American literature

“It probably was true”: The Curiously Incurious Narrator of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat

/ johnwbuaas / Leave a comment
Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber

 Note: This is the long-promised Part II of a post on Show Boat that began here. In that post, I suggest that trying to firm up Show Boat‘s chronology introduces questions that might not have occurred to the reader to ask beforehand, because the narrator makes that chronology almost absent: just what is Andy Hawks’ family background; and does that background have anything to do with his being in Massachusetts in 1862 or ’63 instead of serving on a military warship on the Mississippi in either the Union or Confederate army?  I further suggest that on these questions the novel’s narrator, who is otherwise a conventional omniscient 3rd-person narrator, seems curiously incurious.

In this part of the post, then, I want to do what I hope is an attentive reading of these few pages of Chapter Two to show why these questions occur to me.  As of this writing, I have no theories as to why the narrator chooses this strategy–or even if it is a strategy on their part. However, I believe I have a starting point for beginning to think about how the narrator positions theirself relative to the uncertainties surrounding Andy’s–and, by extension, Magnolia’s–ethnicity. Continue reading →

Show Boat, Huckleberry Finn, and Intertextuality

/ johnwbuaas / 1 Comment
huck finn hamlet's soliloquy

The Duke strikes a pose during his rehearsal of (a version of) Hamlet’s soliloquy, in Chapter XXI of Huckleberry Finn.  (Illustration from first edition, via First Edition Huck Finn Illustrations. 

This is not the promised Part II of the previous post but, instead, an elaborating on the following passage from that post:

Meanwhile, beneath (quite literally) all of this, enabling the narrator’s and characters’ lack of interest in these matters, is the brute fact of the Mississippi River and its tributaries and, more to the point, the Cotton Blossom‘s ability to travel upstream as well as downstream.  In Show Boat‘s jacket art, the other unseen-yet-constant presence, in addition to the riverboat itself, is the river.  As in Huckleberry Finn, this novel is obsessed with the various features of its setting; also as with Twain’s novel, though, the river becomes, in Lauren Berlant’s words from a slightly different context, “an apparatus of forgetting” (414).  Or, more accurately, in both those novels at least some of their respective characters fervently hope, even if subconsciously, that it become such an apparatus.

In no place do the characters in Ferber’s novel mention Twain’s novel; indeed, it would be very surprising if they were to do so, seeing as most of Show Boat‘s action takes place before or right around Huckleberry Finn‘s American publication date of 1885.  Moreover, as of my writing this post I do not know if Ferber had Twain’s novel in mind as she composed hers.   Even so, the correspondences between these novels are striking.

In the world of the novel itself Andy Hawks begins his career as a riverman in the 1850s, about ten years after the time in which Twain’s novel is set.  We can fairly say, then, that these novels’ respective worlds’ starting points, at least, are contemporaneous with each other.  However, I want briefly to point out that, as alluded to in the quoted passage above, these novels have more in common with each other than the same chronological starting point, or even their shared setting of the Mississippi River. Continue reading →

The Narrator of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat: A Speculative Reading (Part I)

/ johnwbuaas / 1 Comment
Show Boat dust jacket

A facsimile of the dust jacket for the first edition of Show Boat.   Via.

The dust jacket for the first edition of Show Boat (1926) is fascinating to contemplate.  Laid flat as it is here, you can see how the procession of people moves from left to right, up the Cotton Blossom‘s gangplank to the very edge of the book’s front-right edge, their movement seeming to invite the reader to open the cover and process into the novel.  The paddle-wheel itself, though, is out of the frame; the gangplank rests not on the deck of the boat but on the text of the jacket blurb that describes the novel.  The Cotton Blossom itself is not exactly invisible (the novel’s title tells us it is there), but neither is it yet seen.

This procession toward an unseen boat that nevertheless serves as the titular character of the novel fits, I think, the reader of the book that this dust jacket enveloped.  As a novel, Show Boat itself seems on its surface to be rather conventional, its style often quite gaudy and given to flights of sentimentality.  It is, as it were, a bit show boat-like in quality.  But when we look closer at certain crucial moments in the story it tells, the novel’s narrator, ostensibly a rather ordinary third-person omniscient narrator, suddenly reveals herself** to be ignorant of important matters.  At best, she seems uninterested in knowing the truth of those matters, but it may also be the case that she would simply not rather know the truth.  Or, she does know the truth but will not say them out loud.

While it is difficult to say precisely what is the narrator’s relationship to that knowledge, there is no doubt that those matters, as it happens, are part of Show Boat‘s persistent subtext of secretiveness regarding race.  We encounter this secretiveness despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that much of the music and plays at the heart of the Cotton Blossom‘s troupe’s repertoire originates in minstrelsy, a genre whose trappings are dependent on the exaggerated-verging-on-offensive mannerisms of African-American speech and gesture.  Moreover, it is a secret regarding race that serves as the catalyst for the novel’s (and the musical’s) most famous moment, the revelation that Julie Dozier and Steve Baker, two members of the boat’s acting troupe, are a miscegenated couple.  But even as Andy Hawks, the Cotton Blossom‘s captain, sends the couple away from his boat, the subtext of racial secretiveness accompanies the rest of the novel’s plot, Magnolia’s transformation into a noted singer of songs associated (correctly or not) with 19th-century African-American folk music who performs them in an “authentic” style, shaping the novel’s subsequent action but otherwise never examined directly.

This post and one following it will explore that subtext, beginning, here, with an attempt to firm up the novel’s hazy chronology.  Because Show Boat is, as much as anything else, a celebration of nostalgia, we can safely assume that Ferber intentionally wants to impart a dreamy feel to the novel’s events.  However, nostalgia also happens to facilitate the maintaining of secrets about race, and not just in this novel, either. Whether this facilitation is also Ferber’s intention is difficult to say, but the effect is undeniable.  It seems equally undeniable to me that once we have a firmer chronology for the novel, it begins to reveal its possible secrets–or, better put, we can see that the novel has secrets that no one in it seems especially interested in but which are of the utmost importance.

Continue reading →

Maira: The Cannibalization of Iracema

/ johnwbuaas / Leave a comment
Maira

Originally published in Brazil in 1978, this translation (by E. A. Goodland and Thomas Colchie) was published in 1984.

In her important study, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991), Doris Sommer discusses a range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novels from throughout Latin America that, she argues, were intended to create in readers a sense of national identity in the wake of independence.  These novels, she writes, “are almost inevitably stories of star-crossed lovers who represent particular regions, races, parties, economic interests, and the like.  Their passion of conjugal and sexual union spills over to a sentimental readership that hopes to win partisan minds along with hearts” (5).  We have no exact equivalent to these novels in the U.S., though Sommer discusses Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans as inspiration for some South American novelists; but, if one squints in a Leslie Fiedler kind of way, one can see how Huckleberry Finn would be an exact fit for the description Sommer provides.  For Brazilians, one such novel would be Iracema (1865), by José de Alencar (1829-1877), who was an important political figure in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil.  It allegorizes the origins of Brazil by means of the tale of the Tupi Indian woman Iracema (an anagram of “America”) and Martim, a Portuguese colonist, who together conceive a son; his birth, however, even as it symbolizes the emergence of the Brazilian people, also leads to Iracema’s death.  (Notably missing from this novel is the presence of the third race that, combined with indigenous and European peoples, led to the emergence of the Brazilian people: people of African descent brought to Brazil as slaves.  But all of that belongs, for now, in a discussion for another time.)

I am sharing all this because, while reading Darcy Ribeiro’s novel Maíra (1978) and becoming a bit frustrated with it as I did so, I finally realized that it is writing both in response to and against the romantic myth of Brazil’s founding that Iracema helped establish.  Moreover, it does so by turning Iracema‘s elements inside-out in an attempt not to re-mythologize Brazil’s past but to cannibalize that nation’s literary past so as to render the truth of Brazil’s present, at least as Ribeiro had come to understand it.

More below the fold.

Continue reading →

Mid-July work

/ johnwbuaas / Leave a comment

I have just now finished my first read-through of PrairyErth and will shortly begin to work my way through it again, this time looking at notes I’ve made in the book by passages that might serve well as jumping-off points for writing assignments for my class this fall.  So, this seems like a good time to take stock of academic-related work I’ve accomplished so far this summer.

Continue reading →

Living within Nature’s means: Some further thoughts on the Anthropocene novel

/ johnwbuaas / Leave a comment
moby_dick_by_mumblingidiot-d36w1qz

One of the more striking images for Moby-Dick that I’ve come across; it seems to be as much about the novel’s ideas about the interaction between humans and Nature as about its central action. Source

As I worked toward a conclusion in my previous post, it occurred to me that some things yet remain to be said about the implications of using Naturalism’s presuppositions about the world and our place in it as a foundation on which to build the Anthropocene novel.  To point the reader toward Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” and say “Here is something like a template for what those presuppositions would look like” is to say, in effect, that such novels would be dark indeed.

Well, many of them, yes.  But perhaps not all, or at least all the time.  But because Nature, in these novels, will Matter, such novels’ respective zeitgeists will be situated in such a way that human concerns and hopes and fears cannot but be depicted as direct responses to Nature–whether in accord with or defiance of Nature, no matter, but never independent of it, never with Nature as a passive backdrop or submissive setting, but always with it having an unmistakable bearing on the resolution of the narrative, usually “winning” or at least bending people to its will (whatever those might look like given Nature’s fearsome indifference), and yet itself remaining inscrutable.  In other words: if we’re looking at American literature for examples of what we might call proto-Anthropocene novels, Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, canny as they occasionally are, through Natty Bumppo, about what we would now call sustainability, would not be models for Anthropocene novels; they are ultimately about human choices in dialogue with other human choices, but not in dialogue with Nature–at least, that latter dialogue seems not to rise to the level of narrative.  On the other hand, I’d nominate Melville’s Moby-Dick as a fine candidate for an Anthropocene novel (no “proto-” about it, come to think of it): the central activity of the novel, whaling, is an activity which God, speaking out of the whirlwind to Job, taunts Job (and the reader/listener) as something humans are supposed to be incapable of doing (recall that one of the novel’s Extracts is from Job); Ahab sees Nature, as embodied by the whale, as a malevolence he must try to overcome so as to understand his place in the cosmos; in contrast to Ahab, Ishmael’s post-Pequod musings on whale-ness end in the whale’s nature (and Nature itself) remaining inscrutable, as unreadable as those scars on some whales’ outer skin that resembles writing; Nature “wins.”  (And as I write this, I begin to realize there is much, much more to say about Moby-Dick within this context than I can here.)

Anyway.  Below the fold are some fairly knee-jerk, broad-stroke speculations regarding what Anthropocene novels might look like, along with some uninformed musing, combined with heavy reliance on John Berger and a shout-out to Dan Barber, about what an Anthropocene aesthetics arising from Nature might look like.

Continue reading →

“The trouble with him was that he was without imagination”: On a return to American naturalism for the Anthropocene-era novel

/ johnwbuaas / 1 Comment
ToBuildAFire-1

An illustration of a scene from Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” Via.

“Like the president, I’m not concerned about sea level rise,” he said. “I’m on the water daily, and I just don’t see it.” –James Eskridge, mayor of Tangier Island, Virginia, an island that is now one-third the size it was in 1850. (Source)

If readers follow the link for the quote above, they will find that Mayor Eskridge says what he says above even as he was talking with President Trump about expediting the funding of a proposed jetty that, he hopes, will help mitigate the now-frequent inundation of his island by the sea.  Even occupying the space that he and his city do, responding as they are to the effects of climate change, the thing itself remains a term, an abstraction.  As Mayor Eskridge says, it is hard to see, which makes it even harder to imagine.  To which I would add that, encouraged at every turn by our culture to live in the Now and give as little thought to the past or future as possible, Mayor Eskridge easily could be–is–all of us in the collective.

Via my Facebook feed yesterday comes this fascinating short essay by Siddhartha Deb, “Stranger Than Fiction,” in The Baffler.  Here’s its core argument:

If [literary] fiction has been unable to come to terms with our steadfast rapaciousness, it is because to truly represent the ravages of the carbon economy involves understanding capitalism, and even nationalism, as failures, and this is not something contemporary fiction is capable of doing. This is why in the context of India, which Ghosh focuses on, there is almost no fiction that depicts the industrial disaster in Bhopal in 1984, or, in more recent years, the displacement of people by dams in central India or the ravaging of tribal communities by mining companies, including the uranium mining carried out in Jadugoda and that the Indian government is attempting to expand, against protests from local people, into the north-eastern state of Meghalaya where I am writing this.

In the United States too, even well meaning liberal fiction, often falling under the rubric of cli-fi, reveals itself as incapable in grappling with this. This is perhaps because to think of modern life as a failure, and to question the idea of progress, requires an extremism of vision or a terrifying kind of independence. An indie bestseller like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, set in an eco-apocalypse, features rhapsodies on the internet and electricity. Marcel Theroux in Far North includes a paean to modern flight as one of the finest inventions of “our race,” even though the effect of air travel on carbon emissions is quite horrific.

Fiction, in other words, suffers from its own kind of anthropocenization, one that owes as much to post-war prosperity in the West and to globalization, which succeeded in universalizing the obsession with individuals, character, and interiority that dominates writing programs and its reviewing culture. Even nature, resource extraction, and climate change, viewed through the filter of character, become a kind of exoticizing backdrop.

As I read this, I could not help but think back to both my understanding of Bakhtin’s argument about the novel-as-genre’s essential contemporaneity (no matter its setting) in his essay “Epic and Novel,” and to Fredric Jameson’s discussions of modernism and postmodernism in the opening pages of his Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Each in its way indirectly explains, for me at least, the perceived failure of the novelistic imagination that Deb describes here, and they both got me to thinking what form the novel might take in order to grapple with the climatic (and climactic) consequences of the Anthropocene.

I find it interesting and important that the examples of narratives that Deb notes do engage in this grappling are written by Indians or Indian ex-pats, as if to suggest that one direction for the novel might be by way of pursuing to their eco-critically logical conclusions the tropes of the post-colonial novel.  That is a perfectly logical progression: colonialism, above all else, is a clear expression of capitalism, and the consensus seems to be that, all things considered, capitalism as manifested in colonies historically has not benefited the peoples in those colonies.  It may be a bit inaccurate to say that capitalism “failed” those peoples, since the colonial system was never intended to be of benefit to them.  Still, it is but a short leap, in this globalized world of ours, to argue that late capitalism has colonized all of us in some way, even the well-off among us: every time we turn on our smartphones or engage with social media or forget to disable cookies, we constantly supply, for free, the raw ore of data to be mined and processed by algorithms into information used to create or point us in the direction of real and virtual objects designed to shape our decisions and purchases.

As I read this essay, however, I kept returning in my mind to Deb’s phrase elsewhere in the essay, “imaginative fatigue,” and found myself remembering a sentence describing the anonymous subject of Jack London’s well-known short story, “To Build a Fire” (1908): “The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.”  It seems to me that part of why writers for the moment have difficulty imagining the Great Climate Change Novel is that awareness of Nature qua Nature has pretty much been bred out of mainstream literary fiction’s DNA for well over a century now.  In view of this, such a novel would have to re-establish and fully embrace, make a priori, Nature’s presence as a character in it–not, however, in a Transcendentalist-like, rather benign way, but, rather, the reminder that ignorance of and indifference toward Nature will not help but lead to our collective impoverishment, if not literal demise, as a species.

Enter Jack London and the Naturalists as a possible model for an American version of this kind of novel.  But before they enter, I need to say a few things about Bakhtin and Jameson.

Continue reading →