“In regard to the many sophisticated ideas concerning media, identity, and sampling developed over the last century,” writes Kenneth Goldsmith in the introduction to his new collection of essays, Uncreative Writing, “books about how to be a creative writer have completely missed the boat, relying on cliched notions of what it means to be ‘creative’.” I can imagine a 22-year-old version of myself nodding along sympathetically. Disgruntled and arrogant, having run through the course of workshops and lectures required for a BA in creative writing, “creative” seemed a laughable term to apply to the diarrhetic flood of forced epiphanies, leaky metaphors, execrable prose, and shitty advice washing over the seminar tables in the Modern Languages building in the spring of 2005. Genteel “literary fiction” was the house style — a cohort of dreamy MFA students and downtrodden adjuncts policed our sentence boundaries: simple, precise phrases must be mobilized in the service of conjuring a vague aura of meaningfulness from the most commonplace events. A strict attention to the wonderousness of the everyday was rigorously enforced. Had any of us any talent, it surely would have been crushed under the boot heel of the institution. Some of us carved away, carefully blowing the dust off the most exquisitely idea-less sentences, while the rest took refuge in a half-baked version of postmodern involution, barricading our lack of creativity from scrutiny with wall after wall of ham-fisted irony and self-reference.

I was one of the worst offenders, a pomo dunce of the first order. My cleverness knew no bounds. To be “creative” was to turn the tenets of the workshop on their head, to be “creative” was to lay bare the device, to be “creative” was to reckon with the infinitely regressive nature of signification, to be “creative” was, finally, to sneer at all of those unreflective trogs who thought they were so “creative.” Workshops were ideological warfare, though only I seemed to be aware of it, if one can be “aware” of something that simply isn’t the case. I harangued the insufficiently self-conscious, derided the epistemologically naive, lambasted the formally normal. An adjunct instructor told one of my classmates that I gave her nightmares, and when that classmate relayed the information, I felt a buzz of perverted pride that now registers as a correspondingly powerful shame.

I often stop reading front to back and read the book backwards. I can’t predict which books it will happen to me on, but this reverse-reading will tug on me like a magnet about halfway or two thirds through. It often occurs on books that I love the most.

Use a tree as a fence post and string barbed wire across it; allow ten years to pass; the tree will have grown around the barbed wire, and the barbed wire will now go through the tree rather than around it.

Am I missing the narrative gene? I frequently come out of the movie theatre having no idea what the plot was: “Wait—he killed his brother-in-law? I didn’t know he even had a brother-in-law.”

The way he hopscotches from reading journal to enigmatic factoid to anecdote keeps you suspended, dangling from the edge of one paragraph until you release, free fall, and land on top of the next. What happens in midair is really the substance of the essay — Shields carves out little spaces to think in.

Which makes sense, as his chosen project lately has consisted of an attack on narrative in favor of what he refers to as the “lyric essay.” Reality Hunger is focused in large measure on taking apart cherished traditions like narrative, story, authenticity, and authorship, and this essay is involved in the same sort of thing (plus some rather pointed criticisms of Jonathan Franzen’s “Farther Away,” the New Yorker essay on David Foster Wallace). In that sense, it’s more of the same — I’m still waiting for a new form, rather than the continual unspooling of these numbered, and admittedly extremely pleasurable, fragments. I’m not sure I agree with all of Shields’s critiques; I’ve never understood why authors of aesthetic manifestos insist on the abandonment of one form in favor of another. Isn’t there room and desire for pretty much everything?

After all, when you do a Google image search on “collage,” you come up with a bunch of those collages that are thousands of smaller images arranged to form a large portrait. The avant-garde connotations Shields seems to attribute to collage got subsumed beneath more accessible, mimetic forms. This is the way of things, probably, and it speaks to the malleability of forms, both strange and familiar, the way in which forms that were strange have a tendency to become familiar. So it’s not, like Johnson said of Tristram Shandy, that “nothing odd will last” (or whatever), but that nothing odd stays odd for long.

* Also, here’s something Shields wrote called “Collage” which I’m pretty sure is an excerpt from Reality Hunger.

Antisthenes defends the claim that, although he is penniless, he prides himself on his wealth. True wealth and poverty, he argues, are possessed in people’s souls. He observes persons who are conventionally wealthy yet pathologically unsatisfied by their possessions. As for himself, he has sufficient to satisfy all his basic bodily needs, and, since he is not choosy, he can always find some willing woman if he wants sex. For enjoyment, instead of buying expensive things, he draws on his soul’s resources. Anticipating Epicurus, he says that it is more pleasurable to satisfy his appetite when genuinely hungry or thirsty than when not in need. Such frugality promotes honesty and contentment (32).

One of the most interesting things about ancient Cynicism (radically different from modern cynicism — on this, see Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason) is its emphasis on the pleasure of self-denial. That is, denying oneself immediate and excessive gratification actually enhances pleasure eventually. Discipline, denial, self-mastery are all different paths to pleasure rather than virtuous acts in themselves. Nice.

Diogenes of Sinope, who Plato called “a Socrates gone mad,” is probably the most famous Cynic. From Diogenes Laertius’s (different guy) Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, written in the first half of the third century, A.D.:

Once, when a man had conducted him into a magnificent house, and had told him that he must not spit, after hawking a little, he spit in his face, saying that he could not find a worse place.

Burn!

A profligate eunuch had written on his house, “Let no evil thing enter in.”"Where,” said Diogenes, “is the master of the house going?”

Ay-oh!

Once at a banquet, some of the guests threw him bones, as if he had been a dog; so he, as he went away, put up his leg against them as if he had been a dog in reality.

Huh. Okay. Diogenes: never afraid to let shit get real.

—

David Markson died over the summer, and the occasion was marked by a flood of obituaries and retrospectives. I’d wager the number of words published about Markson in the weeks following his death (cancer, he was 82) add up to more than those published about him in his 50-some-odd year career as a writer and editor. And, as happens with these things, most of those words look conspicuously similar to each other. This primer from The Millions does a more thorough job than most of summarizing all of his fiction, but look to any of the dozens of obituaries published after the novelist’s death this past June and you will find a litany of paragraphs describing his last four novels. All of them basically look like this one, from the New York Times: “Mr. Markson did not much bother with character development or plot; nor, as his work evolved, did he care much for devices of organization like chapters, or even paragraphs. Rather, he built his books in nuggets and epigraphs, oddball observation by peculiar found fact, to portray the mind of the narrator, who was generally an artist in some state of mental distress.”

And that’s a more or less accurate description of what those novels look like, though it hardly captures what they feel like. The word “oddball” is particularly tin-eared, imputing a kind of zaniness nowhere present in his work (though it is often funny). In fact, given the scramble to commemorate the death of a supposedly important novelist, none of these obituaries seem particularly interested in talking about why Markson matters as a novelist; you’ll often see his novels described as an achievement of some kind. Exactly what they have achieved, however, remains unclear. One can turn to any obituary one likes to find out that the author of The Last Novel is dead, but, given that he’s so frequently described as “esoteric” or “obscure,” you’d we’d have some justification for the obituary’s existence in the first place. Part of what makes them great is simply his finely-tuned ear, which seems equally attentive to the silence surrounding words as the words themselves. When he jabs, as he does several times, at Julian Schnabel and Harold Bloom, his barbs often come out of nowhere, emerging from the blank white spaces in which his sentences float, like a callback to an earlier moment in a conversation.

But what most obviously sticks out about Markson’s work is its experimental form. Markson’s late novels are, as many of these obits note, avant-garde page turners, both strange and strangely readable. I have more than once missed my subway stop, wholly absorbed by what is, after all, an assemblage of anecdotes, apocryphal stories, and quotations lassoed together, in each case, by a vaguely sketched narrator. Such conceits often, if not usually, result in the kind of tortured pseudo-philosophical cerebrations that pass themselves off as “postmodern” experiments in narrative self-awareness. Yet Markson, postmodern, cerebral, and apparently tortured by demons unknown, produced work both improbably entertaining and ungodly complicated. For every moment in which my tweedy inner pedant attempts to quantify the epistemological ramifications of Markson’s narrative technique, there is another in which all thought stops and the novel simply takes up residence in my consciousness, lazily rattling off an anecdote about John Stuart Mill, an interesting fact concerning the death of Lucretius. It’s easy enough to imagine Markson reclining eternally on some faded sofa, ankle crossed over knee, muttering something about Keats’s hygiene, probably just to amuse himself.

For instance, from The Last Novel: “John Locke died while sitting in a drawing room listening to someone read from the Psalms.” And then: “Novalis died while listening to a relative play the piano.” Further down the same page: “Antonin Artaud spent nine of his last eleven years in insane asylums,” and so on. One could trace these sketches of death and decline throughout the novel, and each novel in the final four possesses its own thematic strands, all of them interwoven yet each clearly visible in its own right. The brilliance of these novels resides in their drift; they associate restlessly and obsessively, alternately flitting from theme to theme and elaborating on a detail with a stoner’s intense half-interest.

To see what I mean, take this passage from Wittgenstein Mistress. Though not a part of the final tetralogy, that novel is in many ways both the overture and finale of Markson’s late style. Here are some of his narrator’s thoughts on Helen of Troy:

“After all, a single Spartan girl, as Walt Whitman once called her.

“Even if in The Trojan Women Euripides does let everybody be furious at Helen.

“In the Odyssey, where she has a splendid radiant dignity, nothing of that sort is hinted at at all.

“And even in the Iliad, when the war is still going on, she is generally treated with respect.

“So unquestionably it was only later that people decided it had been Helen’s fault.

“Well, Euripides of course coming much later than Homer on his own part, for instance.

“I do not remember how much later, but much later.

“As a matter of fact it was much later as twice the time between now and when Bertrand Russell’s grandfather met George Washington, apparently.

“And certainly any number of things can be lost track of, in that many years.

“So that once he had gotten the idea to write a play about the way, certainly it would have been necessary for Euripides to think up an interesting reason for the war.

“Not know that the real reason must surely have been to see who would pay tariff to whom, so as to be able to make use of a channel of water, as I have indicated.

“Although on the other hand it is also quite possible that Euripides just lied.”

Speculative and inconclusive, Markson’s narrator, Kate, thinks in a void, and her thoughts take on the character of the unpeopled world she inhabits. Critics have read the novel, variously, as an apocalyptic elegy or a solipsistic delusion. A young and rather enthusiastic David Foster Wallace thought the novel did “artistic & emotional justice to the politico-ethical implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s abstract mathematical metaphysics,” making “what is designed to be a mechanism pulse, breathe, suffer, live, etc.” No matter your theory, the experience of reading Wittgenstein’s Mistress eerily reproduces its premise: the absence of other characters, other people leaves us only stray shards of sentence-matter from which to construct a world reduced to one person’s account of it. The typical fictional world, a world something like ours, inhabited by other people’s accounts of it, other people’s experience of it, has been shorn away. We, like Kate, spend our time with the novel attempting to negotiate something we can have no knowledge of, a terrain that seems to shift under our feet as we traverse it.

Even in a novel seemingly interested in taking apart narrative conventions, the wholesale jettisoning of narrative is not an obvious move. At least in theory, we could situate Markson alongside a host of other writers, all of them more famous, who came up during the 1960′s (Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and so on) who sought to do something similar, though in vastly different ways. He is of their generation and his earlier “literary” novels, Going Down and Springer’s Progress, bear a kind of family resemblance to their work. Going Down is structurally convoluted, a modernist gothic reminiscent of John Hawkes, while Springer’s Progress is a blend of allusion and sex that climaxes in its narrator’s decision to write the novel Springer’s Progress. Though one can recognize in them the elements that will eventually become the later works, these earlier novels are bound to conventions of story and character by virtue of their attempts to disturb conventions of story and character. Just as many writers of Markson’s generation took pleasure in demystifying the workings of fiction even as they built compelling narratives out of those demystifications, as did John Barth in “Lost in the Funhouse,” the contortions of Markson’s earlier novels produce a twinge of nostalgia for the traditions they attempt to unmake.

This is partially because neither Going Down nor Springer’s Progress is very good: the latter is annoying while the former is unreadable. One of the major stumbling blocks both of those novels share is a clumsy, overly emphatic use of allusion, citation, and quotation. In both cases, Markson’s narrators and characters quote and cite with the show-offiness of a precocious undergraduate. One chapter in Springer’s Progress consists almost entirely of the names of writers, artists, and characters that share the same initials; a fine display of smugly superficial knowledge. When Springer and his muse/fuck buddy Jessica Cornford spew allusions at each other, the effect is something like a couple of high school band geeks trying to trade fours using a sousaphone and an out of tune viola. Yet these are the features, allusion and citation, that emerge in Wittgenstein’s Mistress and the final tetralogy as the apotheosis of Markson’s stylistic development. In a remembrance on N+1′s website, Paul Maliszewski writes, “Markson was like an abstract painter who, determined to chase the ultimate and logical conclusion of what he’d been driving at his whole career, paints less and less, until he’s taking a white canvas and applying to it a single coat of white house paint.” The painterly analogy is apt: it’s almost as though Markson achieved his effect by blotting out everything he found excessive in his own work and allowing its essential elements to remain unobscured.

In this way, Markson’s final novels are the negative image of the revised New York Edition of Henry James’s fiction. Toward the end of his life, James remade his earlier work in his “late manner,” cutting some immature passages, but expanding and complicating other scenes, lending the capacious syntactical complexity, or otherwise excluding whole novels he wasn’t happy with (such as the The Bostonians, a fascinating, entertaining, and maddeningly bloated book that Mark Twain said he would “rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven” than read, which quote Markson includes in one of his late novels). In the resulting “definitive” edition, one thus finds a Henry James who seemed destined to develop into “The Master,” the ultimate exemplar of aesthetic refinement and distinction. We see the seeds of the hallowed “late manner” in the earlier works because they were, in many cases, planted there for us to find. But this younger James is another fiction of the older James’s own invention, a back-formation composed as much for posterity’s sake as to relieve the shudders of a mature writer looking back on his apprentice work.

If there is an aspect of disavowal in James’s revisions (and he’s far from alone in this), then we might recognize in Markson something like a repeated affirmation. At no point does his writing undergo anything so recognizable as a “break” or “turn.” Even in his hugely entertaining hardboiled detective novels, Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Deadbeat, the obsession with quotation and anecdote lurks (famous literary incidents tend to drift through detective Harry Fannin’s head as he succumbs to beatings or awakens from them; he’s also an avid reader of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations). And yet, far from remaining the same, though the same anecdotes, the same quotations are often repeated from book to book, the way in which these seemingly random bits of literary trivia accrete changes radically. We often speak of writers returning to favorite themes, repeating particular images; indeed, we often mark a writer’s development not only by the way in which his style changes, but by the way his treatment of subject matter changes. With Markson, style and subject matter achieve a unique convergence, and they achieve it not through the writer’s changing opinion about his subject, but from an increasingly thin attention to any excessive material, anything that falls outside of the historical and thematic resonances his novels amplify.

Markson’s achievement is recognizable only when one takes his development into account. In paring away novelistic convention, rather than demystifying it or turning it back on itself, Markson’s novels became, in a weird way, more capacious, somehow larger. They simultaneously represent common threads that span millenia and a dying man’s proximity to himself. Novels can make the end of the world look and feel identical to a single person’s cognitive misfirings, but David Markson erases the difference between apocalypse and solipsism, writer and reader, so completely that not even a trace of it remains on the page. Many people figured that when he published The Last Novel, it really would be that, and indeed it was his last. But it’s also a kind of formal endpoint, bringing to a close the innovations of a generation. If Markson published relatively few books, they will, taken together, prove to be among those novels that matter. Markson’s books may not ended up quoted in the novels of the future, but all novels will quote him, whether they know it or not.

Heidegger, in the lectures that make up his Parmenides, provides another way to think through the problems of authority and authorship bound up with Bosanquet’s relationship to the typewriter and to James’s writing. “Man himself,” he writes, “acts through the hand.” For Heidegger, “only a being which, like man, ‘has’ the word can and must ‘have’ the hand” because “through the hand occur both prayer and murder, greeting and thanks, oath and signal, and also the ‘work’ of the hand, the ‘hand-work,’ and the tool” (80). The typewriter, through its elimination of “handwriting” from the relation between hand and word, “tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the realm of the word,” while “the word itself turns into something ‘typed’.” Moreover, typewriting “conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same” (81). For Heidegger, “typewriting” interrupts the essential relation between man’s hand and the word, severing the continuity between the meaning imbued by man into the word and the appearance of the word on the page. The specificity of handwriting, eliminated by the printed word, signals the withdrawal of man’s “work” from his “word,” renders every word like every other because no word bears the identifying trace of handwriting, the thing that would link the specificity of a man’s activity to the mark left by that activity.

Heidegger’s critique of typewriting, then, posits a concomitant loss of authority when the typewriter intervenes between the word and the hand. “Hand” designates both anatomy and a general realm of identifying writing, as when we say a letter is written in someone’s hand. Heidegger views this link between anatomy and a highly individualized mark as the essential realm of man, one that exemplifies his capacity not just to acknowledge but to “greet,” not just to kill but to “murder.” “Handwriting,” in other words, serves to encapsulate the process through which the materialism of writing conjoins itself with a signifying quality that transcends it, a quality granted to it by the idiosyncracies of the writer’s body. Without the linkage between “hand” and “writing,” writing’s materialism supersedes its roots in the authority of human utterance, retains no trace of the hand that bore it into the world.

If, beginning in the 1890′s with the first viable commercial machines, typewriting becomes one of the most visible links between writing and authority, it is because, in Heidegger’s analysis, typewriting’s radical impersonality erodes the linkage between the body of the writer (who, as dictator, is not obliged to handwrite at all) and inscription: typewriting allows all authorized, all “official” writing to look the same, eliminates personal flourishes, and deletes even those hidden aspects of personality and motive that the pseudoscience of graphology, in existence since at least the middle ages, sought to uncover. Typewriting transfers the authority of writing from “the properly acting hand” to “the mechanical forces [the hand] releases,” abstracts rote motion away from the animating force of the hand’s grip on the stylus and transposes it onto the typewriter’s keys and hammers. This transference of force stakes out the particular moment in the “’history’ of the kinds of writing” that contributes to “the increasing destruction of the word” at the end of the nineteenth century (81). Typewriting’s newfound cultural authority, then, encroaches on the ontologically prior authority of handwriting, exposing the essential humanity of writing to historical technological contingencies.

So that’s where we’re at right now.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

And though I thought it wasn’t possible, I realized my loathing of that jackass had not yet reached its limit.

It just so happened just to one side of my bench there was a big hole in the sidewalk, something like the Metro at home. That hole seemed propitious, so vast, with a stairway all of pink marble inside it. I’d seen quite a few people from the street disappear into it and come out again. It was in that underground vault that they answered the call of nature. I caught on right away. The hall where the business was done was likewise of marble. A kind of swimming pool, but drained of all its water, a fetid swimming pool, filled only with filtered, moribund light, which fell on the forms of unbuttoned men surrounded by their smells, red in the face from the effect of expelling their stinking feces with barbarous noises from everyone.

Men among men, all free and easy, they laughed and joked and cheered one another on, it made me think of a football game. The first thing you did when you got there was to take off you jacket, as if in preparation for strenuous exercise. This was a rite and shirtsleeves were the uniform.

In that state of undress, belching and worse, gesticulating like lunatics, they settled down in the fecal grotto. The new arrivals were assailed with a thousand revolting jokes while descending the stairs from the street, but they all seemed delighted.

And so on! The shitting scene actually goes on for several more paragraphs in which we’re treated to a kind of comical version of Ezra Pound’s beloved (at least by me) “Canto XIV,” the shit canto. Here’s a good section:

Io venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto;
The stench of wet coal, politicians
. . . . . . . . . . e and. . . . . n, their wrists bound to
their ankles,
Standing bare bum,
Faces smeared on their rumps,
wide eye on flat buttock,
Bush hanging for beard,
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
newts, water-slugs, water-maggots,
And with them. . . . . . . r,
a scrupulously clean table-napkin
Tucked under his penis,
and. . . . . . . . . . . m
Who disliked colioquial language,
stiff-starched, but soiled, collars
circumscribing his legs,
The pimply and hairy skin
pushing over the collar’s edge,
Profiteers drinking blood sweetened with shit,
And behind them. . . . . . f and the financiers
lashing them with steel wires.

And the betrayers of language
. . . . . . n and the press gang
And those who had lied for hire;
the perverts, the perverters of language,
the perverts, who have set money-lust
Before the pleasures of the senses;

howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house,
the clatter of presses,
the blowing of dry dust and stray paper,
fretor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges,
dung, last cess-pool of the universe,
mysterium, acid of sulphur,
the pusillanimous, raging;
plunging jewels in mud,
and howling to find them unstained;
sadic mothers driving their daughters to bed with decrepitude,
sows eating their litters,
and here the placard ΕΙΚΩΝ ΓΗΣ,
and here: THE PERSONNEL CHANGES

Ok, so Céline’s pink marble shit pool isn’t as gross as Pound’s Hell. Pound’s Hell is obviously a reimagining of Dante’s Inferno, and thus we get “Faces smeared on their rumps / wide eye on flat buttock, / Bush hanging for beard,” a descriptive jumble in which faces are either transposed onto asses or asses are being described as faces, the contortion of the human body, and so on. Céline seems to delight in the opportunity the shit pool presents for unrestrained masculinity to run free. It’s like a “football game,” it’s a “rite and shirtsleeves were the uniform,” and so on.

He evokes an atmosphere of manly gregariousness exaggerated to the point of the grotesque. The ease with which the men laugh and joke seems to amplify the shit-spattering and belching somehow. This linkage between camaraderie and feces, sophomoric humor and infantile evacuation is totally at odds with the doom, horror, and bile of Pound’s Hell. Perhaps it’s the apparent disregard the damned have for their surroundings, like the “scrupulously clean table napkin” tucked under one of their penises, the public addresses spouted from assholes; they tend to go on with the hideous business of their lives without regard for the squalor they’re mired in. This is part of the point, of course, as Hell is just whatever you were doing in life, plus a kind of punitive metaphorical morality. If you talk nothing but shit your whole life, you go to Hell and literally speechify out your asshole.

If shit is part of the punitive metaphor of Pound’s Hell, then Céline’s shit pool is a masculine utopia in which (in the Freudian scheme of things) the id’s desire for the pleasure of expulsion come to terms with the super ego’s pressure to acculturate and socialize. And yet what emerges is not comforting but even more disturbing than either the unrestricted reign of pure pleasure or total repression.

This is where things get a bit trippy for me, because we’re presented with a dilemma here. My first instinct is to say that the shit pool scene reminds us of the necessity for the struggle between the individual’s pleasure and the codes and norms of society. If this is what we get when the two meet, count me out, thank you. I’ll take repression any day. Incidentally, I think this is also what Pound’s “scrupulously clean napkin” tucked under the penis is about – the terrible meeting of civility and pleasurable filth.

But of course my instinct is to say it’s gross, because I’m someone who’s internalized cultural codes and mores that tell me not to flaunting my shit everywhere. If I were more like one Céline’s defecaters, I would recognize the scene as something liberating.

I think this last reading is less convincing for other reasons – in Journey Céline seethes with loathing for almost everyone. I can’t imagine one of literature’s most pessimistic, misanthropic writers positing a Utopian vision of anything without the express purpose of exposing its stupidity. Pound was misguided about who belonged in Hell, as his World War II radio broadcasts clearly show, but he at least saw its necessity. Céline, while less extravagant in his vision, produces something far more disgusting, which must have pleased him.

To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.

Mohamed spends the last part describing a way where English Departments should look at the relationship between Western or Anglo-American culture as part of broader “world humanisms,” expanding the scope of English Departments rather than constricting it to the criticism of Anglo-American culture.

The first thing to say is that there are plenty of “world humanism”-type programs in existence in English Departments. Doing a favor for a department chair, I taught one for part of last Summer. It was interesting and challenging, not least because at the school where I was teaching, every student had to take the class in order to graduate. I know at the school where I did my B.A. there were classes like that as well, and that institution was no bastion of progressive education.

I think the confusion that inheres in Mohamed’s criticism, suggestion, and the “paradox” that he locates is in what he means by “English Department.” Does he mean the English Department that is the home for teachers of English language and literature, the place where students take classes? Or does he mean the English Department that is the home for scholars who produce new research, new knowledge, and new discourse? Because those are clearly two different places. Stanley Fish and others have written about this pretty extensively, but it’s not clear that the interpenetration between those two English Departments is absolute. Both of them are the same department, but they serve two different functions and are staffed by two different but overlapping faculties.

Most teaching English Departments are populated by a handful of full-time, tenured or tenure-track professors and a slew of grad students and adjuncts. In their teaching functions, these faculty members are charged with teaching everything from comp to advanced undergraduate seminars. They’re their to instill knowledge in the university’s students, knowledge ranging from the structure of the college essay to the techniques of close-reading to the history of twentieth-century literary criticism. In serving this function, these teachers don’t produce new knowledge or new research; if they do, it’s incidental to the task of teaching. For the most part, classes taught in English Departments, at least in my experience, have ostensibly little to do with critiques of “Anglo-American culture,” and more to do with things like learning what “analysis” consists of or (less frequently) how to scan a poem. Though what gets taught varies from class to class, the point is to communicate content and technique to students.

Then there’s the other English Department, the scholarly one, which produces new knowledge and new research. The faculty for this department is comparatively small. Their relationship to their university is symbiotic – they want tenure or tenure-track jobs because they offer financial support and security. The university wants to hire them in order to increase its prestige, knowing the department and therefore the university will look better when it’s attached to the work of a brilliant and cutting-edge scholar. This is the English Department that is producing criticism and scholarship that is often critical of Anglo-American culture.

I think the validity of Mohamed’s paradox depends on viewing these two English Departments as more unified than they really are, and on what realm the declaration of “the limits of Anglo-American culture” occurs in. It doesn’t seem paradoxical to me for critical discourse to turn itself back on the traditions that gave birth to it. This has been the function of any number of critical discourses, though not necessarily criticism within the academy. But I think there’s some sense in Mohamed’s criticism, as in most criticisms of “English,” that something said in the critical/scholarly realm reverberates just as loudly in the realm of teaching, that what one says in the critical realm also “occurs” in the teaching realm. Regardless of what should or should not be studied or taught in English Departments, the discourse surrounding the perpetual crisis of English Department ought to sort out which English Department it’s talking about.

James’s consciousness, a surprising fact at the time, turns away from interiority. It is, so to speak, never the center of itself. It remains purely a point of view. A point of view which, most of the time, is that of a character whose investigating look, different from all others, holds the faculty of leaving on the objects which it contemplates, a nuance, a specific coloration, which is the stamp of its contemplative activity, Every look attests the entirely relative way of looking of a definite being. And the novel of which it is the center has as its goal to make this invariable individuality of point of view to appear in the variety of objects on which he exerts it.

Consciousness in James is “never the center of itself”: not bad, Georges Poulet. In a certain sense, he’s simply restating certain things James said about his own work. But there’s something about Poulet’s formulation that skids outside the bounds of paraphrase, a kind virtuosic literary-critical flick-of-the-wrist granting what could otherwise be rote recitation a kind of revelatory quality. This is why I’m always bugged when journalists, students, fellow grad students, even professors deride the practice of “academic” criticism as a whole. Academic criticism encompasses some pretty dreadful stuff, but it also allows for (but doesn’t directly imply) a kind of statement you can’t really make anywhere else.

People also say no one writes like Georges Poulet (or Eric Auerbach or name your preferred graying/dead eminence) in academia anymore. But that’s not to say one can’t, right?  I think of Franco Moretti, in particular, who’s someone I used to deride because I was an idiot and didn’t understand what he was trying to say in Graphs Maps Trees and hadn’t read his other books. Moretti is a beautiful, funny, humane writer working in an explicitly academic context. I can think of a few other examples of academic critics who consistently make me admire the beauty of their prose along with the ingenuity of their arguments. Anybody have any favorites?

1. As I understand it, The Black Swan is a kind of parable about the relationship between art and the uncontrollable, dark aspects of human nature. That is, one must have access to the latter in order to produce the former. This is a more-than-worked-over trope in art and film, but more importantly it’s a central theme of at least one of Aronofsky’s other films: Pi (1998), which is also his first. Both feature central characters, brilliant in their fields (math in Pi, ballet in The Black Swan), whose obsessions with their work brings them close to transcendent achievement and death or madness.  The difference is the ending: Pi features its hero, Max, eventually abandoning his work after it becomes too dangerous to continue. Nina, the dancer in The Black Swan, endures her plunge into madness in order to give one great performance in the lead role of Swan Lake before, it’s implied, dying by her own hand at the performance’s conclusion. Thus in Pi, by far the better film, Max “chooses life,” as it were, while the look on Nina’s face at fadeout tells us the “perfection” she’s attained also brings her life to a close.

1.1. Another conspicuous similarity. In Pi, Max is plagued by migraine headaches that approach when he works too hard. In The Black Swan, it’s implied that Nina’s mother suffers from some variation of bipolar disorder or manic depression (obsessive behavior [she paints dozens of pictures of her daughter's face], a brief glimpse of her crying alone in her room, lightning-quick mood swings from effusion to despair) which, we are led to infer, Nina may have inherited. I’m suspicious, then: whereas Max’s migraines (the first of which was spurred by staring too long into the sun as a child, which presages the Icarus/Daedalus relationship he has with mentor Sol [like wise King Solomon but also the sun]) impair him, serve as a blockage to his genius, or an indicator that he’s gone too far, Nina’s breakdown is inseparable from her achievement as a dancer. Discipline, precision, and perfectionism are at the root of her talent while mental illness is the source of her brilliance.

1.1.1. Let’s also note that some of the ways in which Aronofsky represents “the black swan,” the dark side of Nina’s artistry, are shudder inducing, and not in a good way. The film is rife with mirrors, people looking in mirrors, reflections acting in an unruly manner, people punching mirrors, and so on. Lots of mirrors. Part of this simply derives from the setting, dance studios having lots of mirrors, after all. But come on: this is what it’s come to?

1.1.1.1 “I’ve chosen the motif of broken mirrors to show my protagonist’s fragmented self,” says Donald Kaufman in Adaptation. Which tells you something.

1.1.2. Brilliance as pathology, artistry as illness, and so on. The metaphorical world of the film seems like an excuse for its own failings.

2. A movie disguising itself as art by being about art.

2.1. Or as Jessica Suarez more elegantly phrased it, “basically bi-curious Fight Club.”

2.2. Or as Vulture phrased it, an “Art-House version of Showgirls,” though that’s meant as a compliment.