions much like the interpretation of a literary text, and involves an agent encountering a phenomenon which initially seems surprising, counterintuitive, or otherwise contrary to prior experience, and “he looks over its features and notices some remarkable character or relation among them, which he at once recognizes as being characteristic of some conception with which his mind is already stored, so that a theory is suggested which would explain (that is, render necessary) that which is surprising in the phenomena” (Peirce qtd. in de Waal 63). It is in effect reasoning towards a hypothesis.  In Peirce’s account, it is acknowledged that prior conceptions will inevitably influence hypothesis-formation.  This is pertinent to any reading of Michelle Remembers as it adequately accounts for how the discursive and culturally-historically-conditioned symbols of the devil and the familiar iconography of satanism and the occult came to inform Pazder and Smith’s understanding of the ambiguous symptoms experienced by Michelle.  Abductive reasoning, which is far more uncertain than the inductive and deductive varieties, can only serve as a starting point for inquiry.  “Some surprising fact B is observed. If A were true, B would be explicable as a matter of course.  Therefor there is reason to suspect A is true” (de Waal 64).  The intrepid and pious investigators of Michelle Remembers avail themselves of this mode of inquiry but tragically do not pause to question their underlying assumptions or test their hypotheses in a sufficiently rigorous manner.  Nevertheless, there is an internal logic to the manner in which Pazder and his associates make inferences from the more chaotic happenings of Michelle’s story.  

[I]t was possible to deduce the design behind the seemingly chaotic events Michelle recounted that autumn- the eighty-one day ceremony that lasted from September 7, 1955, until November 27, the final day of the Christian Church’s liturgical year.  Satan, they suggested, was beginning a Black Mass called the Feast of the Beast, a rite that takes place only once every twenty-seven years.  It employs many of the same elements as the Christian Mass, but uses them in precise opposition to that service, and it obeys a strict plan… The plan is based on the Horns of Death, the Satanic emblem used on the altar cloths and the backs of cloaks.  Just as the Christian Mass moves in the form of a cross, the Satanic worshippers trod the form of the Horns of Death, its shape that of the face of a horned pig. (Pazder and Smith 211)

The iconicity of the ritual is what is key.  Pazder and Smith believe that Satan must inscribe himself through his iconography to prompt the construction of the world he wants his worshippers to perceive, and this requires a little exegesis for the attentive reader to truly comprehend.  As the critic Christina Ljungberg would put it, “[I]conicity is generated by the readers as they decipher the signs, in their activity of making meaning – much like a detective trying to solve a murder case which, even though clues are indexical signs, involves evoking possible scenarios by calling up images, structuring these by putting them in context, and then picturing potential motifs and lines of development by comparing these to similar cases… Reading experientially is thus the performance of actively taking part in the dialogue with the text, the performative generation of a fictional world, a mental space in which we are able to move…” (275)  Pazder and Smith are functionally doing literary criticism in their hunt for real-world satanic activity, but they believe they are doing detective work proper: iconicity masquerading as indexicality. 

(Part II coming soon!)

“Let man keep his many parts…”: On Melville, Ellison, and CLR James.

(Note: This piece was originally a paper I wrote for a lit course on Ralph Ellison I attended while in grad school, hence the fidelity to MLA citations. I present it here with some edits.)

When considering the issues surrounding the matter of literary inheritance, the writer’s process of interpretation coupled with creative application stands out as especially interesting and complex.  When a writer is influenced by another writer, they bring their understanding or interpretation of a text to the task of the creative process.  The demands of the writer’s particular project (which can be in part determined by their literary influences) govern how an influence is incorporated into a new composition, and how an influence functions as a literary device that signifies to the reader.  The procedure is never neutral or arbitrary.  The challenges adjacent to the puzzle of influence can seem especially urgent when a writer engages essential ethical, moral, and political questions and themes.  The black American author Ralph Ellison, most famous for the only novel he published in his lifetime, Invisible Man (1952), was particularly invested in the related issues of American identity, race relations, and citizenship, and he understood his project to be in line with the “continuity of moral purpose” that centered the nineteenth century American literary classics.  He was attracted to the works of Herman Melville especially, and Invisible Man is peppered with allusions to Melville’s works, and many other writers as well.  The most explicit reference to Melville comes even before the narrative proper commences; a quotation from Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1855)serves as the epigraph (along with a quote from T.S. Eliot) to Ellison’s novel.  It is a line of dialogue, spoken by the protagonist Amasa Delano, the captain of an American merchant ship, to the traumatized titular character near the end of the narrative: “’You are saved,’ cried Captain Delano,  more and more astonished and pained; ‘you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?’”  The answer, not given in the epigraph, is, of course, “the negro.”  Benito Cereno is in essence a story about the moral evil of New World slavery, and Ellison’s decision to utilize a quote from that work as an epigraph announces from the outset that one of the chief themes of his novel will be the legacy of that moral evil and the challenge that legacy poses in modern American life and American identity.  In fact, I would argue that the question of American identity is of central importance to Invisible Man, and that the position Ellison takes on the matter is an affirmation of the founding principles supplemented by a greater commitment to cultural pluralism.  Ellison rejects the legitimacy of class and race-centered ideological critiques of “the principle” of American citizenship, while also challenging the pervasive racism characteristic of American cultural life by troubling the centrality of whiteness in the wider national dialogue.  A creative engagement with the works of Melville generally and Benito Cereno specifically at least partially informs Ellison’s cultural commentary and his novelistic aesthetic. 

           

Another writer of African ancestry roughly contemporaneous with Ellison was the Trinidadian cultural critic C.L.R. James, who was similarly admiring of Melville’s work.  Although James demonstrated aptitude, and even mastery, in multiple forms, including fiction and poetry, his most overt engagement with Melville came in the form of literary and cultural criticism.  In 1953, the same year Invisible Man won the National Book Award, James  published the book-length study of Melville entitled Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.  It was a study, as implied by the title, with an explicitly political dimension.  At the time James was writing his book on Melville he faced deportation from the United States courtesy of the Immigration and Naturalization Services (Pease viii).  The motivation for this punitive move was James’s “subversive” political activities, and the justification was the McCarran Act, a piece of Cold War-inspired legislation that gave the federal government more powers concerning the monitoring, detainment, and deportation of political subversives, often understood to be synonymous with communists (Pease xxv).  Although James addresses multiple works in Melville’s oeuvre, including Benito Cereno, he focuses most of his attention on Moby-Dick.  The crux of his critique begins with the familiar assertion that the megalomaniacal Captain Ahab represents a totalitarian type, but James eschews the then-standard critical line that Ishmael represents the democratic opposition to authoritarianism (an untenable view since Ishmael explicitly identifies with Ahab’s quest to slay the white whale) and instead insists on the heroic centrality of the Pequod’s diverse crew (who also identify with Ahab’s quest but exhibit moral potential beyond it).  This analytical gesture reflects James’s then-current political and legal situation; he wished to protest the state mechanisms that denied him both citizenship and due process, and he did so by reformulating the concept of citizenship in the American cultural milieu.  For James, a critical reading of Melville allowed him to rethink race and nation and articulate a post-national and transnational conception of citizenship.  James is less inclined than Ellison to affirm American exceptionalism, and his sensibility is much less individualistic, but it is quite remarkable that Melville served as an intellectual ‘in’ for both writers to approach questions surrounding American race relations and national identity in the context of the Cold War.  I would like to argue that both Ralph Ellison and C.L.R. James used the works of Herman Melville, most notably Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick to interrogate the concept of American citizenship, especially as it pertained to race, but that each writer, owing to somewhat different ideological orientations, arrived at markedly different creative social visions which nonetheless had some intriguing points of overlap.  In the case of Ellison, the aspiration was a more inclusive, pluralistic American identity buttressed by the doctrine of American exceptionalism and the supremacy of the American creed, while James gestured towards a transnationalism that eschewed the telos of a nation state-oriented identity.  For Ellison, pluralistic multi-nationalism served as the raw material for a revised American identity, while for James American identity could potentially serve as a starting point for an enlightened world citizenship beyond nation; but first, the contradictions needed to be engaged, and the writings of Melville served as exemplary conceptual aids to think through the pertinent issues.   

The Picture Desk Ltd Rebel slave on a slave ship

            One of the more noteworthy analyses of the kinship between Benito Cereno and Invisible Man is the essay “The Variations on a Masked Leader: A Study on the Literary Relationship of Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville” by Stuart E. Omans.  Omans is more interested in identifying the myriad ways Benito Cereno manifests itself in Ellison’s novel than in connecting it to a single theme or idea; this is perfectly legitimate of course, since Ellison would seem to wish to keep his acquired literary material flexible and thematically fluid.  “He [Ellison] has carefully reworked, varied, and remolded Melville’s themes so that they finally become a unique part of his own creation” (Omans 15).  However, interested critics could perhaps narrow their focus in order to link Benito Cereno to Invisible Man’s sense of American citizenship.  The antagonist (not necessarily the villain- critical interpretations are legion) of Benito Cereno is Babo, the leader of an African slave revolt aboard the Spanish slave ship San Dominick in the later part of the eighteenth century.  After the failure of the revolt, Babo is captured, tried, and executed by Spanish authorities in Peru.  The description of the legal proceedings is quite revealing: “Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to.  His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words…  On the testimony of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of Babo” (Melville 315).  The “legal identity” being referred to here is in accordance with Spanish law of the period, which, unsurprisingly, did not grant the slave Babo anything by the way of legal rights, autonomy, or self-definition.  In the absence of legal rights, the authority of the state over the individual can be said to lack legitimacy, and this condition tends to create a potent sense of alienation and rage in the person whose rights are not recognized.  In Lima, Peru (the destination of the San Dominick) Babo would have the social status of a slave; his solution is to secure his freedom through violent rebellion and return to Africa with his fellow freed captives.  An attempted change in social status is pursued through action.  When the mechanisms of the enslaving state prevail, Babo performs his citizenship in accordance with its underlying logic.  He is voiceless and inert, robbed of the right to self-definition and agency.  The unnamed protagonist of Invisible Man (whom I will refer to as “Invisible Man”) experiences a set of conditions that are not identical to those experienced by Babo, but are clearly related both historically and structurally to similar cultural factors (racism, most obviously) and force similar challenges to his identity, social status, and sense of self-worth.  As Omans observes, “Constantly Ellison looks to Melville for his views concerning the democratic American experience but particularly for his searching portrayal of the Negro’s implications within that experience” (16).  The experiences of Invisible Man are more multifaceted than Babo’s, or indeed, any of the characters’ in Benito Cereno.  Invisible Man is a much longer work with a more epic and expansive scope, so the range of citizenship possibilities presented is much wider.  Invisible Man experiences, and comes to reject, both the racialized social hierarchy of the Jim Crow South, the materialist internationalism and more subtle racism of a thinly-disguised communist party, and the apocalyptic exhortations of Black Nationalism (If Melville had granted Babo the opportunity or inclination to speak at length about his experiences or views, he may have sounded much like Ras the Exhorter.).  Ultimately, Invisible Man is left dejected and alienated by his experiences, and his alienation is articulated through the apt metaphor of invisibility.  When pondering the sense of self he has cultivated over the course of his experiences near the end of the novel, Invisible Man recalls his grandfather’s enigmatic advice and links it to a social and political identity- “I’m still plagued by his [grandfather’s] deathbed advice… Perhaps he hid his meaning deeper than I thought… Could he have meant- hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men…”  He goes on: “Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word.  Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states…  America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain… Our fate is to become one, and yet many” (Ellison 574 and 577).  This is he foundational political principle of the United States harmonized with a pluralistic conception of American cultural and social life, an aspirational condition that is the closest Invisible Man comes to a foundation for a secure identity. Tellingly, this position comes in the form of a creative utterance, and invisibility is mitigated through the discovery of a coherent artistic voice. 

            The self-originating quality of this voice is of central importance, and again Ellison engages Melville’s novella as a means to represent its development and eventual articulation.  The phrase “Follow your leader” recurs throughout Benito Cereno, being the words written on the bow of the slave ship by Babo after the initial and short-lived success of the rebellion.  Leadership and social power are manipulated by Melville in Benito Cereno to create ambivalent and disquieting effects. Throughout the story, Babo forces Don Benito to make a show of being in charge in order to deceive Captain Delano.  Captain Delano, for his part, is incapable of seeing Babo as a possible, credible figure of authority because of his slave status; Babo effectively utilizes his invisibility to his own advantage.  The instability of social power and its relation to identity is explored by Ellison through an engagement with Melville’s text.  “Ralph Ellison was so affected by the implications of the phrase [“Follow your leader”] that he revised it to become a repetitive note in his own hero’s search for identity.  It became, in fact, the major theme of Invisible Man…  Nearly every character in the novel claims to be the protagonist’s leader” (Omans 17).  All of these claims turn out to have a cumulative deleterious effect on the protagonist, of course.  A preacher at one point tries to uphold the authority of the corrupt and draconian Negro university president Dr. Bledsoe, the man who leads a system representative of Booker T. Washington-style racial reform.  The preacher utilizes especially fulsome language: “For has not your present leader become his living agent, his physical presence?  Look about you if you doubt it…  How can I tell you what manner of man this is who leads you?”  (Ellison 132) Bledsoe, of course, betrays Invisible Man and reveals himself to be a morally bankrupt and self-interested little Caesar.  A similar pattern holds for other would-be political and spiritual leaders the protagonist encounters.  Following one’s leader proves to be a consistently unfulfilling and occasionally dangerous business.  As Omans observed, “The boy searches for some stable force throughout the book to lead him to freedom, or visibility.  In his attempt to find a visible identity he at first wishes to follow an outside force, to have his identity defined for him by others” (17).  The motif of “leadership” is an echo of an aspect of the earlier Melville work, one Ellison, as an admirer of jazz music, appropriates as a theme on which he can riff in several different variations. 

            The dominant theme of invisibility generates much ambiguity in Ellison’s novel, particularly in the arena of social relations.  Invisibility and obscuration occur in multiple forms, and masking is one of them.  Symbolic masks are featured throughout Benito Cereno as well.  The San Dominick has a stern-piece that Melville likens to “a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked” (qtd. in Omans 18-19).  This is clearly a symbolic representation and a foreshadowing of the deceptive pose adopted by Benito Cereno and Babo during Delano’s visit on the ship.  It is a social mask crafted out of the violence of slavery.  Similarly, socially masked figures appear in Invisible Man.  As the critic Valerie Bonita Gray observed, “Babo, Bledsoe, and [Invisible Man’s] grandfather are all black characters who wear masks.  In order to function in the white world in which they find themselves, they recognize the need to hide their real selves” (37).  Masking can become a habit, and soon enough one which assists the condition of total invisibility.  Of course, masks are not intrinsically limiting throughout Invisible Man.  The memorable episode near the end of the novel where the narrator acquires a pair of dark sunglasses and wanders around Harlem and is routinely mistaken for a man named Rinehart is probably the best example of a potentially empowering mask.  Although Invisible Man is initially ambivalent about being mistaken for somebody else, he eventually comes to see in Rinehart an expansive world of possibilities.  The ambivalence at the beginning emerges from the lack of social stability intrinsic to the process of masking.  Invisible Man muses, “Perhaps I’m out of his territory at last, I thought and began trying to place Rinehart in the scheme of things.  He’s been around all the while, but I have been looking in another direction… What on earth was hiding behind the face of things?  If dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?” (Ellison 493) Masking has the disquieting potential to obscure identity to the point that it becomes doubtful that there is any “real” self at all.  In this conception, social performance is such a powerful, potent, oppressive force that self-definition is all but impossible, and stability and a sense of certainty regarding the self and one’s relation to others is all but obliterated.  However, this uncertainty and fear concerning Rinehart does not remain with the protagonist for long.  He begins to see the possibilities in Rinehart’s protean social presence, and how a multiplicity of masks may overcome the limitations of a singular, imposed mask.  Rinehart is still a condition of invisibility, but he is the one manifestation of invisibility that is something other than tragic and disempowering.  The narrator concludes, “Can it be I thought, can it actually be?  And I knew that it was… could he be all of them: Rine the Runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend?…  What is real anyway?…  His world was possibility and he knew it.  He was years ahead of me and I was a fool… The world in which we lived was without boundaries” (Ellison 498). The mask morphs from a set of restrictive boundaries to a world of freedom and expansive possibilities once it multiplies. This empowering and multi-faceted brand of masking is not really present in Benito Cereno (Babo is temporarily granted power by his mask, but it has a somewhat singular quality), but animates another Melville text centered on a character very much like Rinehart- The Confidence-Man.  “A fraud and a trickster, Rinehart is reminiscent of Melville’s Confidence Man.  Just as the Confidence Man can be a deaf-mute, a cripple, or an agent for an orphanage, Rinehart too changes” (Gray 52).  An important difference between the two characters, however, is the nature of their roles in their respective texts.  The Confidence Man is essentially a villain whose protean qualities serve as a commentary on the corruption and rootlessness present in American society, while Rinehart more optimistically suggests a strategy for survival in an often hostile cultural landscape.  This trickster condition suggested by Rinehart opens up the possibility of agency and a viable range of identities for black Americans in the United States, although his lack of stability still leaves the protagonist with a lingering feeling of ambivalence.  He says in the epilogue of his story, “But what do I really want, I’ve asked myself.  Certainly not the freedom of a Rinehart…” (Ellison 575)  Masks may aid the development of the citizen-subject, but they cannot be an end in themselves.

            Both the works of Melville and the works of Ellison are deeply invested in the role memory plays in the creation of a political and cultural subject.  The dominant metaphor for memories of a troubled past in Benito Cereno is the shadow.  The shadow is mentioned in the quote that serves as the epitaph to Invisible Man, and given the name “negro.”  The critic James Booth is quite helpful on this point, and persuasively draws the connection to Ellison’s project: “The shadow here is cast by the memory of a slave revolt on his [Benito Cereno’s] ship, or perhaps by slavery itself.  Delano’s (characteristically American) appeal to turn away from the past expresses an optimism, and a future-directed gaze, made possible, in part, by forgetting.  Ellison, too, wrote of shadows, and in particular, ‘the shadow of the past’” (684).  Historical consciousness is no light matter in Ellison’s novel, and it is closely bound to his concept of American citizenship.  The climax of Invisible Man involves a destructive riot in Harlem instigated by the perfidious pseudo-communist organization called the Brotherhood, and largely carried out under the “leadership” of the black nationalist Ras the Exhorter, who takes on the more appropriately apocalyptic persona of Ras the Destroyer in his vengeful campaign against the racist institutions of the United States.  The episode culminates with Invisible Man experiencing a bleak vision involving his castration at the hands of Brother Jack.  The vision involves the protagonist’s confrontation with all the would-be cultural and ideological leaders that “kept him runnin’” over the course of his narrative; he asserts his right to self-determination, and Brother Jack “frees him from his illusions” in the form of a violent castration.  Invisible Man witnesses his bloody genitals flung over the river and onto a bridge.  This gesture robs the protagonist of the generative possibilities that come with the capacity to self-define, but it also unburdens him of the illusory myths that dominate the social order.  He says to his tormentors, “It’s not invisible… that there hang all my generations wasting upon the water… there’s your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you’ve made, all you’re going to make…” (Ellison 570)  The racial injustice that has been a near-constant feature in American life draws the oppressor into its twisted logic along with the oppressed; when white attempts to negate black, it establishes the conditions of its own negation.  As it pertains to history, castration is both the symbol of a denied future and a forgetting or denial of history.  White effaces black out of time and space, and from his excluded position, the protagonist can witness the destructive logic of this program.  Ellison’s project is at least in part a creative act of remembering that un-erases the black presence in American life and restores an informed historical consciousness.

            The castration scene in Invisible Man has a precedent in Melville’s Benito Cereno that Ellison may or may not have consciously drawn on for inspiration.  After Captain Delano rescues Benito Cereno, it comes to light that the sword in Cereno’s possession throughout the events of the story was a fake: “The dress, so precise and costly, worn by him on the day whose events have been narrated, had not been willingly put on.  And that silver-mounted sword, apparent symbol of despotic command, was not, indeed, a sword but the ghost of one.  The scabbard, artificially stiffened, was empty” (Melville 315).  Babo had apparently taken Cereno’s sword during the course of the rebellion, and provided a stuffed scabbard as part of his elaborate constructed façade.  This is a symbolic castration, as opposed to a castration with a symbolic significance, but like the castration in Ellison’s novel, it is closely linked to social and national status.  By taking Cereno’s sword, Babo places Cereno in a subordinate position, wearing the costume of his nation but possessing none of the real status the costume usually confers.  Earlier in the story, Babo humiliates Cereno by forcing him to receive a shave in which the Spanish flag is used as a barber’s covering.  Cereno’s symbolic castration estranges him from his national/cultural identity and the protections of citizenship, a fate Cereno himself and his associates inflicted on the abducted slaves.  Ellison clearly understood the potent effect such a metaphor could have when applied to the question of the Negro in American society, and it would seem that Melville’s example suggested some possibilities for representing such an experience.

            When C.L.R. James expressed his appreciation for the works of Herman Melville, it was in the form of a book-length study, Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.  A work of criticism obviously has a different character from the novel, but James’s approach to Herman Melville and his thematic concerns intersected with Ellison’s in a number of ways.  From the introduction, James makes it clear that he wishes to place Melville in an explicitly political context:

  “The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in two novels Moby-Dick and Pierre, and two or three stories, he painted a picture of the world in which we live… the totalitarian madness which swept the world first as Nazism and now as Soviet Communism; the great mass labor movements and colonial revolts- this is the world that masses of men strive to make sense of.  This is what Melville coordinates- but not as industry, science, politics, economics or psychology, but as a world of human personalities…” (3)

Despite James’s insistence that Melville does not coordinate the troubling modern world as politics, his linking of Melville’s work to such historically important political events as the rise of Nazism and communism, as well as mass labor movements and decolonization, indicates a deep concern with the then-current political scene, one molded chiefly by the imperatives of the Cold War state.  This is the same political landscape in which Ellison was working.  For James, the personal is very much political.  He wrote his book on Melville while detained on Ellis Island and awaiting deportation.  He commented, “A great part of this book was written on Ellis Island while I was being detained by the Department of Immigration.  The Island, like Melville’s Pequod, is a miniature of all the nations and all sections of society.  My experience of it… [has] so deepened my understanding of Melville and so profoundly influenced the form this book has taken…”  (James 3) The authoritarian mechanism of the Cold War state, the paranoid atmosphere of the McCarthy era, and the vagaries of American nationalism all intensely colored James’s interpretation of Melville.  What might be the strangest aspect of his study is that it remains so persuasive despite a conspicuous tendentiousness.  James wishes to investigate the modern totalitarian social type through Melville.  Intuitively, he centers his attention on Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick.  “Ahab is no common man… he is a man who wants to live fully and completely according to his beliefs…  His basic religion for years has been the religion of his age- material progress” (James 9).  Of course, the religion of material progress brings Ahab much success and even more alienation and quasi-existential misery.  “His business becomes to reconcile the undoubted advantages of an industrial civilization with what that very civilization is doing to him as a human being” (James 10).  This struggle is not at all unlike the struggle of Ellison’s protagonist, who attempts many times to reconcile his attachment to American civilization with the deleterious effects of its racism.  Of course, Invisible Man pursues his dilemma towards a frustrated but defiant individualism, which he molds into a creative act of communication that may have the potential to mitigate the effects of invisibility.  Ahab is not so fortunate, though he has in common with Invisible Man an instinct toward individualism.  “There is a fatal flaw in his [Ahab’s] misery and his challenge and defiance.  Never for a single moment does it cross his mind to question his relations with the people he works with…  He has been trained in the school of individualism and an individualist he remains to the end” (James 11).  The alienating effects of mechanization and individualism create an untenable situation that has the potential to tip over into the genuinely authoritarian in the event of a catastrophic event that prompts men to seek radically different modes of social organization.  For Ahab, the catastrophic event is his fateful encounter with the white whale, Moby Dick.  This compels a new program of passionate, violent repudiation.  James cannot help but link this mindset to the pathological nationalisms and ideologies that proved so destructive during the first half of the twentieth century.  James views nations and nationalisms as being founded on dubious concepts of race: “This doctrine is that the national race, the national stock, the national blood, is superior to all other national races…  over the last twenty years [the doctrine] has grown stronger in every country in the world.  Who doubts this has only to read the McCarran Immigration Bill of 1952, which is permeated with the doctrine of racial superiority” (13).  Here we have race, nation, modernity, and the totalitarian type all meeting in the space of Melville’s most famous novel.  In this formulation, citizenship is not a desirable status in the least.  For James, the possible redeeming factor for this volatile and possibly tragic scenario can be found in the make-up of the Pequod’s crew. The critic Donald E. Pease wrote that James would eventually consolidate his political views into a three-part doctrine: “the rejection of the Soviet Union’s bureaucracy as a form of state capitalism, the rejection of the vanguard party, and the insistence on the relative autonomy of spontaneous social movements” (ix).  The latter is especially important when considering James’s reading of Melville.  When considering the matter of social change, James rejected the centralizing tendencies of the vanguard party and placed the emphasis on collective action.  His earlier book American Civilization brought this view to bear on America’s troubled race relations: “it… advanced the argument that various sectors- the family, the political community, the civil sphere- of American civilization were in crisis along a racial division that could only be resolved through the development of a mass revolutionary movement that would reorganize American culture on an egalitarian and participatory basis” (Pease ix-x).  The diverse, subaltern mix of Ahab’s crew can be understood as the necessary action that could be taken against the totalitarian type in incipient form.  Of course, in Melville’s novel the actual outcome is tragic, not emancipatory or triumphant.  The totalitarian type leads his social order to ruin.  However, James’s project is more one of advocacy on the crew’s behalf than an interpretation of an actual conflict in the novel.  James sees in the Pequod crew the diverse collection of marginalized individuals who could break the racist and authoritarian model of the modern nation state, if only they could see their dilemma with clarity and unity of purpose.  This renegotiation of nationality and citizenship has some similarities and differences with Ellison’s project.  Like Ellison, he values cultural pluralism, and considers America’s troubled race relations and efforts to efface pluralism through rigid racial hierarchies and impose a unitary whiteness on cultural life as major social evils.  However, Ellison wished to navigate this corrupted landscape and offer his challenge through the cultivation of a renewed brand of American exceptionalism and individualism; Ellison’s ideal America would seem to be its present diverse mix of individuals organized on the same creed but untainted by an artificial racial hierarchy centered on white supremacism.  James, by contrast, wants to be a citizen of the world, and gestures toward a transnational and post-national construction of the social subject.  Both of these writers, I feel, chose to engage with Melville because of the circumstances of their historical moment, which was dominated by the Cold War and the very recent memory of two brutal world wars.  Melville, along with Dostoevsky, was the nineteenth century writer who arguably saw the most keenly that modernity and industrialized society would not be able to eliminate the problem of evil, and in fact, the burdens of history and social alienation may be felt even more acutely in the brave new modern world.  Ellison and James, both being writers of African ancestry and deeply concerned with the problem of American racism, responded to Melville’s insights and aesthetics and deployed them in their own work to imagine new possibilities beyond the limits of the then-current sociopolitical order.

Works Cited

Booth, W. James.  “The Color of Memory: Reading Race with Ralph Ellison.”  Political Theory.

            36.5 (2008):  683-707.  Print. 

Ellison, Ralph.  Invisible Man.  New York: Vintage Books, 1995.  Print.

Gray, Valerie Bonita.  Invisible Man’s Literary Heritage: Benito Cereno and Moby Dick. 

            Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1978.  Print.

James, C.L.R.  Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World

            We Live In.  Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2001.  Print.

Melville, Herman.  Great Short Works of Herman Melville.  New York: HarperCollins Publishers,

            2004.  Print.

Omans, Stuart E.  “The Variations of a Masked Leader: A Study on the Literary Relationship of

            Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville.”  South Atlantic Bulletin.  40.2 (1975):  15-23.  Print.

Pease, Donald E. Introduction. Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman            Melville and the World We Live In.  By C.L.R. James. 2001. Hanover and London:

            University Press of New England, 2001.  Print. 

“This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi…”: a review of Merrell R. Davis’s Melville’s Mardi

(Note: I originally wrote this while I was in grad school, hence the MLA citations; no Works Cited though, as I only drew on one source, a single endnote aside. This is a review of a book-length study published in 1952 of Herman Melville’s third novel. I had previously written about Mardi here.)

Merrell R. Davis’s book-length study of Herman Melville’s third novel, Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage (1952), engages its subject in a somewhat counterintuitive manner.  Mardi has been a problematic text since its publication in 1849, and there has been a pronounced critical tendency, at least since the Melville revival of the 1920s, to consider it in terms of works that would follow, most obviously Moby-Dick.  What might be called a “standard” approach to studying Mardi is to analyze its contents and structure as a trying-out phase for Melville to first discover, then explore and hone, his emerging literary ambitions and talents.  Mardi is typically regarded as a text of little intrinsic value and more a tantalizing indicator of what was to come.  I will admit to a degree of bias; I see little reason to dissent from this critical line.  While there are many substantial reasons to challenge the Moby-Dick-centrism that sometimes informs Melville studies, Mardi seems to work best as a record of unfolding and not as a fully-realized literary composition.  It is therefore quite interesting that Davis chooses to investigate and analyze Mardi largely on its own terms.  This is not to say that context is not an important aspect of Davis’s study, just that the contexts he selects do not extend beyond or much before the composition of Mardi; Melville’s life prior to pursuing a career in letters is given a cursory overview and hardly anything at all is said about what followed the publication of his third book.  Understanding Mardi as a self-contained work of literature would seem to be Davis’s priority, with the specific circumstances of composition and the curious qualities of its formal structure being brought to the forefront of the analysis.  Within the parameters Davis constructs for his study, Melville’s Mardi is thorough, insightful, and informative, but its narrow focus seems somewhat myopic.  Davis would appear to believe that Mardi is best understood in terms of its composition, and while that is undoubtedly an essential, even principle, component to an informed understanding of the text, I feel that more attention could have been paid to the circumstances of Mardi’s critical and public reception, and how its reputation has developed over the years amongst readers, writers, and critics.  It is well-established that Melville was attuned to the reactions of his reading public and the critics to his books, and that his responses to these reactions at least partially informed the course of his creative endeavors; the author’s note that precedes the main narrative of Mardi makes this perfectly clear.[i]  Davis acknowledges that one of the central reasons Mardi holds some interest is that “the experience… it exemplifies marks a significant growth in an author who came to acknowledge an ambition to write ‘such things as the Great Publisher of Mankind ordained ages before he published ‘The World’” (200).  The growth of Melville’s ambition in tandem with his idea of his audience is one of the most fascinating components of Melville’s art, at least partially because it was one of Melville’s chief sources of frustration and struggle.  It can be argued that Mardi is the first significant benchmark of that unfolding struggle, and it is somewhat frustrating that Davis does not pay it more attention.

            Davis’s study has a conveniently bifurcated structure, with the first half covering Melville’s early literary career (the publications of Typee and Omoo) and the circumstances surrounding the writing of Mardi, and the second half given over to an analysis of the novel’s formal structure and purpose.  Appropriately, Davis’s primary sources for the biographical portion of his study consist largely of correspondence among members of the Melville family and between Melville and his publishers in both England and America.  Davis effectively proves what most readers of Mardi intuit; that Melville’s ambitions for his third book underwent significant changes over the period from 1847 to 1849 when he was writing it.  The skeptical response of some critics to the allegedly true events of Melville’s first two books, Typee and Omoo, apparently rankled Melville enough to encourage a stylistic and thematic shift for his third effort, one which would be more conducive to his developing philosophical interests and thematic concerns and which would also provoke the more literary sensibilities of critics who had previously been preoccupied with biography.  There was also, apparently, the more prosaic matter of financial returns.  After the (mostly) enthusiastic reception of Typee, Melville resolved to pursue a career as a professional writer, and needed to take into account the practical demands such a decision would entail.  While engaging in a discussion with the English publisher of his first two works, John Murray, Melville evidently came to realize that he could anticipate diminishing returns for every reiteration of his South Seas adventures, and that altering the character of his storytelling was a prerequisite for long-term literary success.  Ultimately, it would be Melville’s voracious reading, Davis argues, that most strongly informed the character of the change in his writing.  Davis writes: “Either by coincidence or design, just at the time Melville was expanding the plan of his book he was beginning to buy new books and to borrow others… in addition to the travel books… Melville was reading Seneca, Proclus, Montaigne, Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Ossian, Hartley, Coleridge, and Rabelais…  These books contributed to the content or the literary manner of Mardi” (62 and 66).  In this reading list one can find the inspirations for Melville’s densely allusive style and more conspicuously literary and philosophical orientation.  Reading the classics of the Western canon not only changed the stylistic nature of Melville’s writing, but his engagement with life and the world generally, and this in turn would come to inform Melville’s thematics.  Davis persuasively demonstrates that the last, or nearly last, material Melville wrote for Mardi was the satirical-allegorical section in which the group of island-hopping questers land on a series of islands that are thinly disguised representations of real countries.  In this material, Melville refers to then-current events, like the activities of the Free Soil Party and the 1848 revolutions in Europe.  By incorporating current events into his increasingly bizarre and fluid allegory, Melville demonstrated that his active engagement with the world was starting to take on a decisively literary character. 

Herman Melville (1819-1891) 1868.

            The second half of Davis’s study, as already indicated, is given over to an extended analysis of Mardi itself.  Overall, this second section is less edifying than the first and marked by a sterile formalism in its approach to literary criticism.  Davis effectively divides the narrative into three sections, “The Narrative Beginning,” “The Romantic Interlude,” and “The Travelogue-Satire.”  These sections each possess an internal narrative structure of their own, so much that each can be considered a book in itself.  Davis, for better or worse, cannot isolate much worth analyzing in the beginning chapters, the section of the book that most closely resembles Melville’s lighter, early work, and reduces the formal effect of its episodes to the conjuring of suspense.  Some appreciation is reserved for its comic aspects as well, particularly the fractious relationship between husband and wife Samoa and Annatoo.  Davis argues that the center of the Romantic Interlude section of Mardi is the character of Yillah and her dramatic and transformative effect on the narrator-protagonist Taji.  Yillah can be understood primarily as a mythopoeic construct, one who happens to have both a “realistic” and “mythical” life story.  The literary antecedents for Yillah can be located in the work of Romantic poets like Byron and Shelley, and as a beguiling representation of an abstract concept (or set of concepts) Yillah also has the archetypal quality of a mythical, goddess-like figure.  Thematically, her function is to introduce the theme of guilt (Taji murders the priest Aleema in order to “rescue” her) and provide the symbolic significance that characterizes the third section of the book.  The third section, or travelogue-satire, is perhaps the most difficult and unwieldy part of Mardi.  Davis splits his consideration of this section into two chapters, one that explores the satirical and symbolic qualities of the island visits, and one that considers the characters that make up the traveling entourage.  I am in agreement with Davis that the philosopher Babbalanja warrants special consideration; he is the only character other than Taji with a distinct and independent quest.  While it could be argued that both Taji and Babbalanja are seeking “knowledge” of a sort (though it is worth remarking that Babbalanja’s knowledge-goal lacks a symbolic personification) Babbalanja’s orientation is that of the philosopher, not the romantic quester.  Davis observes: “Babbalanja has a quest of his own.  Throughout the voyage he has exhibited his concern over the problems of science, religion, and philosophy as they relate to the sources of man’s knowledge and his faith.  As a philosopher, he would find the philosopher’s stone, and his quest is ended by his humble acceptance of the limitations of his own reason” (198). At least within the context of the travelogue-satire, Babbalanja is the only character aside from Taji who undergoes something resembling a persuasive change (the sudden religious conversion of the other characters at Serenia is less convincing) and therefor is more recognizable as a well-constructed character than the other travelers. 

            As I have already indicated, Davis’s study is somewhat limited by its adherence to a rote formalism as its principle means of literary analysis and it is somewhat frustrating that Davis does not do more to contextualize Mardi in the entire, completed body of Melville’s works, or give any consideration to its critical reception or how its reputation has developed over the years.  However, A Chartless Voyage makes expert use of biographical data to meticulously chart the course of Melville’s development while he was composing Mardi, and the cumulative effect is quite edifying.  Whether Davis consciously intended to or not, the significance his study suggests for Melville’s third novel is the development of a conflict between Melville’s professional and artistic ambitions.  By seeking alternatives to the travel-adventure mode which initially made his reputation, Melville plunged headlong into the self-consciously literary and the densely philosophical, a mode which allowed for the creation of some authentically timeless works of art, but which he was never able to harmonize with a professional career.             

                                  

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[i] “Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience.

This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi. New York, January, 1849.”