I wish I could annul all citizenships, all belonging to any Nation-State whatsoever. I’ve remarked previously about my reluctance to engage or self-identify as “Indian;” at least in any way that marks me as that exclusively.
After reading this amazing article by Arundathi Roy, I remember all those small, painful, relatively insignificant but ideal crushing moments I associate with India. However, learned critical tools blunted by sharp empathy have enlarged my disassociate tastes; I want to carry the world’s violence one step further to complete violence: complete disassociation.I would love to say “disengagement” but there’s no outside to misery, deceit, jingoism, or fucking lunacy. No. However, there is the space of voluntary delusion; “there’s nothing wrong with the world…I have nothing to do with all that…in fact, don’t even tell me about any of that…”
The words are trite but the theory is pure violence. Disassociate completely. Repress absolutely. Drink. Do anything that excludes the bloody Real.
It’s noon in Mumbai (Bombay for the nostalgic)
Although I’m more partial to Hockey and the Red Wings, Detroit sporting success is always shared—even if it is underappreciated by us bandwagoners. Anyway, Ryan was remarking recently that the Tigers have a distinctly working class feel to them because anyone is able to buy tickets for $8 and go watch them on any given day. Then I read this...
During the Oakland series, Jones spoke eloquently about the recent trying times in Detroit, with massive job losses due to problems in the auto industry. The Detroit players derived some satisfaction, Jones said, from giving the team’s blue-collar fans a three-hour respite each day from weightier, real-life issues.
Leyland, predictably, got emotional after Ordonez’s homer. But he wasn’t the only one at Comerica Park to pull a Dick Vermeil.
"You can’t go anywhere in this city without Tigers fans talking about their pride in the organization and the team,’’ Rogers said. "As players, maybe we don’t understand it completely, but we surely appreciate it. This is something we’ll take with us for a long, long time.’‘
All that’s left now is to seal the deal. As far as the Tigers are concerned, it’s two celebrations down, and one to go.
The text of a class presentation by Shashi Thandra™
The multiple threads that knot Henry James’ The Real Thing together cannot be unraveled easily or without an arbitrarily chosen starting strand. Let me then begin by outlining some of the material social conditions within the text before moving on to a more aesthetic formal reading.
The absurdly named Mr. and Mrs. Monarch’s arrival at the narrator’s studio points to the drastic social mobility and individualism signaled by modernity. Their status as “Lady” and “Gentleman” is no longer a stable predetermined given, but rather subject to the same flux as other characters. This social flux, in turn, combines with the density of city life, London in this case, to force the mixing of various social ranks. The narrator’s studio becomes a contact zone where old aristocracy in the form of the Monarchs meet the working class cockney Miss Churm, the recently arrived Italian Oronte, and incisively unproductive Jack Hawley. Common to all, however, is their relationship to the narrator, a relationship predicated on another entailment of individualism, namely labor power. As Singer states, “Whatever the reality of material compulsion, they were at liberty to sell their labor on the market, entering into contracts independently and voluntarily” (Singer 31). Within the rise of mature capitalism, these contracts were impersonal, with nonspecific others, such as the ultimately anonymous narrator. This situation is foreign to the Monarchs as evidenced by their awkward negotiations with the narrator, and ultimately revealing itself as the shock of equality to Mr. Monarch and his efforts to secure employment. “There are thousands, as good as yourself, already on the ground” (James 15).
The ground itself becomes compressed in the narrative, through the mention and use of transportation technologies such as the train and omnibus. Moreover, the arrival of Oronte and the voyages of Jack Hawley hint toward the rapidity and relative affordability of travel. These material circumstances provide ground for the constant arrival, stasis, and departure of characters in the narrative. For the purposes of this presentation, I want to morph these themes into a theory of time, focusing first on the Monarchs as representations of a past historical moment.
“But, somehow, with all their perfections I didn’t easily believe in them. After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was the detestation of the amateur. Combined with this was another perversity––an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question” (12).
The Monarchs are professional aristocracy but amateur models of a historical moment that has already passed. As living monuments to that past moment, however, they are real, which is precisely what makes them useless for the narrator-artist. If one envisions the Monarchs as a historical archive, as historical data available in the present, their uselessness takes on another dimension; their literal and figurative bankruptcy can only be undone by their value for representation. Our narrator’s preference for the represented subject, although posited as a perversity, is the inevitability of accessing the past only as a representation. Indeed, he begins to envision them as such from the moment of their arrival. “The defect of the real” is that it raises the “profitless question” of facticity, which is subordinate to the concerns of the present. In other words, the value of a representation of the past is not in its factual faithfulness but rather its ability to serve the present moment. One can then be sure of things that appear precisely because one is sure that they are representations.
The narrator’s moment requires figures for a book and the Monarchs’ realness doesn’t translate into, and in fact hinders, their representability. Mrs. Monarch has no variety, is “insurmountably stiff” and rather pleased with a self-identified facticity, that “she was the real thing.” The narrator-artist’s attempt to contort and reposition cannot repress the ‘real,’ and she ultimately cannot fit adequately within the representation’s frame, always coming out “too tall” (21). As a metaphor for the historical archive, Mrs. Monarch and her stiffness allude to the ultimate incomprehensibility/ unrepresentability of a past ‘real’ and its perpetual bankruptcy if it cannot be molded for present use. Beyond this metaphor, Mrs. Monarch specifically and the Monarchs generally stand in as premodern subjects who have not adapted to the fundamental plasticity required by modernity, a plasticity that is given voice by our narrator.
“I adored variety and range. I cherished human accidents, the illustrative note; I wanted to characterize closely, and the thing in the world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type…I might only be a presumptuous young modern searcher, but I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner than character….It couldn’t be everybody’s––it might end in being nobody’s” (22).
The narrator-artist’s notion of “character” seems to point toward a unique individual “essence” but is rather the plasticity of modern subjects, as exemplified by Miss Churm and Oronte. The former is characterized positively as having an “inexplicable talent for imitation” and negatively as having “no positive stamp” (22). In contradistinction to Mrs. Monarch, Miss Churm does not bear the mark of the ‘real’ and so can “sit for characters that had nothing in common with each other” or her (23). Her point of pride is demonstrated in the narrative by her ability to represent a Russian princess and Artemisia, the love object in an acclaimed novel series (38). The name Artemisia itself is the phonetic equivalent of combining ‘art’ and ‘amnesia’, which in turn doubly signals the necessary plasticity of ‘character’ required in representation specifically, and modernity generally. Even more plastic, however, is Oronte.
His arrival is the kind of “human accident” valued by the narrator, one that bespeaks a heroic dimension to the plasticity of the modern subject. Oronte’s “dumb, dog-like fidelity,” his “innocent impudence” and “manner of a devoted servant” almost instantly make pictures (27). One of these pictures envisions Oronte at St. Peter’s, an instant transport that places his actual journey from Italy in sharp relief. More than sudden changes of location, however, Oronte is able to communicate his desires, acquire employment and perform his duties without language, demonstrating infinitely more plasticity than the Monarchs. Indeed, it is precisely this “uncultivated, instinctive” plasticity of the “bright adventurer” that allows him to represent the novel series’ hero, Rutland Ramsey (27).
As a brief aside, and for my own intellectual interests, Oronte’s migration also becomes an instant “assimilation;” he becomes an Englishman as soon as he dawns the clothes of one. That is to say, he is instantly ‘home.’ Moreover, Miss Churm’s ability to look Italian when called upon seems to negate the necessity of ‘real’ border crossing because the representation of such is equally valuable to the present. From another angle, we could say that Miss Churm and Oronte demonstrate the ‘character’ performance that is citizenship. But, I digress. Let me return to the original metaphor framing this reading. If the Monarchs represent a historical archive rigidly imposing itself as ‘real,’ then Miss Churm and Oronte are the malleable present. Beyond their relative youthfulness, the hero and heroine are a metaphor for the temporal present precisely because they are ‘characters,’ infinitely plastic and representable. Explicating this, however, requires an examination of the narrative’s form.
Two formal qualities will be briefly analyzed here: 1) The narrative is framed as a memory, within which are indicators of the temporal distance but ultimately eluding specificity. 2) Within the narration there are tangential moments, drifts to other spaces that imbed us further in an ambiguous past.
The narrative is a recounted memory whose temporal distance from the narrator’s “actual” moment is impossible to determine. Phrases such as “in those days,” ubiquitous use of the past tense and the lack of dates yield an ambiguous orientation vaguely pointing to an unlocatable past; we can, however, note that the narrator has acquired the contract for the Rutland Ramsey series during the interim (26).
Other narrative clues point also point toward time passing, the most notable of which is the narrator’s trip to Italy. When Oronte arrives, the narrator remarks that he “had not then visited his country’ (26 Italics mine). Although the “then” of his comment establishes Oronte’s arrival as temporally prior, it does not help us gauge the temporal distance in any specific way. Such travel in the premodern period would require a great amount of time but, as has already been mentioned, emergent technologies, themselves rapidly developing, greatly reduced travel time disabling our temporal orientation in the narrative. Moreover, the “then” implicitly points to the “now” the narrator ‘actually’ occupies as he tells the story; however, our inability to locate the “then” with any specificity negates the search for the “now.” Indeed, the narrative flow itself negates the “now.”
When Mr. Monarch first asks his wife to show how “smart” she is, the narrator-artist is immediately “reminded of an incident” in Paris, in which his friend, a dramatist, is approached by an actress who begins to audition for him (8). The narrative tangents for a mere two sentences here but breaks continuity in at least three different ways. Most obviously, we are spatially dislocated from London to Paris. Second, the art form shifts from the illustrative to the dramatic. (One could easily argue that this is in fact a juxtaposition meant to illustrate the former’s performative needs). Thirdly, the moment is a temporal break that places us doubly in the past; that is, within the narrative as memory, we are placed in another memory, all without being able to locate a stable present. [A more explicit example of this is the opening two paragraphs of section II]
Finally, I want to argue that the narrative form––the impossibility of locating a “then” and “now,” and the temporal ruptures within it––combined with the plasticity of Oronte and Miss Churm, points to the absence of an immediate “now.” Rather, we have degrees of the past. The illusion of a present is actually the immediate past that, like Oronte and Miss Churm, is a ‘character’ without essence but infinitely plastic. However, this ‘character’ is only useful, it only ‘works’ literally and figuratively, if it is represented.
The shock of a blinking white cursor renews itself when one steps away form daily writing practice. Thinking of it as a practice, as a draft and open space for exploration rather than the academic drive to “produce” alleviates some of the pressure; yet, there still remains the internal overachiever neurosis to form gorgeous sentences, posts and ideas. Interestingly, although unsurprisingly, writing practice has a material spatial dimension that I am, as I write this, trying to take in new directions.
My practice of late, whether it be for this blog or other work, is to write after my evening mediation, while sitting on a soft couch, my laptop’s screen illuminating the otherwise dimly lit room. The relaxed surroundings are meant to offset the intensity of formulating and articulating the thin strand of clarity dangling between the abstractions of a critical apparatus and specific object it is reading and being read by. However, these cozy conditions aren’t quite conducive to paper writing; my couch will not easily accommodate all the books that simultaneously need to be available, nor will the dim lighting aid in the already troublesome process of decoding. That is to say, the material conditions will not allow for thought beyond the vignettes produced in this virtual space. So, in an effort to transition to conditions more in line with actual academic production, I have placed myself in my ‘study’ (which is also my tv/ movie space, my dinning room and my library) and am writing this on my desktop. However, because this is a process rather than a leap, I have kept the dim lighting. What does your writing space look like?
A few weeks ago, I was out to lunch with Kristine and began to tell her a joke from Family Guy. As usual, I was laughing and squirming even before I finished the story; despite her distaste for the show, she always laughs only because, I think, my own enthusiasm/ delivery is comical.
“You become a 12 year old when you talk about that show” she says.
Ah-hah. Yes, I do! I become giddy, enjoying (and trying to transmit) a space of raw joy that is self-perpetuating like nothing else I’ve experienced, save depression. However, what struck me as amazing a few days later when we met for our Kant reading group, was that Kant took me to that same space, albeit via an entirely different route. Reading a few Foucault articles today took me there again and prompted this post. Although I don’t have the energy to use Kant to critique my own experience of joy in two drastically different objects, let me offer a strange example and some commentary.
“Even from a distance, one experiences Foucault’s death at fifty-seven as an event whose untimeliness affirms the violence and mercilessness of time –– the power of facticity, which, without sense and without triumph, prevails over the painstakingly constructed meaning of each human life.” –Habermas on Foucault
Despite the rather morbid content of the quote, the beauty of its formal construction, the language and the abstract awareness it evokes all strike me as gorgeous. The abstraction of time, death and the ultimate negation of self-creation strike me as an amazing sequence that inverts its very content. That is, despite its seeming moroseness and, at the level of content, the reduction of all endeavors to ephemeral absurdities, the craftsmanship of the sentence itself affirms human projects, of lives devoted to the perfection of self-creation. Indeed, it is this latter space that functions as a performative affirmation, a torch of violence against the inevitable and a defiance of the cognizable abstractions we know will overwhelm us. In sum, fuck off death! Foucault lives!
